Every Little Scrap and Wonder

by Carla Funk

  We fought with a zeal reserved only for each other. And when we fought, we fought dirty. Wrestled on the carpet. Hurled curses. Pulled hair. He punched. I spit. He pummeled. I tattled. If his walloping fist didn’t draw a bruise on my body, I made sure of proof. Holed up in my bedroom, I’d wham my own knuckles against the spot he’d punched until the skin purpled. With evidence of a wound, I slumped into the kitchen, eyes welling with newly brewed tears, and show off the bruise for sympathy and justice.

  “But I didn’t even hit her that hard!” my brother argued.

  “Hard enough to bruise her,” our mother said, and when she grounded him from TV for yet another day, I buried my smugness and smirk.

  Manipulative, sneaky, tactical—that was my sisterly methodology. I plastic-wrapped his toilet bowl, squirted toothpaste on the seat. I spider-webbed a network of near-invisible thread throughout his bedroom, looping it around knobs, bedposts, through crotch holes of underwear folded in drawers. In the hallway outside his room, I flipped the clear plastic utility mat so that its toothy spikes poked up, and when he ran down the stairs toward his room, bare feet striking the sharp nubs, he screamed, hollered my name, the thorn in his flesh.

  Brute force—that was my brother’s style of warfare, along with the occasional verbal dart to bull’s-eye my pride, but only until I plucked out the poisoned tip and dipped it in my own brand of venom, then fired it right back at him. If he called me stupid, I called him a stupid jerk. To his lard-ass, I threw back a loser dork. I savoured every insult as it formed, turning it over in my mouth like a hard candy, working the shape until it fit tightly inside my cheek. Each word was a shard that could cut, could draw blood if angled just so. As much as I hated having him sit on my chest and tap my sternum rapid-fire with his index finger in what he called “Chinese chest torture,” I knew the pain would last only a finite amount of time, until either he tired of the torment or our mother walked into the room.

  When my brother was angry, his eyes sparked wide, his jaw tensed, his teeth gritted. Fury narrowed my eyes, and I grew cool and sullen. If he was fire, I was ice. To my sun-white hair, pale eyes, and light skin, his dark hair, dark skin, dark eyes were the inverse, my shadowy foil. When he was a baby, strangers in store lineups and on sidewalks asked my mother if the father was Native, wanting to know if any tribal blood flowed from somewhere down the genetic line. Grandma Shenk sewed a fringed leather vest for him when he was a toddler and stitched him moccasins, too, which he wore with a headband made from a strip of leather and adorned with the feather of a crow. In the cowboys-versus-Indians story, he never wanted to play the cowboy. He wanted to wear the hides of animals and cook his bannock over an open fire, wanted to track and hunt and live wild in the woods. He ran face-first into the wind, leapt over fallen logs, fleet of foot. Behind him, I dragged my feet, dawdled, and whined about the miles. In a gang of boys, he was the quiet one, the sidekick and the shadow, not wanting the spotlight, never the bully. Clever, mischievous, fearless, tough, and fair, he was a boy I would have wanted as my friend—if he weren’t my brother. Instead, I fitly filled the role of kid sister, earning well the names he levelled at me. Pest. Turdface. Idiot. Bugger. Bag. Nimrod. Numbskull. Jerk.

  We could hardly be in the same room without turning on each other. At the supper table, when I threatened to catapult a spoonful of mashed potatoes his way, he glared and gave me his best Clint Eastwood: Go ahead, make my day. I let the starchy lump fly. A clot of white hung on his forehead a moment, then oozed down the bridge of his nose. His shock surged to anger. My bare foot, propped on an empty chair between us, caught his feral widened eye, and he stabbed it with the fork in his hand, hollering as he brought down the tines. Every road trip began with my mother dragging her index finger down the middle of the back seat. “Stay on your own side,” she’d say, threatening with force, but a few miles into the trip, I’d already be edging closer to the line, seeing how far I might go before I lit the wick of his rage.

