Every Little Scrap and Wonder

by Carla Funk

  “We bring you good news, grrrrreat news!” Gloria proclaimed, throwing her arms wide open to the empty pews that soon would fill with her admirers.

  More than anything, I wanted to proclaim the bad news about Gloria: that once, in chapel service, I’d seen her blow her nose, peek into her Kleenex, and then covertly peel the snot from the tissue with her front teeth like a cat pulling flecks from a fishbone. But I didn’t know how to say to Miss Hornsby—without seeming like a jealous snitch—that the wide-open mouth singing the rising holy notes was the same mouth that chewed mucus chunks when we bowed our heads for chapel prayer.

  On the shadow edges of the limelight, I lamented my understudy status, convinced I was meant for a more dazzled life. If God’s eye was on the sparrow, like the hymn proclaimed, then surely God’s eye was on me, too. The psalms said that he numbered the hairs on my head, knew when I slept and when I woke, was spying on me always like a mom. I wanted to believe that he saw me as more than a wingless no-name, but my place in the back row confirmed a more minor identity: less the star and more a drifting dust mote, caught briefly by the beam, then gone.

  ON THE NIGHT of the performance I arrived one hour early and joined the buzz of hyperactive angels milling around the basement classroom, donning our costumes and receiving final directions from Miss Hornsby, who ran us through our musical cues. We were a choir ready to belt out the hallelujahs and recite in chorus the Gospel of Luke in which Quirinius was governor and Caesar Augustus issued a decree for a census—all words that made little sense to me, but that sounded ancient and important. Miss Hornsby kept checking the door, peering out into the parking lot.

  “Has anyone seen Gloria?” she said, scanning the room with nervous eyes.

  What felt like a tiny spark lit in my gut. She wasn’t here. No one had seen her arrive. That spark sizzled and threatened to crack into fire. Miss Hornsby kicked into action, sending searchers into the parking lot, the foyer, the sanctuary. She stood inside the staff room with the telephone receiver to her ear, dialing numbers, but nothing. No answer.

  At five minutes to showtime, with every angel lined up and ready to shuffle up the stairs and onto the church stage, Miss Hornsby tapped me on the shoulder and called me aside. In a corner of the classroom, she held me by the shoulders and said, “Do you know Gloria’s lines?”

  I nodded my yes, vigorously, dramatically, and nearly added an “amen.” In my mind’s eye, I already saw myself on stage as Carol Angel, zipped into the flutter-sleeved white dress fitted for Gloria.

  “Can you sing the final song?”

  Again, I nodded. Miss Hornsby had no clue how many times I’d practiced alone in my bedroom, my dresser mirror the audience to which I made my face go solemn and holy, mimicking the dreamy Heaven eyes and slightly tilted head of the angel that hovered over baby Jesus in the Children’s Picture Bible. I could be that angel, sinless and pure, proclaiming the arrival of a new, surprising greatness.

  At seven o’clock, the sanctuary dimmed and I took my place on stage. Instead of standing in my usual row, I stepped forward, and waited for the light to fall. I looked out into the pews, all of them filled with people made unrecognizable by the darkness. Somewhere, among the other moms and dads, my mother perched on the edge of her seat with a camera in her lap, ready to aim her flashbulb when I appeared, still thinking that I was one of the choir’s nameless. As the pianist played the opening bars of the overture, and all the angels watched Miss Hornsby’s hand conducting us toward our first notes, I saw at the back of the church a girl in silhouette being hurried along by a woman.

  It was Gloria, shuffling with her mother through the packed sanctuary, trying to get to the stage to take her place, but the music was telling her she was too late, and her mother was tucking an arm around her shoulder, drawing her back, pulling her close. At the end of the centre aisle, against the back wall of the church, Gloria turned her face into the crook of her mother’s coat sleeve, as if she might be crying. Then as the spotlight dawned on me, she disappeared with all the other faces into darkness.

  Throughout the play, Miss Hornsby crouched in the front pew with a script on her lap, ready to cue me, but I knew the lines, hit my marks, spoke the monologue—But the innkeeper won’t give them a room! Where will Jesus be born? Where? Where?—with as much feeling as I could muster. When the audience laughed, I took it like a gold star and stuck it in my heart.

