Missing Mom: A Novel

by Joyce Carol Oates

  I heard myself say, with a bright smile, “Well! It must be wonderful, Mr. Szalla, to pursue your dream as an adult.” Even as I spoke these innocuous words they sounded phony and trite, insincere and tossed-together as my conspicuous clothes which Clare was in the habit of calling (to my face as well as behind my back) “Nikki’s costumes.” Except Wally Szalla smiled happily and reached over, as if impulsively, to squeeze my hand. “Nikki, yes! That is what my life is about: pursuing my dreams in the hope that they will be others’ dreams, too.”

  His fingers closing over mine were warm. And strong.

  The interview ended. I was shaky from the strain but I was very happy. As I prepared to leave his apartment Wally Szalla hovered beside me smiling awkwardly and tamping down his unruly hair and finally he cleared his throat to ask if I was free that evening for dinner?

  “No,” I said. “I’m not free. But after I make a brief call on my cell phone, I will be.”

  Hours later we were still together. Still talking, or anyway Wally Szalla was still talking. He was gripping my hand on the tabletop between us and telling me that our meeting had been the strangest of his life.

  I asked him why.

  He said, staring at me, “Nikki, I think you know.”

  2.

  Ridiculous! Wally Szalla wasn’t my type.

  Not a man at whom, in the street, I’d have glanced at twice.

  Too old! Overweight, and losing his hair. No more glamour than Dad’s scruffy old moccasins.

  Another woman’s husband. And a father of three.

  “Clare, I am not ‘seeing’ a married man, who told you such a thing! I happened to interview Wally Szalla who’s the new owner of WCHF AM-FM, that’s all. We’ve become friends, you know I have lots of friends and this one happens to be separated from his wife and we’ve discovered that we have some interests in common. That’s all.”

  Clare spoke. At some length. I listened, until my face began to burn as if my sister had slapped me and my hand gripping the receiver began to shake. Even then, I was exceedingly polite. In the sweetest and most cordial voice you could imagine I said: “Wally Szalla is a remarkable man but there is nothing between us except friendship and in any case Wally is separated, there is nothing remotely ‘wrong’ in seeing him. You can tell Mom, too, in case she’s wondering.”

  Nikki? Can I see you tonight? I know it’s late and we didn’t plan for tonight but I didn’t go with Isabel and the children to visit my in-laws at Lake Placid after all and on the way back from the station I began to feel very lonely for you, Nikki, and I’m wondering if you are feeling lonely, too?

  He brought flowers—“Corny, but can’t help it.” He brought CDs, blues classics by Nina Simone, Billie Holiday, Bessie Smith. He brought aromatic New Age candles for me to light. He brought champagne. He brought delicious pre-roasted chickens from The Food Shoppe and he brought a clutch of those miniature books called “inspirational”: Joy of Everyday Life, 101 Reasons to Love, The Zen Path of Enlightenment: Poems of Solitude and Wisdom. Gravely he read aloud to me, holding a miniature book close to his face, like a character actor in a sweet, corny Hollywood film of the 1950s: William Bendix, Ernest Borgnine. “‘The song of the yellow oriole/echoes in the forest./Warm sun, gentle breeze,/willows green along the shore./The ox has no place to turn in the brambles.’”

  “The ox?”

  Wally frowned. “It’s a Zen concept, I think. Searching for the ‘ox’ is a spiritual quest. Or the ox is the physical body, to be overcome.”

  “But why an ox?”

  “Nikki, don’t be so literal. It doesn’t have to be an ox, I suppose, it could be, well—a bear, a deer. An elephant.”

  “Why’d we be hunting one of those? It seems so cumbersome, somehow.”

  There was something of Troy in my voice. It seemed to come naturally, teasing Wally Szalla when the man was trying to be serious.

  Wally said, exasperated, “Make it an oriole, then! The point is, Nikki, the philosophy of Zen Buddhism is now.”

  “Now what, Wally?”

  “Now what?”

  Wally laughed, as if baffled, and ran a hand through his hair, and allowed his eyes to glide up onto me as if he’d been holding back his warm, brown, liquidy gaze.

