The Better Mother (25 page)

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.