While Miss Val chatted with the people in the crowd, Danny stayed as close to her as he dared, his nose on level with her gloved elbow. He stared at her green strapless dress, at the ruching on its sides and the slit up the thigh. How wonderful.
The music started and couples floated out into the middle of the room, the women with their necks held gracefully, like porcelain figures, the men smiling, close-lipped, over their partners’ shoulders. It was all so flawless, without dust or pickles or the smell of bubble gum. Danny heard Miss Val laugh and he looked up at her clear, white face.
Gently, he tugged on her hand.
“Yes, honey?”
Danny bowed his head and, in as low a voice as he could manage, said, “Would you care to dance?”
Miss Val smiled and took his hand in hers. “Why, of course.”
They spun out onto the dance floor, his left arm clutching the fabric around her waist, his right holding her hand. He peered down at his own feet, careful not to step on her toes. Gently, she said to him, “Look up. Only a fellow with something to hide doesn’t look into the eyes of his partner.”
And so they danced, slipping through gaps in the crowd, skimming over the floor as if they weighed no more than feathers. He could see their bodies in the mirrors, the whirl of movement that meant they were fast and smooth, like the wind Danny felt when he stood at the top of the hill in the school playground. When the music stopped, Miss Val embraced him and his face was crushed against the smooth satin of her dress. He put his arms around her and closed his eyes, wondering if he could somehow make this moment last and last, preserve it with perfume or shellac it with hairspray. He sighed, because he knew that this was impossible and he would have to return to his real life.
He said, “There’s something I want to tell you.” There was nothing she couldn’t understand. She would know how it was to feel like a Martian. She would help him figure out why he always stood apart from the other boys as they played in the schoolyard. She would never look at him with disappointment or confusion. Or sound like she was sorry whenever she spoke. Or plod down the street in tan walking shoes when all Danny ever wanted was to see her in a pair of high heels.
Val knelt in front of him and touched his cheek with her cool hand. “I have a secret too.”
And he leaned forward, his ear practically touching her red lips. She breathed in and he shivered, knowing the words were coming very soon. She would know everything about him and he would know everything about her.
Danny woke with a start, rubbed his eyes in the grey light of early morning. He stood and pressed his nose to the window. Even though his small room looked out at the house beside theirs (a newer, taller house, covered not in wooden siding, but in a fine layer of beige gravel with bits of granite that winked in the sunlight and grew shiny in the rain), Danny could see the reflection of the sky in the neighbour’s window. Usually, in this small square of glass, he tracked the speed of the clouds, the magical break in the mist when the sun shone for one second, long enough to illuminate everything and remind him that it couldn’t possibly rain all the time. But now he squinted at the barely blue sky and listened, hearing nothing but the two-note song of the bird that lived in the scrawny birch tree across the street. He must have slept through the night, but it was just as well, because the house was still and he was sure everyone was sleeping.
He crawled under his bed and pulled out the pile of department store catalogues from its hiding place behind two shoeboxes in the far right-hand corner. Sitting on the floor, he opened the newest one—the one his mother saved for him two months ago by pinching it from the morning mail before his father saw. He traced his sticky finger along the lines of the long dresses, the dangling strands of imitation pearls, the gloved hands of the one lucky little girl modelling her white, rabbit fur coat. The thin, glossy pages were dotted with his fingerprints, and small clumps of dust had collected in the spine. He lingered on his favourite page, the one with the teen-aged boy wearing a navy-blue sweater vest and white shorts, his hair parted on the side. Like a real movie star stepping out to play tennis in a city with palm trees swaying in the warm breeze. Someplace far from here. He wondered if any of the boys he knew saved catalogues like he did, but of course no one else did. Of course he was the only one.
