The Better Mother

THE STAGE

1947


Warren and Meg left the next day, their suitcase repacked with Meg’s worn stockings and Warren’s one white shirt. When she returned from the train station, Val changed the sheets, her hands smoothing out the depressions in the mattress from her mother’s body. The pillowcase her father had been using smelled of his hair. She had never noticed before how feral they smelled, their oils and other discharges mingling in the air and sticking to the chairs and towels. She was ashamed of her disgust, the roiling of her stomach when she swept up their stray hairs. But she cleaned and scrubbed anyway, erasing their presence with rags and brushes.

At breakfast, they had asked if she would be back for Christmas. Her mother had even smiled and said, “We could get ourselves a ham.” Val tried to remember if her parents had ever served a ham before; all she could recall were sludgy stews made with three pieces of a gristly oxtail and turnips discoloured from weeks in the cellar.

Val said, “I don’t know how much I’ll have to work. So many of the men here are away from their families at Christmas, and they’ll want a good hot meal from the restaurant.”

Her father had continued chewing his toast.

When she left them at the train station, they had looked shabbier and smaller than when they had arrived. Val watched until the crowd closed around them. For a brief, panicked second, she felt like running forward and pushing people aside until she found them again. She wanted to burrow into their dingy, faded clothes, touch their dry skin and listen (carefully, for the cavernous station was loud and voices echoed) to her father’s uneven breathing and the whistle from her mother’s nose. But before she could take even one step forward, the crowd surged toward the trains, and there was no trace of her parents, only hundreds of people who could have been them but weren’t.

That night, in her bed, she held herself beside the newly empty space. She missed the shape of Joan: sharp and angled, with cold radiating from her bones. And she missed Meg, who curled up like a kitten while sleeping. Sam had held her gently; his strong arms were surprisingly smooth. She didn’t dare admit that she missed him. Val listened to the rustlings of the old man who lived in the room next to hers. She imagined herself rushing into his room and climbing into bed beside him, holding his skinny and wrinkled body in her capable hands. The old man’s bones would jab at her, and he might have icy feet, but it wouldn’t matter. She would feel his chest rising, stroke the remaining hair on the top of his head, whisper her fears for Joan and herself and this wild city, knowing that his deafness and poor memory would never betray her. She wondered if he would be afraid or silently grateful, unable to put into words his relief at discovering that another human being was willing to touch him, look at his drooping face with unflinching eyes. She hugged a pillow to her stomach, the darkness in her head like the black water of the ocean outside her window.


There was a time when she dreamed about Vancouver as a glittering city, bright with electric lights and the glinting of diamonds worn by languorous women. She had always known it wasn’t very far, that it was a trip that could be made in the course of a day; still, it was a place that might as well have been across an ocean instead of the rolling, thick-watered Fraser River.

The morning after her parents left was her day off. She stood in front of the Orpheum in a circle of summer sunlight. She tilted her head back to see the theatre’s sign in its entirety—the glowing white letters, the border of light bulbs that would have been ordinary in a regular lamp in a regular house, but not here, above the fanciest theatre in town. She loved Vancouver and, until yesterday, loved the fog in the early mornings as she walked to work, the sound of rain bouncing off the sidewalks as she rushed around the café, even the shouts and beats from the nearby nightclubs as she and Sam sat at a back table after closing, feeding each other with chopsticks shiny with oil.

It was his fault she was now thinking about leaving.

The rest of that morning, Val walked through the downtown streets, touching the walls of buildings with her palms, feeling the roughness of brick or limestone, the warmth they had already absorbed from the first half of the day. People walked past and around her, some bumping into her as she stopped and bought a bag of roasted peanuts from a street vendor. She savoured the sensation of their bodies so close to hers, the hum of blood and digestion that rose through the air. She licked her fingers.

At ten minutes past noon, Val walked into the café and cornered Suzanne as she was hurrying to the back with a tray full of dirty dishes.

“I’m quitting today,” she whispered, keeping her voice low in case the customers heard.

“What? But how are we going to find someone else in time for tomorrow’s shift?”

“I don’t know. I can’t stay another day because,” and Val hesitated, hating the quiver in her voice, “things have become too complicated. I might leave town. I don’t know.”

Suzanne looked at her with sharp eyes and nodded.

“All right, honey. You’d better go tell the boss.”

