Missing Mom: A Novel

by Joyce Carol Oates

  I was furious with my smug sister. First, she disapproves of my love affair with Wally Szalla; now, she’s sneering at me because the love affair isn’t going well. I thought of showing her the bracelet wristwatch as evidence of—what? The gesture would have been childish and desperate but the sort of visual proof that would impress Clare.

  I changed the topic: “But why Philadelphia, Clare? So far—”

  “It isn’t far! You know that I have a friend there.”

  This would be Clare’s old college roommate Amy Orlander. How could I forget Amy Orlander, invariably spoken of as “a friend in Philadelphia” when Clare wanted to trump those of us lacking a friend who belonged to a rich Philadelphia department-store family, in whose lavish wedding Clare had been a bridesmaid and with whom Clare stayed on mysteriously intimate terms, though other female friendships had been allowed to wither away. How could I forget that the Orlanders had long ago issued an “open invitation” for Clare to visit them whenever she wished and to stay for as long as she wished.

  “Also, there’s an excellent private school in Philadelphia that specializes in challenged children, I’ve been able to enroll Foster in the middle of the term, with Amy’s mother’s help: she’s on the board. I’m just so very, very grateful—”

  Challenged? Since when was Foster, a sweet affable slow learner with a weakness for video games, challenged?

  “—and Amy’s husband has put in a word for me with the dean of admissions at the Philadelphia Language Institute, I’m going to enroll in a master’s degree in ‘language psychology.’ So that I can teach, or go into private practice. The tragic thing was how I became burnt-out as a teacher, before I’d even begun a career. Stifled and exploited at that terrible school. The principal was a petty bureaucrat and he’d have never left, there was no hope for advancement for me. My creativity was stifled. My soul was stifled! You aren’t the only one who felt that Mt. Ephraim was a straitjacket.—Nikki, what’s this?”

  In the midst of her excited speech Clare had wandered into the dining room where I’d set some of Mom’s and Dad’s things temporarily on the table. “These old records? Weren’t they in the garage for years? You’ve brought them back in?” Clare lifted out of a box Classical Guitar Favorites, New World Symphony, Mormon Tabernacle Choir Sings Yuletide Classics. I said, “I haven’t had a chance to sort through them completely. You know, some old records have become collectors’ items.” Clare snorted in derision, “‘Collectors’ items’! Do they even manufacture needles for hi-fi’s any longer? Are there hi-fi’s?” But she soon became engrossed in the records, which were covered in dust and cobwebs and randomly boxed. “Oh. These are mine, I haven’t heard these in years.” Clare had taken out Dirty Dancing: The Original Film Score and Tango! whose cover was a sexy Latino leaning over a near-supine Latina in silhouette.

  “And what’s this?”

  Also on the dining room table were photos and snapshots, mostly of Mom, I’d been arranging in chronological order. The earliest was sixteen-year-old Feather Kovach in her maroon cheerleader’s jumper, taken with sister-cheerleaders on the Mt. Ephraim cheerleaders’ “squad” (for, strangely, I had not been able to find any snapshots of my mother at a younger age): here was a girl with the most shining eyes and most hopeful smile you could imagine, dimples, wavy-curly darkish blond hair, pert little face round and luminous as a moon. There was Feather in pink-sherbert prom gown, and in a graduation gown that fitted her like a tent; there was Feather looking scarcely older than she’d looked as a cheerleader, in a dazzling white bridal gown beside her young, stiffly smiling groom (how thin Dad’s face, how thick and weirdly styled his late-1960s hair) in a tux. There, basking in an unnatural sunshine, was the happy couple on their honeymoon in Key West, Gwen in tank top and miniskirt posed with a bright-feathered parrot on her shoulder, as Jon looked on somewhat doubtfully. There was Gwen with a baby (Clare), and there was Gwen with a baby (Nikki); there was Gwen with a plumpish little girl (Clare), and there was Gwen with a fidgety little girl (Nikki). And so through the years, the decades, a rich profusion of images that left me dazed and shaken when I contemplated them. Clare had taken up the most recent photos, claiming she’d never seen them before: Mom, Clare, Lilja and me posed with arms around each other’s waist in front of a Christmas tree so overdecorated you could hardly see the tree. “This was taken at our house. It must’ve been Rob’s Polaroid.”

