The Better Mother

THE CIRCUIT

1947 to 1958


The act was the main thing. Without it, she was just a girl taking off her clothes to music; with it, she was a star.

The band began playing and she shuffled through the curtains, her eyes cast down, her hands clasped in front of her. She wavered uncertainly in place and the audience fell silent, perhaps feeling shame that such a shy Oriental girl needed to strip for money. Men cleared their throats, and Val could hear them shifting in their creaky, fold-down seats. Slowly, she lifted her head and looked out over the crowd through her thick black bangs. Here, in a dusty theatre in Chicago, lights were bolted to the walls haphazardly, and, even from the stage, Val could see the electrical cords dangling from the sconces. The wood on the balcony walls was poorly carved, no better than her father’s drunken whittlings on scrap lumber. But no one was there to gaze at the construction of the place.

The music picked up speed. The drummer played a driving, impossible-to-ignore beat. The piano tinkled. Val began to tap her right foot in time.

She bowed low to the audience and said, “Hello, I am the Siamese Kitten. Tonight, I dance for you.” And then she smiled, throwing off her red silk robe and purring to the crowd.

The applause. It came at her suddenly every time, so deafening that she inevitably stepped backward, rippling the curtain as she steadied herself. But she felt the audience was holding her close, buffeting her from the sharp winds that blew in toward the city. In this theatre—the moth-eaten red curtains, the cold dressing room, the candy and cigarettes that littered the makeup table—she was nothing like what she had been before. Not a waitress, not a girl from a thin-walled house on the banks of the Fraser River, not Valerie Nealy, not the mistress of a handsome Chinaman. No, she was the Siamese Kitten, the dancer whose posture never slackened, whose long, lined eyes held the audience in her inscrutable gaze, whose costume fell away so regally that the men who watched her imagined her to be a Chinese princess who had lost her way.

Eventually, she was left wearing nothing but her green G-string and red pasties with gold tassels. She held a large fan in front of her, flashing her bum, then her belly button and, finally, the under-curve of her breasts. She finished by pulling her robe back on, one shoulder at a time. When she took her final bow, her hands in front of her chest, palms together, fingers up, she said, “I am the Siamese Kitten. Thank you for watching me. I see you again sometime.” As the spotlight faded, she could feel the collective flutter of disappointment that meant she could have danced forever, and these men, some of them lonely, others unfulfilled, would gladly have watched. Inevitably, one of the other girls or the night’s MC came to her and said, “I’ve never seen a new dancer work up a crowd like that. They couldn’t get enough!” She wondered if it was the gimmick or her choreography or the way she talked to the crowd as she danced. Several times, she stared at herself in the dressing-room mirror and searched her face for that special something. Maybe, she thought, I really am a star.

Before she left the theatre, she wiped off all her makeup except for her red, shiny lips. She didn’t care that they were shocking when combined with her light brown hair and grey overcoat, that they marked her as a woman different from the wives and daughters of respectable men. Without them, she was no more than a once-rejected waitress, and she could bear anything but that.


In some cities, it was hotel rooms. Small hotels that had once been run by respectable families but were now staffed by surly men who eyed her bum as she walked up the stairs, carrying her own luggage. Other times, if the run was a long one, she let a room at a boarding house. She arranged her bottles on a chair and propped her makeup mirror against the wall. In these unfamiliar rooms, she sang to herself or read the five-cent magazines that she bought in every city and town. She tried to learn how to knit, but her very first scarf ended up as a confused knot of cheap yarn, and she threw the whole thing, needles included, into the garbage at one of the theatres, maybe the one in Wichita, she couldn’t be sure. The other girls who travelled with her were lonely too, and they sometimes spent early mornings in each other’s rooms.

But she was bored most days, and her thoughts often turned to Sam. She imagined her hands running through his thick hair one more time, the bones of his pelvis pressing against hers, the taste of his skin in her mouth. She touched herself, pretending that her fingers were his, that her touch was really the brush of his lips. This usually worked for fifteen minutes, but afterward she could smell herself, undiluted and uncombined, in the sheets that were twisted around her. She thought she might weep at the idea that she had been in love once, but even then everything about that love was false, for the presence of his wife hovered above them whenever they were together, even though she didn’t know it at the time.

Men waited for her on the sidewalk after every show, in every city. At first, when they invited her to dinner or offered her a bouquet of flowers, she hurried away with her eyes firmly fixed on her shoes, holding her breath until she was sure no one was following her. But one night, during a week-long series of shows in Reno, a man’s voice, smooth but with a hiccup of hesitation, made her look up. He stood underneath a lamppost with his hands in his pockets, his dark brown hair combed away from his face.

“What did you say?” Val asked, still holding open the door to the theatre, in case she needed to run back inside.

