The Chrome Suite (26 page)

Timothy had been gone for over two years and still she wrote to him, letters that she sometimes mailed, but usually not. She had grown disappointed in his replies. She had looked in them for the father who had bought her the cape, but his letters were too carefully written, as though writing her was an assignment that he strove to do well. “You must come and visit us sometime,” he once wrote. She hadn’t the courage to ask, Sure, when? Then his unsatisfying letters dwindled to greeting cards sent on the occasion of holidays and special days such as Valentine’s or St. Patrick’s, and which, Amy suspected, had been chosen by Aunt Rita.

Margaret allowed Amy to make one telephone call a month and it was the same thing, the same stiffness in his voice as in his letters. There were long silences between their sentences when Amy wanted to but could not ask, “When can I come and live with you?” And so she stopped calling him as well. She began to write Timothy’s replies to her letters. “I want you to come and live with us soon,” Amy wrote Timothy saying. “You should be with your mother right now. But once you’re older, then I want you to come.” She invented his life with Aunt Rita, and an Irish setter named Pal. On Saturday afternoons they’d play bingo at the legion hall while Pal waited for them outside. But they didn’t play for money. They played for things, and Timothy had won an ironing board and a kitchen clock that was
shaped like a Dutch windmill and which he was going to send to Amy because it wasn’t an antique. She looked up Victoria, British Columbia, on the map at school and took them out of the legion hall and put them instead on a sandy beach with the sound of surf crashing as they looked out over the Strait of Juan de Fuca, Aunt Rita throwing a piece of driftwood into the water and Pal bounding after it, eager to please. She had Timothy explain how, from the beginning, he really had been attracted to Rita more than to Margaret but didn’t want to hurt Margaret’s feelings.

Amy tried to write a story about the time when Timothy had taken her to visit Santa Claus at Eaton’s and the line-up of children and parents to Santa’s throne was too long. She had grown impatient and so, rather than wait to see him, she’d pulled Timothy over to see the electric trains. She wrote about what she saw: trains winding through tunnels past gumdrop signal lights, train-station roofs encrusted with frosting and embedded with jewel-like candy, candy cane lampposts, trains crossing bridges over orange soda-pop rivers. She stopped writing when she remembered that Timothy had let go of her hand and she’d been frightened that he’d abandoned her. Dad! she’d cried out, then saw how the faces of several people around her had gone soft with pity, and so she’d swallowed her panic and set off angrily to find her father, who was only an aisle away, his back to her, engaged in conversation with a store clerk.
Dad!
she had yelled, and when he turned she punched him in the stomach.

Dad! Amy sometimes cried silently and punched her pillow, but it wasn’t the same thing. One Saturday before Father’s Day, resentful over the absence of mail at the post office, Amy went into Black’s Dry Goods and marched to the men’s section at the back of the store. On a table was a display of gift suggestions, ties encased behind plastic in narrow boxes, plaid shirts, handkerchiefs, fishing lures. Her compulsion to pick up the items and one by one throw them across the room
began to recede. A fishing lure, she thought. Yes. Perfect. She chose the largest one, a silver spoon with red glass beads for eyes. She bought it and mailed it away to Timothy in Victoria.

At age fourteen, Amy refused to get out of bed on Sunday morning and told Margaret that she no longer wanted to go to the “Alliance Gospel Circus.” Mel didn’t have to go, she reasoned, and, besides, it had become a boring affair; they repeated the same stories over and over, did the same tricks. Margaret, who had become somewhat of a spiritual force in the congregation, perceived Amy’s rebellion to be an attack by the evil one and she rose to the challenge.

When Amy is sixteen, and Shirley Cutting walks into her life, Margaret puts in a request to her prayer cell for “prayer warriors” to come to her aid, those who will fight on their knees daily for Amy. And Amy becomes a redhead like Shirley and Shirley becomes her best friend.

