Missing Mom

by Joyce Carol Oates

  I was distracted by Rob’s hurt-hungry mouth. Thinking what a long time it had been since Wally Szalla had seriously kissed me.

  Since any man had seriously kissed me.

  Since any man had seriously made love to me.

  Rob queried me further about what Clare had allegedly said. I had to wonder if I was inventing dialogue for my sister in the way that Dad used to accuse Mom of so badly wanting people to make up the differences between them, she invented their dialogue for them.

  Mom always defended herself, passionately. In her mind, the dialogue was 100 percent authentic, she swore she’d heard it with her “own ears.”

  I could almost swear, yes I’d heard Clare with my “own ears.” If she hadn’t exactly said these sensible words, she’d meant to say them.

  “…she does love you, Rob. That’s the main thing.”

  Rob was on his feet, swaying. I hoped he wouldn’t stumble into the pedestal table, that weighed a ton: people were always banging their shins on it, especially men. I was on my feet also. Oh, my head was spinning! But it was a comforting sensation, I hadn’t felt in a while.

  One of those sensations you feel lonely for. Like a man’s hands touching you, a man’s mouth kissing you. Almost, the exact identity of this man isn’t relevant.

  I roused myself to say, staring at my wristwatch, “Well! It’s getting late…”

  Rob roused himself, too. He’d finished most of the whiskey himself and would leave the bottle behind. Though he pointedly ignored my hint he seemed to know that it was time to leave. Thanking me not once but several times and calling me Nik-ki in a voice tremulous with emotion. “…why I came here, I knew, if I saw you, things would make some sense. Of the two of you, Nikki, you and Clare, this goes back years, Nikki, it needs to be said, of the two of you, you are the one who…” Rob jammed his fist against his heart in a sudden forceful gesture, as if words were failing him. “…no matter what people say about you. See, people don’t know you. They think they know Clare, Clare Eaton is the ‘sensible’ sister but oh man, I happen to know otherwise. You don’t live with a woman like Clare for fifteen years and not know otherwise. Also you’re nicer, Nikki…And smarter, and better-looking, and, well…sexier. Oh, man.”

  When words like this come lurching at you, maybe they’re the fantasy words you’ve been wishing to hear, always they come too quickly, too suddenly, before you’re prepared, and the man is coming too quickly at you, lurching also, in this case stumbling against the pedestal table. Rob must have banged his shin hard but in his emotional state seemed scarcely to notice. His fumey breath was in my face. His fingers took hold of my shoulders in the mohair sweater. Before I could react, he stooped to me, brushed his lips against my cheek and then, hot-mouthed, kissed my mouth. His lips were rubbery and wet and not so comforting as I’d anticipated yet a sensation like an electric shock ran swiftly through me, chest to groin.

  “Nikki, hey. I’m crazy about you.”

  Rob was pleading. Yet it was a forceful pleading, and he wasn’t relaxing his grip on my shoulders.

  I was pushing Rob away, or trying to. Didn’t want this to escalate into anything like a struggle. My brother-in-law was drunker than I’d guessed and a drunken man is very hard to budge.

  “You’re crazy about your family, Rob. Not me.”

  “No, Nikki. You.”

  Suddenly, in the confusion of the moment, it seemed utterly plausible. My brother-in-law Rob Chisholm was crazy about me. Not Clare but me. Me!

  The way he was looking at me, preparing to kiss me again if I didn’t squirm out of his grasp, if I didn’t decisively wriggle free of his fingers gripping my shoulders which I meant to do, or tried to do, except my knees were weak and my reactions slow as if underwater, or in a dream: one of those sweet/shameful taboo dreams you hope to forget as soon as you wake.

  “Nikki, you like me, too, don’t you? A little?”

  “Rob, I…”

  “Hey c’mon: you know you do.”

  This was so. This was true. Those years of flirting between us. In Clare’s very house, and here in Mom’s house. At family gatherings innocent and gregarious as outdoor barbecues, where Rob Chisholm himself was in charge of steaks, chicken, hot dogs sizzling on the grill. Always there were opportunities. Sly-secret opportunities. Moist-lipped smiles, unmistakable in meaning. Squeezing my brother-in-law’s fingers even as, teasing-quick, I released them. When we spoke together—and always, at some point in the evening, we’d find ourselves speaking together earnestly and at length—lightly touching my brother-in-law’s arm. Sometimes Rob Chisholm and I were so highly charged, except not always, especially at the end of a festive evening when we’d each had a few drinks. When I’d say goodnight to my brother-in-law in a luxuriant display of full-frontal teasing: “Goodnight, Rob! Love ya!” The full length of Nikki against the full length of Rob.

