Every Little Scrap and Wonder

by Carla Funk

  “Now pinch your cheeks and count,” she said. I gripped the flesh fat between forefinger and thumb and squeezed.

  “And bite your lips,” she said, “a little on the top, a little on the bottom.” I pressed my bottom teeth against my upper lip, then switched to top teeth, bottom lip, back and forth.

  “Count to thirty,” she said, and I obeyed.

  When I released my grip and relaxed my lips, Grandma held a pocket mirror up to my face. “See that extra colour?” she said. “That’s natural cosmetics.”

  Alone in my bedroom, in front of my dresser mirror, I practiced ways of smiling that would hide my teeth. I bit my lips. I pinched my cheeks. I watched the brightness swell.

  “CHARM IS DECEPTIVE, and beauty is fleeting; but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised,” said the book of Proverbs. Your beauty, said every pastor, every preacher, every prophet, comes from within. The Lord looks at the heart, not at your outward appearance.

  In the Sears catalogue, the girls smiled with blushing cheeks, straight white teeth, and lips tinted with gloss. Their bangs curled under with a little puff above their arched eyebrows. Above my nearly white brows, my bangs fell jaggedly, despite my mother’s Family Circle magazine cost-saving tip for cutting bangs straight. While I perched on a stack stool, she fastened a strip of Scotch tape across the bottom edge of my bangs. With one drawn-out slice of the sewing scissors, she cut away the sticky strip together with the stuck-on hair, and then chucked it in the garbage can beside the toilet.

  As young girls, my mother and her sisters plucked blossoms from a rose bush and tucked the red petals between their lips. When their father caught them vaunting around the house on tiptoes, pretending to be high-heeled and lipsticked society ladies, he scolded them with the story of Queen Jezebel, a painted woman who grew so vain from looking at herself in a mirror all day that she fell out a window and died, her blood licked up by dogs.

  When God looked deep down in my heart, he surely saw me posing like her in my polished mirror. He knew the dark knot in me, how badly I wanted someone to say, “Look—do you see that girl? Her white hair, the way it catches sunlight? Her eyes, like sky and river slate flecked together? Look at her. Just look at her.”

  AFTER SUPPER, WHILE the adults played cards at the Nicholsons’ dining room table, I snuck back into the guest bathroom and turned on the sink faucet. I checked the door again to make sure it was locked. I let the water run to mask the sound of me sliding drawers and opening cupboard doors. At home, my mother’s vanity held Avon face cream in a plastic green tub, a tube of pale beige cover-up for dark circles beneath her eyes, and a bottle of amber perfume called Tabu.

  But here, on the bottom shelf of Mrs. Nicholson’s medicine cabinet, lipstick tubes stood in a neat row. I heard the small voice whisper, Don’t, but still I lifted a tube of lipstick, careful and with a steady hand so that I wouldn’t domino the others. I uncapped it and swivelled the base. A nub of sunset rose. I chose another tube, then another and another, until the countertop bloomed an array of reds, pinks, oranges, and mauves, like all the richest crayons in the box. One by one, I lifted the colours. I watched in the mirror as my puckered mouth changed from coral to poppy to ruby to plum.

  With each new colour I applied, the lipstick picked up the hue left behind, and each tube now bore traces of the one before it. Dark violet, now smeared with rust, had lost its voltage. What had been dusty rose looked more like dirty brick.

  “Are you okay in there, honey?” Mrs. Nicholson, outside the door, called to me.

  I flushed the toilet. I turned the taps off, then on again. “Just about finished.”

  As I rushed to swivel down and cap the lipsticks, some tubes clattered to the floor. I coughed. Flushed again. Listened for the voice outside the door. I lined the lipsticks up in a row on the lowest cabinet shelf, but I couldn’t make them straight.

  In the mirror, my lips, now layered with eleven swipes of colour, had darkened to a waxy bruise. Even after I wiped my mouth with a wad of dampened toilet paper, scrubbed with a bar of hand soap, I still wore the proof. The Jezebel spirit, like Grandpa warned so many years ago, had found a willing vessel.

  “GLORY TO GOD in the highest!” proclaimed an angel harnessed in cardboard wings and haloed with silver garland. “And on earth, peace! Goodwill toward men!”