  Only when we were alone together in the house did a measure of peace descend and civility reign. On those rare, parent-less, ceasefire evenings, we put aside the charley horses, purple nurples, door slamming, ear flicks, name calling, and stepped into the story we wished we always lived. My brother, my rival for power and territorial dominance, the one who ran faster through the trees, who could pop a wheelie on his bike without falling backward, whose pocketknife was always sharp, whose arrow and pellet and slingshot stone hit the mark when mine would not—in the empty house without a mom or dad to intervene, my brother became my ally, my defender, the one beside me, not against me. As the television fed us forbidden images—Agent 007 stroking the bare thigh of his lady-love, Rambo machine-gunning the jungle to a bloody spatter—we scarfed down whole bags of potato chips and guzzled pop straight from the bottle, all the while taking turns at the living room picture window, looking for any sign of our parents’ return. If headlights started down the driveway, we’d shut off the TV, run to our bedrooms, dive under the covers, deep-breathing through the adrenaline rush, ready to feign sleep, and in the morning, keep our story straight: No, we didn’t stay up too late, and no, we never watched those R-rated movies.

  My brother and I didn’t have a language yet for the deeper struggle, that unnamed turmoil beneath the skin of things. Time hadn’t given us the distance and objectivity to see our lives clearly. When I stood guard at the night-time window, I had to press my face close to the glass to see into the darkness beyond my own reflection. Out there, in that other world, nothing was secure. Any tragic thing might happen. A car accident on the snowy road home from their evening out, a sudden brain tumour, lung cancer, heart attack, a fire that took them alive—the narratives played out in my mind and held me ransom to my brother’s protection. If the two of us were left to fend for ourselves, then I needed him, and needed to love him. And wanted him to love me in return.

  When mission bound us together, when the elements were against us, when in the sub-zero darkness I sat behind him on the Big Red, our three-wheeled all-terrain vehicle, and flew over snow and ice and slippery trails, my arms around his waist as we travelled his nightly newspaper-delivery route that seemed too many miles and too cold without my help, I felt the possibility of that love. When we arrived at the orange plastic box posted at the end of a driveway, I climbed off, stuffed in the rolled-up newspaper, and then hopped back on for the next leg of the journey. The wind, the noise of the motor, and the fat, padded helmets we wore kept us from speaking. No great sibling communion occurred in language. Snow flecked his goggles as he drove, but I closed my eyes and held on, the only time my arms around my brother felt justified, permissible, outside of a wrestling match or attempted escape from a headlock. If he felt any kinship with me, he never betrayed it, nor did I to him. After we delivered the final newspaper, he revved for home. When we hit a rut or bump, Big Red gained enough air to make my stomach lurch with laughter and my arms cinch tight around him, but the two of us said nothing to each other about the stunts. Still, our brief flight—that momentary hovering before we landed back on the snow-packed trail—held us together, brother and sister, bound, and flying through the ice and cold toward home.

  If I could go back to him, I’d be a different sister, the kind who speaks aloud the buried love, who lets herself look up to her brother, no shame. If I could go back, I’d stand beside him in the clearing out back, behind the pig barn and the shop, and as he notched the arrow to the bow, I’d keep quiet, crouched beside him in the snow, let him focus on the far-off target tacked to the frosty bale of hay. This sister—the one I wish I’d been—doesn’t say jinx, doesn’t bet two bucks he’ll miss, and if he does—and the arrow flies off course, veers and arcs above the target—doesn’t snark, Nice job, great shot. This sister prays the arrow straight, wills it through the drift of wind that threatens to undo its course, and bids it hit the true bull’s-eye. And when it lands a mark, she throws her arms around his neck, unabashed, praises his shooter’s eye and instinct. She runs
toward the target so she can pluck the sunken arrow, bring it back, and say to him, Now, let’s do it again, this time even better than before.

