The Better Mother (24 page)

She imagined the clubs to be hot and damp, with the odour of dancers and men alike, the floors sticky with spilled rye and whatever else the crowd brought in on their shoes. It would be warmest close to the stage, where the lights cut through the gloom and where high kicks spun the humid air. Maybe she could go, just the once.

A thin woman, her cheekbones like sharp rocks, staggered down the sidewalk. Her dress was pulled to one side, exposing a bony shoulder. One stocking pooled around her ankle. Val could see the makeup streaming down her face, black streaks from eyes to jaw. A man ran after her and pulled her arm so roughly that she spun into his arms. “You’re to give me what I asked for,” the man shouted, and she collapsed on his shoulder. He dragged her away, her body limp.

“Well, do you want to go?” Sam’s voice was soothing.

Val shook her head.

That night, well past midnight, she took him to the waterfront. As she began to lead him toward the waves, he hesitated, whispering, “I can’t swim.” She gently untied his
shoes, peeled off his socks and rolled up his pants before taking his hand and walking him over the sand and rocks. He stood in the cold water up to his knees and shivered, his lips set in a grimace.

“How can you live here and never touch the water?” Val asked, but Sam didn’t answer and briskly rubbed his hands together.

She kissed him and felt the chattering of his teeth against hers. He held her tightly and pushed his face into her hair. As big and tall as he was, the water reduced him to a cold sliver of a man. Val wanted to laugh, but she stroked his back and led him to dry land. He reached into the paper bag he had left on a flat rock and passed Val a packet of sticky rice wrapped in bamboo leaves, the pork in the centre still steaming.

She woke up the next morning in her room, warm and smug with the cobwebs of happy dreams still clinging to her. Today Joan might sulk over the fabric of her wedding dress, or drag Val to look at potential apartments, but none of it mattered. For the first time in her entire life, Val was finally, deliciously full.

The wedding took place that June in the front garden of the boarding house. Joan and Peter said their vows under an arch covered in purple clematis, and the guests stood in the grass in a small circle, smiling and nodding as the two said their vows and kissed. Val’s eyes narrowed.
Like brother and sister
, she thought.
If they’re in love, who could tell?

She was acutely aware of her parents standing beside her. When she met them at the train station, she was shocked at how old and brittle they seemed. They stood waiting with their
suitcases on the floor between their legs, looking confusedly at the crowds. But it didn’t take long for her to realize they hadn’t changed at all; rather, in the year she had been away, she had grown used to their absence. With time and distance, her memories of them, now small and indistinct, had become smoother and more loving. Cleaner. The sight of them reminded her of Joan’s baby, his sharp bones, the way he clutched her skirt whenever she held him on her lap. She wondered if her parents ever visited his grave, but she didn’t ask. On the way to the boarding house they spoke about her father’s job at the cannery, where he had been downgraded to working half-shifts, like a lot of men. The foreman never said why, but everyone supposed it was because the war was now over, and they could hire cheaper men from the Chinese and Japanese crowds that were begging for work each day.

“They’ll take over soon. Mark my words,” he mumbled. When an Oriental walked past, Warren spat in the street.

At the wedding, Meg stood with her hands behind her back, her unfashionably long dress blowing against her ankles. Val could see that her father had been drinking, but he was sober enough to lean himself against the cherry tree and keep his hands clasped so that others would think that he was praying, not dozing in and out. His face was tinted with layers of dirt that had accumulated over the years and repelled water and soap, no matter how often he washed.

Peter’s parents, who had travelled all the way from Toronto, wore dark clothes and stood to the side, inches apart from each other. His mother silently wiped the tears from her face. They stared straight ahead, not daring to look into the eyes of Meg and Warren or to look too directly at Joan, in
case one of them spoke, forcing a response. Val could sense their disapproval in the way Peter’s mother pursed her lips and in the sound his father made when he cleared his throat every few minutes. It was easy to imagine the conversation they might have had with each other that morning.

“Have you seen her parents? Hicks. They probably don’t even know how to use indoor plumbing.”

“Well, what are we supposed to do? He loves her, and she
is
a pretty girl.”

“Pretty! All you see is that blond hair and those blue eyes. She has no class. Just a step up from your common whore.”

