The Better Mother (31 page)

Val remembered the river. The way it smelled at the height of summer. The muddy banks where the bodies of fish that had died in the winter were exposed to the hot sun. The saltiness of eelgrass. The faint smell of chemical sewage from the paper mill upriver that was usually hidden by fog and rain the rest of the year. The rumble of trains speeding past every other day. Val and Joan, one small and the other smaller, sitting with bare legs on the steps of their back porch, sniffing the warm wind blowing up from the water and through the bush. Val never loved their house, but the river was something
else altogether. It churned with the scraps of canning and logging, yet it still reflected the blue sky on sunny days and winked at Val if she watched it long enough, her chin resting on the rickety railing outside, her mind empty of all the debris from village gossip or a bad day at school. The river could be lovely. You just had to be patient.

As if Joan could hear Val’s thoughts, she said, “Our house isn’t so far from Burrard Inlet, you know. There’s a beach there. Dawn would love it.”

Val met Joan’s eyes and nodded.

Val felt puffy with rest. She woke up before anyone else, her body jerking through the last cobwebs of a dream she couldn’t remember. The baby wasn’t crying yet. The early winter rain dripped off the eaves and onto the wide driveway lined with miniature spruce trees. It was still dark and the warmth of the bed cocooned her. Puffs of down-filled comforter formed in the crook of her elbow and the curve of her waist. Val fell asleep again, dozing as the overcast sky brightened. She was half aware of the wind shaking the Japanese maple on the front lawn, of cars slowly backing out of garages and heading toward the highway.

When she awoke a second time, she sat up stupidly at the sounds of Dawn whimpering in the next room. Val threw on a robe and slipped out of her bedroom, padding into Dawn’s nursery, which, at the last minute, had been decorated by Joan with just a crib and a white dresser. As Val crept closer to the baby, Dawn began to wail. She kicked out her legs and stiffened her back when Val reached in to pick her up. Val changed her, tried to feed her, even held her to the window,
whispering that this same type of tree lined the road where Val and Joan grew up. None of it made any difference. Finally, she screamed over Dawn’s cries. “What do you want? I don’t understand!” She leaned against the wall, too tired with the effort of shrieking to even cry herself.

Joan strode into the room and took the baby from Val. “What are you doing? Shouting at an infant like that,” she scolded. Val stared as Joan wiped Dawn’s face with a tissue from the pocket on her slacks and brushed her pinky against her mouth. Dawn’s lips parted and, as she sucked on Joan’s finger, her eyes closed and Val thought she heard her release a quiet chuckle.

“My car keys are on the hall table. When the store opens, you’ll have to go and buy a soother.” Joan turned toward the window and Val saw that, this time, Dawn opened her eyes wide and stared at the trees outside.

Weeks later, Val kneeled on the floor by her open bedroom window. No sound outside, not even the bang of a garbage can lid. If she listened hard enough, with her head craned to the right, she thought she could hear the swish of the highway, the sound of tires speeding through the rain. But she couldn’t tell if what she was hearing was real or if she was making it all up because, otherwise, she would go mad, choked by Joan’s wall-to-wall carpeting.

There was no music in the house, only a television in the family room that Peter turned on to watch the news. Dawn was asleep. To fill the silence, Val began humming a tune. Soon, her bare feet were tapping the carpet, and she stood up, twisting her hips, her arms above her head.

She closed her eyes, saw pin dots of light underneath the lids that she could trick herself into believing were stage lights, or the lampposts on Granville Street that glimmered yellow in the dark.

Val began to dance by herself every night after Joan and Peter and Dawn had gone to bed, her nightgown billowing around her legs. Her body remembered her old moves: the spin that helped unwind her skirt, the shrug that slipped one spaghetti strap down her arm. She opened the window as wide as it would go, and, as she twirled, the sharp air brushed past the hair on her arms and worked its way between her toes. Branches rustled together in the wind, and she pretended it was the sound of a rowdy crowd, cheering and clapping at every kick, every arched eyebrow. The rest of the house slept while her body vibrated, awake.

Val dressed carefully, sorting through her clothes until she found the right outfit, a grey day suit with navy-blue piping around the lapels and sleeves. She found Joan and Dawn by the living-room window, the baby nestled into Joan’s lap.

