The Chrome Suite Read Online Free PDF Page A

wouldn’t have the patience to put them down. She can remember, though, whatever she wants to. She has a mind for minutedetail, shades of a colour, a raised eyebrow. She could, if she wanted to, remember way back to age nine. In a place she will call … something unusual, she thinks, exotic. The name jumps forward from the bottle of beer placed between them. Corona. Carrion, Charon. No, something plastic and meaningless. Carona.
    If she wanted to she could recall that long, strange summer when she spent almost the entire time outside, on a rope swing.

    Sometimes I’d lie on my stomach and wind the swing up and let it fly and then afterwards I’d reel about the backyard, loving that off-spinning feeling of things not being what they were. I’d swing standing up, sitting down, upside down with the rope wound through my legs and chafing the skin behind my knees raw. Once I vomited into my shoes from motion sickness, and near the end of that long, strange summer, I got a sliver in my buttock from the wooden swing seat. Two small sutures closed the wound. I still have the scar. And the doctor’s his, too, I imagine, on the wrist where I bit him when he tried to pin me to the table. He joked about it later, saying he’d had to give little Amy Barber as much anaesthetic as he would to put down a horse.
    To the left and across the street from my yard stood the red brick face of the school, elm trees, and the jangled shimmer of television antennas. When I think of that horizon of antennas in the Fifties, I think of the word “jangled” because of its connotation of sound, the sound I thought their aluminum arms made as they embraced the invisible signal. It was also the sound of bangles jangling at a wrist: Aunt Rita as she approached the house one morning. I saw her coming. She was up early. Taking her role-playing at nurse seriously. Rita had taken a leave of absence from her job at the Film Exchangewhere she was in charge of distribution of short subjects and news-reels for Paramount. She had come to relieve Margaret, my mother, in the sickroom. I have no idea what, if anything, she may have been doing for my father at that time, but she certainly did something later. As Rita stepped through the gate, I waved and she nodded, concentrating to keep from spilling whatever it was she carried on the covered tray. Food, I suppose. An attempt to seduce Jill’s tastebuds and bring some colour back to her waxy, pale cheeks. Rita eased the gate open with her hip and passed by the veranda and down the side of the house along the pathway obstructed by overgrown weedy flower-beds.
    The door closed behind her, and her white shoulders disappeared into the gloom of the back porch. She called hello in the kitchen, her heart-shaped face turned up to the ceiling as she passed her greeting through it into the sick room, my parents’ room, where they had moved Jill, my sister. Where Jill had spent the past month. I continued to swing, and each time my feet shot forward the swing’s metal rings squealed in the wooden crossbar above my head, groaned when I receded into the low branches of the shade tree. Squeal and groan. Squeal and groan. Like someone learning to play the violin. This was the sound of that particular long and strange summer. I remember the look of it, too, almost tropical, pools of water collecting in hub caps beside the road and rusty-looking sprinkles of mosquito larvae floating on top. Maroon and white peonies, blooming fools, the size of dinner plates. And tomatoes. Water-logged and swollen, thin-skinned fruit cracking open and leaking their juices in my Grandmother Johnson’s garden.
    “Do you want an orange, kid?” Jill had asked me. This was in July when it was still thought that her illness might be rheumatic fever. The middle of July. Possibly only three or four weeks after our trip to City Park on the day of the Lutheran Sunday School picnic. Jillhad been kneeling on the bottom bunk bed, the humidity of the