Missing Mom

by Joyce Carol Oates

  As Alyce spoke, I’d been arranging photos. Tidying the messiest of the albums. I had not been looking at Alyce, and could not look at her now. Thinking You asked. You wanted to know. And now you know.

  “…never knew, of course. Oh, Jon couldn’t have accepted it! I think I was the only one who knew. And Gwen had a way of pretending it had never happened, even with me. Like she didn’t know about sex. And almost it was like she didn’t. I was the one who remembered, of the two of us.” By this time I’d been quiet for so long, Alyce looked at me with worried eyes. “I shouldn’t have told you, Nikki. I’m sorry.”

  Carefully I said, as if this were a prepared speech, “No, Alyce. Thank you for telling me. I feel that I love Mom more than ever.”

  I swallowed hard, close to choking on these words. I didn’t want Alyce Proxmire to hug me.

  We were on our feet. Alyce was leaving. She wasn’t so tall as I remembered, and her middle-aged-girl’s face was etched with tiny creases. Dad used to joke Good old Alyce will outlive us all but I wasn’t so sure. In a wondering voice Alyce was saying, “Gwen is gone, and I’m still here, and I don’t feel much older than when we were sixteen, and Gwen was so cold at Star Lake, and I hugged her to stop her shivering, and she said, ‘Don’t tell, Alyce! Promise,’ and of course I promised and here I am, forty years later, breaking that promise.”

  Early next morning, a gregarious flock of chickadees would help dispose of the remains of “Alyce’s Bread,” in chunky pieces on the snowy rear terrace.

  change

  Next night my married-man-lover came to see me late, after “Night Train.” We were ravenous devouring slices of cold turkey on sourdough bread, cheddar cheese and coleslaw and our favorite Chianti. For the first time, we made love in my girlhood bed. We were tender with each other as new lovers. I thought I will never have a baby with this man, I am safe from him.

  “Nikki. There’s some change in you.”

  “Is there! Good, or not-so-good?”

  “Darling, don’t know. Maybe it’s a necessary change.”

  singapore sling

  She’d been waiting an hour to run me down, she said!

  Waiting months, years!

  She was breathless and laughing. She was “medicated”—her eyes shone like gasoline. Braking the white BMW sedan beside me in the snowy parking lot behind the YM-YWCA with a sharp squeal like a pig in pain. So close, the car’s left front fender grazed my thigh.

  The driver was a pretty-petulant woman in her forties with a hard red rosebud mouth and flaring nostrils. She was wearing a massive mink coat that sprouted like her own fur. I must have gaped at her in astonishment, as she rapidly lowered her window to jeer: “You are ‘Nicole Eaton.’ Hello.”

  I knew without having to ask: it was Isabel, Wally Szalla’s “estranged” wife.

  That morning I’d gone to swim at the Y. On her calendar Mom had marked 10 A.M. to 11:30 A.M., usually three days a week. I went to swim at the same time.

  At the pool, I’d met up with several of Mom’s seniors, to whom she’d given swimming instructions. I would confuse their names and faces afterward but they were Beverly, Mimi, Katrina, Shirley. They were Annemarie and Lillian, two of the women who’d released white doves at Mom’s grave site. They were frail-elderly “Mr. M.” who confided in me, he’d been in love with Gwen Eaton for years, and gregarious “Mr. E.” who insisted upon shaking my hand repeatedly, and swimming in my wake like an amorous seal. There was beetle-browed Mr. Kempton who’d retired from thirty-six years of teaching chemistry at Mt. Ephraim High, whom I recognized at once. (“Do I remember you, Nikki Eaton? I sure do.”) They were Miriam and Yardley Shafer, a matched-set pair who paddled about in the shallow end of the pool scolding and sniping at each other like peevish chows. There was sweetly vague Mrs. Cadwaller whose daughter-in-law brought her to the pool every morning, who’d once lived up the block from us on Deer Creek Drive and was eager, seeing me, to ask where my mother—“That nice woman who always smiled so”—was?