  When it came time for my solo verse in the play’s closing number, I moved downstage and stepped into the light that beamed down from the ceiling. The aisle stretched in front of me, and at the end of it, the shape of Gloria still clinging to her mother’s arm. She could have marched on stage, nudged me aside, and taken back her Carol Angel costume, could have made me fade into the background where I began, belonged. And I could have offered to stand aside and let the stage lights throw their gold over her freshly combed and curled hair. Instead, I held my ground, my solo’s spotlight place, and sang my lines, clear and bright: O come to my heart, Lord Jesus, there is room in my heart for Thee.

  Even as I sang, I knew the truth of it. No room, I thought. Not in the spotlight’s beam, not on the stage decorated like Heaven, a twinkling miracle, tinselled and spangled with glitter. No room for Gloria, and if no room for her, then surely no room for the baby Jesus born in Bethlehem. No room for anyone but me and all my starry dreams.

  As the song ended, just like I’d practiced in my bedroom, I hinged forward at the waist, one arm crossed in front of me and the other tucked back, knees slightly bent. In the brightness of the spotlight, I bowed, my shadow thrown behind, my hair shining whitely, every flyaway strand lit up, numbered, and known.

  Christmas Eve, Loop Road

  WE ATE THE same meal every Christmas Eve: clam chowder, homemade buns, pickles, and a salad made with orange Jell-O, canned mandarins, Cool Whip, and cottage cheese. All day, my mother stirred the pot steaming on the stove, punched down dough, shaped the rolls. The living room’s tinselled jack pine perfumed the house. The radio gave updates on Santa’s whereabouts, and though neither my brother nor I had ever been allowed to believe that a fat man in a flying sleigh sailed the globe and dumped presents down chimneys, we both felt the anticipation rising in the countdown hours toward morning and our own pile of gifts beneath the tree.

  Dusk slid into darkness down our rural road, leaving only the snow to lighten the sky over us. The picture window mirrored back our family scene: my brother and me on the rug raking through a pile of Lego, the TV glowing holiday cartoons, and beyond us, the table, set for supper.

  We were waiting for my dad to show up. Already, Mom had phoned around to some of the usual places—Sparky’s, Clem’s, and Striegler’s shop, searching out my dad to call him home. We were, it seemed, always waiting for him, always asking when, how long, how many more lines on the clock face before he pulled into the driveway. My mother clicked down on the receiver, then dialed another number.

  “I’m looking for Football,” she said.

  No matter how many times I asked, my dad refused to tell me why his friends called him that. Football. He didn’t play the sport, didn’t do anything athletic, except pitch a game of horseshoes now and then at summer barbecues, or shoot snooker at his father’s billiards table. I guessed that the nickname might have something to do with the tune that we sang along to on his pickup stereo, the song that went, “Could’ve been the whiskey, might’ve been the gin” and then the line about the singer’s head feeling like a football the morning after the party.

  “Supper’s waiting,” my mother said into the phone, her voice a taut wire. On the other end, amid laughter and the buzz of men’s voices, he’d tell her he was coming, don’t get so hyper, the card game was almost done, he was just finishing his drink, he’d be home soon.

  Though his evening lateness had become commonplace, we kept checking the window for headlights. Always, the question hovered: What if he doesn’t come home? On Christmas Eve, the threat level seemed higher, with more at st
ake. No Dad, no Christmas. No Christmas, no gifts. When lights slowed on the road out front and turned up the driveway, my brother and I, on our knees on the sofa, heralded his arrival with he’s here, he’s here, Dad’s finally here.

  He took his time coming in from the yard. He must have sat in the pickup a moment, drawing in the final puffs of his cigarette, tapping the ash in the pullout tray, clicking off the radio’s country carols. What he thought about as he walked across the yard from his truck to the carport, I never wondered. I only waited for the sound of his hand on the doorknob, the stamp of snow from his boots on the front step. Then the door swung open and a little blizzard of cold wind rushed up the staircase and into the dining room, where we sat at the table with his empty chair at the head.

  After the usual back-and-forth between them—my mother telling him to wash his hands, my dad arguing they were clean, clean enough, and finally, the compromise of a soapy dishrag to wipe off the grit and grease—he eased down into his seat with a groan. My mother turned off the lights, and my dad pulled his lighter from his shirt pocket, flicked it to the wicks of the slim white candles in their holders. The heat from the tiny flames rose into a current that set five flat brass angels spinning in a circle that whirred into a carousel of chimes.

