The Better Mother (27 page)

On her last night, she danced and shook and wiggled, and the men shouted the usual things.

“Show us your tits!”

“Sit on my lap right here, little missy.”

“That’s some backside.”

Tonight though, she could also hear another kind of heckling, the mean-spirited kind that grew from desperation, the kind that men, usually angry and drunk, engaged in when jobs were scarce and they had to dilute their children’s milk with water. From her position, it sounded like a low hiss or the roll of drumsticks on a snare. Disjointed words floated toward her.

“Mother.”

“Shame.”

“Home.”

But she continued to dance. She knew she couldn’t be a star everywhere she went, but she had performed in every city on this circuit at least once, and she knew how to handle herself.

After she changed into her street clothes, she slipped out the back door, not stopping to see if anyone was waiting for her. She began walking down the street, past empty and dark grocery stores and diners. She liked these solitary walks back to her room; she never asked to walk with one of the other girls. She craved the way the night wrapped itself around her, the silence of the sleeping city or town like a warm, fluffy towel waiting as you step out of the bath. It was three and a half blocks to the boarding house, and the harvest moon was shining orange and huge in a sky that was not quite black, just the darkest shade of blue possible.

She shivered. Surely the heckling wasn’t bothering her now? She turned around, but saw nothing behind her. A striped
chipmunk skittered up a small, skinny tree as she walked by, and she jumped at the sound.

When she turned the corner, a man stepped out from behind a car. He wore a hat and a light coat. Val stopped and looked around at the dark, empty street, at the small abandoned playground behind her. “Shit,” she whispered.

She braced herself for the assault. When he grabbed her and pulled, her feet remained on the ground, her hands in fists. She could hear him grunting, smell his armpits. Turning, she looked into his face. She saw the roughness of his skin and the dark stubble lining his cheeks and jaw.
A hard life
, she thought. She squirmed in his grip, and he swore. She was stronger than he had thought.

He said, “Fine. You don’t want to move? We’ll do it right here.” He pulled open her coat and thrust his hand between her legs. He smiled.

She looked him in the eyes and spat, spraying saliva on his nose, his upper lip. He let go but didn’t run away, only stared at her coldly. She planted her feet on the pavement, ready to scratch or slap or bite.

“How dare you? You’ve been flaunting yourself on a stage all night long. I’ve already seen everything you’ve got, Kitten.”

He rushed at her and knocked her to the pavement. He grabbed her by the ankles and dragged her into the playground and behind the small, wood-sided playhouse. The blunt ends of cut grass were too short for her to grab. He struggled with her stockings and panties and with his own trousers (nicely pressed, how incongruous). She balled her hands into fists and punched at his head, but he didn’t seem to feel it. When she
screamed, he pressed his thumb into her throat, and she choked, angry that tears were filling her eyes. He positioned himself on top of her, and she realized that his weight on her body was too much and she couldn’t push him off. She tried to will her body to be as heavy as possible, letting her arms and legs go limp and cumbersome so that anything he tried would cost him too much effort. She felt him pressing against her, felt that familiar sensation of unaired genitals touching each other. He muttered to himself, and she stiffened, waiting for the inevitable push and burn of unwanted sex.

But he stood up, zipping his fly. His face seemed swollen, angry in the moonlight. Val’s underwear was still down around her ankles, but she felt nothing—no pain, no dry soreness.

“You see? You’re just a used-up hag. I wouldn’t do it with you anyway.” He lifted his foot and stomped on her belly with his brown, well-worn boot.

Val stayed curled up in a ball on the grass for a long time. She cried silently through the night, barely seeing the light change as the stars faded into a daytime sky. He had winded her, and she thought she might have some broken ribs. She pretended the playground was her mother’s lap and that the smell of the dirt was the smell of her mother’s hands, like soap and dry, thick skin. If her mother were there, she might sing to her. Maybe “Hush, Little Baby,” while she stroked her hair. Val remembered how light Joan’s baby had been in her arms and how carefully she had bathed him, as if he had been a thinly painted porcelain doll with fine, breakable hair. Val even wished for her father, for the comforting smell of his tobacco, his curt nod whenever she cooked dinner.

