The Gallery of Lost Species

by Nina Berkhout

  When he wasn’t painting, my father called himself the Collector of Useless Things.

  He taught me to categorize paint tubes and brushes before I could walk. He encouraged me to checklist stuffed animals and alphabetize and colour-code my books. He bought me tackle boxes to organize shells and buttons and my mother’s perfume bottles, which he retrieved from the bathroom garbage—Christian Dior, Guerlain, Givenchy—ornate glass decorated with roses and doves from which I’d sniff the dregs of floral essences.

  His lifelong obsession wasn’t with relics themselves, which got dusty and took up space. The fixation was with the search for the exemplary paperweight or the valuable Coney Island postcard. While Constance and Viv were off at dance class or stage coaching or vocals, these quests kept him going. My father always brought me along. He said I was endowed with special artifact-finding powers, when all I did was follow him around without discovering anything extraordinary.

  It was impressive the way he persevered. Saturdays were devoted to garage sale hopping, often in the rain. For hours Henry sifted through the neighbourhood’s failed projects, foraging for treasures amongst soggy boxes of wool and bamboo needles, woodworking tools, lozenges of coloured glass, and fitness paraphernalia. Trappings nobody wanted to be reminded of because they were associated with a more hopeful time in their lives.

  Sometimes we’d leave the city for drives on unexplored dirt roads, spending chilly mornings unscrewing antique doorknobs and hinges from tenantless farmhouses, and getting chased by dogs.

  Once, we pursued a rainbow down one of those gritty stretches. I went in one direction and my father in another. When we met up again, he told me the rainbow ended on some railway tracks and that he’d walked right through it.

  Then there were the estate sales, in houses like those from The Young and the Restless, which Viv and I watched with Constance after school. The hushed ambience, plush curtains, and locked doors thrilled me. Those sombre homes were where my father picked up his prized paperweights.

  The times I watched him remove his collection from their compartmentalized boxes were enthralling. Cautiously, he would place the weights on the kitchen table with a sly smile, as if he’d crafted them himself. I remember one morning when he cooked up strawberries and bacon while I sat with my chin propped on the mint green Formica surface, gazing into these miniature universes as the sunlight moved across the room, changing what I saw.

  How those swirls of colour, those flowers and animals, got inside the orbs, I couldn’t figure out.

  THREE

  OF THE FOUR OF US, only Viv didn’t have the compulsion to gather objects around her.

  You’d think she’d have copied Constance, cluttering her vanity with makeup and costume jewellery, but outside the pageant world, my sister remained unadorned.

  She ignored her shelves of trophies and her reams of rosette ribbons. Her room had minimal furnishings and lacked decoration other than the jagged mirrors and a dark mound of clothes at the foot of her bed. She didn’t look into the mirrors and draped her sweatshirts over them when she wasn’t practising at the barre. Regularly, I peered beneath the fabrics to examine myself, squeezing at the overhang of fat above my waist and striking poses to appear thinner.

  Unlike Viv’s spartan quarters, my room was jammed with books that Henry told me were important to my future education. I read before school and at night and whenever I could in between. I still didn’t get through all the tomes, and the ones I did finish, I couldn’t make sense of.

  Novels, poetry, and theatre lined my closet and dresser drawers. I had the Aeneid, The Divine Comedy, the Decameron, Paradise Lost, and Shakespeare’s collected works. I also had Russian novelists whose names I couldn’t pronounce and dictionaries with old, marbled bindings.

  I stacked volumes under my mattress and along the windowsill. Henry made me a chair from books and book steps leading up to my bed. The books were full of mould spores and I developed permanent respiratory problems that were alleviated by an inhaler.

  Viv hardly read a thing. She breezed through her studies without trying, whereas the sole class I was any good at was English. When I won the school’s Bookworm Contest, the teacher blew up a picture of my head and pasted it onto a worm’s body that she fastened to the awards board in the hallway.

  Henry picked us up from school that day. He was delighted by my accomplishment and carried my prize—an Encyclopaedia Britannica box set—to the parking lot. I felt weighed down by the heavy reference set as soon as I received it. I didn’t want it in my room.

