Missing Mom

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Wally Szalla. Of course I wanted to see Wally: I was in love with Wally.

  Telling myself He is the man I hope to marry. He is the man I intend to marry.

  A few hours after Clare’s visit, Rob Chisholm called.

  I didn’t speak with Rob, but I listened to his message several times before erasing it.

  “Nikki? If you’re there, will you pick up?” Pause. A sound of harsh breathing. “Well. Clare is very upset. We thought you were going to clear out the house…I mean, I’m upset, too. We’d thought it had all been decided—selling the house. But now Clare is saying that you’ve moved back in?—you’ve brought back your mother’s cat?” Pause. Cat had been uttered with faint incredulity. The breathing sound was louder, against the phone mouthpiece. An edge was creeping into my brother-in-law’s voice, I had a glimpse of how Rob Chisholm spoke to subordinates at Coldwell Electronics, Inc. and it was nothing like the affable flirty tone with which he usually spoke to his sexy/hip sister-in-law Nikki when his wife wasn’t within earshot. “Clare is upset so possibly she’s exaggerating. Will you call me, Nikki? To clear this up? Definitely, we need to talk.”

  I replied to Rob’s message when I knew no one would pick up the phone at the Chisholms’. Carefully I explained that I had not moved into the house, I was only just staying at the house temporarily. Beyond that, my life was my own business.

  the tryst

  “But, Nikki: are you living here now?”

  Wally Szalla was smiling uncertainly. Walking through the rooms of the house at 43 Deer Creek Drive in the cautious and oddly formal way of a man testing his weight on thin ice, waiting to hear it crack.

  I laughed. I kissed my lover’s lips.

  Too late, Wally laughed, and reached for me as if to kiss me. But the playful moment had passed.

  “Wally, I told you no. Of course I’m not living here. It’s just that Smoky was feeling confined in my apartment, and so was I. And the house here is empty. And there’s so much work to be done here, sorting through my parents’ things, getting the house ready to be sold, it seemed such wasted effort, driving from Chautauqua Falls to Mt. Ephraim and back so often. And it’s summer, and I can work out on the terrace. And my editor at the Beacon is agreeable to my coming in to the office only once or twice a week, since we do everything by e-mail and fax anyway.” I saw how gravely Wally was nodding. As often I’d seen him nod while speaking on the phone to his wife or one or another of his children. Here was a rational man trying to understand another’s irrationality. A reasonable man trying to resign himself to another’s unreasonable will. “And I can come to see you, Wally, any time you want me. I’ll be driving to Chautauqua Falls often. It doesn’t always have to be you driving to Mt. Ephraim to see me.”

  When Wally kissed me, it was with an urgency I hadn’t felt in him for a long time. Now I wasn’t living ten minutes from his bachelor’s quarters at Riverview Luxury Apartments or twenty minutes from WCHF AM-FM. Now Wally couldn’t take me entirely for granted, waiting for him lonely and lovelorn after “Night Train.”

  It was a warm July evening. I was showing Wally through the house, which he’d never seen before. I took care to speak of the house as the “family” house—not “Mom’s house”—though Wally knew that Clare and I were co-owners now. So long as Mom had been alive, Wally Szalla had never been invited here. I had to wonder if Wally had wondered why.

  Before us, retreating, Smoky skulked away. His tawny eyes glared and his claws clicked on the hardwood floors. As usual Wally tried to befriend the indignant cat, despite his allergy, and as usual Smoky snubbed him. “Smoky is just shy, Wally. It will take him a while to adjust to a new person in his life.”

  Wally said, “I’ve noticed that. Well!”

  Overweight and inclined to perspire, Wally was dabbing at his face with a damp tissue. The house had air-conditioning but I hadn’t gotten around to turning it on that day, though the temperature had been in the eighties. Like Mom, I hated air-conditioning. It had been Dad and Clare who’d insisted on it, in this house.

  Gamely Wally was wracking his brains for something to say about the Eatons’ utterly ordinary suburban-development ranch house. It was “homey”—“comfortable”—“a great architectural idea, one single floor.” No one in the Szalla family, you had to surmise, had ever lived in a ranch house in a place like Deer Creek Acres, even those Szallas relatively down on their luck. Wally was especially praising of Mom’s macramé wall hangings, clay flower pots, ceramic vases, needlepoint cushions and quilts I pointed out to him in nearly every room. Her waxed gardenia artificial flowers, Wally thought “so lifelike you can almost smell them.”

