Missing Mom: A Novel

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Mr. Waldeman spoke of my piece on the Christian punk band, that had been featured on the front page of the Beacon and had stirred some interest. In fact, it had been reprinted in its entirety in newspapers in Rochester, Buffalo, Syracuse and Albany. I smiled to think that Mom would have been proud of me. At the house I’d discovered a scrapbook devoted to NIKKI’S WRITINGS. Each article, each clipping, dating back to columns in our high school newspaper and features in college publications. The most recent was an interview with a local private school headmaster, dated May 8, 2004.

  One of your best pieces, Nikki! Really, it is.

  So Mom had assured me. Beaming with pride.

  Like Dad’s calendars, Mom’s scrapbooks were scrupulously maintained as holy relics. You would not think they might come to an end so abruptly.

  We must have ordered lunch. Food was brought. Our hefty silverware flashed. I pushed food around on my plate until, at an appropriate moment, a waiter murmured Ma’am may I? and whisked it away.

  “Nikki. I hope I haven’t offended you.”

  Alpha-male code for: you are not responding as I wish.

  Alpha-male code for: you are not responding in a way to assure your own best interests.

  The nickel eyes were guarded. Perpendicular lines bracketed the small smile. By this time my heart was beating so slowly, I had to wonder if I was awake. There was little likelihood of my tossing wine at my companion, muttering Go to hell! I hate you! I quit! and stalking out of the elegant dining room.

  The check was paid. We were parting company. One of my hands was shaken. I heard myself say, in my bright Nikki-voice, “When I’m ready to ‘share my grief,’ Mr. Waldeman, it will be with the Beacon. I promise!”

  time…

  In the house at 43 Deer Creek Drive, time moved differently than it did elsewhere. Not in short frothy rapids that glittered in the sun but in large wide swaths you could not see the edges of and could not know where they began, how far they extended and where they might end.

  If they might wash over you, and drown you.

  Or bear you aloft, hopeful and unharmed.

  “a good, safe thing”

  It had become routine: Mt. Ephraim police now patrolled Deer Creek Acres.

  At least twice a day, but not at predictable times, a metallic-blue Mt. Ephraim PD cruiser turned into the subdivision and passed with methodical slowness along the curving roads, drives, lanes. Gliding into and out of cul-de-sac “circles.”

  The cruisers were manned by youngish uniformed cops. Usually there was just the driver. I knew that Ross Strabane would never have ridden in the patrol car and yet each time I saw the car I thought of him and felt a stab of alarm, resentment. I don’t need you. I have a man who loves me.

  If I saw the cruiser I looked quickly away. My face beat with blood, I felt stricken, exposed. For of course the cruiser had to do with 43 Deer Creek Drive. With what had happened to my mother in that house.

  Opinion in Deer Creek Acres was divided on the subject of the patrol. Most thought it was a good, safe thing, especially the parents of young children. Some older residents grumbled that it was annoying to see the patrol car, Deer Creek Acres wasn’t a “crime ghetto.”

  If I’d been asked my opinion of the patrol I would have said yes certainly it was a good, safe thing.

  In a time of emergency. When you need the police. Yes.

  No one asked me. Except for a few of Mom’s close friends, residents of Deer Creek Acres waved hello to me but otherwise kept their distance.

  Her? The Eaton girl. The daughter.

  That house where Gwen Eaton was murdered.

  Through the summer, the police cruiser became an ever more familiar sight in Deer Creek Acres. Children waved at the uniformed driver, who waved back. Young mothers dawdled in the street with babies in strollers, toddlers, eager dogs. Often I heard laughter. I felt a pang of envy.

  I didn’t answer Strabane’s letters. I didn’t call him.

  Yet it happened one afternoon, I was just parking my car in the driveway when the Mt. Ephraim cruiser appeared. And instead of looking away, somehow I was smiling at the cruiser, and waving.

  “Hi! Hello!”

  The youngish uniformed cop behind the wheel might have looked surprised but he smiled, too, and waved as he drove past.

  And now I was suffused with a strange childlike happiness. For it had been so easy, what Mom would have been doing from the start: making the young police officer feel, not unwanted, but welcome in our neighborhood.

