Missing Mom: A Novel Read online

  Clare cried, “A chance to exploit you! A chance to rob you!”

  “But how could I know, Reverend Bewley said…”

  “So I called the Reverend. Oh boy did I call the Reverend and give him a piece of my mind. ‘No more charity cases! No more phony Christian ex-cons preying on my tender-hearted mother! Gwendolyn Eaton’s family takes care of her just fine, thank you.’ And the Reverend, too, had at least the decency to apologize.” Clare was breathless, triumphant. Each time she told the Lynch story it was becoming more embellished, crueller and funnier. In the earliest version which Clare had told me on the phone, on the very day of the episode, it hadn’t seemed so clear that lawn worker had been practicing a fall, only just behaving suspiciously in Clare’s eyes, in the vicinity of the garage. (While Dad was alive, the garage had been kept relatively clear, and he’d insisted that the car be parked inside every night. After Dad’s death, Mom tended to park the car in the driveway, and the garage was filling up as a kind of storage space.) This new version was such a success in the telling, even prim-faced Tabitha and Alyce Proxmire were reduced to fits of giggling, unable to resist the tale of another’s hard luck.

  Foster, who’d been watching TV in the other room, ran back to see what was going on with us, and there came languid Lilja, cell phone to her ear: “Mom? What’s so funny? Why’re you guys laughing so hard?”

  It took me a moment to register, Lilja’s “Mom” wasn’t Mom but Clare.

  In Mom’s guest bathroom where the predominant smell was sweet potpouri and “floral” soap. Where the hand towels were prissy little linens Mom had embroidered with rosebuds, you’d never dare soil with your actual hands.

  Nikki what have you done with my hair seeing my pale startled reflection in the mirror and the fright-wig dyed-maroon hair on my head that looked weirdly small. What have you done with my Nikki.

  “I’m thirty-one years old! I’m not your Nikki any longer, Mom.”

  Whose Nikki, then? I’d had a few glasses of wine and wasn’t thinking with my usual laser clarity.

  Ran cold water, splashed my feverish face. Winked and smiled flirtatiously at myself. “‘My specialty would be moths.’” Pursed my lips in a mock kiss trying not to see that I wasn’t so sexy/funky/glamorous close up. Was it seductive or silly, or sad, the way my puckered-tight black top had a tendency to ride up my midriff showing a swath of skin? No wonder Rob Chisholm, Gilbert Wexley, “Sonny” Danto snagged their eyes on me as I’d excused myself from the table.

  Lilja on her cell phone. She’d been bored out of her skull by her grandma’s Mother’s Day dinner.

  I’d brought my cell phone too. Arrived at the house by 6 P.M. and it was 8:35 P.M. now and I had refrained from making a single call. (I knew Mom would notice. Seeming so unsuspicious, Gwen Eaton had eyes in the back of her head, and ears, too.) I was feeling empowered not having called my voice mail in Chautauqua Falls which would determine for me had I been expecting a call, or not; was I hoping for a call, or indifferent; was I oblivious of what might, or might not, be waiting for me on my voice mail in my darkened apartment in Chautauqua Falls.

  In fact, I couldn’t risk it. Hearing the recording click in.

  You have no new messages.

  “This has gone better than we expected.”

  “Well, Nikki! That isn’t saying much.”

  Next morning Clare and I would have to concede, speaking on the phone, that the crazy quilt of Mom’s guests had worked, sort of. If we’d taken Mom out to dinner at the stately Mr. Ephraim Inn she’d have fretted over the prices (“Twenty-two dollars for chicken! Twenty-eight dollars for lamb!”), she’d have been overly friendly with our waitress out of an embarrassment with being waited on (“I’m never waited on at home, am I? I can go to that service station and pour ice water for myself, it’s no trouble”) and, when the check came, she’d have tried to talk Rob into letting her “help out.”

  At 9 P.M. Mom’s guests were still at the dining room table. Showing no signs of preparing to depart. Wexley and Danto and Rob Chisholm had established an unexpected alliance, criticizing state government officials. In the kitchen Mom was brewing fresh coffee (“real” and decaf ). Through the evening she’d been on her feet half the time, into and out of the kitchen in her usual flurried zeal to serve her guests. Mom was a small woman but could be fierce in forbidding anyone to help her: “Now! You’re my guests tonight. Even my daughters, you just sit.” As if Aunt Tabitha and oldest girlfriend Alyce needed to be told.