  “Rob took these with Mom’s Polaroid. I’m sure you have copies, Clare.”

  “No, I don’t. I’ll take this.”

  Clare continued to look through the photos. I knew she was pissed with me about the Post-its. I laughed.

  “I’m glad that you’re amused, Nikki. That’s in character.”

  “‘Pissed over Post-its.’ That’s in character.”

  A quarrel was flaring up, but we decided to let it fade. Not just now.

  “…I thought, if the memorial takes place, we could use some of these as mementos. I was thinking of putting together a little booklet of Mom’s life, there’s this printer in Chautauqua Falls who did a memoir of Jimmy Friday, remember him? It’s not posthumous but it has pictures, it’s very attractive…”

  “Jimmy Friday? That old bluegrass singer? Why are we talking about him?”

  “We’re not. We’re talking about a memorial booklet for Mom.”

  “Oh, that. The memorial.”

  Clare spoke flatly, as if annoyed.

  “You don’t want a memorial for Mom?”

  “I don’t know, Nikki. Do you?”

  “Well. If it could be for Mom…”

  “Exactly! But it can’t be. It’s for Mom’s relatives, friends…for us.”

  “Not for us. I don’t think that I could bear it.”

  “I won’t be here. I’ll be in my new home.”

  “Clare, you’d have to be here! For your own mother’s memorial, you can’t think of not coming.”

  “Yes, I can think of not coming. It’s a thought I’ve already had.” Clare laughed, daringly. For a moment she seemed almost elated. “In fact, Gilbert Wexley isn’t well. So plans for the memorial are suspended.”

  “Wexley isn’t well? What’s wrong with him?”

  I only now realized that the man had stopped bothering me, for weeks. I felt a small stab of hurt on Mom’s account.

  Clare said, not very concerned, “Rob says he’s heard that Wexley has been drinking ‘heavily.’ He seems to have collapsed at the Arts Council last week. His female staff has been covering for him for months, people say. He and the ‘reverend’—I won’t say his name—but you know who I mean—have been disagreeing over some aspects of the memorial, what sort of music Gwen Eaton really liked, religious or ‘secular,’ I’ve stayed out of it, I refuse to become involved with these two male egos. Some of the Eatons—you know how suspicious Uncle Herman is—are grumbling that maybe Wexley has been misappropriating donations for the memorial and the award in her name, there’s no evidence for this that I know of, but you know how Dad’s family is. Not that any of the Eatons want to organize the memorial themselves.”

  “I hadn’t heard about Wexley. That’s very sad.”

  “I thought you couldn’t stand the man, Nikki!”

  “I can’t. But I think he means well. I think he was in love with Mom and didn’t realize it and now his heart is broken, he’s confused and clumsy with grief…”

  Clare shrugged. “It’s hard to feel sorry for someone whose heart is ‘broken’—it seems like a luxury, somehow.” She gestured at the photos scattered on the table and I knew exactly her meaning: to be alive was all that mattered, the rest is extra. “Anyway, thank God Wexley never got around to asking Mom to marry him, she might’ve said yes. Now we’d be Gilbert Wexley’s step-daughters.”

  “‘Dad’ Wexley. Jesus!”

  We laughed and shuddered together. For a moment we were girls again, in a sudden alliance against someone adult. Neither of us wished to think that, if Mom and Gilbert Wexley had married, Mom wou
ld surely be alive now.

  We were standing close together, but not touching. Clare’s skin looked as if it would be hot to the touch. Perspiration was oozing through her fastidiously applied makeup. I remembered how, after Mom died, I’d stayed at the Chisholms’ house for several days and had had glimpses of my sister’s splotchily pale, unmade-up face: the shadowed eye sockets, the lines bracketing her mouth, the way after she washed her face most of her eyebrows vanished. This was my sister’s vulnerable face, I hadn’t seen since we’d been girls.

  Those days, I’d felt powerful surges of love for Clare. An anxious need to please her, placate her. She’d seemed so much stronger than I was. So much more capable, responsible.

  At the time, it hadn’t fully sunk in: what had happened to Mom had happened to Clare and me, too.

  Clare was looking at more Christmas photos. There were several that had been taken in Mom’s house, in front of Mom’s Christmas tree that was smaller and less ostentatiously decorated than Clare’s. We tried to determine when these had been taken, and by whom.

