The Chrome Suite (36 page)

“I don’t know what you mean,” Amy said.

“I mean,” Elaine said as Marlene entered the kitchen, “that life’s a more serious business for some people. They have a lot more to lose than others. And when you start loving them, then you’d damned well better be prepared to keep on loving them for as long as they live.”

When I want a sermon, I’ll ask for one, Amy thought.

“She means Hank,” Marlene said.

“I never said that,” Elaine snapped. “What do you want for breakfast?”

“Nothing,” Marlene said. “I need to talk to you. Upstairs. It’s about the old bugger.”

“Oh,” Elaine said, and her expression grew flat and unreadable. “I’ll be up in a minute.” She turned to Amy once again. “Listen, you’ll have to let me know what you plan on doing.”

Here it comes, Amy thought, I’m getting the big turf.

“Because if you’re going to go to school with Marlene then we’d better get you registered right away.”

This is the reason why Steve and Laura can go at it tooth and nail this morning for all Amy cares; this is why she feels like singing.

Steve clears his throat to prepare for another round with Laura. “Now look here,” he says energetically, “don’t you let on that you never got a wink of sleep past two o’clock because it was you who woke me up. You were snoring. I was up to the bathroom at a ten to four and you were out like a light.”

“I heard you get up, Steven. And it wasn’t four, either.” Laura has become fully engaged now and stands with her hands on her hips and her jaw thrust forward.

“I said a ten to four.” Amy watches how his fingers never miss a beat as he threads, loops, and twists the bulging casings into sausages.

“No it wasn’t! It was more like one-thirty. The dog was making a racket and you said to me, ‘Skinner must of just got home.’ “

At one-thirty you were still at Elaine’s, Amy wants to interject, but this is their dance. She feels the tickle of laughter inside.

Steve’s voice becomes puffed with indignation. “You think I don’t know the difference between one-thirty and a ten to four? I was up to the bathroom twice.”

“Twice.” Laura winks at Amy. “Now he was up twice. Well, I only heard you the once and it must of been one-thirty because –”

“Ahhh!” Steve groans in frustration.

“Because I took a pill before I went to bed. You know how it knocks me out, and then I woke up around two-thirty and you said to me, ‘Skinner must be just getting home,’ and I remember looking at the clock and saying to you, Steven, ‘Not at this hour. Skinner can’t be getting in at this hour.’ And, Steven, it was two-thirty.”

“Can’t see past her nose without her glasses,” Steve murmurs. “Laura, honey, just what difference does it make?”

“Well, now, it does make a difference,” Laura says and Amy hears the quiver of tears in her voice. “You’re calling me a liar.”

“I did no such thing. And just a darned minute. First you say it was one-thirty and now you say it was two-thirty.”

“I did not. You’re the one who said it was one-thirty when you got up, not me.”

“I give up,” Steve says.

Great, Amy thinks. They’ll be quiet now as they work until Steve goes over and flips the sign on the door to
OPEN
and by the time the first customer walks in their grievance will have given way to pleasantries.

“Anyway,” Laura says, “I’m so tired I could cry. So I won’t be going to Souris with you tonight. You’ll have to go alone.”

“I wanted to look at shoes. Zack’s got that sale on, you know that.”

“Well, go and look at shoes. You don’t need me,” Laura says briskly.

“I’ve been wanting to go down there all week. But no, we had to go and visit your sister on Tuesday. The grass needed cutting on Wednesday, yesterday I take you to Brandon to do your shopping. Why didn’t you say you didn’t want to go in the first place? The sale ends today.”

“Love, I just can’t go,” Laura says and Amy hears the smile in her voice. “I’m just too darned tired to go traipsing around after you while you stand there gawking at things for hours. My feet won’t take it.”

“But the sale ends today.”

“You go then.”

“But I won’t know what colour to buy.”

“Oxblood.”

“Oxblood?” he asks, astounded. “To go with my blue suit?”

Laura’s answer is cut off by the drone of her electric hand-mixer.

“I’ll go and get the car gassed up at noon!” Steve yells.

Amy wonders if this is what love is. If this is what it comes down to in the end, these exchanges of conversation centring around the previous night’s sleep, white or brown bread, oxblood shoes.

“Turn that danged thing off!” Steve shouts.

The electric mixer stops. Laura is about to protest when the door opens. “We’re not open for business yet,” Steve calls. Amy looks up and her heart jumps.

“Hi ya, Sis.” It’s Mel. Garth stands behind him, staring over his shoulder. They don’t walk, they strut as they enter the butcher shop. Mel’s tan trenchcoat is rumpled and the belt trails down one side. He leans into the showcase and peers across at her. He’s unshaven, and the brown fedora tipped back on his head looks like a poor joke.