  “where we all came from”

  Every few weeks for as long as we could remember, Mom drove into the old, east side of Mt. Ephraim, to St. Joseph’s Cemetery.

  For a long time I went with her. Longer than Clare went.

  As soon as Clare was in eighth grade she was too busy for such excursions. Jumping into the car because Mom called out in her cheery-adventure voice, “Who wants to go with me?” no longer appealed.

  The east side of Mt. Ephraim was a hilly tumbling-down neighborhood near the river of row houses, potholed streets, derelict buildings and vacated mills with such faded names as Beame Ladies Hosiery and Carlyle Footware & Leather Goods. Here, South Main Street intersected with Spalding where Mom had once lived. The names of the streets were plain and utilitarian: Bridge, Front, Railway, Commodore.

  Mom told us how as a child she’d been told that Commodore Street had been named for “Commodore” Cornelius Vanderbilt of the New York Central Railroad, a long time ago. It was said that Vanderbilt, the wealthiest man in the world at the time, had “disembarked” from his luxury car to visit with a Mt. Ephraim resident. Or, Vanderbilt had at least stood on the railway platform overlooking the street.

  “Did you see him, Mom?”

  “Did I see the ‘Commodore’? That man died in 1877.”

  As a little girl I’d been concerned with dates, ages. Numbers were tricky, figuring them in your head. You had only ten fingers and ten toes to calculate with. The only birth-date that seemed to be permanently imprinted in my brain was October 8, 1973, when I’d been born.

  Mt. Ephraim had once been an important stop on the New York Central Railroad. Trains had pulled into the station often, sometimes two or three a day; the east side had flourished. Now, trains thundered past hauling what seemed like miles of freight cars and the old depot was boarded up and covered in graffiti. Anyone who wanted to travel by train had to drive thirty miles to the station at Chautauqua Falls.

  As a child I’d asked Mom why was this so? Why the trains didn’t stop in Mt. Ephraim any longer?

  Mom laughed. “Oh, ask me! As if I’d know.”

  Then, for Mom always pondered our questions to her, even those she couldn’t answer: “I think it has to do with the economy, Nikki. ‘Supply and demand.’ You can ask Dad, he will know.”

  I was reluctant to ask Dad such questions. He’d squint at me suspiciously as if, at school, I’d already learned the answer and was testing him. Or, worse, he’d provide such a long and complicated answer I couldn’t make sense of it. “Supply and demand” was what it all boiled down to.

  “Will you look at these weeds! It’s enough to break your heart.”

  Visiting her parents’ graves in St. Joseph’s Cemetery, in warm weather, Mom brought grass clippers, a hand hoe, potted flowers. If it was sunny she wore a crinkly straw hat to protect her face, which burned easily. If the grass was wet, she wore rubber boots. St. Joseph’s Cemetery had become shabby and overgrown and Mom was fearful of snakes.

  At her parents’ graves Mom knelt in the grass. Always she was sad, subdued. This change in my mother disturbed me. I saw that my Kovach grandparents’ graves were smaller than the graves of most of their neighbors and wondered if that was why Mom wiped surreptitiously at her eyes. Such plain dull-gray markers!

  MARTA ANNA KOVACH

  JACOB WILLIAM KOVACH

  March 7, 1919

  December 29, 1916

  November 14, 1959

  August 4, 1961 />
  As soon as I was old enough to subtract numbers, I calculated the dates on the grave markers: Grandma Kovach had been forty when she’d died and Grandpa Kovach had been forty-four. You could see why they’d died, such old people!

  In my bright schoolgirl voice I asked Mom how old you had to be, to die, and Mom smiled nervously saying any age that was old, much older than I was, so there was no need for me to worry—“You’re just a little girl, darling.” Impatiently I said, “No, Mom. How old do you have to be? You.” For of course it was preposterous to think that Nikki would die, for “die” meant to go under the earth, and why’d I want to do such a silly thing?

  Mom stared at me for a moment. Then laughed, and gave me a smacking wet kiss.

  “Not for a long, long time, sweetie. Maybe never.”

