Missing Mom: A Novel Page 28

  In Wally’s fleshy arms (the man was muscled, but you had to squeeze to find it) in an uncomfortable antique bed high as an operating table I cried. As Wally made love to me, I cried. Not asking why I cried as if, in Wally Szalla’s experience, a naked woman crying in his arms was to be expected.

  This was the romantic weekend away from Mt. Ephraim and Chautauqua Falls both, when Wally meant to speak seriously to me about our future. But somehow in the mist of champagne, wine, vodka and brandies, and Nikki’s tears, the future was displaced.

  This man wants me to adore him. Then he won’t need to adore me.

  I returned home to Mt. Ephraim, thirty-two years old.

  I baked.

  part four

  have faith

  Your life will begin again. After the trial.

  In Mom’s sewing room was her Chautauqua Valley Shelter Animals calendar. When I took it over, I was surprised to discover that it was an eighteen-month calendar, from January 2004 through to June 2005. So, as the date of the trial kept being postponed, into the so-called New Year, I could keep rescheduling: TRIAL.

  calendar

  Mom’s calendar! Eighteen color photos of orphaned, abandoned, neglected and abused animals who’d been taken into the local ASPCA-affiliated shelter, prior to being adopted into “good homes.” These were dogs, cats, horses, even a goat, a Vietnamese potbellied pig, and a glorious white cockatoo.

  I’d taken over Mom’s calendar when I moved into Mom’s house, it seemed only logical.

  Clare hadn’t objected. When she’d seen the calendar, the days neatly annotated in different colors of ink that looked, from a short distance, like a combination crossword puzzle and spiderweb, she’d backed off.

  Mom had never kept a diary, so far as we knew. (Oh, we were certain we’d have known!) But her calendar was so annotated, almost you could read it as a kind of diary.

  As a kind of puzzle, in part. For while most of the initials and abbreviations were obvious, others were mysterious or indecipherable.

  It was painful to see. To retrace Mom’s days, weeks. She’d led what looked like a “busy” life. A glance at her crowded calendar suggested this. Each Sunday was church of course. Often on Sunday evenings were church-related activities. Mondays through Fridays were dense with initials: chur com mtg (church committee meeting), SSC (Senior Swim Club at the Y), lib (library, where Mom did volunteer work at the checkout desk), hosp. (hospital, where Mom did volunteer work in the gift shop), HH (Hedwig House, an assisted living facility in Mt. Ephraim where one of Mom’s elderly Kovach relatives lived whom she visited regularly), art mtg (arts council meeting). There were numerous initials that had to refer to friends and relatives, mostly women Mom’s age, with whom she had lunch frequently. There were initials referring to medical appointments. Hair salon appointments. On May 9, the day of Mom’s Mother’s Day dinner, the last time I’d seen Mom alive, she’d marked the date with a column of red-inked initials headed by Cl/Nik—meaning Clare and Nikki.

  The first of Mom’s guests to have been invited.

  May 11, the day of Mom’s death, had been marked in blue ink: class 10:30 A. M., HH 5 P.M.

  May 14, the day of Mom’s funeral, had been marked in green: SSC 11 A.M., hosp. 1–5.

  From January through to the end of May, the calendar was heavily marked. Most of the week of May 16 was marked, the last week in May had been less marked, turn the calendar to June and there were only a few scattered dates marked.

  Beyond that, blank days. Stretching into eternity.

  On a childish impulse, I checked October. And there, in red ink, on October 8, was marked NIKKI. My birthday.

  Clare’s birthday, on June 2, had also been marked in red.

  I checked to see that both January 8, 2004, and January 8, 2005, anniversaries of the date of Dad’s death, had been marked with a small black in the upper right-hand corner of the date.

  I could hear again Mom’s breezy remark, she couldn’t live without her calendar: “If I don’t write the least little thing down, I’ll forget it. So I always write everything down, and I never forget.”

  missing clare

  “I have news, Nikki. Prepare!”

  Out of nowhere the call came. The husky elated voice was both familiar and not-familiar. Intimate and startling in my ear so that I was made to realize how much I’d been missing my bossy older sister.