  In the midst of a meal Mom had a way of slipping into the kitchen to surreptitiously rinse a few plates at the sink, place them in the dishwasher and return smiling innocently to the table. Getting a headstart on cleanup was for Mom what illicit sex was for other people.

  I followed Mom into the kitchen carrying dirtied plates. And there came Clare with more. When Clare scolded, her nostrils flared: “Mom! For goodness sake let Nikki and me take over. Enjoy your guests, you invited them.”

  I laughed. Clare glanced at me, incensed.

  “Well, it’s so. No one but Gwen Eaton would have invited these people, thrown them together to sink or swim, and hopped up and down from the table all evening abandoning them to one another.”

  Mom mildly protested, “Clare, I have not. I have not been hopping up and down and abandoning my guests. You’re being unfair.”

  Quickly I intervened: “Clare is being Clare, Mom.”

  Clare had been doubtful of the evening from the start. Tomorrow was a school day for Lilja and Foster and that meant getting up early and getting the children up etcetera. Worse, Rob seemed to be drinking more than usual. And enjoying himself more than usual.

  I smiled to think this wasn’t Rob Chisholm at home.

  Mom was asking, anxiously, “Don’t you think the evening is going well, really?” and Clare and I said, “Oh, Mom: yes. Of course.” I complimented Mom on such “lively, original” guests and Clare complimented Mom on “how pretty” the table looked. “But do you think people really like the food, or are they just having seconds to be polite?” Mom asked, all but wringing her hands, and Clare and I laughed at the very question: “Mom, the food is delicious. Of course.”

  “But the Hawaiian chicken, Tabitha thought was too sweet…”

  “Tabitha!” Clare laughed. “Didn’t you notice, she heaped her plate at least twice?”

  “She said the rice was undercooked.”

  “Because it wasn’t gummy,” I said. “Aunt Tabitha doesn’t know the first thing about serious cooking.”

  “Well. Maybe.”

  “Mom, please! You’re a terrific cook.”

  Mom had promised more ice cream for the table, to accompany the remains of the peach melba and the kringle, and it was my task to poke through the crowded freezer in search of another pint. I tried not to be distracted by the numerous snapshots held by tiny magnets to the refrigerator, mostly family pictures. There were layers of these going back to when Clare and I were teenagers. My smiling parents in summer clothes, looking startlingly young and happy. Clare and Rob on their wedding day, also young and happy. Clare with infant Foster in her arms, looking like an athlete who has won a prize. Blond Lilja at age eight, squinting at the camera with a beautiful shy smile. And there was almost-eighteen-year-old Nicole in high school graduation cap and gown, over-exposed white in a dazzle of sunshine: “Nikki” not yet spiky-haired, darkish blond and smiling wistfully at the camera (held by Dad) in the grassy backyard at 43 Deer Creek Drive.

  Strange, to see an old photo of yourself. All that was so crucial at that time (senior prom, boyfriend, sex) melted away now like last year’s snow.

  I’d located the ice cream, raspberry ripple. The carton was covered in a fine frost-film, icy-cold against my fingers.

  “…and Lilja, she scarcely touched her food. Oh Clare, I worry about her…”

  “Please don’t.”

  “But her wrists are so thin, little sparrow bones…”

  Between Lilja and her adoring grandma t
here’d been a special bond, it had seemed. But not recently.

  Lilja was a sensitive topic Clare refused to discuss with Mom, in fact with anyone. I avoided this subject as I’d have avoided a live wire. (I’d have taken my niece’s side, anyway. Rebelling against her so-efficient mother must have been delicious.) Mom knew better, but couldn’t help herself. Clare bustled about the kitchen in a way to make you think she was shoving Mom and me aside though she hadn’t so much as touched us. She grabbed the steaming teakettle off the stove, tossed two fresh bags of Almond Sunset herbal tea into the ceramic teapot, poured boiling water carelessly into the pot and slammed back into the dining room.

