The Gallery of Lost Species

by Nina Berkhout

  “That’s not you,” I’d insist. Gone was the youthful, chiselled man with wavy black hair and a challenging look in his eyes.

  While Constance retained her beauty in an unearthly way, my father’s handsomeness was like a flare producing a bright comet over my mother, signalling her then expiring.

  * * *

  ONE NIGHT AFTER Constance slipped out the door in a cocktail dress, lacing the room with her frangipani aroma as she left, Viv turned to Henry and said, “Why don’t you bust her, it’s obvious what she’s doing.”

  Our father gave my sister a blank stare. He opened his mouth but retracted whatever he was about to say. Instead, he walked over to the bay window and watched our mother drive away.

  I can still see his profile there in his brown sweater vest, his back and shoulders curbing prematurely, his hair thinning. Worse than this image, it’s the sound of his wheezing that stays with me—the coarse rasping that came with each breath.

  Viv glowered from the couch then stomped outside to the painting shed. I trailed out after her.

  “No one dresses like that to go to a quilting class. See if she ever comes home with anything from those slut outings. I hate her!”

  Viv had a point. Con never returned with any of the products of her crafting classes. She was either naive or she didn’t care. Though I found it inconceivable that she wasn’t enrolled in any courses and was meeting a man on the side, as Viv’s accusation implied. But maybe our mother was up to no good.

  “I thought you wanted her off your case.”

  “She can bite me.” My sister chewed her nails. The skin was torn and bleeding.

  That night, Henry told me, “It’s time we got you a job. Get you out of your room.” Summer holidays were starting. I anticipated having two months at home with Dickens.

  “I like my room.”

  “It’s not good to isolate yourself, kiddo.”

  “I don’t want a job.”

  “It’ll be more like an apprenticeship.” He paused. “With Serena. Would you like that?”

  A summer with Serena in her peculiar shop did not excite me.

  “Give it a chance,” he said, adding, “Her son Omar helps sometimes.” As if my meeting the boy in the attic would be incentive enough.

  I forced a smile. I wanted to make him just as proud as Viv did, though less so lately.

  * * *

  HE LET ME off in front of Ye Olde Coin Shoppe the next morning, waiting until I’d gone inside before pulling away.

  Serena was hunched over like a watchmaker, with a magnifier sticking out of one eye. When she heard me come in, she placed the lens on the table, sliding it away from her like a chess piece. She stretched her arms in the air, swaying into a backward arch.

  “Hello, Edith.”

  She pulled a cigarillo from behind her ear and lit it. The blue smoke curled in on itself at her lips. I preferred this sweet odour to that of my mother’s cigarettes.

  Serena picked a piece of tobacco from her tongue. She had a feline quality to her, in her wild mane and in the way she languidly moved around the jam-packed space. She sauntered over to the window, parting the curtains to inspect the street.

  “Your dad bring you?”

  “He’s gone.”

  She let the curtains drop and scrutinized me. Fitting me with a heavy, rubbery apron, she led me to a wooden desk like the ones we used in class.

  “So much for school being out,” I joked, sliding into the seat. But Serena didn’t smile.

  “That’s Omar’s. He doesn’t use it anymore.”

  Lifting a bucket onto the desk, she dunked her arm into the soapy water and pulled up a handful of black lumps that she plunked onto a cloth. Using a denture brush, she showed me how to scrub loose dirt off the coins. Once she was confident I’d mastered the scrubbing, she retreated upstairs and told me to call if any customers entered the store.

  In the time it took her to return, calluses formed on my palms and my neck began cramping. When I heard her coming down the steps, I straightened up.

  “Where’s your son?” I asked as she surveyed my progress.

  “Omarrrr!” Serena called. She rolled her r’s like Con.

  A gangly boy about my age appeared on the landing. He had inky hair and the same serious face as his mother. He wore coke-bottle glasses with a thick white band like a tennis player’s around his head.

  “Hi.” He shuffled over and peered into my bucket. “I see my mom has you doing her dirty work.”

  “She’s paying me,” I told him.

