“They’ll take over soon. Mark my words,” he mumbled. When an Oriental walked past, Warren spat in the street.
At the wedding, Meg stood with her hands behind her back, her unfashionably long dress blowing against her ankles. Val could see that her father had been drinking, but he was sober enough to lean himself against the cherry tree and keep his hands clasped so that others would think that he was praying, not dozing in and out. His face was tinted with layers of dirt that had accumulated over the years and repelled water and soap, no matter how often he washed.
Peter’s parents, who had travelled all the way from Toronto, wore dark clothes and stood to the side, inches apart from each other. His mother silently wiped the tears from her face. They stared straight ahead, not daring to look into the eyes of Meg and Warren or to look too directly at Joan, in case one of them spoke, forcing a response. Val could sense their disapproval in the way Peter’s mother pursed her lips and in the sound his father made when he cleared his throat every few minutes. It was easy to imagine the conversation they might have had with each other that morning.
“Have you seen her parents? Hicks. They probably don’t even know how to use indoor plumbing.”
“Well, what are we supposed to do? He loves her, and she is a pretty girl.”
“Pretty! All you see is that blond hair and those blue eyes. She has no class. Just a step up from your common whore.”
“Come on now, that’s cruel.”
“Mark my words: she’ll never make him a proper wife. When we sent him out here for school, I didn’t think he’d get married for a long time. Or at least not to a girl like this.”
And there’s so much they don’t even know, Val thought.
A crow began cawing from its perch on the roof. Val watched as it opened and closed its sharp beak, its neck pulsing with the effort. The crow’s talons, curled over the shingles, glinted in the sunlight. It emitted one last caw and flew off, the shadow of its body floating over the lawn, changing shape as it drifted over the bushes and trees.
After lunch was served on the veranda, Val sat with Suzanne on a bench by the lavender bush at the very edge of the garden, both of them enjoying the day off from the café. They could see Joan floating over the grass in her white dress, touching guests on the shoulders as she passed, holding her skirt away from the dirt in the flower beds. Suzanne smiled.
“She looks pretty.”
“Yes, she does,” said Val, trying to keep her voice light.
“Hugh and I, we’re going to get married with no fuss. Just the minister and us, I guess.” Suzanne spun the plain gold band on her ring finger with her other hand. “My parents couldn’t come anyway, not in the summertime when there’s so much to do on the farm.”
“That’s too bad.” Val watched as her mother smoothed a wrinkle on Joan’s skirt. Joan turned around and stared at the fabric their mother had touched, looking, Val knew, for a dirty handprint.
Their landlady, dressed in yellow with a white hat, bounded across the lawn. “You must be so proud,” she boomed at Meg.
Val thought her mother was in danger of blowing away, her body small and dry, no match for the landlady’s generous bosom and wide smile.
“Proud,” Meg answered in a loud, strained voice, as if trying to match the merriment around her. “Yes. Very.”
“And you, sir, are you a little sad at marrying off your little girl?”
Warren nodded slowly, his eyes wandering from tree to guest to the landlady’s rouged cheeks. “I was sad when she left home last winter. She’s got a good husband now and doesn’t need to worry about herself anymore. Between you and me, I was never much of a provider. Shiftless, my father always said.” He laughed and spilled half his wine on the grass. Val leaned forward, ready to rush across the lawn and coax her father into a chair.
“The café will be busy next month,” Suzanne continued. “I’m leaving, and Mr. Chow is off to China again.”
Val turned and stared at Suzanne’s freckled face. “He’s going away?”
“Didn’t you know? Yes, he’s going to visit his family one more time to tie up some loose ends in the village. His wife and kids are moving here next spring, he told me. They’ve been apart for so long. I don’t think he’s been back in at least two or three years.” Suzanne laughed lightly. “I wonder sometimes if he even knows the names of his children.”
Val felt a throbbing behind her right eye and wondered if Suzanne could see the muscles of her face stretching and contracting.
“Children?”
Suzanne turned and looked at Val, her eyebrows knitted together. “He never told you, did he. I think there are three. One set of twins and another little girl? I can’t remember.” She paused and tilted her head to the side before speaking more quietly. “I do feel sorry for his poor wife, though, raising those kids alone back in China all this time and not knowing what her husband is getting into. I don’t know how she does it.”
“His wife.”
“He doesn’t talk about the family much, so I’m not surprised you’ve never heard of them.” Suzanne opened her mouth to say more, but the living-room clock chimed, and she turned her head at the sound. “Lord, is it three o’clock already? I have to go. Hugh is waiting for me. Make sure Joanie gets my gift, will you?” She stood up and put a hand on Val’s shoulder. “He’s still a good man, sweetie. Try to remember that.”
And Val was left sitting alone, smelling the off-sweet scent of lavender. She thought of the sweetness of dried sweat that comes from two people, the taste detectable only after the salt has been kissed away.
That night, she lay in bed beside her mother and felt the heat coming off her body in a way that was unfamiliar; Joan was always cool, her feet clammy. Val kicked the covers off and turned to the open window. Across the room on the floor, her father mumbled in his sleep and pulled his blanket up over his chin.
