The Better Mother

THE FIRST TIME

1968


It was the summer after graduating high school that Danny worked at the Exhibition, operating the rickety roller coaster. Part of the thrill, his boss told him, is that it looked as if it could splinter apart any minute, as if a nine-year-old constructed the rises and falls out of paper glue and balsa wood. On hot days, he baked in his uniform; on rainy days, he hunched over in his standard-issue yellow slicker. He hid his camera in a gym bag and took it out when the lineup was short, when no one would notice his hands winding and clicking, the lens pointed at long hair whipped back by the wind on the steepest fall, or hands held upward, stretched straight, the fingers trying to escape the rest of the body.

The year before, his art teacher had pulled a small camera from her desk and tossed it to him, muttering, “If you’re going to stare out the window all day, then take some pictures of what you’re looking at and maybe I can give you a passing grade.”

He brought the viewfinder to his eye and something curious happened.

Through the lens, the world resettled. He saw the angles of shadows, the fall of light on walls, faces, shoes. He saw the tetherball hanging alone in the school’s concrete court and understood that its meaning in a photograph was more than a ball on a rope. It was loneliness and hope and the promise of play, all in one. Absolute, wordless sense.

He didn’t know it until then, but this particular silence—where even the innermost meanings were revealed—was what he had been looking for. Danny could stare at an unremarkable sidewalk with ordinary pedestrians walking past and see nothing, but when he looked through the camera, he saw that there was fear and joy and frustration drawn like lines on the walkers’ bodies. And he knew exactly who these people were and how their footsteps—punishing, light, slow or uncertain—spoke what they probably would never dare. I love my wife. I’m scared of this city. What am I doing? There was no confusion, and he felt warm and happy because it meant that, one day, maybe somebody would turn their lens on him and see Danny for what he really was. And then explain it all to him in a way he might understand.

Today, the last day of the Exhibition, a little girl, waiting for her older brother to disembark, stood to the side and stared at Danny, her eyes just visible over the top of her pink cotton candy. Danny wondered what she saw in his face, if his restlessness from the night before was branded on his skin somehow. Or perhaps she was simply scared and realized the one thing preventing her brother from being flung off the very top of the roller coaster was this unsmiling young man.

Her head moved slightly to the left and Danny saw that she was looking at the control box. He pushed a red button and the line of cars came to a sudden stop at the bottom, the people inside tossed around as if they were only flesh and not bones. One woman, sitting in the very front, laughed and laughed. She wiped her eyes with a handkerchief and adjusted her pearl necklace. Danny squinted through the smoggy air, thinking that there was something familiar in her red-painted mouth, or the upward tilt of her head. He heard her say to her male companion, “Well, honey, that’ll liven us up for the rest of the day. What do you say to a nip of whisky?” And she pulled a flask from her purse while a mother with two young children gasped and hustled them away.

But then a chubby boy threw up beside the control booth and Danny had to reach for the sawdust and broom. By the time he looked again, the woman was gone and the lineup for the roller coaster had snaked around the metal barriers and down the fairway.


On his day off, Danny took the bus aimlessly through the city, ringing the bell whenever he thought to and boarding the next bus on a different route. His camera dangled from his bony neck, resting against his equally bony chest. He stood at street corners he had never noticed before: 2nd Avenue at Main, Alberni at Bute, Beach at Gilford. “Perspective,” he whispered to himself. “That’s what it’s all about.”

Ahead of him lay the great expanse of English Bay with barges anchored on the edge of the horizon, the water churning at the shore but barely rippling in the distance. If he had been an extraordinary swimmer, he could have reached the open ocean eventually, and, from there, turned south to California, or west to Hawaii, or perhaps farther to the Philippines, even China, if he wanted. But here—the western edge of the city’s core, only eight kilometres from the family house—was possibly just far enough. There was something he loved about the salt air in his nose, the burn that filled his throat and lungs. He looked down at his own feet and wondered why he wasn’t running, why he wasn’t pounding the sidewalk, smiling so widely that his face might never recover, laughing when he stopped to catch his breath because he was on the way to somewhere else. He looked to his left, where a man and woman were helping a little girl build sandcastles. All three were covered in a fine grey-brown dust. Danny slipped behind a maple tree and began shooting.

The little girl had dug a hole with her bare hands. A collection of brightly coloured spades and rakes lay in an abandoned pile beside her. The woman offered her a bucket to help shape the mound of sand, but the little girl frowned and slapped at her hand. Face reddening, the man yelled, “Don’t you ever hit your mother like that!” The girl looked up, startled, and began to cry, her wails floating over the sand and water, travelling swiftly through the air in all directions. Danny winced.