  “So she says.”

  He ran a finger along the glass tops of the cabinets. In among the coins and banknotes from foreign countries were other currencies—belts made from shells and beads, ivory statuettes, and shackles.

  Serena was adding up a pile of receipts at the back of the room. “I’m going to take a nap,” Omar said, walking over to her.

  She smoothed his curls down and kissed him on the forehead. “Don’t forget, we have a doctor’s appointment at four o’clock.”

  “I won’t,” he said, looking virtuous.

  Serena came back to my workstation with a dental pick and a coin. “See green? Scrape.” When I scratched at the coin, she slapped my hand. “Gentle!”

  She hoisted the bucket off my desk and dumped the murky water into the sink. Omar lingered at the counter. I continued with my scraping, not letting on as I saw him slip a coin into his pocket before he climbed the staircase. When he caught my glance, his eye twitched.

  Later, I was startled by a loud, rhythmic thudding upstairs and then a howling. Serena flew up the narrow passageway and never came back down. I walked around the shop, intrigued by the sawed-off shotgun under the counter and the alarm system on the wall.

  When my father picked me up, I asked, “What’s wrong with Omar?”

  “Hmmm?” He seemed preoccupied.

  “Her kid. What’s with him?”

  My father lowered the volume on the radio. “Oh, Omar. He’s epileptic.”

  EIGHT

  IT WAS OUR MOTHER’S unfailing belief in the impossible that was her undoing. Toward the end of Viv’s pageant career, Con was like an actor with lines memorized for the wrong play, performing in a tragicomedy of her own making.

  The night before the Fairytale Faces competition, which we all attended annually, it was evident something was off with my sister.

  Viv wrestled with her pointe shoes. Con had bought them from a new supplier at a lesser cost. The pointes didn’t shape to her arches and were a size too small.

  “Constance, these don’t fit.”

  “Don’t fret, zouzou. We’re going to make them fit.”

  She sat Viv on the bed, squeezing her delicate feet into the hard slippers. She took a spray bottle and applied water onto the satin to stretch it out.

  Viv grimaced with each step as she practised her routine. She didn’t finish her final run-through. When she pulled the shoes off, her toes looked as if they’d been spattered with red paint.

  “Merde, Vivienne. How many times do I have to tell you to tape up? You will bleed right through the shoe!”

  Viv said she wasn’t feeling well and she didn’t touch her supper. When she retreated to her room, I followed her. “Beauty is lame,” she mumbled with indifference, closing her eyes. I brushed and braided her hair until she slapped my hand away.

  Viv recoiled from our family. Even though she shared an artistic talent with Henry, she remained uncommunicative with him, while her relationship with Con was a long and painful tournament of wills.

  She wouldn’t get close with my parents and by extension she wouldn’t get close with me. Yet I didn’t need her to shower me with affection to know that she loved me. Protecting me from bullies like Andy and Paul was proof of it, as were other similar and unpredictable gestures, though they were few and far between.

  My theory was that my resplendent sister kept her distance so she wouldn’t crack up. So I forgave her and let her be.


  * * *

  AT FOUR IN the morning, we packed into the wagon for the five-hour drive to Toronto. Viv slept the whole way there. By the time we reached the Hilton, where the contest was being held, her complexion was washed out and she was shivering.

  Con dismissed it as nerves.

  In the room we’d rented for the day, she wrapped my sister in a blanket and sat her down at the mirror. Humming “Au clair de la lune,” she pulled Viv’s costumes from their garment bags and laid them out with care on the king-size bed.

  When they started arguing, Henry and I left the room and installed ourselves in the back row of the large conference space. Soon the lights dimmed and the girls paraded out one by one: Calista wants to be a chief executive. Her hobbies include shoe shopping and surfing. Madison dreams of being a physicist and Miss Universe. Her favourite foods are Astro Pops and KFC.