  These things of Mom’s were beautiful, really. It made me happy that Wally Szalla should acknowledge them, if only fleetingly. If only to me.

  And to me, in such a way, only because I was his lover. Because I’d brought him to my house in Mt. Ephraim, locally known as the house where the lady was murdered.

  (I wasn’t exaggerating this. I wasn’t inventing it. I had actually heard these exact words, in a child’s wondering voice, borne by the breeze from Deer Creek Drive as a young mother pushed a stroller past the house, accompanied by an older child. The young mother had responded with Shhhhh!)

  Whenever Wally spoke of my mother to me, his eyes misted over. His voice softened. It was a variant of Wally Szalla’s radio voice, the tone he took when speaking of the “late, great” jazz musicians he particularly revered, but it was a sincere tone, and it never failed to move me. Wally’s sympathy seemed to spur me to react with a smile, even to laugh, to assure him that I was fine, and didn’t require being treated like a convalescent. (Generally, this was how people treated me. Unless they managed to avoid me entirely.)

  “Your father was interested in American history, I guess?”

  Wally was enthusiastically examining the books (now dusted, and neatly arranged) on the shelves in Dad’s study. Clare had wanted to box these and get rid of them at a secondhand bookstore but I’d resisted. Vaguely I planned to read some of these books, sometime; also, someday, Lilja or Foster might want them for a school project. These were titles from the History Book Club to which Dad had belonged for twenty-five years, and some of them were bound in russet-red “special edition leather” with gilt-stamped letters, that looked impressive on the shelves. With boyish eagerness Wally read aloud, “—A Soldier at Gettysburg—I Fought with Geronimo—Fifty Years on the Old Frontier—The Great Adventure: The Lewis and Clark Expedition—Custer’s Luck—Wigwam and Warpath. It looks like your father was an amateur historian, Nikki.”

  “Well, yes. Sometimes he said so.”

  “I wish I’d met him, Nikki! The Lewis and Clark expedition has always been something I’ve been interested in. I mean, as a kid I’d wanted to hike into the Yellowstone, and float down the Missouri in a dugout canoe. Your dad and I would have had a lot to talk about.”

  Wally was leafing through one of the simulated-leather volumes, examining antiquated maps and photographs. I couldn’t tell him that Jonathan Eaton would have been profoundly disgusted with me, simply for being involved with him: a married man, and an adulterer! If Dad were living, Wally Szalla couldn’t have stepped onto this property.

  It was true, Dad had wanted to be a historian. So he’d often said. As an undergraduate at the State University at Binghamton, he’d had to make a practical decision to major in business administration, as most of the Eatons did, and not so academic a subject as history; and he’d always regretted it, he said. Over the years, as Dad told and retold the story, it began to acquire a mythic dimension in which Mom played a role: “A man has to have a decent income to support his wife and family. I never shirked my responsibilities.” There was an air of reproach to Dad’s voice as if Mom had forced the decision on him but, if you figured out the times and dates, you could see that Jonathan Eaton must have majored in business long before he’d even met Gwen Kovach, who was years younger than he was.

  When in doubt, blame Mom. I
guess it was easiest.

  Most evenings, Dad watched TV after supper. Sometimes he’d have one of his history books on his lap, to read during commercial breaks when he’d turn the set on mute. By 9 P.M., Dad would be nodding over both the TV and the book though he claimed never to fall asleep for his eyes were “always open.” We knew not to tease him even when he snored. We knew not to ask him too closely about what he was reading. Among the relatives, Jon Eaton was an authority on all things historical and political and his word was never challenged. “That man is a walking talking encyclopedia!”—my female relatives were gushing in their admiration.

  Yet when the distinguished Civil War historian James McPherson came to speak at the University of Rochester, while I was enrolled there as an undergraduate, I invited Dad to McPherson’s lecture and to a symposium afterward, but Dad turned me down impatiently. He hadn’t “time to waste,” he said. Unlike people who “frittered away their time” on college campuses, he had to “earn a living.”

