The Better Mother (22 page)

But Danny sat at the kitchen table, his legs folded underneath him, the hot steam from the boiling pots penetrating his thin wool sweater. He knew that the kitchen was the one warm room in the house. Everywhere else, the single-paned windows seemed ready to drop out of their rotting wooden frames. Doug could promise all he wanted, but they knew he would never get around to replacing them, so they huddled in their beds at night and wore layers of clothes as they hurried from room to room. In the kitchen, the warm air seemed to wrap around his body, and sitting near a simmering pot of pork bones was as comforting as sitting by a blazing fire in a stone fireplace. Danny sighed, and his small torso relaxed.

Betty placed a bowl of palm sugar lumps and hot water in front of him. “Stir until it melts,” she said, resting her hand on the top of his head for the briefest of moments before she turned away to shred the napa cabbage. Danny ran his fingers through his hair, and rice flour floated around him. He wondered if this was what it would be like to sit amongst the clouds, where everything was seen through a veil of white that softened edges and blurred lines so that each person appeared younger and prettier. His mother turned back, and Danny smiled at her. She nodded, and he picked up a spoon and started stirring.

Now, as Danny watches the pot on the stove, he smiles at the memory. He realizes that not every moment with his mother was painful. Still, it would be simpler to leave it all in the dusty cracks of his mind. It’s his fault for returning home. With this one jar of soup, he understands how bad a son he really is, how he is no longer happy to sit with his gentle-voiced mother in a steamy kitchen. Now, whenever he thinks
of her, he is devising ways to avoid her completely. And here she is, travelling for an hour and a half in the heat, just for him. He wants to shake her, yell at her that she should take a bath or read a Hong Kong tabloid, anything that will keep her away from her particular cycle of work and bloodletting that leads to this pool of guilt Danny flounders in.

He thinks of Val. She feels, she rages, she can say,
You’re a fucking idiot
. When, as a child, he had met her, he knew in an instant that she was not a woman like his mother. Val could slice open your cheek with a twist of her fingernail and kiss you afterward, love and hate commingling in the air like a heady perfume. She is the mother who would have understood the confusion that twisted within his belly when he thought of other boys, the longing to burst out of his humdrum shell and emerge as something new and wonderful. If you hated her or didn’t want to see her, Val would smile slightly and saunter away, every step seeming to say,
If you don’t want me, I don’t want you either
. His own mother is a turtle, sometimes poking her head out to watch the world with small black eyes, careful to upset nothing. Her smell speaks of work, days in the kitchen and cleaning other people’s homes, nights on her knees in her own narrow hallway. She doesn’t ask to be acknowledged, but the results of her drudgery are everywhere and speak for her when she is silent.

He rubs his eyes and tries to remember how he felt the first time he met Val in that alley. Awestruck. Comforted. For a second, his mother’s face hovers as he visualizes the stage curtains he hid behind, the spotlights that circled through the gloom. Now that he knows Val came from a small house like his parents’, her glamour is that much more
impressive. If he thought she was strong before, he had no idea.

As the soup begins to boil, the phone rings. Even though she hardly ever called in the years after he ran away, he knows it is his mother, who has likely been calling every hour to see that the soup is safely in his apartment. The ringing is like a siren, persistent and unrelenting in its volume and shrillness. He reaches over to pick up the receiver then stops. He turns off the stove and grabs his keys from the hall table.

The dancers grind and spin, their platform shoes squeaking on the stage. The lights shine red on a girl’s belly, blue on her thighs. Some are barely awake, their eyelids drooping from a long day followed by this long night, or for a chemical reason. Danny no longer looks for the track marks, and he doubts that the other men in the club ever notice. Whether they are asleep or awake their breasts still bounce when they sashay up the stage, and the space between their legs looks the same.

Danny looks at his watch and realizes that he has been sitting in this chair, absorbed in examining every costume and every shimmy, for three hours. His head feels stuffed with cotton batting, and his mouth is dry from the beers he has been mindlessly sipping. He wonders what Val is doing, but can’t get past an image of Frank’s newly sunken face. He leaves his money on the table, nods at the waitress and leaves.