  The pianist arpeggioed our carol’s opening chords, and Mrs. Penner, perched on the front pew, lifted her hands to count us in. In the front row of the Sunday-school children’s choir, pinned by the brightness beaming from the balcony, I stood in my Christmas dress, blue calico with a velvet bodice and dark-blue lace at the cuffs, the one my mother had sewn for me.

  Evenings, after supper, I’d stood on the brown, padded seat of her sewing chair and turned a slow circle as she pinned the hem in place, the pinpoints snagging and pricking the skin below my knees. I felt important, like royalty on a pedestal. The pleats and darts, the shoulder puffs and sweetheart waist—my mother altered them to my shape so that when I wore the garment, it fit me perfectly.

  Zipped into that dress, I wanted to be good, to kiss my mother’s cheek, to not jab my brother when he crossed the invisible line dividing our territory in the car’s back seat as we drove across the bridge toward the church, to let my dad hold my hand as we walked into the sanctuary. In that dress, I felt like beauty might soak through to the inside of me and turn me pure.

  My father’s eye was on me. I was sure. In some hard wooden pew, he sat at the back of the sanctuary, watching me, me in my blue dress with the shiny ribbons cinched tight across my rib cage and tied into a bow. Beside me, behind me, other flush-cheeked girls in their own dresses sparkled and swayed, their hair preened in barrettes and bows. My own hair, curled and combed by my mother’s deft hand, shone white under the spotlight. Close your eyes and hold your breath, she’d said, then sprayed my head with an aerosol mist that smelled like perfume and disinfectant. This will hold it all in place.

  Like a pageant hopeful, I smiled into the darkness and opened my mouth, ready to lift the long open O of “O Holy Night” into the rafters. I wanted the tune to splinter through the roof, up, and up, for it to glide into the heavens and float all the way to Jesus’s feet, where it would land like flowers, myrrh, and incense, like the beauty and splendour of holiness. Inside the choir’s swell and swarm of voices, my song flew up, a speck of glitter, a dust-winged thing, a fleck of light in falter, straining to become a star.

  The Carol Sing

  COME DECEMBER, YOU’D see the signs everywhere, taped to the steamed-up glass of Woody’s Bakery, bold-lettered on the door of Taylor Brothers Hardware, papering the windows of Diamond Jim’s Video, Jewelry, Used Books and Pellet Stoves. Come one, come all, proclaimed the posters tacked on telephone poles and storefronts. Come one, come all to the Community Carol Sing!

  This was one of the nights when the whole town gathered, a ritual on our municipal calendar, announced weeks in advance on the front page of The Omineca Express-Bugle alongside advertisements for “Midnight Madness,” Vanderhoof’s holiday spending spree, where all the stores stayed open until the stroke of twelve, sidewalks bustled with people scrabbling for bargains, and Aunt Evelyn seemed always to be careening around a snowy corner in her van, hollering the hourly surprise specials—Co-op’s got butter for a dollar a pound! —to my mother, whose hand I gripped as we navigated the steady flow of shoppers.

  Our town’s social life followed the rhythm of the seasons, each shift in weather signalling a reason to come together—the summer air show, the fall fair and rodeo, the greasy carnival that rolled into town every spring on dusty lowbeds and set up in the empty lot across from the bowling alley. In a town our size, small in population but sprawled out over miles, any event was cause enough to make the drive into the valley, to close the rural distance between houses, the wide acres of pasture and forest that separated neighbours.

  But the Community Carol Sing, our winter tradition, held a feeling that set it apart from the town’
s other events. Every element—the darkness, the cold, the streets and buildings strung with lights—tilted the world away from the ordinary and toward the miraculous. From across the tracks and both sides of the frozen river, traffic rumbled over the roads and down into the valley, a northern caravan of exhaust fumes winding toward the local high school. Into the gymnasium we tromped, hundreds of us in heavy coats and boots, snow melting into puddles where we trod. The gym that usually reverbed with cheers, sneaker-squeak, and the thud of a bouncing basketball now lay in darkness except for a few flickering overhead fluorescents and the blinking strings of coloured lights strung up along the walls, hoops, and scoreboards.

  As we bustled and climbed into the rolled-out bleachers, the crowd’s small-town small talk buzzed in the wide-open room—gruff discussion of the cold snap moving through, who bought the old Schultz farm off Braeside Road, whose dog bit whom and why and how, and what to do about the falling price of lumber.