Amy meets Shirley for the first time in Ken’s Chinese Food when Shirley walks in one day with a self-possessed air, as though she’d been coming to Ken’s all her life. Her thick red hair is pulled back into a ponytail, drawing her features taut, accentuating their sharpness. A fox, Amy thinks, when she first sees Shirley. “Foxy” is what Cam and Gord will nickname Shirley later on, the name muttered under their breath, for their ears only. Shirley sits on a stool at the counter, looking unconcerned as she puffs furiously at a rollie and blows the smoke towards the ceiling. She turns and looks at Amy, Cam, and Gord where they sit in the back booth, and her eyes become slits as she studies them coolly and with a great deal of contempt. When Amy goes over to the jukebox, Shirley speaks. “Play fifty-six.” Curious, Amy punches the number and the song turns out to be an old one, Sarah Vaughan singing in a clear, bittersweet voice,
“I’ll Be Seeing You.” Shirley hums along like a slightly drunk, love-lost woman in an old black-and-white movie, sitting at a bar nursing a drink. Fade to black.

That was Shirley. She was seventeen.

Amy sits down beside the young woman and begins talking past her to the waitress, well aware that Shirley is listening in, and Amy is not surprised as Shirley’s mask of contempt begins to slip and that she almost smiles. As the song ends and the waitress is called away to another customer, Shirley turns to Amy. “You come across as being a snob, but you aren’t. What a relief. This is such a tight-assed town.” Amy had won Shirley over, she knew, because she had peppered her conversation with swear words. She invites Shirley to join them in the back booth, the one they have come to think of as being exclusively theirs. Cam, Gord, Amy. Over the years they’ve been hanging out at Ken’s there have been others invited to join them in the back booth, those who were in the transient stages of rebellion. But it’s Amy, Gord, and Cam who have proven to be the hard-core oddballs. When they were younger they were explosive and loud, sometimes laughing for no reason other than that someone had belched. Ken, the good-natured proprietor, doesn’t object to their presence as long as they buy a reasonable amount of food. Each year he paints over the graffiti and names they have carved into the plywood booth. Now that they’re older they’ve grown quieter, tense, a rather pitiful-looking group sitting there wearing silly little masks of bravado. At sixteen and seventeen, they are edgy about where they might be heading. Shirley is a welcome diversion.

“You guys want to help me do the shopping?” Shirley asks.

Shirley’s question is a challenge, and because her green eyes promise an adventure, Amy, who has become a lazy, mediocre student, is all too willing to skip school and accompany Shirley on her hitchhiking jogs into the city, and to try her hand at shoplifting.
She reasons that she’s simply helping Shirley out with “her problem” – the problem being Shirley’s father dying too young of a heart attack and her mother remarrying. Her new husband is foreman of the Hydro crew, recently arrived to rewire the town of Carona, and there is another child. Shirley’s presence is barely tolerated by the new husband. When he comes home from work Shirley leaves the house. She calls from the cafe before returning, to check if the coast is clear. Her stepfather does an inventory of the refrigerator before he leaves for work in the morning and again when he returns, to determine if she’s eaten anything that belongs to him. Amy figures she is helping out, because at first all they steal is food and cigarettes.

It takes them only two rides to reach the city. Then they get on a transit bus and head towards Shirley’s old neighbourhood in the north end. Amy sits next to the window, watching people strolling along Memorial Boulevard. Several young men and women, hippies, she believes, are long-haired and wild-looking in their frayed jeans and floppy hats. She imagines herself walking among them, wearing white cotton, sandals, wooden beads maybe, her hair long and straight to her tail bone. As Amy watches the “flower children,” she thinks that while she’s the one on the bus and moving, it seems as though she’s the one standing still.

When they get off the bus, the long face of Stanley Knowles stares out at them from an election poster taped to the window of Pete’s Grocery and Meats, the store Shirley remembers going to with her real father on Friday nights, treat night, to spend her allowance. The politician’s face is a solemn one, Amy thinks, as she enters the store behind Shirley. The man, she will learn, though unpopular and feared in the municipality of Carona, is this neighbourhood’s totem.

“Pete!” Shirley shrieks as she enters the store. She opens her arms to receive an embrace. A tall, muscular man grabs her in a hug.

“Doll! How you been?”

“I told you, this guy is a mark,” Shirley says later, and winks. “While we talk you get me tuna, solid white. It’s the only kind I can hack.”

