The Chrome Suite (35 page)

“I thought you could teach me how to play checkers,” she says, though she knows he can’t hear her. “It might be useful information. For my future.”

His hand tightens around the stamp album in his lap as she reaches for it. Get lost, his expression says.

Hank returns with a chair and positions it on the other side of the
TV
tray. He’s surprised when Amy sits down. “Oh, okay.” He backs away. “You know how to play?”

“I’m sure it’s no big deal. He can teach me.” She knows from having watched the two of them play how to position the checker pieces. The old man frowns and swivels sideways in his chair, cups his chin, and fixes his rheumy eyes on a distant point. It’s only his legs and ears that don’t work, Marlene has explained. He can talk when he wants to. Amy is aware of his legs beneath the wool pants. Dry twigs. She waits. His face says, If you don’t go away I’ll just ignore you. She hears Hank grunt as he yanks at a cornstalk. Well, to hell with this, Amy thinks, and watches as a monarch butterfly
floats down through the air between them. Then it dips and wavers, coming to rest against the edge of the checkerboard. “Hey, Shorty, you know what happens when a caterpillar spins its cocoon?” Amy remembers her grandfather saying this one summer when she was on the swing. “Yes, it goes to sleep inside the cocoon.” “And then what?” he had prompted. “Jill is not a caterpillar,” she said.

As she watches the butterfly fan its wings, Amy remembers how she would put cocoons in jars. She’d either take the jar inside the house where she’d store it until the cocoon dried up, or else she’d be too impatient to wait for the metamorphosis to occur and would break open the cocoon and be disappointed in what was revealed: a tangle of strings and ashes, paper-thin unformed wings crumbled beneath her probing. She holds her breath as the sun glazes the mosaic of gold and black panels outlined on its wings; iridescent powder-covered scaled, she knows, from having captured them and seen the silvery powder on her fingers. “Pretty.” It lifts off suddenly and she watches as it flutters across the yard and away.

The old man turns to the table at his side and places his hand on top of a stack of magazines. He slides a magazine out and hands it to her. On the cover is a photograph of monarch butterflies. She flips through it to the feature article. It’s a story about the migration of monarch butterflies with photographs of eucalyptus trees bending beneath the weight of thousands of clustering butterflies. Then the old man straightens in his chair. You can read that later, he indicates, as he nudges a black checker piece forward a square.

The remainder of the afternoon passes swiftly. Amy loses every game of checkers they play. But even though she loses, the games begin to last longer and she learns the necessity of thinking several moves ahead. When Hank finishes clearing away the cornstalks he brings them a plate of sandwiches Elaine had prepared that morning. She feels Hank watching as she begins to nibble at a
sandwich and her throat closes when she tries to swallow. She excuses herself and goes up to her room.

Amy sits in front of the attic room window, feet propped up on the small chest beneath the table, paging through the magazine the old bugger has given her. She becomes aware that the light in the room is fading as the sun drops behind the trees at the end of the street. She switches on the lamp in the centre of the table, and the colours of the monarch butterflies, a patchwork quilt covering the branches of a tree, leap to life from the glossy page. She has heard Hank when he’s dragged the old man up the stairs to his room on the other side of the wall, and she hears him now, outside, sitting on the steps, she supposes, humming and strumming softly at the strings of his guitar. She sets the magazine aside and listens as he seems to find what he’s been looking for and begins singing. It’s a whiny sound, and she wonders why country and western singers think they sound great singing through their noses. She recognizes the song. It’s about a man pining for a pillow his sweetheart has slept on, wanting to put it beneath his head so that he can dream her dreams. Elaine and Marlene should have returned by now. The breeze flowing through the screened window feels cool against her hot skin and she shivers. She doesn’t want to think about Elaine and Marlene being late.

She goes over to the bureau to get a sweater from her bottom drawer. As she leans forward her eyes look directly into the face of James Dean. Strange, she thinks, as she notices a small eruption on his face. The picture has been torn or poked with something, she discovers, as she examines it more closely. Marlene will flip out, she knows. She loosens the strings of Marlene’s peach-coloured halter top and lets it drop around her waist. Her breasts are stark white against the deep tan at her throat and shoulders. Perky. She cups a breast. She strokes the nipple until it draws up into a tight
bud. She wonders if Marlene ever masturbates. From the way she keeps herself covered most of the time, dressing in a corner with her back turned to the room or undressing in darkness, Amy doubts it. She’s tempted to slip her hand down there and press the button which is already swollen. Hank’s song becomes a moan. Corny, Amy thinks, and resists the temptation. She pulls the sweater on over her head. He sounds sick. Lovesick, lovelorn. She goes downstairs, following the sound of his singing. When she steps outside and sits down beside him, he grins at her because she’s humming the tune, harmonizing under her breath.

