Missing Mom

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Seeing the stricken look in my face, Lucille reached out impulsively to touch me. It was more of a rough poke of my shoulder than a touch, but I came close to clutching at Lucille’s callused fingers, just to hold them.

  Since Mom was gone, and Wally Szalla, no one touched me any longer. Somehow I had changed from being someone much-loved and not even quite realizing her good luck to being a sexless stick figure like Alyce Proxmire, luckless.

  Lucille nudged me again, more gently. “Nikki. It’s time for you to know.”

  Lucille glanced at Aunt Renate, absorbed in a cherry-bran muffin and oblivious to us. She had something to tell me in confidence, in a voice lowered and somber, for Lucille.

  Oh, I wasn’t sure if I wanted this! If I could bear any more news of my mother. From Aunt Tabitha, from Alyce Proxmire, from Brendan Dorsey I’d had surprises sprung on me. In Lucille Kovach’s moist glittering eyes I saw there would be more to come.

  “About Gwen. When we were girls…”

  And so Lucille told me, what I had never known, and was certain that Dad hadn’t known: when Mom had been eleven, and her mother Marta Kovach died, it hadn’t happened that Mom had not been allowed to see her mother when she’d returned home from school that day. The eleven-year-old girl had been the one to discover her mother, already dead. And Marta Kovach had not died of some “wasting-away disease” but by her own hand, having slashed both her forearms with a butcher knife.

  “See, it was kept secret. Only just a few people knew. It was such a terrible thing, that woman hurting herself so bad, in such a way, right in her bed, where Gwen was the one to find her. Gwen would never talk about it afterward only just around it, sort of, you know how she was, she’d ‘talk’ with me about it, sometimes. But nobody else. Her father brought her over to our house, that night. All he could do was drink, and disappear. Gwen stayed with us, she slept in my bed with me, it was O.K., we’d played together a lot and I always liked Gwen better than my own sisters, for sure. Momma here, she was partial to Gwen. ‘My best girl’ she called her. Nobody was all that surprised, what Marta did to herself, she’d always been heavy-hearted and kept to her bed a lot, and Gwen was the one to cook up supper for them when she was real little like nine or ten. When we lived together, we’d make meals together in the kitchen, Gwen and Momma and me, and that was fun. We did have fun! Later on it was sad, your father didn’t care for us, I guess. So we weren’t invited over to your house much, you were growing up. Gwen was kind of lonely there, she said. She missed a city neighborhood, sidewalks and more people. I mean, she had friends, and she had Jon’s family. But she was lonely for us, she said. I told her, like I told Momma, that’s how it is sometimes, it’s no point in getting mad at anybody. In families, these things happen. The Eatons are a class of people in a ‘whole different ballpark’ as the saying goes. Gwen and I were girls together, though, and we never forgot. We helped each other lots of times. The things in my life, Jesus!—Gwen was the one I turned to, for sure. Your dad never knew, he’d have been madder’n hell, Gwen lent me money lots of times. It was money like twenty-five dollars, fifty dollars, not a whole lot but it saved my life more than once. Jon never knew because it was money Gwen made selling her knit things and crafts, like at those fairs at the mall. When I tried to pay her back, she wouldn’t take it. ‘You have a harder life than I do, Lucy,’ Gwen always said, ‘you have to work. I’m just a housewife.’ When Gwen was still a girl, her dream was to be married and have her own house. And she’d be so safe in that house! Except, sometimes she’d be sad and say, ‘Oh maybe it’s wrong for me to have children, Lucy. Maybe there are bad genes in me, I shouldn’t pass on.’ Because it wasn’t just her mother Marta who was so troubled in her mind, it was Gwen’s father, too, but he never turned against himself in such a way, or anybody else, it was more like Jacob Kovach stayed so remote, and drank himself to death. But I said, “Hell, Gwen, I wouldn’t let nothing stop me. And I wouldn’t, neither. I had my own kids, and they turned out O.K. I told Gwen say God has some plan, it’s a weird plan that wouldn’t make any sense to us, but it makes sense to God, so if there’s this guy comes along who wants to marry you, and wants to have children with you, just the fact he shows up, you don’t even have to love him like in the movies, that’s what God has planned for you. See?’ And Gwen thought about that, and must’ve agreed because that was how it was, I think. Exactly.”