At dawn, she heaved herself up and stumbled to the boarding house. In her room, she lay on the covers, panting like a cat. She was to get on a bus that afternoon for a performance in San Diego. If she missed the bus, she would miss her gig the following night, and they would have to replace her, which meant that they might use the substitute dancer for the rest of the week. The Siamese Kitten was never late and had never missed a show. Her agent once said she was the most reliable, least-bitchy dancer he had ever met.
I can sit on a damned bus
, she thought.
I’ll sleep the whole way there
. She checked the clock on the nightstand. Six hours before she had to leave. For now, she could stay still.

When she woke up, every breath was an explosion, and the bones in her chest felt like they were splintering each time she inhaled. She crept down the hall to the bathroom and rinsed her mouth out with cold water. She coughed, and a splatter of blood stained the sink. “Shit,” she said, before walking slowly back down the hall, where she pounded on another dancer’s door. “Where’s the hospital around here?”

Eight years later, during a sunny and pleasant fall, Val returned to Vancouver. She had been back before, of course, to dance in the theatres and clubs, and to see her agent in his office on Granville Street. There were too many loggers, too many mill workers, for her to ignore the place altogether. This time, however, she was back for a whole two weeks, staying in a downtown hotel with a view of the mountains. She didn’t think she needed such grand accommodation, but the manager at the Cave Supper Club insisted. “We don’t get stars of your calibre every day, Val. It’s been four months
since Lili St. Cyr came through town and the boys around here are ready for more. Maybe you don’t remember,” he continued, “but Vancouver is one of the few cities that treats its talent right.” When she checked in, the man at the front desk asked if she would sign his pocket square so he could prove he had met her.

She thought about Joan, about the house she and Peter had bought outside of the city, with the fish pond and wall-to-wall carpeting. In her letters, Joan seemed consumed by the house, by the creaks in the floors, the steepness of the staircase, even the colour of the grout between the bathroom tiles. Val, lying in bed at a boarding house in Indianapolis, laughed while she read. She could just see little Joanie tumbling around alone in a gigantic house, a gin and tonic in her hand, fluffing up the pile of her carpet, staring at the other houses in the cul-de-sac through the big front window but not stepping outside to speak to one of her neighbours.

Joan never asked what Val was doing on the road, and Val didn’t tell her. She wrote of the impossibly tall Chrysler Building; the groves and groves of oranges on the side of the highway in California; the flatness of the American Midwest; the deadened eyes of the travelling salesmen she saw at train stations, the elbows, knees and seats of their suits shiny with wear and filmed with dust. But they both knew other words lurked behind her written ones:
circuit, cabaret, the strip
.

In her hotel room, she picked up the telephone and dialled her sister’s number. It rang once before Joan’s crisp voice answered.

“Joanie, it’s me. I’m back in town.” She heard Joan snort.

“Back? For how long?”

“A couple of weeks. I’m having Mum and Dad down to the city for a few days. I thought it would be a nice treat, especially now that Dad’s not working much anymore. Maybe you’d like to have dinner with us or walk with us in Stanley Park.”

Joan clucked her tongue against the roof of her mouth and Val wondered how a woman so small could make such a sharp, gunshot-like sound. “It’s a busy time here for us, Val. Peter’s working long hours, and I really should be home to make sure he has a good dinner so he can keep up his energy. I’m sorry. It’s not a good time.”

Val looked at the fresh flowers on the side table, the shiny mirror across from the bed, the jug of cold water on a silver tray. This life—so much like their dreams of living in the big city, the ones they whispered to each other when they were little girls—or the bland interior of Joan’s house and dinners with Peter, his stout face reflected at suppertime in the dining-room mirror.

Val said, “Suit yourself,” and didn’t wait to hear Joan’s response before she hung up.

That night, the standing ovation at the Cave drowned out Joan’s words, and Val was glad she had returned.

