Missing Mom: A Novel

by Joyce Carol Oates

  “Do you know anything about it?”—Tabitha’s eyes were prying at mine.

  “‘It’—?”

  “Their marriage. Clare’s and Rob’s.” Tabitha spoke impatiently as if to a retarded child.

  “No, Aunt Tabitha. I do not.”

  “Clare doesn’t confide in you? Did she confide in Gwen?”

  I shook my head, not-knowing.

  “That poor little boy. He has ‘learning disabilities’—Clare told me? Since when?”

  Again I shook my head, don’t know.

  “And Lilja! That girl. I’ve tried to speak with her on the phone but she’s always in a hurry and lately she must have caller I.D. because she won’t pick up.”

  Shook my head: baffled, too. Sad!

  In fact, Lilja seemed to be avoiding me, too. I’d thought that with Clare gone Lilja might be wanting to talk to Auntie Nikki, might want to have dinner with me from time to time, even stay over at my house, but she’d declined with a little cry of alarm as if I’d suggested something obscene. Rob complained to me that Lilja spent as much time away from home as she could, usually at a girl cousin’s house. So far as he could tell, she didn’t miss her mother much: “The main change in the household is it’s quiet.” Once, Rob had thought he’d heard Lilja crying in her room but when he went to inquire he’d discovered that she was on her cell phone with a girlfriend, laughing.

  Tabitha sighed. “Girls that age! Lilja will be growing up even faster than you did.”

  Meaning, having sex at an age too-young for one of Tabitha’s pristine nature even to contemplate.

  Before arriving at my aunt’s house I’d calculated how soon I could slip away again, reasoning that anything less than an hour would be an insult, but now that I was here, I realized it would be much more difficult to escape. Almost wistfully it had been hinted by Tabitha that we might have dinner together and, taken by surprise, I’d murmured an ambiguous reply not quite yes, not quite no, feeling a faint stir of panic. No! no! It would be an ordeal to prepare a meal with my fussy aunt in her dreary kitchen, nothing like preparing meals with Mom in her cheerful kitchen where I’d fallen into the daughter/helper role, with Mom the boss. I couldn’t imagine such intimacy with my aunt. I couldn’t imagine what sorts of meals Tabitha might prepare for herself, alone in this house. The wild thought came to me, I should take Tabitha out to dinner. What fun! My old friend Sylvie LaPorte had recently called suggesting we meet for lunch or dinner, I’d ask Sylvie to invite her mother, or an elderly aunt, we could have a double date.

  Tabitha said, sniffing, “I see you’re smiling, Nikki! So good to know that someone is happy.”

  I chose to interpret this rebuke as a compliment. And a signal to depart.

  Except as I stood Tabitha said suddenly, as if she’d just now thought of it, that a closet door in her bedroom had fallen “off its hinges,” and could I help her repair it? The last time this had happened, Gwen had helped, and they’d fixed the door “good as new” in five minutes.

  Of course, I offered to help. With Mom as my predecessor, it wasn’t as if I had much choice.

  So, leaning heavily on the banister, Tabitha led me up the stairs to the gloomy second floor of her house. So far as I could remember, I’d never been upstairs before. (As children, Clare and I had been forbidden to “explore” our aunt’s house.) Immediately, a feeling of disorientation came over me. Not just I didn’t want to be here but I shouldn’t be here. Tabitha was breathing quickly, as if excited. Following her stolid pear-shaped body along a dim-lit hall with soft, plush carpeting that swallowed up our footsteps, I scared myself thinking that in one of the closed-off rooms we were passing, my long-deceased uncle Edmund Spancic III lay embalmed in a canoe-like coffin.

  “Gwen was just so helpful after Edmund passed, you can’t imagine. Why, I never needed to ask her a thing, she would ask me, ‘Tabitha, is there anything in the house that needs seeing-to?’ She would ask me.”

  I absorbed this in silence. Not asking meanly what Tabitha had offered to do for Mom, after Dad “passed.”

  Tabitha’s bedroom was exactly what I’d have expected in such an old, stately house: over-large, yet with too much furniture; fussily decorated in the style of a bygone era, with faded floral-print wallpaper and heavy brocaded drapes and an ugly chandelier. The bed looked as if it had been hastily, even grudgingly made, lumpy beneath a brocade spread. The most striking piece of furniture, the only thing I might have coveted, was a faded velvet chaise longue on claw feet, piled with one of Mom’s silk-square quilts and several of her needlepoint cushions which I recognized immediately as her handiwork. I told Tabitha that the chaise longue looked like something you’d see Joan Crawford lounging on in a black silk negligee, in some late-night TV movie from the 1940s. Being Tabitha, unresponsive to my attempts at wit as Smoky, my aunt simply stared blankly at me. “I mean,” I amended, “it’s glamorous.”

