The Gallery of Lost Species

by Nina Berkhout

  Constance spent Henry’s nest egg on pageantry. Dance and stage-coaching classes alone cost a thousand dollars a month. The money to fix the rickety fence and the money to renovate the bathroom went to travel and entry fees. The money for new windows and the money to build a deck went to apparel and aesthetics. So long as it made her happy, Henry didn’t object.

  Meanwhile, my father’s zeal switched from books to coins. I was overjoyed. My collection began with a jar of pennies that he had me sort by year and country of origin—Britain, Canada, Australia, America, Ireland. Then we organized them by age and wear.

  When Viv and Constance were off pageanting one Sunday, he took me to Ye Olde Coin Shoppe, a used and rare coins store that belonged to a gypsy named Serena. Tucked between the neighbourhood pawn dealer and Payday Loans, Ye Olde Coin Shoppe resembled the witch’s house from Hansel and Gretel with its steep, gabled roof and brown exterior decorated with triangle pennants and the sign COINS GOLD SILVER BUY SELL. Even with its barred windows it stood out gaily, contrasting with the street’s otherwise down-and-out storefronts.

  We entered through a cloud of burning incense. A woman with unruly red hair and an angular, masculine face emerged from behind the counter. She was smoking a long thin cigar and she wore a glass circle over one eye, attached to her waist with a chain. Approaching us in her layers of shawls and skirts, her arms adorned with bracelets, she could have been thirty or fifty, it was impossible to tell.

  She made us tart hibiscus tea that she poured into glasses rather than cups. She offered us figs from a tin with dragonflies on it, which she kept on a shelf above the till.

  My father let me pick an item from Serena’s grubby cabinets for myself. But as I was deciding what to choose, I was thrown off by the strange sounds coming from the upstairs living quarters, noises that neither my father nor Serena reacted to.

  “What’s happening up there?” I asked.

  “My son,” Serena said without looking up from the album she was making. “Don’t hold this upside down.” She slid a coin into a plastic casing and gave it to me. “A sterling obol to start you off.”

  My father shook Serena’s hand in appreciation as I priced out my new acquisition. On one side of the coin there was a double axe and a cluster of grapes. I flipped the transparent page over. The other side had a double head stamped on it, with a bearded face looking left and a clean-shaven face looking right, sharing the same skull.

  “Are these Siamese twins?”

  “It’s a janiform head,” she explained, “named after the Roman god Janus.”

  “I know a Janice at school.”

  “Hold it around the edge. Don’t put your fingers on the faces.” Serena told me I was touching a 2,500-year-old coin. The lump of metal was rough and tarnished.

  “What’s it worth?” I asked her.

  “Nothing. Twenty dollars at most.”

  “But it’s so old.”

  “Some objects are like women.” Serena removed her eyepiece before giving my father a beguiling smile. “They lose their value with age.”

  * * *

  AFTER WE LEFT the Coin Shoppe, we wound through the streets of Mechanicsville to see what was up for grabs. It was late afternoon, the eve of garbage day, and a lot of people had already dragged out their junk. On these occasions Henry was like an addict. He couldn’t help himself.

  You can make art from anything, my father always told me. Even trash.

  It was perfectly okay to rummage through strangers’ belongings curbside because—contrary to what Serena had said—according to Henry, objects did not lose their value with wear and tear.

  We found my first bike in a pile of garbage. And some totally functional bookshelves. An imitation Tiffany lamp and a gently used dollhouse.

  It didn’t end there. Henry never left the house without a bag in his pocket. If he saw litter in the park or on the street, he automatically picked it up, much to my and Viv’s displeasure. Bending down every five minutes to retrieve trash and throw it into the nearest wastebasket was second nature to our father, as if he was on permanent custodial duty. Eternally cleaning up after the rest of us.

  A few blocks from home, his eagle eye spotted a so-called gem. He pulled over, the car still idling.

  “Edith, go grab it.” He pointed to a grungy three-legged chair with a carved-out star in the middle of its back. As the smaller and speedier of the two of us, it was my job to pull odds and ends from mishmash as fast as I could, while Henry kept watch.

