The Better Mother

THE MONEY SHOT

1982


Canada geese honk through the sky, and Danny’s head is clogged with the late August sunshine. Where is the f*cking rain when you feel like weeping? Danny shouts to himself over the din. Even if he cried, the tears would evaporate instantly. What, then, would be the point?

The funeral comes to him in bits and pieces. The priest droning in a voice that doesn’t differentiate between speaking and chanting. Edwin standing with a group of men to the left, their eyes fixed on the casket. Frank’s mother’s grip hot on his arm. The relatives politely offering their condolences to Frank’s parents, but not asking Danny’s name or shaking his hand. The looseness of the skin in everyone’s faces, but especially Frank’s father’s, who droops a little more with every passing minute until Danny wonders if he will topple into the grave; in the hole, at least, it would be cooler.

Danny looks back and sees Val, standing by herself with her hands clasped in front of her. Shadows from a maple tree dance across her face. When she sees Danny, she winks and nods. He feels swollen with the pressure of looking like he cares about the grief of others. Frank’s mother’s fingers are like claws, and he stays in his place. He turns back to the circle of people in front of him, and sees that they are no more than disparate groups, pieces of Frank’s life that, without him, are nonsensical and unordered fragments.

He shuts his eyes and pictures Val as she was when he first met her, with her long, lean legs and her cigarette smouldering in the semi-darkness of that damp alley. There are things about that day he can no longer remember. Was it June or July? Had it been raining the night before, and did he peer at a familiar face in the theatre the day he went back, or was it a trick of the light, the shadows that morphed strange features into ones he thought he knew? He reaches further into his memory to retrieve small details, like the smell of the Sweet Caps in his hand, or the exact shape of the puddle he ran through on his way back to the shop. Frustrated, he pounds at his forehead. I wish I’d had a camera then, he thinks, so none of it would be lost like this.

Abruptly, Frank’s mother pulls at his sleeve. He opens his eyes and sees that it’s time to leave. There is a wake he must go to; one, in fact, he helped plan.

He pats her on the shoulder. “I’ll meet you there,” he whispers, and she smiles at him in a way that indicates only a bare satisfaction that nothing has yet gone wrong today.

He walks through the crowd. Edwin tries to stop him to talk, but Danny waves him away. Cindy, gripping her purse, stands by a large shrub and watches him stride across the grass. He breaks into a run until he catches up with Val’s retreating body.

“Miss Val,” he says, out of breath, “you’re coming with me.”


In his studio, under the lights that he wired himself and turned so that they would both show and hide at the same time, the satin wrapped around Val’s body blinds him. Through his lens, she is smaller than real life, but the real-life Siamese Kitten cannot be seen in her entirety. Her red lips are a target. He focuses.

The small purple suitcase, still half open, has been pushed to the side. Val has only a stool to work with, but still, she vibrates. Buzzes even. Danny, for the first time since he was eight years old, is face to face with the costumed and powdered Siamese Kitten. She smiles, and he thinks it means either I love you or I will eat you alive. He shivers; her cool breath is blowing lines across his forehead.

The shots are flawless. No closed eyes, no drooping posture, no muscle untensed. Danny calls out, “These will be the greatest glamour shots ever taken.”

He has not yet zoomed in on her face. From this distance, Val could be the dancer Danny first met twenty-four years ago. Beautiful and powerful and sexy, but not, somehow, the woman he now knows her to be.

“Miss Val,” he says, “let’s try something a little different.”

He settles her on the stool and points the lights away. With a damp cotton ball, he gently wipes off the eye shadow, the glitter on her cheekbones and the powder on her nose until her face is almost bare. He is reaching for her mouth when Val says, “Leave the lips.” Danny nods and backs away.

When he looks through the lens again, she is softer, her still-red mouth relaxed into a not-quite smile. The lines in her skin point to everything he has learned about her. Danny can see the house on River Road in the curve of her jaw. The lost babies in the hollows of her cheeks. The thorny bush she grew up with in the scar on her forehead. Even the years she spent on the circuit are embedded in the wrinkles that he might have expected to see on a woman fifteen years older. It’s all there: frown lines, smile lines, a droop in her left eye. Yes, she is glamorous and beautiful, but hers isn’t a fragile glamour; rather, it’s the kind that has sprouted out of real flesh, the living, breathing mulch composed of her numerous pasts. They’re all there, pulsing under her skin.

He hasn’t said anything, but Val speaks anyway. “This will be all I have left, you know, of my life before. Everything else is gone.”

The roll is finished and he straightens up. “I know,” he says gently.

She doesn’t cry, but he leaves anyway to go to the darkroom, in case she wants to.

When she sees the contact sheet for the first time, she runs her finger down each strip of tiny prints. She hunches over on her stool and considers every shot. With a half-smile, she turns to Danny and says, “I look almost young. Not so bad for an old stripper.”