“Can you do it for me? Please? And could you collect my pay too? You can send it to Joanie when it’s ready. I just need to leave.”

Suzanne shifted to the right, and Val could see through the open office door. Sam was hunched over the desk, his wide shoulders curled around whatever he was reading. She felt sorry for him, for the contradictory thoughts that must be swirling around his head, the voices that whispered family, this is home, money, my hands on her young body. She thought of rushing into the office, beating on his chest with her fists and then crying as he made love to her one last time. His wife and children were the entire reason he lived and worked in this city. The café was for them, not for Val, not for the nights they spent crushed up against the office wall together. She was eighteen and had spent three months with a forty-year-old man who was also her boss. His wife (Val imagined her as thirty-seven and practical, saving pennies because she knew they would add up) had his three children. There was no use in forcing him to answer her demands. If Joan couldn’t force an unemployed logger to leave his lazy wife even when Joan was pregnant, Val knew Sam would never cut off his entire family to marry her. Val knew that when a child slipped out of your grasp, the pain lingered, like razors slowly cutting away at your flesh.

Val looked down at her knees and wondered if they would even carry her to the office forty feet away. She waited for Suzanne to write down Joan’s address and then left, turning the corner as the lunch rush began. She stopped half a block away and leaned against the wall of a building. No tears came, only a sharp, quick gasping that made her feel that her lungs might burst right out of her chest. She shivered in her summer coat, despite the heat from the sidewalk rising up around her. Pork dumplings, she thought, in soup with egg noodles. And a plate of steamed greens on the side. Her stomach rumbled, and she could feel Sam’s hands on her waist.

A man’s voice boomed behind her. “You a dancer?”

She jumped and, turning, saw a short, thin man with a full beard and a tall, brown hat. “I’m sorry?”

“Are you a dancer? I need someone for tomorrow. One of my girls skipped town. If you don’t have a costume, I got some old ones in the back.”

Val backed up two steps and stared at the sign in the window. THE SHANGRI-LA. THE BEST BURLESQUE IN THE WEST.

“Well? Are you in or out?”

“No, no. I was just resting here for a minute.”

“Suit yourself.”

He turned and pushed open the door. Val looked past him into the dark theatre. Even in the dim light, she could see the plush seats, the stage with its red curtains and string of turned-off lights. If she were onstage, eyes would be watching her, assessing the smoothness of her skin, the curve of her legs. She would see the desire in men’s faces, in the flush around their ears, in the way they sat, hunched forward, waiting for her to peel off another piece of her costume. She could almost hear the music, the driving beat, the swells and peaks of a pounding piano that would drown out any doubtful words. Sweat would pour down her back from kicking and grinding, from the stage lights too. In that theatre the humidity of different breaths and damp skin would glide over her arms and legs, clinging like a film. Perhaps, if she went onstage, she could close her eyes and imagine that she was a chorus girl, dancing behind Bing Crosby, beside a younger and more innocent Joan.

She had been watched by a man before. How different could this be?

“Wait,” Val said. The manager turned to her again, scratching his beard. She straightened up and looked down at him. “How much are you willing to pay?”


Two weeks. Only two weeks. It was a chant, comforting her and keeping other, more troublesome, thoughts at bay. The dancing was just an experiment that could make her some good money until she could find another waitressing job. But Val also wanted to satisfy the little girl who used to high-kick in her thin-walled bedroom; after it was over, she could start another, more regular life.

An orange striped cat. A front porch with a rocking chair. Children. Chicken and pound cake in the oven. Sunrises in the summer. Snow angels in the winter. All the things other families had that hers never did.

The manager handed her a leftover costume before leaving her in the windowless dressing room. She pulled the dress over her head, settling the fabric around her hips and smoothing the tear-away skirt over her thighs. The dress skimmed and contained her body, showing and revealing all at once. She fingered the blue sash and tried to fluff up the faux-crinoline underneath the blue skirt, but the dress was irredeemably limp, too tired to look acceptable. She was afraid she would smell another woman in its folds or, worse, the scent of a woman and man together. Looking up, she saw ropes hanging from pipes running below the ceiling and long cobwebs that swayed in the draft. Piles of mouse droppings littered the concrete floor. Her eyes grew dry and her vision blurred; she could barely see herself in the frameless mirror that leaned against the wall. She could make out a dim outline of her familiar shape, but she was dressed in a costume meant to transform her into a countrified Alice in Wonderland; Alice’s older, dumber cousin. She might have drawn one eyebrow too high, or powdered her face so white that the men would recoil at her pallid presence. Her hands riffled through the dusty pile of eye pencils and rouge. Briefly, she wondered how many girls had touched these compacts and puffs, but she knew such a thought wasn’t productive. “Two weeks,” she muttered, her lips sticking together from the pink lipstick.