  In the car, my father congratulated me with a thin A. A. Milne volume of When We Were Very Young.

  “Just what you need, another book,” Viv said.

  “A 1924 first edition, and I found it used! Guess for how much!” He turned back to us, beaming.

  “Ten bucks,” Viv replied, her voice flat.

  “A dollar, can you believe it!”

  “Neat. Thanks, Dad.” I turned the book over and pretended to study it diligently, not wanting to hurt his feelings.

  The board cover, once a rich royal blue, had faded to drab grey. The linen was tattered and the pages folded and torn. The last bit of gilt lettering on the spine had worn off, leaving When We Were.

  “Nice job, little one,” Viv said, grabbing the book and flipping through it. When Henry pulled up to the house, she got out of the car and wandered toward the painting shed to replicate the drawings inside it.

  When she wasn’t pageanting, Viv drew. She inherited her artistic sensibilities from Henry, not from Constance, who didn’t have a creative bone in her body unless you counted beautifying. Mostly Viv sketched birds in hollow trees and grassy beds whose shapes were barely distinguishable from the underbrush.

  I went inside with my father, where he showed Con the encyclopedia set.

  “About time you won something.” She turned to me with her hands full of meat loaf. “Out until dinner, Édith.” She was the only one to pronounce my name ay-deet.

  I made my way to the shed. I could hear Viv rambling to herself as she drew, imitating our ill-tempered mother berating her after a contest. “It’s elbow, elbow, wrist, wrist, you didn’t wave properly. You blew it!” I went back to the porch and sat in the rocker, hoping to be readmitted to the house early.

  Two neighbourhood boys from Viv’s grade approached on their bikes. They dinged their bells non-stop and picked up speed as they pulled up in front of our place.

  Paul was short and chubby with a snub nose. Andy was handsome with a face like a G.I. Joe action model. They dropped their bikes on the sidewalk, took off their knapsacks, and pelted apples at me.

  “Hey, fat worm!”

  Moving away, I muttered, “That’s an oxymoron.”

  “What did you say?” Andy growled.

  I’d recently learned the word in English. “Worms are skinny. What you said is a contradiction in terms.”

  Andy ran at me, pushing me hard against the side of the house, and jabbed me with a large branch. When Viv came flying around the corner, Paul was doubled over with laughter. “Lardass bug-eye fatso three-chin worm!”

  Viv wrangled the branch from Andy, snapped it on her knee, and hurled the sticks at him. Then she shoved him backwards and he fell.

  “Say that again,” she demanded.

  Paul hesitated and retreated, but Andy scoffed as he stood and wiped the dirt off his shorts. Half the school was in love with Viv. Blowing her hair out of her eyes, she shot them a fierce look until they ran off.

  They were already pedalling down the block when she shook her fist in the air. “Come near her again and I’ll kill you!” Pageant girls were vicious. Viv had learned how to fight back at a young age.

  She came over and put her arm around me. I rubbed my shoulder where Andy had drawn blood. “You shouldn’t read so much,” she offered. Then she saw something up the road that caught her attention. She let go of me and walked away.

  That was the thing about my sister: one minute she w
as protecting me with all her being and the next I could be drowning while she stood at the edge of the pool holding the life jacket, her mind elsewhere. It was as though she was in a perpetual state of leaving, following a procession led by a piper no one else could hear.

  * * *

  A FEW WEEKS after the confrontation, Viv knocked on the door of my room. She came in and sat with me on the bed, something she did less and less since entering her teens.

  I moved some animals aside as she stared up at my walls. Along with Henry’s pillars of books, I had a collection of every kind of clown imaginable, from rodeo clowns to big top performers to the mime Marcel Marceau. Figurines and clown-themed music boxes crowded my dresser, and posters of jesters and Pierrots lined my walls. Their tragic nature appealed to me—the cracked makeup and the serious mouths behind the paint.

  “Man, these clowns are atrocious, Worm.” Thanks to Paul and Andy, the name stuck, only Viv said it in an endearing way. “Those guys still bugging you?”

