Missing Mom Read online

  As a girl, already a model of efficiency and frugality for whom sentiment was a secondary matter, Clare had solved the gift problem by buying items with a festive twist in quantity: boxes of gaily colored tissues, mouthwash and toothpaste in unusual flavors, giant boxes of Dad’s favorite cereal Wheaties and a full case of Mom’s most-used Campbell’s soup cream of celery; without irony or a wish to be cruel, Clare had given me such birthday gifts as flea collars for our cats, a bag of scented Kitty Litter, deodorant, a “giant economy” box of Junior Miss Sani-Pads.

  “Oh, Nikki! What on earth…”

  Mom was marveling over the rainbow-wrapped present that weighed so little. With comical fastidiousness she undid the yarn with which I’d tied it, anxious to preserve the wrapping paper to use another time. “So beautiful, Nikki! Isn’t this just like you, so—imaginative.”

  Was it? I wanted to think so.

  Inside the paper was a fluffy white ostrich feather boa, I’d found in a Rochester thrift shop. Mom exclaimed with childish delight, pulling the boa out of its wrapping and positioning it on her shoulders. There was something comical and touching about her, like a little girl playing grown-up. “Nikki, just what I was needing. However did you guess?”

  Mom leaned over to hug me. She smelled of white talcum.

  After Dad’s death, which had been abrupt and unexpected, Mom had lapsed into a phase of showering frequently, washing her hands compulsively until the skin began to wear out, brushing her teeth until the gums bled. She’d dusted herself obsessively with the fragrant talcum powder Dad had given her, even the soles of her feet, so that, when Clare and I dropped by the house we’d be startled by ghostly white powder footprints on the floor outside the bathroom.

  Eventually, Mom had returned to normal. We thought.

  “I found a feather boa once, ostrich feathers, too, white mixed with black, in my grandmother’s attic. I asked the old woman if I could have it to play with, I was just a little girl, and d’you know what my grandmother said?—‘No you may not.’”

  Aunt Tabitha delivered this little speech in an amused voice, as if she’d shifted her loyalties to the long-departed grandmother, not the long-departed little girl. You had to guess that Tabitha didn’t much approve of my whimsical present to Mom. And Alyce Proxmire shook her head, frowning in wonderment as at the spectacle of a girl classmate making a fool of herself. Of course, my big sister Clare smiled indulgently: “Nikki always buys us things she’d like for herself.”

  I felt the sting of that remark. Damn Clare, it wasn’t true!

  Sonja Szyszko was so exclaiming over the “beautiful”—“glamorous”—boa, Mom draped it over her sturdy shoulders. I felt a moment’s concern that Mom would impulsively give the boa to her as Mom often did with things that “looked better” on others than on her.

  Talk shifted to thrift shops. On this subject, I was the expert. For Mom’s guests I showed off a watch I’d found in the same Rochester shop, slightly tarnished but still very beautiful silver with a delicate midnight-blue face that hadn’t conventional numerals, but pale, luminous little stars instead. On the back was engraved: To Elise with love. High on champagne, in an excitable mood, seeing how the men were watching me, I heard myself prattling on like an airhead TV personality about my “insatiable” love of browsing in secondhand stores. I seemed to be drawn to old things, as if what was new, raw, untested and “not-yet-loved” hadn’t any appeal to me; I seemed to need to acquire things that had already belonged to someone else as if I wasn’t sure of my own judgment and had to follow where others had been: “Clothes, jewelry, men.”

  My slender purple-silk legs were crossed, my waxy-white naked left foot (toenails painted magenta, to match fingernails and mouth) was jiggling in the gold-spangled high-heeled sandal. I’d spoken as if whimsically. I had a way of saying what was serious in a bold-innocent fashion to elicit startled laughs.

  Except Clare wasn’t laughing. Or Mom, still fussing over the ostrich feathers draped across Sonja Szyszko’s shoulders, marveling at their beauty.

  Another woman’s husband! How can you, Nikki.

  How can you expect him to marry you, if he doesn’t respect you.

  Because if that man respected you he would get a divorce and marry you.

  Yes he would! I don’t care what century this is.

  And if he doesn’t marry you he doesn’t respect you.

  Nikki don’t you laugh at me! Your father would be upset about this, too.

  Honey I’m your mother. I just don’t want you to be hurt.

  Everyone marveled at Mom’s cooking. Of course.