The night air blows thick and slow. Even here, standing at the mouth of an alley beside a strip club, Danny thinks he can taste the salt from the ocean, those tiny crystals that tickle the raw red tissue of his throat. He scratches his head, trying to slough off the dullness of beer. Thin clouds move across the surface of the moon. When he was a little boy, he always
thought the moon had a woman’s face, the craters and shadows like the age spots spreading across his mother’s left cheek, the criss-crossing lines like the deep creases around her mouth. Not a face subject to the whims of makeup. Not a face that smiles unless she means it.

Behind him, the side door to the club opens, and a dancer steps out, dressed in a pair of light blue jeans, running shoes and a kangaroo jacket. When she hurries past him, he steps to the side, hoping that she doesn’t think he’s a pervert waiting in the shadows. She turns and he sees her face, lit from above by the street lamp, pale and young, freshly washed. Her eyelashes are blond and her chin is a small knob, tensed against the dangers that lurk in the street. It is the lines of her face, the smoothness of her cheeks that fascinate him. She’s like a little girl who pours imaginary tea for her grandmother and rubs rouge from her auntie’s vanity table on her round cheeks when no one is looking. This stripper, without makeup and looking faintly afraid of Danny’s gaze, is ready to break, as though she grew up only yesterday and has found that she is already cracking under the weight of adult responsibility.

Danny turns down the street, leaving the dancer to dash across the road and disappear into a waiting car. The next night, he returns with his camera. He waits in the side alley, his lens pointed at the backstage door of the club.

A girl with dark feathered hair steps out into the alley and pauses against the contrast of street lamp and dark night. Danny, his fingers itching, waits for a car to approach before he presses down on the shutter release, hoping that the glare from the headlights will make the sudden brightness of his flash unnoticeable. Tires squeal up the street. The camera flash
is blinding, but only for a fraction of a second. By the time the dancer turns and looks around her, Danny has retreated into shadows and there is nothing to see but a line of speeding cars. She looks around once more before climbing into a cab. He lets out a breath and grins to himself as he advances the film.

All night he stands there, waiting for the girls to leave, hiding behind a Dumpster when the bouncers turn his way. It is easier than he thought, this lurking and snapping, capturing their faces, the faces he imagines they had when they were small, when they sat at desks in school and smiled openly at the teachers in front of them. These pictures will show them in their moments of transition and prove that none of them are inhuman, blow-up dolls come to life. On his way home, he walks with feather-light feet and fights the urge to skip down the sidewalks and swing his camera by the strap, singing as he goes.

In the morning, when he develops the contact sheets and brings them into the front room of his studio, he sees that he was right. The women look uncomplicated, like the ones you see at the corner store. And yet there is something about their beauty. Like moonlight, they are ghostly and transitory, as if they might disappear during your next blink. Behind them and above, the flickering neon sign of the club is solid and unmoving, the same in every shot, ugly in its explicitness, yet necessary—without the club, these women might be hairdressers or students or social workers, and their fragile beauty might never be seen.

Danny is euphoric at how clearly he can see their eyes, the arc of their lips. He can feel their breath on his cheeks,
that rhythm that says,
This is just me
. No costumes, no makeup. These are their real and thin-skinned selves, as tangible to him as Val’s throaty laugh and be-ringed hand on his arm.

This is why he returned to the strip club again and again. It wasn’t for the glamour onstage. It was for this: flesh and despair, the things that make up these women, each neatly contained in one glorious shot. He looks up at the sunshine streaming through the skylight and thinks,
Finally
.

The next morning, he hurries to a Catholic church in Shaughnessy and then to a lunchtime reception at the bride’s father’s house. By four o’clock, he’s exhausted, and he drives to the studio with his eyes half closed. There, he handles negatives and contact sheets automatically, not even looking at the tiny images that emerge from the developer. All he can hear is the groom’s mother saying sweetly, “We need the proofs tomorrow. I’ll have the cheque ready for you when you drop them off.” He arrives at his apartment at three in the morning. Before he can submit to a wave of unconsciousness, he feels smothered and panicked, so he fights it, flicking at it limply with his open hand. But the sleep pulls him under, and he stops struggling as he realizes that this relinquishment of his day-to-day senses is what he really wants.

