Missing Mom

by Joyce Carol Oates

  “Star Lake! We used to go there too, some summers.” Strabane had set the suitcases back down. Flexing his strong fingers. “Until my family moved away, I’d take them, too.”

  This was an ambiguous statement. Much of what Strabane said came out just slightly jumbled, not-coherent. The way he stared, and smiled, and twisted his face, and shrugged and shifted his shoulders as if they didn’t quite fit him, was distracting. You couldn’t know what he meant by my family: parents? or his own wife, children?

  Strabane wasn’t standing close to me yet it felt as if he was crowding me. I didn’t like the feeling. I didn’t know why he was here. It was true that I’d called him, I’d dialed his telephone number, but I hadn’t wanted him, even then. And he couldn’t know any of this. Could he!

  No right to intrude. No right to remind me of something I want to forget.

  At least, he’d shaved off the scruffy beard. His jaw was blunt and curiously dented, or scarred. His swarthy skin was fleshy as muscle. You had to be fascinated by the bristly quill-hair and the close-shaved sides of the man’s head. No one else I’d seen in the small-town Mt. Ephraim Police Department looked anything like Ross Strabane.

  Still he was speaking of Star Lake as if it had a special meaning to him, as it must have a special meaning to me. As if somehow the two of us had known each other from summers there.

  “Except I’m older than you, Ms. Eaton. I graduated from Mt. Ephraim High in 1981.”

  I knew, I was expected to say when I’d graduated. But Detective Strabane already knew when I’d graduated. He knew “facts” about me and my family and he knew information acquired through interviews, of which I could have no idea and wished to have no idea.

  Seeing how I wasn’t responding to memories of Star Lake, Strabane hesitated.

  “Well. These suitcases? D’you want them at the curb, or—”

  “I…I’m not sure. If the trash men take them away, they’ll be gone forever.”

  “Do you have any use for them? You?”

  “I have my own suitcase. You know, the practical kind with wheels like everyone has now.”

  “So, these? You want them gone?”

  “No, wait! I just don’t know.” I was becoming anxious, I had to think quickly. “They’re ‘high quality’ leather, that’s why they’re so heavy. No one has luggage like this any longer. I mean, my suitcase is light as plywood! It came to me maybe these suitcases could be fitted out with wheels? That way, they’d be practical.”

  Strabane smiled, baffled. That just-perceptible edge of exasperation you’d see in my dad’s face, when Mom was being “logical.”

  “These? That weigh a ton? Fitted out with wheels?”

  “Is it a silly idea? On Animal Planet the other night I saw this program about dogs and cats whose rear legs had had to be amputated because they’d been injured, the animals were fitted out with ingenious little platforms on wheels. With their front legs they propelled themselves like kids on skateboards! They didn’t seem to miss their original rear legs at all.”

  I didn’t like sounding so naive. Animal Planet cable TV had been one of Mom’s weaknesses we’d teased her about. But Strabane was listening respectfully. He had the air of a man practiced in considering seemingly naive remarks. “Maybe because the animals don’t have the concept ‘rear legs’—‘original legs’—they get along pretty well with what they have. Like they don’t have the concept ‘crippled,’ ‘freaky.’”

  It wasn’t a rebuke but common sense. And maybe Strabane was teasing, just a little.

  I said, “Animals don’t have the concept ‘animals.’ We don’t seem to have it, either, applied to ourselves though in fact that’s what we are: ‘animals.’ We want to think better of ourselves.”

  “We sure do! I hope so.”

  I decided to give up the “matched luggage.” I took the smallest suitcase from Strabane to carry to the curb while Strabane managed to carry the other four suitcases in two hands. He was showing off, was he? Thinking well of himself, impressing me. I tried not to wince as he dropped the suitcases on the lawn at the end of the driveway with a thud, like the most ordinary of trash.

  “Thanks! I appreciate your help, Detective.”

  This was a signal for Strabane to leave. Another man would have picked it up immediately. But Strabane, flexing his fingers, wiping his cobwebby hands on his trousers, seemed oblivious. My mother would have invited him inside to wash his hands but damned if I would invite this intruder anywhere.

  Offer him coffee, too. Banana nut bread.