  My hand was shaken. I was hugged. I smiled until the lower part of my face became unhinged. I heard myself say in my mother’s buoyant voice Oh yes Mom told me about you. And you, and you. How she’d loved the swim class, how special you were to her.

  Each of Mom’s pupils had information about her to impart. From Katrina I learned something I hadn’t known, or had forgotten: my mother’s favorite way of swimming was the backstroke.

  “‘Because your face is out of the water. Because you can get dreamy and into your own zone. Because you can see where you’ve been, if you remember to open your eyes.’”

  From Lillian I learned that my mother had a curious sort of faith in water: it wouldn’t drown you, if you trusted it.

  “‘I love the water. It holds you up.’”

  Strange and thrilling, to hear my mother’s words in the mouths of others. If I shut my eyes, almost I could imagine I was hearing Mom.

  Beneath the chlorine-aqua surface of the pool. Beneath the bright splotches of reflected light. Beneath the clamorous hum and chatter of voices. You resist opening your eyes underwater but it must be done, as Mom tried to teach us. You have to see where you’re going, girls! You can’t swim blind.

  It was tempting to hide underwater in the pool. Sinking slowly to the concrete floor that felt smooth against the soles of my bare feet. Beside me, near enough to touch, was a wavy tiled wall. The water glimmered aqua and was sinuous, caressing. At a short distance were the pudgy bodies, slow-paddling legs of sister swimmers. Ten seconds. Fifteen. Stubbornly I held my breath until my brain began to feel like something that could explode. And my lungs, my throat. Twenty seconds. Twenty-five. Twenty-six, twenty-seven…

  I wondered how long Mom could hold her breath underwater. I wondered what she’d meant by “into your own zone.” I wondered if she’d meant it truly, that water won’t drown you if you trust it.

  Like Feather, wishing to be blown by the wind, where others can’t follow.

  I surfaced, gasping for air. My heart was pounding. An animal exuberance came over me: a greedy delight in filling my lungs with air.

  “…gunning the motor and waiting. And this wicked thought came to me, It could be an accident, there’s snow and ice here, who would know? Then I thought, It’s that bastard I should run down, not her.”

  Isabel Szalla laughed with surprising heartiness. Nudging me with her leather-gloved hand, to laugh with her.

  We’d been seated at a window table in the cocktail lounge/restaurant at the Marriott. At this time of day, only the restaurant was much occupied. Isabel had suggested an “anonymous” place. As if expecting, here in Mt. Ephraim, that people might recognize her. For the walk through the lobby and the restaurant she’d fumbled to put on oversized dark glasses. She looked both glamorous and frazzled. She gave off a sharp, peppery smell. She was a smallish compact woman with rouged cheeks and a jowly chin, several inches shorter than me. As we were led to our table, my eyes were fixed on the stiletto heels of her expensive Italian leather boots. Isabel swayed as she walked, semi-lurched, righted herself, resumed her air of ruffled dignity, fending off my hesitant offer of support before I came anywhere near touching her. Once seated, and the massive mink shrugged off, Isabel was fine. Her first drink, something exotic called a Singapore sling, she put away in three practiced swallows.

  “You haven’t ever been married, eh? What I’ve heard.”

  I had to admire this woman’s boldness. Here was a no-bullshit woman.

  “Right. You’ve heard right.”

  “Me! Married twenty-four years, I’m a veteran. Like, from a war? A crippled veteran?”

  This seemed to be a question. Isabel’s penciled-arched eyebrows rose quizzically.

  “I mean, a vet always supports the war he was in, in fact any war. Otherwise he’d have to acknowledge he’d made the worst damn mistake of his life, and he’d never unmake it.”

  Isabel laughed again, reaching over to poke me. I wasn’t at the state where laughte
r is contagious but I tried.

