Mothers had no needs of their own; everything they did or said was for their children, not to satisfy their disgusting desires for the gaze of men. Mothers were clean and put together.
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