The Better Mother (28 page)

—

It had been a hard night in Kansas City, the sort of night when the comics were too tired to deliver their jokes with any enthusiasm. Outside, dust covered everything—the beat-up cars, the screen doors, even the farmers’ wives, who walked by the theatre with a mixture of fear, condemnation and shame on their faces for wanting to enter, to see what the fuss was about or to be dazzled by the lights and beading. Val was sure that these wives, dressed in clothes that made them look like the shapeless and boring potatoes they grew, would immediately leave the grime and kitchen grease forever if they could, just once, sit in the padded seats and watch as the possibilities were revealed before them, glove by stocking by brassiere.

As the dancers slouched and shrugged their way through the show, they each had a sinking feeling that all anyone cared about now were their naked bodies. No one listened to the jokes, hardly anyone clapped for the tease, for the flash of skin that signified more than it showed. Burlesque was growing old, and Val, with the added flesh on her thighs and the roll she had to suck in during every act, was almost thirty and perhaps growing old too. But she gave them the best show she could, day in and day out.

After her act, she hurried through the sharp wind, back to her boarding house. She paused and looked into the drugstore window, at the soda counter, the abandoned soda jerk hat on a stool near the front. So clean, so red and white. It was easy to imagine the rosy cheeks of the girls and boys who worked there, the smiles of the teenaged couples sneakily holding hands while they sipped their shared egg cream—two straws, of course. Val turned away.
Bad nights at the
theatre always trigger the stupidest thoughts
.

In her room, she changed into her nightgown and pulled on thick woollen socks. As she padded to the closet, she saw a letter on the floor inside the door to the hallway. From Joan, of course. Her parents never wrote Val with such regularity.

Mum and Dad are gone
.

I don’t know how to deal with it
.

The house is a mess
.

The funeral is tomorrow
.

Please come home. I need help
.

It was impossible to comprehend. Her mother, with her downturned brown eyes and knobbly legs. Her father, with his dirty undershirts and unkept promises. Joan must be mistaken.

But there it all was, in Joan’s neat, small handwriting. It was a lung infection, one that developed quickly from a small, dry cough until they were lying, hot and damp, in their bed, unable to move, and only picking up the new phone that Val had paid for when they couldn’t speak anymore. When Joan arrived, it was too late. A neighbour had cleaned them, and they lay like sleeping children, fresh-faced under white sheets.

I would have phoned you, Val, but you never gave me the numbers
.

It had been three years since Val had seen them. They had come down to Vancouver for a few days, staying in her hotel room, marvelling at the indoor plumbing they still hadn’t installed in their own house. She applied makeup to her mother’s small, sharp face, draped her own clothes on her
body and took them out for dinners and shows and shopping.

“All this,” her mother wondered, “on a chorus girl’s salary?”

Her father ate his steak in huge bites and hunched over his plate, probably expecting that someone would take it away from him.

Val crawled into her boarding-house bed and pulled the covers up to her nose. The wind whistled outside, and she couldn’t decide if it was wolves she was hearing or the howling of the dry air, blowing itself through the gaps and cracks between buildings and trees.

She could have stayed with Joan, in her green and white spare bedroom with its line of porcelain dolls on the window seat, their glass eyes blue and grey and brown and unfocused. Instead, she took the train to the house by the river.

The water seemed to have crept closer to the house. When Val walked in, dragging her two trunks behind her, the smell of her family was gone, replaced by the fishy, woody and turbid smell of the river. Already, the remains of their lives were being claimed by the bush and air and water.

Joan arrived the next morning, spent one night crying and sniffling in their old bed, and left the next morning in her shiny green car, saying that Peter needed her for a company cocktail party. Val didn’t try to stop her. It was better to be alone with the silence of the nighttime. She sat in the backyard, smelling rain from across the river, her hands folded over her knee. It was quieter than she remembered; the great logs floated by without a sound. The rough men who used to work
and live here were slowly being replaced by young families who painted the houses white and planted flower gardens along their front paths. In the dark, when the one remaining cannery and rail yards were closed, the river lapped up on the shore, and Val could hear the occasional splash of a fish jumping and falling back.