  By this time, exactly seventeen days since the interview, the two of us had some “history” between us, you could say. We had come pretty quickly to that point in a relationship between two people who essentially don’t know each other very well when they are beginning to think that they like each other a lot and are mildly dazed by this revelation as you’d be dazed to take your temperature and discover that you were running a fever of 102°F and yet you’d been feeling normal, or better than normal. It’s that stage when the two of you are still play-acting, a little.

  Wally was saying, in the serious voice of the interview, “What Zen Buddhism means, as I understand it, is that ‘now’ is the realization of how precious life is. The ordinary things of life. Not that an ox is ordinary for us, but maybe for them. These poems are from long ago, I think. And it isn’t an ox, as I said, it’s, well—all things we don’t notice, we’re in too much of a hurry.”

  I laughed, and stretched. I was feeling frankly sexy. “I’m not in any hurry, Mr. Szalla. I’m mellow, like a Siamese cat in a negligee.”

  Wally sputtered with laughter. He never knew what I might come out with and I felt to myself like a leggy girl skater out there on the ice, free to improvise with every eye on her.

  “You’re laughing at me, yes? You think I’m too old for this.”

  “For what? Zen Buddhism?”

  “For this. You know.”

  “Tell me: what do I ‘know’?”

  Wally laughed. His face was pleasantly flushed. Maybe he was thinking that, in Nikki Eaton, he had his kids again, the brash playfulness of adolescents when they adore you and wish you well and not the other, that hurts like hell. In the romantic-subdued lighting of my funky apartment, one of Wally’s Nina Simone CDs playing in the background, I had to concede that Wally Szalla didn’t look so middle-aged after all. In fact, with each sip of wine I was finding him more attractive, more my age and more my type.

  It wasn’t just Zen poems he’d brought me this evening. We’d shared a greasy roast chicken from The Food Shoppe, heated up in my lopsided oven, and German potato salad devoured out of the plastic container, and a loaf of Russian rye bread, and most of a bottle of Italian red wine that tasted as if it cost a little more than the “luxury” twelve-dollar wine with which I was more acquainted.

  Wally said ruefully, “This. Me falling in love with you, and you a little bitty skinny girl scarcely troubling to hide your scorn.”

  “Oh.”

  “Oh, what? Surely you aren’t surprised? Surely this isn’t exactly ‘breaking news’?”

  I was taken aback a little, I hadn’t expected this. My fingers made complicated by two-inch bright-polished nails I had to be overly conscious of, not wanting to crack the damned things, or chip off the polish I’d applied only that evening, these fingers fumbled for my wineglass on the carpet beside my bare twitchy toes. Again I murmured, “Oh!” as I nearly overturned the glass.

  Falling in love. Men didn’t say such things, usually. Or anyway not to me. Nor did I say such things to men. Usually. Falling in love was words from a blues song of the 1940s lamenting the fact, funky-funny but not to be taken seriously like lacy red tops with boxy shoulder pads, high-heeled sandals with leather straps that looped and tied around the ankles, disco hair. Falling in love: the punch line to a joke.

  “If you want me to leave now, Nikki, I understand.”

  Wally made a move as if about to lurch to his feet. (He’d half-sat, half-collapsed into a sling chair. It was more a trap than a chair and not intended for a tall, stocky male.) By an alarmed gesture I allowed him to know no! I didn’t want him to leave.

  “What you’ve said has surprised me, that’s all.” I smiled, eager to make a joke of it. “‘Little-bitty-skinn
y.’ That’s a compliment, I guess?”

  “And beautiful, Nikki. Mostly beautiful.”

  “Oh.”

  When I’d heard Wally’s footsteps on the stairs outside my apartment, earlier that night, I’d quickly removed my phone receiver from its hook. I’d turned off my cell phone and my computer. I’d lowered the lights for a suitably “romantic” atmosphere. (The first thing you saw, stepping into my low-ceilinged apartment, were elegant old lamps, both table and pedestal, with rose-tinted shades or gauzy rose-tinted fabrics wrapped about their shades. The second thing you saw might be satiny wall-hangings, or antique-looking mirrors framed in brass or ivory. Deep-cushioned plush velvet settees, chairs draped with afghans (knitted by Mom in rainbow colors), and attractive carpets from the remnant store covering the ruined hardwood floor. The lipstick-red plastic table I used for a desk, my computer and printer, shelves of books, were in my bedroom, facing a window with southern exposure. This back-bedroom area was my “real” self, the other the “feminine.” Most visitors never got beyond the “feminine.”) Knowing that Wally Szalla was imminent, I’d felt my heart beat and plunge about like a bird trapped inside my rib cage. I’d smiled at my reflection in a mirror: “Nikki! Lookin’ good.” Now I was feeling confused and wishing almost that I was alone, to think these things through. The presence of an actual man, only a few feet away, staring at me, was disconcerting.