Outside, he heard Mr. Murray open his front door for his morning newspaper and Danny knew he had only a few minutes before his mother woke up and began gathering the dirty sheets for laundry day. He reached inside his pillowcase and unravelled a long, emerald-green silk sash. He folded it over and over again, pressing down each fold with his small hand until the creases were sharp and the belt was flat and no bigger than a handkerchief. He slipped it between two catalogues, Winter 1957 and Spring 1958, and pushed the whole pile back under his bed, careful to slide his two shoeboxes into place again. Even in the middle of summer, the mornings were cold, and the floor beneath Danny’s bare feet bit into his soles. He climbed back into bed and waited for his mother to knock on his door, whispering in Chinese, in that apologetic way of hers that he hated most, “Time to get up, Danny. Breakfast is ready.”
The summer days began to blend together. Danny had forgotten how long it had been since he and Cindy walked to school in the cool mornings and pressed their shoes into the thick frost blanketing Mrs. Fratelli’s lawn. He lay on the folding lounge chair on the back porch, the flesh on the backs of his legs oozing through the holes in the woven plastic cover. A cloud like a spooked horse and another in the shape of a feather duster passed overhead.
Cindy’s face hovered above him. Her thick bangs were held back with a yellow plastic barrette and she shaded her eyes with her left hand. Her right hand held an old cookie tin.
“It’s time for paper dolls, Danny,” she said, shaking the tin so that they could both hear the scissors and coloured pencils bouncing around inside.
“Can’t you play with Jeannie next door?” he asked, drowsy from the sunshine.
“She’s at camp. And no one draws better than you. Please, Danny?”
He blinked against the harsh light and tried to remember the last time he rode his bike to Marcello’s house two blocks away. Yesterday? It was too hot to play outside and, besides, Danny was never convinced Marcello really wanted to play with him. He was just too polite to say otherwise. Maybe it was time for paper dolls.
In Cindy’s bedroom, they drew and cut out paper dolls from their father’s used and carefully refolded brown wrapping paper. They giggled, marched their dolls across Cindy’s bed, changing the dolls’ clothes for brunch, drinks at the club, or a dinner date with a dashing young doctor. Through the thin walls, they could hear their mother wringing out the wet laundry in the bathtub and cleaning the floors with the grey, stringy mop that, when propped in the corner of the bathroom, looked like a skinny, dishevelled old man, the kind who insisted on holding your hand while he was telling your parents what a fine little boy you had become.
“They should go to a party, I think. Maybe Anastasia will wear the pink dress with the white bow. Glamorous, right, Danny?”
But Danny was busy making a new paper doll, one with black bobbed hair like midnight, and a green robe. Cindy, looking up from Anastasia’s honey-blond head, wrinkled her nose and said, “She doesn’t look like any paper doll I’ve ever seen.” But Danny took no notice (little sisters, what do they know?) and propped up his new creation on a tissue box. He tried to remember what Marcello’s teenaged brother told him about the women who danced at the Shanghai Junk. Danny wiggled the paper doll’s bum and sashayed her around the stage while Cindy laughed and laughed, her chubby hands held up to her mouth. Finally, Danny pulled the doll’s clothes off, piece by piece. He poked Cindy in the leg and whispered, “You have to clap, dummy. It’s almost the end of her act.”
And the doll bowed to thundering, appreciative applause before sauntering off, obscured from the crowd by one white tissue standing up in the box, in folds like a stage curtain.
As Danny was carefully re
-dressing his paper dancer, their mother hurried into the bedroom. “Baba doesn’t like to see the mess. Put the dolls away,” she said, her eyes wide open and searching the room for any stray paper clothes. “Cindy, take them to your room. You shouldn’t play like this with your brother anyway.”
Generally, their father hardly noticed the house at all or most of the objects inside it. But Danny knew that the paper dolls were the one thing that might rouse his father out of his television, beer and armchair stupor, so he helped Cindy pile them into the box as quickly as his small hands allowed.
“Summertime,” Danny heard his father mutter as he walked through the front door. “Nothing but tourists.”
After dinner, Danny sat in the bathtub while his mother washed his hair, her thick fingers massaging his scalp. He closed his eyes, breathed in the steam rising from the water and the smell of soap and shampoo and his own wet skin.
“Wake up, Danny. It’s very dangerous to fall asleep in the bath.” She tapped his shoulder with a sudsy hand.