It took her five days to clean everything out, not because Meg and Warren had accumulated much during their marriage, but because mould was creeping up the walls, mice skittered across the floors and vines were growing into the siding, slowly unfurling tendrils into the cracks by the windows. The landlord never came to see the damage. A letter arrived in the mailbox one morning, informing all remaining occupants that they were to vacate by the end of the month. Val read the letter with wet fingers, the front of her dress (her mother’s old housedress, with her mother’s large blue apron) damp with soapy water.

On her last day at the house, she pulled her father’s axe out of the shed and walked through the backyard and down to the blackberry bushes, now a wall of thorns and twisted, impenetrable brambles. She wore her father’s coveralls and work gloves and her mother’s rubber boots. The darkness of the bush, even in the middle of the day, was complete. The wild plants rose above her head and blocked the sun. As she chopped and pushed, the thorns scratched her face and neck, catching on her hair and the tips of her ears. She stomped down the damp, fetid-smelling dirt and kicked the carcasses of dead rats and crows to the side. The mosquitoes rose around her in clouds. But she kept moving forward, cutting the path that her father had promised he would make when
she and Joan had wanted nothing more than to dip their hot, sweaty feet in the cool water.

About halfway through, she found a pile of stones, polished and round as only rocks battered by the river could be. She knelt down and felt the ground with her palms, and she thought she could detect a slight warmth through the dirt. She swallowed hard. After a few minutes, she stood up again and swung the axe ahead of her, her eyes hard against the flickering dark.

Finally, she emerged on the other side, the Fraser River rushing fifteen feet from where she stood. She slipped off her boots and coveralls. Wearing a blouse and panties, she walked over the rocks and beached logs to the pebbly shore. She waded in until the water was up to her knees. The current pushed at her, but she dug her toes into the gritty sand and watched as fish, big and small, swam past her. Bending down, she dipped her hands into the cool water and washed her face, rubbing off the dried blood and grime. When she stood up again, she felt a breeze in her damp hair, like Joan’s breath on her skin when they shared a bed. Now, over the sound of the running water, she thought she could hear the soft buzz of her father snoring in the other room, the creaks of the bed frame when her mother woke up in the middle of the night and had to walk the floor to dissipate the pins and needles in her legs. She wondered at what point memories became ghosts, clinging to the body like the anchoring threads of a spider web. Across the river, another town. And beyond that, the big city. She could see it all clearly.

Behind her, the path she had made rose up the hill, and she saw the house, no longer white, with its small windows
like blind eyes in the afternoon sun. She sat on a large flat rock and waited for her feet to dry before pulling on her boots and trudging uphill.

THE ACCIDENT
1958

Finally, she left the house and returned to Vancouver. The number of families had grown in her absence, and three-bedroom houses had sprung up in pockets of town Val had never even heard of. Everywhere she went, there was more construction. She supposed 1958 was proving to be a profitable year for the husbands and fathers who commuted across the bridges into downtown. Still, desperate girls worked the streets. Val wondered if men came in every weekend like they used to, fresh from months of hauling logs out of the bush or netting fish off the Gulf Islands, their pay burning in their pockets, their bodies hungry for booze and women. Perhaps it was now salesmen and managers who drove to Georgia or Davie or Main after their babies had been bathed and put to bed, and their wives were watching
Perry Mason
in their flannel pyjamas. Not that it mattered. Sex and the paying for sex remained unchanged.