  Glamorous? With the disproportionately clumsy claw feet, the piece was purely camp. But I meant to be admiring.

  Yet still Tabitha stood, staring at me. She was wearing, in her drafty house, a dark wool-looking dress whose hem fell to mid-calf, over this a hefty nickel-colored cardigan with wooden buttons; on her surprisingly small, though rather swollen-looking feet, sensible-grandma shoes, more stolid leathery versions of Mom’s all-occasion crepe-soled shoes. Pressing her hand against her bosom, Tabitha said, breathless, “Oh! Gwen once said that exact same thing, about that sofa. One day when I was feeling poorly, and Gwen came with me upstairs and helped me into bed, she said, you know how Gwen was always sparkly, ‘If you get tired of that spiffy chaise longue, Tabitha, don’t give it to Good Will without consulting me. I could use some glamour over at Forty-three Deer Creek Drive.’”

  It was stunning to me, to so suddenly hear Mom’s words, Mom’s voice, rendered through Tabitha Spancic. I wouldn’t have thought that my self-absorbed aunt would have remembered such a remark, let alone recount it for me so vividly.

  I couldn’t think how to reply. I felt a terrible wave of loss sweep over me.

  Tabitha said, “Oh, I wish I’d given it to Gwen! It isn’t as if I ever use it.”

  We turned our attention to the “broken” closet door. In fact, it was one of four elegantly constructed louvre doors, on two good-sized closets facing each other in an alcove, that had been designed to open and shut on rollers. Not ordinary closet doors for the Spancics, but needlessly complicated white louvre doors whose slats were grim with dust. I could see how the door had slipped off its roller, but damned if I could see how it might be forced up into the mechanism again. Tabitha had left it tilted drunkenly against a wall. As she fretted and fussed, I tried to lift the heavy door, struggled with it for several long minutes, broke several fingernails and came close to crushing my fingers. Tabitha did absolutely nothing to help. As the door teetered, swerved, fell against my arms, tilted back against the wall, left a sizable scratch in the hardwood floor (which Tabitha didn’t seem to have noticed thank God) my aunt lamented, “Somehow, Gwen and I were able to force it back. ‘It’s nothing,’ Gwen said. ‘But it has a trick to it.’”

  I said, “Well, it’s broken now, Aunt Tabitha. Maybe it wasn’t broken before.”

  “Gwen said…”

  Were we arguing? About what?

  “Can you call a handyman, Tabitha? You must have a man you call often, with this house.”

  “Oh, I do! But he passed away, this summer.”

  A sly thought came to me: “Maybe Rob Chisholm could help. Call him.”

  Tabitha said, in her way of coercive helplessness, “Oh, couldn’t you call him, Nikki? I scarcely know Clare’s husband.”

  I said, “I scarcely know Clare’s husband. In fact, I scarcely know Clare.”

  I’d managed to tilt the damned louvre door back against the wall, as I’d found it.

  All this while, I’d been distracted by a sweet, seductive scent of lavender emanating from my aunt’s closet: Gwen’s “potpourri cachet.” Every fall, T
abitha said, Gwen had given her a fresh supply made of dried wildflowers and herbs. “Why don’t you take some with you, Nikki? It isn’t like there will be more.”

  In fact, there was an excess of my mother’s potpourri at home. In every closet, in the guest bathroom and in Mom’s sewing room. I’d become so habituated to it I rarely noticed it any longer, except when I entered the house out of the fresh, chill air. I didn’t doubt that every female relative and friend of Gwen Eaton’s in a ten-mile radius of Mt. Ephraim was well-stocked with the scent. Yet it was kind of my aunt to make the offer, and I thanked her.

  Unexpectedly then, Tabitha began to pull items of clothing out of the closet to show me. These were “good” dresses, some of them made of silk, satin, cashmere wool, and all of them on cushioned hangers. There were tweed suits, there were blouses and vests and skirts, the sight of which caused Tabitha to laugh almost gaily. She hadn’t fitted into some of these things since she’d been pregnant with Aaron more than forty years ago, and it broke her heart to see them go to waste. Wouldn’t I like to take something? Please?