  The first segment was character costumes. Snow Whites and Rapunzels dominated. When Viv’s turn came, Constance participated in the skit, as parents sometimes did. My sister had been adamant about choosing her own attire. The music was also stopped at her request. In silence, she stepped onto the platform and lay on her back for what felt like forever in pageant time. People in the audience started fidgeting. Then Con emerged all dolled up in her strapless dress and mules. With a dancer’s grace, she bent over and dragged Viv out by the ankles to centre stage.

  My mother attached Velcro strings to Viv’s head, wrists, and knees. She took a few steps back and raised a wooden control bar high in the air, prompting Viv to sit up and turn her head from side to side.

  My sister had converted one of her princess cones into a Pinocchio hat. She’d stamped circles on her cheeks with a bingo blotter, and put the cardboard cylinder from a roll of toilet paper over her nose, fastening it around her head with twine.

  For three minutes, Viv entertained the audience as our mother acted as the puppeteer. There was applause and gasping when Viv snuck behind Con to fake a kick or make the strangling motion around an invisible throat with her white-gloved hands. When her time was up, Viv stiffened. She dropped her upper body down and pinned her nose against her knees, returning to an inanimate object that Constance hauled offstage.

  The judges and audience roared with laughter. We all did. Only when Viv flipped Con the double bird from the curtain wing, which everyone saw except my mother, did the room go quiet.

  * * *

  THERE WAS A two-hour break before the final glitz-wear portion of the contest.

  Back in our hotel suite, Con turned on the TV and plugged in the hair appliances. When the irons were hot, she began the lengthy activity of creating ringlets of varying sizes out of Viv’s hair, over which she fastened a heavier artificial hairpiece, which stayed on with sharp-toothed metal combs that gave my sister severe headaches.

  My father put his hand on Viv’s forehead. Then he grabbed my mother by the upper arm and pulled her into the bathroom, closing the door. Viv turned the volume up on Oprah, but we could still hear them arguing about whether or not my sister was really sick. When they came out, he told me to put on my coat.

  “Henri Walker, don’t you dare.”

  “Hang in there, sweetheart.” My father studied Viv, ignoring our mother.

  My sister moved the curls away from her eyes. “I am a pageant angel,” she said, blowing kisses weakly in our direction.

  That afternoon, Henry took me to the Royal Ontario Museum. The rotunda’s mosaic ceiling was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. It was made from a constellation of tiny squares of Venetian glass. Sea horses, falcons, dragons, and other mythical creatures sparkled in amber, turquoise, and bronze.

  The main and upper floors were crammed with medieval garb and Asian sculptures. But my father led me down to the basement level, where there were hardly any visitors. There he showed me collections of Roman glass and ancient coins and, finally, paperweights. We sat on a bench facing the wall of domed tops, each one uniquely faceted, etched, and coloured.

  In our quiet thinking time together, we shared a closeness that Con and Viv didn’t have with each other or with us. The one thing I lacked, which Viv had in common with my father, was her talent with the paintbrush. Yet I made up for this with my wit and collecting sensibilities.

  Henry and I were like bookends. We had the same appearance, personality, and interests. But our connection ran deeper than being carbon copies of one another. We were allied in our pact to create little asylums where we could—antique shops and museums being the perfect places to evade Con and Viv’s feuds. And like bookends, we reinforced the pulpy novellas that made up our family library, preventing the unit from toppling over.

  Plus, we couldn’t get close with Viv or Con no matter how hard we tried. We had that in common too.

  “Someday maybe you’ll work in a place like this.”

  “I’d like that.”

  “Good, Boss. That’s good to hear.”

  “It would be pretty to see a clown juggling these, don’t you think?”

  My father smiled. Then he checked his watch and said it was time to go back to the circus.

  * * *

  WE RETURNED TO find Viv in the lobby, enveloped in a cloud of lacquer that Constance was spraying onto her hair and her shimmering fur-lined gown. She was the personification of stardust. The costume cost two thousand dollars.

  Viv was covering her eyes and coughing.

  “Enough, Constance.” Henry seized the can of hairspray from our mother. My sister smiled. She had her flipper in, so it was her phony smile. Her skin had gone from pasty to greenish.

