The Chrome Suite (44 page)

Later, Amy runs water for Richard’s bath and then goes out into the kitchen and calls Hank’s shop. The setting sun glares through the bedroom windows at the other side of the house but the kitchen is already dim. She sits at the table in the kitchen nook and listens to the ring of the telephone. Richard stands in the doorway, eyes bright, fixed on her. She hangs up. He doesn’t wait for her to ask, What is it?

“It’s broken again,” he says. “Can you fix it? I want to watch ‘The Brady Bunch.’ “

The world outside the house rushes inside. A shrill ambulance siren, the waspy whine of a motorbike passing by colliding against the sound of water running into the bathtub – she must constantly
be on guard that it won’t overflow. The stink of the scorched wall, Hank’s absence, his duplicity, eat at her. She crosses the hall into the living room and she sees the flickering roll of the television set. “By Jesus, you little bugger!” she hears herself scream, and sees herself grab Richard by the arm, swing him around, and let go. She sees him slide and slide across the living-room floor. She hears the horrible crack of his head meeting the edge of the coffee table.

The shift that had occurred overnight
was
cataclysmic, I realized, because I knew I couldn’t be deflected or driven away from my resolution to make changes. I held my ground in the kitchen with Hank. “Another baby? You must have rocks in your head. Number one,” I said, “with the miserly bit you’ve been giving me to run this house we can barely afford the one we have. No matter what you say I won’t continue trying to feed the three of us on twenty-five dollars a week. Period.” I told him that I had been forced to buy groceries on the cuff at Pete’s. “Fact number two,” I said, “it’s a job I want, not another kid. Selena, across the street, just started cocktail waitressing, and she says she makes as much in tips in one night as you give me for an entire week’s groceries.”

“Number one,” Hank countered, “there’s something pretty screwy about the system if it takes two incomes to run a family. And, number two, it stinks if a waitress can earn as much as a skilled worker. It just plain well stinks. And that’s what happens because of socialism,” he said, jabbing at the tabletop. “That’s what comes from voting for the likes of Stanley Knowles.”

I said I didn’t quite get the connection and he ground to a halt, throat knotting with words that refused to be born. He managed to say, “Richard needs his mother. A full-time mother, and not one
with her nose in a book all day either, not watching properly. No wonder accidents happen,” he said, his voice accusing.

I could see Richard from where I stood in the centre of the kitchen, opening the front gate to let one of Selena’s children into the yard. The cut on his head would need a fresh bandage at bedtime.

Hank’s voice grew quieter as he turned the alarm clock around and around in his hands, and I listened once again as he recited the litany of his hard life – about being the illegitimate child of a single working mother, her early death, and his consequent vow that if he ever had children they would have their mother at home, full time. I said that I would try to get a night job, be at work while Richard slept, and he pointed out that he couldn’t be expected to babysit, not while he was sweating blood to increase his clientele and needed the freedom to be able to get up and go at a moment’s notice.

“What, to the Lincoln Motor Inn?” I asked. “Is that where you find your customers?”

He began to blink and his face became a mask I couldn’t read. “I work all day,” he said. “I need to go out once in a while.”

“And I don’t?”

“You do, almost every day,” he said, sounding genuinely surprised by my question. I wanted to hear glass shattering, feel the pain of it cutting my knuckles as I put my fist through the window beside his head. Put fear into his flat, smug expression. “And what about this?” I pulled his bank passbook from my jeans pocket. “What about all this money sitting in a bank while I’ve been short for food, worrying myself sick about how to make the money you give me stretch? What about the fact that we couldn’t afford to get my teeth fixed?”

“You’ve been snooping through my things,” he said and then he lunged, snatched the book from me, and jammed it into his shirt pocket. His face grew scarlet.

“So what about it?” I said, unwilling to back down.

“A person’s entitled to save ten per cent of what they earn,” he said. “It’s a smart practice. And, anyway, if you’d known about it, do you think it would still be there?”