  Mom said, hurt, “Well, I do worry. You read about anorexia, it’s on TV all the time. It isn’t just Lilja is thin, she’s so edgy and, I don’t know, not-there when you try to talk to her. This little sweater I want to knit for her, in a light cotton yarn, she hasn’t picked out the style yet and her birthday is only two months away…” Mom’s voice trailed off wistfully.

  I could imagine Lilja’s polite interest in Grandma’s latest knitting project. I didn’t want to think how vulnerable Mom was to hurt.

  “Well, Mom. Lilja will be fourteen. She isn’t a little girl any longer.”

  “Oh, I know! Girls that age. I see them at the mall, and at the pool, they seem so self-sufficient, somehow. I smile at them and their eyes go right through me. When you were that age, Nikki…”

  “Was I more immature, Mom, than I am now?”

  Mom laughed, perplexed. Knowing this was a joke even if it wasn’t wholly logical.

  I loved to make Mom laugh. These last four years it seemed the best I could do for her.

  All this while Mom had been fussing with the coffee percolator which was made of glass that had become too stained for use with guests, coffee made in it had to be carefully poured into a gleaming silver pot to be carried into the dining room. And the ice cream, which I’d simply have passed around in its carton, naturally had to be scooped into a “nice” bowl to be presented with a silver serving spoon.

  Nice. That was the measure of Mom’s life.

  As if she’d been tracking my thoughts Mom said suddenly, in an anxious undertone, “And you, Nikki? How are you?”

  “Terrific, Mom. As you can see.”

  I brushed at my spiky hair tufts with both hands.

  Mom was peering at me, smiling uncertainly. Her greeny-amber eyes appeared moist as if, in fact, she was trying very hard to see who stood before her.

  “You’ve been distracted by him, haven’t you. All evening.”

  “Mom, please. Not that tired old subject.”

  My response was quick, sharp. I would realize later that I’d been waiting for this, for my mother’s murmured words of the gentlest reproach, and that quivery look to her face, the rapid blinking of eyelids signaling Your mother is blinking back tears. She is being brave on your account. She is a good loving mother of a willful self-destructive daughter intent on breaking her heart.

  “Nikki, it isn’t tired to me.”

  “Look, you don’t know him. You’ve met him once, you have no idea how it is between us. So, please. Let’s drop it.”

  “‘Drop it.’ What a thing to say. As if I could ‘drop’ my own daughter.”

  “Mom, your guests are waiting for you. We’d better go back.”

  “Oh, what do I care about them! I don’t know why I invited them, a kind of madness came over me. ‘More people! More people! If I can’t be happy myself I can make them happy!’—maybe that’s it. But I only care for my family, I care for you.”

  Mom made a clumsy move to touch me, and I drew back. Quick as if a darting little hummingbird had struck at me with its beak, I’d reacted without thinking.

  Suddenly we were speaking in low excited voices. My heart was beating with painful clarity, unless it was my mother’s heart beating. I could not breathe, she was sucking the oxygen out of the room. I wanted to push her from me, I was frightened of her power. I could not bear to be touched by her, as, in the waiting room at the hospital when we were told of Dad’s death, I could not bear to be touched by any of the family for the outermost layer of my skin had been peeled away, I stood raw, exposed. Mom was saying words I had heard in her mouth many times and imagined many times more, I must break up with that man, he has been such an evil influence in my life, even if he divorces his wife think how unhappy he has made her, and me. How can I expect him to marry me if he doesn’t respect me and how can he respect me if I don’t respect myself. How can I drift as I’ve been drifting. These years. Drifting downstream. As if I’d been rowing a canoe, and I’d let the paddle go, now the canoe is just drifting downstream, with me in it…

  “Maybe you haven’t drifted enough, Mom. Family isn’t all there is.”

  “Without family, what is there?”

  Afterward I would think, Mom was asking this question sincerely.

  Wanting to know, and how could I tell her. I could not reveal to her I didn’t know.

  “Mom, you are not me, and I am not you. And thank God for that.”

  All that I said was true. I had thought such mutinous thoughts many times. Yet now, suddenly I was uttering them aloud in a hurt, childish voice.

  It was at this point Clare pushed open the kitchen door.

  By 9:40 P.M. the party had broken up. Finally.

