Authors: Jen Sookfong Lee
Val was a mother. But not the kind anyone wanted.
“If you don’t mind, Joan, maybe I could leave her here for a month or so. There are still lots of loose ends for me to tie up.”
Val left Joan’s car to take the bus, bringing nothing except the carefully made quilt she pieced together when she was pregnant. Later, in her small apartment, Val rolled the quilt into a ball and carried it to bed with her, holding it close
to her chest while she slept, waking when the afternoon sun flooded the room.
Kelly. That’s what Joan started calling the baby, and soon the name Dawn was totally forgotten. Every third Tuesday of the month, Val woke up, a gnawing in her stomach. She clutched at her belly with both hands, eyes shut to the sunshine sneaking into her bedroom from a crack in the curtains. She knew that Joan was expecting her, as she did every month, and that, even though she was a failed mother, she must go and watch her daughter play and babble happily. There was no use in pretending that seeing Joan wipe the milk off Kelly’s lips or retie a hair ribbon wasn’t painful. Punishment wasn’t punishment unless others could see. Val spent an hour and a half picking out her clothes and high heels and doing her makeup before boarding the bus to Joan’s, shiny red lips on her powdered face. She knew the neighbours were watching, kept their eyes on her ass when she sashayed up the walk. She felt like laughing, until she remembered why she was there.
As soon as Kelly turned two, Joan started cancelling their visits at the last minute. There came a day when Kelly no longer recognized Val, and she cringed when she tried to hug her.
For a while, it was birthdays and Christmas. And after that, only at Kelly’s elementary and high school graduations, or when Joan and Kelly drove into the city and ran into Val at a shop. Most of the time, Val didn’t think about them but, once in a while, she felt that she might crumble, her skin and makeup and clothes nothing more than a thin, brittle veneer that covered up uncountable scars and underground fissures.
On bad nights, she stared into space, not daring to look at the studio photographs Joan had had done of Kelly and Peter and herself. The white wall or the black night sky was safer. Emptier.
For almost ten years, she continued to dance, wearing new costumes she had made to accommodate the extra weight around her thighs and hips. As time passed, she noticed how cold and dark it was in the wings, how brusque the managers were when the dancers asked for more light or a portable heater for the dressing room. The new girls seemed unprepared; their costumes looked cheap onstage, and, when they danced, Val could hear seams tearing as they struggled to keep time to the music. She pinned up the rips between sets, rubbed lotion on dry knees and put her arms around the younger girls to warm them up even as the cold seeped into the marrow of her own bones. She wondered if this was how people developed arthritis. When the MC announced their names to the audience, she pushed the dancers onstage, felt their clammy young skin underneath her hands, the fear vibrating off their bodies. Sometimes, she whispered, “You’ll be fine, sweetie. The crowd will tell you what they want.”
And when she looked in the mirrors as she stood beside these trembling, smooth-skinned girls, she could see what twenty-three years of dancing had done to her. She was forty-one, and the other strippers were half her age. Her maturity sat in the droop of her belly button, in the dark shadows under her eyes, in the wing-like looseness of the skin on her arms. She could feel her joints rubbing together, creaking as she tried to high-kick, grinding when she made a quick turn. If she had become a secretary, would there be this same damage? She
might have been a woman who looked good for her age, who had spent her adult life in a cushioned chair instead of on stage floors that didn’t give when she stomped through a routine.
Eventually, working nights both tired her and made it impossible for her to sleep through the light of morning. Besides, the circuit had changed again. When did it become titillating to look straight between a dancer’s legs? To stare at the flesh without noticing the face? To scream with impatience if a girl tried to tease by slowly taking off one item of clothing at a time? The club managers told her that full nudity was what everyone expected these days. The province had even caved in and changed the laws so that girls could dance without their G-strings. Val supposed the bigwigs in government wanted more people in the clubs buying taxable liquor, and one sure way of keeping them there was bottomless dancers doing the splits onstage.
