Missing Mom

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Yes Clare: sex is terrific between Wally Szalla and me. You can imagine!

  No Clare: because I sleep with Wally and have been sleeping with Wally for more months than I care to tabulate on the fingers of both hands it does not mean that the man does not respect me. It does not mean that the man will never marry me.

  Don’t you judge us, Clare: you don’t know Wally Szalla. You don’t even know me.

  When I woke, the bathwater was tepid. It was already past midnight. Hurriedly I stumbled from the ungainly old bathtub and toweled myself dry. The stippled-red claw marks on my thighs smarted. I was surprised to see such clusters of scratches. Some were old, and nearly healed; others were fresh. When Wally had first noticed a few days ago, he’d reacted with alarm: “My God, Nikki, did I somehow do this?” and I’d laughed at him, and kissed his mouth. Telling him that yes in a way he had, but not directly.

  “bearer of bad news”

  There’d been a time. Such a sweet time. When Mom and I left secret messages for each other around the house.

  I LUV U in cake frosting. I LUV U 2! in toothpaste.

  Naughty Nikki daring to squirt Dad’s shaving cream onto a mirror knowing that Mom would find it first, not Dad. MRS H IS TAKING US TO THE MALL BE BACK BY 6. U-KNOW-WHO.

  Valentines bought at flea markets. Old used scenic-sights postcards scribbled over in strangers’ handwriting. Tiny plastic bunnies, ducklings, Cracker Jack whistles attached to pieces of cardboard: 4 U from ME. Beads spelling out CRAZZE 4 U. A photo clipped from a magazine of a herd of white-tailed deer including fawns gazing pensively at the camera—DEER NIKKI COME PLAY!!! A Chinese fortune inside one of Mom’s herbal tea packets, ingeniously inserted: LOOK FOR THE SLIVER LINING. Homemade cards for birthdays, Easter, Halloween, Ground Hog’s Day. More valentines. Mom’s flower beds were great places to leave messages for her since only Mom would find them there, part-covered by loose dirt or leaves. Also Mom’s sewing machine, kitchen cupboards, bureau drawers. Mom left messages for me on and beneath my pillow, in my textbooks (where I’d discover them in school), inside my socks (I’d discover when I put my socks on). NIKKI PLEASE PICK UP YOUR ROOM PLEASE PLEASE U-KNOW-WHO. And clever Nikki responded PICK UP MY ROOM & take where? PLEASE INFORM! U-KNOW-WHO.

  There were messages spelled out in jelly beans—and lima beans—on the kitchen table KISSKISS! There were messages coiled about the collars of Miranda and Suzie-Q., our cats of the time. Some of the messages were practical exchanges of information but most were plain silly. Most, I’ve long forgotten.

  Like most of what Mom and I talked about, all those years.

  For such a long dreamy time it seemed, I’d been a little girl. And then, a girl. Eleven, twelve years old. When I was in middle school, Mom had been in her thirties. She’d looked young as a girl herself, running around in jeans, shorts, T-shirts and sneakers, her hair tied back in a ponytail or frizzed in a windblown halo about her head.

  Before the days when Gwen Eaton helped senior citizens navigate the pool at the Y, she’d taken us swimming at Wolf’s Head Lake summer afternoons. (Dad hadn’t cared for swimming, and especially not for the child-centered boisterousness of Wolf’s Head Lake.) While other mothers sunbathed, or sat gossiping beneath beach umbrellas, Mom had taught Clare and me to swim, dive. In the murky lake water Gwen Eaton had swum quick and lithe as a fish.

  Yes you can do it! Mom would cry.

  Oh yes you can.

  Mostly, that turned out to be true. I think.

  I was jealous of Mom. Dad complained of “open house” on Saturdays when neighbors and women friends dropped by to see Gwen, but he hadn’t any idea how busy weekdays could be. A rap on the kitchen screen door, and before anyone invites her inside, there’s a woman poking her head in calling: “Gwe-en? You home?”

  I’d have said, “No! Nobody’s home!” or, more inspired, “Yes! We’re home but we’ve got Rocky Mountain speckled fever. You know, that’s so contagious.”

  But Mom never hid away. Even if she wasn’t feeling well, or in one of her rare “blue moods” (Mom attributed merely to “cramps”—“migraine”—“a touch of the flu.”) Always she’d hurry out to greet whoever it was who’d barged in, smiling and gracious and ready with Gwen Eaton’s perky signature remark: “Why! You’re looking good.”