  Driving back to Chautauqua Falls I thought I will punish her, I won’t call her tomorrow.

  Maybe the next day.

  Maybe not.

  …then judge me

  When we were growing up. When we were harsh in our judgments of others as adolescents are apt to be. “‘Walk a mile in my footsteps, then judge me.’ That’s what my mother used to say.”

  Mom wasn’t scolding us exactly. She spoke gently, and she was smiling. Clare understood the rebuke but I had such a literal mind I’d try to work out how you could walk in another’s footsteps: in snow? in mud? in sand?

  Mom rarely spoke of her mother Marta Kovach who’d died when Mom was only eleven. She’d died of some mysterious “eating-away” nerve disease.

  Even decades later the subject was too painful for Mom to discuss. It alarmed Clare and me, growing up, to realize that our mother had been a stranger’s daughter, she hadn’t always been our mom but a little girl of eleven who’d come home from school one day to a shingle-board row house on Spalding Street in downtown Mt. Ephraim to discover that her mother had “passed away” in her sleep and she would not be allowed to see her.

  Mom had been in sixth grade at the time and would have to repeat the grade, everything she’d learned had been wiped away.

  “It was like a blackboard being wiped down. I just forgot everything.”

  Mom smiled wistfully. I wondered if it could be true: forgot everything? Her name, how to read and write? I doubted this.

  We were alone together in the kitchen. Mom was looking so sad, staring out the window at the bird feeder where a swarm of small birds—chickadees, sparrows, juncos, a flashy red cardinal and his olivish-red mate—were fluttering and darting at the seed. Yet she didn’t seem to be seeing them.

  I felt an impulse to hug her. But I was fifteen at the time, I wasn’t into hugging much.

  Anyway, the moment passed.

  missing

  Two days after the Mother’s Day dinner, late afternoon of Tuesday, May 11, the phone rang and since I was finally working, after an all-day procrastination of epic-neurotic proportions, I tuned it out.

  A few minutes later it rang again. Somehow, the rings sounded like my sister Clare.

  “Nikki! I’ve been trying to reach you. Have you spoken with Mom today?”

  “Not today.”

  Actually, not the day before, either. Wally Szalla had re-entered my life, the man whom Mom had said was an “evil” influence on me. Wally and I had not been communicating for six days, fifteen hours and forty minutes, and so had catching-up to do.

  Not that I’d tell Clare this fact. Or Mom.


  Though that morning I’d called Mom, around eleven. Knowing she probably wouldn’t be in, weekday mornings were Mom’s busy times, at the YM-YWCA pool with her aquatic seniors, church committee meetings, garden club, library/hospital volunteer, lunch with women friends, crafts classes at the mall. Sometimes, just outside digging in her flower beds. Driving to my first interview appointment of the day I’d left a hurried message via cell phone Sorry I didn’t get to call yesterday, Mom. Mother’s Day dinner was terrific. Everyone had a wonderful time and the food was wonderful, I finished the corn soufflé for breakfast this morning, absolutely delicious, THANKS! Oh and hey, I think I’ve fallen for the Scourge of the Bugs. You were right, Mom, we’re a perfect match! We’ll name our firstborn little roach after you: Feather. Bye! Mom would know it was a joke, I hoped. Not adolescent sarcasm.

  Since Sunday, I’d come round to seeing the humor of the situation, and was feeling regretful that I hadn’t been very sociable after Mom and I had exchanged words in the kitchen. After the other guests left, Clare and I stayed behind to help Mom clean up; this was our usual routine when Mom invited us to dinner. We’d never let Gwen talk us into leaving her to a massive cleanup! But I hadn’t talked much; listening to Mom and Clare chatter about the party I’d tuned out; I’d been hurt by what Mom had said about drifting, drifting downstream, for possibly Mom was right, and I’d drifted now out of Wally Szalla’s life too, or he’d drifted out of mine, and I loved him, and wanted him to love me, and was feeling sorry for myself as you’re apt to feel on Sunday night preceding Monday morning and the hectic beginning of another work week, I’d left the house at 43 Deer Creek Drive as soon as the last rinsed plate was set in the dishwasher. (Mom had invited me to stay the night in my old room she’d converted into a guest room, but I’d declined. Had to escape!)