The Better Mother

by Jen Sookfong Lee

  “Does Frank ever ask about me?”

  “Oh, Danny,” Cindy whispers.

  “I mean, I know it’s been a long time, but I’ve been thinking about him because, well, I don’t know why. But here I am, calling you, asking you a question you probably can’t answer in a way that will make me happy. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I called.” Danny is ready to hang up the phone, to put an end to this humiliation masking as conversation.

  “Wait. I’ll tell you if you really want me to. Do you?”

  He takes a deep breath, counts to ten, and lets it out. “Yes.”

  It was a few years ago that Danny had met Frank. Back then, Danny had often wondered if he was going to meet someone; the city itself seemed like such an unlikely meeting place, so separated into pockets where people walked and ate and worked, but never seemed to look into each other’s eyes. Even when hidden behind the dark trees and enveloped in the blanketing silence of Stanley Park, where he shuddered with satisfaction at the heat generated by him and these other men, conversation seemed impossible. They held him, ran their hands over his body in the ways he wanted them to, whispered strange secrets into his ear sometimes. Still, when it was all over, he left alone and walked through the downtown streets with his collar turned up against the night-time breeze. No one followed. Until he met Frank, that was all he wanted.

  Danny was at Cindy’s twenty-sixth birthday party. They sat in a corner booth of a loud, full-to-capacity restaurant. Lights blinked on and off. Donna Summer beat mercilessly through hidden speakers. On the walls, fabric panels undulated in the slight draft, like skin stretching and relaxing.

  He sat beside a blond woman from Cindy’s aerobics class, who kept whispering into his ear that she loved to dance. Danny smiled and nodded, but avoided looking into her sharp grey eyes, fearing that she might never let his own eyes go once she locked on to them. Forty-five minutes into dinner, he heard a booming voice. “Cindy, I’m so sorry I’m late. The dog threw up in the hall, and I had to mop it up and then spray the whole place with Lysol to get rid of the smell. Is there a place for me to sit?”

  Cindy gestured at the end of the table and the empty seat across from Danny. “Make room for Frank!” she shouted as she tightened the post on one of her dangling gold earrings. “Danny, be nice!”

  What Danny saw was a tall man with thick brown hair and light blue, glow-in-the-dark eyes. His grey shirt was impeccably ironed and his teeth shone white and straight in the dim light. Frank reached across the table and offered his hand.

  “I’m Frank. I work at the bank with Cindy. You must be her brother?”

  Danny grasped his hand—warm and dry, with tiny hairs at the base of each knuckle. “Yes. I’m Danny.”

  “Nice to meet you, finally. She tells me all about you, all the time. It makes me wonder sometimes if she’s trying to set us up.”

  A roaring started in Danny’s ears and he wondered if the restaurant had suddenly shut off all the lights except for this single one suspended on a wire track right above Frank’s head. He stared at the wave of his hair, the span of his shoulders, the joints visible under the skin at his wrists. Now everyone here knows, he thought, but he smiled, and the crowd seemed to recede into the surrounding darkness.

  Slowly, as Frank and Danny talked, the room reappeared in his peripheral vision. Frank remained in the centre of it all, seeming to grow until his body took up all the space, looming and somehow benevolent. Danny was dimly aware that the blond woman beside him had shifted in her seat and turned her head to the right to concentrate on an accountant from Prince George. Danny laughed before he could stop himself.

  Everyone could see him and Frank talking, staring at each other with eyes wide open and hands inches apart. They were the two gay men in a room full of people who knew why they were laughing, ordering drinks for each other, talking to no one else. And still, he didn’t care. He wanted to reach across the table and cup Frank’s face, feel that tender skin on his cheeks and chin and pull the two of them together. What if he stood on his chair and sang a wordless, godless hymn? What then? He wondered if this freedom might last forever.