  True, Wally Szalla and I had become “lovers”—we’d “had sex”—the kind of sex you’d call “promising”—still it was unexpected to hear Wally speak to me as if, suddenly, he wasn’t play-acting but sincere. In a halting voice he confided in me that his separation from his wife Isabel was “painful” for him; it had been Isabel’s idea, not his; though he’d come to think, since she’d asked him to move out of their house in May, three months before, that probably it was a good idea for them both. They had married too young, begun having babies too young. They’d been drifting apart for the past decade and needed to reassess their future: “If we have one.”

  Wally supposed that Isabel was right: he had a deeply flawed character. He was immature, irresponsible. He threw his money away on “harebrained hobbies”—“playthings”—like WCHF AM-FM; he neglected his serious business affairs, the myriad stocks and investments in Szalla family holdings that generated their real income. Wally was a “soft touch” who did favors for people who didn’t deserve them, he lent money too readily without charging interest. His very friendliness in public annoyed Isabel: the way he shook hands, vigorously and with a big smile, like a politician. Wally believed that he and Isabel loved each other but were no longer in love. Wally could live with that, he had his work, he had a complicated and rewarding life outside the marriage, but Isabel’s pride was hurt and (maybe) her vanity so she seemed always angry at him for something neither of them could help.

  “Call it change, time. ‘Fate.’”

  Wally fell silent. He wiped his eyes on his shirtsleeve. Instinctively I reached over to squeeze his hand. He gripped my hand in his, tightly.

  “And what about you, Nikki? You’ve told me so little about yourself.”

  What about Nikki! I sat very still, my mind struck blank.

  Men rarely asked me about myself. As if myself apart from the sexy-flirty female gazing at them with adoring listener’s eyes had not much existence. I was an ideal interviewer, asking questions of others. Frankly, I liked it that way. Nikki Eaton didn’t greatly interest me. She never had, as the younger and less personable of the Eaton sisters. I’d always accepted it that my parents loved Clare better than they loved me, or anyway recognized that Clare was so much more accomplished than I was, even when we were girls. It seemed so self-evident to me, I wasn’t even jealous. So now, Wally Szalla looking at me in that way of his, expecting me to confide in him as honestly as he’d confided in me, I could not speak. I could not confess that often I lay awake in the night wondering when I would be in love again, when I would have sex again, when I would have a “meaningful” relationship again, and sometimes I was tormented by these thoughts when I was in fact lying beside a warm slumbering male body.

  Finally I told Wally that what he’d said about himself was true of me, in a way. Being “separated.” Since high school I’d been involved with boys and men, I’d been engaged and almost-engaged and in love and out of love more times than I could count and right now you could say that I was separated: “From my past. Permanently.”

  “From your entire past? Or just—men?”

  “My past.”

  “But you have a very supportive family, Nikki, don’t you?”

  “I do?”

  “Well, your mother. People who know Gwen Eaton have told me so.”

  “‘People who know Gwen Eaton’—? Wally, who are these people?”

  Wally shrugged evasively. Of course, he had friends in Mt. Ephraim. He had friends, acquaintances, associates and “contacts” everywhere in the Chautauqua Valley, and beyond. He was a Szalla, and the Szallas knew everyone. Of course.

  I was made to feel like a small child who’d told a fib. Not an outright lie but something tiny and trivial, to make me blush.

