The Gallery of Lost Species (2 page)

In Ottawa, my father got a job as a janitor in the public service. They purchased a house in Mechanicsville, a blue-collar neighbourhood consisting of small brick houses occupied by rail yard workers and riff-raff, bordered by the river, the Transitway, and the train tracks. Three months later, Viv was born.

“Your papa wouldn't take me to Montreal, so he brought the Saint-Henri slums to me!” Constance repeatedly told us.

“You call it
délabré,
but this area has
potential,
Constance,” our father asserted when she complained about the bums in the alleys, the halfway houses, and the parks littered with needles.

Mechanicsville was below her. Her haughty airs made it clear that she felt she was meant for something else, something grand.

People used to ask if she was a ballerina. When the neighbourhood housewives gossiped about her foreignness, so as not to appear inadequate she'd say yes, she was a retired soloist from the Bolshoi Ballet. It was a story she wore like armour.

I was born the afternoon following Vivienne's inaugural pageant, a homely, five-pound preemie who was an unwelcome diversion from my sister's victory. I came out by emergency C-section, inflicting an ugly scar on my mother's taut stomach, which distressed her so much she didn't notice I couldn't hear.

An ear infection left me deaf for my first six months. I'd never be able to carry a tune. But Vivienne was my parents' salvation. If I were them, she'd have been my favourite too. Vivienne could dance, sing, and act. Vivienne could draw and paint. Vivienne was beautiful and smart and good. Vivienne was everything I wasn't.

Like the trophy halls of high school, my sister's crowns and sashes were displayed in cases lining our living room walls. The kitchen pantry, which should have contained preserves, was stocked instead with Viv's ruffly dresses, suspended from ropes like extravagant cheerleading pompoms. Sequined shoes cast prisms along the dried goods shelves, and the broom closet held accessories and props—wands, capes, parasols, and endless bins of masks and ribbons.

Our mother collected mirrors from thrift stores and fastened them to my sister's bedroom wall from floor to ceiling. Opening Viv's door, you'd see your broken reflection scattered and distorted like faces in a funhouse. On Con's instruction, across the mirrors, our father attached a barre for Viv's warm-ups. The living room furniture was pushed permanently against the walls so my sister could rehearse her step sequences. It always seemed as if we were in the middle of relocating.

Viv participated in contests in nearby towns and then farther afield, across the provinces, where she competed at regional and national levels. Mostly the pageants were held in community centres, bingo halls, school gyms, and church basements.

I rarely went along. Constance said my appearance detracted from my sister's portfolio. She was ruthless when it came to winning. But she was no different from the other mothers feeding their girls Pixy Stix—a powdered sugar candy in a drinking straw—and Jolt cola backstage, to gain advantage over their adversaries like Olympic dopers.

I wanted to look like Viv. When she had a professional body wave done on her hair, I requested one too. Con wouldn't pay the exorbitant rate twice over, so she gave me a home perm. Instead of voluminous, syrupy curls like my sister's, my black hair came out as a tightly crimped poodle's mane. When my mother waxed the blond peach fuzz off Viv's legs, I stole my father's razor and did the same on my arms, only to have the hair grow back coarser, darker. I begged for hoops in my ears like Vivienne's, but the piercings infected my lobes, which expanded like cherries. I couldn't wear earrings for years.

The older I got, the less I envied my sister. The tanner spray and the eyebrow tweezing burned her skin. The dyeing of eyelashes, which Constance accomplished with Q-tips, made her eyes water uncontrollably as the falsies were applied with glue. Often Viv snagged an acrylic nail on her costume, tearing off the real fingernail beneath it in the process. Then there was the dental flipper, a removable partial denture that caused Viv so much pain she couldn't chew for days after a show.

My sister wasn't one for complaining, though. She even took to slapping herself in the face before heading out to competitions, to get the blood flowing. Eventually, when she came home, I asked her why she persisted with the pageanting.

“If I play along, I can do what I want. If I don't, she'll destroy me,” she replied, pulling out her fake teeth and tossing the apparatus in the trash. “Whoops, I seem to have lost my flipper,” she added smugly, and walked off.