  They saw movies and went for dinner, talking until their tongues hurt. Eleven days after they met, in Frank’s bedroom, with the curtains drawn against the streetlights outside, Danny folded himself into Frank’s arms. They lay, Frank’s stomach curved around Danny’s spine, for hours, breathing in tandem, inhaling deeply into each other’s skin and hair. When dawn filtered through the leaves on the red alder outside, they began to move together, their bodies slowly reaching for lips, thighs, hips. Danny ran his finger down the curve of Frank’s jaw, whispering, “You’re so beautiful.” That afternoon, Frank saw Danny’s photographs for the first time. “We should get these into a gallery,” he said. “I’ll help you.” And even though Danny knew his images weren’t good enough to be shown anywhere, he felt invincible, Frank’s words like armour against his chest.

  —

  Through the phone, Danny can hear Cindy clear her throat. “Once in a while, he asks me how you’re doing, if you’re happy. He does it nicely, like he’s interested, like he really wants the best for you.” She pauses. “Does that help?”

  He bursts in: “Does he still love me?”

  “Danny, how would I know that? Since you guys broke up, I never ask about his personal life.”

  He feels ashamed. “I know. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  “I tell him you’re happy.”

  Danny lets loose a rupturing laugh that is part cry, part scream, part release. “Thanks for that, I guess.”

  Cindy pauses before taking a breath. “Are you happy?”

  “What?”

  “Seriously, are you happy? I mean, maybe you are. But do you have everything you want?”

  “I don’t know, Cindy. Maybe I want to have my pictures shown in a gallery somewhere. Maybe I want to move to New York. Maybe I want a dog. Stop asking me. I don’t even know what I’m going to do tomorrow, for Christ’s sake.”

  “You know what your problem is? You keep too much inside. What do you do most of the time? Where do you cruise? How can you live like that, with your life so separated?”

  “You should talk. Do Mom and Dad know what you do outside of the house?”

  Cindy laughs roughly, but it soon dies away into silence. “Fine. I get it. We both have secrets. But you work yourself into fits, worrying about how it could all go wrong. It’s not good, Danny, not at all.”

  “Thanks, Dr. Cindy. I’ve wasted enough of your time this morning.”

  “Yes, you have,” and her laugh, a real one this time, trills over the phone line. Danny smiles, half in love with the version of his sister who can laugh like this, who can coquettishly twirl her hair around her finger. “Maybe I’ll call you later.”

  When he sets down the phone, he turns and picks up his camera bag and folds his tripod under his arm. Before he leaves, he scans the apartment. Like an empty eggshell. His eyes wander over the clean surfaces, the chrome and glass and leather, resting on the iron, the stove and coffeemaker to make sure that he hasn’t left anything on that could burn down the building. If Danny were watching himself, he wouldn’t see any difference in this pre-studio ritual he performs four days a week. No, he has done everything in the same way, with the same neutral expression on his face. But inside, an unstoppable rush has started, and he is submerged by Frank’s puffy, sleep-crusted eyes first thing in the morning, by the roll of flesh Danny once saw on Miss Val’s thighs where her costume bit into her skin, even by the coolness of his mother’s hand on his forehead when he was feverish. The deluge is beyond his control, and the fear of it washes over him; without control, his life bleeds together and he is no longer the Danny of his own creation, but a nerve-ridden, guilt-racked man who will never please his parents and never have sex again. He calmly closes his apartment door behind him and locks it, but each muscle and brain cell churns, remembering touch and smell and sight, old memories that he thought were ir
revocably lost.

  THE FIRST TIME

  1968

  It was the summer after graduating high school that Danny worked at the Exhibition, operating the rickety roller coaster. Part of the thrill, his boss told him, is that it looked as if it could splinter apart any minute, as if a nine-year-old constructed the rises and falls out of paper glue and balsa wood. On hot days, he baked in his uniform; on rainy days, he hunched over in his standard-issue yellow slicker. He hid his camera in a gym bag and took it out when the lineup was short, when no one would notice his hands winding and clicking, the lens pointed at long hair whipped back by the wind on the steepest fall, or hands held upward, stretched straight, the fingers trying to escape the rest of the body.