  For longer than I cared to remember, Wally had complained to me about this woman. She was “unstable”—“unpredictable”—“self-destructive.” He’d complained that each time she seemed to agree to a divorce, in fact insisted upon a divorce, shortly afterward she had an “emotional meltdown.” In the jargon of contemporary psychiatry, she was “bi-polar.”

  Yet there was something appealing about Isabel, even if she was crazy. A no-bullshit wife inviting the Other Woman to lunch after almost running her over.

  If I’d had time to think, I would recall having noticed the white BMW occasionally in my vicinity. Cruising past my car as I parked in one or another familiar parking lot in Mt. Ephraim. Possibly, I’d seen the car in Deer Creek Acres, cruising past my house. I hadn’t given it a second glance of course. Only if I’d been suspicious would I have linked it with a white vehicle I’d glimpsed parked outside Wally’s condo in Chautauqua Falls, on one of my rare overnight visits there some time ago.

  Poor Wally! In his underwear bulging at the waist, disheveled and unshaven before his morning shower, peering through the venetian blinds, cursing Oh why couldn’t that woman leave him alone why when she hated his guts why did she torment them both how could this end!

  “…just as much a victim as I am. You should know.”

  “Well. I…”

  “I said, you should know.” Isabel’s voice rose warningly.

  At the same time, taking advantage of our waitress’s startled attention from across the room, Isabel smiled and signaled for a second Singapore sling.

  “Won’t you join me, Nicole? They’re delicious, actually.”

  “Well. I…”

  “You do drink, Nicole! I’ve heard.”

  Big-sister-bossy. I could relate to that. This woman and I would never be friends but we could relate.

  So far as I knew, Wally Szalla’s marital situation at the present time seemed to me fairly clear-cut. He and Isabel were legally separated. Their lawyers were “negotiating.” There was the expectation that, sometime soon in the next year, the Szallas would be divorced and Wally would be at last “free” to marry me.

  I believed this, maybe. It had become a comfortable belief.

  Anyway, if marriage to Wally Szalla happened, it would happen on the far side of the trial in January. Nothing was very real on the far side of the trial as nothing was very real on the near side of the trial.

  “…the children. So ashamed! Distraught! They adore their father though knowing full well the man’s hypocrisy, duplicity. Oh, they would blame me. Never forgive…”

  Our lunches were brought. And two glasses of tart white wine. I didn’t remember ordering. Numbly I began to eat, something crouton-crispy with large glops of a whitish dressing, black olives, tomatoes, grated Parmesan cheese and raw purple-onion slices. Isabel stared at her plate with a look of peevish alarm. “…raw onions? Somebody take this away.”

  Through the plate-glass window beside our table, a snowy landscape glimmered white beyond the parking lot. And there was a wintry hard-blue sky. It was like holding my breath underwater to think how it had happened, time had swerved from that May evening at Mom’s house to now. I would have liked to explain to Isabel Szalla that now was in continuous motion like high-scudding clouds overhead and that was why I’d recklessly accepted her invitation to lunch, because it could have no permanent meaning, and it would pass. While that May evening smelling of lilacs, when I’d last seen my mother alive, when she’d hugged me for the last time, was fixed and unshakeable as rock.

  I would realize afterward, and be grateful for, the fact that Isabel made no reference to what had happened to my mother. Obviously, she’d known. But no personal tragedies engaged her except her own, probably she’d discounted what she had heard, and forgotten.

