The Better Mother (36 page)

A young girl (her hair was falling over her face, but Betty could see by the boniness in her shoulders that she was not a woman yet) sitting at the front desk muttered, “Fifty cents.”

Betty gave her the coins, and the girl waved her through, her eyes fixed on the magazine open in front of her.

The doors to the theatre itself were closed. Double doors, the kind that silently swing both in and out. They were painted a dark red, too purple to look like blood, but alarmingly fleshy nonetheless. The foyer was empty. No one remarked on the small, motionless Chinese woman.

The doors opened, and Betty jumped backward until she was half hidden by a gold-painted pillar. A bearded man with a dirty hat and thick shoes walked out, rubbing his wide hands
together. Through the open doors, Betty caught sight of a roving spotlight, then a flutter of red and yellow feathers. Before she could think any further, she took three steps and was inside. The doors closed behind her with a murmur of air.

The theatre was half full, and most of the men occupied the first eight rows of seats. A few dotted the seats in the back, but Betty spied a patch that was completely empty under the jutting balcony. She crab-walked into the middle and sat down.

It was dark, but everything glowed red and dark and thick—velvet curtains, rich wood, plush carpet beneath her feet. But these were details she noted only perfunctorily.

She looked up and there it was: the lit stage, the dancing woman dressed as a resplendent parrot, the men watching as if this woman were the only thing they could ever want to see, as if this performance, with the waggle of her hips, contained all their happiness. The dancer flashed a glitter-covered nipple, and a roar went up from the audience, a roar that belied the number of men actually gathered there.

The men reacted to every move she made. She flicked a finger, and a ripple of energy spread through the crowd. She walked the width of the stage, and Betty could see their heads following her. She performed a high kick, and a collective wave of approval surged through the seats.

Betty thought she could smell the arousal in the air, a burnt-skin odour that rose up from the seats and circled the room slowly like a thick soup. If she stepped on that stage, would the reaction be the same? Could the curve of her hips bounce to the beat and draw gasps from strange men, or even from her own husband?

She looked around, and drew the sleeves of her jacket over her hands. If anyone noticed her, they made no indication.

The spotlight twirled and spun, and Betty wished she could warm her hands in the light, watch her flesh turn white and blue and red with each change of a filter. The music pounded, and she thought about going home that night and dancing with the children, or waltzing around the living room with her husband. Preposterous, of course, but she smiled at the thought anyway: the house filled with the noise of stamping feet and the tinny music from their small radio. Laughter bouncing off walls and ceilings, rattling the windows and escaping into the night air, spurring the neighbours to remark, “That Lim family. Always having fun.” Her own reflection in the glass, spinning and beautiful, so glowing and shiny that people on the street stopped and stared, unconsciously moving their heads in time to the music. It could be, couldn’t it?

Another dancer appeared onstage, a blond woman dressed like Shirley Temple twenty years earlier. Betty watched for a few minutes, saw her body revealed bit by bit. She saw the look of irritation on her face, as if these men were mosquitoes, crowding her and impossible to swat away. Betty felt a headache coming on (that music, and the lights that seemed to pound at her just as loudly) and she remembered her children. She was a mother, sitting in a dark room half full of men, with naked ladies dancing in front of her. She looked down at the peanut shell—covered floor, her cheeks burning. How irresponsible.

She had groceries to buy and dinner to cook, a silent husband who would make his displeasure known in some
other way if she was late. He might ignore the dripping garden hose, or leave his near-empty beer bottles on the floor, where they would inevitably tip over and form a sticky puddle she would have to clean up.

The twenty minutes inside this place would have to be forgotten, locked away in her brain. It didn’t matter anyway; she would never be like these women, showing the intricacies of their bodies, or these men, displaying their desires for anyone to see. Her family didn’t dance, and that was that. If she wanted something different, no one could know or guess, least of all her children. It wouldn’t be a problem: half the time, little Danny stared right through her. He thought she wasn’t interesting enough to hold his attention, and, while this occasionally made Betty sad, right now she considered it useful. The quiet, muddy-skinned mother couldn’t possibly have music and dance and laughter ringing inside her body. Those things belonged to the beautiful people.