  Once, at a noisy wedding, I’d given Rob a hot wet goodnight kiss at the edge of his mouth and Rob responded by grabbing my derriere with both hands, to press me against him a little harder.

  I’d only just slapped at him lightly, and laughed.

  Hoping that no one had seen.

  (Or maybe I hadn’t much cared if anyone had seen. Not Clare, not even Mom.)

  I wondered if Rob had been remembering the last time we’d been together in this house. Mom’s Mother’s Day dinner. So close to the day of her death.

  I’d been well aware of the way the men’s eyes had moved onto me. Danto, and Wexley, and Rob Chisholm. Especially Rob Chisholm. No wonder Clare had been furious, in the kitchen. No wonder Mom had been disgusted with me.

  How can you drift as you’ve been drifting. How can he respect you if you don’t respect yourself.

  I seemed to hear Mom. Somewhere in this room. I wondered if Rob had heard her, too.

  I was saying, pleading, “Rob, you’d better leave. This isn’t the right time, and it isn’t the right place,” and Rob was saying, “What’s that mean, Nikki? This is where you are, and I’m here. You must know, I’ve been crazy about you for a long time,” and I said, “Rob, no. It’s your family you’re crazy about, please believe me,” and Rob said, “Don’t send me away, I’m so lonely,” and I said, “Lilja must be waiting for you…” and Rob said, half-sobbing, “Lilja! Lilja can’t bear to look at me! She won’t even discuss the separation, she’s staying with her cousin Caroline, didn’t Clare tell you? I’m so lonely, Nikki, I can’t go back to that house…” and I said, trying to remain calm, “But you can’t stay with me, Rob, someone is coming to see me, soon,” and Rob said, “Szalla? Him? He’s coming?” and I said, “Never mind who’s coming, my private life is no concern of yours,” and Rob said, “Szalla doesn’t deserve you, Nikki,” and I said, “You’d better leave now, Rob.”

  By this time I’d managed to back away from Rob who was looming over me, hot-faced and panting. My shoulders stung from the grip of his fingers. My mouth felt bruised, from the single hard kiss. I saw a glisten of resentment in my brother-in-law’s face, a look of purely male anger. I hoped Rob wouldn’t turn into a mean drunk. I had to realize I’d never been alone with him in such circumstances. I hoped I hadn’t been leading him on though of course I’d been leading him on and we both knew it.

  Rob staggered out of the living room, along the hall and into the kitchen, went to the sink and turned on a faucet. In a gesture meant to be clownish as well as pragmatic he turned the hand-spray onto his hot face, wetted his face, hair, shirt and splattered his trousers. Water streamed down his face like tears. “This is to cool me off. This will teach me a lesson.”

  Rob stumbled into Smoky’s food bowls and spilled kibble onto the floor. He apologized, laughing. He would have stooped to clean up the mess except I told him please just leave, I’d take care of it myself. At the door he fumbled with the knob, I had to open it for him and urge him out and still he lingered, unsteady on his feet as an upright bear. “…just that, Nikki, you’re too good for Szalla. Guy’s too old and fat for you.
Sweet girl like you. Sweet, sad girl like you. I’m the one understands you, not what’s-his-name. Clare is out of it, see I don’t want her back, it’s Foster I want back, I want my son back, I want my sweet Nikki on my side, whyn’t you come over to my house and make supper for me, this isn’t good for you, living here isn’t good for you, Nikki, your mother died in this house…”

  Now I was upset. Now I shoved Rob Chisholm out the door.

  “My mother didn’t die in this house, my mother lived in this house for thirty years.”

  After Rob left I cleaned up the spilled cat food. I knelt on the linoleum floor, my tears fell onto the spread-out newspaper. Of course Smoky appeared, nudging against me and purring loudly. He had banished his rival, now he was famished.

  In the morning, I would discover the Rochester Sun-Times Sunday Magazine on the kitchen counter, where Rob Chisholm had left it.

  messages

  Has he been to see you?

  Has he been complaining of me, to you?