Of the two of us, I was the pragmatic one. Knowing there would be consequences, I fished the flipper out, rinsed it off, and slipped it back into its protective carrying case in the medicine cabinet. It had cost our father two weeks' salary, after all.

TWO

W
HAT
V
IV MEANT BY
doing what she wanted was sketching and painting like Henry, and accompanying us on excursions during her downtime from lessons and contests.

“I am
not
bound by the sun!” she'd say, mocking our father in his fondness for trite expressions. “There's
no
such thing as bad weather, just bad clothing. We Walkers were born to walk!”

He'd tell us this when we were knee-deep in snow, goading him to finish his charcoal studies of the Gatineau Hills so we could go for hot chocolate at the chip wagon in Hull. “Constance! We've been to Hull and back!” was his standard greeting when we returned home, and sometimes she was there and sometimes she wasn't.

Our father drew mostly in winter. Bundled in multiple layers, we plodded after him in our cumbersome second-hand snowshoes, making slow progress along the escarpment while he lectured us on historical treks Up North, pausing now and then to blow his nose and to make sure we were still there.

Henry fantasized about taking us on a northern expedition.
Up North,
he'd say, as though it were a precise, cosmopolitan location like Milan. “One day we'll go Up North, you two!” His voice resonated through the evergreens. “This is practice for the Big Trip!”

Up North was the only place we'd ever see white in its purest form. He said we'd mine diamonds there for Constance. Our father was always on his way to finding a new life-altering site, an inner shrine, a revelation, although he never entirely found it.

All winter he made oil paintings consisting of overlapping slopes of white, none of which resembled his preliminary sketches. He worked in his “studio” behind the house, a poorly insulated shed with a west-facing window and a space heater plugged into an outlet that routinely emitted sparks.

He transported his zinc and titanium-white creations down into the basement to dry. Inhaling her cigarettes with half-closed eyes like a bored film star, our mother complained about the fumes. “Henri, you
keel
me with these chemicals!”

Once, Viv kicked her orange Nerf ball smack into a large canvas propped on a shelf, smearing the landscape beyond recognition. The ball left white circles on the concrete like fingerprints—marks that were still there years later when I pulled back the carpet, as I was clearing out the house.

Our father had worked on that painting for months. Viv was distraught. “You've improved it, Sport!” he said, tousling her hair and chucking the thing out onto our snowy porch, where it stayed till spring thaw.

When he wasn't painting, my father called himself the Collector of Useless Things.

He taught me to categorize paint tubes and brushes before I could walk. He encouraged me to checklist stuffed animals and alphabetize and colour-code my books. He bought me tackle boxes to organize shells and buttons and my mother's perfume bottles, which he retrieved from the bathroom garbage—Christian Dior, Guerlain, Givenchy—ornate glass decorated with roses and doves from which I'd sniff the dregs of floral essences.

His lifelong obsession wasn't with relics themselves, which got dusty and took up space. The fixation was with the search for the exemplary paperweight or the valuable Coney Island postcard. While Constance and Viv were off at dance class or stage coaching or vocals, these quests kept him going. My father always brought me along. He said I was endowed with special artifact-finding powers, when all I did was follow him around without discovering anything extraordinary.

It was impressive the way he persevered. Saturdays were devoted to garage sale hopping, often in the rain. For hours Henry sifted through the neighbourhood's failed projects, foraging for treasures amongst soggy boxes of wool and bamboo needles, woodworking tools, lozenges of coloured glass, and fitness paraphernalia. Trappings nobody wanted to be reminded of because they were associated with a more hopeful time in their lives.

Sometimes we'd leave the city for drives on unexplored dirt roads, spending chilly mornings unscrewing antique doorknobs and hinges from tenantless farmhouses, and getting chased by dogs.

Once, we pursued a rainbow down one of those gritty stretches. I went in one direction and my father in another. When we met up again, he told me the rainbow ended on some railway tracks and that he'd walked right through it.