Val had walked to the Shangri-La that morning, taking a winding route so she could avoid the café. She wondered if her act might send ripples of electricity down the block and around the corner until Sam looked up and sniffed, the hairs in his nose twitching. Screw him, she thought. If he finds out, so what? I was never going to be his wife anyway.

She stood in the wings, waiting for her cue, peering out past the edge of the curtain at the rows of plush seats, the empty balconies. This early in the day, most of the men in the audience were loggers on their week off and old men with canes and neatly brushed hats. She had hoped that the theatre would be so dim and the stage lights so bright that she wouldn’t be able to see the faces of anyone in the crowd, but as she stood there, one hand holding tightly to her sash, she could pick out each individual head. A white-haired man in a leather jacket who looked like he might once have been a pilot. A lanky Indian boy who couldn’t be any older than fifteen. The usherette in her red-and-gold jacket in the back of the theatre. She wanted to cry with fear, but she didn’t want her makeup to run.

She turned away from the crowd and forced herself to watch the stage. A clown with a crooked, painted mouth rode a unicycle, juggling bananas, and she could hear one man laughing, a slow chuckle she was familiar with, thick with rye and barely audible. As the two shabbily costumed clowns bantered back and forth onstage, a man with a dark moustache in the front row nodded off, his chin resting on his chest. One of the clowns spied her in the wings and blew her a kiss before tumbling into a somersault. She suppressed a laugh, closing her eyes so that she didn’t notice when the MC ran past her onto the stage.

With his tall red hat in his hand, he smirked through his moustache and, with a cocked eyebrow, announced, “How about another round of applause for Jules and Bubbles? I tell you, folks, those two could make a joke out of a pair of old bedroom slippers.” A tepid wave of clapping barely rippled through the seats. “Ah, but we have something coming up that I know you’ll all love. Plucked from the farmlands of the Canadian West, I bring you the prettiest little girl you’ll ever see dancing on a burlesque stage. Gents and gents, put your hands together for Val the Small-town Beauty!”

She shivered and rubbed her hands together to stop the shaking. Pulling on the ends of her hair (braided in two pigtails, tied with ribbon, the way she thought an innocent girl would fix it), she stepped out into a warm puddle of light.

The tidal wave of fear pouring out of her skin was so palpable she could smell it, like the odour of horses’ sweat after they have been whipped or shod. When she closed her eyes, she could feel it: the electricity that crackles off you because you are just so damned scared. She swore the audience must be able to see the fear encasing her body. They could get up and leave, or throw their shoes at her, and then this whole experiment would be a failure, a huge disappointment for the younger Val who had only wanted to dance. She would be walking the streets sooner than she had planned, asking every restaurant in this stranger-infested city for work. She tried to repeat to herself, Two weeks, but instead she thought, I hate this place so much. Why did I ever agree to this stupid dancing thing? She suddenly realized that no one had really told her what to do onstage, or even how to dress and make up her face. The manager had simply made her watch two of the more experienced dancers and then vaguely waved his hand. “Do something like that, sweetheart. Don’t strip too fast and make sure you shake what you’ve got.”

Val walked to the middle of the stage and stood there trying to remember how she had intended to start her act, how she had visualized this first moment. But she froze and the spins she had practised fifteen minutes ago were totally forgotten.

A piercing whistle sliced through the air. For her. Someone was whistling for her.

Her arms and legs began to tingle from the heat radiating off the lights. One lone man started to clap, the echo bouncing around the theatre until it sounded like a dozen pairs of hands clapping. Others joined in, and she was cosseted by applause, by how it felt like the crowd was holding her up or patting her on the head, murmuring, “It’ll be fine, Val. Don’t you worry.”