  Jammed shoulder to shoulder, our crowd was the town’s true cross-section: loggers and cops, accountants and hairdressers, seniors from the care home and runny-nosed kids sweating in their snowsuits. In one huge room, the stoic Lutherans and turtlenecked Anglicans, the equally reproductive Mormons and Mennonites, the wild Pentecostals and rosaried Sisters of St. Joseph (Don’t stare at the nuns, my mother whispered)—we all came together, ready to sing.

  I’d been raised in communal song, surrounded by the voices of the congregation at the Evangelical Mennonite Church, the men dipping down into the low bass or holding the reedy tenor, the women wavering on the soprano melody or skimming steadily below it in the alto tones. When I stood beside my mother in the pew, holding one corner of the heavy open hymnal and following her lead, the music enfolded me so that I became a swaddled thing within it. But gathering on Sunday for a church service and plodding through a hymn with the voices I knew well, many of them belonging to family, was different. To be one in a crowd of people who were familiar but still mysterious, to share a bleacher seat with the tall, curly-haired woman from the produce section at the Co-op grocery store, or to spot, one row up, the man with the goiter, that turnip-sized, purplish bulge on the side of his neck—to breathe alongside these almost-neighbours, almost-strangers made the occasion seem magical, like a scene in a dream where my earthbound body, cut loose from the law of gravity, suddenly took flight.

  WHEN THE SPOTLIGHT rose on the low podium, and the high-school band lifted their instruments, and when the music teacher raised his baton, we rose, too, as the opening bars of “Deck the Halls” drummed and trumpeted us in. And we sang, our voices surging at every fa-la-la, hushing into “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” then vaulting back up into “Jingle Bell Rock.” To the right, my first-grade teacher and her stern-browed husband. To my left, a row of fidgety cousins, an aunt, an uncle. And leaning in the doorway, some of the Stoney Creek men who stood on the corner by the Reo Theatre and sometimes called me Blondie when I passed. Together, we belted it out, one raucous choir breaking into four-part harmony whenever the choruses came around, then returning to the simple, unified melody of the verses.

  But the true high note of the evening always came near the end, when the town’s barber, John Zandbergen, made his way to the microphone. Even as a kid, I felt the thrill of that moment when the spotlight brightened on him. Though I’m sure he must have worn a suit jacket and slacks, in my mind he was wearing his white barber’s smock, high-collared and button-snapped. His chest pocket held no pocket square, but a pair of silver scissors. His dull brown hair and wide mustache gleamed in the light. When the speakers swelled with the canned orchestral backing track, he lifted his hands to his mouth, leaned into the microphone, and began to whistle.

  What song he whistled, I don’t recall. But how he whistled—that was unlike anything I’d ever heard. His breath took the melody and flew it upward, lilting, spiralling as if on wings, a pirouette, a twirl, a whirling silver trill that rose and dipped like some strange bird sprung loose from its winter cage and freed into the sun. John Zandbergen—the town barber!—whistled that gymnasium into wonder—the nuns, the fussing babies, the mayor and his council, the truckers and trustees and housewives and ranchers—all of us. His hands fluttered at his face, trembling the tune, soaring it, unscrolling it, flying it lofty and alight, then winging it down to rest in a clear held note that faded into silence.

  We rose to our feet. We clapped and clapped for this man, the town barber, this ordinary human whose whistling made anything seem possible. If that song could rise from a man who daily razored the stubbled jawlines of cussing truck drivers, who buzz-cut every fidgeting farm boy in town and trimmed the wild eyebrows of old men, if by some strange miracle his song could rise like that, then so could anyone’s.

  The Community Carol Sing closed with a final rousing stand-to-your-feet and sing-as-you-leave song. As we made our way back to the parking lot in a collective shuffling of boots through snow, more than one man, low beneath his breath, whistled as he walked to his pickup truck, picking up the song still playing inside. The breath of all that whistling scrawled the air with a little rush of warmth, the winter night bending to the lowly tune beneath a sky heralding stars to guide us along the icy road for home.

  Gloria

  EVERYONE WAS AN angel at first. We started off the same, floating amorphous in bleached-out bedsheets every December for the school Christmas musical. I blurred, like all the others, into the chorus of white robes. When the piano played the opening chords, I sucked in breath and filled my lungs to belt out hallelujah with the other voices, one anonymous angel singing with the host.

