The Better Mother (8 page)

This had to be back stage; it was just like the auditorium at school. Danny could make out shapes hanging from the ceiling and stacks of boxes piled against the walls. He inched
forward, his hands stretched in front of him until his eyes adjusted. Wires on the floor, coiling and stretching in all different directions. Sandbags weighing down ropes that hung from a catwalk above. To his left, a crack in the darkness. It took a few seconds until Danny realized that the sliver of light he was seeing was the narrow meeting place between two curtains. The stage curtains.

He desperately hoped that his shoes wouldn’t squeak on the floor as he walked toward the gap. His heart was beating like a rabbit’s, and his skin felt no thicker than a tissue. Every sound made him jump, but he kept walking. He stopped when he was behind the curtains at centre stage. The Siamese Kitten must be dancing steps away.

Taking a deep breath, he leaned forward and peered through the curtains. At first, all he saw were the lights—the bright spotlight, the other smaller lights in different colours suspended from the catwalk. But soon enough, he caught a glimpse of skin, the long, extended flesh of an arm, a glove being peeled off slowly, but not so slowly that the audience lost interest. He heard men whistling, could see one or two of them leaning forward in their chairs, their hands cupped around their mouths as they shouted toward the stage. “We want to see your fanny! Come on, give us a little bump and grind!” Danny was appalled. How could these men shout at Miss Val like that? Treating her like the bearded lady in a circus. How rude!

He pulled open the right curtain an inch so he could see Miss Val’s costume. He wondered if she wore the same clothes at every performance, or if she rotated, pulling out a blue gown for Tuesdays and a red cape for Fridays. He tilted his head until he could see her clearly.

But it wasn’t Miss Val. No, this was a different woman altogether, a woman with curly blond hair like Shirley Temple, a woman in a short, white dress with ruffles on the skirt and ankle socks and shiny black Mary Janes. In his surprise, Danny let go of the curtain and stumbled forward, just a step and a half, but it was enough.

The blond dancer’s head whipped around and her eyes narrowed as she spied Danny. He stepped behind the curtain, his breath coming sharply, his head turning left and right, his eyes looking for the quickest way out. As he was about to run off the way he had come, he heard her voice through the curtains.

“Kid, you’d best get out of here. The manager won’t like the looks of you.” She spun on her toes and glared through the crack before turning back to the audience with a wink and a smile.

The wisest thing, of course, would be for Danny to slip away as fast as he could, but he couldn’t resist leaning toward the curtain and whispering, “Where is the Siamese Kitten?”

The piano player pounded on the keys and, by the rise in volume, Danny knew this must be the climax of the act. He heard her shoes tapping on the floor.

“Val? I don’t know, kid. She stopped dancing at least a month ago, at the start of the summer. I heard she’s retired. Now scram before anyone catches on that I’m talking to someone back there.”

“But I wanted to tell her something,” he insisted.

The dancer pushed her hand through the curtains and waved him away, her fingernails—painted lavender and chipped on the sides—flicking the air. Danny stepped backward, then peered past her arm and into the crowd, hoping to
catch a glimpse of Miss Val in the balcony or maybe walking up the aisle. The theatre was partially full and only the first eight rows were occupied. An old man, bald except for a tuft of white hair that stood up straight from the back of his head, leaned forward in his front-row seat, elbows on his knees, his face empty, his cheeks hollow like those of the toothless men who continuously drank coffee in Mr. Gin’s café. Behind him, a younger man with black hair combed away from his forehead tapped his fingers on the back of a seat. He seemed to be vibrating from head to toe while his squirrel-like amber eyes remained locked on the dancer. His nostrils flared a bit when she shimmied to centre stage and her skirt twirled upward. Danny shivered because he was watching a man watching a near-naked woman, which seemed naughtier than watching a naked woman all alone.

In the back, underneath the protruding balcony, a lone figure sat, half in and half out of the heavy dark. Danny squinted. There was something familiar in the way the head was tilted to the side, in the line of the shoulders leaning back in the red upholstered seat. An usherette in a red and gold hat shone a flashlight into the rows and the shadows disappeared for one second, long enough for him to see that the figure in the back with the small eyes wide open was someone he knew. His mother.