  While Mom tended to the graves, clipped weeds and trimmed the English ivy she’d planted, wiped bird droppings from the markers, I prowled about, restless. It was hard to care about my Kovach grandparents who’d vanished so long ago. Dad never spoke of them and if Clare or I asked Mom about them her replies were vague and distracted and her smiles forced as if she was trying to keep from crying.

  In St. Joseph’s Cemetery there were some large, shiny grave markers. There were angels, and crosses. The small plain Kovach markers held no interest for me. I could not associate them with any actual people, not people who mattered. The cemetery was hilly and overgrown with shrubs, Mom couldn’t see where I was poking around and if I climbed up onto gravestones. At the top of a steep hill there was a dumping-ground for old, rotted flowers and broken clay pots.

  Sometimes from the top of the hill I’d lose sight of Mom. Then I’d see her, kneeling in the grass. Mom looked so little! I almost wouldn’t have recognized her.

  Distance makes people sad, I thought.

  After a while Mom missed me and began to call anxiously: “Nikki? Nikki?”

  It was the most delicious feeling to hide from Mom then to jump out from behind a gravestone, and run down the hill to her.

  “Oh, Mom! I was here all along.”

  On the way home Mom sometimes swung around to Spalding Street to drive past her old house. The number on the front doorframe was 91. The house was weatherworn wood faded gray like the Kovach grave markers, with a sagging veranda. Mom had lived upstairs which seemed strange to me: other people lived downstairs? It seemed wrong, too, that the houses on Spalding Street were so close together, you could hardly squeeze through the narrow space between them. The front yards were small, grassless and ugly, nothing like the lawns in Deer Creek Acres.

  Clare once snorted in disgust: “Some people! You’d think they’d be ashamed not to fix up their houses better.”

  Mom said reprovingly, “Clare. Not everyone has our advantages.”

  “‘Advantages’—what’s that?”

  “A father to work and take care of them and—love them. A mother who can stay home with her children. Enough money to—well, live.”

  Clare objected, “Mom, anybody can rake up trash! Anybody can shut their front door, and pull their curtains back inside the windows, for heaven’s sake.” At thirteen, Clare had a schoolteacher’s indignation in the service of absolute fact.

  Mom continued driving, biting her lower lip. Poor Mom! She never argued with us if she could avoid it. And more and more, Clare was seeing things that Mom seemed not to see, or didn’t acknowledge seeing. It was Mom’s just-pretend way, in Clare’s words.

  It was a relief when Clare was too busy to come with us to St. Joseph’s. I suppose Mom missed her but I didn’t, not one bit.

  The last time we drove past 91 Spalding, I asked Mom if she’d liked living in that house? If she missed it, sometimes? and Mom said with a vague smile, “We’re all happy where we came from.”

  So softly Mom spoke these words, she might have been alone in the car.

  “comfy”

  Come over to the cemetery, Clare? Around eleven this morning? I’ve got a rose tree to plant by Mom’s and Dad’s graves. Pause. We haven’t seen each other for a while. I’ve been missing you. Double pause. I ran into Lilja at the mall the other week, and…Awkward pause shading off into silence and a brisk throat clearing. Well. Drop by if you can make it. ’Bye.

  It was as likely that Clare would show up at the cemetery as it was she’d show up at the house. My call was primarily to make her aware of me, and to make her feel guilty.

  The yellow Rose of Remembrance tree was a perfect fit between my parents’ gravestones.

  Now that Mom’s marker was in place, an exact match for Dad’s, this corner of Mt. Ephraim Cemetery with its predominance of Eaton names was starting to look comfy.

  “Comfy.”

  Such a silly sad word, I had to say it aloud.

  Made you think of worn old furniture, tattered old slipper-shoes like Dad’s infamous moccasins. Dad’s recliner chair, the leather seat shaped to ghost-buttocks. Those boxes I’d discovered in the attic containing baby clothes, little-girl clothes, hand-knitted blankets and hand-sewn quilts and long-ago school report cards for Clare Eaton and Nikki Eaton and such special projects as a watercolor booklet titled “Sparkle Bright the Kitty Who Came to Stay” I’d made for Mom in fourth grade, on the back of which Miss Jaime (I’d adored, I hadn’t given a thought to in twenty years) had written Nikki, this is BEAUTIFUL! Your mother will love this little gem.

