The Chrome Suite (31 page)

I went to her closet and reached for the movie projector on the top shelf, smelling a faint odour of mustiness which I now know to have been a dried funeral bouquet, out of place among the careful arrangement of her shoes and clothing. I carried the projector downstairs and to the dining-room table. Tucked in all around the projector were boxes containing reels of film with Timothy’s concise square printing of the dates and subjects. “The Robin. Amy,” Timothy had written, and I knew what that reel contained. The whole film was images of leaves, a tree bobbing in the wind, and, occasionally, if you looked closely, you could see the flutter of the red breast of a robin among the branches. “Now where in hell did that come from?” Timothy had asked once, scratching his chin.

I lifted the projector from the box and set it up on the table. The metal pulleys had long ago broken and the bottom of the box was littered with elastic bands and sealer rings which Timothy had used as a replacement for them. I picked up another box of film which said, “At Grand Beach.” I couldn’t remember having been at Grand Beach and so I decided to look at that one.

The film was underexposed and grainy, the colours off, the sky, sand, grey-looking, and the picture, fed unevenly by the elastic
band, jumped erratically. I saw a stretch of sand, water, and then the back of a head come out from under the camera, shoulders in a green sweater. Mine. The sweater had been knit by Grandmother Johnson. I watched myself appear whole in the frame, watched my round body being propelled on stubby legs down the side of a sand cliff, falling, getting up, my legs churning awkwardly. Then I stopped at the edge of the water and looked back at Timothy, who held the camera, as though I didn’t know what to do next. And perhaps he told me what to do, because I bent over suddenly, kicked my fat legs up in an attempt at a head stand, and tumbled over.

The light in the picture changed suddenly and became brighter, another time and day and the sun had come out. Margaret walked towards the camera wearing a head scarf and black shorts, her legs looking pasty-white. She carried a plastic pail and in the background was a screened dining tent. She waved the camera away as she passed by but at the last moment stopped, dipped her head sideways, and stuck out her tongue. I would later remember Margaret that way, a bit of the child still there.

Once again the picture changed and, amazingly, there was a baseball game. For some reason Timothy had filmed it at high speed and the players darted about with jerky movements. The camera panned past Mel, standing on a base, looking knock-kneed and skinny in baggy shorts. Suddenly, Jill rounded the base, and as she ran by, Mel stuck out his foot, tripping her. She tackled him, faking a huge rage, and Timothy moved in to record Jill pretending to bite his leg. Did she already possess the seed of destruction? I wondered. Had it lain in her body from birth, dormant, or festering, and poisoning the air around her and Mel, turning them against me?

The remainder of the film was of me. Me, standing waist-deep in water, clasping myself, shivering. Me, squatting and patting sand cakes and decorating them with shells. Me, attempting to stuff a
huge piece of chocolate cake into my mouth and wearing most of it on my face. Timothy loved me, I thought. He must have.

When I entered the kitchen, later, I was struck by the sameness of things. The same pearly-grey chrome suite. Mel’s battle-scarred, now elderly cat, George, parked directly in front of the refrigerator door, paws tucked up beneath him as he crouched and blinked up at me, daring me to just try and get past him. But in spite of the intense familiarity of the room and the things in it, I felt as though I had become a stranger to the house.

Margaret had left the fluorescent light on above the sink. The radio sat on the counter wedged between the toaster and the red and white canister set whose labels read
FLOUR
,
SUGAR
,
COFFEE
, and
TEA
. Radio, I thought, and my eyes veered back to it. “When I heard that man’s name, I was almost certain the other name would be yours.” It came to me then that when Margaret listened to news of the accident that morning, she had to have known it wasn’t me. I was sleeping on the couch. She would have seen me on her way to the kitchen. And yet, I knew she hadn’t lied. Hoped, I thought suddenly. Some dark craving for the high wire of catastrophe had made her hope against the impossible: that the name would be mine.

I heard footsteps on the walk alongside the house, and then the porch door opened and Margaret stood in the doorway of the kitchen. “Oh, you’re home,” she said softly, serenely, as she stepped into the room. “Good. I want to talk to you.”

She still wore her wedding band. She still jammed combs, at either side of her head to keep her unruly hair in place and, still, by the end of the day, those combs would pull loose and her hair would tumble about her face, making it appear smaller. She still appeared to be all long limbs, composed in her freshly starched and ironed
dresses, as though she never perspired; always cool, dry between her legs, too, the crotch of her underpants never clotted with the discharge of desire. She did not hold herself in the night, caress her breasts or place her hands over her abdomen just to feel herself being touched. Not Margaret. I am almost certain.

I stood waiting for what she had to say. I resolved to listen and not speak, to not say anything that might signal what I was feeling or thinking.

“Amy,” she said, “I have finally come to understand that there’s something terribly wrong here.”

My heart lurched with unreasonable hope. At last, I thought, we’re going to talk. Our eyes met and I saw grief and longing in hers; over our alienation, I thought, and I felt my own longing for reconciliation rise. For a brief moment I believed this was going to turn out all right.

“We’ve been praying for you,” Margaret said. “And what we’ve just come to realize is that it’s possible you have a demon. It explains so much, your behaviour, how I’ve always sensed the striving of two spirits here.”

“A what?”

“A demon. An evil spirit. I see it sometimes, in your eyes.”

It was night time. I stood inside a telephone booth downtown, on the corner across from the White Rose gas station, and I couldn’t stop crying. My throat ached with the effort not to cry but each time I lifted the telephone receiver to get the operator my throat would open up and I would begin weeping again, bitterly, for having hoped. Why had Margaret said that to me? To drive me away? Or did she really believe it to be the case and seek to have me exorcized and made over into her own image at last? Or was it, as I have since
come to speculate, that Margaret herself is possessed with the mindset, with the heart, of a terrorist? An inclination that I fear I may have inherited.