  I admired Tabitha’s expensive things but declined her offer. The panicky sensation returned, a sudden conviction She will make me into her daughter, too.

  “It’s you or Good Will, Nikki. Naturally, I’d prefer a blood relative to utter strangers.”

  “Well, naturally. Aunt Tabitha. Thank you.”

  Still, Tabitha wasn’t to be discouraged. From out of a cherrywood bureau drawer she lifted a peach-colored angora sweater, wrapped in tissue paper like something precious. “Isn’t this beautiful! You won’t believe, your mother knitted this for me. Such a long time ago, I know I haven’t worn it in thirty years.”

  Rapidly I calculated: thirty years? If Tabitha was remembering correctly, Mom had knitted the sweater for her when Mom had been in her mid-twenties, and Tabitha in her mid-thirties. Somehow I didn’t want to think that my mother and her sister-in-law had been close at one time; or, worse, Mom had wished to think they were close.

  “I never did wear it very much. It was always a bit snug in the bosom. Please do take it, Nikki! Gwen would want you to.”

  Reluctantly I took the sweater from her. Angora is so light, it seemed to float in my hands. Contemplating myself in one of my aunt’s mirrors, I held the sweater against me. Peach wasn’t one of my favorite colors. My eyes appeared oddly shiny, glassy. My cheeks were strangely flushed. Close beside me Tabitha hovered, stolid and nearly my height, smiling in the way Mom used to smile when I’d tried on things she’d made for me.

  “Aunt Tabitha, thanks. But—”

  “There, that’s settled. Wear it for your ‘man friend,’ dear. I think you will find,” Tabitha said gravely, “men are most impressed by ‘feminine’—‘gracious’—items of apparel, in good taste.”

  The peach-colored angora sweater was certainly in good taste. It would have been suitable for a child, with slightly puffy sleeves and an eyelet neckline. Across the bodice was a small constellation of seed pearls.

  If I wore this sweater braless, hard little nipples poking through the peachy angora, Wally Szalla would be impressed, indeed. Not to mention hot-eyed Rob Chisholm.

  I laughed. I thanked Aunt Tabitha with a quick kiss on the cheek. Ordinarily we’d have both been shocked by my impulsive affection but there was something feverish/festive in the air in Tabitha’s bedroom, intensified by the pervading smell of lavender.

  Next, Tabitha insisted upon giving me a detachable white lace collar my mother had sewed for her years ago, that had gone just slightly yellow. (“You can wear it with the sweater, Nikki. It will be adorable.”) And a red silk blouse with an enormous bow, Tabitha said was too small for her but “looked just right” for me. (It looked voluminous.) And a black jersey cloche hat, she claimed not to have worn in fifty years.

  “Aunt Tabitha, you aren’t that old. Come on.”

  “In their hearts, people age at different rates, Nikki. You will see.”

  A cryptic remark for Mrs. Edmund Spancic III to utter!

  Mom hadn’t sewed the cloche hat for Tabitha, I was sure. It fitted my head just loosely enough so that I could sweep up my hair inside it. I had to admit, I liked the look: if I’d discovered the hat in a thrift shop I’d have quickly snapped it up. It was difficult to envision my aunt wearing such a hat but I could envision a lover pulling it off my head and my hair tumbling—glimmering, rippling—down past my (bare) shoulders.

  Naked Nikki, in just a cloche hat. And the hat stripped from her.

  The thought came to me: Detective Strabane might like this hat.

  And the peach-colored angora sweater with the puff sleeves and seed-pearl bodice, too.

  Primly Aunt Tabitha murmured: “They were not a natural couple, I’m afraid.”

  “Oh. They…weren’t?”

  “Not what you’d call ‘compatible.’ That is the word, isn’t it—‘compatible.’”

  I was reluctant to answer. The subject was my parents. My heart felt as if it had been gripped in a vise: Aunt Tabitha’s sturdy hand.

  Somehow—oh, don’t ask how!—we were in my aunt’s drafty high-ceilinged kitchen. Somehow, I seem to have agreed to stay for what Tabitha called “supper.”

  In fact, I seemed to be the one preparing the meal while Tabitha opened and shut drawers, peered into kitchen cupboards, with a vague, vexed look of being unable to find what she sought.

  Aunt Tabitha’s kitchen was a place where things weren’t likely to be where you sought them. “Good, linen” napkins were discovered amid greasy cooking utensils in a lower cupboard, “good, crystal” water glasses turned up amid canned goods, mostly Campbell’s soups, in another cupboard. The roll of paper towels had run out forcing us to use “good, cloth” hand towels in the interim. These vexations, and others, were attributed to the unreliability of a woman named Daniella who “helped out” Tabitha once a week, usually Thursdays.