  The year before, his art teacher had pulled a small camera from her desk and tossed it to him, muttering, “If you’re going to stare out the window all day, then take some pictures of what you’re looking at and maybe I can give you a passing grade.”

  He brought the viewfinder to his eye and something curious happened.

  Through the lens, the world resettled. He saw the angles of shadows, the fall of light on walls, faces, shoes. He saw the tetherball hanging alone in the school’s concrete court and understood that its meaning in a photograph was more than a ball on a rope. It was loneliness and hope and the promise of play, all in one. Absolute, wordless sense.

  He didn’t know it until then, but this particular silence—where even the innermost meanings were revealed—was what he had been looking for. Danny could stare at an unremarkable sidewalk with ordinary pedestrians walking past and see nothing, but when he looked through the camera, he saw that there was fear and joy and frustration drawn like lines on the walkers’ bodies. And he knew exactly who these people were and how their footsteps—punishing, light, slow or uncertain—spoke what they probably would never dare. I love my wife. I’m scared of this city. What am I doing? There was no confusion, and he felt warm and happy because it meant that, one day, maybe somebody would turn their lens on him and see Danny for what he really was. And then explain it all to him in a way he might understand.

  Today, the last day of the Exhibition, a little girl, waiting for her older brother to disembark, stood to the side and stared at Danny, her eyes just visible over the top of her pink cotton candy. Danny wondered what she saw in his face, if his restlessness from the night before was branded on his skin somehow. Or perhaps she was simply scared and realized the one thing preventing her brother from being flung off the very top of the roller coaster was this unsmiling young man.

  Her head moved slightly to the left and Danny saw that she was looking at the control box. He pushed a red button and the line of cars came to a sudden stop at the bottom, the people inside tossed around as if they were only flesh and not bones. One woman, sitting in the very front, laughed and laughed. She wiped her eyes with a handkerchief and adjusted her pearl necklace. Danny squinted through the smoggy air, thinking that there was something familiar in her red-painted mouth, or the upward tilt of her head. He heard her say to her male companion, “Well, honey, that’ll liven us up for the rest of the day. What do you say to a nip of whisky?” And she pulled a flask from her purse while a mother with two young children gasped and hustled them away.

  But then a chubby boy threw up beside the control booth and Danny had to reach for the sawdust and broom. By the time he looked again, the woman was gone and the lineup for the roller coaster had snaked around the metal barriers and down the fairway.

  On his day off, Danny took the bus aimlessly through the city, ringing the bell whenever he thought to and boarding the next bus on a different route. His camera dangled from his bony neck, resting against his equally bony chest. He stood at street corners he had never noticed before: 2nd Avenue at Main, Alberni at Bute, Beach at Gilford. “Perspective,” he whispered to himself. “That’s what it’s all about.”

  Ahead of him lay the great expanse of English Bay with barges anchored on the edge of the horizon, the water churning at the shore but barely rippling in the distance. If he had been an extraordinary swimmer, he could have reached the open ocean eventually, and, from there, turned south to California, or west to Hawaii, or perhaps farther to the Philippines, even China, if he wanted. But here—the western edge of the city’s core, only eight kilometres from the family house—was possibly just far enough. There was something he loved about the salt air in his nose, the burn that filled his throat and lungs. He looked down at his own feet and wondered why he wasn’t running, why he wasn’t pounding the sidewalk, smiling so widely that his face might never recover, laughing when he stopped to catch his breath because he was on the way to somewhere else. He looked to his left, where a man and woman were helping a little girl build sandcastles. All three were covered in a fine grey-brown dust. Danny slipped behind a maple tree and began shooting.

  The little girl had dug a hole with her bare hands. A collection of brightly coloured spades and rakes lay in an abandoned pile beside her. The woman offered her a bucket to help shape the mound of sand, but the little girl frowned and slapped at her hand. Face reddening, the man yelled, “Don’t you ever hit your mother like that!” The girl looked up, startled, and began to cry, her wails floating over the sand and water, travelling swiftly through the air in all directions. Danny winced.