  For Mother’s Day dinner we had: the much-anticipated Hawaiian Chicken Supreme, a gooey mélange of very tender chicken, chopped green peppers and onions, hefty pineapple slices, soy sauce and white rice and almonds. Also, asparagus spears, corn soufflé, beet salad with chopped mint. Also, Mom’s home-baked raisin/yogurt/twelve-grain bread. And for dessert peach melba with ice cream and cherry-pecan kringle. Except for sulky Lilja who ate only asparagus spears and a teaspoon of corn soufflé, and infuriated her mother by asking to be excused after ten minutes, we all ate hungrily. Even Aunt Tabitha who commented stoically that the Hawaiian chicken was “a little too sweet for my taste” and the rice “just a little undercooked”; and prissy Alyce Proxmire with her habit of cutting her food into tiny portions to be eaten with excruciating slowness as if she were expecting to bite down on broken glass.

  One of your mother’s lame ducks, Dad used to say of Alyce Proxmire with a bemused roll of his eyes.

  For a while as a child I’d actually thought there might be “lame” ducks Mom had rescued, somewhere. She was such a soft touch for stray creatures, predominantly women, calling at all hours or dropping by the house (“I’ll only stay for a few minutes, Gwen, I promise”) so it would be just like Mom to take pity on limping ducks.

  So many people at the dining room table, we’d had to add extra leaves. Rob and me struggling to fit the sections together. Our hands brushing. Maybe it’s harder to relate to a brother-in-law if you’ve never had a brother.

  At dinner, the table seemed too crowded. You’d have thought it was Thanksgiving or Christmas and that we were all family, talking and laughing loudly. Trying to sound festive. My eyes smarted with tears, though I was laughing. I kept looking for Dad amid all these faces and was baffled to see Rob Chisholm in Dad’s place, across the long table from Mom.

  More annoying, the exalted Gilbert Wexley was seated to Mom’s right, speaking pompously to the table—“The president will be reelected by a landslide in November, the patriotic American people will never be soft on terrorism”—while Mom looked on smiling and anxious. I couldn’t bear to think that my mother might care about this man who so reveled in his own self-importance.

  Fifty-six was too old to “date.” If Mom didn’t know this, Clare or I would have to clue her in.

  Beside me sat Sonny Danto, as I’d feared. Before dinner I’d tried to switch name cards, placing myself between Mom and Lilja, Mom had caught me and slapped playfully at my hand. Nikki no!

  One good thing about Danto, he vied with Wexley for dominance at the table. Though he knew virtually no one here, he wasn’t shy in the slightest. Talking, gesticulating, eating and drinking with the zest of a swarm of cockroaches. Even his attempt to speak with me was bustling, aggressive: “‘Nicole Eaton’—your name? In the little local paper?”—smiling with his large stained teeth, leaning toward me so that I wasn’t spared seeing each hair, each follicle of the Presley pompadour with unnerving intimacy—“my favorite of all the local writers, I always look for your columns.”

  “Do you.”

  Mom must have talked me up shamelessly to Sonny Danto, he seemed to have come prepared. In the local library quickly scanning back issues of the Beacon.

  Danto confided in me, in a lowered voice, he intended to write his memoir someday—“The Scourge of the Bugs: A No-Holds-Barred Account of a Real-Life Terminator. Terrific title, eh?” Or may
be, if he could find the right collaborator, it would be one of those “as told to” memoirs.

  He’d been inspired by his grandfather in Tonawanda, who’d been the original “Scourge of the Bugs.” Except Danto’s grandfather’s specialty had been termites, his were carpenter ants. “It reveals a lot about a person, which is his specialty. In the field of pest extermination.”

  I said, “I think my specialty would be moths. Those little fluttery paper-looking things? That are kind of pretty? Though I guess, I’d have to kill them, wouldn’t I. I don’t think I would like that.”

  Danto laughed extravagantly. He must have thought that I was flirting with him. Like an infomercial he began to lecture on the subject of moths, drawing the interest of most of the table away from Wexley: “Now your so-called paper moth can infest a household worse than ants! One day you see there’s a few of them, next day you see there’s a dozen of ’em, suddenly they’re all over the house and know why?—it isn’t just woollens they eat. No, they lay their eggs in cereal, crackers, pasta, dry pet food, birdseed, even in tea, anything in your cupboard that isn’t canned or packaged airtight. People just don’t know! Like poor Mrs. Eaton yesterday who despite a pretty clean household was about overrun with red ants and had no clue how to deal with ’em, which is where the Scourge of the Bugs comes in. You don’t ever want to underestimate the power of bugs to take over your house, you need professionals to exterminate ’em.” I saw Mom force a smile at pretty clean household and exchanged a look of sisterly irony with Clare across the table. How could our mother have plucked “Sonny” Danto out of the yellow pages and foisted him upon us, at this table!