  Lucille smiled, pleased with herself. By this time Aunt Renate had dozed off in her chintz easy chair. Her head was lolling in a way painful to observe so Lucille adjusted a pillow behind it. With fussy tenderness she wiped muffin crumbs from her mother’s collapsed mouth and brushed them from her knees. Saying, if her mother woke up suddenly not knowing where she was, and her glasses falling down her nose, she’d see the crumbs and panic thinking they were ants.

  “Momma’s got this thing about ants, scared to death of them and it’s getting worse. Out home, trifles never fazed her.”

  We left Hedwig House together. We talked a while longer in the parking lot where Lucille immediately lit a Camel. I was feeling weak, dazed. I was feeling light-headed from the sudden fresh air, that made my eyes water. Lucille gave me a wadded tissue, to wipe my face.

  “So, Nikki. This past year, it’s been pretty shitty, eh.”

  Pretty shitty. I suppose, yes. You could say so. There was a succinct sort of eloquence in Lucille’s phrase.

  “Well. I don’t know. I’m missing Mom, yes. But…”

  “Living in Gwen’s house. Wearing her things and baking what she used to bake. Her cat, and seeing her people. You think that’s a good idea, eh.”

  This wasn’t a question. Lucille wasn’t challenging me. She was brash and pushy and yet, like all the Kovachs, most of whom had not graduated from high school, she would defer to Clare and me, because we’d “gone away” to college. She said, exhaling smoke in a massive cloud, “Well, it’s your way, Nikki. There’s others, worse.”

  I was wiping something sticky from my nose. Tactfully, Lucille seemed not to notice.

  “It’s nice of you to visit Momma. She’s always complaining nobody visits her but she forgets, those who do. By the next day she forgets. She’ll be eighty-eight next month. She’s a tough old girl, for sure. Like I was saying, there’s times she surprises us, the things she remembers. It’s like her brain is some kind of sponge, you squeeze it and the damnest things come out. Like, things I did when I was a little girl. Things I said. The kind of cereal I liked—‘Cream of Wheat.’ Things like that, nobody else would know or care about. That, when Momma is gone, go with her.”

  “Aunt Renate seems happy…”

  Lucille laughed harshly. “Bullshit. ‘Happy’ is a word people say around places like this, it makes them feel better. Being Momma’s age is shit, and half the time it’s actual shit. If you’re not sitting in it, your roommate is.”

  I couldn’t reply to this! Lucille was nudging me to laugh, she’d intended to shock me.

  “See, when your mother died, it was so awful ’cause Gwen died before her time. Gwen died way too young. Nobody was ready for that, or could have been. Like”—Lucille snapped her fingers—“that. So you are spared what my sisters and I are going through, with Momma. There is that to consider. Where Gwen is, there isn’t any pain. The pain is back here, like with you. See what I’m saying? Missing your mom can be a place to hide, see? Like that house. Like a cave. After a while, it’s time you come back out.”

  Lucille had more to say but was distracted by a dark-skinned Hedwig House attendant in a green uniform, carrying trash to a Dumpster.

  “Rigger! You tryin’ to ignore me?”

  Lucille called to the young man in her brash bugle voice, hands on her hips. The lizard-jacket was pushed open by her big, billowing T-shirt breasts. It seemed she and the young man knew each other, some way.

  “Naw, Lu-cille. You know better.”

  “It looks that way. C’mon here, meet my girl cousin Nikki.”

  “Naw, Lu-cill
e. Can’t waste no more time today, I’ll get my ass kicked.”

  “Get your ass here, man. You need to meet this girl.”

  “I said, ma’am I can’t.”

  Rigger laughed like one being tickled. Shook his head that was braided spikes. He carried himself with the swaggering aplomb of a black rap performer. He was thirty years younger than Lucille Kovach and good-looking and sexy in even the grungy green uniform and you could see that he liked it just fine that two white women were watching him perform though all he did was shoulder cumbersome trash bags into a foul-smelling Dumpster and trot back to the rear entrance of Hedwig House where all the residents were elderly Caucasian females. Lucille brayed after him, “Snubbin’ me, Rigs, next time I’m gonna snub you.” Rigger waved a hand at us in farewell, possibly it was meant to signal genuine regret.