And then, both parents crouched forward and began murmuring. Danny could see the father saying, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it,” while the mother fumbled in her purse for a tissue. Danny wasn’t sure who was more upset, the tiny four-year-old or her furrowed, anxious parents. He didn’t stop shooting. Each frame was this whole story in miniature.

Inside, his stomach was churning; the ham and pickle sandwich from lunch had become a brick-solid mass. He could hear his father’s voice booming.

“I’ll teach you to steal one of my beers.”

“Give me that look again, I dare you.”

“Your mother might think the sun shines out of your ass, but I sure don’t.”

“Not such a smart-mouth now, are you?”

The words all pointed to the same truth. If his father could have chosen a son from a lineup, Danny would have remained unpicked, standing by himself, staring at his own shoes. Waiting for the right family.

When Danny looked again, the little girl was drinking from a nearby water fountain and her parents were sitting on a log, staring out at the water, their hands hooked together, each finger woven with the next. Danny pressed the shutter release one more time before walking off the beach to the corner of Denman and Davie. He took three buses to get home and when he arrived, his parents were both waiting for him in the living room.

“Am I late?” Danny asked, checking his watch.

Betty, sitting in the far corner of the couch, looked at Doug, who held a beer can on his lap. “Not this time,” he said.

His mother scratched her nose before speaking. “Your father wants to talk to you about your plans.”

“Plans? For what?”

Doug sat up straighter in his armchair and stared at Danny until Danny looked down at his sand-covered shoes. “When the Exhibition is over, I want you to work at the shop full time. You’re old enough now to learn how to run things. We don’t have the money to send you to school anyway.” He ran his hand over his face. “Not that you or your sister could even get in.”

Danny didn’t say anything. He turned his head toward his mother, who nodded at him gently. For a moment, he wanted to shake her, bounce her head off the wall behind her and yell, You should know better. You should know that working at the shop will be the end of me. You should know this is nothing close to what I want. But her eyes were so blank, so blandly accepting and quiet that he knew it wouldn’t be any use.

After a minute and a half of silence, Betty stood up and took one of Danny’s hands. “Auntie Mona’s friend has a daughter about your age. Maybe we could invite them over for dinner.”

Danny looked from his father to his mother and back again, and saw that they both had set jaws and unshaking hands. He patted his mother’s shoulder and stepped around her toward the hall.

“Well?” Doug said. “Is it a plan, or what?”

Danny paused. “Sure. Whatever you want.” When he reached his bedroom, he closed the door as quietly as he could before shaking the sand out of his socks and shoes onto an old newspaper. The itch would have bothered him all night.


Two weeks later, Danny lay awake in the middle of the night. When he was sure everyone else had fallen asleep, he got up and changed out of his pyjamas and into a sweater and jeans. He stuffed his final paycheque from the Exhibition, which he had collected that morning, into his wallet. As quietly as possible, he opened his dresser drawers and pulled out socks, underwear and T-shirts. He listened, unmoving, for the sounds of his parents walking through the hallway to investigate the noise. But all he heard was the wind blowing through the unruly patch of bamboo in the backyard. He pulled out four pairs of pants and his winter coat.

He filled up his mother’s old suitcase, the one she brought with her to Vancouver twenty-five years ago. He was careful not to overstuff it, for fear that the tattered corners would not hold. He stood in the middle of his room and looked at the single bed, the blue floral curtains with the hole near the hem that could be from moths or maybe even mice. He wondered if he should feel nostalgia for the years spent here or if relief was acceptable too.

He pushed down the thought that he was running away. If he allowed them, those words would burrow into his head and remain forever. His parents’ friends would whisper, “That Danny, he’s a runaway,” and they would shake their heads and cast their eyes skyward. He scurried around his bedroom, moving from closet to bed to dresser, not daring to stop in case he imagined his mother crying into her apron, her face buried in the grease and pork juice and rice flour embedded there. And beside her, sitting in one of the hard kitchen chairs, his father, hands in fists on the table, his usually slicked-back hair hanging over his forehead in one damp, drooping lock.

Leaving was one of two choices. He could stay, and work in the curio shop for the rest of his life. He would marry a girl he barely knew or barely tolerated, and live in this house with his parents, eating the same food, staring at them staring at him. If he left, no one would notice him. He would be invisible, moving around this city or another one, one body among many—life unseen, life unplanned. If he left, he could be anonymous for a time, observing and quiet. And then he could create a new Danny, one who took the world’s most famous photographs, one who never thought of his parents at all.