The houses in the neighbourhood where Shirley lived in happier days with her mother and real father are identical wartime prefab single-storey houses built on cement slabs and constructed on lots so narrow that their eaves troughs meet over the strip of walkway running between them. There’s a stingy look about the neighbourhood in the way most of the yards are enclosed behind chainlink fences. Amy feels she is intruding as she stands with Shirley in front of the house where Shirley used to live. Amy doesn’t know that in not much more than a year she’ll leave Carona and wind up in this neighbourhood, in one of these very houses. That several years later she will bring home a bundled up spring baby, and in summer watch, amazed, as he zooms around the front yard on all fours, stopping now and then to taste a bug. That in autumn the child will pull himself up at the chainlink fence, suck at the wires, and screech with delight at the sight of a garbage truck lumbering by. Or that in her memory she will always frame her child, Richard, as being five years old and out behind the house sitting on the clothesline stoop, making an airplane, the summer she almost killed him.

Amy comes home late one night in December, and Mel, diligent in his final year at university, is still up, at the kitchen table studying, as usual. But he is also waiting for her, she realizes, as he stretches and pushes his books aside.

“Look,” he says and begins to scratch at his chin exactly as Timothy would do when he was forming what to say. “You’re going to make a mess of your life. Why not play it smart for a change? Why not put the necessary time into the books and then you can get out of here. Because the time’s going to pass by anyway, and you do
have the brains to accomplish something if you want to, you know.”

For a moment Amy is struck dumb by this rare display of brotherly concern. Mel goes on to tell her what their cousin Garth discovered while riffling through the secretary’s files at school: the results of a recent test which show that Amy’s intelligence quotient is among the highest of all the students. As Mel talks, it dawns on Amy why the teachers have suddenly begun to take an interest in her. It explains the reason for their requests that she remain after class so they can have a friendly but concerned chat. They use hackneyed phrases such as: Nose to the grindstone, Apply yourself, Pull up your socks.

“Were you ever tested?” she asks.

“Yes.”

“Know your score?” She notices the blood rush to the tips of his ears.

“Average.” His candid expression disappears as he reaches for a textbook and begins flipping through it. “But I’ll get there.”

The old tortoise-and-hare crap, she thinks. She laughs and tosses a package of Black Cats across the table. “They’re on me.”

“Hey, thanks,” he says, genuinely pleased.

Steady, plodding, dull, Amy thinks. And poor. Mel only smokes when he can get o.p.’s. “Shirl and I are going Christmas shopping tomorrow. You got a wish list?”

He grins and then attempts to look serious. “That’s another thing,” he says. “You’re going to wind up in reform school if you’re not careful.”

She laughs to cover what she’s feeling as she leaves the room: dread. Not of being caught and being shipped off to a reform school, forever wearing the badge “juvenile delinquent,” but because it’s true that Mel is going to get where he wants to go, while she doesn’t even know what she wants. When she looks around at the people of Carona, there isn’t a single one among them that she’d like to be,
and this confirms her growing suspicion that being struck by lightning may have made her unsuitable for a life of normalcy.

She undresses in the dark and boosts herself up onto her bed. She falls asleep instantly and dreams of flying. She dreams she is borne upwards, up above the street and far away she flies, now, outside of town, above other towns, and above the giant sleeping city to the east.

The following morning she dresses for her date with Shirley in baggy too-large pants, an oversized shirt. She puts several bangles on her wrist and at least two rings on each hand. She will not wind up in a reform school. She will not get caught. No sweat, she tells herself, as she stands in front of the mirror brushing her henna-red hair until it crackles with static and puffs out around her tiny white face. Witchy, she thinks, and likes it. She ties her hair back with a black velvet ribbon, like an r.b. She studies her profile. Snobbish-looking, perfect, she thinks. I look like a rich bitch from Balmoral Hall.

Frost crystals hang in the air, and the snow-packed road crunches loudly beneath her feet as she walks to the other side of town to meet Shirley. It’s a hollow sound, as though during the cold night the earth’s core has shrunk, and walking now across its fragile mantle, a thin crust of frozen earth, makes Amy feel a bit off balance, wondering if she’s wrong to think it will support her weight.

Shirley has taken Amy from piking cans of tuna and cigarettes from Pete’s to the Metropolitan Store downtown where she has learned to tie several scarves onto her head, slip rings onto her fingers, bracelets onto her arms, and stroll away, selling them later to the kids in Carona. Recently, they have graduated and begun to “shop” at Simpsons. For Amy, these trips into the city to shoplift are like touching an electrically charged wire on a dare and then spitting on her finger and touching the wire again for an even stronger jolt. She likes to see how long she can stand the buzzing of electricity in her body. That day, as they enter Simpsons, Amy imagines that she has become a well-oiled machine, precise and with no nerves at all.