She buttoned up her jacket and stood, careful to keep her head down in case someone should notice her. As she was walking up the dark aisle, she heard a low and raspy male voice in the balcony shout, “Where’s the Siamese Kitten? I want the Siamese Kitten.” Betty stopped and scanned the crowd, but couldn’t see who had spoken. She felt her shoulders droop.

She didn’t know how she would shake off this fatigue. But today was like any other day, and there was food to be cooked and floors to be swept. Like always, she would hardly talk. She thought she might say something to her husband, just once, about Danny and how she knew he could still be
the son they would be proud of, but then she thought that speaking up was something to be done sparingly. Best to save it all up for a time when she really needed to unleash what was on her mind. As Betty pushed open the door to the lobby, she took one last look behind her. The dancer onstage ripped off her skirt with a whirl of energy, but her face remained still, the lines clear but so, so tired.

THE MONEY SHOT
1982

Canada geese honk through the sky, and Danny’s head is clogged with the late August sunshine.
Where is the fucking rain when you feel like weeping?
Danny shouts to himself over the din. Even if he cried, the tears would evaporate instantly. What, then, would be the point?

The funeral comes to him in bits and pieces. The priest droning in a voice that doesn’t differentiate between speaking and chanting. Edwin standing with a group of men to the left, their eyes fixed on the casket. Frank’s mother’s grip hot on his arm. The relatives politely offering their condolences to Frank’s parents, but not asking Danny’s name or shaking his hand. The looseness of the skin in everyone’s faces, but especially Frank’s father’s, who droops a little more with every passing minute until Danny wonders if he will topple into the grave; in the hole, at least, it would be cooler.

Danny looks back and sees Val, standing by herself with her hands clasped in front of her. Shadows from a maple tree dance across her face. When she sees Danny, she winks and nods. He feels swollen with the pressure of looking like he cares about the grief of others. Frank’s mother’s fingers are like claws, and he stays in his place. He turns back to the circle of people in front of him, and sees that they are no more than disparate groups, pieces of Frank’s life that, without him, are nonsensical and unordered fragments.

He shuts his eyes and pictures Val as she was when he first met her, with her long, lean legs and her cigarette smouldering in the semi-darkness of that damp alley. There are things about that day he can no longer remember. Was it June or July? Had it been raining the night before, and did he peer at a familiar face in the theatre the day he went back, or was it a trick of the light, the shadows that morphed strange features into ones he thought he knew? He reaches further into his memory to retrieve small details, like the smell of the Sweet Caps in his hand, or the exact shape of the puddle he ran through on his way back to the shop. Frustrated, he pounds at his forehead.
I wish I’d had a camera then
, he thinks,
so none of it would be lost like this
.

Abruptly, Frank’s mother pulls at his sleeve. He opens his eyes and sees that it’s time to leave. There is a wake he must go to; one, in fact, he helped plan.

He pats her on the shoulder. “I’ll meet you there,” he whispers, and she smiles at him in a way that indicates only a bare satisfaction that nothing has yet gone wrong today.

He walks through the crowd. Edwin tries to stop him to talk, but Danny waves him away. Cindy, gripping her purse,
stands by a large shrub and watches him stride across the grass. He breaks into a run until he catches up with Val’s retreating body.

“Miss Val,” he says, out of breath, “you’re coming with me.”

In his studio, under the lights that he wired himself and turned so that they would both show and hide at the same time, the satin wrapped around Val’s body blinds him. Through his lens, she is smaller than real life, but the real-life Siamese Kitten cannot be seen in her entirety. Her red lips are a target. He focuses.

The small purple suitcase, still half open, has been pushed to the side. Val has only a stool to work with, but still, she vibrates. Buzzes even. Danny, for the first time since he was eight years old, is face to face with the costumed and powdered Siamese Kitten. She smiles, and he thinks it means either
I love you
or
I will eat you alive
. He shivers; her cool breath is blowing lines across his forehead.

The shots are flawless. No closed eyes, no drooping posture, no muscle untensed. Danny calls out, “These will be the greatest glamour shots ever taken.”