  How like Clare, to call with such a pronouncement. Assuming on this weekday morning in October that I’d be home, and awaiting her. That I wasn’t immersed in my work (“Only just writing? That isn’t work”) and had time for her after so many weeks of silence.

  Since she’d called me a squatter, and run out of the house, Clare had been avoiding me. Sometimes I was furious, and sometimes I was plain hurt, that Clare had so suddenly cut me out of her life. All the years she’d been criticizing me for not living closer to Mom, now I was living in Mom’s very house and Clare had ceased inviting me to hers. I hadn’t seen my niece and nephew in weeks. I hadn’t seen Rob. If I needed to communicate with Clare on something urgent, I called Rob at his office. If, less frequently, Clare needed to communicate with me, it was through Rob.

  My brother-in-law was embarrassed and apologetic: “Clare says you make her ‘nervous’ and ‘sad,’ Nikki. She’s trying very hard not to be ‘nervous’ and ‘sad.’”

  This hurt. This made my blood boil. Damned if I would defend myself over the charge of making my sister nervous and sad.

  Rob said, “Nikki? Don’t take it too personally, you know how Clare is.” After a pause, sighing: “You learn to make compromises in families, as in marriages. If you want to stay together.”

  The old Nikki would have brightly quipped: “Who? Not me.”

  The new Nikki murmured, “Don’t I know!”

  Since Detective Strabane had come by and upset me I’d been thinking a lot about Clare and her family: Rob, Lilja, Foster. They were my family, too. They were all that remained of my family. I’d been haunted by the fact I’d lost both my parents within the past several years. It seemed too soon. It was too soon! How I envied my friends who still had their parents. Even grandparents! I’d vaguely thought the “older generations” a not-very-exciting responsibility/burden but now I was wishing badly that I’d asked Mom more about my Kovach grandparents when I’d had the chance.

  So many years I’d had the chance. Those visits to St. Joseph’s Cemetery, I’d must have assumed would go on forever.

  Mostly I was hurt by Clare’s behavior. The more she ignored me, wouldn’t return my calls, the more I wanted to contact her. I wanted to think that Rob must be exaggerating. Clare couldn’t be afraid of seeing me! One day impulsively I drove to her house to leave a loaf of fresh-baked bread (raisin/yogurt/twelve grain) with my startled niece Lilja who stared at me as if seeing a ghost.

  Stammering guiltily, “Aunt Nikki, I don’t think Mom is h-home.”

  “Just say hello to her for me, Lilja. And love to all of you.”

  Obviously Aunt Nikki was in a hurry, couldn’t have visited with Clare if Clare had been home.

  Instead of calling to thank me for the bread, Clare wrote a cold little note on a Finger Lakes Wineries postcard.

  Thanks for the bread. Quite a surprise you’d have time for baking. Rob & Foster have already devoured most of it. Nice to know you’re settled in there & have time for bread baking.

  Yrs,

  CLARE

  Yrs! Was that supposed to be short for Yours? Hadn’t Mrs. Rob Chisholm had time in her busy suburban life to spell out Yours?

  It was Rob who called to thank me for the bread: “It was delicious, Nikki. Did you really bake it? You?”

  As soon as Clare swept into the house, before she even hugged me and left a smear of lipstick across my cheekbone, she announced her news: she and Rob had agreed upon a “trial separation.”

  I was utterly taken by surprise. I must have looked as if I’d been kicked in the belly.

  Clare laughed at me. She
was exhilarated, thrilled. A flush of sheer pleasure rose into her face, the pleasure of seeing how your news has surprised another. Clare was smartly dressed in a chic new pants suit in autumn-leaf colors, stylish black shoes with a lizard-skin look. Her face was carefully made up, glamorous and even youthful, and her hair was a startling coppery-red, lifting from her forehead in moussed wings. And she’d lost weight! The fleshy-moon face she’d been despairing of since high school was visibly thinner, the hips and belly were thinner. There was something fevered and crackling about Clare, like a live wire you wouldn’t wish to touch.

  “Oh, Nikki. Don’t look so shocked. You remind me of Aunt Tabitha, that’s exactly how she looked when I told her.”

  Aunt Tabitha! This was a cruel touch. This was not nice.