  On Beauty

  CONSTELLATIONS IN A winter sky. The night road illuminated by snow. Beauty was above me, higher, thrumming in the voltage of a storm and rising from the dirt after a hot summer rain. In the birches and poplars flaming with autumn, in the western sun’s reddening over the field, in the glitter of hoarfrost and the springtime drip of icicle thaw, beauty named itself true. Whatever was beauty, was God.

  Beauty was what made my mother stop in the garden at twilight and point up at the moon, what made my dad snuff his cigarette beneath his boot, hook his thumbs in his belt loops, and shake his head in wonder. Beauty called, Look up. When I lay on the dew-damp lawn with dusk settling deep blue over me and counted points of light to find the Big Dipper scooping darkness, beauty hushed and held me, breathed into my lungs like back in the first beginning.

  But everything was only a shadow of the one who made it. Stars, planets, the halo of the sun through cloud, snowflakes feathering down—that was beauty talking shop about its maker, the handiwork of a lofty God bidding the gaze upward in wonder. When we held open our dusty hymnals at Sunday service and sang, Worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness, I pictured angels with trumpets flying circles around a massive throne, jewels and gems the size of barn doors glinting in the smoke and mist, all the furniture of Heaven—gold streets, sea of glass, shining river, hovering seraphim and cherubim—opulent and royal and kitted out for paradise, pure by proximity to the perfect one.

  Back on earth, in the eye of the beholder, beauty shifted definitions. Beauty was a word we didn’t use often or well. It carried a heightened sense of the earthly. To be beautiful was to be otherworldly, to be different, to be other. The very sound of the word beauty mimicked birdsong—soft and taking flight on a cool breeze, disappearing into a high trill, then feathering into blue ether. To call someone beautiful was to set her apart from the gathered room, to usher her up a white staircase to a high balcony, to let her stand where every eye could see, while below, the rest of us gawked up in wonder.

  THE ONLY WOMAN my mother ever called beautiful was the Sri Lankan lady who managed the drugstore cosmetics counter. In a town where most folks either bore Dutch or German blood, or descended from the Carrier-Sekani people, the make-up lady stood out as wholly different. With her turquoise and silver eyeshadow, black eyeliner that cat-eyed in the corners, and bright-pink blush streaking her high cheekbones, she seemed to have come from some exotic beyond. Her lips, lined and painted, formed a perfect fuchsia bow. Beneath the fluorescent store lights, her long black hair, pulled back at the sides with jeweled barrettes, gleamed. When she rang through purchases at the till or waved goodbye to a customer, her gold wrist bangles jangled and shimmered.

  “That woman is very beautiful,” my mother whispered down to me as we passed a glass case full of expensive skin creams. “Look at her skin,” she said. “It’s flawless.”

  For my mother, beauty was carried from afar, tinted with mystery. The aurora borealis was beautiful. Miss Venezuela on the TV pageant show was beautiful. The Christmas music sung by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir was beautiful. On the album cover, the singers stood white-robed in tiers like layers of a living wedding cake. Through our stereo speakers, their harmonies poured forth something more celestial than the earthy four-part harmony of our Mennonite Sunday-morning hymns. “The Mormons believe that Heaven has seven layers,” my mother said. “And they wear that secret underwear.”

  My dad’s definition of beauty was tethered to a wholly other exoticism. To him, beauty was the funeral at which the deceased’s younger brother gave a sobbing eulogy, and the open casket by which everyone paraded, sniffling into Kleenex, shaking their heads.

  “Now that,” my dad said, “was beautiful.” He tapped his cigarette into the ashtray. “Looked like she was sleeping.”

  Beauty was brutal, came broken, was buried far too young.

  To women, my dad never ascribed beauty. When he deemed a woman attractive, he used the term “good-looking.” He favoured the types found crooning heartbreak on the stage of the Grand Ole Opry or leaning in a too-small bikini against a dripping-wet Kenworth. Tammy Wynette in her fringed Western denim—good-looking. The peppy new waitress at the Pine Country, hand cocked on her hip as she flirted with the breakfast regulars—good-looking. Daisy Duke lounging on the hood of the General Lee in short-short cut-offs and a plaid shirt tied into a halter—well, she was good-looking.