  As we sat in shadow, I tried to love the elements of our ritual—my father’s rare prayer of thanks for the food, his low muttered amen, the carols playing on the stereo, the hot chowder in the bowl, the four of us sitting down like a family from a picture book or TV commercial. But reality never met my built-up expectations. The clams in my mouth felt like slippery pockets of snot. “It’s the guts and poop,” my brother said, and slid out his clammy tongue. The Jell-O salad, which was supposed to taste like sweet oranges, left me gagging on cheese curds that clotted the peach-coloured fluff.

  “It’s tradition,” said my mother when I shuddered at the clams and curds.

  “Eat,” said my dad. “It’s Christmas Eve.”

  As he leaned back in his chair, the mood in the room shifted. What had been uneasy anticipation—would he come, how long would we wait—drifted into the calm and bright. Though called away from his party, he was jovial, lighthearted, and we were all trying our holiday best, straining for the miraculous as we sat together for our meal.

  “Get me some more milk,” he said, holding up his glass.

  Even his gruff demands couldn’t shake loose our little scaffold of peace on earth and goodwill to men. Somewhere in that house, our gifts were hidden, wrapped in shiny paper, ready to be ripped into in a matter of hours, and after we cleared the table and the dishes were washed and dried and put away, we’d watch the TV specials—Rudolph, Frosty, The Grinch Who Stole Christmas—and start the countdown to morning, when we’d launch out of bed in the dark and sit in the living room before the stacks of presents piled beneath the lit-up tree, waiting for our dad to finish his morning cigarette and mug of coffee behind the locked bathroom door.

  But first, before the momentum toward morning could build any further, my dad set down his empty glass. “We’re gonna go for a drive,” he said. “To see Grandma Reimer.”

  She’d been our neighbour, her house a two-minute walk from ours until we moved from Loop Road to the other side of the river, the tracks, the town. On his way home from school, my brother had often knocked on her door and waited on the doorstep while she rustled in her pantry and returned with a cookie or bag of coconut-covered marshmallows, whatever treat she had on hand. Grandma Reimer, long widowed, was someone’s grandma, but not ours. She belonged to my dad’s side of the family, but indirectly, through a second or third cousin twice-removed. Still, we called her Grandma—Gross-mama—and we called her two bachelor sons, who lived at the back of her property in a one-room cabin, Uncle Pete and Uncle Jake.

  It’s not that I dreaded going to Grandma Reimer’s house, but it didn’t compare to the TV’s cartoon elves and top-hatted Frosty laughing up our Christmas Eve. Visiting her felt like duty, the way I would come to feel in adolescence about church, huffing at the ritual of it, wondering what was the point of our Sunday routine, the hymns, the long-winded sermons preached by a monotone, legally blind minister.

  “Really?” my mother said to my dad. “We’re going?” She sighed, and stacked our dirty supper dishes in the kitchen sink.

  “It’s tradition,” said my dad, wiping his mouth on his sleeve. “You can drive.”

  GRANDMA REIMER’S HOUSE was dark when we pulled into her driveway.

  “She’s probably sleeping,” said my mother. “Let’s come back another day.”

  But my dad was already out of the passenger seat, tromping up the front steps and knocking. After a moment, the porch light came on, and the door opened a crack. My dad looked back at us still sitting in the idling pickup and waved for us to come.

  Grandma Reimer stood in the doorway smiling, smoothing the stray white hairs that had come loose from the braided, coiled bun at the nape of her neck. “Come,” she said, drawing us into the dim, tiny house. “Oh, bah, yo,” she said, the yo her “yes” to our arrival. She led the way into the main room, which functioned as kitchen, dining area, and den. Seated at the table, Uncle Pete and Uncle Jake sat smoking, the air above their heads hazed blue. From its high shelf in the corner of the room, the TV buzzed a fuzzy black-and-white show.

  “Hallo,” they said, nodding, lifting their cigarette hands.

  The uncles sat on a wooden bench with their backs to the wall, dressed alike in dark snap-front work shirts and matching pants with clip-on suspenders. They were a study in contrasts. Uncle Pete was built like a bulldog, jowly and broad-chested. He had a square face and a salt-and-pepper buzz cut. When he smiled, which was often, his eyes narrowed into slits, and his laughter sounded like radio static. Uncle Jake, the younger by several years, wore his thinning hair slicked back into a ducktail. He was lanky and long-faced. Twitchy, he sat with his knee bouncing beneath the table, and to whatever anyone said, he nodded and loudly agreed.