Danny places a stack of other prints in Val’s lap, the photographs he took over several nights outside the club. She squints at them, her forehead wrinkling. But soon enough she sees the neon sign in the background and recognizes the traces of heavy stage makeup on the dancers, the apprehension on their faces as they step out onto a street where the protection of bouncers and bartenders doesn’t exist. Modern Red Riding Hoods, picking their way through a forest consumed by city.

Val fans the prints out on the floor and places her contact sheet beside them. “Do you see? They belong together, Danny.”

And they do. Each photograph is a girl transformed from a dancer to the individual who walks through daylight, but each carries the marks of the strip with her——streaks of blush, a piece of stray glitter, the suspicion in her eyes as she scans the street. And beside them, the Siamese Kitten, the woman they might one day become. A dancer who carries the marks of her entire life on her face, who is both the little girl dreaming of the city in her room with the thin walls and limp curtains, and the woman strutting in pasties and a G-string on stages from Idaho to Vancouver. There’s no separating them now.

Together, these photographs are a trajectory. Real girls who dance for a living. A real woman who is defined by the strip, but also by her lovers, parents and the boarding houses she slept in. Together, they breathe near-tangible breath, feel like skin——not costumes——in Danny’s hands.

“You should do something with these,” Val says. “They’re not doing any good sitting in a drawer.”

She’s right. Danny can see that this set of photographs tells a lifetime of stories. There is fear and uproarious joy, the smell of blood and missed connections. Everyone will love them, and they could hang on a white gallery wall and move people to think of their mothers or sisters or enemies, or the things they said that can never be taken back. He looks at the photographs once more, and it feels like he is about to throw off his unsuccessful, mediocre self and give birth to a brand-new, brightly coloured Danny who sings in the shower with gusto and smiles at children on the street. His skin tingles, feels raw and new and soft, in a way that seems baby-like, except that, as a child, he felt this open to the possibilities just once, when he was eight years old and met Miss Val for the first time and saw that even in ordinary alleys, glamour can smoulder.

He has been a disparate patchwork, none of his pieces contributing to a cohesive whole. What if this transformational moment doesn’t last, and he fails to pull it all together? What will happen to him? The answer is inevitable and simple: he will never be anything but a collection of whisper-thin fragments, and he will die that way, sooner rather than later. He knows what he has to do, and he won’t be afraid again. The real, lovely Val is the one with her history etched on her face. The real Danny, the one with no secrets, will be beautiful too.

Now that she has seen this set of photos, Val is the only one who knows everything about him. He feels as if the air has left his body, and he is on the cusp of filling himself up again, with breath or new places of beauty. Whatever he likes. He turns to Val. She of all people deserves his full attention on this night, at the end of a seething, unbearable summer. Sitting on a stool beside her, Danny pours two shots of whisky and rests his head on her shoulder, the satin like a kiss on his hot cheek.

—

Danny wakes up with a start at six in the morning. This is his apartment, his bed, the sound of one man living——and waking——by himself. He scratches his head and his fingertips are cold and clammy. He sits up and pulls open the blinds covering the window. The sky is a comforting grey, and mist blows in through the gap. He sees dark clouds to the west, a woman walking down the sidewalk with her head covered in a clear plastic kerchief, leaves falling from the maple out front as a squirrel jumps from branch to branch.

It’s been ten weeks of unrelenting heat, of stickiness, of nights with no wind. Danny smells the coming rain, an odour so particular and so ground into his brain that the skin on his arms breaks into goosebumps in immediate recognition. Soft ground. Rainbow puddles of drain water and car oil. The continual drip from gutters and awnings.

He jumps out of bed and hums a nameless tune. It’s September, and he can hardly wait to walk outside.


Val made the trip by herself, catching a bus over the Lions Gate Bridge and then a second that took her to Kitsilano, to the neighbourhood she and Joan lived in together when they first arrived in Vancouver years ago. Before she left, she called Joan. “I know why you did it.”

The silence was crisp, like vodka seconds out of the freezer. Val couldn’t even hear Joan breathing.

“He was going to leave you, wasn’t he. When he figured out you couldn’t have children, you panicked. Too bad for me, though. Did you think it was fate when you saw Dawn for the first time?”

Finally, Joan spoke. “It’s Kelly.”

Val laughed. “Of course it is.”

Joan said, “I needed Peter. He was already sleeping with a girl in his office. What if she had gotten pregnant first?”

“What if giving away my baby had killed me?”

Joan let out a short, bitter laugh. “But it wouldn’t have, Val. Even you must know that.”