  Whenever the TV flashed the latest country-music video by Tanya or Reba or Dolly, my dad said, “Now that’s a good-looking woman.”

  On the wives of his trucker buddies, he weighed in freely. Shirley with the tight jeans and smoker’s laugh, good-looking. Moon-faced Trudy, not so good-looking. Debbie, leather-skinned and shy, used to be good-looking, but the years have been cruel.

  My mother, standing before the full-length mirror in her new flutter-sleeved black and teal dress, fluffing her perm for the Legion’s New Year’s Eve party, called the attention of my dad’s gaze. He stood behind her, assessing.

  “And how much did you have to pay for that?” he asked.

  But he wouldn’t say the word.

  ON THE OUTSIDE wall of the shop, against the residue of yesterday’s sun and the evening’s woodstove heat, moths and butterflies congregated. Flattened against the warmth, their wings adorned the beige stucco with spots and scales, whorls and flecks. Every morning, my mother in gumboots and garden jacket hunted them, her hatpin aimed at the lit and resting insect, then the prick of the silver tip through the fuzzy thorax, and the pluck off the wall and into the empty jam jar.

  At the kitchen counter, I watched her dip a cotton swab in rubbing alcohol and dot it on the creature’s head. It flittered, flexed. Thread-legs trod the air until it withered to a still specimen. I knew the kill to be the dirty work of this pursuit, but unlike draping a chicken on the chopping block so we could eat its meat, the snuffing of the moths and butterflies gave us nothing, except the chance to gaze close-up at the feathery scales patterning their wings.

  My mother displayed them on a slab of white Styrofoam and labelled each one with a name pulled from a guide to moths and butterflies of British Columbia. In neat blue ballpoint, she printed names like Tortoiseshell, White Admiral, Mourning Cloak, and Hoary Angelwings on tiny slips of paper, then sticky-taped each slip beneath the corresponding specimen. What once broke loose from a gauzy cocoon and flew who knows how many miles across forests and meadows and lakes and logging roads now lay pinned in uniform rows for eye-level wonder.

  “Don’t touch them,” she said, “their wings are made of dust.”

  I WANTED TO be beautiful the way Joanie Olsen was beautiful. At the winter carnival, Joanie skated the spotlight number to the love theme from Ice Castles. I sat in the crowd hush of the darkened bleachers, fully mesmerized by her sparkle-skirted mini-dress, her feathered hair swooshing with every turn and pivot. Under the disco ball’s starry shards of light, Joanie leapt, looped, and landed with her arms unfolding in silver-glittered wing-sleeves. As she spun in camel position at the centre of the rink and the soundtrack string section swelled through the P.A., cameras flashed among the rows of spectators, and I saw what I didn’t have.

  I knew I wasn’t beautiful, not in the way the world gauged and praised. Too many times, I’d stood beside a female cousin or schoolmate at a bathroom mirror or in a window’s reflection and witnessed our differences. My blue-grey eyes, chubby face, and snub nose did not compare to the dark and delicate features of the girls around me, the ones who garnered breathy wows and admiration for their shiny, naturally curly hair, rosebud lips, and eyes like chocolate drops. They looked like the girls who glossed the pages of catalogues and sales flyers.

  At a medical check-up, a new resident doctor looked with concern at my white-blonde hair and pale skin and asked my mother if I might by any chance be albino. Back at home, I sl
id volume one of the encyclopedia off the shelf. Under Albino, I read words like pigment and photophobia and mutation. I learned that albino animals rarely survive in the wild, that the sun burns their skin to cancer. A picture of a white-haired, white-skinned girl stared back at me from the page, her eyelashes and brows bright white—even whiter than mine. She looked as if she’d been dipped in winter, abandoned to the ice and snow.

  SPEND TEN MINUTES every day, my grandmother urged me, pushing the two front teeth together. “It’ll lessen the gap a bit,” she said. “But small teeth run in the family, so you’ll never have a perfect smile.”