When he breaks off singing to tune the guitar strings Amy watches how his tongue flickers at the corner of his mouth as he concentrates and she feels a tightening in that hard nub at her centre. She pushes off the steps and walks down to the gate. When she sees headlights of a car moving through the trees and turning the corner onto the street she’s relieved, realizing that it’s Elaine and Marlene. The car sways to a halt in front of the house and all four doors open simultaneously. Marlene leaps from the car first, laden down with packages. “Hi! How have you two lovebirds been making out?”

“We have not been making out,” Amy replies darkly but a great worry has been lifted from her chest at the sight of them.

“Oh! So you
are
lovebirds,” she sings. “Huh, huh, huh.” Her shoulders jerk with laughter. Hank has followed and steps up behind Amy. He takes packages from Marlene’s arms. Amy wonders suddenly, Why not Marlene? Why not Hank and Marlene? She hears Elaine’s voice mixed with the sound of big band music blaring from the car radio. “Well, I don’t know, Steven,” Laura says, her voice uncommonly loud. “It seems to me that if we’re going to stop in for a pee, we could stay for a short snort too.”

“They’re looped,” Marlene whispers as they walk towards the house. “We stopped at a hotel for supper and they must of drank a gallon of beer. Each.”

“Honey?” Elaine calls.

They both turn. “Yah?” they say in unison. Elaine hates the word “Yah.” They tease her with it. Amy has never seen Elaine wearing a dress before. It’s a sleeveless white cotton dress with red polka dots, cinched at the waist with a wide red belt which makes Elaine’s hips jut out like two shelves. The V-neckline reveals the deep crease between her breasts. Amy thinks that Elaine looks nice wearing a dress. Real. She sees through that full-blown woman to the girl Elaine may have been, daring, impudent, and probably a flirt.

“Go down to the cellar and bring up some of that chokecherry wine, okay?”

“Okay,” they both say and salute.

When Amy remembers that night she recalls Steve sitting beside the fire, the burning cornstalks, which Hank had doused with kerosene and put a match to, going up in a great whoosh of flame, dimming the stars overhead, roaring and crackling, and that they’d had to yell in order to be heard above it. She remembers Steve sitting on an overturned washtub, dabbing perspiration from his face, which shone with the heat of the bonfire. She remembers the story he told about Buddy, a dog he once had. A little fox terrier who could deliver meat. Steve would tie a package of meat to Buddy’s collar and off he’d go without a backward glance. “And the little beggar, he’d never think to even take a sniff of that package, never mind eat it,” Steve had said, pounding his fist against his hand for emphasis. “By gum and that’s a fact,” he repeated over and over.

“He’d just pick up the phone,” Laura says, “and tell them Buddy was on his way and to watch for him.” She crosses her legs and a white high-heeled shoe dangles from her toe as she leans forward, clutching a glass of red wine and laughing uproariously when Steve tells them about an electrician who has a sign in his window that says “Let Us Check Your Shorts.” Even Elaine cackles over this one although she’s probably heard it several times before. Laura’s big
square horsey teeth are smudged with lipstick and her white plastic button-earrings dance with the light of the bonfire. Hank stretches out on his chair, full length, feet crossed, and chews on a straw.

And Amy remembers being upstairs later in the attic room after Steve and Laura leave and only Hank remains. He’s downstairs in the kitchen playing gin rummy with Elaine and having the last bit of chokecherry wine. The smell of smoke clings to Amy’s hair and sweater. She watches Marlene open the packages spread on the bed. She holds up a sweater, a skirt, a blouse. Then she unpacks her new school supplies and the room smells like clean paper. Marlene lists the items out loud: loose-leaf paper, binder, geometry set, pencils, ruler. Amy falls silent. She sits on the edge of the bed and counts the cracks between the floorboards. When the school buses arrive, the town will empty and she’ll be alone.