“I’m going into town today, if that’s all right,” Val announced, fiddling with the clasp on her purse.

“Oh?” Joan didn’t even look up.

“Yes, I thought I’d go and check on the apartment, maybe bring back a few things that I forgot to pack.”

“How long will you be gone?”

“Since it’s such a long drive, I thought I might stay overnight and come back in the morning. There doesn’t seem to be any point to driving into town just to drive right back again.” Val smoothed down a pleat in her skirt to hide
her shaking hands.

“That’s probably a good idea. Pick me up some magazines, will you?” Joan bent down to kiss Dawn on the forehead, her pale lips on the baby’s white skin.

Val brushed her hand over Dawn’s fine, floating hair. She swallowed hard and then marched out the door.

In the driveway, Val breathed in the cold suburban air, which smelled like frost. When she was on the highway, she could almost feel the heat from the electric lights on her head and the rise and fall of cracked sidewalks under her high-heeled shoes. The downtown streets were no place for a baby, of that she was certain. She pressed down harder on the gas pedal and smiled as the car surged forward.

The pounding of the drum was undeniable, and it bore its way into her body until her heartbeat was forced to keep pace. Val’s blood rushed upward in waves, and she breathed hard as her fingers, sticky from a puddle of spilled beer, tapped the table-top. Around her, groups of men and women smoked cigarettes in long holders, shouted over the music to the waiters and lifted their drinks in a pool of light so warm that it seemed improbable it could be winter outside, where freezing rain hurled itself downward with such ferocity that it hurt to stand unprotected in the night.

The dancer onstage untied her gingham blouse and shook her breasts in their gingham brassiere at the audience. She wore a straw hat and freckles drawn in pencil on her cheeks. Val smiled. Milly the Country Girl. Young, with a rounded body. The men watched her sling her bra into the wings, wiggle her backside as she walked to the left to pick up a banjo. The band
stopped, and she played “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” singing so sweetly Val forgot that her breasts, except for a pair of pasties, were bare, white and full in the spotlight, and that her denim shorts were cut so high the curve of her ass hung past the frayed hems. The crowd stopped talking, their eyes on Milly.

A voice whispered behind her, “Val, is that you?”

She turned around in her chair and saw the manager of the supper club, sleek in a tuxedo, squinting at her through the shadows.

“Jim. Nice to see you.”

“Everyone’s been asking about you. Tell me you’re back on the scene.”

Val laughed and looked down at her hands. “No, honey. Just back for one night of fun.”

An idea flashed across his face. “Come backstage with me. I’ll get you a costume. We can set up a special performance. One night only with the Siamese Kitten!” He took her hand and pulled it in the direction of the stage.

Val remembered the wrinkles in her belly, the loose skin that sagged over the elastic of her underpants. She hadn’t looked at her naked body in a mirror in months and knew the dimples in her bum from touch. Had she even shaved her legs? She pulled her hand back.

“I can’t, Jim. I’m not ready. I haven’t done anything to prepare.”

“Come on, no one will know.”

“Under those lights?” Val pointed at the spotlights and the bright white circles that swirled over Milly’s body onstage. “They’ll see everything.”

Jim stood with his hands on his hips. “How’s this? You
come back tomorrow night. We’ll set it up. That way, you have time to do whatever it is you girls do to look pretty.”

“Tomorrow?” Val felt the itch in her legs, the gooseflesh that could only be dissipated by the eyes of men watching her shimmy and grind and strut. “I’m supposed to be somewhere tomorrow.”

He waved his arms around the club. “What could be more important than this?”

She could already hear the suspension of breath, the way a full room shimmers with silence when a crowd waits for something it has wanted for a very long time. She saw the sliver of light between the curtains and felt it slice through the darkness of backstage and burn as it touched her skin. She blinked.

“Tomorrow,” she said. “I’ll be here.”

It was too easy. Val called Joan and told her that she needed to stay an extra day or two to sort out some financial matters she had forgotten about.

Joan didn’t ask, perhaps because the baby was fussing, or perhaps because she recognized the lie in Val’s voice, the same tone she used whenever she phoned home while on the road. “You can come back whenever you want,” Joan said. “We’re fine by ourselves.”

