The Better Mother (6 page)

The pounding in his head has disappeared. The past has arrived.

THE ALLEY
1958

He meant to stay awake, to wait up until his parents and sister went to bed and the house hushed under the weight of nighttime, when the sounds were restricted to cars driving down the street and the neighbour’s cat crying from its post on the lid of a garbage can. Danny imagined that the outside world after dark was full of skittering creatures brushing past and faraway laughter rolling through the air, thick with black. He squirmed in his bed and tried to ignore the urge to burst through the back door so that he could run and run and run, down the alley, around the corner and away, to New Brighton Park perhaps, or toward downtown, where the neon lights buzzed and men whispered to each other, the brims of their hats touching. Danny turned over and listened.

His mother was still padding down the hallway, her slippers simultaneously dragging and thumping on the scarred wooden floor. He could hear her walking from closet to back porch to closet again, the squeak of the rusty hinges on the folding doors. From the living room, the crack and hiss of his father opening another can of beer, and the fuzzy sounds of the late-night news. Even Cindy was tossing and turning in her bed on the other side of his bedroom wall, her small feet kicking the spot right by his head.

He waited and waited, but it was no use. He thought that he may as well rest his eyes until the low noise settled (his father burped, his mother dragged a chair across the kitchen floor),
perhaps sleep—just a little—until the quiet finally came.

He stood in the middle of a ballroom, illuminated by one enormous chandelier that was the size of his father’s Oldsmobile. Danny looked down. He was wearing brown corduroys with knees worn smooth, and his brown shoes, so small that he could feel his toes scrunching up under the leather. How on earth had he arrived in this place, with its mirrored walls and parquet floor, looking like this? He wiped his clammy hands on the seat of his pants.

In one of the mirrors, he could see a door (a fabulous door, decorated with stars made of glitter) opening and closing, and a slip of something green slid into the room. He turned around and Miss Val, the Siamese Kitten herself, stood in front of him, both her hands on her hips. She smiled and the painted beauty mark on her cheek lifted and then fell.

“My little Danny,” she said, “what are you doing here?”

He felt himself blushing. “I guess I was waiting for you.”

Miss Val laughed. “In those clothes? Honey, we have a ball to get ready for!”

Danny crossed his arms over his chest. “I don’t have anything else.”

“Well, we’ll fix that, won’t we?”

Miss Val opened the lid of a fantastically bejewelled chest in the corner. She rummaged through piles of silk and satin and muttered to herself, “I can never find anything in here.” After a few minutes, she drew out a small black tuxedo on a hanger, complete with red bow tie and cummerbund. “There, you see? Now, put this on before anyone arrives.”

As Miss Val was tying his bow tie into a fat knot, the double doors at the end of the room opened and a line of
finely dressed men and women entered, their arms linked in couples, the women’s skirts brushing the floor. Miss Val placed a hand on Danny’s head and whispered, “Be yourself, sweetie, and everybody will love you.”

While Miss Val chatted with the people in the crowd, Danny stayed as close to her as he dared, his nose on level with her gloved elbow. He stared at her green strapless dress, at the ruching on its sides and the slit up the thigh.
How wonderful
.

The music started and couples floated out into the middle of the room, the women with their necks held gracefully, like porcelain figures, the men smiling, close-lipped, over their partners’ shoulders. It was all so flawless, without dust or pickles or the smell of bubble gum. Danny heard Miss Val laugh and he looked up at her clear, white face.

Gently, he tugged on her hand.

“Yes, honey?”

Danny bowed his head and, in as low a voice as he could manage, said, “Would you care to dance?”

Miss Val smiled and took his hand in hers. “Why, of course.”

They spun out onto the dance floor, his left arm clutching the fabric around her waist, his right holding her hand. He peered down at his own feet, careful not to step on her toes. Gently, she said to him, “Look up. Only a fellow with something to hide doesn’t look into the eyes of his partner.”

