Missing Mom: A Novel

by Joyce Carol Oates

  We were remembering how, when we were girls, in this very house, our quarrels over the most trivial subjects escalated in quick rising steps until suddenly we would begin shouting at each other and Clare might slap at me, and I might kick at Clare, and Mom would rush at us to intervene.

  Mom would plead: “Girls! Don’t disturb your father, he’s trying to relax.”

  Or, plaintively: “Girls! It breaks my heart to hear you like this.”

  And one of us would cry, “I hate her!” and the other would cry, “I hate HER!”

  We were quiet now, remembering.

  We were breathing quickly, not daring to look at each other.

  I was planning how, when Wally and I chose a date for our wedding, I would not even tell Clare. She would learn from other sources. That would embarrass her.

  To my surprise Clare said, as if this were the subject we’d been discussing all along, “Fine, Nikki. Keep anything you want of Mom’s. You always were one to encourage her to sew you things, knit you things, she’d spend days and weeks on things you had no intention of wearing. Poor Mom was always asking me, ‘Clare, why doesn’t Nikki wear that velvet dress, why doesn’t Nikki wear that blouse,’ so why not hoard her things now, now it’s too late? But don’t bog us both down, please. This sentimental bullshit of yours. I can’t believe how much time has passed and we’re still with the damned clothes and we have the rest of the house ahead, we’ll be doing this for days.”

  I was shocked at Clare’s outburst. For a moment, I couldn’t speak.

  “—for weeks! We’ll be stuck in here, together, in this house where I can’t breathe.”

  I’d been noticing, Clare was short of breath. Her face that had been so artfully made up when I’d arrived was now flushed with an oily sheen and most of her lipstick had been gnawed away.

  “Clare, Jesus! Why are you so hostile?”

  “This is a strain, Nikki. I keep waiting for some nosey neighbor to knock at the door, you can be sure everyone is aware of us. ‘The Eaton sisters, the ones whose mother was murdered in her home.’ I keep looking up expecting Mom to be in the doorway, or Dad, or—what was the name of Mom’s gray cat?”

  “S-Smoky?”

  Even more shocking, that Clare seemed to have forgotten Smoky’s name. I’d been wondering why she hadn’t asked me about him, how he was adjusting to life with me in Chautauqua Falls?

  “I keep expecting something! Some awful unspeakable thing! I’m not the one who’s been bristling with hostility, Nikki: that’s you. The way you’re dressed, that ridiculous hat on your head, hasn’t anyone ever told you it’s rude to wear a hat indoors, especially a hat advertising some tax shelter of some married-man friend of yours, the way you pull the rim down to hide your eyes so I can’t see you when I’m talking to you, that’s plain rude. And I live with a thirteen-year-old so I am accustomed, let me tell you, to rude. Since you’ve arrived our progress has been one step forward and two steps backward and I believe it’s deliberate. I could do this so much more efficiently without you, Nikki!”

  I’d been squatting on the floor, awkwardly. Now I managed to straighten my legs, wincing with pain. I saw that Clare was glaring at me with hot acid eyes. I said, stammering, “Because you don’t care about Mom, or Dad. All you care about is putting the house ‘on the market.’”

  “That is not true! Except that I have a family, Nikki, I have responsibilities you could never fathom. My life is other people!—not me. I wasn’t the one to break away from Mt. Ephraim and lead a selfish life—I didn’t practically abandon our mother when she became a widow—I’ve never slept with a man married to another woman—I’ve never broken our mother’s heart humiliating her in front of relatives and friends: that’s you, Nikki. Don’t look so wounded, you must know this. That’s why you’ve been so hostile to me, I know you’re angry from yesterday, when I couldn’t get over here. As if that was my fault! As if I can control my life! Lilja blackmails me with her hysterics and Rob practically runs out of the house to escape us and poor Foster keeps asking about his grandma, children at school are tormenting him, he’s begun wetting his bed after years and half the people I see when I go out, including women I’d believed were my friends, turn away or duck into stores to avoid me because they feel so sorry for me. It’s a nightmare, Nikki, you seem to have been spared, not living here. As usual, you’re spared! It’s just me, I am so sick and tired of being me.”