  Cruel, too, to allow me to know that she’d sprung her bombshell news onto Aunt Tabitha, before telling me. Her sister!

  I told Clare that I was sorry to hear her news and Clare said sharply, “‘Sorry’? You? Why?” and I said, confused, “Well—where is Rob moving?” and Clare said, “Rob isn’t. I am. Foster and I. Day after tomorrow we move to a new residence,” and I said, staring, “You, Clare? And Foster? You can’t be serious,” and Clare said impatiently, “You sound like Rob. You sound like Dad, or Mom. I’m the only serious person I know, I have to save my own life.”

  Seeing that I was stunned, Clare took fleeting sisterly pity on me and gave me another hug: hard enough to make me wince. Here was a girls’ coach hugging a temporarily demoralized team player, as much to chide as to comfort. Her hands on my bare arms were unexpectedly brisk and cold. Her perfume/hair mousse was overpowering. With a throaty little laugh she told me that Rob was “stubborn”—“in denial”—insisted upon keeping the separation secret from his family and at Coldwell: “As if you could keep anything secret in Mt. Ephraim! Dad used to say we were all a hive of bees, buzzing whether there’s news or not.” Yet Clare sounded grimly pleased, at the prospect of news being buzzed about.

  I asked about Lilja, and Clare said, frowning, “Lilja is furious with me, won’t speak with me. All this is interfering with her ninth grade social life. ‘First Grandma, now Mom’ is what she’s stamping about the house saying, as if what happened to her grandmother was some sort of inconvenience for her. Lilja is welcome to visit her brother and me anytime she wants. It’s out of the question living with us, there isn’t room. And her temperament! If she chooses to side with her father, that will be her decision. This past year has been hell, let me tell you. That girl is tough as steel.”

  Tough as steel? Lilja?

  “Yes! If you were that girl’s mother and not her ‘cool’ aunt, you’d know.”

  All this while Clare was charging through the house. Too restless to stay in the kitchen, or the living room, or the dining room; charging into the back bedrooms, in and out of Mom’s sewing room, Dad’s study, even poking her head in the bathrooms. Whatever Clare was searching for she didn’t seem to find.

  I offered Clare coffee, something to eat (still I hoped to impress my sister with my bread baking), but Clare scarcely heard me. I wanted to clutch at her hands, and hold her; I’d been wanting to talk to her for months, and now she was moving away from Mt. Ephraim! I was made to recall how after Dad’s funeral, Clare had pleaded with me to move back to Mt. Ephraim for a few months, to help her with Mom, but I’d been far too distracted by my own complicated life at that time—a new job and a new man who’d been exerting pressure on me to marry him.

  Now, I’d have had to think to recall that man’s name.

  “I hope you don’t intend to take Rob’s side, Nikki. Like everyone else in the family. You of all people.”

  “Clare, I’m not taking anyone’s side. I’m just—well, surprised.”

  “But you shouldn’t be. I told you how I’d been feeling—stifled, suffocated. Oh, for a while I was happy, when Lilja was little, and Foster, I’d have liked them to stay that age forever, but it isn’t like that, Nikki. If you have children, you’ll learn for yourself. And there’s Rob: you’d never know it from how easygoing Rob seems, but that man takes up all the oxygen in the house, he’s what is known as a high-maintenance male. Just the way he smiles sometimes, it’s a command and I’d better salute and obey. The way he’ll say ‘Never mind about me.’ Oh! the way he doesn’t want anyone in his family to know, or at Coldwell. He’s so furious, so hurt in his pride. This man who has the most unbreakable habit of leaving any bathroom he uses a mess, wadding up and practically hoarding his soiled underwear and socks, kicked into a corner of his closet, and claims he ‘forgets’!—how can you ‘forget’ when you can smell these things across the room! I’m so ashamed of my husband, I hurry around picking up after him before Maria arrives, and Foster is taking after his father, there must be a gene for hoarding dirty underwear, Foster’s winds up under his bed. As for Lilja—if you saw her room at this very moment you’d think that a cyclone had rushed through it. If you even knock at the door she screams like she’s being attacked: ‘Go away! This is my private space! I have a right to my private space.’ Poor Foster, his eyes never stop watering, it must be an allergy, some sort of sinus infection, he claims he can’t see. So I’m taking him to an eye specialist this afternoon in Rochester. Rob doesn’t think we should wait until we get settled in our new residence but of course it falls on me to make the drive to Rochester. Wouldn’t you know, Foster starts his new school next week.”