  “Well. My mother is special, I suppose. She’s a terrific mom. One of those 1950s housewife-mothers who lives for her family, exclusively, hasn’t much life of her own, but she’s happy that way, or mostly. Now Dad has died and Clare and I are grown, Mom lives for the community, I guess. Her church, her friends. ‘Other people.’ She makes such a fuss over my work for the Beacon, you’d think that I was a best-selling novelist. She doesn’t know me, really. She never has. And what she knows, she doesn’t approve of. When Dad was alive I think she defended me against his disapproval but now that Dad is gone, and Mom is getting older, she’s becoming more concerned about what she calls my ‘future.’ If she learns about you—”

  Wally frowned. “‘Learns about me’—what?”

  “Well. That I’m seeing you. And you’re married.”

  Married. The word tasted sour in my mouth. I hated to be the one to utter it, as if in accusation.

  I wasn’t being altogether honest with Wally. (Are we ever honest with men with whom we’re “involved”?) By this time I had reason to surmise, from reproachful remarks of Clare’s, that Mom knew about Wally Szalla and me. Or knew something.

  “I won’t be married forever, Nikki. I’m fairly certain, Isabel and I are moving in that direction.”

  I wondered what this meant. What Wally meant it to mean, telling me. Still he was speaking in that somber, thoughtful voice, not at all affable, or playful. The corners of his mouth were downturned, ponderous. His eyes glistened. I had to suppose that divorce wasn’t his idea, either.

  “It’s just—I’ve been hurt, Nikki. My wife has hurt me with the things she has said, and my children…You met Troy, I mean you had a fleeting glimpse of Troy in action. His older sister Katy is even angrier. And Andrew, our oldest, who’s been flunking out at Colgate since he enrolled…They’ve made me feel as if everything I do is wrong, ridiculous somehow and pathetic. Mostly, I don’t feel that I’m real. Some people think the world isn’t real, other people aren’t real, but me, I wake up in the morning thinking, Is this me? and the guy I see in the mirror sure isn’t. If I could shave wearing a blindfold, I would. I’m afraid if I sneeze suddenly, I might disappear.”

  “Oh, sweetie. The size of you, you aren’t likely to disappear.”

  I laughed, Wally was being funny now. We were getting back on safer ground. I went to Wally, as he struggled to hoist himself up out of the sling chair, and we kissed. It wasn’t our first kiss but it felt like a first kiss, eager and awkward and wetter than you’d wish, like spaniels kissing. I slid my arms around Wally’s warm, solid torso and I pressed the side of my face against the front of his white cotton shirt, the top of my head snug against the bottom of Wally’s fleshy chin. I heard his heart beat slow, strong, certain, not rapid-fire like my own.

  “My ox.”

  “Hmmm?”

 
; “My ox.”

  By this time, well past midnight, the aromatic candles had mostly burnt down.

  How quickly your life can change: a day, an hour.

  And all the hours flowing from that, weeks and months. Years.

  Not until January 2002 did I dare to introduce Wally to Mom.

  Of course, by then Mom “knew.” Whatever Clare had been telling her, or ominously hinting. Why of course we haven’t seen much of Nikki lately, you know Nikki: doing her own thing. There was a network of female informants eager to tell Gwen any news of her wayward daughter living in Chautauqua Falls, but especially scandalous news. Gwen! You know I hate gossip, I hate to be the bearer of upsetting news but I think you should know, I mean in your place as Nikki’s mother I would certainly want to know, that Nikki is involved with this married man over in Chautauqua Falls, he has three children, he’s separated from his wife, he’s one of the Szallas, he’s twice Nikki’s age or anyway much older, his car is always parked outside her apartment and it’s there in the morning…Gwen? Did I upset you? Are you still there, Gwen?

  So I imagined. Probably, the reality was worse.

  On a clear, very cold, chalky-smelling winter day Wally and I drove to Mt. Ephraim, to take Mom out for an early dinner at the historic old inn on the river and afterward to a spirited Bach chorale at the Mt. Ephraim Arts Center, performed by students from the Rochester Music Conservatory. I’d planned this evening for weeks: initially in my head, as a fantasy of bringing together the two people who meant the most to me in all the world; then, with Wally; and then with Mom. Gwen had been reluctant to meet my “current man friend” but at last she’d given in, and as soon as they met and shook hands and Wally was his usual kindly, cordial, smiling self, I could feel Mom’s distrust of him melt away.