  “Nah.” I put Kafka down.

  The boys hadn’t come near me since the apple assault. The story of Viv’s threat spread. Nobody hassled me at school anymore. For the most part I played alone or stuck with my one friend, the mild and timid Daphne, who enjoyed collecting rocks and bottle caps almost as much as I did.

  Viv reached into her pocket and passed me a finely carved alligator. It must have been a schoolyard trade. Or maybe she was stealing.

  “This is Vespers. He’s made out of moonstone.” She got up and shut the bedroom door, turning off the light. “Pull down your blind,” she told me.

  My outstretched palm took on a milky, bluish lustre. I moved the alligator around and saw that the glow came from inside the stone.

  “It’s Egyptian, for protection,” she said.

  “What’s vespers?”

  “It means when things get dark.”

  The next year, Paul and Andy went on to high school. Within months, Viv was dating Andy. She didn’t bring him home, but I’d see them together holding hands and smoking in the park, or making out on a picnic table at the Dairy Queen. It didn’t last. And any time I saw Andy after Viv moved on, he’d rush past me looking crushed.

  I never found out what happened between them. My sister didn’t share her emotions, secrets, or aspirations with me. I wished I could get her attention more often. It saddened me that we weren’t all that connected.

  I set aside Proust and Rilke to read the A. A. Milne my father had given me. Children’s poems were one thing I could relate to. Milne wrote about the closeness of siblings and understood a lot about feelings of uncertainty: Where am I going? I don’t quite know. / Down to the stream where the king-cups grow— / Up on the hill where the pine-trees blow— / Anywhere, anywhere, I don’t know.

  FOUR

  ON STAGE AND AT school, my sister had more rivals than friends. The girls in Viv’s class went green-eyed over her, especially those with boyfriends. When couples walked past, Viv never failed to siren the boys’ attention away as they rubbernecked to get just one look at her, like passersby at a crime scene or a crash.

  Her lack of female companions worked out well for me. Sometimes I got to be Viv’s art assistant by default. She had no one else and I was always there.

  One afternoon while Con and Henry were out, Viv led me to the painting shed, where she’d set up buckets of supplies and warm water. She told me we’d be making a plaster positive for one of her studio assignments.

  She had me lie down on the small wooden table that took up half the shed while she mixed casting goop in one of the buckets of water, squishing the clay substance with her bare hands.

  “Consider this, like, your unrepressed face,” she told me. “I’m just going to slap it on you for a bit, then we’re done. Easy peasy.”

  She put cotton balls in my ears and straws up my nose, for breathing. She told me to shut my eyes and mouth and she rubbed petroleum jelly on my skin. Then she started masking me with the same stuff dentists use to mould teeth. Since it dried rubbery, the next step was to coat my face with actual plaster, for support.

  Viv was about to tackle my mouth when I chickened out at the thought of airlessness. Before she could say anything, I shot off the tabletop and wiped the goop from my face with my sleeve.

  “I can’t do this, Vee!” I cried. Vee was my nickname for her, stemming from when I couldn’t yet pronounce Vivienne as a toddler.

  She sighed and put a hand on her hip and tapped her foot. I’d let her down. “Fine, do me instead,” she said, hopping onto the table.

  I was ill at ease with the role reversal, but Viv gave me a pep talk before she stretched out. I put new straws in her nose and adjusted her headband over her ears. I bordered her clean, makeup-free face with wet paper towels and wrapped a bigger towel around her hairline, even though she’d skipped these steps with me.

  I applied the petroleum jelly then covered her immaculate skin with the dental goop, including her eyes, nose, and mouth. Although she was blind now, and couldn’t really hear or speak, her body language indicated she was fine. If anything, she was relaxed and floppy, like when Con brought her home from a pricey massage session.

  With Viv’s face gone, I got more nervous and rushed the process, sloppily pressing some cheesecloth down and caking on the premixed plaster, like she’d told me to do.