Now, as she steps off the bus and opens her umbrella, she thinks of Joan as hollow. Joan has worked so hard at maintaining appearances that there is nothing else, only the hard shell she created. Whatever she was before and underneath no longer exists, eaten away, perhaps, by herself.

She walks down Cypress Street, carefully checking the numbers of each apartment building against the note in her hand. It’s a Sunday morning, and birds huddle in the trees and shrubs, ruffling the wet leaves as they hang, pecking at the aphids and spiders still crawling on the branches. She stops at a building on the corner and presses the buzzer by the front door.

“Kelly,” she says into the intercom, “it’s Auntie Val.”

The front door unlocks and Val pushes through, pausing for only a second to look in the lobby mirror and touch up her lipstick. No need to worry. She looks perfect.


This day, the very act of standing on the front walk of his parents’ house, has been something he has imagined over and over again. Like today, the rain is always falling and the call of seagulls slices through the air above his head, above the house, above even the power lines criss-crossing the sky. Today, the leaves on the trees lining the sidewalk have started to turn colour, some brown, some red, some yellow. He smells autumn, that sharp mixture of potential frost, mud and the burning of wood.

Cindy’s shadow moves across the closed curtains. Her back is bent, and he remembers that she is only hunched like this when she’s at home, when their parents are speaking to her and watching her with eyes fearful of her future life without them. He realizes he hasn’t seen her in weeks, except at the funeral, hasn’t even talked to her over the phone.

The sound of a metal spoon against the side of his mother’s wok rings out. He can’t stand outside forever.

Inside, Cindy’s face looks drawn and jaundiced as she walks back and forth in the dull glow of the floor lamps. They say nothing to each other, only nod and look away. Danny wonders if Cindy is feeling guilt, if Frank’s death sits in her thoughts like an immovable stone, heavy and distressingly unavoidable. Or if the grind of living with their parents—of seeing them every day, of listening to their silence punctuated only by Betty’s mutterings over her unmarried children and Doug’s grunts of displeasure over the electricity bill——has accumulated until that feeling of being trapped shows on her face, in the greyness of her skin, the droop in the corners of her eyes.

His mother strokes the line of his jaw with her square fingertips. After she returns to her cooking, he can smell the trace of ginger she left behind on his face.

Danny steps into the living room and stands near the window. Doug watches the news, and eyes Danny warily during the commercials. Outside, a brand-new BMW is inching into a parking space across the street. It reverses in, then pulls out, each time narrowly missing the bumpers of the economy cars ahead and behind. The windows are tinted, but Danny thinks he can see a professional haircut, a pair of reflective, designer sunglasses, even soft leather driving gloves.

“Some car,” Doug says.

Danny turns around.

His father hasn’t left the armchair, but his body is tensed, his neck stretched so that he can see over the windowsill. The legs of his cotton pants are rolled up, exposing his bare ankles and the tops of his feet before they disappear into his summer slippers. The stains on his short-sleeved shirt are mysterious—perhaps soy sauce, wood oil or dirty water from the rusty pipes in the shop. His hair, glossy with Brylcreem, is still forbidding.

“Yeah, it’s pretty nice,” Danny says.

Doug drums his fingers on the chair. “Too expensive to maintain. Too much car to handle. I was never much of a driver anyway.”

Danny imagines his father as he might once have been. Slick hair, dust-covered pants, a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. The scowl on his face when he lost another street race and had to drive home in the produce truck, the smell of stray cabbage leaves drifting forward from the bed. He doubts they would have been friends had they met then, but that doesn’t stop him from wishing he could have asked the younger version of his father what he really wanted. Betty and Cindy and this house? Or something else that required shiny cars and a house with a view of the ocean?

Danny nods. “Me neither.”

Doug turns his head away from the window and looks at Danny’s face. For a moment, Danny thinks that his father is trying to read him, but then Doug merely leans back in his chair and grunts.

“We have something in common, then,” he says before he shifts his eyes back to the television.

Danny grins.

They eat, and only the click of chopsticks against bowls fills the kitchen. Cindy eats slowly, picking up one grain of rice at a time. Doug chews on a spare rib and spits the bone into a napkin, grimacing as he sucks the meat from between his teeth. Betty nibbles at a piece of gai lan and smiles at nothing in particular, her eyes unfocused. This dinner is the same as the ones they used to have when he was a little boy, some of them silent and uncomfortable, others peppered with Cindy’s chirpy voice as she told the family the latest gossip from school. Danny settles into his chair, lifts his bowl to his mouth and readies himself for a long evening. All those years he stayed away, he carried his father and mother with him wherever he went, no matter how often he tried to pretend the opposite. There’s no use in splitting up past and present, family and lovers, anymore.

Betty looks at him, cocks her head as she gazes at his mouth. Quietly, she asks, “Why did you not come home for so long? I thought you might come more often.”

Cindy sits up, places her bowl on the table.