“Fuck your money,” I said and saw him flinch. “I’ll get my own.” I told him then I had made an appointment for a job interview on Monday and that if I got the job I would find someone to look after Richard on the nights he had to be out, “working” at the Lincoln Motor Inn.

“Like who?” Hank asked, with a slight mocking smile, implying I didn’t have a single friend who might help me out.

“Like Rhoda,” I said, and that’s when he attacked me.

No way would that “bra-burning bitch” get near Richard, Hank said. What I needed was to come to my senses, to cool off, he said, as he grabbed my arm and twisted it behind my back. He brought his knee up and bumped me across the room to the sink. He turned on the water tap and pushed me under it. I gasped with the shock of cold water against my scalp as he forced my head down and down until my nose squashed flat against the bottom of the sink. “So what do you think of that?” Hank said, me rearing up, gasping and sputtering, unable to say what I thought of it because the moment I tried to open my mouth and talk, he’d push my head down again to the bottom of the sink and the rising water. “You think you’re so goddamned smart. You think you know everything about everything. You think I’m an asshole, don’t you? You think I don’t know that? You with your stupid smirk and big nose always in the air. Big nose stuck in a book all day. Well, let me tell you, life is not in books,” he said, the words spat out as he released me then plunged me under again. “Life is out there. Ten hours a day. One week off a year. How would you like being jerked around by guys at work? Locked in the washroom, ha, ha, big joke. Turds in my tool box. Hank the Tank. Big dumb Hank. Did you ever stop to think that
maybe I can’t stand you? That maybe I hate the sight of your nose? I try to do something. I get my own place. Now I’m being jerked around by salesmen, the sales tax people, income tax, business tax, accountants. And what for? Because I want something better for myself and they don’t want me to have it. They see that I’m trying and they don’t want me to make it.”

Once again he released me and I lifted my head. Water streamed down my face, the front of my shirt. “No, Hank,” I said. “I don’t think that’s the case –” and then he shoved me under again.

“If you want to work so darn bad then why not come and work for me, eh? All that stupid paperwork. You think I wanted Richard to have to say at school, ‘My dad works as a repairman at Eaton’s’? That’s why I’m doing this! I’m a businessman! I’m trying to run a business so that I, I, I. …” He couldn’t find the words to continue. Red-faced, the cords in his neck still jumping, he turned away, freeing me, half-drowned, dripping and wheezing. I was stunned by his anger.

Hank sat down at the table and covered his face with his hands.

I stood at the sink twisting water from my hair and then sponged my sodden shirt with a tea towel. I saw my reflection in the tiny mirror above the sink. Eyes large, looking black with fully dilated pupils. When I touched my nose it hurt. I was shocked by what he’d said about it. I wondered how it was possible to live twenty-six years and never realize that your face is off kilter, your nose too large.

“What do you mean, big?” I asked. “I don’t have a big nose.”

I heard the front door open and close. Richard stood in the hallway staring at us. “I’m not going to play with the
TV
,” he said. “I promise I won’t play with the
TV
and I won’t ride my bike too far. I’m not going to be bad any more.”

“Okay, okay, true,” my friend Rhoda said to me Monday afternoon after the others had left the book club meeting. “When a person is a
victim they don’t have to take the responsibility for the things that happen to them. But when you think of it, doing nothing is actually making a decision too, you know.” She curled into a quilted floral chair and her fine blonde hair became a puff ball as the sun slanted though the vertical blinds behind her. In the street beyond I saw the last of the book club women, Sara, get into her car and drive away.

“By the way,” Rhoda said, following my gaze, “Sara is fucking someone.”

I saw in my mind’s eye Sara. Tall, thin, with raw hands, a harried mother of four children, who still managed to donate several hours of her week to
UNICEF
. I said I didn’t believe it.

Rhoda laughed. “The trouble with you,” she said, “is that you don’t look past the surface. I’d say the guy she’s fucking is about fifty-five, grey, and a little on the heavy side.” She leaned back into the chair and swirled orange juice around in her glass. “She’s fucking her father, if you get what I mean. Have you?”