  I was happy at first to be counted in the choir, to join the melody that travelled up and ever up toward the finale’s whole note, held to draw applause. Though my twisted-pipe-cleaner halo scratched my scalp and made it itch, at least I had a halo, silvery and sparkling. At least I didn’t have to be a shepherd with a tea towel on my head, carrying a broomstick for a staff. Sure, the audience laughed at the shepherds as they bumbled in their bathrobes up the side steps of the stage while shielding their eyes from our angelic splendour. Sure, the three wise men got to carry their moms’ jewelry boxes and empty perfume bottles to the manger-side, kneel in reverence, and touch their foreheads to the floor in worship. Wedged between my fellow nameless angels, I was just another bedsheet on the line, content to blend in with the laundry, at least the first few times around.

  But I saw the way that spotlight hit the stars, those kids with speaking roles who stood downstage inside an illuminated circle and spoke their lines, sang their solo parts above our choir’s background oohs and aahs. I wanted what they had, that moment bathed in full attention, all audience eyes on me. I wanted to be singled out, noticed by the crowd. I wanted what Gloria Dick had won—the leading role with all the monologues and solos—but every year she earned it with her pure and sweet soprano, her thin white wrists, her glossy brown hair, her cocker-spaniel eyes.

  If Gloria was the polished flute, I was the oboe with a split and rasping reed. I could carry a tune but had to jut out my chin and strain to hit the high notes. I had no trouble memorizing lines but somehow couldn’t bend my voice to do what it needed to make Miss Hornsby, the music and drama teacher, choose me. When Miss Hornsby asked who’d like to try for the lead, I always raised my hand high, stayed quiet, smiled as righteously as I could without looking proud, my eyes bright and blinking a signal as I swirled a prayer inside my heart and head that whispered to the chapel ceiling, Pick me, pick me, pick me.

  In one nativity, Gloria was Mary in a blue-and-white gown sewn by her mother, kneeling beside Rocky Peters, a red-faced Joseph. She stared into the straw-filled manger as if the swaddled baby truly was the Messiah and not an old doll swiped from the church nursery. For the play about the animals in the Bethlehem stable, Gloria was the little lamb offering her whole fleecy self to the holy family, foreshadowing the Christ child as the perfect lamb who takes away the sins of the world. While she sang her meek solo in a whit
e woolly cape and lamb’s-eared hat, I stood in the background mooing softly, wearing a cloth hood with plush horns sewn askew.

  When Miss Hornsby announced a new Christmas musical about a team of angels working to get the latest campaign off the ground and into the sky over Bethlehem, no one was surprised that Gloria won that lead, too. As Carol Angel, she busied herself with Heaven’s housekeeping and choir practice and trumpet polishing. During rehearsals, when Gloria gave her monologue and Miss Hornsby asked for more excitement, more volume, more energy, I stood at the back of the stage with the rest of the supporting angels and ran her lines in my head, pictured myself in Gloria’s place raising my hands like a healing evangelist, proclaiming the good news like a real archangel, one so genuine and holy and with such vivid blonde hair, it was hard to tell that I wasn’t the real celestial thing.

  Whether Miss Hornsby watched me mouthing Gloria’s lines during practice or simply needed a failsafe, I don’t know, but after one of the rehearsals, she pulled me aside and handed me a stapled script with my name pencilled at the top.

  “If you like, you can be the understudy,” Miss Hornsby said. “Learn Gloria’s part, and if she gets sick, you’ll fill the role. It’s a big responsibility.”

  That night, in my bedroom, in front of my mirror, I practiced all of Carol Angel’s lines and movements. With a hand above my brow, I peered at Earth below. I threw my hands up in frustration at the absentminded angel, sighed with exasperation at the progress of the choir, crossed my arms, smiled, winked, practicing what it meant to be a good angel, the best angel ever, all the while wishing fallen-angel wishes—that Gloria would be struck with the flu or mumps or leprosy.

  The day before the big performance, during final rehearsal, Gloria, crowned in gold garland, floated in her fluttery white dress, expressive and spritely, while I hunched in my requisite white sheet, waiting for her to make a mistake. On one side of me, Teddy Dueck stuffed his hand into the neck hole of his shirt and levered a sweaty fart from his armpit when Miss Hornsby wasn’t watching. On the other side, Tammie, who smelled like old underwear, breathed hard through her mouth.