Free The Chrome Suite by Sandra Birdsell Page B

first imagined.
    She thinks of Bill as being a young Ernest Hemingway and of herself as Catherine and that she will make him love her. He senses her watching now and raises his head. She has known since that night last winter that something would eventually happen between them, that the lines would one day converge: Timothy’s absence, her being mid-cycle, when her desire for sex was at its peak, the children away. Her throat clicks with dryness. Be quiet, she thinks. Stop this. But she’s certain that when she rises up to meet him, skin against skin, she will meet the substance of her intemperate dreams.
    Bill North feels compelled to look up from the spool of electrical wire he’s been unwinding and looping around his elbow. He sees Margaret’s face and the self-satisfied look of her mouth. He’s become impatient with her game, the signals she telegraphs with her eyes and then takes back moments later retreating behind a mask of pleasantries. She needles Bill into remembering the act. The night she’d picked up his hand and pressed it against her breast and then walked away as though nothing had happened. He feels uncertain and off balance in the presence of that self-knowing look. She’s tooold to play at cock-teasing. “Howdy,” he says. “Bun says after work. Still okay by you?”
    “Yes, sure.” Her voice is brisk and businesslike. “Around four.”

    I watched through the back window of Josh’s car as Margaret receded from view that morning. Goodbye forever, I thought, without knowing why I had thought of the word “forever,” except that seeing her standing there in the street, wearing the new blouse with its crooked collar, growing smaller and smaller, made me think of the song “Clementine.” “You are lost and gone forever, oh my darling Clementine.” I prefer to remember Margaret looking like that, uncertain, vulnerable. Elsa and Jill had rolled the windows halfway down and I leaned into the upholstery enjoying the pressure of the windstream against my face. I took short gasps of breath through it and felt beads of cold water form inside my nostrils, and I thought, Maybe I can breathe under water now.
    Josh patted the dashboard. “Rocket ‘88,” he said to Mel. “Hydra Matic. But it won’t get you to the moon. Maybe those old Americans can make better cars but they’d better get the lead out if they want the moon.” He turned on the radio. “It’s a push button,” he explained. “Go on, have a go at it.” Bits of music and voices popped from the speakers as Mel began pushing buttons at random.
    “Hey, that’s not a toy, boy,” Josh warned. I laughed inside, thinking that Mel was just that. Not real. A toy.
    The seat bounced as Jill fidgeted, moving her knees in and out as though she needed the bathroom and signalling her impatience with the long ride to the city. It seemed to take longer to get there than to return. We called it “the city” because Winnipeg was and still is the only real city in the province of Manitoba, a sprawling island with half the population of the province living on it. We had all been to the citybefore, of course. Timothy made a point of taking us in for the Santa Claus Parade each year. Occasionally we accompanied Margaret when she took the bus in for her appointment with the doctor. Mel, Jill, and I had the distinction of having been born in the city because Margaret wouldn’t go to the clinic in Carona where the receptionist snooped and your health became everyone’s business. Or else we would go with her for a short day’s shopping excursion which always ended on the mezzanine floor at the Hudson’s Bay store. She would collapse into an overstuffed sofa, bags strewn about the carpet at her feet, while we waited for Rita to get off work at the Film Exchange and join us for a Denver sandwich and ice-cream floats. “She puts all her money on her back,” Margaret said often about Rita, and when she appeared, causing all heads to turn, my