“Come on now, that’s cruel.”

“Mark my words: she’ll never make him a proper wife. When we sent him out here for school, I didn’t think he’d get married for a long time. Or at least not to a girl like this.”

And there’s so much they don’t even know
, Val thought.

A crow began cawing from its perch on the roof. Val watched as it opened and closed its sharp beak, its neck pulsing with the effort. The crow’s talons, curled over the shingles, glinted in the sunlight. It emitted one last caw and flew off, the shadow of its body floating over the lawn, changing shape as it drifted over the bushes and trees.

After lunch was served on the veranda, Val sat with Suzanne on a bench by the lavender bush at the very edge of the garden, both of them enjoying the day off from the café. They could see Joan floating over the grass in her white dress, touching guests on the shoulders as she passed, holding her skirt away from the dirt in the flower beds. Suzanne smiled.

“She looks pretty.”

“Yes, she does,” said Val, trying to keep her voice light.

“Hugh and I, we’re going to get married with no fuss. Just the minister and us, I guess.” Suzanne spun the plain gold band on her ring finger with her other hand. “My parents couldn’t come anyway, not in the summertime when there’s so much to do on the farm.”

“That’s too bad.” Val watched as her mother smoothed a wrinkle on Joan’s skirt. Joan turned around and stared at the fabric their mother had touched, looking, Val knew, for a dirty handprint.

Their landlady, dressed in yellow with a white hat, bounded across the lawn. “You must be so proud,” she boomed at Meg.

Val thought her mother was in danger of blowing away, her body small and dry, no match for the landlady’s generous bosom and wide smile.

“Proud,” Meg answered in a loud, strained voice, as if trying to match the merriment around her. “Yes. Very.”

“And you, sir, are you a little sad at marrying off your little girl?”

Warren nodded slowly, his eyes wandering from tree to guest to the landlady’s rouged cheeks. “I was sad when she left home last winter. She’s got a good husband now and doesn’t need to worry about herself anymore. Between you and me, I was never much of a provider. Shiftless, my father always said.” He laughed and spilled half his wine on the grass. Val leaned forward, ready to rush across the lawn and coax her father into a chair.

“The café will be busy next month,” Suzanne continued. “I’m leaving, and Mr. Chow is off to China again.”

Val turned and stared at Suzanne’s freckled face. “He’s going away?”

“Didn’t you know? Yes, he’s going to visit his family one more time to tie up some loose ends in the village. His wife and kids are moving here next spring, he told me. They’ve been apart for so long. I don’t think he’s been back in at least two or three years.” Suzanne laughed lightly. “I wonder sometimes if he even knows the names of his children.”

Val felt a throbbing behind her right eye and wondered if Suzanne could see the muscles of her face stretching and contracting.

“Children?”

Suzanne turned and looked at Val, her eyebrows knitted together. “He never told you, did he. I think there are three. One set of twins and another little girl? I can’t remember.” She paused and tilted her head to the side before speaking more quietly. “I do feel sorry for his poor wife, though, raising those kids alone back in China all this time and not knowing what her husband is getting into. I don’t know how she does it.”

“His wife.”

“He doesn’t talk about the family much, so I’m not surprised you’ve never heard of them.” Suzanne opened her mouth to say more, but the living-room clock chimed, and she turned her head at the sound. “Lord, is it three o’clock already? I have to go. Hugh is waiting for me. Make sure Joanie gets my gift, will you?” She stood up and put a hand on Val’s shoulder. “He’s still a good man, sweetie. Try to remember that.”

And Val was left sitting alone, smelling the off-sweet scent of lavender. She thought of the sweetness of dried sweat
that comes from two people, the taste detectable only after the salt has been kissed away.

That night, she lay in bed beside her mother and felt the heat coming off her body in a way that was unfamiliar; Joan was always cool, her feet clammy. Val kicked the covers off and turned to the open window. Across the room on the floor, her father mumbled in his sleep and pulled his blanket up over his chin.

If it weren’t for her parents, she would walk down to the beach in her nightdress and step into the cold, churning water. Soak her body until she could no longer feel anything. She could hear the waves breaking on the rocks, followed by the whisper of water as it ran down the length of the sand and through tide pools that would be empty by morning. She could float face-up, her nightdress both billowing and flattening around her, and see nothing but the night sky.