  Constance handed her some Pixy Stix. Without blinking, Viv tipped her head back and poured the contents from the straws into her mouth. Her eyes watered as she swallowed the powdered sugar. “I don’t feel well,” she said.

  Names were already being called for glitz-wear. Constance escorted Viv down the corridor and we wished her good luck. As I followed Henry back to our seats, a girl covered in peacock feathers whispered to me as she passed, “Your mom’s demented.”

  It was a packed house. Families came from across the country, hoping to win the lavish prizes, including electronics, canopy beds, scholarships, and cash. There were no seats left, so we stood against the wall by the stage. Behind the curtain, Viv’s cramped feet were the only ones in pointe shoes.

  “Number twenty-three, Vivienne!” chirped the announcer.

  My sister came out smiling. Her flipper was so white, she looked like a girl in a toothpaste commercial. I waved to her as she floated back and forth across the stage, pausing every so often in a new pose until, midway through her act, she lurched forward as if the wind had been knocked out of her.

  Viv threw up on her diaphanous dress and on the stage. She covered her mouth but kept vomiting. Terrified, she turned toward the curtain then back to the judges and the audience. Everyone stayed fixed in their seats. Even Constance froze backstage. Unassisted, my father rushed over, put his arms around her, and guided her offstage to the nearest washroom.

  It was the first pageant where my sister left without a crown, or even a consolation prize.

  Nobody talked the whole drive home. When Viv stormed to her room and slammed the door, my father said, “You’ve taken it too far, Constance. She’s not a trained monkey. She’s had enough.”

  For a week, Viv stayed in bed with the flu. None of us spoke of Fairytale Faces again.

  * * *

  SHORTLY AFTER, ON one of those warm days when Constance forced us outside, I sat in the tree swing and watched my sister extract a pair of scissors from her pocket.

  Other than Viv’s pageants, our mother’s only pleasure was gardening. In our postage-stamp yard there were unkempt beds and a rock garden that Con brought to life with flowers and the rich scents of herbs. She added window boxes around the house. She put a cement bird bath under the apple tree in the far corner by the painting shed, dangling feeders from the branches.

  With her gleaming scissors, my sister cut the hea
d off every bud in Constance’s garden. Of all the yarrow, geraniums, and fringed bleeding hearts, the begonias and roses and daisies, she didn’t miss a blossom.

  Then she dragged the hose over to the wheelbarrow and filled it with water, throwing heads by the armful into the old receptacle.

  “She’s going to kill you, Vee,” I said, and this snapped Viv out of her trance. She looked at me then back at the wheelbarrow.

  Constance was in the kitchen, buttering up a pageant co-ordinator on the phone. She materialized at the window with her bulky head of curlers, sucking on a cigarette and zeroing in on us to see what we were doing.

  “Over here, Con! I made you flower soup!” Viv scooped a fistful of jewel-tone petals in her hand and threw them in the air.

  Constance dropped the phone and flew through the patio door, tearing down the steps. Neighbours eyeballed her chasing my sister across the street in her bathrobe, the both of them barefoot. But Viv outran her and didn’t come home until nightfall.

  “Vivienne, Vivieeeennnnne!” our mother shrieked. She sounded like a wounded animal.

  Later, there were similar episodes. So many they melted together like a stack of Polaroids left out in the sun too long.

  NINE

  I ESCAPED TO THE Coin Shoppe as much as possible.

  Serena had me cleaning and photographing coins. It was dull, methodical work and I enjoyed her assembly-line approach to preparing lots for sale.

  She ordered most of them from England. They arrived in dented boxes covered in stamps and stickers. After their initial scrub in soapy water, they went into a sodium carbonate solution that removed dirt and organic debris.

  She taught me to pick at thick clay encrustations under a microscope, using dental instruments including diamond-tipped drill bits. My desk was coated in dust and I used my inhaler frequently. When Serena swept the powder onto the floor with a hand-held broom, I’d launch into a coughing fit.

  While we soaked one lot for a week, we brushed and picked the next. The coins ranged from dime size to the size of a loonie, but thicker. None were exactly round and many were split at the edges.