  I fumbled to touch her. This sudden reversal of roles made me shy and ungainly. “Clare, I’m so sorry, I—”

  Clare pushed at me, glaring. “Nikki, you are not sorry! All you are is Nikki.”

  Clare ran from the room, clumsily. I heard her in the bathroom next door, running water loudly. Then I heard her in the living room, shoving furniture around. Then she was on the telephone, speaking sharply.

  I had thought she might leave, and I would have the house to myself. I took advantage of her absence from the bedroom to retrieve several articles of clothing from the boxes. The lime-green velour top, I tried on in front of a mirror. (Tight in the shoulders and a little short at the waist, otherwise fine.) A white silk blouse with a lacy bow, I knew Wally Szalla would admire. (My lover had a weakness for old-fashioned ladylike girls, I’d discovered. He much preferred white underwear on me, whether silk or cotton, to anything more spectacular.) And there was the poppy-colored scarf, and there was the tortoiseshell hand mirror cloudy with age, that had once belonged to my mother’s mother. Also, several of my father’s neckties I had given him years ago, looking as if they’d never been worn. I would make a present of them to Wally Szalla.

  “Nik-ki! Come look.”

  In a voice that sounded almost gleeful Clare called me from our father’s study at the end of the hall. I’d been hearing her laughing in there, a sign that her good spirits had returned and she’d forgiven me, or anyway wasn’t angry at me any longer.

  Immediately, as when we’d been girls, my animosity toward my sister dissolved.

  Since Clare’s outburst we’d been working in separate rooms, much more productively. We were aware of each other without needing to see each other or to speak. I’d sorted through most of Mom’s and Dad’s personal items and had moved on to impersonal things like bedding, towels, shower curtains. I was becoming as proficient with the Post-its slips as my sister.

  The only temptation was to return to things in boxes destined for “sell” or “donate.”

  “You’ll never believe this, Nikki. Goodness!”

  Clare was kneeling on the carpet in front of Dad’s old desk. She’d kicked off her shoes. Her white cotton shirt was no longer so crisply ironed but she’d replenished her lipstick and powdered her face. It was like Clare to abruptly switch moods and expect you to switch moods with her.

  Weird to be walking into Dad’s “home office”! This room we’d been forbidden to enter as girls except at Dad’s invitation. (Which was rare.) Since Dad’s death, Mom had kept the room more or less unchanged. We joked together, Clare and me, that she was maintaining it as a shrine.

  Dad’s desk, filing cabinets, bookshelves. His collection of mostly American history books, known as “Jon’s library.”

  It was unsettling, to so freely enter this room, as an adult. To see how ordinary its dimensions were. Its furnishings. Dad’s desk had seemed massive and very special to me as a girl, but it was just a standard office desk, aluminum and wood veneer with a simulated stain, smooth and practical as Formica. Somehow, seeing Dad at this desk had seemed so impressive: always I’d wondered what he was doing, what were the documents he frowned over. But now, I could see that the desk was no larger than the table I used as a makeshift desk in my apartment, purchased for fifteen dollars in a secondhand store and painted lipstick red.

  On top of Dad’s desk was his old electric typewriter, affixed with a green Post-it. Dad had a computer at Beechum Paper Products of course but he’d refused to have a home computer in the belief that the so-called electronics revolution was all about product
obsolescence: getting silly people to spend money. If Dad had lived into our era of universal cell phones he’d have been outraged.

  “Nikki, come on. Nobody’s going to scold us.”

  Clare had pulled out the desk drawers as far as they could go without falling out. She’d been sorting through Dad’s meticulously kept records dating back to the early 1980s: New York State and Internal Revenue documents, insurance policies, volumes of cancelled checks and receipts (for purchases as low as $2.98). Mom had said of Dad that he kept everything out of a fear of losing something and I think she meant this approvingly.

  Not like me, I’d thought. Who kept almost nothing, out of a fear of losing it.

  “The weirdest thing, Nikki: Dad’s calendar collection! This stack, I found in the bottom drawer here. They go back to 1981.”

  These were uniformly large, somewhat bulky calendars with generic landscape and wildlife photographs. What was most striking about the calendars, which Clare had spread out on the carpet, was the maze of emphatic X’s, in black ink. Each day of each month of each year had been methodically crossed out, not missing a single square including the very last day of December of each year. The last x’d-out date was December 31, 1999, eight days before Dad’s death.