He has not yet zoomed in on her face. From this distance, Val could be the dancer Danny first met twenty-four years ago. Beautiful and powerful and sexy, but not, somehow, the woman he now knows her to be.

“Miss Val,” he says, “let’s try something a little different.”

He settles her on the stool and points the lights away. With a damp cotton ball, he gently wipes off the eye shadow, the glitter on her cheekbones and the powder on her nose
until her face is almost bare. He is reaching for her mouth when Val says, “Leave the lips.” Danny nods and backs away.

When he looks through the lens again, she is softer, her still-red mouth relaxed into a not-quite smile. The lines in her skin point to everything he has learned about her. Danny can see the house on River Road in the curve of her jaw. The lost babies in the hollows of her cheeks. The thorny bush she grew up with in the scar on her forehead. Even the years she spent on the circuit are embedded in the wrinkles that he might have expected to see on a woman fifteen years older. It’s all there: frown lines, smile lines, a droop in her left eye. Yes, she is glamorous and beautiful, but hers isn’t a fragile glamour; rather, it’s the kind that has sprouted out of real flesh, the living, breathing mulch composed of her numerous pasts. They’re all there, pulsing under her skin.

He hasn’t said anything, but Val speaks anyway. “This will be all I have left, you know, of my life before. Everything else is gone.”

The roll is finished and he straightens up. “I know,” he says gently.

She doesn’t cry, but he leaves anyway to go to the darkroom, in case she wants to.

When she sees the contact sheet for the first time, she runs her finger down each strip of tiny prints. She hunches over on her stool and considers every shot. With a half-smile, she turns to Danny and says, “I look
almost
young. Not so bad for an old stripper.”

Danny places a stack of other prints in Val’s lap, the photographs he took over several nights outside the club. She squints at them, her forehead wrinkling. But soon enough she sees the
neon sign in the background and recognizes the traces of heavy stage makeup on the dancers, the apprehension on their faces as they step out onto a street where the protection of bouncers and bartenders doesn’t exist. Modern Red Riding Hoods, picking their way through a forest consumed by city.

Val fans the prints out on the floor and places her contact sheet beside them. “Do you see? They belong together, Danny.”

And they do. Each photograph is a girl transformed from a dancer to the individual who walks through daylight, but each carries the marks of the strip with her——streaks of blush, a piece of stray glitter, the suspicion in her eyes as she scans the street. And beside them, the Siamese Kitten, the woman they might one day become. A dancer who carries the marks of her entire life on her face, who is both the little girl dreaming of the city in her room with the thin walls and limp curtains, and the woman strutting in pasties and a G-string on stages from Idaho to Vancouver. There’s no separating them now.

Together, these photographs are a trajectory. Real girls who dance for a living. A real woman who is defined by the strip, but also by her lovers, parents and the boarding houses she slept in. Together, they breathe near-tangible breath, feel like skin——not costumes——in Danny’s hands.

“You should do something with these,” Val says. “They’re not doing any good sitting in a drawer.”

She’s right. Danny can see that this set of photographs tells a lifetime of stories. There is fear and uproarious joy, the smell of blood and missed connections. Everyone will love them, and they could hang on a white gallery wall and
move people to think of their mothers or sisters or enemies, or the things they said that can never be taken back. He looks at the photographs once more, and it feels like he is about to throw off his unsuccessful, mediocre self and give birth to a brand-new, brightly coloured Danny who sings in the shower with gusto and smiles at children on the street. His skin tingles, feels raw and new and soft, in a way that seems baby-like, except that, as a child, he felt this open to the possibilities just once, when he was eight years old and met Miss Val for the first time and saw that even in ordinary alleys, glamour can smoulder.

He has been a disparate patchwork, none of his pieces contributing to a cohesive whole. What if this transformational moment doesn’t last, and he fails to pull it all together? What will happen to him? The answer is inevitable and simple: he will never be anything but a collection of whisper-thin fragments, and he will die that way, sooner rather than later. He knows what he has to do, and he won’t be afraid again. The real, lovely Val is the one with her history etched on her face. The real Danny, the one with no secrets, will be beautiful too.