  “I don’t want it,” I told him.

  He knew this was the one habit of his that drove me up the wall. But even as I said it, I was reaching under the seat for my baseball cap and rubber gloves.

  “For real, that grody thing? This has to stop, Dad.”

  “Just doing our bit for the environment, mon amie.” He pinched my cheek. “I’m timing you.”

  The truth was, even garbage picking was fun with Henry.

  If I had to plug my nose and pull my cap down low over my forehead, praying no one from school would see me, so what. I had nothing better to do. Most of the stuff we nabbed was intended for me anyhow. Even though a majority of it stayed in the garage until it got thrown away again at Con’s insistence—we never got around to revitalizing most of our trove—I was touched by my father’s big-hearted efforts.

  In under five seconds, the rejected piece of furniture was pitched into the back of the wagon—one of the three remaining legs breaking—and I was in the passenger seat. Henry peeled off with squealing tires.

  * * *

  WE WORKED HARD on that little chair over the next week. We cleaned it with bleach and washed it off with the hose, and then we sanded it down. With his woodworking tools my father made two new legs and fixed the two wobbly ones. Then he took me to a paint store and let me pick out the chair’s new colour. I chose Tyrian purple because Henry said it was the shade emperors wore, and that it was made from sea snails, and that the tint would get brighter with time instead of fading like other colours.

  We set up shop in the backyard under the apple tree. “Viv’s missing out,” I told him.

  “You bet.” He dipped his brush.

  “But not the picking garbage part.”

  “Your sister would never engage in such an activity,” he agreed. “See? All it needed was a little sprucing up. Get it—spruce?” He elbowed me.

  We stood back to assess our restoration. Displayed on a square of cardboard in the grass, it was the finest-looking chair I’d ever seen. I felt proud to have made this stellar piece of furniture with my father. Together we’d turned a hideous castoff into a work of art.

  “Now my star’s got somewhere to sit and think,” Henry said.

  “That’s one fuuugly chair,” Viv called out as she passed through the yard to the side door. She was only putting on a show. Viv had fun with the scrap collection too, even if she wouldn’t admit it.

  Just a year prior, when Con ordered Henry to clear out the garage, Viv had been the one to take the lead. She’d rolled a shopping cart over from the alleyway and we’d piled our father’s findings high into it, balancing and interconnecting plastic, aluminum, nylon, wood, and foam items at my sister’s instruction.

  Viv got streamers and ribbons from the pantry and tied these to the cart’s metal rungs. Then she had me climb onto her shoulders to stick a plastic wind-spinning flower on top of the pile, like a candle on a cake.

  I hopped onto the end of the cart and Viv pushed me up and down the street, an old transistor radio blaring Elvis from somewhere within our mini, roving dumping ground.

  “Faster, Vee!” I told her as she ran circles.

  “Magical cart and all its contents for sale!” she hollered. “Splendiferous top-notch crap! I’ll throw in my sister for free!” She broke into side-splitting laughter.

  “That installation would sell for big bucks in a gallery, girls,” Henry called to us from the front steps where he sat watching. “Tens of thousands in New York.”


  “Sell it to the dummies,” Viv cried. “Make us rich!”

  When one of the swivel wheels jammed, Viv skipped off, leaving Henry and me to drag the stubborn cart to a nearby Dumpster.

  Con and Viv referred to our extracurricular activity as dump picking. That was one thing they agreed on.

  As for the chair, once the paint dried, we relocated it to a corner of my room. Sometimes I’d read on it, but the wooden seat was uncomfortable. When I leaned against the chair back, I’d get an indentation of the star on my skin. I didn’t tell Henry when the Tyrian purple began fading not long after.

  SIX

  IT’S HARD TO PINPOINT when things took a turn between Viv and Con. If I had to make a half-blind guess—like Viv dancing when one of her eyes got glued shut from lash adhesive—I’d say it was following Barbie Belles.

  By this time, Viv had already started slacking in her pageants. She still won crowns, but now she came home with lesser titles. With each practice came protest, and she began making mistakes onstage.