“Hi, Cuz,” Garth says. She smells stale whisky and cigarette smoke.

“What’re you guys doing here?” She’s shocked at how Mel brings with him that other world, the shapes of familiar rooms, an inner
landscape that she thought had been erased in leaving. Has Margaret sent him? she wonders.

“I thought it was high time I popped in and said hello to my baby sister.”

Stir, Amy thinks. Mel slurs the word and it sounds like “baby stir.” Still half-drunk, which accounts for his careless appearance, his bravado. She feels Laura and Steve listening. She wipes her stained hands against her apron as she rounds the showcase. The apron is too long. It reaches down to her ankles. She suddenly realizes this and feels silly and awkward in their presence.

“How did you know where to find me?”

Garth cackles fiendishly. “Oh, we do have our ways.”

“Actually we were at a dance last night. About twenty miles from here, so we said, Why the heck not?” For a moment Amy thinks Mel will engulf her in a clumsy brotherly hug, and so she steps back.

“Where can we get some breakfast?” Garth asks and glances at the coffee bar where Laura has busied herself plopping spoonfuls of batter onto a cookie sheet so as not to let on that she’s listening.

“You go on,” Steve tells Amy. “I’ll finish putting the counter in. You go and have a visit.”

With a certain stiffness Amy introduces Mel and Garth to Steve and Laura. “Nice place you got here,” Garth says, and Amy sees the snicker in his eyes. Then he tiptoes over to Laura’s counter and rubs his hands together over a plate of dry-looking cookies. She sees Laura colour and simper as she holds the plate up for him to choose one. Amy goes into the bathroom and unties the apron and throws it into the laundry bag. She washes her hands and looks into the mirror and wishes that she’d put on make-up this morning. When she steps back into the shop she sees that Mel is behind the counter now with Steve, who is demonstrating how he makes the links of sausages, how he twists and threads them into clusters of four.
“It’s the seasoning,” Steve says to explain the difference in colour between the large and the smaller breakfast sausages.

“Interesting,” Mel says and scratches his chin. “Pretty good little set-up you’ve got here.”

Steve beams. “Oh, we get by.”

“What the hell are you doing in this place?” Mel says under his breath as they leave. “It’s a rat-infested hole.”

As she walks between them heading down towards the town’s only cafe, she wants to say she’s there because she likes Steve and Laura. “It’s a job,” she says, and feels herself stepping away from the people of Spectrail. She sees the shop through Mel’s eyes and realizes how pitiful it really is with its rippled and worn linoleum floor and the paint-by-number landscape pictures Laura has hung on the walls to cover gaping cracks in the plaster, how the building sags in one corner. When she looks down the four blocks of Main Street, which stops so abruptly at the war memorial, she knows how deadend the town really is.

In the cafe she sits across from Mel and Garth, watching as they dab egg yolk from their plates with chunks of toast. Mel has told her about the job he got in the city to begin later that fall, and he’s brought news of Cam who is about to leave for the navy. Gord was just put in a reform school where he will spend half a year being reformed, Mel says, and Amy sees bits of the old world spill down onto the table, the pieces beginning to lock together. “Dumb shit,” Garth says and goes on to tell how Gord was caught red-handed in the office of the town secretary with a batch of birth certificates that he’d planned on selling to others for fake
ID
’
S
.

“Not bad,” Mel says as he pushes the plate to one side. He lights a cigarette. He exhales and looks across at her through its smoke. “So why did you leave?”

Amy watches her hands turn the coffee mug around and how moisture from it leaves half-circles on the tabletop. “Because I
couldn’t take it any longer.” She’s aware of the curiosity in the glances of several people at the tables around them. The same curious looks she was subjected to when she first came. She knows that even though they accept her now, she doesn’t belong here. Nor does she belong with Mel and her cousin Garth.

“What was there to take?” Mel asks, a sudden edge in his voice. “You know what your problem is, don’t you?” He pulls hard on the cigarette. “You were spoiled rotten, that’s what. You always got everything you ever wanted without lifting a finger.”

Amy resists the desire to leap up and run away from his straight-line reasoning. “There’s not much I can do about that, is there?”

“What a loser attitude.”

Garth taps his onyx ring against the coffee mug, signalling impatience.

“How’s Mom?”

“Okay. She’s thinking of going to some creative writing thing. In Saskatchewan.”

Does she ever talk about me? she wants to ask.

“She’s thinking about writing a book,” Mel says, sounding embarrassed.

“A book?” The notion of it makes Amy want to laugh. “What would she write about?”

