The Chrome Suite Read Online Free PDF Page B

the walk home I’d hugged the ice-filledenamel bowl against my body and a cold spot radiated from my breastbone as I walked towards him. He held the oil can and pointed up to the metal rings screwed into the crossbar of the swing. He smiled, nudged the swing’s wooden seat with his foot, and it swung back and forth, silent now, its only sound a soft whisper of rope rubbing against slippery metal. He set the oil can down on the seat and the swing moved between us, a lazy, hypnotic motion. I remember how he would clear his throat before he spoke. “Here now, Shorty.” He had something to tell me, he said, and I wondered how he would say it.
    Yes, she can remember. But can she be trusted? Can one trust a person who seizes every occurrence that passes by in the street and changes it instantly the second her eye rests on it? She’s the kind of person who believes that when she enters a room, action begins, and that when she leaves it, people freeze in their positions. She thinks, for instance, that Margaret Barber, her mother, is at this moment sitting in her bachelor apartment in Carona, motionless, not at all alive until Amy walks in for one of her monthly hour-long visits. She is a mother, too, of a twenty-year-old son living somewhere in Alberta. She wonders if he, too, is in a state of waiting. She sees him as being five years old, with dark, curly hair, sitting outside on a clothesline stoop, his tongue working across his bottom lip as he concentrates on his task of stripping leaves from a twig. She allows for his father, Hank, to have some kind of life, but she can’t imagine what. This is Pergolesi’s “Stabat Mater.” Amy. Two voices. The learned counterpoint and the new, what she hears floating through the rooms of her mind
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    I don’t know if you should trust her
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2
    he summer Amy Barber remembers is the summer of 1959. The hot season had arrived in May, overnight, with unusually high temperatures that held steady throughout the early weeks of June. The people of Carona could hardly believe their good fortune. And then they worried. “Looks like we’re in for a doozer,” they warned one another as they ascended the marble stairs of the Bank of Commerce and passed through its Corinthian columns and on into the cool interior. “We’ve either been living right or awfully wrong, time will tell,” is what they said as they waited their turn to see the manager about their seeding loans.
    It is now mid-June. Amy was among the students who had polished their penny loafers or saddle oxfords and marched down from the school to the Town Hall where they’d lined up for their injections of polio vaccine, and then, because of the unusual heat and their tender arms, they were sent home early. She’s walking home now, alone, as she almost always is. She doesn’t realize how ridiculous she looks, comical the way she walks, leading with her chin, her wispy, nondescript-coloured hair held flat against her head with arow of bobby pins on either side. And even though she’s nine years old, she still has what looks to be a milk stomach, a doughy protrusion which the waistbands of her shorts, pants, skirts, work down below so that often her stomach sticks out from beneath her shirt-tail. Her mother, Margaret, has sewn countless tunic-type shifts for Amy, who she worries aloud will turn out fat. But Amy despises those shapeless dresses and paints her fingernails with red polish and pins her hair flat on either side of her head. She dabs Margaret’s cologne behind her ears even though it makes her eyes water and mucus run from her nose in two thick rivulets, which she clears from time to time, a reflex action, on the back of her arm. Her knees are bony knobs and often peppered with scabs where the skin has been scraped away. Her feet are large for her body and as she walks home along the sidewalk they flap against the concrete like duck feet.
    Her feet stop flapping as she squats and tumbles a large rock away from the base