  Clare sighed. “Oh, Mom always looked so happy! You can see why they called her ‘Feather’ as a girl.” She paused, swiping at her eyes. “To think that that man killed this woman. This woman.”

  “He didn’t know her, Clare.”

  “But he did! He knew Mom.”

  “He was ignorant. Of what he did. Even of what he was doing to himself.” My voice trailed off as if unconvinced. It was a man’s voice echoing in mine, faintly.

  “He knew! It was to get back at me, he hurt Mom. For the way I’d mocked him, insulted him. Ward Lynch stabbed a defenseless woman thirty-three times. He was stabbing me.”

  Quickly I said, “Clare, that isn’t so. How can you think such a thing…”

  For a moment I felt dazed, light-headed. What Clare had said was so terrible, yet so logical…I couldn’t accept it.

  “The police said it was a ‘crime of opportunity,’ Clare. It’s ridiculous to blame yourself.”

  “You’d thought of it, though. Hadn’t you.”

  “No!”

  “Yes. You did.”

  “No, Clare. I never thought of it, and it isn’t true.”

  Clare said bitterly, “Well, Rob thought of it. The night after the court hearing, when I was pretty upset. Right in the courtroom, that man yawning! I couldn’t get over it. And Rob said, ‘If you hadn’t insulted him, Clare. Didn’t you know that a man would want to take revenge?’ Rob says these things that come into his head, it’s like he has pulled back the bedclothes and discovered a nest of spiders that have to be my fault somehow.” Trying not to cry, Clare looked angry.

  Now I did touch Clare, or tried to touch her. The way a cat eludes you without seeming to, sliding away from your hand, Clare eluded me.

  “Clare, no. Rob didn’t mean it. He was just…”

  “Saying what came into his head. Exactly.”

  “I’m not going to let you blame yourself, Clare. This is like Mom’s friend from church Mary Kinsler, ‘confessing’ and crying to me that if she’d picked Mom up for their crafts class that morning, as she sometimes did, unless Mom picked her up, none of what happened would have happened.”

  In a voice heavy with sarcasm Clare said, “Who do you want me to blame, then? Mom?”

  It was nearly noon. Clare used the guest bathroom to freshen up her makeup. Clare then made three brief calls on her cell phone, took into her possession the Dirty Dancing and Tango! records and a clutch of photographs to take with her to Philadelphia. In mounting panic I followed her to the door. It seemed unbelievable that Clare was leaving Mt. Ephraim in a few days, as if it were the most natural thing to be doing. It wasn’t just Rob from whom she was separating, obviously. It was all of us. It was Mom.

  Seeing my face Clare said, exasperated, “I’m moving to Philadelphia, not to the moon.” When I said, “But you’ll return for the trial, Clare, won’t you?” she seemed not to hear.

  It was a humid October day. The sky looked like clotted cobwebs.

  I walked Clare to her Land Rover, parked on the road and not in the driveway. Clare must have noted the closed garage door, my car not in the driveway, which meant I’d cleared out much of the cluttered garage, but she’d said nothing.

  My selfish sister! I hated her.

  At this moment, the Mt. Ephraim Police cruiser turned onto Deer Creek Drive. You’d almost think it was headed for us, Clare stiffened, staring, but of course it glided past at about fifteen miles an hour. The young uniformed officer behind the wheel lifted a hand to us, in greeting.

  Clare said sharply, “That’s new here. A patrol car.”

  “Not so new, any longer. Since May.”

  Clare climbed into the Land Rover. I could see that she was eager to be gone. I wanted to clutch at her, to pull her back. I wanted to hurt her. I said, “Clare, don’t you love us?”

  Clare said frankly, turning the key in the ignition, “Nikki. It’s hard to love people now. Without Mom, I’m forgetting.”

  with regrets…

  The invitation arrived. Wedding nuptials, Szyszko and Danto, Mt. Ephraim Christian Life Fellowship Church, twenty-second of November at ten o’clock in the morning.

  Yes, I’d promised to attend. But damned if I would go.

  Knowing that Mom would have been disappointed in me.

  taboo

  There came my brother-in-law Rob Chisholm to see me.

  Less than eighteen hours after Clare and Foster had left Mt. Ephraim.

