The Better Mother (26 page)

“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 strip
tease
, 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.

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.