She heard her own laughter as a little girl, her voice coaching Joan to kick higher, to twirl longer on her toes. She remembered her father taking them to a calm part of the river to learn how to swim, his hands under her arms, holding her up, his whisper in her ear, “You’ll learn. I’ll just let go.” And the water was so cold, but she swam and grew to like the chill.

With her mouth set, she pulled off her skirt and kicked one leg high into the air.

The men roared and banged on the wooden backs of the seats in front of them. She smiled widely at the audience, then kicked and twirled to the drums, all her limbs filling in the gaps between beats, her feet pounding the stage in perfect time. She flashed her bum, her breasts, even bumped and ground when the piano trilled the bluegrass tune meant to go with her costume. Her doubts and fears disappeared and she was simply a dancing girl, half naked, hot under the lights, pushing and pulling against the music that drove her. When she left the stage, she clung to the curtains in the wings and peered at the men, still cheering, calling her name.

She heard the MC’s brassy voice close to her ear. “Listen to that, sweetheart. They love you.” If she wasn’t smiling so hard, she could have wept.


The two weeks were over, but it hardly mattered. The applause shook between her ears even when she wasn’t performing, and she could hear the men’s voices calling for her or their feet stamping on the floor. The rhythm of the single piano and the thump of her own high-heeled shoes on the floorboards of the stage lulled her to sleep.

And the money. The paycheque was fine, but men were throwing bills and coins onto the stage as she danced, and they threw more when she bent down, ass out, to pick up the money and stuff it into her panties. When she returned to the boarding house early in the morning, she counted each night’s earnings and packed them in one of Joan’s discarded shoes at the back of the closet. She washed her face while making lists of all the ways she could spend that roll of cash. New clothes. A nice apartment. A meal in a fancy restaurant once a week.

One night, as she stepped out of the back door of the club, a man in a grey hat emerged from the shadows and gripped her hand. He smiled and his little pointed beard bobbed up and down as he spoke. “Val. Have I got a proposition for you.” He took her to an all-night café and outlined the acts he represented. “I handle all of Ann Corio’s bookings on the West Coast and Yvonne de Carlo—she was one of mine before she went Hollywood. I’ve watched you dance. You’ve got strong legs and a big stage presence, plus that star quality any girl would kill for. You can’t do better than me, little miss. I got girls asking me to represent them every day, but I always say, ‘You have to be picky or else you’re an agent with no credibility.’ You follow?” He ordered another jelly doughnut while he watched her face with his small eyes.

Val nodded. An agent. She could travel and get out of this city that reminded her of the café and Joan. She saw her two weeks at the club stretch into years at real, respectable theatres, maybe even one of those new supper clubs that were opening in San Francisco or Cincinnati with their velvet curtains and champagne. She took a mouthful of coffee and gazed calmly at the agent before speaking.

“When can we start?”

Within the week, she was booked for Los Angeles, Toledo, Des Moines and Chicago, leaving before the end of the month. “New costumes,” her agent told her, “and it’s about time you got yourself a better stage name. Something with a hook. Something that’ll grab ‘em by the balls and never let go.”

He took her to choreography sessions at a Water Street studio with an ex-dancer named Portia, who had taught himself to strip with his penis tucked between his legs. During rehearsals, he screamed at Val, “This is a striptease, child, not a Halloween dance at an old folks’ home! Step it up before I fall asleep.”

At first, she had no idea what sort of act she should perform. One girl danced in a costume strewn with Christmas lights. Another wrapped a white python around her body. When Val asked a dancer at Portia’s studio what made for a successful gimmick, the woman cocked her head to the side and said, “You have to go with what’s natural, sweetie. If you like birds, go with some parrots. If you feel gorgeous with a blond wig, then wear the biggest, baddest blond wig you can find. I’m the Bazoom Girl because of these.” She gestured at her breasts and then moved one independently of the other before laughing out loud. “Figure out what you’re really all about and turn it into an act. It’ll work. You’ll see.”

That night, Val lay awake in her bed at the boarding house. She saw gold and dragons and long, curling fingernails cupped around painted teacups. She could taste Sam’s food—the sharp, clean ginger, the tooth-coating fermented black beans—but then she focused on the paper lanterns she used to see swinging from the third-floor balconies across the street from the café. They glowed through the dark winter afternoons, exotic pockets of light that dissipated the gloom and the ordinariness of the city around them. In the morning, she walked to the big fabric store on Hastings Street and bought yards of green and black and red satin, packets of sequins, and fishnet stockings. She took the fabric and trimmings to a Chinatown tailor, who nodded and smiled at her instructions and asked her no questions. Red lipstick, tassels, a black wig and nail polish in five different colours. The glossy bottles twinkled and shone in her drawer.