  Has he been taking care of himself?

  Has he been drinking?

  Has he been missing work?

  Has he, well—missed us?

  Messages on my answering machine from Clare. Playing and replaying them I wasn’t certain if I felt relieved to hear from my runaway sister, or resentful. Wanting to fire back You’re the one who has left us, do you miss us?

  church street

  “You baked this? You?”

  With a prim doubtful expression Aunt Tabitha lifted the slice of sprouted-wheat/almond bread to her mouth. Then, as she chewed, tasted, swallowed, a grudging-Grandma expression came over her face.

  Where other elderly women turn frail, with rice-paper skin, my aunt seemed to be thickening and hardening. Her skin exuded a lardish lustre and her figure was pear-shaped, stolid. Her bluish-white hair, tightly permed, had a synthetic bounce. Her appetite appeared to be undiminished.

  “…a trifle airy for my taste. You know, like there are air bubbles in the bread. Of course, Gwen’s bread was like this, too. There are people who prefer it this way.”

  Tabitha spoke so solemnly, I told her I was sorry.

  “Oh no, dear! It is good. It is”—Tabitha hesitated, regarding me with unexpectedly moist eyes—“very good. Gwen would be proud of you at last.”

  After weeks, unless it had been months, of avoiding Aunt Tabitha, I’d finally gone to visit her in the drafty cobblestone house on Church Street. As Mom would have done, I’d brought a fresh-baked loaf of bread made from one of Mom’s recipes. Unlike Mom, I wasn’t going to be overly sensitive about Tabitha’s enigmatic remarks. Truly I didn’t know if she’d meant at last to be hurtful to me, or a heartfelt compliment. Even Dad had said of his older sister that she doled out compliments the way she doled out tips: “Grudgingly.”

  After Rob Chisholm, I’d been feeling guilty. Almost as if I’d slept with my brother-in-law.

  Waking to feel myself sexually aroused. A taste of a man’s soft-hard mouth on mine. Whose?

  Maybe it was a guilty season, autumn. Not leafy/colorful autumn but leafless/dreary autumn with skies like eraser smudges when it wasn’t raining which usually it was. I needed to feel good about myself which meant behaving in a not-Nikki way, not-selfish but good-hearted like Gwen Eaton, rushing about Mt. Ephraim visiting with elderly relatives and friends. It had been a revelation to me, how my mother’s calendar was sprinkled with the initials of these females, how frequently she must have seen them. Tabitha was telling me now, even as she buttered a second slice of crusty bread, that she missed Gwen every day, how “sweet” Gwen had been to call on her several times a week to ask after her health, how “thoughtful”—“generous”—Gwen had been to drive her to appointments, since Tabitha was having trouble driving lately: “Not me, but other drivers! They are so young, and so rude.”

  Before I realized, I seemed to have agreed to drive my aunt to an upcoming doctor’s appointment (“This terrible ‘colonoscopy’ it’s called, you are given something to make you woozy, you are not allowed to drive a car afterward”) and a Women’s Garden Club luncheon (“All the way downtown, and then you can’t find a parking space”).

  It was ironic that Aunt Tabitha so missed Mom, whom she’d taken for granted as her younger brother’s “sweet” little wife. In the Eaton family mythology, Jonathan Eaton had married “for love”—meaning, beneath him. Mom had always been intimidated by the Eatons and above all by Tabitha who’d been the wife of a Mt. Ephraim businessman named Edmund Spancic III. (Which made Tabitha Mrs. Edmund Spancic III, a name she still signed with a flourish.) The Spancic house in the oldest and most prestigious neighborhood in Mt. Ephraim was twice the size of the ranch house in Deer Creek Acres and my childhood memory of this house was one of brocaded fabrics and claw-footed furniture, “doilies” and “slipcovers” and German-made “figurines” not to be touched. Unlike our floors which were mostly covered in wall-to-wall carpeting, the Spancics’ floors were polished hardwood which meant you could run and slide on loose rugs, or in your stocking-feet, if no adults were observing.