Mel shrugs and butts his cigarette out. “She’s going to call it ‘The Angels Among Us.’ “ His voice drops. “It’s supposed to help people who are grieving. So I guess it’s about Jill.”

“Who’s the cowboy?” Garth asks.

Amy turns and sees Hank enter the cafe. He glances over at them and then goes and sits at the counter. It’s too early for his break, Amy thinks, and annoyance chews at her. He must have seen them when they passed by the bowling alley. “Oh him,” Amy says. “So how long are you guys staying?”

“This is it,” Mel says. “We have been up all night, you know.”

“But it was worth it.” Garth winks at Mel.

As they leave the cafe Amy is aware of Hank’s heavy-lidded and sideways glance at them and his presence weighs heavily. When she steps outside she notices how the air seems lighter and easier for her to breathe. She has begun to be able to predict when Hank will appear around the corners she turns.

She walks back to their car parked in front of the butcher shop. “It’s my new shagging wagon,” Garth says and pats the top of his father’s new Chrysler Town and Country. Yuck, is what Amy thinks about sex with Garth, who still wears his greasy hair slicked back at the sides and falling across his forehead. Caught in a time, she thinks. He slides in behind the wheel and turns on the ignition. Mel hesitates beside the open door and Amy feels her throat tighten. The urge to cry wells in her chest. Don’t go, she thinks, wanting to hurl herself into him. “So,” he says. “You coming with us or not?”

“Longing,” “loneliness”: words Amy feels but doesn’t allow to have a shape because she isn’t sure what she longs for or misses. “No.”

“I didn’t think so, but I thought I’d ask. Let me tell you, though, you sure as hell could have picked a better place than this dump.” He reaches over into the back seat for a paper-wrapped package. He hands it to her. “I was supposed to mail this off ages ago.” She sees her name and address written in the sprawling flourish of Margaret’s hand.

Amy watches as their car sweeps around the U-turn at the war memorial. Garth taps the horn as they pass by. She watches as they cut through the screen of trees, cross the bridge, and disappear. Laura stands behind the venetian blinds, looking out, expecting that Amy will come inside now. Instead, Amy walks back down to the end of Main Street. She looks out over the land and sees that it has
become solid and flat. Not at all like an Impressionist painting, as she’d come to think of it after she’d discovered a book on that period in art in the library. Mel’s arrival has changed Spectrail.

As she walks back towards the butcher shop Marlene appears on her bicycle in the middle of the street as if by magic. She moves gracefully and effortlessly, as if she were floating. Her hair streams out on both sides of her head and the sausage ringlets part, exposing her clear forehead. “Look at me,” she calls and lifts her hands from the handlebars. She glides by, riding free-handed, her arms flung out on either side. “Neat, eh? I finally figured it out.” She grins as she passes by and it seems to Amy that Marlene is caught in a photograph, her hair still streaming out behind her, frozen that way, and that her eyes have become a doll’s glass eyes looking out across the street at Amy. Eyes that seem to say they know all but will give nothing away. Marlene will go to school until she finishes, Amy knows. Then she’ll probably get on another bus and become a nurse or a teacher or a secretary and work in another town and come home to Elaine every weekend and be happy to do it. She will be one of the lucky ones, Amy thinks, content with a meat-and-potatoes life.

“Seems like a nice fella, that brother of yours,” Steve says as Amy enters the shop.

“My, yes, wasn’t that nice of them to drop by and see you,” Laura says.

Well, at least they’re agreeing with each other, Amy thinks. “Yes, nice,” she says and hurries to the bathroom. She rips the package open. Inside are several items of clothing which are vaguely familiar, but it’s Margaret’s note that holds her attention. She scans the lines that boil down to, How are you? I am fine. Keeping busy and please keep in touch. Amy sees the word “Shirley” and her eyes drop to the bottom lines. “Shirley’s mother wanted you to have these clothes. I don’t know if you’ll want them but I did promise that I would see you’d get them.” The package contains a pair of bell-bottom jeans,
an orange sweater, and a bracelet with a mother-of-pearl inlay. Amy was with Shirley when she’d stolen every single item. I wonder if her stepfather misses taking inventory of the fridge every day? she thinks, sliding the bracelet onto her arm. She sits with the clothing on her knee and sees Shirley kneeling beside the bathtub, cooing babytalk to her little stepsister. She knows she should feel remorse over not telling Shirley the real story on Dave, and she could if she tried. But what purpose would it serve? It would only make me feel good about myself, she thinks, because I can feel those things; it wouldn’t change a thing. She sets the clothing aside and goes over to the sink and splashes cool water against her face. All right, she tells her reflection in the mirror. You have been raped. I know, the reflection says. But there’s no need to slit your throat over that one, is there?