  Now Wally was imagining that he and my father might have bonded over a common interest. I didn’t have the heart to contradict him.

  “All right if I borrow this, Nikki?”

  It was one of the massive fake-leather books, I had a strong feeling my father had never read. The gilt-edged pages looked pristine. The Way Westward: American Pioneer Adventures. I told Wally of course he could borrow it, in fact he could keep it: “Dad would be so pleased.”

  The protocol of staying-overnight-with-a-lover.

  Should you bring toiletries? A change of clothes?

  Since we’d become lovers three summers ago (so long! yet our relationship was so undefined, the time felt much shorter), Wally kept a number of his things in my apartment in Chautauqua Falls. At first just toiletries—toothbrush, razor, deodorant. (The deodorant was Male Maximum Strength.) Then, articles of clothing—boxer shorts, T-shirts, socks. Selected shirts, trousers. (Not pajamas: Wally slept naked.) With his tucked-in smile meant to signal shyness, though Wally was anything but shy, he’d say, “Nikki, is there room in your closet for—?” When other men had made such suggestions in the past I’d become edgy and guarded but with Wally my response was immediate: “Move right in, Wally. There’s plenty of room.”

  Because there was so little room in my three-room apartment, this had to be a joke. Yes?

  Wally laughed, uneasily. “Darling Nikki, I wish I could.”

  I knew to keep my tone light. Maybe I’d become an other woman but I didn’t intend to play that role.

  The Szallas’ divorce proceedings were stalled, Wally told me. Isabel had fired her lawyer and hired a new “very aggressive” lawyer from Rochester and Wally’s own lawyer, a friend, was “seriously outclassed.” I listened to as much as Wally cared to tell me but didn’t ask questions. I knew that Wally was miserable enough.

  But now, I seemed to be spending most of my time in Mt. Ephraim, and not in Chautauqua Falls. Somehow this had happened, overnight. I hadn’t discussed this change in my life with Wally, or with anyone. And suddenly Wally seemed uncertain of me. When he called me on my cell phone his first question was: “Nikki, where are you?” His second question was: “When am I going to see you?”

  Wally wasn’t a possessive or proprietary man. You could never imagine him jealous. But now, when I wasn’t so accessible to him, he was eager to see me. I had to recall that, before Mom’s death, there’d been stretches of time—days, even weeks—when Wally and I hadn’t seen each other often, or even spoken on the phone; I’d waited for him to call, annoyed and anxious, and had to hide my vast relief when finally he did call: “Nikki, this has been a crazy time, I’ve been missing you like hell. Please, can I see you tonight?”

  My pride melted like ice cubes dumped in the sink.

  Yes! Oh yes.

  Wally spent nights with me in my apartment, when he could. Sometimes twice a week, sometimes several times a week. If he was traveling on business, I might not see him for a week. If there were “complications” with his family, I might not see him for a week. It was rare that I stayed overnight in his apartment. The pseudo-“luxury” quarters weren’t very comfortable. I dreaded one or another of his children showing up without warning. Like much younger children they left clothes and possessions scattered through the rooms. In the wake of Troy, pizza crusts, beer cans, smelly socks and soiled sodden-wet bath towels on the bathroom floor, it fell to me, as a concerned female visitor, to hang them up to dry. If I was foolish enough to hang around long enough, I ended up doing massive laundries.

  Of course, Wally had a cleaning service. But the husky Russian-born girls came only once a week, by which time the apartment was a pigsty.

  Wally sighed. “I love my kids, and they know it. ‘Doormat Dad’ is the T-shirt for me.” You’d have to know Wally to understand that this wasn’t a complaint but a boast.

  One day, in June, I’d happened to see Wally in the company of two of his children, in the showy Chautauqua Valley Shopping Mall. Stepped out of a store and saw, to my shock, my lover Wally Szalla walking with his son Troy, now nineteen years old but no less sulky, and a young woman who had to be Troy’s twenty-two-year-old sister Katy, who appeared also to be sulking. Here was a middle-aged man speaking earnestly to his grown children, half-pleading it seemed, smiling in the tender-wounded way in which Wally sometimes smiled at me. It was evident that the three were related by blood, you could see the family resemblance. Yet, for all his charm, Wally couldn’t seem to charm these two, who sauntered beside him as if indifferent to him.