The second week, she walked through Chinatown, wearing her navy cashmere coat and chocolate-brown shoes. She told herself that she was simply visiting a neighbourhood in which she had spent so much time. Her hair, set in full curls, was brushed away from her face and carefully tucked behind her ears. On her right index finger she wore an emerald set in gold, a gift from a movie producer she had met in
Los Angeles, who had moved her into his cavernous house before casting her in one of his pictures. But as it turned out, Val was the kind of actress who made audiences cringe with embarrassment; she was too loud, too fast, too
big
to be contained by the screen. After the premiere, the producer patted her hand and said nothing before dropping her off at a nice hotel. When she walked into her room, all the clothes and makeup and jewellery she had left in his house were there, packed in a neat little luggage set made of purple leather. To her relief, the movie came and went with scarcely a whisper. Most of her audience was more interested in live flesh anyway.

She walked down Pender, and the bright neon signs, more numerous than she remembered, blinked palely in the thin, grey daylight, announcing clubs, restaurants and butchers. Her face was turned up, like she was catching snowflakes instead of marvelling at the buzzing, multicoloured pigs, buddhas and seahorses.

Across the street, a little boy was sitting on the curb, spinning a wooden top on the concrete. She stood still for a second, thinking that this black-haired child in the worn brown sweater and corduroys could have been young Warren. From where she was standing, she could see those round eyes that seemed to take in everything at once, even those things no one else could see. He was hunched over his faded top; his shoes were nestled in the garbage and fluid flowing beside the sidewalk in the gutter. Val stopped herself from running through traffic and snatching him up, taking him with her to the house by the river where she could feed him better, hold him longer. Change how it had all turned out.

A woman with crudely bobbed hair emerged from the doorway of a souvenir shop and spoke to the little boy. He stood up into a beam of sunshine, and Val saw that he had olive skin and a smooth, open face. He stepped off the curb, and Val heard the woman sharply lecture him in Chinese before pulling him onto the sidewalk. Val wanted to smack herself in the forehead for being so sentimental and delusional. If Warren were alive, he’d be twice that boy’s age.
This city
, she thought,
makes me crazy. Always will
.

As she walked on, she found that she couldn’t keep the memories from flooding in. At first, she pretended that she wasn’t thinking of Sam, but she soon saw that pretending to no one but herself was ridiculous. Every familiar crack in the sidewalk reminded her of him. Over the years, she hadn’t dared to think of him as often as she might have wanted. She sometimes imagined him in the front row during one of her shows, although she knew this was impossible. Sam was a family man, after all, one who never went to see strippers, but one who kept his out-of-country wife a secret from his barely adult mistress.

She recognized some of her old customers: Chinese men squatting in the alleys, chewing on tobacco and pumpkin seeds, mostly unchanged but now smaller, their sockless ankles fragile under the rolled-up cuffs of their pants. She peered into the barbershop, wondering if her favourite customer from the café was still there, cutting hair, trimming beards with long razors, tenderly scraping a sharp edge against the thin skin of someone’s neck. She saw no one except a lone man, hair falling over his ears, waiting in a chair by the window.

Tired, she turned around to begin walking back into downtown, to her hotel with its deep tub and piles of pillows. As she looked west, she saw a couple—a man in his fifties, with a slightly younger woman—walking toward her. She blinked. It was Sam.

She made no pretence; she stood in the middle of the sidewalk and stared. There he was, still tall, still broad in the shoulders. What did she expect? After all, he could hardly have shrivelled up and been driven mad by her absence. His hair was still thick, but it was growing white around his ears and temples, and his face was beginning to fall; the wrinkles were hardly visible, but Val could see the old man he would become, pushing through his skin like roots through cement.

The woman, of course, must be his wife. The top of her head was level with his shoulders. She stooped a little, and her clothes were subdued: a grey raincoat, a faded yellow print dress, black shoes that laced up. Val could see the traces of multiple pregnancies, the fat that pads a woman’s thighs and belly with each succeeding child. And her face—drawn, tired, hopeless.

Just then, she felt a touch on her sleeve. Sam looked her in the eyes, said, “Excuse me,” and edged past.

He smelled the same: that sweet and doughy smell of pancakes. After his scent had disappeared from the air around her, she continued walking west. She replayed his gaze over and over again as she drew closer to the downtown core. Dark eyes, straight eyelashes, fine wrinkles in the corners. But one thing was different. His eyes showed not a glimmer of recognition and she knew, then and there, that she had truly become someone else.