If it weren’t for her parents, she would walk down to the beach in her nightdress and step into the cold, churning water. Soak her body until she could no longer feel anything. She could hear the waves breaking on the rocks, followed by the whisper of water as it ran down the length of the sand and through tide pools that would be empty by morning. She could float face-up, her nightdress both billowing and flattening around her, and see nothing but the night sky.
She knew exactly how naive she had been. She had never asked, and he had never told. He had watched her undress, night after night. There were no secrets, only truths she hadn’t discovered yet. Her own fault for never guessing that a man his age—a man who owned a thriving business and yet lived in a single room on the second floor of a boarding house—would have a family to save his money for. Ridiculous. Stupid, stupid girl.
She sat up in bed and leaned in closer to the scissor-sharp air cutting through the open window. Even if she were swept away or chilled to the bone in that unforgiving ocean water, she would never forget the way he sucked her fingers or the hours they spent breathing in tandem or his bemused face watching her eat plates of food like she had never eaten before. She chewed on her fingers, remembering. There was no doubt about it. His cooking had left its mark.
THE STAGE
1947
Warren and Meg left the next day, their suitcase repacked with Meg’s worn stockings and Warren’s one white shirt. When she returned from the train station, Val changed the sheets, her hands smoothing out the depressions in the mattress from her mother’s body. The pillowcase her father had been using smelled of his hair. She had never noticed before how feral they smelled, their oils and other discharges mingling in the air and sticking to the chairs and towels. She was ashamed of her disgust, the roiling of her stomach when she swept up their stray hairs. But she cleaned and scrubbed anyway, erasing their presence with rags and brushes.
At breakfast, they had asked if she would be back for Christmas. Her mother had even smiled and said, “We could get ourselves a ham.” Val tried to remember if her parents had ever served a ham before; all
she could recall were sludgy stews made with three pieces of a gristly oxtail and turnips discoloured from weeks in the cellar.
Val said, “I don’t know how much I’ll have to work. So many of the men here are away from their families at Christmas, and they’ll want a good hot meal from the restaurant.”
Her father had continued chewing his toast.
When she left them at the train station, they had looked shabbier and smaller than when they had arrived. Val watched until the crowd closed around them. For a brief, panicked second, she felt like running forward and pushing people aside until she found them again. She wanted to burrow into their dingy, faded clothes, touch their dry skin and listen (carefully, for the cavernous station was loud and voices echoed) to her father’s uneven breathing and the whistle from her mother’s nose. But before she could take even one step forward, the crowd surged toward the trains, and there was no trace of her parents, only hundreds of people who could have been them but weren’t.
That night, in her bed, she held herself beside the newly empty space. She missed the shape of Joan: sharp and angled, with cold radiating from her bones. And she missed Meg, who curled up like a kitten while sleeping. Sam had held her gently; his strong arms were surprisingly smooth. She didn’t dare admit that she missed him. Val listened to the rustlings of the old man who lived in the room next to hers. She imagined herself rushing into his room and climbing into bed beside him, holding his skinny and wrinkled body in her capable hands. The old man’s bones would jab at her, and he might have icy feet, but it wouldn’t matter. She would feel his chest rising, stroke the remaining hair on the top of his head, whisper her fears for Joan and herself and this wild city, knowing that his deafness and poor memory would never betray her. She wondered if he would be afraid or silently grateful, unable to put into words his relief at discovering that another human being was willing to touch him, look at his drooping face with unflinching eyes. She hugged a pillow to her stomach, the darkness in her head like the black water of the ocean outside her window.
There was a time when she dreamed about Vancouver as a glittering city, bright with electric lights and the glinting of diamonds worn by languorous women. She had always known it wasn’t very far, that it was a trip that could be made in the course of a day; still, it was a place that might as well have been across an ocean instead of the rolling, thick-watered Fraser River.
The morning after her parents left was her day off. She stood in front of the Orpheum in a circle of summer sunlight. She tilted her head back to see the theatre’s sign in its entirety—the glowing white letters, the border of light bulbs that would have been ordinary in a regular lamp in a regular house, but not here, above the fanciest theatre in town. She loved Vancouver and, until yesterday, loved the fog in the early mornings as she walked to work, the sound of rain bouncing off the sidewalks as she rushed around the café, even the shouts and beats from the nearby nightclubs as she and Sam sat at a back table after closing, feeding each other with chopsticks shiny with oil.
It was his fault she was now thinking about leaving.
The rest of that morning, Val walked through the downtown streets, touching the walls of buildings with her palms, feeling the roughness of brick or limestone, the warmth they had already absorbed from the first half of the day. People walked past and around her, some bumping into her as she stopped and bought a bag of roasted peanuts from a street vendor. She savoured the sensation of their bodies so close to hers, the hum of blood and digestion that rose through the air. She licked her fingers.
At ten minutes past noon, Val walked into the café and cornered Suzanne as she was hurrying to the back with a tray full of dirty dishes.
“I’m quitting today,” she whispered, keeping her voice low in case the customers heard.
“What? But how are we going to find someone else in time for tomorrow’s shift?”