Marlene doesn’t notice Amy’s silence. She carries the stack of supplies over to the bureau. As she sets them down she sees the hole in James Dean’s face. It wasn’t there this morning, she thinks. The old bugger, Marlene rages silently. Tears of anger push behind her eyes as she walks along the wall slowly, checking all the other magazine pin-ups for evidence of the holes that her father makes by slipping the tip of his Swiss army knife between cracks in the wall boards in order to spy on her.

Amy lies beside Marlene and wonders if there’s any way possible for her to get on that school bus too. She has earned enough money at the butcher shop to buy supplies. So what if this is a dull and boring place? she thinks, as she curls onto her side to try and sleep. She feels the pull of sadness, though, because she knows she will not be able to bring herself to speak to Elaine about it. She falls asleep then and doesn’t stir later when Marlene gets out of bed and feels her way around the room for the flashlight. Or when she tears off a corner of her school paper and tapes it over the hole in James Dean’s face.

Amy doesn’t hear Elaine and Hank or the slap of cards against the table as they play game after game of gin rummy. Elaine has heard the creak of Marlene’s step but it’s been quiet upstairs for half an hour. Her hand stops Hank’s hand from dealing cards and she says to him with her eyes, Honey, do you want to? She nods in the direction of the maroon floral curtain which divides the living room in half. She sleeps behind that curtain in a bed that is wide enough for two bodies. The chair legs scrape against the floor as Hank pushes away from the table. He stretches, yawns, feigning tiredness, and says he’ll take off for home.

Elaine begins to understand at last that the reason why Hank has declined her invitations lately to lie beside her in bed and let his penis grow thick against her leg while they listen for a cough or the sound of a footstep against the stairs, before they begin their hurried, stealthy lovemaking, is the girl Amy.

“I hardly got a wink of sleep last night,” Laura complains to Amy the next morning in the shop. “That damned Skinner dog woke me up and I couldn’t get back to sleep.”

“Oh, too bad,” Amy says sympathetically. Probably hung over and that’s why she couldn’t sleep, she thinks, but she feels generous this morning. She feels like singing, only she wouldn’t know what. She stands at the block behind the counter, working. The boning knife’s slim blade moves swiftly as she pares fat and sinew from chunks of stewing meat that she’ll arrange in a tray for the display counter.

“Second night in a row now,” Laura says as she hangs around behind the coffee-bar counter, opening and closing cupboard doors with more force than necessary. “I’ve got a good mind to call Randolph and give him an earful.” Her frown is accentuated by the uneven and heavily pencilled arch of her eyebrows.

Amy’s fingers are tinged red and the apron she wears is streaked with animal blood. Laura’s hands can no longer take the cold, Steve explained when he’d hired Amy. Or the blood, Amy thinks. Amy dislikes the smell of animal blood. Steve has told her that it’s not really blood, but it’s red and it’s in the sinewy tubes she comes across and rips from the meat.

“What do you mean you didn’t sleep a wink?” Steve says. His voice booms out over Amy’s head. He works on a counter behind her, making sausages. “Every time I woke up you were sawing logs.” His fingers loop and twist the meat-filled sheep gut into clusters of breakfast sausages.

“I beg your pardon,” Laura says, in a huff. “I was awake most the night. I know because when I looked at the clock it was two. And then three. It was a quarter to five before I got to sleep.”

Steve snorts. “She’s as blind as a bat without her glasses,” he says under his breath and Amy grins. She knows what’s coming. It’s a ritual, a volley of shots over who slept the least and therefore who is entitled to be more tired in the morning. Laura slaps a cookie sheet against the counter. Amy looks up. Through the slant in the venetian blinds she sees Hank walk towards the bowling alley and work. He’s provided for himself one way or another ever since he was fourteen, Elaine had said to Amy over coffee at breakfast that morning. “I know,” Amy said quickly so that Elaine would spare her the recitation of Hank’s history. Cleared snow. Delivered papers. Ran errands. Set pins at the alley, babysat kids at the Community Centre, and all the while practising, working hard at becoming a country and western singer. Elaine polishing Hank’s halo. When she passed the butter, she looked Amy hard in the face and said, “There’s some people in this world you don’t treat lightly, you know? You don’t fool around with some people’s hearts.”