  Clare said, “Can you guess what these mean? These numbers?”

  You could see, past the black X’s, abbreviations and cryptic codes. Not every date contained these, but each date contained, at the bottom, a miniature numeral. In January 1999, the numerals were 188, 186, 1871?2, 190, 189, 189, 1891?2, 191, etc. In the earliest calendar, in the month of January 1981, the numerals were 171, 173, 1701?2, 1711?2, 173, 173, 173, 1741?2, etc.

  I crouched over the calendars to study the numerals. So carefully recorded in Dad’s hand! Day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year. I didn’t want to think what this was.

  (Dad’s weight?)

  “I think it must be Dad’s weight, Nikki. Imagine, Dad weighed himself every day and kept a record. We never knew, did we? It must have been a secret, he was always teasing us about watching our weight, at least he teased me. I’m sure that Mom didn’t know. You can see, looking through the calendars, how Dad had slowly gained weight, he’d never been what you’d call heavy but he’d gone from 171 in 1981 to 196 by the time he, well”—Clare paused, suddenly swallowing, as if the enormity of what she was saying in her archly bemused voice suddenly struck her—“died.”

  Died. That forlorn word. We’d been unable to utter it for a long time, regarding our father.

  We weren’t yet able to utter it, regarding Mom.

  Clare continued to chatter nervously. She wasn’t going to tell Rob about the calendars, she said. Or any relatives. She didn’t think that I should, either.

  I told her no. I would keep Dad’s secret of course.

  Awkwardly I squatted above the calendars spread out on the carpet, paging through them with a kind of fascinated dread. So many days, hundreds of days, bluntly x’d out in black ink! I sensed with what satisfaction Dad had crossed out the days of his life not seeming to know how finite they were, how rapidly he was using them up.

  “Maybe we should just throw them away, Nikki? In this trash bag I’ve started.”

  “Well. I guess.”

  Clare hadn’t been able to open the windows in Dad’s study more than a few inches, the air smelled of mildew and something faintly chemical. The police forensics investigators had been in this room as they’d been everywhere in the house, but there hadn’t been any evidence, we’d been told, that the “perpetrator” had taken anything from this room. Evidently Dad’s old electric typewriter, covered with a dusty plastic cover, hadn’t tempted him.

  A crystal meth-head, the detective had called Ward Lynch.

  Desperate for cash, to feed his addiction. Might’ve chosen anyone, but Gwen Eaton came along.

  Gwen Eaton, who saw the “good” in everyone. Who seemed to believe that we’re here on earth to “be nice” to people in need.

  “Nikki, stay with me. Let’s finish up here.”

  There was a small quaver in Clare’s voice. I understood: suddenly my sister didn’t want to be alone any more than I did.

  After Dad’s calendars, it didn’t seem so strange or anyway surprising that he’d saved what appeared to be hundreds of paper clips of varying sizes, many of them badly rusted; that he’d saved dozens of loose U.S. postage stamps, many so old they dated to an era beyond memory (when first-class postage was twenty cents?); that, rattling loose in his desk drawers, were countless ballpoint pens advertising local businesses, and all of the pens dried out. There were rubber bands, thumbtacks. Erasers. Telephone directories for 1996, 1997, and 1998 as well as 1999. The antiquated stapler Dad had had for all of our lifetimes and allowed us to use with his supervision, plus a nearly empty box of staples. In the same drawer, several rulers and a badly torn measuring tape from Hamrick’s Office Supplies and a cache of Scotch tape dispensers, empty of tape.

  Clare held the dispensers in her hand, frowning.

  “Nikki, why would Dad save these, once the tape was used up?”

  I didn’t want to look at Clare, for fear we’d break into hysterical laughter.

  As if we’d been brought to the threshold of a door long locked against us and at last the door has been opened but—what is inside?

  We’d planned to drive to the Blue Star Diner for lunch, it was less than a mile away and no-fuss. But somehow, we never got there.