He opened his mouth to call out to her, but clamped it shut in anger instead. How could his practical, workaday mother be sitting here, in this place, where women were supposed to shine like stars or comets? What did she care for fancy clothes and fast music? He had come here to find Miss Val, to be dazzled and awestruck, and to be somewhere else
besides the shop or their sad little house. He should run at his mother right now and tell her to get out. But then he remembered that he was supposed to be at the shop, counting his father’s inventory of teacups. If she saw him, she might tell his father and Danny didn’t need to hear any more shouting. He punched his right fist into his left hand and stomped into the darkness, shoulders quivering.

When he was past the sandbags, he stopped. Which way should he turn? A cool breeze blew past his left ear and he turned toward it, thinking he could smell the garbage cans in the alley outside. With every step, he felt the floor with the toe of his shoes, afraid there might be stairs or even a trap door that might drop him into the tunnels his father once claimed ran like rivers underneath the whole city. He shivered.

He was in a narrow hallway with a line of doors on each side. He looked up, down, in front and behind and still nothing looked familiar, only cramped and dim and strange. A triangle of light appeared at the end of the hall and Danny hurried in its direction, thinking it was sunshine. As he squinted through the dark he saw the light shimmer and gain shape, and he thought he saw a flash of green fabric and a sliver of cigarette smoke spill out into the hall. He heard high-pitched laughter and a crowd of ladies’ voices, each layered on top of another. “Miss Val,” he half called, “is that you?”

In the open doorway he stopped. Five heads turned and looked directly at him.

He stared at the women, at their bare legs and stockinged ones, the flesh spilling out over the tops of corsets, the shoulders sloped forward and criss-crossed with straps. He
took a step forward and whispered, “Miss Val,” without really knowing which of the dancers he was talking to. He was sure he had seen her while he was running through the hall. Was that the Siamese Kitten’s dark hair? Or was it the bobbed head of his mother, shining in this room like it never had before?

The room was full, stuffed like the stockings that hung in the Woodward’s display windows every December. Elvis Presley blared out of a radio set on the concrete floor. To the right, pink, blue, striped and sequined costumes dangled from a wheeled rack. Two brassieres and one stocking were draped over a pipe heater. To the left, a table was piled with lipsticks and creams, perfumes and hairbrushes. And directly opposite hung six mirrors, each lit by one bare light bulb. Danny counted six chairs.

All Danny could hear was his mother’s voice, that singsong tone she used whenever she was trying to tell him something very important. “Remember,” she said to him yesterday, as she hurried him up the street on the way home from grocery shopping, “you must never wander off by yourself. Evil woman-demons are always looking for sweet little boys like you.” He frowned. He was quite sure no woman-demon ever put this much effort into making herself look pretty.

One of the women stood up. A black feather escaped from her headdress and floated through the air, catching the draft from the ceiling vent. Danny remembered how cold he was and rubbed his left arm with his right hand.

“What are you doing here?” asked the woman with the heavily lined eyes and Cleopatra wig.

“The Siamese Kitten,” he said, in a voice barely above a whisper.

“Are you looking for Val?”

Danny nodded. This dancer towered in her high heels, far taller than any woman he had ever seen. He could not see her face; instead, he stared at her black stockings and the feathers sewn into her romper.

“She left without much notice and didn’t say where she was going. Sorry, kid.”

He closed his eyes against the mirrors, the reflections that turned the five dancers into ten and then twenty and beyond.

“Did you come here all by yourself?” Danny felt the weight of her hand on his shoulder as he leaned against the door frame.

When he opened his eyes again, the women were crouching around him in a half-circle, so close that he could smell their skin, the dampness that collected in their belly buttons or under their arms. A ring with a purple stone flashed and he saw long fingers topped with bare ragged nails, the kind that have been chewed and chewed, the kind that picked dried food off dishes in scalding hot water.

He was silent.

“I don’t think he speaks much English,” one of the dancers said.

“He’s clearly lost,” said another.

Danny heard a giggle. “He’s cute as a button though. I could use him in the act. He could carry my train for me.”