He turned his head and looked at her face. Small round eyes. Cheeks like brown apples. A wide mouth that smiled and opened for whispers and quiet complaints, but never for laughter that caught you off balance or blew through the house like a cedar-scented windstorm. He saw that her sleeves, once pushed up but now falling, were soaked. What if we just curled her hair? he thought. She could wear real stockings and not those dumb white socks. Maybe she wasn’t always like this.
“Tell me a story, Mama. About you and Ba when you were young.”
She clucked and poured water from an ancient, cracked rice bowl over his head. “Those old stories. I don’t know why you love them so much.”
“Please, Mama.”
It was the same story every time, told in the same way, in his mother’s soft voice. Doug Lim was a fast-talking Chinatown boy, one of the few born in Canada back then. He was the undisputed king of gin rummy and, many times, she saw him slam his fist on the table in victory as the cards flew up into the air and the glasses rattled. “Not everyone liked him, you know,” she said frowning. “Young men don’t like to lose all the time.”
During the long evenings of summer, Doug used to race his father’s produce delivery truck against the other boys’ faster, newer Chryslers and Fords, the cars bought by the fathers who had managed to finish school and worked as notaries or salesmen or hospital technicians. Doug didn’t win, of course, but the truck held up, never once spinning out of control or overheating in the sunshine.
“After I met him,” Danny’s mother whispered, scrubbing his back with a damp cloth, “I would tie my scarf around his arm and he would tell everyone, ‘This race is for Betty.’ Your father was very sweet then. He really wanted to marry me and have a son and daughter.” She tilted up Danny’s chin and said, “You should remember that and try to get along better.”
He saw his mother in a red circle skirt, hair combed up into a bouncing ponytail. He wanted to ask if she had ever looked like that, but was afraid that she never had, and he would be left with an image of a less wrinkled, slightly thinner version of the woman she was now. Danny tried to imagine his father walking down the street with his hands in his pockets, his hips tilted forward in a teenaged boy’s swagger, but all he saw was the same rounded, cranky man who ended up running a curio shop for the tourists he sneered at when they weren’t watching.
Maybe everything changed when he decided to marry Betty, who had arrived in Vancouver from Hong Kong at sixteen to join her father. Maybe Doug fell in love with her quietness, with her wide mouth and round, sad eyes. Maybe he wanted this life, and hadn’t fallen into it. Maybe, as a young man, he dreamed of having a little house like this one on Dundas, and maybe he didn’t mind saving eggshells for fertilizing the garden, or layering sweaters to save on the heat in winter.
She dried Danny off with a large blue towel, mercilessly rubbing under his armpits and around his ears. The mirror above the sink was fogged over and Danny thought he might choke on the heavy dampness in the air. He looked at his mother’s blurry reflection and imagined how beautiful she could look if she tried. She could wear some blush on her brown cheeks, even put on something with a low neck to show that she really was a woman underneath the shapeless cardigans and wool slacks. But he knew that if he even suggested it to her, she would knit her ungroomed eyebrows together and stare at him like she might stare at a two-headed cat.
“Have you heard enough for tonight?” Betty smiled, but her eyes didn’t change, didn’t crinkle up in mirth the way Cindy’s did when Danny made a funny face. “Was that a good story?”
As he pulled on his pyjamas, he nodded and said what he always did: “Yes, Mama. The greatest.”
The morning light hurt Danny’s eyes and he curled up in bed, the covers pulled over his face. He could hear Cindy’s voice, clear and shrill. “It’s Thursday, right? We’re going to help Ba at the shop today, right?”
The walls shook with his father’s shout. “Don’t you ever shut up? Every Thursday, it’s the same thing. Mama goes to clean the big house and you and your brother come to the shop with me. You know how it works, so stop talking. All I want is a little quiet to eat my goddamned toast.”
Then, silence. Danny felt sleep dragging him down, felt the warmth of his blankets pooling around his body.
His mother opened the door to his bedroom and put a hand on his forehead. “Are you feeling all right, Danny? It’s not like you to be late for breakfast.”