  “Comfy.”

  In early June, when we’d been on speaking terms, Clare and I and a few close relatives had come to the cemetery to watch our mother’s grave marker set into place. It was a larger, sleeker, more stately and much more expensive dark-granite stone than Mom would have chosen for herself. Now we had

  Gwendolyn Ann Eaton

  Jonathan Allan Eaton

  April 22, 1948

  February 16, 1941

  May 11, 2004

  January 8, 2000

  Beloved Wife and Mother

  Beloved Husband and Father

  A “grave blanket”—a slab of turf unconvincing as a toupee on a bald head—had been laid on Mom’s grave, not quite matching the lusher grass growing on Dad’s. Numerous flowers still brightened Mom’s grave including glassily plastic lilies, bluebells, and roses. The Kovach touch.

  Delicately Mom had suggested to her relatives over the years that artificial flowers weren’t a good idea, generally. Her bulldog cousin Lucille had stared at her in amazement: “The point is, they don’t die.”

  For years we’d been repeating Lucille’s sage remark. The point is, stupid, they don’t DIE. Even Dad, whose usual response to the Kovach tribe was to sigh and roll his eyes, laughed heartily at such wit.

  My hands ached pleasantly, spading up soil and struggling to remove the thorny rose tree from its pot. That morning I’d had a call from Wally Szalla asking when we could see each other again and I’d been evasive about naming a date: “But soon, Wally. I miss you.”

  This seemed to be a season when I told people I missed them while hoping I wouldn’t have to see them. Somehow, avoiding the task of sorting through Mom’s attic boxes took up most of my energy.

  I was thinking that Mom would have been touched by Sonja and Sonny’s gift. Yellow was her favorite color for roses, she’d have told them.

  How Mom would feel about my living in the house, I wasn’t sure. Of course, she’d be happy that Smoky was back in his old haunts and that he was gaining some of the weight he’d lost. She’d have been upset that Clare was angry with me; or, maybe, it was the other way around, I was angry with Clare.

  You have your own life, Nikki. Save it.

  “Go to hell. Save your own life.”

  It was a relief, Mt. Ephraim Cemetery wasn’t cramped like St. Joseph’s but spacious and attractive and far better maintained. Most of the graves were carefully tended and some were routinely festooned with flowers. There was invariably the roar of a lawn mower or a leaf blower to assure you that things were being kept up. You still felt sad and more than sad but not so guilty, walking away.


  In June, Clare and I had been brooding and teary and hadn’t much to say to each other. Mom’s death had been so fresh, it was like trying to breathe through layers of gauze wrapped around our heads. But I’d managed to say, in a voice just loud enough for Clare to hear and no one else, “Mom preferred St. Joseph’s, remember? That ‘special atmosphere’” and Clare had flared up at once: “Oh, Mom. You know what she’s like.”

  Actually, I wasn’t so sure any longer that I did.

  avoiding…(II)

  Then there were the people I avoided.

  Like “bugs” this was a large, loose category. Much of the time it included anyone who wanted to see me.

  Ohhh Nikki! We miss Gwen so.

  Just can’t believe that Gwen is…

  …want you to know you are in our prayers. If there’s anything we can do…

  One of these was Gilbert Wexley.

  The exalted one, Mom had so admired.

  Though I never called him back, Wexley left messages on my answering machine that were terse and cryptic: Nicole. We must talk. I knew that he wanted to plan Mom’s memorial service and that his plans were becoming ever more grandiose and I could not bear it.

  To my dismay I read in the local paper that Wexley had begun soliciting donations for the “Gwen Eaton Memorial” to be scheduled sometime in the fall, and for the “Gwen Eaton Citizenship Award” to be administered by the Mt. Ephraim Arts Council.

  A stranger interfering in our lives! I could imagine what Dad would say, who’d distrusted “civic-minded” individuals from the secretary-general of the United Nations to the local, unpaid members of the Mt. Ephraim Township Board.

  I called Rob Chisholm, to ask him to object. I didn’t want to speak with Wexley personally.