  And upon me, her supposedly beloved daughter.

  She doesn’t know me. Doesn’t want to know me.

  As usual, Mom was oblivious of any discomfort that wasn’t obvious. As long as her guests appeared to be enjoying themselves, eating her food and accepting offers of seconds, what else mattered? Gwen Eaton, incurable optimist! It was hopeless to be angry with my mother, she meant so well. She wanted her Nikki to be happy like her Clare and that meant marriage, kids, home. Family.

  Inspired by Danto whose swaggering self-confidence must have annoyed him, Rob confided to the table how, as a boy, he’d wanted to be a bacteriologist, or maybe an epidemiologist: “Somebody who would do good in the world not just make money.”

  Aunt Tabitha crinkled her nose as if Rob had said something vaguely obscene. Alyce Proxmire shuddered, staring at him in disbelief. Clare was looking embarrassed as if Rob had suddenly revealed an intimate secret and Sonja Szyszko clapped her ungainly hands together as if she’d misunderstood.

  “Why Rob,” Mom protested. “You do good, in your line of work. ‘Electronics.’ ‘Sales.’ There has to be electronics in our world, doesn’t there? There has to be business, and making money, or there wouldn’t be other things like science, would there? You couldn’t make a living just from tiny things you can see only through a microscope, who’d have invented and manufactured the microscope without business and money? Bacteria are so little, not like birds or even bugs.” Mom spoke gaily, giddily. She was being funny without knowing why, and seemed pleased at the smiling response.

  Danto said belligerently, “Bugs have their own bacteria, you better believe it. Like ticks? Lyme disease? It ain’t the ticks that cause the disease, it’s bacteria.”

  “Actually, it’s a virus,” Rob said curtly. “Lyme disease is caused by a virus.”

  The subject shifted to Lyme disease: everyone knew someone who’d had it. Alyce Proxmire seemed to come alive for the first time that evening, speaking excitedly of how, two summers ago, in this very house, she’d made the near-fatal mistake of holding Gwen’s gray cat in her lap and in so doing she must have picked up a tick from the cat’s fur because early next morning she was wakened by a terrible throbbing in her scalp, and managed to see in the mirror an angry red swelling of the kind that is a danger sign meaning infection, and Lyme disease, if you aren’t treated immediately with antibiotics.

  “I might be paralyzed right now! I might be in an iron lung, right this minute! Thanks to Gwen and one of her strays.”

  Alyce meant to be joking, even as she was seriously chiding Mom, but her voice quavered with dread.

  Mom said apologetically: “Oh, Alyce. I feel so bad about that! Right away I examined Smoky, and took him to the vet, and Dr. McKay could not find a single tick on him, honestly. Not even a flea. ‘Smoky is one of the cleanest animals in my practice,’ he said, truly, Alyce! I’ve explained to you. Maybe you did pick up a tick at my house, out in the grass, remember we were walking in the lawn, there are always deer crossing the lawns in this neighborhood, and Lyme disease comes from deer ticks. I’m sure the tick didn’t come from Smoky.”

  Alyce murmured petulantly that Gwen always defended the cat, as she always defended her strays. Aunt Tabitha smiled grimly, agreeing: there was no telling how many of Gwen’s strays were underfoot, she was sure she’d felt something brush against her ankle beneath the table. In her teacherly way of shutting down a subject Clare intervened: “Mom is a sucker for stray animals but her family keeps a close watch on her, she’s down to just one.”

  Mom said, sighing, “Well. Morning Glory passed away. Now there’s just Smoky.”

  “But there was a time, not long ago,” Clare said, “when you had four cats. You know how Dad felt about that.”

  “Oh, dear. Your dad didn’t…” Mom smiled, faltering. Before dinner she’d draped the white feather boa playfully over her shoulders but now it was slipping off. “…actually didn’t like animals. Very much.”

  “Not animals, Mom. Strays!”