  And then, both parents crouched forward and began murmuring. Danny could see the father saying, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it,” while the mother fumbled in her purse for a tissue. Danny wasn’t sure who was more upset, the tiny four-year-old or her furrowed, anxious parents. He didn’t stop shooting. Each frame was this whole story in miniature.

  Inside, his stomach was churning; the ham and pickle sandwich from lunch had become a brick-solid mass. He could hear his father’s voice booming.

  “I’ll teach you to steal one of my beers.”

  “Give me that look again, I dare you.”

  “Your mother might think the sun shines out of your ass, but I sure don’t.”

  “Not such a smart-mouth now, are you?”

  The words all pointed to the same truth. If his father could have chosen a son from a lineup, Danny would have remained unpicked, standing by himself, staring at his own shoes. Waiting for the right family.

  When Danny looked again, the little girl was drinking from a nearby water fountain and her parents were sitting on a log, staring out at the water, their hands hooked together, each finger woven with the next. Danny pressed the shutter release one more time before walking off the beach to the corner of Denman and Davie. He took three buses to get home and when he arrived, his parents were both waiting for him in the living room.

  “Am I late?” Danny asked, checking his watch.

  Betty, sitting in the far corner of the couch, looked at Doug, who held a beer can on his lap. “Not this time,” he said.

  His mother scratched her nose before speaking. “Your father wants to talk to you about your plans.”

  “Plans? For what?”

  Doug sat up straighter in his armchair and stared at Danny until Danny looked down at his sand-covered shoes. “When the Exhibition is over, I want you to work at the shop full time. You’re old enough now to learn how to run things. We don’t have the money to send you to school anyway.” He ran his hand over his face. “Not that you or your sister could even get in.”

  Danny didn’t say anything. He turned his head toward his mother, who nodded at him gently. For a moment, he wanted to shake her, bounce her head off the wall behind her and yell, You should know better. You should know that working at the shop will be the end of me. You should know this is nothing close to what I want. But her eyes were so blank, so blandly accepting and quiet that he knew it wouldn’t be any use.

  After a minute and a half of silence, Betty stood up and took one of Danny’s hands. “Auntie Mona’s friend has a daughter about your age. Maybe we could invite them over for dinner.”

  Danny looked from his father to his mother and back again, and sa
w that they both had set jaws and unshaking hands. He patted his mother’s shoulder and stepped around her toward the hall.

  “Well?” Doug said. “Is it a plan, or what?”

  Danny paused. “Sure. Whatever you want.” When he reached his bedroom, he closed the door as quietly as he could before shaking the sand out of his socks and shoes onto an old newspaper. The itch would have bothered him all night.

  Two weeks later, Danny lay awake in the middle of the night. When he was sure everyone else had fallen asleep, he got up and changed out of his pyjamas and into a sweater and jeans. He stuffed his final paycheque from the Exhibition, which he had collected that morning, into his wallet. As quietly as possible, he opened his dresser drawers and pulled out socks, underwear and T-shirts. He listened, unmoving, for the sounds of his parents walking through the hallway to investigate the noise. But all he heard was the wind blowing through the unruly patch of bamboo in the backyard. He pulled out four pairs of pants and his winter coat.

  He filled up his mother’s old suitcase, the one she brought with her to Vancouver twenty-five years ago. He was careful not to overstuff it, for fear that the tattered corners would not hold. He stood in the middle of his room and looked at the single bed, the blue floral curtains with the hole near the hem that could be from moths or maybe even mice. He wondered if he should feel nostalgia for the years spent here or if relief was acceptable too.

  He pushed down the thought that he was running away. If he allowed them, those words would burrow into his head and remain forever. His parents’ friends would whisper, “That Danny, he’s a runaway,” and they would shake their heads and cast their eyes skyward. He scurried around his bedroom, moving from closet to bed to dresser, not daring to stop in case he imagined his mother crying into her apron, her face buried in the grease and pork juice and rice flour embedded there. And beside her, sitting in one of the hard kitchen chairs, his father, hands in fists on the table, his usually slicked-back hair hanging over his forehead in one damp, drooping lock.