  You weren’t brought up to be rude, Nikki!

  Strabane asked if there was anything else I needed hauled to the curb and I told him with a bright quick smile no thank you, there was not.

  You could see by glancing into the garage that there was plenty more that was bulky, cumbersome. But Strabane wasn’t about to contradict me. When he removed his dark glasses, I looked quickly away.

  A police detective’s job was identifying lies. Liars. I didn’t want this man looking too closely at me.

  “Guess I’m intruding here, Ms. Eaton? I’m sorry.”

  “You can call me ‘Nicole.’ Please.”

  After the dark lenses, Strabane’s eyes were unexpectedly warm, vulnerable. The eyes of a worried man. He’d been feeling the awkward strain between us. The fact that he’d written to me, and neither of us had acknowledged it.

  “Well. ‘Nicole.’ Anyway I’m not the ‘bearer of bad news’ this morning. That’s good, right?”

  Strabane stepped closer to me. The gesture seemed unconscious, instinctive. He wanted to protect me but: from what? The worst had happened, all that was over. What had happened to my mother could never happen to me. I knew, it was only common sense.

  I could smell Strabane’s hair oil. Unless it was some high-octane male deodorant beyond even what Wally Szalla used. My heartbeat began to quicken as in the presence of danger.

  Oh, I hated him! I hated the memory of him. I wanted him gone, so that I could lock myself inside the house, in my girlhood room, and bawl.

  Specifically, I hated his clothes. Hadn’t he anyone to supervise his clothes! Maybe small-town plainclothes cops have to wear the kind of neckties you only see heaped in bargain bins, in post-Christmas sales? Maybe they have to wear shirts of some thin synthetic fabric that’s only nominally white, you can see their wiry-shadowy chest hair through the fabric?—shirts that, glimpsed from behind, show bats’ wings of perspiration across the wearer’s shoulders? I hated the flash of mismatched socks, one of them beige with small checks and the other a frayed-looking sand color. Only Strabane’s shoes looked decent this morning, maybe because they were new and unnaturally shiny, like his belt buckle.

  I hated the way he’d showed up at the house when I hadn’t chosen to speak with him. I hadn’t replied to his letters. I hated it that this was a sexually aggressive male utterly unaware of himself, clumsy and uncertain. Wally Szalla gave that initial impression, too: comfortable and harmless as an old shoe. But Wally’s sexual intentions were never unconscious.

  Strabane said, awkwardly, “Why I dropped by, Nicole: I’m wondering how you’re getting along.”

  Getting along? Was I? I had no more idea how I was getting along than I knew what my white blood cell count was.

  I resented the question. I resented the implication that there was a desired way in which I might be getting along, that I might not be living up to; that Detective Strabane might assist me. Innocently I asked, “How do I look?”

  This was meant to be a joke for I didn’t believe that I could be looking great in faded denim shorts, a grimy T-shirt worn without a bra, no makeup except a smear of purple lipstick where a mouth should be. My hair was now a stiff broom-sage mix of glinting sand, wiry silvery-gray that crimped and thickened in humid weather. For my most recent tryst with my married-man-lover Wally Szalla I’d painted my fingernails and toenails peacock blue spangled with gold. The fingernail polish had mostly endured but the sassy blue toenai
ls were chipped. I’d been noticing my visitor’s gaze drifting downward to my bare dirty feet, then lifting again quickly to my face.

  “Beautiful.” Strabane spoke quickly, as if embarrassed. He was tugging at his shirt collar, his fingers left a smudge of cobweb. “You look beautiful, Nicole.”

  I hadn’t heard this preposterous remark. A nerve had begun to beat in my left eyelid. I wanted to shove Strabane away with the palms of both my hands: flat and hard against his stocky chest.

  “That’s why you’ve come here? To tell me—what?”

  “To tell you that your life will begin again, Nicole, after the trial. You have to have faith that that’s so.”

  The trial. It had been set for late October, then postponed to early December. Just recently we’d heard that it might be postponed again until “after the New Year.”

  “I don’t think about the trial. I try never to think of the trial.”

  “That’s good, Nicole. Because the trial is not up to you.”