“Would you join me for dinner? My apartment is a few blocks away. I could cook for you, if you like.”

She sat in his kitchen while he made her spaghetti with meatballs, which she ate quickly, sucking up noodles with so much enthusiasm that droplets of sauce flew in every direction, landing on the wallpaper, the tablecloth, the front of her blouse. Later, in his narrow bed across the room, he did exactly what she told him to do, caressing and sucking the parts of her body she presented to him. She felt heavy and sweetly full. She relished how the thin layer of spit he left on her neck and chest dried in seconds with the parched desert air blowing in the window, each breeze sweeping her skin clean.

When she left in the morning, he didn’t ask to see her again or request her address so he could write. He gave her a meatball sandwich, wrapped in brown paper. Surprised, she cradled it in the crook of her arm and then walked through the grey dawn light to her hotel room.

Weeks later, she walked into a doctor’s office in Idaho to be fitted for a diaphragm. When he asked if she was married, she laughed and said, “Not a chance. But if you don’t give me that diaphragm, then I’ll be a stripper with a baby, and I don’t think anyone, not even the church ladies, wants that.”

Soon there were other men. Electricians, judges, travelling salesmen in rumpled suits. She believed that these men, whose heads were buried between her legs, were happy enough, at least until they returned home to their wives, who, Val thought, must be able to smell another woman on their husbands’ collars. But by the time they figured out it was her, she was gone, on a bus or a train to another city where another man would wait for her outside the back door of the club, clammy hands twisting together to calm his nerves.


Val had never liked Sacramento, not now, and not the first time she danced there three months before. The ground was dry and yellow, nothing like the wet black dirt of home, or even the dusty brown roads of Des Moines or Saint Paul. She couldn’t help thinking that everything here was the colour of urine, like the spot you shovelled dirt over whenever you had to move the outhouse. Even though nothing smelled bad (beyond the odour of manure that drifted in from the surrounding farms), she still breathed through her mouth when she walked to and from her boarding house and the theatre.

On her last night, she danced and shook and wiggled, and the men shouted the usual things.

“Show us your tits!”

“Sit on my lap right here, little missy.”

“That’s some backside.”

Tonight though, she could also hear another kind of heckling, the mean-spirited kind that grew from desperation, the kind that men, usually angry and drunk, engaged in when jobs were scarce and they had to dilute their children’s milk with water. From her position, it sounded like a low hiss or the roll of drumsticks on a snare. Disjointed words floated toward her.

“Mother.”

“Shame.”

“Home.”

But she continued to dance. She knew she couldn’t be a star everywhere she went, but she had performed in every city on this circuit at least once, and she knew how to handle herself.

After she changed into her street clothes, she slipped out the back door, not stopping to see if anyone was waiting for her. She began walking down the street, past empty and dark grocery stores and diners. She liked these solitary walks back to her room; she never asked to walk with one of the other girls. She craved the way the night wrapped itself around her, the silence of the sleeping city or town like a warm, fluffy towel waiting as you step out of the bath. It was three and a half blocks to the boarding house, and the harvest moon was shining orange and huge in a sky that was not quite black, just the darkest shade of blue possible.

She shivered. Surely the heckling wasn’t bothering her now? She turned around, but saw nothing behind her. A striped chipmunk skittered up a small, skinny tree as she walked by, and she jumped at the sound.

When she turned the corner, a man stepped out from behind a car. He wore a hat and a light coat. Val stopped and looked around at the dark, empty street, at the small abandoned playground behind her. “Shit,” she whispered.

She braced herself for the assault. When he grabbed her and pulled, her feet remained on the ground, her hands in fists. She could hear him grunting, smell his armpits. Turning, she looked into his face. She saw the roughness of his skin and the dark stubble lining his cheeks and jaw. A hard life, she thought. She squirmed in his grip, and he swore. She was stronger than he had thought.

He said, “Fine. You don’t want to move? We’ll do it right here.” He pulled open her coat and thrust his hand between her legs. He smiled.

She looked him in the eyes and spat, spraying saliva on his nose, his upper lip. He let go but didn’t run away, only stared at her coldly. She planted her feet on the pavement, ready to scratch or slap or bite.

“How dare you? You’ve been flaunting yourself on a stage all night long. I’ve already seen everything you’ve got, Kitten.”

He rushed at her and knocked her to the pavement. He grabbed her by the ankles and dragged her into the playground and behind the small, wood-sided playhouse. The blunt ends of cut grass were too short for her to grab. He struggled with her stockings and panties and with his own trousers (nicely pressed, how incongruous). She balled her hands into fists and punched at his head, but he didn’t seem to feel it. When she screamed, he pressed his thumb into her throat, and she choked, angry that tears were filling her eyes. He positioned himself on top of her, and she realized that his weight on her body was too much and she couldn’t push him off. She tried to will her body to be as heavy as possible, letting her arms and legs go limp and cumbersome so that anything he tried would cost him too much effort. She felt him pressing against her, felt that familiar sensation of unaired genitals touching each other. He muttered to himself, and she stiffened, waiting for the inevitable push and burn of unwanted sex.