Then there were the estate sales, in houses like those from
The Young and the Restless,
which Viv and I watched with Constance after school. The hushed ambience, plush curtains, and locked doors thrilled me. Those sombre homes were where my father picked up his prized paperweights.

The times I watched him remove his collection from their compartmentalized boxes were enthralling. Cautiously, he would place the weights on the kitchen table with a sly smile, as if he'd crafted them himself. I remember one morning when he cooked up strawberries and bacon while I sat with my chin propped on the mint green Formica surface, gazing into these miniature universes as the sunlight moved across the room, changing what I saw.

How those swirls of colour, those flowers and animals, got inside the orbs, I couldn't figure out.

THREE

O
F THE FOUR OF US
, only Viv didn't have the compulsion to gather objects around her.

You'd think she'd have copied Constance, cluttering her vanity with makeup and costume jewellery, but outside the pageant world, my sister remained unadorned.

She ignored her shelves of trophies and her reams of rosette ribbons. Her room had minimal furnishings and lacked decoration other than the jagged mirrors and a dark mound of clothes at the foot of her bed. She didn't look into the mirrors and draped her sweatshirts over them when she wasn't practising at the barre. Regularly, I peered beneath the fabrics to examine myself, squeezing at the overhang of fat above my waist and striking poses to appear thinner.

Unlike Viv's spartan quarters, my room was jammed with books that Henry told me were important to my future education. I read before school and at night and whenever I could in between. I still didn't get through all the tomes, and the ones I did finish, I couldn't make sense of.

Novels, poetry, and theatre lined my closet and dresser drawers. I had the
Aeneid,
The Divine Comedy,
the
Decameron,
Paradise Lost,
and Shakespeare's collected works. I also had Russian novelists whose names I couldn't pronounce and dictionaries with old, marbled bindings.

I stacked volumes under my mattress and along the windowsill. Henry made me a chair from books and book steps leading up to my bed. The books were full of mould spores and I developed permanent respiratory problems that were alleviated by an inhaler.

Viv hardly read a thing. She breezed through her studies without trying, whereas the sole class I was any good at was English. When I won the school's Bookworm Contest, the teacher blew up a picture of my head and pasted it onto a worm's body that she fastened to the awards board in the hallway.

Henry picked us up from school that day. He was delighted by my accomplishment and carried my prize—an
Encyclopaedia Britannica
box set—to the parking lot. I felt weighed down by the heavy reference set as soon as I received it. I didn't want it in my room.

In the car, my father congratulated me with a thin A. A. Milne volume of
When We Were Very Young.

“Just what you need, another book,” Viv said.

“A 1924 first edition, and I found it
used!
Guess for how much!” He turned back to us, beaming.

“Ten bucks,” Viv replied, her voice flat.

“A dollar, can you believe it!”

“Neat. Thanks, Dad.” I turned the book over and pretended to study it diligently, not wanting to hurt his feelings.

The board cover, once a rich royal blue, had faded to drab grey. The linen was tattered and the pages folded and torn. The last bit of gilt lettering on the spine had worn off, leaving
When We Were.

“Nice job, little one,” Viv said, grabbing the book and flipping through it. When Henry pulled up to the house, she got out of the car and wandered toward the painting shed to replicate the drawings inside it.

When she wasn't pageanting, Viv drew. She inherited her artistic sensibilities from Henry, not from Constance, who didn't have a creative bone in her body unless you counted beautifying. Mostly Viv sketched birds in hollow trees and grassy beds whose shapes were barely distinguishable from the underbrush.

I went inside with my father, where he showed Con the encyclopedia set.

“About time you won something.” She turned to me with her hands full of meat loaf. “Out until dinner, Édith.” She was the only one to pronounce my name
ay-deet.

I made my way to the shed. I could hear Viv rambling to herself as she drew, imitating our ill-tempered mother berating her after a contest. “It's elbow, elbow, wrist, wrist, you
didn't wave
properly. You
blew
it!” I went back to the porch and sat in the rocker, hoping to be readmitted to the house early.