  “I think about my life in this house, day to day. Sometimes hour to hour. That’s what I think about, and there’s happiness in that, and I have a right to that.”

  My voice rose. Strabane nodded gravely. He was looking as if I’d shoved him in the chest. Surprising him, but he’d stood his ground. And now he was rueful, chagrined. But still he stood his ground.

  I was saying, excited: “Clare promised to help me clear out the garage but you don’t see her here, do you! She wants to sell the house but she can’t force herself to come back. This matter of leaving garage doors open permanently, my dad thought it was a moral failing in homeowners. Garages filling up with junk and cars parked outside. ‘People don’t respect privacy any longer not even their own.’ Dad would drive us around the subdivision pointing out lawns, houses, garages that were ‘well kept’ and those that were ‘disgraceful.’ He judged by appearances, the outsides of things, because after all that’s what people see. ‘A garage door open to the street is like a wall missing from someone’s house so you can see inside where they’re sitting around in pajamas or worse yet naked.’ The way Dad said ‘naked’ was funny as a laugh line on Saturday Night Live.”

  The way I’d been speaking, rapidly and meant-to-amuse, was a definite signal, my visitor should leave. I was becoming overly excited, upset. My skin felt feverish and the nerve in my eyelid was hopping. Strabane edged closer to me, regarding me with worried eyes. He’d meant to console me, somehow. He hadn’t meant to antagonize me.

  He said: “I’ve got part of the day off. I’m here offering to help you. If you want help. I was hoping I’d hear from you.”

  “Well, you didn’t hear from me. You won’t hear from me. I don’t need you.”

  Through much of this edgy exchange, Strabane had been glancing past me into the garage. It was a tic-like gesture, he couldn’t help himself. Thinking how he’d been summoned to this garage, that evening in May. He’d been the chief detective at a “crime scene” in that garage. Not four months ago but it seemed like four years. The bright-lit interior of the utterly ordinary suburban garage where my mother had been struck down, fallen to the concrete floor. A woman’s small broken body on that dirty floor, in torn and blood-soaked clothing. I’d wanted to ask if the professional cop had noticed how carefully sewn the blue linen jacket was, with its pale-blue silk lining. How beautiful the floral-print blouse.

  Women’s things, women’s bodies. Women’s lives of so little consequence, finally.

  Strabane was watching me, curious. He was one who’d made a profession out of decoding secret thoughts.

  I said, “I appreciate your help, Detective. But—”

  “‘Detective’ is my rank. ‘Strabane’ is my name.”

  “Yes, I know. Mr. Strabane—”

  “People don’t call me ‘Ross,’ my first name. Somehow, it’s always been, even in middle school, ‘Strabane.’ Weird, eh?”

  I had no reply to this. Something strange and tight was happening to the lower part of my face.

  “—I don’t need you, ‘Strabane.’ It’s too much effort now.”

  “What is?”

  Becoming involved. Inviting you inside the house. Inviting you inside my life. Or, just offering you coffee, banana nut bread baked from Mom’s Breadcraft book.

  Inviting you to wash your hands, soiled on my account.

  “There’s a man, we’re planning to be married. He…”

  Afterward I would realize, Strabane knew about Wally Szalla. For sure, Strabane knew about Wally Szalla.

  He’d been “investigating” our Eaton lives. I knew this. Though exactly how much he knew I didn’t care to imagine, except I resented this, I resented this stranger knowing anything about me.

  “Right, Nicole. Got it!”

  He’d replaced the dark glasses. Immediately he looked just slightly sinister, sexy. The lenses were flat and hyper-shiny and I couldn’t see his eyes any longer and Jesus, what a relief. I hoped I would never see those eyes again.

  Still, he didn’t leave. You’d think Good, fine, this is over, you’ve got it, goodbye. He was saying, “Soooo. Well…If, y’know, you need me, Nicole, give me a call, O.K.? Any time it comes over you, like you want to talk?”

  His hand moved toward a pocket, until he remembered he’d already given me one of his cards. At least twice.

  I thanked him, I said yes. I wasn’t even looking at him now.

  Not wanting this man to take away the wrong impression of me. That I was attracted to him though I couldn’t stand him. That I wanted him, not to go away but to come closer, so that I could shove him away with both my hands, shut into fists.