For the first time in years, he sleeps dreamlessly, floating in his own special, complete darkness. It pulses, and his heart pulses. It expands, and he feels his body stretching.

Breathe. It’s the only thing he has to remember here.

He could be in an ocean, the tide rolling over and under his body. He swats at the waves, irritated with the interruption. Then he hears it. A ringing, growing louder and louder.
With each ring, the darkness dissipates and sleep recedes a little more until he can see the sunlight, bright and unrepentant, through the open blinds.

He stumbles out of his bedroom.
What would happen if I dropped the phone out the window and never left the apartment again?
He picks up the receiver and holds it to his ear.

A woman’s voice explodes, “Danny? What took you so long?”

“What? Who is this?”

He can hear her clucking in disapproval. “Have you forgotten me already? It’s only been a week since I saw you.”

Confused and foggy, Danny reaches for the wall to steady himself before he remembers. “Miss Val.”

“Well, that took you long enough.”

He stands up straighter and smoothes the front of his undershirt. “I’m so sorry. I was sleeping, and I’m a little groggy right now.”

“Sleeping? Danny, it’s two o’clock in the afternoon.”

He smiles. “You know, for a second there, you sounded more like my mother than a stripper.”

“You little bastard.” She laughs. “And here I was phoning because I was worried about you. You were supposed to phone me two days ago so we could go out again, or do you not remember?”

“I’ve been a little preoccupied.”

“Sure, whatever you say, honey. I need to go somewhere today, and I was hoping you could give me a ride. What do you say?”

He knows if he simply delivers the wedding proofs and then returns home, he will want to replay memories: him and
Frank in Banff, his mother combing out the tangles in his hair, the last time he embraced someone under a tree in Stanley Park. If he calls his sister, or goes to see his parents, he will risk the silence that inevitably descends on his family gatherings; the silence that would be too tempting to break with
I am gay
, or
I think I might be dying
.

“I’ll be there in an hour,” he says. “Wait for me out front.”

THE SUBURBS
1982

They drive east down the highway, toward the sprawl of the suburbs. Danny holds his left hand out the open window, and the warm air brushes his forehead. To his right, Val sits with her eyes closed. Danny can see the layers of her eye makeup: the liquid liner, the champagne powder near the tear ducts, the gold-flecked violet on the upper lid. Impeccable, with the ghost of her real skin showing through.

After twenty minutes of driving, he pulls up to a house with a familiar wall of dahlias. The garden where he saw Val for the second time.

Val opens her eyes and sits up straight, grasping her green, patent-leather handbag. “Here already?”

“You still haven’t told me why we’ve come,” he says, unbuckling his seat belt.

“Well, come in with me and you’ll find out.” She steps
out of the car and saunters to the front door.

Val’s sister opens the door. Joan is dressed in pink slacks and a white sleeveless blouse. Her blond hair is pushed back from her smooth forehead with a plastic headband, also pink. Danny wonders if this is how Val would look if she had married an unremarkable man and lived in a big house away from downtown—calm, coordinated, with a face that betrays nothing, not even her age.

When she sees Val, Joan frowns. “Val, you could have called. I’m in the middle of cleaning out Kelly’s room.” She looks up and sees Danny hovering behind Val, trying to blend in with the lilac bush at the side of the door. “Oh. Hello. Do you need something? Has Kelly not put in our order for the prints yet? I have to apologize. She’s sometimes a very thoughtless girl.”

“Let us in, Joanie. He’s with me.”

Joan tilts her head to the side and narrows her eyes before walking down the hall toward the kitchen, leaving the front door ajar. Danny follows Val into the sunken living room and sits beside her on a tan leather sectional. As Val straightens her tucked-in blouse, she whispers in his ear, “Can you believe this place? Everything’s so meticulous it gives me the willies.”

Danny looks at the thick pile of the carpet, at his feet flattening and soiling this collection of fibres. He decides to sit as motionless as possible. Val is unusually silent, and Danny watches as she twists her hands together, over and over again.