The night I left Carona for good I didn’t know who I was crying for or what about. My chest muscles ached and my raw throat burned. When I was able to stop shaking enough to pick up the receiver, I hoped for Brenda’s voice on the other end of the line. When Brenda was working she would sometimes put us through without requesting we deposit a coin. I was relieved to hear the familiar lilt of her voice. “Brenda, this is Amy.”

“Amy! Oh gosh, what a day. Isn’t it just awful about Shirley?”

“Yes.”

“Is it true?” she said. “Were you really supposed to go out with the guy and she went instead?”

I felt a sudden weariness, making me slack-jawed and sluggish, making me want to curl up and close my eyes and fall into a deep sleep. “Brenda, I have to call Victoria.”

“B.C.?”

“Yeah, my father.”

She groaned. “Amy, don’t ask me. I can’t. I’ll get into trouble with my supervisor.”

“Please, just this once. I have to talk to him.”

Again she groaned. “Don’t do this to me, I can’t.”

“Put it on my mother’s phone bill.”

“But what if she questions it? If she does, I’m dead.”

“Please.”

I heard static on the long-distance line. “Thanks, Brenda.”

“Yeah, sure,” she whispered. “But only this one time.”

“Hello?” A woman’s voice, high, cheerful.

The static sounded like water, waves in the Strait of Juan de Fuca, I thought, rolling up onto a beach outside their front door.

“Hello?” Her voice dropped, its tone now wary. My tongue refused to move as I heard a muffled sound, her hand, perhaps, placed over the receiver, and then the line became clear again. “Well, if you’ve got nothing to say, kiddo, neither do I,” Aunt Rita said sharply and hung up.

I didn’t know where I was going to go, but I knew that I was leaving Carona for good. All I had were my white bucks, ankle socks, jeans, underwear, tee shirt, and black denim jacket. What I was wearing. Then I felt the bulge in the breast pocket of my jacket. I patted it and it crackled. I also had most of two weeks’ pay from Sullie’s Drive In. Thank you, Sullivan.

he walked for almost four weeks. The balmy weather held for her, high skies during the day, and warm enveloping nights, which carried the essence and softness of the night she swam in the gravel pits, the night she had recognized as being one of the few when she did not yearn to be moving towards another place. Her predilection for the melancholy is evident in how often she recalls the external landscape. A romantic Amy, remembering with her body and not her mind
.

She walked well into each night, frightened, imagining what demons look like. Grinning tiny imps with monkey tails, or bloated gargoyles with steaming, fetid breath? She would startle at every small sound by the way, and look with yearning at lights in windows of distant farmhouses. Then, as those dots of lights winked out one by one and only yard lights remained lit and churning with a frenzy of moths, this was where you could find her. In the darkness. Not during the day, but at night, when there was no one but herself
.

Even though she would like you to think so, there is nothing at all romantic about being alone on the road in the dead of night. It wasn’t so much the absence of people but the presence of absence; not a single loving person at her
centre. And, frankly, who, if they dared to approach, would find much that was lovable there – a heart as flat and as polished as her white face
.

That first night I walked until past three in the morning, and then trampled down some grain, making a nest for myself in a field, and spread my jacket as a pillow and slept. In the morning I awoke feeling damp and stiff but strangely exhilarated as I stretched and listened to a dog barking in the far distance and heard, too, the whistling, cawing, the hiss and croak of the landscape, and thought: I did it. Then the barking was drowned out by the sound of a machine’s engine sputtering to life and I knew it was time to move on.

During the days I ignored the curious appraisals of the truckers, farmers, and waitresses I encountered in roadside gas stations, and I didn’t speak more than was necessary to order what I wanted to eat and to ask directions to the washroom. After the first day, when I saw myself in one of those washroom mirrors, I noticed that the skin beneath my eyes looked bruised from smudged mascara and so I dampened a paper towel and wiped my face clean of cosmetics. By the end of the first week my skin took on a rosy glow from the sun and my arms became deeply tanned. As I travelled I tried not to think of distances, set no goals, just walked, cutting away from the main highway after the first day to travel along secondary roads and then roads that were not really roads but rutted paths crossing open fields, until I saw on the horizon the crawl of headlights or rows of telephone poles, meaning that I had come back to the main highway. I would follow it again, perplexed sometimes to find myself passing by a hamlet or town I had come across several days earlier.

My feet seemed to move independently of my will, so that even though the rest of my body ached with tiredness, my brain screamed for sleep, still I could walk.

In the days and nights that followed I did not think about Shirley’s crushed chest or ruptured heart; but I suppose now that Cam and
Gord did. They were among the pall-bearers at Shirley’s funeral and they must have thought about her broken body as they filed past the open casket and saw her too-high, pointy, and obviously fake breasts thrusting out against the dress her mother delivered to the undertaker, one of her own, probably, because Shirley didn’t own a dress.

I did not imagine myself as Amy the squirrel, or standing on a book and floating towards a harbour, heading towards Truth and Knowledge. I thought instead about Margaret. If there was one thing I could have changed, I wouldn’t have struck her. I reasoned that my mother had told me I was possessed by a demon for revenge. I began to dread the silent telephone calls in my own future.

But gradually thoughts of Margaret vanished in the open air, and during the days I walked I became aware of how large everything was, how tall and wide the sky, how broad the plains of the Midwest, which seemed to breathe and become twitchy with nervous energy during the night. At night I heard the earth’s nervousness in the ground as I lay on it, how it quivered with sound.