  Then she was doubly lost to me beneath two layers of solidifying, thick grey icing like someone caught under a mudslide. Despite my objections—if her breathing holes got plugged up, she would die—Viv pulled the straws from her nostrils and played drums in the air until I finished.

  I rinsed my hands in one of the buckets and set the timer to fifteen minutes. As the plaster warmed, I blew on Viv’s face to speed things up. Then I sat on Henry’s painting stool and watched her. She got so still I had to put my palm under her nose to make sure she was breathing.

  When the timer sounded, I helped her up to a seated position. She sat cross-legged on the table and leaned forward with her heavy, plastered head in her hands. It was time to remove the new face.

  Like in the diagram on the instruction sheet, Viv fastened her fingers around the edge of the casting material and pulled, only the mould wouldn’t come off. Before she tried again, she halted me with her one free hand so I couldn’t get in close. Then she pulled some more. But the solidified plaster didn’t budge.

  Viv started breathing hard and fast through the too-small holes. She jumped off the table and bent over and tried to yank the thing off her skin again. She stood up and flapped her hands around as if her fingers hurt. Then she wilted to the ground in a faint.

  “I’m calling an ambulance, don’t move!” I wailed. “I won’t let you die!”

  As I fumbled with the shed door and ran for the house, I heard my sister’s laughter behind me. I swung around to see Viv holding her negative face in her hands.

  “That was hilar.”

  “You’re not funny, Vee!” I screamed and lunged.

  “C’mere! I was only kidding, little one.”

  “I thought you were dying,” I spat out, wiping the tears and drool from my chin.

  “Come on, Worm, I was just messing with you. I’ll buy you a slushie when we’re done. I can’t finish this without you.”

  I trudged back to the shed, still furious.

  We prepared the mould to pour plaster into the negative space, and let it set. Then we had an hour to kill. I spent it out in the yard, brooding and hunting for four-leaf clovers in the uncut grass.

  Eventually, Viv pried the positive face away from the mould.

  “There,” she said, proudly stepping out of the shed and holding her new artwork up to the sun. “My death mask!”

  It had all been worth it to see her so cheerful, which was rare.

  She passed the white form over to me and I cradled it. It had my sister’s bone structure and really did look like her, only a more rested and peaceful version of her, without any of the distress signs Viv’s face usually w
ore. Calm and anonymous, the opposite of Viv’s pageant face.

  “Isn’t it a life mask since you’re living?”

  “Death mask sounds cooler,” she said, wrapping it in a towel and putting it in her school bag. “We did it, Worm. High-five!” I got up from the grass and hopped in the air to reach her hand, overcome by a feeling of loyalty.

  Maybe I idolized her so much because I’d never existed without her. There are no memories of a time when Viv wasn’t there. She was in my past and my present and my future.

  Yet, thinking back, even our happy moments contained a grain of anxiety. Often it was as though Viv was trying to toughen me up in preparation for some detrimental event, always inserting an upsetting incident into our good times. As a result, I constantly worried about her well-being. Like a sandfly bite you couldn’t see, with all things concerning Viv, this tiny sting of panic embedded itself beneath my skin from early on.

  FIVE

  I ADMIRED MY SISTER’S ability to do everything to the extreme.

  If Constance adjusted Viv’s caloric intake before pageants, instead of shedding five pounds, she lost ten, skipping breakfasts and handing me her brown bag lunches as soon as we left the house so that I grew chubbier in my adolescence as she transformed into a sylphlike reed with large, shell-shocked eyes.

  When her weight decreased too much, her fancy custom-made “glitz dresses” didn’t fit, and a flustered Constance had to get down on her knees and pull crazy glue, safety pins, and duct tape from her fanny pack. More than once I observed Viv lowering her gaze at our mother with an enigmatic smile, as Constance sweated and struggled to tighten seams so Viv wouldn’t be docked marks for loose attire.

  Often the duct tape stuck to Viv’s lily-white skin. At home, Con forced her into the painting shed, where she poured turpentine onto a rag, scrubbing Viv’s back to remove the adhesive as my sister’s body flared up in rashes.