  On the phone he’d pleaded: “Nikki! We need to talk.”

  Fifteen years we’d been in-laws. My sister had been the apex of the triangle. Brother-in-law is a taboo category meaning no sex. I knew, I had to see Rob now that Clare had left him; I could not push him away, not cruelly as Clare was doing. Yet I knew it was probably a mistake.

  The way sometimes you see an accident looming ahead. You are driving into an intersection, you have the right of way. Except you see a vehicle approaching the intersection from the side and you see that the vehicle isn’t slowing for the stop. And in protest you think But I have the right of way! And then you think But I have the power to stop, I have the power to prevent the accident.

  It was dusk when Rob arrived. Immediately I saw he’d been drinking. His jaws were unshaven and his face appeared gaunt. His white shirt was rumpled. Though it had been blustery and rainy through the day, he wore no coat. He stumbled in the doorway, laughed and muttered something meant to be funny. His eyes, snatching at mine, were red-veined and glassy.

  I wondered if he’d left Coldwell Electronics early. Or if he’d even showed up that day.

  Rob surprised me, he’d brought a bottle of whiskey. Without asking me he rummaged in the kitchen for glasses. I knew the whiskey was expensive since Wally Szalla often drank this brand. Rob was hoping we might share it, he said. He’d also brought a rain-splattered copy of last week’s Rochester Sun-Times Sunday Magazine for me to inscribe.

  “For this old friend of mine, his father is a vet in the Adirondacks. He’ll appreciate this.”

  A feature I’d done for the Chautauqua Valley Beacon had been reprinted in the larger Rochester newspaper under the title “The Lady Is a Vet.” This was one in my series of interviews with Chautauqua Valley individuals of local distinction: in this case Dr. Eve Spicer, a seventy-eight-year-old veterinarian whose specialty was horses and the “larger farm animals.” Dr. Spicer was a small fierce shock-white-haired woman who’d become something of a legend in the Chautauqua Valley, as much known for her eccentricities as her veterinary skill. Dr. Spicer had been married four times. Dr. Spicer “thrived” on emergencies and beat out her competition by making home visits at any hour of the day or night in her SPICER VET MOBILE minivan she’d painted all the colors of the rainbow because such colors signified “hope.” Dr. Spicer boasted of “psychic rapport” with most animals and I saw no reason to doubt her, considering the way she’d peered at me through her bifocal glasses and with a look of astute sy
mpathy pronounced me “wounded.”

  Rob was saying vehemently, “—this friend of mine from Colgate, lives in Potsdam, Clare knows him but you haven’t met him I don’t think, it’s his father this is for, he’s been a vet in the Keene Valley for thirty years, he’ll get a kick out of ‘Dr. Spicer.’” Rob was looming over me holding the magazine open to my article, so that I could sign above the byline Nicole Eaton. His breath smelled like gasoline fumes. He was being maudlin, sentimental as I’d seen him only a few times, at Christmas with his children. You’d think that Clare was somewhere within earshot, all this attention focused on her sister was for her benefit.

  I was embarrassed, signing my name. As if “The Lady Is a Vet” was such an accomplishment! But I understood that some people who don’t write and never see their names and words in print attribute a magical power to the printed word. Mom had always revered books, any kind of serious writing. My newspaper journalism was, in Mom’s words, “parts of you that go out from you and into other people.”

  I’d never wanted Mom to know, and wouldn’t want Rob Chisholm to know now, how quickly I began to forget these profiles. I spent hours interviewing subjects and conscientiously—sincerely!—“relating” to them; I spent more hours transcribing tapes, to the point of becoming mesmerized with the very tedium of the task; and then there came the hours of writing, and rewriting. (Most of “writing” is “rewriting.” This is another fact non-writers don’t know.) Since moving into this house I’d become obsessive about my work, staying with a piece until it was finished no matter how exhausted I’d become in the process. It was a way of missing Mom, or maybe a way of not-missing Mom, while I was working. But once I e-mailed a piece to my editor at the Beacon, a kind of misty-gray amnesia set in and I began to forget. By the time the profile appeared under the byline Nicole Eaton it would seem almost the work of another person, a stranger.

  It was rare for me to see my interview subjects a second time. Sad to say, I forgot them, too.