The Chrome Suite Read Online Free PDF

day evident in the rim of perspiration popping across her forehead. She cradled a fruit basket that someone had brought to the house. She swung her arm, and fruit bounced off the wall behind me. What I caught I could have, she said, and so, my appetite being what it was, I caught all of it and wolfed it down instantly and hid the fruit rind and seeds inside the doll house. Throughout most of that July, and all of August, gifts arrived at the house. Paint-by-number sets. Embroidery kits. Sparkle art. Eventually Jill grew weary of these attempts to amuse her and gave the gifts to me.
    I hadn’t spent almost an entire summer swinging out of resentment over what extra attention Jill may have received. Not at all. I welcomed it because then there wasn’t time for their eyes to pinch pieces off of me, to puzzle over, sort through, measure and compare. My parents, Timothy and Margaret Barber, my grandparents the Johnsons, Aunt Rita and my brother, Mel, all the people who entered and left the house that summer more or less ignored me. Occasionally someone would squat and say hello. Or touch my face with a tentative, quick touch, as though afraid I might bite them. They believed that I was being considerate; soft-shoeing my way through Jill’s illness.
    But I remember something quite different. I was relieved to be left alone because I was teaching myself how to fly.
    The house loomed and receded. Moments after Aunt Rita arrived I saw Grandfather Johnson coming down the street. He walked erect that day, shoulders squared, not tight then – or with a snootful, drunk, blasted, the term depending upon whoever witnessed the prematurely retired gentleman walk by on any given day. Grandfather Johnson’s pride was as great as his thirst and so he didn’t drink in public. My wily and vocal grandmother had lately uncovered his stash of port, and so that day his face possessed a quiet dignity and wasn’t flushed or uncertain. He carried a plant. A geranium. A redwound against his black suit. He would set the plant on the bureau at the foot of Timothy and Margaret’s wide bed where Jill lay. If she was asleep, he’d stand there, fold his hands as if in prayer, and rest them against the footboard, careful not to press his weight against the bed’s frame or jostle the mattress in any way. If Jill was awake, he’d say, “Now, sweetheart. Guess what it was I saw on the way over here?” He believed it was important that Jill never lose sight of the world outside the room.
    He walked slower that day, as though being sober made him tired. The rope swing jerked; I felt weightless for a second, then dropped hard to the end of the slack. A wailing sound rose up in the house, high, thin, climbing above the noise of the squealing swing. A dog, I thought at first, but realized that it had come from the bathroom upstairs. Margaret. Margaret had locked herself in, opened the water taps, and was howling. My grandfather turned and looked at me, his eyes jumping with fear. Then Rita appeared at the back door, her white face angry as she looked out across the space between us. “Must you make so much noise? Must you? You’re driving your poor mother crazy.”
    “Here, now,” my grandfather said in alarm, “she’s just a child amusing herself.” He set the geranium down and knelt in front of me. I looked down at his pink scalp shining through thin strands of silver hair. I regretted for an instant my collusion in the past with Grandmother Johnson in ferreting out his latest supply of port. His crooked fingers trembled as he fastened the buckle on my sandal. I was to go down to the locker plant, he said, to ask for more ice. It was the only thing that would satisfy Jill’s strange food cravings now. Shards of ice wrapped in a handkerchief which she would suck on. I had listened to the sound of it in the night, my sister’s greedy slurping at the cold nipple.
    When I returned from the errand, my grandfather waited for me beside the swing. During