There was no in-between. He couldn’t stay in this house and work where he wanted. He couldn’t leave and still come home once a week for dinner without his father shouting at him for neglecting his duties or his mother staring at him with her eyes half filled with tears. Leaving now meant leaving for good.

There was one more spot he needed to look. He lay down on the floor and peered underneath the bed. Two shoe-boxes, filled with smudged paper dolls that looked dishevelled, like women who had been drinking champagne and allowed their dates to smear their lipstick over their faces and spill caviar on their long silk skirts. A stack of department store catalogues crusted over with dust that had mixed with the dampness in the air and then dried. He ripped the dolls into small pieces and placed them back in the boxes, piles of green and red and purple confetti. He took two issues from the middle of the pile and threw them into the suitcase. For company on a lonely night.

The hands on the bedside clock pointed to ten past four. He wanted to leave well before his mother woke up at five. On his desk sat a pile of hockey cards, a collection his father added to every birthday and Christmas, even giving Danny the thin plastic sleeves to protect the cards from dirty fingers and the disintegration brought by time. Danny left them where they were.

He pulled on a pair of socks and crept, suitcase and shoes in hand, down the hallway, past his parents’ bedroom. Holding his breath, he slipped a folded note under his sister’s door. Tell them not to look for me. I won’t come back no matter what. He knew the precise location of the squeaky floorboards and stepped around them, wincing each time he had to shift his weight from one foot to the other. The front door was the hardest part and he twisted the knob slowly, making sure he didn’t rush, that the door didn’t rub against its frame. Once outside on the front stoop, he put on his shoes, grabbed the suitcase and hurried down the stairs. Across the street, a white Cadillac started its engine and Danny threw his bag into the back seat before falling into the passenger seat, shutting the door as silently as he could. He slid down so that his head was no longer visible through the window.

“What took you so long?” Edwin pulled out, steered through a U-turn and sped westward. “I’ve been waiting for an hour.”

Danny wondered if he had breathed at all this morning. “I found some more stuff that I needed to pack.”

“Well, you’d better tell me where I’m taking you because if I’m not back in bed in about forty-five minutes, my grandmother will have a hairy conniption and start screaming at the neighbours.”

“Keep going,” Danny said, “and I’ll tell you when to stop.”


They stood in the middle of a single room in a downtown hotel where the occupants of one floor shared a single bathroom. A strange combination of people walked the halls and through the lobby: working men who had rolled into Vancouver from Campbell River or Williams Lake; women who crept up the stairs four or five times a night, each time with a different man; and young people who were determined to escape to the big city.

Of course, he hadn’t come very far, only from the house on Dundas in East Vancouver to this hotel on Seymour. But it felt like he’d travelled around the world and was now in a place his parents never once thought about, a seedy establishment where those with shattered reputations nursed their watered-down beer in the ground-floor bar. A building that you noticed only if you needed it. Danny carefully placed his suitcase on the low dresser and grinned.

Edwin talked without once removing the cigarette burning between his lips. “God, did you look into the corner here by the nightstand? I don’t even know what that black crud is. Mould? Dirt? Hair? I’m getting the willies, Danny. You can’t stay here.”

Danny parted the curtains. “This is temporary.”

“You should go to New York,” Edwin said, sitting down on the single chair and then standing up immediately and brushing off the seat of his pants. “There’s nothing happening here. Vancouver is dull, dull, dull.”

“I don’t know where I’m going. I might even stay in town. But I’ll get an apartment after I find a job. This is okay for now.”

Through the window, Danny could see the pearl-grey light of dawn growing brighter around the edges of clouds. He turned and saw Edwin lying on the bed, eyes closed, his cigarette still in his mouth.

“I thought you had to go home,” Danny whispered.

“Grandma can wait. I don’t care. I’m tired.” He pulled out the cigarette and, without even opening his eyes, stubbed it out directly on the cracked nightstand top.

Danny lay down beside him. Even here, in the middle of downtown where the stunted trees were forced to grow out of tiny plots cut into the sidewalk, he could hear the singing of birds, the rise and fall of their chirping. As he fell asleep, he heard no other noise, not even the rush of a car or voices from the hall.

He felt like he was being pushed awake, crashing through a single-paned picture window into the cold morning. He sat up, breathing hard, and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. He could hear the splatter of raindrops as they hit the sidewalk and ran together into the gutters.

As his vision cleared, he looked down and saw Edwin’s head between his legs, his own pants in a puddle by the side of the bed.