What Rhoda had “done for her father” was two years in engineering, she’d explained after one of the book club meetings, when what she really should have been doing was throwing pots and drawing. “What makes you think Sara is having an affair?”

“Affair?” Again the trill of laughter. “Quaint word. Well, for one thing, she’s so mysterious. She’s asked me to take her kids after school three times this week and she never tells me where she’s been. Listen,” she said, “when you get home, write this down somewhere so you don’t forget I said it. I predict that Sara will split within a year. It’s the pattern.”

The muscles in my neck still hurt from the force of Hank’s hand and my nose was sore to touch. I had added little to the discussion around the book
Surfacing
and allowed Rhoda ownership of the idea that the protagonist rejected the label “victim.” I looked at the clay pots hanging crooked in Rhoda’s front window. Like my head, I
thought. “What I like about clay,” Rhoda had said to me, “is that no two pieces are ever the same.” Wrong, I thought, they’re all lopsided.

When she’d asked me to stay on after the others had left so we could talk, I needed to talk but was reluctant. Sometimes I suspected that Rhoda had taken me on as a project of some kind, as though she were building a coil vase to ward off her own depression. She wanted to see if she could make something from nothing.

“Well, so, have you?” She said the words slowly, articulating each one dramatically. “Have you had an affair?”

Most of the women we’d read about had had affairs. They lay on their backs at the bottom of coal mines, on blankets in parks, or in empty or borrowed apartments. They seemed driven to give away little pieces of their hearts here and there for short amounts of time. I wanted to try and get mine back. I wanted to know the process.

“Don’t tell me,” Rhoda said when I didn’t answer. Her eyes went wide behind her glasses. “You’re not going to tell me that you married your first love and that there’s never been anyone else! Wow, what a can of worms,” she said. She tapped me on the knee. “Look, I don’t know whatziz very well, but from what I’ve seen I do know that you’re totally unsuited for each other. How in hell do you manage, that’s what I’d like to know? Hey,” she said, when I didn’t answer, “I’ll help you any way I can. Just tell me how.”

“I’ve got a job. This morning,” I said. “It’s just part-time but I may need someone to take Richard at night off and on.” Now that it had finally happened I was terrified, uncertain whether I could carry through what I had set in motion.

“Well, good for you! It’s a start, anyway. And you can count on me. He can spend the night here any time. Listen, people who stay in unhappy marriages, and who don’t do anything to get out, wind up choosing either alcohol or religion to cope.” This a quote, no doubt, from one of the many “survival” books she read constantly.

“Or art,” I said, and smiled.

“Yeah, art,” she said drily. She started at a noise and her hands flew up around her face. “You hear that?”

I’d heard it, too, a crash in the room above our heads. “Something fell.”

“Well, of
course
something fell. But
what
fell? And why?” She stared up at the ceiling. “You have to come up with me.”

I climbed the stairs ahead of Rhoda and entered her workroom at the far end of the hall. Beneath the window was a door set up on trestles as a work table and strewn across it were curled sheets of drawing paper covered with scraggly lines and smudges of charcoal. All along the window sills sat lumpy shapes of fired clay. Books overflowed from shelves and were piled in stacks about the room, and I ached with envy. Rhoda tiptoed through the clutter. “Look.” She pointed to a painting lying face down on the floor. I laughed and felt the release of tension as she bent and righted it, leaning it against the wall.

“What am I going to do?”

“Hang it back up,” I said.

“But you don’t understand. It’s an omen. A picture falling like that means something terrible is going to happen.”

I drove home through the residential streets, slowly, carefully, mindful of a group of children standing between a couple of parked cars. I slowed down as I approached them. There was a church on the corner and recorded church-bell music chimed a hymn I thought I recognized. I watched in the mirror as the children crossed the street safely behind me. When I pulled into our driveway I saw Richard rise up from his play corner in the garden. I saw the bald spot and the bandage on the back of his head. Something terrible has already happened, I thought. I saw my eyes reflected in the rear-view mirror. Sharp, blue, hard.