She told Portia her idea, and he threw back his head and laughed. “Now, that’s a gimmick we can work with! This act will make you more famous than chocolate cake.”

Two weeks later, an hour and a half before she was expecting her agent for a final inspection, Val carefully painted her face in her boarding-house room, using the brushes exactly the way the girl at the department store told her. Next, she taped the tassels to her nipples and slipped on the black satin corset, the sequined G-string and the fishnet stockings. She attached the green skirt embroidered with lotus blossoms and two swimming, circling goldfish, smoothing it down so that it hugged her hips tightly. Then, the high-heeled shoes. Last, the black bobbed wig with heavy bangs. She looked at herself in the mirror, at the polished sheen of her nails, the length of her legs, the suggestive pull of satin tight over her ass and laughed.

“Why hello,” she purred. “I am the Siamese Kitten.”

She heard a knock and arranged herself in the doorway, sweeping the fabric of her skirt to the side so that her agent could get a good look at her stockings. With one hand, she threw the door open and posed, leaning up against the frame, her back arched.

Joan gaped in the hall.

“Damn it,” Val whispered.

Val grabbed Joan’s hand and dragged her inside, wrinkling the sleeve of her sister’s dove-grey suit. She pushed her into the chair by the window and stood, hands on her hips, staring at her suddenly mute sister.

“What are you doing here?”

Joan blinked.

“You have to go. I’m expecting someone.”

Joan managed to ask, “Who?”

Val told her everything, about the dancing, the stripping, the gigs in other cities, the agent who said she needed a hook. And, of course, the money.

“I’m going to save it, Joanie, and then I’ll never have to worry again. I won’t need a man to support me, that’s for sure.”

Joan nodded, her eyes wandering over Val’s costume, her red, red lips. She touched her own mouth and then patted her blond hair. After a minute, she stopped and dropped her white-gloved hand back into her lap, underneath her handbag.

After a long pause, Joan said, “Have you written Mum and Dad?”

Val looked away. “They don’t need to know.”

“Don’t you think they should know if you’re travelling?”

“Listen, Joanie, you’d better not say anything to them. I’m going to be doing this for a little while, not forever, so there’s no need to go telling everyone. Don’t tell Peter either.”

Joan sighed. “Why would I tell him? Do you think the neighbours would believe me if I said, ‘My sister’s a stripper?’ ” She leaned forward. “I just want to know: is the dancing like we imagined?”

Val looked at Joan’s face, still so pale, with those icy eyes that could burn and burn. She smiled. “Sometimes. I high-kick like we used to. The men like it.”

“They do? What else do they like?” Joan rubbed her lips together.

“Lots of things. They like it when I look at them over my shoulder. I don’t know why, really. They like it slow, especially when I take off my stockings and pull off my gloves. It’s not what I expected, you know, not all tits and ass.”

Joan’s face was flushed. She had taken off her gloves and was wiping her hands on the sides of her skirt.

Val touched her shoulder. “Is everything all right?”

“Yes, of course. Why are you asking?”

“I don’t know. You look like something is upsetting you.”

Joan uncrossed her legs and stood up. “It’s nothing.” Her voice rose to a high pitch Val had never heard before. “It’s just—He goes at me every night. Hard, like he hates me. He wants children, he keeps telling me, as if I didn’t already know.”

“Joanie, I’m sorry. You could leave him.” But even before Val said it, she knew her sister never would.

“I should go. I have a hair appointment.” The expression on Joan’s face had changed, hardened into knife-edged angles.

“Don’t forget: you can’t tell anyone. You promised.”

“I didn’t promise anything.”

Val watched as Joan crossed the room, her black shoes like a new doll’s—shiny and unscratched. When Joan opened the door, Val said, “Remember, Joan, I know exactly why you can’t have children, and I can tell Peter anytime I like.”

Joan paused in the doorway and half turned. But then she straightened her shoulders and continued out the door, wiping her feet carefully on the rug in the hall.