But he stood up, zipping his fly. His face seemed swollen, angry in the moonlight. Val’s underwear was still down around her ankles, but she felt nothing—no pain, no dry soreness.

“You see? You’re just a used-up hag. I wouldn’t do it with you anyway.” He lifted his foot and stomped on her belly with his brown, well-worn boot.

Val stayed curled up in a ball on the grass for a long time. She cried silently through the night, barely seeing the light change as the stars faded into a daytime sky. He had winded her, and she thought she might have some broken ribs. She pretended the playground was her mother’s lap and that the smell of the dirt was the smell of her mother’s hands, like soap and dry, thick skin. If her mother were there, she might sing to her. Maybe “Hush, Little Baby,” while she stroked her hair. Val remembered how light Joan’s baby had been in her arms and how carefully she had bathed him, as if he had been a thinly painted porcelain doll with fine, breakable hair. Val even wished for her father, for the comforting smell of his tobacco, his curt nod whenever she cooked dinner.

At dawn, she heaved herself up and stumbled to the boarding house. In her room, she lay on the covers, panting like a cat. She was to get on a bus that afternoon for a performance in San Diego. If she missed the bus, she would miss her gig the following night, and they would have to replace her, which meant that they might use the substitute dancer for the rest of the week. The Siamese Kitten was never late and had never missed a show. Her agent once said she was the most reliable, least-bitchy dancer he had ever met. I can sit on a damned bus, she thought. I’ll sleep the whole way there. She checked the clock on the nightstand. Six hours before she had to leave. For now, she could stay still.

When she woke up, every breath was an explosion, and the bones in her chest felt like they were splintering each time she inhaled. She crept down the hall to the bathroom and rinsed her mouth out with cold water. She coughed, and a splatter of blood stained the sink. “Shit,” she said, before walking slowly back down the hall, where she pounded on another dancer’s door. “Where’s the hospital around here?”


Eight years later, during a sunny and pleasant fall, Val returned to Vancouver. She had been back before, of course, to dance in the theatres and clubs, and to see her agent in his office on Granville Street. There were too many loggers, too many mill workers, for her to ignore the place altogether. This time, however, she was back for a whole two weeks, staying in a downtown hotel with a view of the mountains. She didn’t think she needed such grand accommodation, but the manager at the Cave Supper Club insisted. “We don’t get stars of your calibre every day, Val. It’s been four months since Lili St. Cyr came through town and the boys around here are ready for more. Maybe you don’t remember,” he continued, “but Vancouver is one of the few cities that treats its talent right.” When she checked in, the man at the front desk asked if she would sign his pocket square so he could prove he had met her.

She thought about Joan, about the house she and Peter had bought outside of the city, with the fish pond and wall-to-wall carpeting. In her letters, Joan seemed consumed by the house, by the creaks in the floors, the steepness of the staircase, even the colour of the grout between the bathroom tiles. Val, lying in bed at a boarding house in Indianapolis, laughed while she read. She could just see little Joanie tumbling around alone in a gigantic house, a gin and tonic in her hand, fluffing up the pile of her carpet, staring at the other houses in the cul-de-sac through the big front window but not stepping outside to speak to one of her neighbours.

Joan never asked what Val was doing on the road, and Val didn’t tell her. She wrote of the impossibly tall Chrysler Building; the groves and groves of oranges on the side of the highway in California; the flatness of the American Midwest; the deadened eyes of the travelling salesmen she saw at train stations, the elbows, knees and seats of their suits shiny with wear and filmed with dust. But they both knew other words lurked behind her written ones: circuit, cabaret, the strip.

In her hotel room, she picked up the telephone and dialled her sister’s number. It rang once before Joan’s crisp voice answered.

“Joanie, it’s me. I’m back in town.” She heard Joan snort.

“Back? For how long?”

“A couple of weeks. I’m having Mum and Dad down to the city for a few days. I thought it would be a nice treat, especially now that Dad’s not working much anymore. Maybe you’d like to have dinner with us or walk with us in Stanley Park.”

Joan clucked her tongue against the roof of her mouth and Val wondered how a woman so small could make such a sharp, gunshot-like sound. “It’s a busy time here for us, Val. Peter’s working long hours, and I really should be home to make sure he has a good dinner so he can keep up his energy. I’m sorry. It’s not a good time.”

Val looked at the fresh flowers on the side table, the shiny mirror across from the bed, the jug of cold water on a silver tray. This life—so much like their dreams of living in the big city, the ones they whispered to each other when they were little girls—or the bland interior of Joan’s house and dinners with Peter, his stout face reflected at suppertime in the dining-room mirror.