  Mid-afternoon, when we were both becoming light-headed from hunger, Clare had the sudden idea of making a meal out of what we could find in the kitchen. “Nikki, Mom would want this! Her leftovers especially.”

  When I hesitated Clare said, sharply, “You know how Mom fretted, if good food went to waste.”

  This meant freezer leftovers. I had to wonder how prudent an idea this was, preparing Mom’s food in Mom’s kitchen without Mom. Only a few steps from the (shut, locked) door to the garage.

  “Nikki. Wake up, give me a hand.”

  Must have been standing there, blank-faced, staring at the (shut, locked) door to the garage.

  Clare chattered brightly as I set about tidying the kitchen. When things have been displaced in a familiar setting, it takes a while for the eye to discover them. Strangers had searched our cupboard shelves, drawers. Glassware, china, canned goods, boxes of rice, pasta, tabouleh had been examined and replaced haphazardly. Even Mom’s many spice jars, and her herbal teas in rainbow-colored packages. The counters she’d always kept spotless were smudged with some sort of chemical grime, it took a while for me to scrub off with cleanser and a sponge. The once-spotless sink was badly stained as if something dark oily, viscous had been dumped into it.

  Even our snapshots on the refrigerator, held in place by little magnets, had been dislodged. I picked up an old photo of myself, smiling happily in some long-ago summer-beach setting, that had fallen to the floor, examined it critically and without thinking tore it into pieces.

  “Nikki, what are you doing? What did you do?”

  Clare slapped at me, disgusted.

  “Mom loved that picture of you. What would Mom say.”

  By the time Clare set out for us, in steaming bowls, what appeared to be the remains of Mom’s Hawaiian chicken spooned over, not white rice, but buckwheat pasta, we were both giddy with hunger. Other leftovers Clare had discovered in the freezer were the remains of a tuna fish casserole, a half-dozen spicy cocktail sausages, and a half-loaf of buttermilk-pecan bread. I’d discovered a chunk of cheddar cheese in the refrigerator, just perceptibly moldy, we could eat with the bread and a box of All-Grain Melba Toast.

  Clare said, “This chicken of Mom’s! Maybe it’s a little sweet but it is delicious. I was furious at old Auntie Tabitha saying what she did, to upset Mom.”

  “That’s just her way. You know Tabitha.”

  “So what if it’s her ‘way’! She’d upset Mom so many times, those seemingly innocent little remarks of hers. Old auntie was pla
in jealous, her younger brother Jonathan preferred Mom to her.”

  “Tabitha is taking it hard, though. What happened to Mom.”

  Clare snorted in derision. “But of course. Tabitha and Alyce Proxmire, it’s been devastating for them.”

  I laughed. Between Clare and me there had long been the conviction—exasperating, annoying—but somehow comical, as in a TV series—that certain of Mom’s relatives and friends exploited her good nature. These were tales told and retold, passed back and forth between us like Ping-Pong balls. I saw now that, though Mom was gone, Clare and I would not relinquish these familiar, comforting old tales of blame, reproach, moral indignation.

  “Mom is just too, well—‘Christian.’ I mean,” Clare said, eating, “—was.”

  Now that we were seated across from each other in the breakfast nook I could see the strain in Clare’s face. Beneath the smooth cosmetic mask there were bruise-like shadows beneath her eyes and puckers at the corners of her mouth. I knew from Rob that the symptoms Clare had had after the hearing—her “touch of the flu”—had been very like my own.

  After my testimony in the courtroom, Clare had avoided looking at me. Glancing sidelong in my direction with a kind of dread as if knowing there might be more I could reveal, of what I’d seen in the garage.

  Almost, I could hear her pleading Nikki don’t tell me!

  Then again, at other times Nikki I must know.

  I never thought of it, now. By “it” I’d come to mean the entire experience, not just the sighting of my mother’s body.

  I never thought of it and would not think of it except at such times when I was compelled to think of it: giving testimony as a witness. But we’d been assured there would be no trial, Lynch’s public defender attorney and the district attorney’s assistant were negotiating an agreement to spare us.

  “Nikki, aren’t you eating? Don’t be silly.”

  “I am, Clare. Stop staring at me.”

  “Well. You’re too thin, you need to eat. It’s fine to be fashionably thin, but that anorexic look is out.”