He peered up at her, his eyes rolling slowly underneath hot lids.
Doug’s face peered around the door frame. “Is he sick? I can’t have him spreading germs all over the shop.”
Betty turned and said, “But I have to go to work. He can’t stay home by himself.”
His father began walking away, toward the kitchen. “Then take him with you. It’s a big house. There has to be some place he can hide.”
His mother pulled the blankets down and helped Danny get dressed. Even the act of stepping into his pants pained him, made his joints shudder with the effort. She rummaged in the cupboards for some crackers and an apple and packed them in her purse. Holding hands, they hurried down the street toward the bus stop, where the sun pushed on Danny’s head and he shivered in the heat.
When they stepped off the bus, all Danny could see were the tall trees lining King Edward Avenue and the boulevard in the middle covered with grass. He stared, searching for one stray brown blade, but found only an even, unblemished green carpet.
As Danny and Betty walked up the street, they could see the house through gaps in the shrubbery. First the stone facade and double, panelled front door, then the high, peaked roof with the spinning, wrought-iron weathervane. By the time they reached the circular driveway, Danny’s hands had grown cold, and his mother folded the one she was holding into the pocket of her skirt.
He saw dark shadows moving behind the windows, changing shape as they flitted past each diamond-shaped, narrow pane. The stones flanking the front door seemed obscenely alive—bulging, round, pushing out of the walls before receding again.
They knocked on the side door and a broad woman with blond hair fading to white answered. She nodded at Betty before glaring at Danny, who peeked around his mother’s body.
“Why is he here?” she asked, in an accent Danny was sure he’d heard before, maybe in a movie.
Betty bowed her head before speaking. “He’s sick today, Mrs. Lehmann, and can’t stay at home by himself. I thought he could sit in the kitchen.”
Mrs. Lehmann wiped her hands on her apron. “Well, he can’t. What if he sneezes on the food? Better take him with you. The family won’t be home until suppertime.” And she walked away, her hips falling heavily as she stepped across the room.
Danny followed his mother from room to room, carrying her rags as she hauled the domed, shiny metal vacuum up the stairs. The children’s rooms were first, and Danny, careful not to touch anything, sat at their desks, his eyes wandering over model airplanes, a si
lver tray covered with hair ribbons and barrettes, stuffed animals arranged precisely at the foot of each bed. When his mother wasn’t looking, he traced his fingers over the wallpaper, the lions and tigers in the boy’s room, and Little Bo Peep with her herd of fat, fleecy sheep in the other.
The master bedroom was dark; all four of its windows were covered in thick purple curtains. When Betty pulled them open, Danny could see the mess: the unmade bed with sheets wrinkled and twisted, the water glass overturned on the nightstand, the clothes all over the floor, sleeves reaching limply out like empty skin. And the smell. Even Danny, with his stuffed nose, could detect that tang of bodies, of wine gone sweet as it slowly evaporated into the air, of expensive, ethereal perfume wasted on the stale, motionless air in this silent room.
His mother, her face screwed up, opened the windows before she began to clean, pausing long enough to pat Danny on the head and whisper in Chinese, “My boy would never be this messy. You’ll be the good kind of husband, won’t you? You’ll help your wife clean and not shout or argue. You’ll be the nicest man, Danny. I just know it.”
When they had gone upstairs to clean, Mrs. Lehmann had been kneading bread dough and listening to the radio. But in this bedroom, he couldn’t hear anything that would suggest there was another living creature inside this house; only the swish and thump of his own mother as she cleaned, and the shiver of leaves outside in the wind.
“Almost done, Danny,” Betty said, straightening up with her hand resting in the small of her back. “And then we’ll go home, have some cool noodles with cucumber.” She walked to the door beside the carved wood headboard and opened it.
Clothes hanging from racks on all four walls. Shoes arranged in rows on the floor, in shelves, even in drawers. A three-sided, full-length mirror and a hanging chandelier, the crystals sending out fragments of light, tiny rainbows that danced around the room.
The Better Mother Page 5