Val said, “Suit yourself,” and didn’t wait to hear Joan’s response before she hung up.

That night, the standing ovation at the Cave drowned out Joan’s words, and Val was glad she had returned.


The second week, she walked through Chinatown, wearing her navy cashmere coat and chocolate-brown shoes. She told herself that she was simply visiting a neighbourhood in which she had spent so much time. Her hair, set in full curls, was brushed away from her face and carefully tucked behind her ears. On her right index finger she wore an emerald set in gold, a gift from a movie producer she had met in Los Angeles, who had moved her into his cavernous house before casting her in one of his pictures. But as it turned out, Val was the kind of actress who made audiences cringe with embarrassment; she was too loud, too fast, too big to be contained by the screen. After the premiere, the producer patted her hand and said nothing before dropping her off at a nice hotel. When she walked into her room, all the clothes and makeup and jewellery she had left in his house were there, packed in a neat little luggage set made of purple leather. To her relief, the movie came and went with scarcely a whisper. Most of her audience was more interested in live flesh anyway.

She walked down Pender, and the bright neon signs, more numerous than she remembered, blinked palely in the thin, grey daylight, announcing clubs, restaurants and butchers. Her face was turned up, like she was catching snowflakes instead of marvelling at the buzzing, multicoloured pigs, buddhas and seahorses.

Across the street, a little boy was sitting on the curb, spinning a wooden top on the concrete. She stood still for a second, thinking that this black-haired child in the worn brown sweater and corduroys could have been young Warren. From where she was standing, she could see those round eyes that seemed to take in everything at once, even those things no one else could see. He was hunched over his faded top; his shoes were nestled in the garbage and fluid flowing beside the sidewalk in the gutter. Val stopped herself from running through traffic and snatching him up, taking him with her to the house by the river where she could feed him better, hold him longer. Change how it had all turned out.

A woman with crudely bobbed hair emerged from the doorway of a souvenir shop and spoke to the little boy. He stood up into a beam of sunshine, and Val saw that he had olive skin and a smooth, open face. He stepped off the curb, and Val heard the woman sharply lecture him in Chinese before pulling him onto the sidewalk. Val wanted to smack herself in the forehead for being so sentimental and delusional. If Warren were alive, he’d be twice that boy’s age. This city, she thought, makes me crazy. Always will.

As she walked on, she found that she couldn’t keep the memories from flooding in. At first, she pretended that she wasn’t thinking of Sam, but she soon saw that pretending to no one but herself was ridiculous. Every familiar crack in the sidewalk reminded her of him. Over the years, she hadn’t dared to think of him as often as she might have wanted. She sometimes imagined him in the front row during one of her shows, although she knew this was impossible. Sam was a family man, after all, one who never went to see strippers, but one who kept his out-of-country wife a secret from his barely adult mistress.

She recognized some of her old customers: Chinese men squatting in the alleys, chewing on tobacco and pumpkin seeds, mostly unchanged but now smaller, their sockless ankles fragile under the rolled-up cuffs of their pants. She peered into the barbershop, wondering if her favourite customer from the café was still there, cutting hair, trimming beards with long razors, tenderly scraping a sharp edge against the thin skin of someone’s neck. She saw no one except a lone man, hair falling over his ears, waiting in a chair by the window.

Tired, she turned around to begin walking back into downtown, to her hotel with its deep tub and piles of pillows. As she looked west, she saw a couple—a man in his fifties, with a slightly younger woman—walking toward her. She blinked. It was Sam.

She made no pretence; she stood in the middle of the sidewalk and stared. There he was, still tall, still broad in the shoulders. What did she expect? After all, he could hardly have shrivelled up and been driven mad by her absence. His hair was still thick, but it was growing white around his ears and temples, and his face was beginning to fall; the wrinkles were hardly visible, but Val could see the old man he would become, pushing through his skin like roots through cement.

The woman, of course, must be his wife. The top of her head was level with his shoulders. She stooped a little, and her clothes were subdued: a grey raincoat, a faded yellow print dress, black shoes that laced up. Val could see the traces of multiple pregnancies, the fat that pads a woman’s thighs and belly with each succeeding child. And her face—drawn, tired, hopeless.

Just then, she felt a touch on her sleeve. Sam looked her in the eyes, said, “Excuse me,” and edged past.

He smelled the same: that sweet and doughy smell of pancakes. After his scent had disappeared from the air around her, she continued walking west. She replayed his gaze over and over again as she drew closer to the downtown core. Dark eyes, straight eyelashes, fine wrinkles in the corners. But one thing was different. His eyes showed not a glimmer of recognition and she knew, then and there, that she had truly become someone else.

—

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.