Why. Off. What the f*ck. These were all the words that sat behind his teeth, ready to be shouted. At first he retracted, his body like a hand in a sleeve. His knees jerked and he was poised to jump up and shake off all of this, everything, that is, except the outrage that hissed through him.

But wait. This felt good. It was a mixture of pain—the sharpness of nerves coming to life, crackling under his skin—and warmth, as if his entire body was radiating heat, wave after wave after wave. He thought he might suffocate; every limb was heavy with simmering blood. His mouth was now too dry to ask Edwin anything; he simply sighed an exhalation of hot air. No one knew they were in this room, not even Cindy. They were alone, with strangers on the other side of the wall. Knowing this, Danny tilted his head back and breathed.

Moving so slowly that it seemed he wasn’t moving at all, Edwin crept up the bed and pulled off Danny’s shirt, every touch like a small explosion on his skin. The mattress creaked and, briefly, Danny wondered how many people had f*cked on this very spot, on these same sheets and blankets.

He felt the weight of Edwin’s body. For half a minute, the pain was vicious, like a scream that ripped across time and space, but Edwin’s right hand was still stroking him and, soon, the pain dissipated, leaving Danny feeling like a melted human candle, a humid pool of liquefied flesh and hair. He shuddered and buried his face in the rough sheets.

They might have been lying there for hours or minutes; there was no clock in the room and the light through the window remained an overcast grey. The rain thickened and the individual drops falling on the pavement couldn’t be distinguished from the roar of water rushing down the street. Neither of them was asleep. For the first time that Danny could remember, Edwin didn’t speak, only breathed deeply, his arms thrown over Danny’s chest. Danny shifted and brought the covers up over his shoulders, but Edwin still didn’t move, his naked body half obscured by the tangle of blankets. Finally, his voice rose from the pillow.

“I love you.”

Danny hadn’t been this close to crying since he was a little boy. His mouth felt glued shut, but the silence was growing thicker by the minute.

“I can’t,” he said, breathing deeply through his nose. How inadequate.

“But, I thought—”

“You never leave me alone, Eddie.” Danny was surprised at the force of his voice, at the way his words echoed in this small room, shrill and clear as glass. “Why do you need me to be with you all the time? Why can’t you make some other friends? Did it ever occur to you that sometimes I just want to be alone?”

Edwin was silent. Danny knew that he was thinking about the unfairness of this outburst. It was Danny who had asked Edwin to drive him to this place, Danny who had accepted his touch and enjoyed it. But still. He couldn’t be Edwin’s lover. At night, Danny drifted to sleep buoyed by images of blunt fingers tracing a line down the side of his body and the fleshy smell that men have nestled in their clavicles, the smell that reminded him of the dirt floor in a dark forest. Edwin’s substantial thighs and sour breath were so real, so solidly part of his everyday life that he felt sick.

Edwin sat up and turned to face him. “I’m gay, Danny. Get it? Maybe that’s something you should try saying one day.”

I’m gay. Danny thought those words were like unexploded bombs, potentially lethal, but still only words. But he knew that they were the right words, ones that had been circling inside him for years and that partially propelled him to leave his parents’ house. Still, he wanted to grab Edwin by the shoulders and ask him, How do you know for sure? How do you know this won’t go away? How do you know you’re not crazy?

Edwin had already begun putting on his clothes. He left without saying another word.

Danny walked down the hall to take a shower. When he returned, he crossed the room to open the window. He breathed in the damp air, so wet that he swore he could feel the invisible mist coating the inside of his nostrils. The morning was halfway over and people hurried past the hotel, careful not to look directly into the bar where dedicated drunks were hunched over on their stools. Edwin paced back and forth directly below Danny’s window, his hair soaked and shiny with rain.

He looked up and waved at the open window, jumping up and down. Danny scanned the street, wondering if someone else might be witnessing Edwin’s strange dance in the middle of a puddle.

“Danny!” Edwin shouted. “I’m sorry I left!”

Danny waved his hands, tried to hush him.

“I didn’t know what to do,” Edwin continued. “I know you and me can never work!”

Half hiding behind the thin curtain, Danny yelled, “Shut up!” Then, lower, “Everyone will hear you. Come upstairs.”

“No, I have to go. My grandmother is probably freaking out. I just wanted to tell you that it’s all right! I know you don’t love me. It’ll be okay, Danny.” Edwin gave a thumbs-up, nodding and smiling.

Danny watched as Edwin ran across the street to his car. The headlights of the Cadillac cut through the gloom as Edwin nosed the car into traffic. He was gone before Danny could shut the window.