  Lucille was revved-up, laughing. Walked me to my car where she gave me a hard, quick hug that might have cracked my ribs except I was wearing a down jacket. “Some night, girl! I’m gonna swing around to your house and pick you up. There’s this great place out on Route Eighteen, halfway to Malvern, Zodiac? You never heard of Zodiac? There’s male strippers, Thursday nights. Fridays, it’s a wild singles scene. You come with whoever you want to and you dance with whoever you want to. Disco like the seventies. Even strobe lights. It’s a free, fun scene. See what I’m saying? Good-lookin’ girl like you, it’s your scene. For sure, you won’t run into any Eatons there.”

  secrets

  That afternoon, I returned to the attic.

  That afternoon, I resolved to “sort through” the attic.

  It was the last region of Mom’s house that I could bring myself to explore. Though I’d done a poor job of sorting-through other rooms at least I’d made the effort.

  The attic was a dimly lighted chill place. When I’d accompanied Mom up here, stashing away things “not good enough to use but too good to throw away, just yet” it had seemed to be a warmer place, with better lighting.

  I left the door to the stairs open, that warm air might rise and make the attic more hospitable. And so came Smoky in my wake, pussy-footing in places too cramped for me.

  Baby buggy. Baby clothes. A shadeless brass floor lamp, I realized I had not seen in years. There were winter clothes in garment bags, there were boots in a sturdy cardboard box festooned with cobwebs. My breath steamed faintly. Smoky leapt atop a stack of boxes, to paw wildly at a mass of desiccated insect corpses in cobwebs hanging from the low-beamed ceiling like stalactites.

  The attic had been Mom’s region. Dad had rarely ventured into it. Clare and me, never. Yet so many of our outgrown/cast-off things were stored away here, clothes, school yearbooks, report cards, stuffed animals and dolls, it was as if we’d been here all along, without knowing.

  Things not good enough to use but too good to throw away, just yet.

  This had been Mom’s principle of accumulation, not only in the attic but everywhere in our house.

  In our lives.

  “Oh, Smoky. You’re driving me crazy, will you stop.”

  The burly gray cat was turning in circles, not very gracefully. A swath of cobwebbed insect husks had caught on his stubby tail and in a mild panic he was swatting vigorously at it.

  I wished that Clare was with me. I hated my sister, that she had abandoned me in my grief.

  Our grief, it was. It should have been!

  No: my deepest wish was that Mom was with me. I’d rarely ventured into this attic except in her company. As a girl, as a child. I’d rarely ventured anywhere except in Mom’s company.

  It seemed wrong, now. To be alone.

  It seemed unnatural, a mistake. Alone, at the age of thirteen. I mean, thirty-two. (Thirty-two? When had that happened?) Except for a cat that more resembled a comical-stuffed cat, a child’s idea of a cat, than an actual, adult animal.

  What had Lucille Kovach told me: It’s your way, Nikki. There’s others, worse.

  Damn, I wished I’d hugged Lucille back, hard as she’d hugged me. Should’ve shared a cigarette with her. Should’ve acted more friendly, flirty, with Rigger. It had all happened so quickly, I’d been dazed and unwieldy.

  Time to come back out.

  But where?

  Against one of the raw, unfinished attic walls were stacks of cardboard boxes. Some of these were marked in crayon with dates—1975–76, 1981–85—but most were unmarked, mysterious. Inside were not-very-mysterious things: postcards, birthday and Christmas cards, a few handwritten letters. Startling to see my own handwriting, on a postcard sent from Santa Fe, May 1993. Dear Mom and Dad, Is it beautiful here! But windy & the altitude makes me breathless. Sorry I’ve been out of touch, I am pretty much O.K. & will call soon I promise. Nikki.

  Unbelievably, I hadn’t even signed Love.