She knew exactly how naive she had been. She had never asked, and he had never told. He had watched her undress, night after night. There were no secrets, only truths she hadn’t discovered yet. Her own fault for never guessing that a man his age—a man who owned a thriving business and yet lived in a single room on the second floor of a boarding house—would have a family to save his money for. Ridiculous. Stupid, stupid girl.

She sat up in bed and leaned in closer to the scissor-sharp air cutting through the open window. Even if she were swept away or chilled to the bone in that unforgiving ocean water, she would never forget the way he sucked her fingers or the hours they spent breathing in tandem or his bemused face
watching her eat plates of food like she had never eaten before. She chewed on her fingers, remembering. There was no doubt about it. His cooking had left its mark.

THE STAGE
1947

Warren and Meg left the next day, their suitcase repacked with Meg’s worn stockings and Warren’s one white shirt. When she returned from the train station, Val changed the sheets, her hands smoothing out the depressions in the mattress from her mother’s body. The pillowcase her father had been using smelled of his hair. She had never noticed before how feral they smelled, their oils and other discharges mingling in the air and sticking to the chairs and towels. She was ashamed of her disgust, the roiling of her stomach when she swept up their stray hairs. But she cleaned and scrubbed anyway, erasing their presence with rags and brushes.

At breakfast, they had asked if she would be back for Christmas. Her mother had even smiled and said, “We could get ourselves a ham.” Val tried to remember if her parents had ever served a ham before; all she could recall were sludgy stews made with three pieces of a gristly oxtail and turnips discoloured from weeks in the cellar.

Val said, “I don’t know how much I’ll have to work. So many of the men here are away from their families at Christmas,
and they’ll want a good hot meal from the restaurant.”

Her father had continued chewing his toast.

When she left them at the train station, they had looked shabbier and smaller than when they had arrived. Val watched until the crowd closed around them. For a brief, panicked second, she felt like running forward and pushing people aside until she found them again. She wanted to burrow into their dingy, faded clothes, touch their dry skin and listen (carefully, for the cavernous station was loud and voices echoed) to her father’s uneven breathing and the whistle from her mother’s nose. But before she could take even one step forward, the crowd surged toward the trains, and there was no trace of her parents, only hundreds of people who could have been them but weren’t.

That night, in her bed, she held herself beside the newly empty space. She missed the shape of Joan: sharp and angled, with cold radiating from her bones. And she missed Meg, who curled up like a kitten while sleeping. Sam had held her gently; his strong arms were surprisingly smooth. She didn’t dare admit that she missed him. Val listened to the rustlings of the old man who lived in the room next to hers. She imagined herself rushing into his room and climbing into bed beside him, holding his skinny and wrinkled body in her capable hands. The old man’s bones would jab at her, and he might have icy feet, but it wouldn’t matter. She would feel his chest rising, stroke the remaining hair on the top of his head, whisper her fears for Joan and herself and this wild city, knowing that his deafness and poor memory would never betray her. She wondered if he would be afraid or silently grateful, unable to put into words his relief at discovering that another human being
was willing to touch him, look at his drooping face with unflinching eyes. She hugged a pillow to her stomach, the darkness in her head like the black water of the ocean outside her window.

There was a time when she dreamed about Vancouver as a glittering city, bright with electric lights and the glinting of diamonds worn by languorous women. She had always known it wasn’t very far, that it was a trip that could be made in the course of a day; still, it was a place that might as well have been across an ocean instead of the rolling, thick-watered Fraser River.

The morning after her parents left was her day off. She stood in front of the Orpheum in a circle of summer sunlight. She tilted her head back to see the theatre’s sign in its entirety—the glowing white letters, the border of light bulbs that would have been ordinary in a regular lamp in a regular house, but not here, above the fanciest theatre in town. She loved Vancouver and, until yesterday, loved the fog in the early mornings as she walked to work, the sound of rain bouncing off the sidewalks as she rushed around the café, even the shouts and beats from the nearby nightclubs as she and Sam sat at a back table after closing, feeding each other with chopsticks shiny with oil.