And so they danced, slipping through gaps in the crowd, skimming over the floor as if they weighed no more than feathers. He could see their bodies in the mirrors, the whirl of movement that meant they were fast and smooth, like the
wind Danny felt when he stood at the top of the hill in the school playground. When the music stopped, Miss Val embraced him and his face was crushed against the smooth satin of her dress. He put his arms around her and closed his eyes, wondering if he could somehow make this moment last and last, preserve it with perfume or shellac it with hairspray. He sighed, because he knew that this was impossible and he would have to return to his real life.

He said, “There’s something I want to tell you.” There was nothing she couldn’t understand. She would know how it was to feel like a Martian. She would help him figure out why he always stood apart from the other boys as they played in the schoolyard. She would never look at him with disappointment or confusion. Or sound like she was sorry whenever she spoke. Or plod down the street in tan walking shoes when all Danny ever wanted was to see her in a pair of high heels.

Val knelt in front of him and touched his cheek with her cool hand. “I have a secret too.”

And he leaned forward, his ear practically touching her red lips. She breathed in and he shivered, knowing the words were coming very soon. She would know everything about him and he would know everything about her.

Danny woke with a start, rubbed his eyes in the grey light of early morning. He stood and pressed his nose to the window. Even though his small room looked out at the house beside theirs (a newer, taller house, covered not in wooden siding, but in a fine layer of beige gravel with bits of granite that winked in the sunlight and grew shiny in the rain), Danny could see the reflection of the sky in the neighbour’s window.
Usually, in this small square of glass, he tracked the speed of the clouds, the magical break in the mist when the sun shone for one second, long enough to illuminate everything and remind him that it couldn’t possibly rain all the time. But now he squinted at the barely blue sky and listened, hearing nothing but the two-note song of the bird that lived in the scrawny birch tree across the street. He must have slept through the night, but it was just as well, because the house was still and he was sure everyone was sleeping.

He crawled under his bed and pulled out the pile of department store catalogues from its hiding place behind two shoeboxes in the far right-hand corner. Sitting on the floor, he opened the newest one—the one his mother saved for him two months ago by pinching it from the morning mail before his father saw. He traced his sticky finger along the lines of the long dresses, the dangling strands of imitation pearls, the gloved hands of the one lucky little girl modelling her white, rabbit fur coat. The thin, glossy pages were dotted with his fingerprints, and small clumps of dust had collected in the spine. He lingered on his favourite page, the one with the teen-aged boy wearing a navy-blue sweater vest and white shorts, his hair parted on the side. Like a real movie star stepping out to play tennis in a city with palm trees swaying in the warm breeze. Someplace far from here. He wondered if any of the boys he knew saved catalogues like he did, but of course no one else did. Of course he was the only one.

Outside, he heard Mr. Murray open his front door for his morning newspaper and Danny knew he had only a few minutes before his mother woke up and began gathering the dirty sheets for laundry day. He reached inside his pillowcase and
unravelled a long, emerald-green silk sash. He folded it over and over again, pressing down each fold with his small hand until the creases were sharp and the belt was flat and no bigger than a handkerchief. He slipped it between two catalogues,
Winter 1957
and
Spring 1958
, and pushed the whole pile back under his bed, careful to slide his two shoeboxes into place again. Even in the middle of summer, the mornings were cold, and the floor beneath Danny’s bare feet bit into his soles. He climbed back into bed and waited for his mother to knock on his door, whispering in Chinese, in that apologetic way of hers that he hated most, “Time to get up, Danny. Breakfast is ready.”

The summer days began to blend together. Danny had forgotten how long it had been since he and Cindy walked to school in the cool mornings and pressed their shoes into the thick frost blanketing Mrs. Fratelli’s lawn. He lay on the folding lounge chair on the back porch, the flesh on the backs of his legs oozing through the holes in the woven plastic cover. A cloud like a spooked horse and another in the shape of a feather duster passed overhead.

Cindy’s face hovered above him. Her thick bangs were held back with a yellow plastic barrette and she shaded her eyes with her left hand. Her right hand held an old cookie tin.

“It’s time for paper dolls, Danny,” she said, shaking the tin so that they could both hear the scissors and coloured pencils bouncing around inside.

“Can’t you play with Jeannie next door?” he asked, drowsy from the sunshine.

“She’s at camp. And no one draws better than you. Please, Danny?”