  That summer, when I was twelve years old. Idly pedaling my bicycle along Deer Creek Drive into the cul-de-sac Deer Creek Circle, and back. Lazy figure-eights in the midsummer sun. So bored! Maybe I’d pedal over to see if Ruthie Haber was home…Just then I happened to see an unfamiliar vehicle pull up to park in front of our house. It was larger than a car, possibly a minivan. Yet it didn’t look like a delivery or service vehicle. From a half-block away I saw a man (maybe in a uniform? maybe not) get out of the vehicle and check the address, walk to the front door and ring the bell. Anyone who knew us would have gone to the side door, this was a sign the man was a stranger or anyway no one accustomed to visiting our house. I knew that Mom was inside, and I knew that Mom was alone. I wasn’t really interested but I waited long enough to see if Mom would answer the door, and she did; then I bicycled over to Ruthie’s house a few blocks away, but Ruthie wasn’t home, only just Ruthie’s mom who liked me, and was looking lonely, so I was stuck with Mrs. Haber until a sudden panic came over me, this weird conviction passing through my head swift as lightning He has come for her. It was all a mistake, that Mom married Dad and had Clare and me. We will never see Mom again because we did not deserve her. That summer I’d been reading science fiction novels by Philip K. Dick that were both bizarre and matter-of-fact, about alternate universes, time dimensions in which for instance your twin who’d died when you were born is alive but you are dead; time dimensions that were like gloves pulled inside-out. You know that there is an “inside” to things normally only seen from the “outside” but you never think about it. And if you do, it can be scary.

  I got away from Mrs. Haber, and bicycled back home, and saw that the vehicle was gone from the curb, and my heart was beating hard by this point, and I’d broken out into a cold sweat. I let my bike fall in the driveway and ran into the house, through the screen door and into the kitchen (no tinkling bells on the door yet), and there was blue-eyed long-haired snowy-white Miranda blinking at me in alarm, from her perch atop the refrigerator. “Mom? Mom?” I seemed to know Mom is gone, this is my fault for leaving her even as I knew it could not be so, my mother would never leave us, of course Mom would never leave us because she loved us, because she was Mom; and I heard a loud buzzing sort of hum that meant Mom, Mom on the steps from the basement, she’d been ironing in the basement and was only just now coming upstairs carrying an armload of ironed shirts, and seeing me so frazzled and sweaty she asked what on earth was wrong, and I told her nothing, nothing was wrong, except who’d been that man who had rung the doorbell about fifteen minutes ago, a man who’d driven up in a minivan?—and Mom blinked and smiled at me as if perplexed, seeming not to know what I was talking about. Her face was round and innocent as a full moon. Her eyes were greeny-amber, and her hair looked windblown, in her brushed-back-behind-the-ears style.

  “A man, Nikki? What man?”

  “Wasn’t there a man, just now? He rang the doorbell…”

  With warm fingers Mom brushed my sticky hair out of my forehead, and laughed at me. Now she remembered: “The electric meter man, you must mean. He’s come, and gone.”

  I felt so silly: the electric meter man!

  Of course, that’s all it was. That’s all it could have been. The electric meter man. Come to 43 Deer Creek Drive to check the meter, and gone.

  A man’s voice, abrupt and jarring.

  “Ma’am? Hello? Is anyone inside?”

  Through slats in the dusty venetian blind I saw him outside, on the front stoop, only a few yards from where I was crouched in a mounting panic. This had to be a stranger. A neighbor would have called me by name, having seen my car at the curb. A relative would have walked inside uninvited calling Hey Nikki?
You here?

  There was something familiar about the man: stocky-shouldered, with a crown of thick hair erect as a porcupine’s quills. I couldn’t see his face, except to know that he had an olive-dark skin, and he was wearing dark glasses. On this warm muggy day in late June he was wearing a sport coat that fitted his shoulders tightly but hung loose at the small of his back, of some vague dull color like eroded stone. His manner was both aggressive and nervous. He frowned and gnawed at his lower lip like a man arguing with himself, and losing the argument.

  I cringed as he rang the doorbell again. A churchy chime-sound, meant to be musical. “Ma’am? Mt. Ephraim Police. May I speak with you?”

  Police! I knew now why he looked familiar.