She returned to the stage that night. Jim introduced her.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we have a real treat for you tonight. A special one-night-only event. Please welcome the incomparable Siamese Kitten!”

Men jumped to their feet and whistled. Even the women sat up straighter in their chairs, peering over heads for a better
view of the stage and the inevitable spectacle of Val’s return.

Before she stepped out through the curtains, she held the palm of her hand to her stomach, felt her breath coming sharp and fast. This was a borrowed costume with a swath of transparent fabric hastily sewn over the belly to conceal the marks her pregnancy had left behind. It had been over a year since she last danced in public. Everything could go wrong. She might ruin her flawless reputation.

She heard the audience fall silent. No impatient hissing, not even the shifting of legs or arms in boredom. No, they wanted her. Only she could deliver what they were expecting. She stepped through the curtains and waited a half-second before the applause started up again and enveloped her. It crawled over her skin in that singular way she didn’t know she had been missing.

When she returned to Joan and Peter’s house three days later, Joan proudly showed her how she had redecorated Dawn’s room.

“Do you see the pink curtains? They’re made of this new fabric, you know, and won’t ever wrinkle. And I couldn’t resist this little table-and-chair set. I thought Dawn could use it for tea parties.” Joan laughed and picked up a tiny cup and saucer. “Who she’ll invite to these parties, I don’t know, but it was all so cute. Oh, and look. I thought we could use a good rocking chair by the window here, for night feedings. I always feel so comforted in a rocking chair, don’t you?”

“It’s beautiful, Joanie, really. Thanks so much.” Even as the words left Val’s lips, she wanted to run from this pink and frilled room to somewhere more familiar, somewhere with
sticky floors and hard bar stools that made her ass cold and achy. When they went to the living room, she reached for Dawn, who sat solidly on the sofa, propped up with cushions, but the baby cringed and her lower lip began to tremble. Val pushed her hands back into her pockets and didn’t try to touch her again for the rest of the day.

It didn’t take long for Val’s old agent to find out about her performance at the Cave, and he started phoning the house every day. “You’ve got to come back to the circuit, Val. Burlesque needs you. If you don’t come back, we’ll be drowning in these girls with no skill whatsoever. All they do is strip. You, my dear, have a
show.”

Val whispered into the receiver, turning her back to Joan, who listened with her arms crossed in front of her chest, her eyes gleaming palely in the winter sunshine. “I can’t. I told you before: I have other things to do. I can’t travel like that again.”

“You could stay in Vancouver! There are plenty of clubs here. You’d be like the grande dame of burlesque, the resident queen of the strip. Come on, Val. You know you want to.”

And she did, but she couldn’t say it. “No. I can’t.”

“You can’t stop me from phoning again. You’ll rue the day you ever went back to the Cave,” he said, with a note of amusement in his voice, before hanging up.

She woke up every night, itching to run out of this house and down the highway—droplets of mist collecting in her hair, her nose running from the cold breeze—until she reached the city. During the day, she and Joan did almost nothing, just fed and changed and soothed the baby, and then cooked supper for Peter, who only wanted to cuddle with Dawn in the armchair in his den, hardly noticing when Joan called him for dinner.

When she stood at the window one afternoon, looking out at the woods behind the house, her reflection seemed thin and bland. The shrubs in the garden squatted in the grass, substantial and unmistakeably green, while she was leached of colour, a poor imitation of her once green and gold self. The phone rang. It was for her.

At first, she went away for five days every three weeks, always returning on a Monday evening. Then she was away for a whole week and, later, ten days. Finally, she stayed away for two weeks, returning one morning with a bag of gifts for the baby. Val stared at Dawn—her pale skin, her golden hair. She searched for a trace of herself in her chin, her ears, even the line of her chubby jaw, but saw nothing, only a baby she must once have given birth to.

Joan saw Val’s face, the restlessness in her eyes. Carefully, in a measured voice, she said, “Do you want me to keep her?”

It was a simple question, and Val knew the right answer. She was a mother, wasn’t she? Mothers were supposed to be competent, unfailingly loving and calm. Mothers had no needs of their own; everything they did or said was for their children, not to satisfy their disgusting desires for the gaze of men. Mothers were clean and put together.