“But, of course,” said the squat and bespectacled manager of the Penthouse, “you can keep something on. Your act is old-fashioned, and no one expects to see all your goods anyway.”
When Val turned forty-four, she tried to be an agent for the dancers, but the scene wasn’t the same. The government was giving out different licences to bars, which meant that they could hire girls to dance naked too, except these girls could dance to records instead of live bands and could strip all day if they wanted to. The clubs, working under the old licences, still needed musicians and could open only in the evenings. The cover at the bars was cheaper, the booze even more so, and crowds at the clubs disappeared, taking the dancers with them. More and more girls came to her in desperation, their
pupils dilated from dope, their hands shaking because the Shanghai Junk or the Shangri-La was the last stop before they started hooking. Val saw how their stories might end.
“Honey,” she said to one girl who had just turned eighteen and stood, shaking, in Val’s office by the Granville Bridge, “I know a choreographer who can help you get a real act together, something really classy that’ll make you good money in the long term. But you have to get clean, really focus on the dancing.”
The girl sat limply in her chair. “I need a job, Miss Val. Any job. I have some bills that need to be paid.”
And every other girl said the same thing until Val was tired of booking them into bars that played thumping, soulless music over scratchy speakers, and where they met men who paid them for other, more intimate jobs in the back seats of their cars.
So she left this new, raw-edged scene altogether. Eventually, she went to work at Woodward’s department store, behind the lingerie and hosiery counter, where the shopping housewives giggled at her loud voice and the unceremonious way she handled their breasts when conducting a fitting. No one recognized her or seemed to remember the Siamese Kitten. Not the movie, not even her act. The customers saw only Val, with her curly brown hair piled on her head, her reading glasses balanced on the end of her nose. During the day, she was alone among the stockings and girdles. She could pretend she was still working for herself and that this little alcove on the fourth floor, with its peach satin slips that felt like water in her hands, was all hers.
Sometimes, the customers told her about their husbands or, often, their secret lovers—men they met accidentally, men
who listened to them in ways their husbands never did, men who lived childless lives and were artists at heart. “Everything would be so much better if we had met fifteen years ago, when I was young and could still change,” the women said. The words were sometimes different, but the meaning was always the same. “We could have had a free life, you know, and not worried about keeping up with the neighbours or whether we should get a new car.” As Val hooked them into brassieres, they took deep breaths. “It could have been so wonderful.”
In these women’s voices, Val heard a small, barely perceptible note of cynicism. They knew that their lovers were as ordinary as the men they had married, and that it was marriage itself that eventually made everybody sexless. Val, a measuring tape around her neck, said nothing. She knew well enough that they didn’t want to hear about Val’s own encounters with men, the ones who were shopping for their wives but whose eyes travelled up and down Val’s legs while she helped them, or the ones she met when she went out for a drink at the local pub. Rough men, sleek men, men who talked during sex.
On the five-year anniversary of her first day at the store, the staff threw her a lunchtime party. “Val,” the store manager boomed, “is some broad.”
He was the sort who would have tried to touch her from his spot in the front row, and she would have kicked him with the toe of her high-heeled shoe. But now, she simply laughed along with the others and raised her paper cup of fruit punch when he called for a toast.
She moved to the North Shore, where she set up a garden on her balcony and took the bus to the beach on her days off.
She liked to sit on a particular log—bleached white from years of sunshine and worn smooth by wind and climbing children—and stare at the waves coming in, one after another. The eagles flew over the treetops, and she could see the seawall in Stanley Park across the inlet and the people walking and biking and jogging in the distance. Some days, it was misty, and, when she put her hand to her hair, she felt the tiny drops in the curls around her ears. Other days, it was clear and cold, and the wind bit through her slacks and jacket until she was shivering, her arms wrapped around herself. And rarely, it was muggy and hot, when the only reprieve was the wind blowing off the ocean in gusts too few to be comfortable. But even here, she never stopped missing the thump of the drums that she once bounced to and the shimmer of the spotlight on her skin. Sometimes she would hum an old song until someone passed by and stared at her. She would pull her jacket tighter around her body and fall silent, feet unmoving in the rough sand.