  He’d known that someone was in the house, and seemed to know it was a woman. He must have seen my car parked on the street, knew whose house this was. But I had a right to park there, didn’t I? I had a right to enter this house I’d inherited, didn’t I? The police officer’s own car, a stolid squarish unmarked sedan with tinted windows, was parked in the driveway. The venetian blind slipped from my fingers, making more noise than I’d wished for. I stepped back from the window hoping the officer hadn’t heard.

  An impulse came over me to hide. Barricade myself in the bathroom. Run up into the attic, or down into the basement. This man had no right to enter the house, had he? If I refused to acknowledge him wouldn’t he have to go away?

  It was mid-afternoon of a day that seemed to have begun a very long time ago. Yesterday, maybe. I’d returned to Mom’s house to continue sorting through her things. Since Clare was otherwise occupied, I’d come alone. For hours I’d been working in the basement and didn’t smell exactly fresh. My hair that was partly grown out, at the roots threaded with gray, needed shampooing but instead I’d covered it with a red-polka-dot scarf retrieved from the Good Will box in Mom’s bedroom, tied at the nape of my neck. When I’d thrown on clothes that morning the polka-dot scarf had looked funky and stylish in a down-low gypsy way but after hours in the basement it had become bedraggled like the rest of me. Without Clare around to sneer at me, what did it matter what I looked like? Nor was I scheduled to see Wally Szalla that night. My grimy tank top was slipping off one shoulder, my denim miniskirt was creased across my belly and buttocks. Somewhere I’d misplaced my shoes and was barefoot, my feet were filthy. I hadn’t dared to glance in a mirror for hours out of a fear of seeing exactly how I looked, no lipstick and oozing an oily sweat on my forehead and nose. This was the true Nikki, nothing like the show-offy glamour Nikki most people knew. The sensible thing would be to hide, and not just because I was frightened of a solitary male visitor when I hadn’t expected anyone to intrude upon me because no one should have known that I was here.

  I hadn’t told Clare that I’d be at the house today. The previous week I’d called her several times, left urgent messages asking how she was, asking her please to call me, I was worried about her. But Clare, being Clare, supremely self-absorbed and indifferent to my concern, hadn’t called back. Finally I called Ron Chisholm at Coldwell Electronics, managed to get past a protective female assistant with a plea that this was a “family issue,” and there came my brother-in-law on the line to assure me, in a voice somewhere between evasive and apologetic, that Clare had certainly meant to call me, but had been “caught up in the kids’ schedules” all this week.

  So that was it. I’d been worried about Clare’s health, and it was Mommy-Clare she’d retreated to, thumbing her nose at me.

  Careful not to sound ironic I said, “Oh. It’s the ‘crazed time,’ I guess?” and Ron said, “Is it! So much is happening at the kids’ schools, Lilja has events every day, and weekends, nothing like when we were kids.” I surmised that Clare hadn’t told her husband about her emotional collapse, the terrible things she’d revealed about her marriage, and she wouldn’t have wanted me to speak of her behind her back, even in sympathy. Instead, I asked if Clare had any plans to return to our mother’s house soon, or should I proceed alone? I’d asked the Beacon for a few days off. I didn’t mind working at the house alone. Ron said, relieved, “Nikki, if you can do it alone, I would be so grateful. As much or as little, anything you feel up to. The sooner we can place the house with a realtor, the better. And Clare hasn’t seemed to be herself lately…”

  I resisted the impulse to say, Oh. Is that the worst news, my sister not “herself”?

  On the front stoop, the plainclothed detective wasn’t about to go away. He’d heard the venetian blind clatter. He’d probably seen me. He was rapping on the door sharply. A curious thrill ran through me. This man doesn’t give up. I can’t shake him off easily.

  I’d felt that way about Wally Szalla, two years before. The way he’d pursued me. At the time, it always feels like fate.

  As the detective lifted his fist to knock again, I opened the door. “Yes? What do you want?” The man’s eyes widened at the sight of me, in a kind of startled pity. Maybe I was part-naked, or my face was smeared with grime, I was too tired to care. Damned if I would invite him inside.

  He was showing me his shiny police badge, like something on TV. Identifying himself, Detective Ross Strabane, hoped I remembered him, wanted just a few minutes of my time. Awkwardly, he extended his hand. As if I would want to shake his hand! Every memory associated with this man was hateful to me.

  I stepped back into the vestibule. My knees were trembling. Ma’am he was calling me. Ms. Eaton. Nicole? I saw his lips move, he was speaking to me. I made no attempt to decipher his words. There was a roaring in my ears through which I heard only hissing syllables.