  The friction between them had been palpable all along, but until then they hadn’t pulverized each other. On the day of Barbie Belles, where competitors channelled their favourite fashion doll, my mother and sister’s bond ruptured into a million fragments like a pile of shattered glass at a bus shelter.

  I’d helped Viv into her Supergirl gear that morning. Her exuberance seemed genuine. But returning from the contest at sundown, she catapulted into the kitchen criticizing our mother in a way I hadn’t witnessed before.

  “She demanded to review the score sheet, Dad! She challenged the judges in front of everyone, saying the final was rigged!” Viv dropped an electric green cape by the counter where Henry and I stood, preparing Welsh rarebits. She was like an acrobat in her long-sleeved unitard, which changed colour like the skin of a fish as she hydroplaned around the room.

  “I got you a top title, non?” You could practically see the heat emanating off my mother’s fuming body as she appeared behind Viv with her hands on her hips, an eyebrow raised. Her nails and skirt matched the wrinkled cape at our feet. She had a knack for co-ordinating her ensembles with my sister’s.

  “Why do you always humiliate me? You’re worse than a heckler!” Viv’s cheeks and neck were blotchy with resentment.

  “Be thankful. My mother never stood for me. Not once.”

  “Stood up for you. Can’t you understand people are laughing at your immigrant accent and your retarded outfits?”

  With a year of elocution training under her belt, my sister intermittently claimed that our mother was grammatically lazy. I thought to underline that Con had taken ESL classes, but I didn’t want to get involved. Was it our mother’s fault that the lessons didn’t help to refine her English? The accent never vexed me as it did Viv, although some expressions befuddled me. Throughout my childhood, when Con told me all things come in trees, I’d look up into trees for whatever it was I yearned for.

  “It’s you who was too lazy to hold on to your langue natale!” Almost imperceptibly, Con’s nostrils flared. She’d long stopped declaring with pride that French was our first language. The comprehension was there, yet we hadn’t retained our mother’s vernacular enough to speak it.

  Henry exhaled loudly, passing me the whisk. I took over stirring the mixture of grated cheddar, mustard, and eggs. “That will do, girls,” he said, wedging himself between them.

  “All the sakreefees I made.” Con’s voice wavered as she pushed our father out of the way. “Mon Dieu, you chagrin me, Vivienne.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Remind us.” Viv kicked the cape into a corner and stepped in close to Con. “You gave up your career. You would’ve been a megastar if you hadn’t had us. Blah, blah, blah.”

  In a swift, violent jerk, Constance raised her arm, her charm bracelet coming undone and flying across the room. As I dove for the bracelet, Henry bulldozed his way back between them, grabbing my mother’s wrist before she could slap my sister.

  “Vivienne, go,” he urged through clenched teeth.

  But Viv wasn’t finished. “Reality check, Con. You’re a frustrated housewife stuck in the past,” she railed as she backed out of the kitchen. “You wouldn’t have made it. And now you’re a hag, so quit burdening me with your unlived fucking life!”

  Viv picked up the cape and threw it against our mother’s chest. It fell like a shroud over Con’s brocade pumps.

  Once my sister left the kitchen, Con’s eyes went from glossy to dry. She was a pro at being on the brink of tears then swallowing them back before anyone noticed.

  Still, I felt bad for her that day. She lost control and then her anger failed her. She couldn’t hide the fact that she was hurt by Viv’s verbal attack.

  Con had grown up poor and hadn’t had much as a child. We were spoiled rotten, she told us, only in her words it came out as you girls are a rotten spoil.

  Overcompensating by ambushing Viv with the prestige and glamour she herself hungered for, she was appalled that Viv didn’t flutter toward the limelight of pageantry like a luna moth toward moonlight. Her reasoning for saddling Viv with her dreams was simple. She wanted Viv to have what she never had. To become the person she hadn’t become. She was granting Viv the chance for her wings to be dipped in gold, and here Viv was, turning away from the light.

  * * *

  SOMETIMES WHEN CON sat by the window with a vacant stare, I wondered if she missed where she came from.