  One of the deeply mortifying memories of my childhood was of a stopped-up toilet in the downstairs “guest bathroom” of my aunt’s house. When I’d flushed the toilet, the urine-discolored water level rose terrifyingly and overflowed onto the tile floor and rose-pattern bathroom rug, and though the mishap hadn’t been my fault, the toilet had obviously been malfunctioning before I’d used it, the commotion that ensued, my aunt’s fussing over the “ruined” rug and my uncle’s fuming over my “carelessness,” had been a nightmare. Twenty years later I was sure that Tabitha regarded me with mistrust as her slovenly niece who stopped up toilets. While visiting her, I took care never to use the guest bathroom, to lessen anxiety on both sides.

  Was this an amusing memory? Clare would think so: she’d teased me mercilessly for years.

  Dad had held his own with his bossy older sister but Mom had always deferred to her sister-in-law. It was her nature to give in to stronger personalities: she assured Clare and me, she “didn’t mind” the way Tabitha treated her. For Tabitha Spancic had genuine silver, not silverplate; in her living room and dining room, Tabitha had “real” Oriental rugs; Tabitha had a “girl” to clean her house, and often a “cook” to prepare meals; there was even a “yardman” for the property, which was smaller than our own. The Spancics had two cars, one invariably a Lincoln, while the Eatons of Deer Creek Acres had just one, which was Dad’s. How many times we’d returned home from Aunt Tabitha’s with Mom silent in the car and Dad trying to joke her out of being hurt: “Gwen, don’t take it personally. You know how Tabby is.”

  Tabby! My heart beat hard in resentment, decades later. Why hadn’t Dad intervened with Tabby, then? In his sister’s house, to her face? In the bulldog-presence of Edmund Spancic III?

  Aunt Tabitha and I were sitting in Tabitha’s high-ceilinged dining room, at an end of the massive mahogany table where two plastic place mats made to resemble white lace had been set. For an important social occasion, Tabitha would have whisked away the plastic and replaced it with genuine lace. My memories of this room were mixed: formal, interminable Thanksgiving dinners and occasional Christmas dinners, endured rather than enjoyed, until I was old enough (by the rebellious age of fifteen) to refuse to come. On the table were the same sturdy silver candlestick holders, with cream-colored candles whose wicks had never been sullied by any match, and between the holders was Tabitha’s favorite German figurine, a buxom shepherdess with rosy cheeks. With my sprouted-wheat/almond bread we were having Earl Gray tea in dusty Wedgwood cups. Tabitha kept spooning sugar into her tea and sighing. She’d been grateful to see me when I arrived but, being Tabitha, couldn’t keep an air of reproach out of her voice, complaining of how long it had been since I’d visited her, how long it had been since she’d seen her grandchildren, how windy and cold it was already in November, how heating bills were so high she’d been having to shut off rooms in the house: “And there you are, across town, in a
nother lonely house. And yours is so small.”

  I swallowed a hot mouthful of Earl Gray tea, pretending not to have heard this.

  “…just last winter, your mother and I were saying, how sensible it would be, if Gwen moved in here. Except of course…”

  Tabitha sighed fretfully. How like fate it was, to have thwarted her wishes.

  I said nothing. I couldn’t look at my aunt, who seemed to be staring intently at me. Tabitha’s pewter-colored eyes were sharply defined as coins behind her glasses, not the old-woman misty eyes you might expect.

  Oh, I would have to ask Clare about this! I was sure I’d never heard Mom speak of wanting to sell our house, let alone moving in with Tabitha Spancic of all people.

  “…and Clare? How is Clare, in Philadelphia?”

  Philadelphia was enunciated as you’d enunciate the name of a loath-some disease. I had to disappoint Tabitha by telling her that Clare seemed fine, very busy with her new life, we didn’t communicate often, if she wanted to speak with Clare she could call her, I’d given her the number, hadn’t I? Tabitha ignored this, sniffing. “There isn’t another man involved, I hope,” and I murmured no, I didn’t think so. Tabitha said, “And Rob, what about him?” with a little catch in her throat, as if this were a riskier question, and I murmured no, I didn’t think so.

  Though I’d been wondering lately. The hungry way Rob had looked at me, the way he’d grabbed and kissed me. The smell of his whiskey breath. Maybe, just maybe, he’d been unfaithful to Clare, and that was the reason for the separation. Rob was often at electronics conventions, in such places as Atlanta, Miami, Las Vegas…

  I’d half-believed him, when he’d said he was crazy for me. I’d wanted to believe. But in the sober light of day, Rob had maybe just been a lonely man whose wife had rejected him and I was his wild/sexy sister-in-law looking lonely, too.