  Now I did clutch at Clare’s hands, to calm her.

  “Clare, wait. Where are you going?”

  “Now? To the bank, and the dry cleaner’s, and—”

  “No, Clare. Where are you moving?”

  “Oh, didn’t I tell you? Philadelphia.”

  Philadelphia! I’d been assuming Rochester, our closest large city.

  “Nikki, I’m sure that I told you we were moving to Philadelphia, of course I did, you just weren’t listening. As I’ve been telling Rob in so many words that I couldn’t breathe in the marriage any longer, but he refused to hear. It’s like Dad whistling, Rob sort of vibrates, a humming noise like static, these men refuse to hear. You know, Nikki, I am not going to be made to feel guilty about this. I am not. I married Rob because I’d been made to feel guilty about not being married, made to feel guilty that Mom was anxious about me, made to feel that Mom was sad about me, how ‘exploited’ I was by the school district which was true, certainly it was true, but the remedy needn’t have been marriage, I should have gone back to school and gotten a master’s degree or a Ph.D., I tried to explain to Mom but it was like speaking a foreign language, I mean—like trying to speak English, and the other person is answering you in a foreign language. ‘Why, Clare, Rob Chisholm is the nicest man you’ve ever brought home to meet us’—‘Rob Chisholm adores you’—‘Your father respects Rob Chisholm, and you know how fussy Dad is.’” Clare laughed harshly, waving her hands about. “Well, Dad should have married Rob Chisholm. They could have whistled and hummed together, kicked their underwear together, pooled their dirty laundry. Mom could’ve done their laundry for them. Remember Mom running those huge loads of laundry, Daddy had a phobia about ‘microorganisms’ on bedclothes, we’d hear the washing machine down in the basement suddenly start to shake and shudder as if it was about to explode. The whole house was shaking, like an earthquake.”

  “Clare, I don’t remember that.”

  “Nikki, you do.”

  “Well, maybe I do, but it happened only once or twice when the washing machine was overloaded. It was most unusual, when it happened.”

  “Everything in this house was ‘most unusual’ when it happened. Because no one wanted to remember it kept happening.”

  Clare spoke with such vehemence, you had to know that her words meant more than they seemed to indicate.

  We’d blundered into the kitchen where Clare was staring at the sunburst clock as if she was having difficulty calculating the time. She had to get to the bank, she said. She had to stop by the dry cleaner’s, Rob was runni
ng out of clean shirts. She had to get to Dr. Myer’s to pick up a new prescription, and—something else that was crucial?—oh yes: she had to pick up Foster at his school no later than 2 P.M. She clutched at her curly-coppery head, laughing. “So much happening at once, no wonder I can’t sleep without pills.”

  Carefully I asked Clare if maybe she was acting impulsively?

  It had been only about five months since…

  “It’s been years. Since I’ve been able to breathe.”

  “But has something happened just recently? The last time I spoke with Rob on the phone…”

  Clare said hotly, “Actually, Nikki, that’s none of your business. If something has ‘happened’ between Rob and me. You can assume that plenty ‘happens’ between a wife and her husband and that it’s private. My decisions are private. Stay here in Mt. Ephraim if you want to!—live here in this house the rest of your life! I won’t interfere.”

  “I’m not ‘living’ here, Clare. It’s only until things get sorted out and we can put the house on the market.”

  Clare laughed. Her cheeks were flushed with a ruddy color as they’d been years ago when Clare had played basketball at Mt. Ephraim High, one of the more aggressive players on the girls’ team. Her expression shifted, meanly. “What about you and Mr. S.?”

  Mr. S.! I stiffened at the question. I told Clare that Wally Szalla and I were fine.

  “Are you!” Clare spoke in a way to suggest that she’d heard otherwise but would humor me in this.

  “That’s between Wally and me, Clare.”

  “No, Nikki. Between the Szallas and you.”