It was at these times she wondered if she was leaving anything behind, if the boxes of costumes she had stored in Joan’s basement or the obscure movie she had made actually counted. If her old life had left any footprint at all, or if it had all evaporated, the years like wisps of steam, the men for whom she danced now tottering in nursing homes, their memories not memories, only threadbare. There was only Dawn, and even she was now someone else.
PART FIVE
THE NURSE
1982
The beach is dark, lit dimly by the tall lamps that border the parking lot. Ahead of them, the blackness of the water and the sky and the cliffs has melted into one—flat and opaque. No seagulls call. No mosquitoes buzz. Danny can hear only the waves lapping on the sandy shore, and Val’s soft breathing beside him.
“Does she know?” he asks.
“No. Joan and I promised each other we would never tell.” Val’s tired voice falters in the breeze.
“But didn’t you ever want to?”
“She’s a happy girl, Danny. You saw her. She’s had a normal life.”
Danny turns to Val. He can see the whites of her eyes, her hands clasped over her knees. “Normal. Is that what you wanted for her?”
Val laughs softly. “I suppose not. I wanted her to be Cyd Charisse, actually. Not very practical, is it?”
“Were you pregnant when I first met you in the alley?”
She nods. “I think so. But I didn’t know it yet. When I saw you, all I could think of was Joanie’s baby. Maybe I should have known that I was pregnant. It makes sense now.”
Danny punches at the ground with a stick, poking holes in the grass and flicking dirt up and around them. His head feels heavy.
Val’s voice cuts through the silence. “Honey, is there something you need to get off your chest? What are you keeping to yourself?”
He starts slowly, with long gaps between words, not because he is deciding what to say next but because he knows the next word, once said, will be final.
Dying, gay, alone, freedom, parents, the park at night, what will I do?
—all words he, in the brightness and tangibility of his everyday life, swallows deep inside his body. But with every second that he continues speaking, it grows easier. Phrases and clauses come tumbling out so rapidly that they generate a momentum of their own. He hears himself and understands that there might be nothing more to him than layers upon layers of secrets with no core underneath, or one that has been so neglected that it is unknown and indefinable. He slumps at the realization.
“Don’t worry,” says Val. “We all have our secrets. There’s no shame in that.”
Danny rips up a handful of grass and rolls it around in his hands until he is left with a tangled, damp ball of green. “The truth, Val. People keep telling me the truth is important.” His voice cracks. “What if we need honesty more than anything?”
She snorts and puts a hand up to her curled hair. “What I need is a gin and tonic.”
“I can’t decide for myself, Val. Tell me what to do.” He almost chokes on his own words.
“I can’t do that,” she says, touching his shoulder with her wide hand.
“Don’t you think I have to change something, and be open with my parents, like Frank used to say?”
“Honesty,” Val mutters. “Only stupid people tell the truth all the time.”
Danny continues. “What if he’s right? Shouldn’t I tell my parents everything? Announce I’m gay and then it’ll be all right?”
“What do you want me to say? That they won’t be disgusted by you? That everything will be the same after you tell them, or that everything will be better? You know, Danny, it won’t happen that way.”
“I know,” he whispers, throwing his warm ball of grass away into the darkness.
Val stands up and holds out her hand. “I’ll make you a deal: the day you tell your parents you’re queer is the day I’ll tell Kelly I’m her mother.” She laughs and straightens her jacket. “Nobody will like it, but you’re the one who’s obsessed with the truth.” When he takes her hand and stands up, she nods curtly toward the car. “Now, come on. It’s getting cold.”
It’s a fog, the kind of drinking that seeps into your eyes until you can no longer see distinctly, and all that’s left are the vague outlines of objects, the solidity of furniture you once knew the names of. Red and yellow and green lights oscillate at the edges of your vision. You grow frustrated trying to see them directly because, every time you swivel your head, the lights simply dance to the side again and you wonder if you will go crazy from chasing them in this roundabout, disorienting game.