  I hadn’t seen Troy in nearly three years. He’d grown, he was taller and thicker in the torso, his face coarser. His straggly hair had been shaved. He wore a grungy Hard Rock Café T-shirt and grungy shorts, running shoes without socks. Katy, whom I’d never seen before, more resembled her father, husky and soft-bodied, but with prissy cornrowed hair that flapped about her head and shoulders like skinny snakes, and a petulant mouth. Out of this mouth I heard a drawling rejoinder, “Oh for God’s sake Dad-dy. Get real.”

  I decided to pass by Wally Szalla with an airy “H’lo, Wally!” and a wave of my hand. Friendly-breezy smile, and gone.

  In that instant seeing Wally’s startled guilty eyes. And Troy’s arrogant male gaze sliding down my rear, my legs, to my feet and up again.

  Afterward, I worried that Troy might have recognized me. That sexy-girl reporter from the Beacon with the punk-style hair, who’d interviewed his father one August afternoon three summers ago. But when I asked Wally, he only laughed.

  “Nikki, don’t worry! A kid Troy’s age doesn’t remember anyone or anything.”

  Don’t worry you will never meet Troy. You will never meet Katy.

  Or the older son, Andrew. You will never enter my personal life, only my sexual life.

  “Nikki. God, I’ve missed you…”

  Wally framed my face in his hands and kissed me. I tried to kiss him back. I tried to lift my arms, to slide them about his neck in the usual way but my arms felt heavy.

  Gently Wally pulled me down onto the bed. We were in my old room—my “girlhood” room as Wally called it. Since I’d left home it was supposed to be a guest room but still the furnishings—maple wood, American colonial style—and the once-chic Georgia O’Keeffe flower posters on the walls were unmistakably mine. I’d been sleeping in this bed, better than I’d been sleeping in Chautauqua Falls, and I’d been missing Wally here, and wanting him here, and I wanted him now, except I dreaded hearing loud footsteps in the hall outside the room and my father’s furious voice Nik-ki! Is someone in that room with you?

  While I’d lived at home, until the age of eighteen, the only visitors allowed in my room had been females. The issue of boys “visiting” me at any time had been, as Dad made clear, non-negotiable.

  Long after I’d ceased to be a virgin. Long after Dad knew I was “having sex” (as he phrased it, in the way you might enunciate the name of a repulsive disease).

  Now, as Wally kissed me, his mouth seemed unfamiliar
, not a mouth I’d kissed before. His warm breath, fleshy warm hands that were eager yet hesitant. I had an impulse to push him from me, to break into laughter. I had an impulse to bury my face in his neck, to press into his arms, and cry.

  Poor, sweet Wally! He meant no harm, ever. He loved me, and he loved his family. I’d missed him here in Deer Creek Acres, in my girlhood bed. We had not made love for, how long? A week? I’d been vague about setting a date for him to spend the night, and Wally had had to rearrange his schedule to tape “Night Train” instead of airing the program live. He’d have preferred one of our romantic Chautauqua River inns for tonight. (“Air-conditioning is the best aphrodisiac.”) But I’d wanted him here. I’d had romantic plans of making dinner for us, dining by candlelight on the terrace. But somehow, I’d put off buying the food. Somehow, I’d run out of time. The previous day I’d experimented with bread-baking, one of the allegedly easy recipes Mom had tried to teach me, for so-called Miracle Bread (soy flour, wheat germ, skim milk) but the bread hadn’t risen, a disappointing dead weight in the baking pan heavy as rock. This home-baked bread, I’d meant to impress my lover with. I smiled to think of it, and then I was laughing.

  “Nikki. We’re all right.”

  Wally was gripping my shoulders. His face was creased in concern. (Maybe I wasn’t laughing?)

  “You’ve been under a strain, darling. You’re not comfortable with me here. Look, I understand.”

  I protested, “But I am, Wally! I want you here, I’ve even changed the sheets on my bed. I vacuumed until the dirt-bag burst and I had to give up, I didn’t have a replacement. I even tried to bake bread for you yesterday—‘Miracle Bread.’ But it wasn’t.” Now I did press my burning face against Wally’s neck, overcome by a spasm of giggling. “A miracle, I mean.”

  “I thought I smelled home-baked bread…”