“I was helping a sick friend. I was looking after him.”

“Such a nice boy you are, Danny. Who is your friend? Someone from school?” Betty smiles, holding her chopsticks in the air.

Cindy touches their mother’s shoulder. “Don’t be so nosy, Mom. Danny doesn’t have to tell us everything.” And she meets his eyes, alarm in the raising of her eyebrows, the wrinkling of her nose.

He looks at her face, at the little girl she used to be only partially hidden by the new, adult lines of her chin, her cheeks. That little girl who never let their father see Danny playing with their paper dolls, who turned off the radio to stop Edwin from dancing when Doug’s car pulled into the driveway. It’s okay, he thinks. She can relax now.

Out the kitchen window, Danny can see one white T-shirt blowing in the wind on the clothesline, forgotten in the rain. A howling begins around the house, and the clothespins give way. The T-shirt flies out of the yard, carried by the breeze but also beaten down by the drizzle. Danny watches as it floats upward and then falls, over and over again, until it blows out toward the end of the alley on one strong gust, where it pauses, suspended above the garbage cans and overgrown gardens. For a few strange seconds, it neither rises nor falls, only floats, almost motionless. But then, just as Danny opens his mouth to tell his parents that he’s gay in a voice that he hopes will sound firm and irrevocable, the T-shirt plummets, plunging behind a fence, landing somewhere invisible, in a yard Danny cannot even picture from memory.

He meets his mother’s eyes and sees her for what she is: loving, worried, hemmed in by the borders of this house and her family. He doesn’t wish she were someone else anymore. He doesn’t wish that for anyone.

“I have something to show you,” he says, drawing out two small prints from his pocket. One is a photograph of Val in full costume. The other, an older one, is of Danny and Frank from three years ago, standing at Prospect Point, the houses of the North Shore behind them. He fingers the edges before laying them carefully in the middle of the table.





ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS


To Amanda Lewis, Diane Martin, Louise Dennys, Marion Garner and Michael Schellenberg, for letting me crash the Knopf and Random House Canada party once again.

To my writing partners, June Hutton and Mary Novik of SPiN, without whom I would be despondent, devoid of ideas and irredeemably grumpy.

To Carolyn Swayze, whose gentle voice and rational advice have become mainstays of my writing life.

To Patricia Kells, for her continued enthusiasm in promoting my books.

To Lissa Cowan, Brendan McLeod and Andrea MacPherson, for commiserating with me over drinks, e-mail and swapped manuscripts.

To my friends at CBC Radio One, in particular Sheila Peacock, Sheryl MacKay, Stephen Quinn, Madeline Green, Jo-Ann Roberts, Ann Jansen, Jacqueline Kirk and Shelagh Rogers, for giving me an excuse to leave the house and reminding me that the world of books is always worth talking about.

To my family, especially my sisters Linda, Pamela, Tina and Emma, for helping me navigate the minefield of working motherhood. And to my niece Madeleine, for cheerfully babysitting a newborn infant while I finished this book, and for showing me the hidden gems of daytime television.

To Troy, Oscar and Molly, for giving me everything.

To the Canada Council for the Arts and its Project Assistance for Creative Writers, for supporting the development of this novel.


I used many sources in the research of The Better Mother, and have listed the ones I turned to again and again whenever I had questions about burlesque, HIV/AIDS or mid-twentieth century Vancouver.

The research of Becki L. Ross, now collected in her comprehensive book Burlesque West: Showgirls, Sex and Sin in Postwar Vancouver.

Fred Herzog, Vancouver Photographs.

Daniel Francis, Red Light Neon: A History of Vancouver’s Sex Trade.

The Age of AIDS, a production of Frontline/WGBH, directed by William Cran.

In 2005, I saw an exhibit of photographs by a Canadian artist named Theodore Saskatche Wan (who changed his middle name to mirror the name of a small town on the Prairies) at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Many of his images moved me, but none moved me as much as his commercial photographs of exotic dancers. Wan died of cancer in 1987 at the age of thirty-three. I found myself ruminating on the fictional possibilities of his story, and soon developed a character named Danny. While Danny isn’t Theodore Wan, I owe a great deal to Wan’s photographs, which began this whole journey in the first place.





JEN SOOKFONG LEE was born and raised in Vancouver’s Eastside, where she now lives with her husband and son. Her books include The End of East and Shelter, a novel for young adults. Her poetry, fiction and articles have appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies, including TOK: Writing the New City, the Antigonish Review and Event. A popular radio personality, Jen is the voice behind “Westcoast Words,” a weekly writing column featured on CBC Radio One’s On the Coast and All Points West. She appears regularly as a columnist on The Next Chapter with Shelagh Rogers and is a frequent co-host of the Studio One Book Club. www.sookfong.com