“Watch out, that might be a hit. Some of those old guys out there like little boys more than they should.”

A storm of laughter erupted around him and he turned and ran out of the room, down the hallway, behind the stage and out the grey door.

Danny blinked at the bright afternoon light. He walked through the alley and around the corner, his head down so that all he saw were the colourless sidewalks, filmed with fine dirt brought in on the dry wind. He had to go back to the shop—there was no question of that—but he wanted to sit on the curb and feel the sun soak into his black hair until he couldn’t stand it any longer, feel the sweat that would inevitably drip down his spine and collect behind his knees.

He wanted to tell Miss Val all the things he had never told anyone else, about the secrets he had hidden under his bed, how his father was pleased with nothing, the time at school when he was picked last for the T-ball team and the other boys didn’t even look him in the eye, the way his mother smiled as if she had never learned what smiling actually meant. Once upon a time, he thought he could tell rich and jolly Uncle Kwan a secret or two, but after letting it slip that he would rather take tap dance lessons than play basketball, Uncle Kwan started to ignore him, and simply nodded curtly in greeting when they met. Danny ached when he thought of Miss Val. He wanted to burrow his head into her stomach, listen to the blood pumping through her body and twist his small fingers into the satin of her robe.

“It’s okay if no one understands you,” she might have said. “I do.”

After he nodded, she would continue, “We’re the same, you know. We grow up wanting something different, something beautiful and glamorous. Who cares about mops and peeling potatoes? Everyone else, they’re boring. We’re the fascinating ones. You’ll see.”

And he would know she was right. They were the exception, the two huddled in the corner when everyone else crowded into the middle. Maybe if he had found her, he could have gone home feeling newly empty and free. Another person would know his secrets and he could look at his soggy house and sullen family without feeling that he was brimming over with dangerous, hidden things. Then his father might love him and his mother could be happier.

Maybe she would have told him all about her own secrets too. He could grasp her hand and listen to the flash and bang and buzz of her life story, one that he imagined was filled with lights and clothes that shimmered in the dark. And he would try to learn from what she said, because she was the one person he had ever met who smelled and looked real but whose whole self was dripping with star quality. She was impeccable, but not so much that he couldn’t throw his arms around her waist and close his eyes against her belly.
Maybe one day
, he thought,
I’ll be lovely and famous too
.

But it was one foot in front of the other on these streets he knew so well that he could close his eyes and feel his way back to the shop through the soles of his shoes. He would never find Miss Val now. In an hour and a half, he would see his mother at home, trimming the ends off bok choy and slicing chicken into thin strips. He wanted to rush into the house and beat his fists into her stomach. He had been looking for
Miss Val
, not her. She was there when he woke up in the mornings, there as he fell asleep at night, shuffling down the hallway and cleaning the floors. Even now, she was there, sitting like a brown lump in a club that should have been full of women who were glittering and colourful. But as he came closer to
the shop, he knew he wouldn’t say or do anything to betray where he had been. The truth meant trouble, so it would probably be an evening like any other: she would cook, they would eat and he would fall asleep. Except tonight, with his face turned toward his open window, his mind would churn because he knew Miss Val and his mother had set foot in the same place. His head ached with the strangeness of it all.

THE MOVIE
1982

Danny resents the hardness of afternoon sunshine, when the sky is so bright that it isn’t blue any longer, only a thin, brittle off-white that is indistinguishable from the wisps of clouds or the exhaust trails of airplanes. He wonders if July in Vancouver has ever been this hot. He walks down East Pender Street, squinting behind his dark glasses. He doesn’t need to look at the street signs or the numbers on the buildings; Chinatown is a place his body remembers. When he crosses Main, he sees it right away. The curio shop.

The same string of bells tinkles when he pushes open the door. Doug is standing at the back counter pulling out jade pendants for a customer. When he sees Danny standing awkwardly by the display of twisted bamboo plants, his face suddenly, inexplicably, brightens. He hurries the elderly woman along, saying, “This one is the best. I’ll give you my lowest
price.” She grows flustered at his efficiency and buys whatever it is that he pushes toward her before turning, head down, and stumbling out the door.