  “Merry Christmas,” my dad boomed.

  “Yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah,” said Uncle Jake, wide-eyed and leaning forward in his seat. Uncle Pete crackled with laughter.

  My dad pulled up a chair at the table and started talking in Low German with the uncles. Between puffs on their cigarettes, the three men chewed slices of farmer’s sausage set out by Grandma Reimer, who toddled from refrigerator to stove, pantry to kitchen counter, delivering plates of food and cups of coffee and tea to the table. Small and round, shaped like a Russian nesting doll, she wore a home-sewn, elastic-waisted polyester dress in muted florals, thick beige pantyhose, and black lace-up shoes. She was in every way the traditional Mennonite grandmother—bustling, plain, offering food, and more food, and still more food. She spoke almost no English, and what little she knew, she wove together with bits of German. She knew my name, and spoke it to me as she pinched my cheeks and said, “So fat, so fat.”

  At the table, the men’s voices spewed words that sounded like throat-clearing, growly and moist and on the verge of anger, but then they’d tip their heads back and laugh until they started hacking tarry coughs again. Their language, Plattdeutsch, was the informal dialect of Mennonites, a cobbled German used for ordinary conversation and barnyard talk, a degradation of the High German reserved for scripture, sermons, and songs. Every few sentences, I caught a fragment of English, or some German word I understood. In Kaut, Schnee, Mutta, Trock, I heard cat, snow, mother, truck, but I didn’t know enough to fit them together into the conversation happening around the shared ashtray. In the presence of Uncle Jake and Uncle Pete, my dad loosened, seemed comfortable in his own skin. But for Grandma Reimer, he shifted a little. In her presence, he sloughed his usual bristle for a softness of speech, the way he did around his own mother and in church, on those rare Sundays he still set foot inside it.

  While my mother, quiet at the table, sipped her instant coffee and spoke in simple English about the Christmas meal we’d eat tomorrow when the whole Funk family gat
hered, Grandma Reimer nodded and kept pushing the plates of food toward us. After we’d eaten as much as we could, she rose from the table and, through a door off the kitchen, disappeared into the sound of rustling plastic and clinking glass. She came back carrying two packages.

  “Merry Christmas,” she said, and held them out to me and my brother.

  Our mother had taught us always to say thank you, no matter what the gift might be. What was given you, you took, and took with gratitude, whether or not you liked it. A pair of slippers crocheted from scratchy wool, a make-your-own-potholder kit, a child-sized suitcase with a comb and brush set tucked inside—though not what you might dream of receiving, they still were gifts, and the giver deserved honest thanks.

  My brother and I tore into our presents, paper flying to the floor as we unwrapped what Grandma Reimer had chosen from her pantry. For my brother, a small car that raced spring-loaded on fat rubber wheels and whirred an engine noise. For me, a smiling plastic doll, naked in a see-through bag, her wide, unblinking eyes goggling back at me. And for each of us, tucked in with our toys, a cup and saucer in the old plain style found in the china cabinets of Mennonite grandmothers everywhere, edged in tiny blue flowers.

  Our mother cleared her throat and tilted her head toward us in reminder.

  “Thank you,” we both said to Grandma Reimer. She smiled, nodded, and pushed the plate of sausage toward us once again.

  “Eat,” she said. “Oh, bah, eat.”

  While my father gossiped gutturally and lit another cigarette, and my mother tried to find the words to bridge the gap between her and a woman she hardly knew, I sat in my chair, my cup and saucer tucked aside, and fiddled with my plastic doll. Every time I turned its arm or leg, the limb popped out of the socket, but the smile on its face never changed. As Grandma Reimer poured the tea and coffee again and again, filled and refilled the small white plates with slices of cheese and bread and meat, and my dad and the uncles talked in a language beyond me, I watched my brother’s toy car zoom across the linoleum. Over and over, he pulled back the car, then let it go. The more he reversed its wheels on the floor, the farther forward it launched, flying ahead with the momentum from its backward drag, the men’s voices rising and falling over the quiet talk of my mother and Grandma Reimer, the window giving back our faces blurred against the dark, snow-pocked sky.