“I don’t know. I can’t stay another day because,” and Val hesitated, hating the quiver in her voice, “things have become too complicated. I might leave town. I don’t know.”
Suzanne looked at her with sharp eyes and nodded.
“All right, honey. You’d better go tell the boss.”
“Can you do it for me? Please? And could you collect my pay too? You can send it to Joanie when it’s ready. I just need to leave.”
Suzanne shifted to the right, and Val could see through the open office door. Sam was hunched over the desk, his wide shoulders curled around whatever he was reading. She felt sorry for him, for the contradictory thoughts that must be swirling around his head, the voices that whispered family, this is home, money, my hands on her young body. She thought of rushing into the office, beating on his chest with her fists and then crying as he made love to her one last time. His wife and children were the entire reason he lived and worked in this city. The café was for them, not for Val, not for the nights they spent crushed up against the office wall together. She was eighteen and had spent three months with a forty-year-old man who was also her boss. His wife (Val imagined her as thirty-seven and practical, saving pennies because she knew they would add up) had his three children. There was no use in forcing him to answer her demands. If Joan couldn’t force an unemployed logger to leave his lazy wife even when Joan was pregnant, Val knew Sam would never cut off his entire family to marry her. Val knew that when a child slipped out of your grasp, the pain lingered, like razors slowly cutting away at your flesh.
Val looked down at her knees and wondered if they would even carry her to the office forty feet away. She waited for Suzanne to write down Joan’s address and then left, turning the corner as the lunch rush began. She stopped half a block away and leaned against the wall of a building. No tears came, only a sharp, quick gasping that made her feel that her lungs might burst right out of her chest. She shivered in her summer coat, despite the heat from the sidewalk rising up around her. Pork dumplings, she thought, in soup with egg noodles. And a plate of steamed greens on the side. Her stomach rumbled, and she could feel Sam’s hands on her waist.
A man’s voice boomed behind her. “You a dancer?”
She jumped and, turning, saw a short, thin man with a full beard and a tall, brown hat. “I’m sorry?”
“Are you a dancer? I need someone for tomorrow. One of my girls skipped town. If you don’t have a costume, I got some old ones in the back.”
Val backed up two steps and stared at the sign in the window. THE SHANGRI-LA. THE BEST BURLESQUE IN THE WEST.
“Well? Are you in or out?”
“No, no. I was just resting here for a minute.”
“Suit yourself.”
He turned and pushed open the door. Val looked past him into the dark theatre. Even in the dim light, she could see the plush seats, the stage with its red curtains and string of turned-off lights. If she were onstage, eyes would be watching her, assessing the smoothness of her skin, the curve of her legs. She would see the desire in men’s faces, in the flush around their ears, in the way they sat, hunched forward, waiting for her to peel off another piece of her costume. She could almost hear the music, the driving beat, the swells and peaks of a pounding piano that would drown out any doubtful words. Sweat would pour down her back from kicking and grinding, from the stage lights too. In that theatre the humidity of different breaths and damp skin would glide over her arms and legs, clinging like a film. Perhaps, if she went onstage, she could close her eyes and imagine that she was a chorus girl, dancing behind Bing Crosby, beside a younger and more innocent Joan.
She had been watched by a man before. How different could this be?
“Wait,” Val said. The manager turned to her again, scratching his beard. She straightened up and looked down at him. “How much are you willing to pay?”
Two weeks. Only two weeks. It was a chant, comforting her and keeping other, more troublesome, thoughts at bay. The dancing was just an experiment that could make her some good money until she could find another waitressing job. But Val also wanted to satisfy
the little girl who used to high-kick in her thin-walled bedroom; after it was over, she could start another, more regular life.
An orange striped cat. A front porch with a rocking chair. Children. Chicken and pound cake in the oven. Sunrises in the summer. Snow angels in the winter. All the things other families had that hers never did.
The manager handed her a leftover costume before leaving her in the windowless dressing room. She pulled the dress over her head, settling the fabric around her hips and smoothing the tear-away skirt over her thighs. The dress skimmed and contained her body, showing and revealing all at once. She fingered the blue sash and tried to fluff up the faux-crinoline underneath the blue skirt, but the dress was irredeemably limp, too tired to look acceptable. She was afraid she would smell another woman in its folds or, worse, the scent of a woman and man together. Looking up, she saw ropes hanging from pipes running below the ceiling and long cobwebs that swayed in the draft. Piles of mouse droppings littered the concrete floor. Her eyes grew dry and her vision blurred; she could barely see herself in the frameless mirror that leaned against the wall. She could make out a dim outline of her familiar shape, but she was dressed in a costume meant to transform her into a countrified Alice in Wonderland; Alice’s older, dumber cousin. She might have drawn one eyebrow too high, or powdered her face so white that the men would recoil at her pallid presence. Her hands riffled through the dusty pile of eye pencils and rouge. Briefly, she wondered how many girls had touched these compacts and puffs, but she knew such a thought wasn’t productive. “Two weeks,” she muttered, her lips sticking together from the pink lipstick.
The Better Mother Page 19