  Her parents visited once. Henry paid the airfare. I was too small to remember much about it. Only that her father was a kind, funny man who looked like a bulldog and that Viv and I fought for his attention and the foil-wrapped chocolates he doled out freely.

  Her mother was an iceberg—an uptight lady with thin lips and coiled hair who wore bogus Chanel suits. Constance called her Thérèse. We had no affectionate nicknames for our grandmother. She didn’t bounce us on her lap or embrace us. She toted Mentos in her purse and never offered us any. She didn’t send cards on birthdays.

  When Pépé, her father, died, Constance locked herself in the bedroom for a week. When Thérèse died, she carried on as usual. She never spoke of either of them again.

  The one story Con did recount matter-of-factly when Henry wasn’t around was the one about how she’d wanted to stay a shopgirl in France rather than go back to New York and marry our father, so that she could start saving again for Hollywood. Apparently her pregnancy was no hindrance to the game plan. You could see Viv doing the math, growing watchful then incredulous at the narration. She never outright asked Con if she would have given her up for adoption or worse—the unspeakable—but you could tell she was thinking it by the way she gawked at our mother, her violet blue eyes full of suspicion by the end of the tale. Me, I had a soft spot for Thérèse, knowing that if it weren’t for her iron-handed authority I wouldn’t exist.

  You had to commend our mother for trying. In a sense, we’d been foisted on her. We should have given her more credit for not walking out.

  It was undeniable that Con wasn’t built for domesticity. Despite coming from the culinary capital of the world, she was a terrible cook. Every odourless thing she served had the same bland taste—her casseroles and her quiches and her tarts—the taste of not caring. Her neatness skills were no better. On the surface, the rooms in our house passed as tidy. Close up, you could start a dust storm by blowing on a shelf. She couldn’t stand the sound of the vacuum, which gave her a migraine. If she got around to sweeping, she nudged the refuse against the walls instead of using a dustbin. Only when she was out at some rendezvous could Henry turn the Electrolux on for a thorough cleaning.

  Opening any cupboard resulted in a landslide of items spilling out. Our home’s chaos was hidden in drawers and closets, similar to the way my mother’s arresting, statuesque face gave no indication of whatever turmoil she internalized.

  She didn’t teach us much or seem to care how we grew up. It wasn’t deliberate neglect. Incapable of maternal nurturing, she fulfilled the minimum of m
otherly obligations.

  In the domain of pageantry, however, she was a perfectionist. No expenses were spared on the prodigy of our family. Until Viv revolted, Constance put all her energy into these opulent charades as if her sanity depended on it.

  After the blow-up, I worried Viv would send Con packing back to France. Instead, our mother started playing Édith Piaf more than ever.

  It was like mean French fairies were gnawing away at her insides, whispering frustrations in her ear, namely that she’d wasted the prime years of her life on us.

  One day she put the song “Non, je ne regrette rien” on repeat. The husky, heartbreaking voice poured forth from the stereo for hours on end.

  “We get it, Mom,” I finally said. “You have no regrets.”

  “Au contraire, ma fille. Je regrette tout.”

  “Everything?”

  “Mostly, oui.”

  I tried not to take it personally.

  “Personne ne m’aime,” she added as she scrupulously folded her stylishly printed pashminas.

  “That’s not true. We all love you.”

  It would have been easier if she’d pitched tantrums and got it all out of her system. But our unknowable mother conveyed her disappointments by a nearly undetectable shift in her gaze, which changed her entire countenance. Had she auditioned to sit for Leonardo’s famous portrait, she’d have beaten out Mona Lisa.

  SEVEN

  THE MORE VIV RESISTED Con, the more my mother distanced herself from us and the more my father hoarded. Constance signed up for night classes in pottery, quilting, and weaving, and Henry’s reckless spending on artifacts increased, as though shining objects and complete sets could soothe his mind.

  When it came to my mother, my father was chasing a fugitive pigment, trying to turn their love into a permanent state without the innate properties required to do so. Even while their relationship waned, he continued to adore her. By his mid-forties, Henry had been reduced. Like paper going through tonal changes, he was unrecognizable as the person in the albums I had flipped through as a girl.