  Saying now with zest, bloodshot eyes giving off sparks, “…his family, also. The Szallas. Oh, that clan! From them, Wally inherited his taste for the illicit. His confidence he’ll always be forgiven. His father Otto, you know, ‘distinguished’ mayor of Chautauqua Falls for fifteen years, was close to impeached, for ‘misappropriation of municipal funds.’ His uncle Joe the U.S. congressman they’re so proud of, had a reputation for messing with interns and got involved in some scandal, his Democrat cronies helped him wriggle out of, and retire. And Wally himself, all these interviews he gives about the ‘environment’—‘ecology’—‘pride in the Chautauqua Valley’—‘saving the local radio station’—why d’you think he’s on the County Board of Supervisors for no salary, except to make a little untaxed money under the table? ‘It is not bribery, Isabel, I forbid you to say such a thing…’ Did you hear, Nicole, your lover has been named ‘Citizen of the Year’ by the Chautauqua County Historical Society? There’s a big holiday benefit dinner at the country club, one thousand dollars a ticket, Wally is begging me to attend as ‘Mrs. Szalla.’” Isabel laughed, shaking her head at the prospect.

  This was a surprise. I had known that Wally was to receive the award, we’d celebrated the other evening with champagne. But I had not known that he would be attending the dinner with Isabel, or with anyone.

  Weakly I said, “I don’t feel comfortable, Mrs. Szalla, talking about…”

  Isabel laughed and poked me across the table.

  “Call me ‘Isabel’! ‘Mrs. Szalla’ was my mother-in-law.”

  “…behind Wally’s back, about such…”

  “My late and not-lamented mother-in-law. She was the one who’d forgive her darling boy things he hadn’t even thought of doing yet.”

  “Isabel, I think we can talk like sensible civilized adults without…”

  “‘Sensible’—‘civilized’—‘adults’? You call yourself an ‘adult’? Having an affair practically in public with a married man and father, lacking even the good grace to be ashamed? Why, you’re ridiculous.”

  I was too shocked to react. Isabel’s bloodshot eyes glared. She’d pushed aside her plate and was rummaging through a crammed leather handbag. For a panicky moment I thought She has a gun.

  It wasn’t a gun but a thick wad of glossy photos, slapped down before me like playing cards. “…that’s ‘Miriam’ at the radio station, with the hair. This, she’s moved away now, is ‘Jolene Java’ the girl jazz singer he’d been promoting a few years ago. This—”

  I stopped the woman’s hands, which were making threatening motions in my face.

  “In his heart, Wally is in love with me. Because I am his wife, I was his bride. He is a sentimental man, Nicole. All the male Szallas are. They believe in ‘family values’—you will see! Wally has his sordid little flings, his whores, then comes limping back to the family, and to me. I’ve been collecting evidence for years, I’ve hired private detectives. Wally says that you are ‘unstable’—‘unpredictable’—‘self-destructive’—he’s worried you might ‘hurt yourself,’ and it would cause a scandal. Of course, I’ve asked him to move out. He pleads to be forgiven but I refuse to allow him to defile my bed. And I will not give him a divorce because I will not be defeated and cast aside at my age—”

  I wasn’t hearing this. I was walking away from my loud-voiced accuser, not listening and not looking back. You’d have thought I was naked, the way every eye in the restaurant leapt onto me.

  You deserve this humiliation, what the hell were you thinking!

  Once through the Marriott lobby I gave up all pretense of dignity and ran for my life, I mean for my car.

  the riddle

  I wouldn’t be seeing Wally Szalla for a while.

  Telling him it’s for the best, some distance between us, some space. Yes I know, but. Please.

  Listening to “Night Train” that night. The gravelly-voiced D.J. played Ray Charles’ classic “I Can’t Stop Loving You”—“This song is for ‘Nicole, with love from W.’”

  I didn’t respond. Damned if I would respond. In my heart I knew that Isabel Szalla was right about me, as I’d known that Mom had been right about me. Even if Isabel w
as crazy, and lying. Even if Mom had never really known Wally Szalla.

  He called, though. Left messages. On the tape his voice was urgent, agitated. I could not believe that he was not sincere…. love you so much Nikki. She wants to destroy that. She’s frightened, this time the negotiations are serious. I will be a free man soon. Please believe me Nikki. Give me a call and tell me you believe me darling I need to see you tonight.

  Played and replayed this message. The words were a riddle I had to decipher yet could not.

  no questions