  Go away! Go away I hate you.

  Mom nudged me. Of course, I knew better.

  “Come inside, I guess. This way.”

  Blindly I walked before Strabane, into the living room. I could feel his laser eyes on me: my sweat-stained tank top, the ridiculous miniskirt puckered at the crack in my buttocks, my long thin too-pale legs and filthy feet. At least, the furniture in this room had been rearranged, by me, more or less as it had been in my parents’ time. Almost, except for the partly rolled-up carpet, and a flurry of dust-mice stirred by our feet, you might mistake this for a normal living room in a Deer Creek Acres ranch house.

  Belatedly I saw that Clare’s Post-its were still prominent: red, yellow, green on selected items of furniture.

  “Anywhere. Please sit.”

  I sank into an easy chair, not very gracefully. Strabane adjusted an upended cushion, and sat on a sofa facing me. There was a coffee table between us, heaped with family photo albums, Mom’s scrapbooks and envelopes crammed with snaphots dating back to the 1960s.

  “My sister and I are clearing out the house. It will have to be sold, no one lives here now.” I laughed, wiping at my face. “My mom never threw away a thing. There’s a little portfolio there, a dozen snapshots from thirty years back, ‘Fluffy’s Last Days.’ An orange tiger cat, I’d never known.”

  This information seemed to come from a long distance. My voice was reedy and nasal and wavering. Strabane was trying to smile, as if to put me at ease. “Your mother lived in this house a long time, Ms. Eaton?”

  “With my dad, twenty-seven years. Herself, longer.”

  But Strabane already knew that, probably. I had the uneasy idea that he knew things about me, my family, and what had happened to my mother on the final day of her life, that I would never know.

  He was peering at me, frowning as he removed his dark glasses and shoved them into a coat pocket. Asking how I was, how my sister was, how we were “getting along.” My answers were monosyllables, mumbled. My memory of Ross Strabane was returning painfully. It was like sensation returning, where you’d had Novocain. The man was familiar to me as a blood relative I’d known long ago, someone I’d known for too long, who’d brought me cruel, crude news. I’d been exhausted by him and I had not wanted to see him again for between us there was a terrible knowledge, I could not forgive him for this knowledge. There seemed a kind of further insult, Str
abane’s jaws were covered in a bristly dark stubble, the start of a beard! It wasn’t a good idea, the beard.

  Strabane’s hair was now trimmed razor-short at the sides and back to erupt in a cascade of quills across the crown of his head. And his eyes! I resented those eyes.

  I wiped my face on the front of my tank top, where it left a smear of greasy damp. Beneath this garment, my breasts were naked and loose and tender, as if they’d been roughly squeezed. I was remembering now, at the hearing in the courthouse when I’d given my testimony, Strabane had watched me fixedly. I’d tried not to look at him. I’d tried not to look at Wally Szalla at the back of the room. Or at Clare, my brother-in-law, any of my relatives. Especially I had tried not to look at the man in the orange jumpsuit, “in custody” and charged with my mother’s murder. I’d tried to focus on the prosecuting attorney who was formally questioning me, leading me across a tightrope above an abyss…Seeing Strabane, I was back in the courtroom. A rivulet of sweat slithered down the side of my face.

  Strabane cleared his throat, uneasily. Trying to smile, but not very convincingly. “I’m afraid I have some bad news, Nicole. There is probably a call on your answering machine, at home. The prosecutor’s office…”

  “Last night, I stayed here. I didn’t go home. I haven’t checked my calls for a while, officer.”

  I spoke quickly, to defer what Strabane had to tell me.

  It occurred to me: everyone tries this. With homicide detectives, you bet. “I’d left plenty of food and water for my cat, before I came here. I mean, I do that automatically. Whether I stay away somewhere overnight, or not.” I paused, my heart was beating rapidly as if this were a flirtation suddenly: but who was this man? and where were we, that looked familiar as a much-dreamt dream, the kind you can’t remember? “I became so tired, yesterday. I didn’t mean to sleep so long. I lay down on my old bed, my bed-I’d-had-as-a-girl, Mom kept my room as a guest room, about the most frequent guest in that room was me. When I woke it was so late, it only seemed practical to stay overnight. But I’ll be back in Chautauqua Falls tonight, I think. I’ll pick up my calls then. Actually, I can pick them up from my cell phone but—”