  Beyond Daniella, the fault lay more obscurely with Tabitha’s grown children who never came to visit, even with the deceased Edmund, who’d left Tabitha a widow alone in such a big house. Daniella had not much to do, but, somehow, Daniella couldn’t be depended upon to do this little as well as she might have, considering how “generously” Tabitha paid her.

  I told Tabitha I could sympathize: I was so sure that hired help wouldn’t work out for me, I never hired help.

  Tabitha laughed at this, her grudging-Grandma laugh that sounded like the cracking of dried sticks. “Oh, Gwen used to say the exact same thing. With a little wink, so I’d know she was joking.”

  “Did she!”

  “Of course, Jon didn’t ‘believe’ in hiring help if he could avoid it.” Tabitha smiled, even as she sighed pityingly.

  As girls Clare and I had been told to stay out of our aunt’s kitchen which had seemed strange to us: at home, and in the homes of our friends, the kitchen was the room you naturally hung out in. But not the Spancic kitchen which was twice the size of mine at home but far less efficiently designed. Everything seemed far away yet the space was crowded. There was even a “butler’s pantry” with a swinging door. Instead of a cozy breakfast nook by a window there was a wooden table in the center of the floor, and this table was surrounded by six chairs of which all but one were stacked with flattened grocery bags, old newspapers and flyers and things meant to be discarded. Instead of being fitted into the counters, the ungainly six-burner gas stove was free-standing. Overhead a lone forty-watt lightbulb shone dimly upon our efforts like the fading star of a distant galaxy.

  As soon as she’d led me into this dispiriting room, Tabitha seemed disoriented. If we’d been rowing a canoe together, Tabitha was letting go her paddle. Her most decisive act was to extricate, out of a drawer of tangled things, an apron for me. “Gwen always wore this when she helped out in the kitchen. In fact, Gwen sewed the apron for me herself, originally.” The apron was made of a coarse beige cloth with ties at both the neck and the waist. Its single large pocket was a sunflower patch. It was very attr
active, unquestioning I put it on.

  Next, Tabitha directed me to the refrigerator freezer which was stocked with TV dinners and quarts of “diet” ice cream. I was astonished to see how bare, and how not-very-clean, the refrigerator was inside: no fresh vegetables, no fresh greens for a salad. Commercial white bread, processed cheeses and opened jars of peanut butter, chocolate syrup, and pickles. At least we had the TV dinners and the bread I’d brought.

  “I don’t suppose you have any wine, Aunt Tabitha?”

  “Wine? For just us?”

  Tabitha’s surprise was genuine. I dreaded to think of the newest family legend of Nikki Eaton as a drinker.

  Unexpectedly, my aunt had a microwave oven in the kitchen. Though there was something amiss with its dials, I was able to rapidly thaw and heat two of the more promising TV dinners: “Stouffer’s Tom Turkey ’n’ Giblet Gravy with Mushroom Bread Stuffing.” This included small portions of mushy vegetables recognizable by shapes and colors as hashed-brown potatoes, sliced carrots, and string beans. And we had my sprouted-wheat/almond bread, which had never tasted better.

  We ate in the dining room, at our appointed place mats. I could envision the two of us at these place mats, eating microwaved TV dinners each evening stretching into eternity.

  With the air of a finicky eater being polite out of consideration for the cook, Aunt Tabitha finished every morsel of her Tom Turkey dinner, and quite a bit of mine. “I hate to see good food go to waste. ‘Just think of the starving Africans’ my mother used to scold us.”

  For dessert, Tabitha doled out large scoops of chocolate-chip “diet” ice cream in bowls, and brought a bag of Pepperidge Farm chocolate-chip cookies to the table. There was such a sugar rush in my mouth, it felt as if virulent microorganisms were attacking me.

  By the time I cleared the table, squirted liquid soap into the sink and began to wash dishes which, in her vague fumbling way, Tabitha set onto the counter to “dry in the air,” it was nearly 8 P.M. and dark as midnight. I had arrived at the dour cobblestone house on Church Street at about 4:30 P.M. with a naive hope of leaving within the hour and now my concern was avoiding spending the night. An unnatural lethargy had come over me, a kind of numbed contentment. It was the way Smoky had slept all but about ninety minutes a day through the summer as if exhausted by his life.