After she found an apartment downtown, she began dancing regularly at the Cave Supper Club and the Penthouse and, later, at the Shanghai Junk, where she was always the final
dancer onstage. “And now, ladies and gentlemen, it’s time for the last, but not the least, act of the night. Please welcome the world-famous Siamese Kitten. She might scratch, but if you treat her right, she’ll have you purring all night long!” The club managers said that her presence elevated the tone of the show, bringing a precious glamour to the evenings that made the audience forget they were living in a wind-blown city built on logging, drink and soil spongy with rain. When she stepped onstage, she could see the men sniff, as if she brought with her a whiff of the Orient, a smell of cinnamon that allowed them to dream about pale-faced, dark-haired women tangled in silk sheets, without the wife ever knowing. While she danced, the warmth of the spotlight swaddled her, and the gruff, low-voiced shouts seemed to propel her arms and legs forward and back, around the stage and toward the ceiling. She flashed a sequined pasty, and the club exploded. Always, she smiled at the noise because it meant the same thing: they wanted her.

After she had been back for several weeks, her eyes began to travel over the faces of the men in the crowd, the ones sitting alone with a single bottle of beer, the groups of businessmen who shouted at the girls and cupped the waitresses’ bums with their meaty hands, the college boys who giggled and threw up in the washroom. There were women, too, women who sat alone at the bar in clothes that glittered in the darkness of the club. They eyed the men, walked over to those who seemed loneliest or who shouted the loudest at the dancers. Even with the bright lights between her and the audience, Val could see how these women pulled their chairs closer to the men they were talking to, how the shadows on their faces deepened as they smiled, and how some of them
tried to hide the bruises and burns on their arms and legs with scarves or makeup that faded as the night beat onward.

Hard
, she thought,
with eyes like stones
.

Throughout the night, they left, arms linked with flushed, sheepish men, or men with set jaws and narrowed eyes. As they passed her, she didn’t look directly at their faces.

Before closing, she heard one girl say to another, “I have to get up early to drop my kids off at school,” and Val flinched.

She soon saw that the dancers were changing, coming out in skimpier costumes that took no time at all to take off, dancing longer without their tops, squeezing their breasts together while they thrust their pelvises into the faces of the men in the front row. Val supposed they made more in tips that way. She could see the expressions on the men’s faces, the damp, oily look of arousal. They were not teased, they were simply erect.

For the first time since she started dancing, she felt tired, as if the audience were sucking her dry. When she asked her agent if he thought the circuit was changing, he blew out a line of smoke and said, “Sure. We had some good years there, but the movies are really taking a bite out of the business. Who needs expensive burlesque shows when you’ve got cartoon movies with Technicolor and singing and dancing? That damned Walt Disney. I should have been
his
agent.”

Val could see that the men expected more. If they were going to spend the money on a live show, they expected to see everything the girls had; the longer it took to get down to the tits and G-strings, the higher the frustration. It was like a slowly building tidal wave of discontent, one that rose from the back of the room and eventually engulfed the dancers until
they all, except Val, took off their clothes to get it over with. Only the Siamese Kitten kept to her original act. No one expected otherwise.

One night, three months after her return, a young man sat at a table of college boys. His blond hair was not combed back with Brylcreem, but long in front, almost covering his eyes. He slouched in his chair, his chin half hidden by the collar of his white shirt and yellow sweater. Val could feel his eyes on her, their sharp blueness burning as they travelled up her legs and over her breasts. She saw the tremor underneath the surface of his smooth face, an electric and involuntary twitch of the muscles. She clenched her jaw to keep herself from visibly shivering.

After her act, she stayed in the dressing room for longer than usual. She imagined those eyes slicing through the air in a dark bedroom, and her own legs liquid and weak. He was not the sort of man who did as he was told. Rather, he got what he wanted and refused to wait. His hands would pull at her clothes, shift her arms and legs until he was satisfied with what he saw. He would say little, offering a small, serious smile that could turn ugly in a minute but was, right now anyway, pleased with the woman he had chosen and shaped.

When the club emptied that night, Val carefully left through the back door and stepped into the alley. There he stood, alone, leaning against the opposite building, his hands in the pockets of his brown trousers.