  I felt a stab of dismay, disgust. Not even to have signed Love to my parents…

  I’d been twenty at the time. In some long-forgotten phase of being hurt, angry. Complaining to the guy I’d been traveling with my parents were O.K. but mostly hadn’t a clue who I was. I guess I must have thought Mom and Dad would live forever, there’d be plenty of time to make up.

  My impulse was to tear the card into tiny pieces. Instead I replaced it in the box with the others, Mom had so carefully preserved.

  I thought of elderly Aunt Renate, who’d once been a strong, stout woman and was now diminished so you’d never guess what her will had been, her soul. What Lucille had said of her, remembering the damndest things. It was the fate of mothers, to remember. What nobody else would know or care about. That, when they are gone, goes with them.

  In the attic where the ceiling pressed low like a skull that has shrunk I searched for another hour and a half, before I found what I’d been looking for.

  It was in a sewing box covered in a lavender Laura Ashley print. When I lifted the box to open it, a swath of sticky cobwebs came with it and an agitated spider ran over my wrist.

  Beneath spools of thread, loose buttons, needles, safety pins there was a partition that slid open, and inside this, partly hidden by more sewing supplies, were packets of letters: Brendan Dorsey’s letters to Gwen Kovach, she’d never returned as he’d requested; and Gwen Kovach’s letters to Brendan Dorsey, he’d returned in a manila envelope with the initials G.K. in black ink on the front.

  G.K.! As if Gwen would have needed to be informed whose letters these were, and for whom they were intended.

  I tried not to hate him. He’d been only eighteen, maybe nineteen at the time. He had not meant to be cruel.

  My heart was beating rapidly and lightly, like the wings of a small, fluttering bird. I knew that this was forbidden, I had sudden access to my mother’s secret life. I would take the sewing box downstairs with me like a trophy.

  I stumbled to leave. I switched off the attic light. As I was about to close the door, Smoky bounded past me, stubby tail switching.

  I cleared a place at the dining room table. I was very excited by this time. My fingers were strangely cold. They were numb, spreading out Brendan Dorsey’s handwritten letter, on a single sheet of plain white paper, of March 7, 1966.

  It was Brendan’s last letter to Gwen, apparently. There was no return address. His handwriting was craggy and slanting, as if he’d been writing quickly.

  Dear Gwen—

  I am sorry to be writing like this but there is no other way. I could not tell you the other night, you did not seem to hear me.

  I am shocked and saddened by what you have revealed to me. I did not let on at the time, I did not know how to speak. Since then, I have

  Because of your mother you “have no faith in God.” I spoke to Father Gorran at our church, he was upset to hear this. (I did not tell him the name of my friend who had said these words, of course!)

  How many children have lost their mothers, and their fathers, throughout History. How many human beings have weathered such storms. Your mother, you told me, died “in her own bed” and “at peace” after 18 months of illness, but onl
y just think of worse suffering, and a child losing her parents at an age younger than you were. Father Gorran says that despair is the most deadly of the sins against God because it is a sin “against creation” and is the sin not to be forgiven.

  Just to have faith in “human love” is not enough. The human race is fallen. Only through our Savior Jesus Christ is the human race SAVED.

  I am not saying these things, because it is time for me to leave Mt. Ephraim. In fact I am hurt, that you would think such a thing of me. I find it hard to forgive you, Gwen. To turn against me even as you say you love me. You will “never stop loving me” yet you doubt my sincerity in this.

  It is not just your lack of faith but other differences between us. I was confused and mistaken in our friendship. I have confessed my part. I was very responsible being older than you, and so much in love with you, truly it was the case I was not “thinking straight.” This matter of purity and celibacy is harder for men. I am grateful that no one in my family will know. I have been given penance for my mistakes and sins by my confessor and am grateful that this error in my life is behind me. I hope the same is true for you, too.

  Please do not write to me again, Gwen. I am returning your letters and cards here. Please do not call me. I vow to always love you, as a sister. I will pray for your soul. But I will not see you, and ask you to honor this. It is all but certain, I will enter the seminary after college. My mother has long understood that I have a vocation and my life will be dedicated to serving God. I pray that my life from now on will be good, with no more secrets!