  Clare was smiling brightly. I knew I had to help her, she’d blundered leading us to this subject. We would tease Mom to deflect her attention, make her laugh with embarrassed pleasure. Telling of her weakness for strays: the cosmetics saleswoman who’d begun to weep during her sales spiel, confided in Gwen how lonely she was, promptly Gwen invited her for dinner, the woman had a “breakdown” and wound up staying the night, and in the morning, Dad was the one to ask her please to leave. Even worse, there was “Cousin Darlene”—a remote relation of Gwen’s from Plattsburgh who arrived unannounced and disheveled with a six-month infant, telling a terrible story of her husband abusing her, and threatening her life, and naturally Gwen made her welcome; and within a few days Darlene was running up long-distance telephone bills, leaving the colicky baby with Mom for much of the day and expecting Mom to cook and clean up after her, until again Dad had to intervene, contacted Darlene’s family in Plattsburgh to please come get her. “‘Cousin Darlene’! She’d be here yet, camping out in my old room,” Clare said vehemently. “She’d stolen from her own family. She wasn’t even married. That baby didn’t have any father.”

  Faintly Mom protested, “Oh, but whose fault was that? A baby doesn’t choose…”

  “And last summer? I dropped by the house here, and there’s this Ozark-looking individual, I swear his arms were covered in tattoos, in a muscle T-shirt and what looks like swim trunks out in the yard pretending to mow the grass. Except the mower kept sputtering. I asked Mom who on earth this person was and she tells me Reverend Bewley ‘spoke up’ for him, he’s a parolee from Red Bank of all places.”

  “Oh but just for some small thing, really,” Mom said, blushing, “like forging checks, or…”

  “Auto theft, Mom! Burglary! Who knows what else he did, he never got caught for! Your precious Reverend Bewley is as naive as you are! And, get this,” Clare said in triumph, “his name was ‘Lynch.’”

  “But Clare, a person can’t help what his name is…”

  “‘Lynch’ was his first name! ‘Lynch’ was certainly a name the man could have changed.” Clare’s eyes glistened with righteous fury, she had the rapt attention of the table. The mood of the moment was wayward and comical. Mom blushed with a kind of embarrassed pleasure at such chiding. I could see my father’s figure hovering in the background as often, when Clare and
I were visiting with Mom, having coffee or herbal tea together in the kitchen, or on the patio, I’d become suddenly aware of Dad as he stood in a doorway seemingly wanting neither to join us nor to leave us; content with listening in, getting that gist of what was so entertaining to his three girls as he called us fondly, without wishing to participate. “…so I’m with Mom in the kitchen and we aren’t hearing the lawn mower, and I go outside to investigate, and there is this ‘Lynch’ in front of the garage where there was oil spilled on the concrete he must have spilled himself, and what is the man doing?—I couldn’t believe my eyes, he was practicing slipping and falling. Falling! This guy, in his late twenties, one of those skinny hard-muscled guys, scrubby little goatee and sunburnt-looking face, sort of positioning his hand on the ground, and lowering himself, preparing to fall hard, turns out Mom had hired him for yard work in some ‘Christian Fellowship Out-Reach Program’ sponsored by Reverend Bewley, and what’s he doing but practicing an ‘accident’?—so he could pretend he was hurt, and blackmail Mom? Sue Mom? So I call out ‘Excuse me, mister, just what the hell do you think you’re doing?’—and that got his attention.” Clare spoke vehemently as one giving testimony on Court TV. The color was in her fleshy face from the wine she’d been drinking, and now the rapt attention of the table. “And all this while Mom is trailing behind me wringing her hands—‘Oh dear, oh dear! Don’t be hard on him, Clare.’ Lynch at least has the decency to be embarrassed when I confront him, he’s mumbling Nothin, ma’am, I ain’t doin nothin just finishin’ up here and I say, ‘That’s right, mister. You are doing nothing. You are finished working for my mother, you will leave this property immediately and not ever return or I will call the police and you’ll be back in Red Bank where you belong.’”

  Amid the laughter of her guests Mom tried feebly to protest. “But he meant well, I think. I mean, at first. I’d talked with him, he wasn’t a bad person, really—told me his ‘only trusted friend’ was his grandma. I know it looked suspicious how he was behaving, I’m sure Clare is right, but how can a parolee support himself, how can he avoid committing more crimes, unless someone gives him a chance…”