He blinked against the harsh light and tried to remember the last time he rode his bike to Marcello’s house two blocks away. Yesterday? It was too hot to play outside and, besides, Danny was never convinced Marcello really wanted to play with him. He was just too polite to say otherwise. Maybe it
was
time for paper dolls.

In Cindy’s bedroom, they drew and cut out paper dolls from their father’s used and carefully refolded brown wrapping paper. They giggled, marched their dolls across Cindy’s bed, changing the dolls’ clothes for brunch, drinks at the club, or a dinner date with a dashing young doctor. Through the thin walls, they could hear their mother wringing out the wet laundry in the bathtub and cleaning the floors with the grey, stringy mop that, when propped in the corner of the bathroom, looked like a skinny, dishevelled old man, the kind who insisted on holding your hand while he was telling your parents what a fine little boy you had become.

“They should go to a party, I think. Maybe Anastasia will wear the pink dress with the white bow. Glamorous, right, Danny?”

But Danny was busy making a new paper doll, one with black bobbed hair like midnight, and a green robe. Cindy, looking up from Anastasia’s honey-blond head, wrinkled her nose and said, “She doesn’t look like any paper doll I’ve ever seen.” But Danny took no notice (little sisters, what do they know?) and propped up his new creation on a tissue box. He tried to remember what Marcello’s teenaged brother told him about the women who danced at the Shanghai Junk. Danny wiggled the paper doll’s bum and sashayed her around the stage while Cindy laughed and laughed, her chubby hands
held up to her mouth. Finally, Danny pulled the doll’s clothes off, piece by piece. He poked Cindy in the leg and whispered, “You have to clap, dummy. It’s almost the end of her act.”

And the doll bowed to thundering, appreciative applause before sauntering off, obscured from the crowd by one white tissue standing up in the box, in folds like a stage curtain.

As Danny was carefully re-dressing his paper dancer, their mother hurried into the bedroom. “Baba doesn’t like to see the mess. Put the dolls away,” she said, her eyes wide open and searching the room for any stray paper clothes. “Cindy, take them to your room. You shouldn’t play like this with your brother anyway.”

Generally, their father hardly noticed the house at all or most of the objects inside it. But Danny knew that the paper dolls were the one thing that might rouse his father out of his television, beer and armchair stupor, so he helped Cindy pile them into the box as quickly as his small hands allowed.

“Summertime,” Danny heard his father mutter as he walked through the front door. “Nothing but tourists.”

After dinner, Danny sat in the bathtub while his mother washed his hair, her thick fingers massaging his scalp. He closed his eyes, breathed in the steam rising from the water and the smell of soap and shampoo and his own wet skin.

“Wake up, Danny. It’s very dangerous to fall asleep in the bath.” She tapped his shoulder with a sudsy hand.

He turned his head and looked at her face. Small round eyes. Cheeks like brown apples. A wide mouth that smiled and opened for whispers and quiet complaints, but never for laughter that caught you off balance or blew through the house like
a cedar-scented windstorm. He saw that her sleeves, once pushed up but now falling, were soaked.
What if we just curled her hair?
he thought.
She could wear real stockings and not those dumb white socks
. Maybe she wasn’t always like this.

“Tell me a story, Mama. About you and Ba when you were young.”

She clucked and poured water from an ancient, cracked rice bowl over his head. “Those old stories. I don’t know why you love them so much.”

“Please, Mama.”

It was the same story every time, told in the same way, in his mother’s soft voice. Doug Lim was a fast-talking Chinatown boy, one of the few born in Canada back then. He was the undisputed king of gin rummy and, many times, she saw him slam his fist on the table in victory as the cards flew up into the air and the glasses rattled. “Not everyone liked him, you know,” she said frowning. “Young men don’t like to lose all the time.”

During the long evenings of summer, Doug used to race his father’s produce delivery truck against the other boys’ faster, newer Chryslers and Fords, the cars bought by the fathers who had managed to finish school and worked as notaries or salesmen or hospital technicians. Doug didn’t win, of course, but the truck held up, never once spinning out of control or overheating in the sunshine.