  Squatting in the garage tugging at boxes of aged, warped records Mom had packed away after, sometime in the early 1990s, Dad had “given in” (his expression, uttered with philosophical disgust) and finally purchased a cassette-CD player like the majority of his fellow Americans. Oh, what to do with these records! I understood Mom’s predicament.

  How could I dispose of these warped classics in their grimy yet still colorful covers, Highlights from Bizet’s “Carmen,” Boston Pops Orchestra at Tanglewood Summer 1981, West Side Story, The Sound of Music? I brushed away cobwebs, and reboxed them. I worked until my knees throbbed with pain, from squatting. I had totally forgotten my visitor. I was not going to think about my visitor. Instead I was thinking See, I am getting along. This is proof. If you require proof. I am not Nikki now exactly but I am coping in a way Nikkie could not cope. I have opened the garage at last. Proof that I am unafraid of the garage is, I have opened the garage at last. From now on, I will be parking my car in the garage. I will lower the garage door. None of you will know by driving past when I am home, and when not.

  breadcraft

  It was so, I’d begun experimenting with recipes from Mom’s much-thumbed flour-smeared Breadcraft book.

  I wasn’t a natural baker. Never much of a cook. Maybe I suffered from ADD like half the U.S. population. Lacking in patience, and patience is a kind of maturity.

  In the kitchen, at the bread board, kneading dough in the way Mom had tried to teach me, I felt peaceful, and I was happy. For—almost!—I could see Mom in the corner of my eye. Almost!—I could hear Mom encouraging me.

  Kneading is easy, Nikki!

  Flour your hands. Add flour to the board until the dough stops sticking. Good!

  Don’t wrestle the dough! Just push pull roll the dough, push pull roll the dough, that’s right, sweetie, find your rhythm, no need to hurry, use your instinct, take your time, kneading is happiness, when you knead bread you enter a zone of happiness, when you observe bread rising it’s happiness, when you smell bread baking it’s happiness, when you cool bread (always on a wire rack, honey) it’s happiness, when you share bread with others it’s happiness and it is happiness you deserve, Nikki, not sorrow.

  Salt tears dripped from my eyes sometimes, into the sinewy bread dough. If I couldn’t wipe them away fast enough leaving flour-smears on my face.

  Miracl
e Bread. Whole Wheat. Cracked Wheat. Twelve Grain.

  While the bread was baking I expected the worst to emerge from the oven and sometimes I was right and sometimes I was what people describe as pleasantly surprised. When I messed up, I tried not to despair but just avoided the kitchen for a day. And when I returned, there was Mom awaiting me in the oversized white apron we’d given her inscribed MASTER BAKER, that tied at the waist and around the neck.

  Bread baking is fun, Nikki! Not like life that gets too serious sometimes.

  Sourdough. Buttermilk. Oatmeal/bran. Raisin/yogurt/twelve grain. Banana nut.

  These were Mom’s recipes, I baked. The familiar smell of Mom’s bread-baking filled the house. If I shut my eyes as in the sweetest dream I could see myself running up the driveway from having gotten off the school bus, pushing open the kitchen door to a smell of bread baking that meant that my mother was home and calling out Hey Mom I’m home!

  I baked. I messed up but I baked. I became exasperated, I lost my temper and dumped rock-hard bread into the trash but I baked. I quarreled with my married-man-lover but I baked. I regretted not having invited the bristly-quill-haired detective into my kitchen, to give him a taste of Mom’s banana nut bread that had turned out pretty damned good, but I didn’t call him; I baked. Thinking You don’t need more excitement in your life right now, you need less.

  I baked.

  Quarreling with Wally Szalla was a prologue to making-up with Wally Szalla which was always worth it. I think.

  For Wally, I baked sourdough. Something simple, for a man who claimed to like things simple. “Nikki, this is good.” A look of surprise. “You baked this, Nikki? You?” For my thirty-second birthday in early October, Wally took me for a romantic weekend at the Hotel Chateaugay on the St. Lawrence River, north of Massena at the Quebec border. He gave me a bracelet watch of white gold inscribed on the back to N, love W that was the most beautiful jewelry I’d ever been given, and made me cry.