Missing Mom: A Novel

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Tell Lilja, I thought. Tell your daughter.

  Clare glanced up at me. In her schoolteacher mode my sister could read my thoughts as easily as one might observe goldfish swimming in a bowl.

  “Lilja is over her ‘crisis,’ I think. Once school is out and the pressure of her damned ‘peers’ lets up she’s going to be fine.”

  I was hungry and tried to eat but each time I lifted my fork to my mouth, it began to tremble. The Hawaiian chicken really was too sweet for my taste, and didn’t go very well with the overcooked clotted-together buckwheat pasta. The cocktail sausages were no temptation on a near-empty stomach, nor the lumpy tuna casserole that had heated unevenly in the microwave. As if Mom would have served such leftovers!

  I busied myself scraping the greenish mold off the cheddar cheese, and ate bits of cheese with crumbly pieces of the buttermilk-pecan bread.

  Years ago, Mom had tried to interest me in bread-baking. I’d complained that it took so long and Mom had said that’s the point of bread-baking, it takes so long.

  “Temperamentally, we weren’t each other’s type.”

  “Who? What are you talking about?”

  I hadn’t meant to speak aloud. It must have been the aftermath of the flu, my brain wasn’t functioning normally.

  I said, “I wonder if this will be the last of it? Mom’s bread.”

  “No. I’m sure I have some at home, still. Wrapped in aluminum foil in my freezer.”

  We fell silent. There was so much to say, it made us tired to not-say it.

  Outside, children were frolicking in the Pedersens’ backyard wading pool. I smiled to think how Dad would be annoyed, complaining of noisy neighbors. Lucky for him, he’d died before the Pedersens acquired the pool.

  What I dreaded most wasn’t noise but the prospect of someone suddenly banging on the door.

  The house was too quiet. Essentially, it was an empty house. You entered a room holding your breath. You were tempted to think that someone might be hiding. Waiting.

  That wasn’t how Ward Lynch had appeared to my mother. I knew. He’d come up to her quite openly, in a public place. He would not have suddenly appeared in Deer Creek Acres, to knock on the door. He would not have thought of the possibility.

  Oh, I’d meant to dismantle the tinkly little sleigh bells above the kitchen door. I thought, if I heard them, I would scream.

  Clare was talking as my thoughts drifted. It was hard not to think that, at any moment, one of Mom’s friends would turn into the driveway, rap at the kitchen door: “Gwe-en? You home?”

  Maude, or Madge. Lucille Kovach, or Gerry Eaton. Alyce Proxmire, Ellie O’Connell, the Barkham sisters. A continuous stream of chattering women five days a week. (Weekends, when Jon Eaten was home, Mom’s girlfriends kept their distance.)

  More people! More people! If I can’t be happy myself…

  Of course, I hadn’t told Clare what Mom said. I never would.

  “Do you suppose they know?”

  Clare was peering past me, into the backyard. She seemed to be looking at Mom’s bird feeder. Though it had been empty of seed for weeks, still there were birds all around the house. That day we’d been hearing their liquidy cries and calls that meant mating, nesting.

  Mom had said that June was the happiest time in the year for her: when all the birds are singing.

  “Who? Know what?”

  “The birds Mom was feeding. They must know that something is different about this house.”

  “Well. In summer birds can feed themselves, can’t they? You only need to feed them in cold months, I think.”

  “Mom put out seed all year round, I’m sure she did. And crusts of bread.”

  I didn’t want to blunder into an argument with Clare. Not after her eruption that morning.

  “One thing they’ve noticed, maybe: Smoky is gone.”

  Clare seemed not to hear. She’d finished her Hawaiian chicken but not the soggy buckwheat pasta. She’d given up on the congealing tuna casserole and pushed it from her as if she couldn’t bear to look at it.

  It was maddening, that Clare wouldn’t ask about Smoky. I’d been annoyed as hell for weeks. As if Mom’s cat had ceased to exist because Nikki had taken him home with her, and not Clare.

  I’d put a kettle on the stove to boil, for tea. When I poured tea into mugs for us, Clare sniffed suspiciously at hers and wrinkled her nose.

  “Nikki, what is this? It tastes like acid.”

  “This is Mom’s Red Zinger.”

  “I’d have preferred peppermint.”

  “Peppermint! That tastes like mouthwash.”

  “Not if you don’t make it too strong. This ‘zinger,’ you’ve made way too strong.”

  “If you’d wanted peppermint, Clare, why didn’t you tell me? You must have seen what I was doing at the stove.”

  “Nikki, I didn’t see. I wasn’t watching your every movement, I was preparing lunch for us. I had to do practically everything myself, you scarcely lifted a finger. You were going to open a can of soup, and you never did.”

  My face burned. I’d forgotten. We were close to quarreling now.

  Clare persisted, “I don’t really like herbal tea, I’d have preferred real tea, or coffee.”

  “Well, you can make it for yourself, can’t you? And then we’d better get back to work, if you have to leave early.”

  “I don’t have to leave ‘early,’ Nikki. I told you when I had to get back home: by six. And I’m not supposed to have caffeine for the time being, with my medication. It’s ‘contra-indicated.’ You know that.”

  Did I know? I couldn’t remember. Clare was glaring at me as if I’d deeply wounded her.

  “I can make you peppermint. The water is still hot.”

  “I didn’t say I wanted peppermint. Only that I’d have preferred it to this ‘zinger.’ That’s all I said.”

  I laughed. I think it was a laughing sound that issued from my mouth.

  Clare said suddenly, “It’s strange to be here, isn’t it. In their house, without them around.”

  “That’s why we’re here, Clare. Because they aren’t around.”

  “But it doesn’t seem natural. Does it?”

  “If you want to sell this house, I guess it’s natural. It’s what ‘heirs’ do.”

  “‘If I want to sell this house’—? Don’t you?”

  I shrugged. What was there to say. What I dreaded most was a knock on the door. A man’s heavy footstep behind us.

  “Neither of us is going to live here.”

  “Right.”

  Clare rubbed at her eyes. She’d pushed away her cup of Red Zinger tea as if its mere sight offended her. “Wasn’t it a surprise, Nikki, Mom’s will! All those bequests.”

  The bequests ($5,000 to the Mt. Ephraim Christian Life Fellowship Church, $3,000 to the Mt. Ephraim Arts Council, $1,500 to the County Humane Society Animal Shelter, etc.) had not surprised me so much as the money Mom had left to Clare and me: $18,000 each. Mom had been so frugal, since Dad’s death. It was sad to think of her pinching pennies, saving money for an “estate” to be divided between “my beloved daughters Clare and Nicole.”

  I said, “I wish they’d spent the money on themselves. While Dad was alive. They’d been talking of going back to Key West for years, where they’d gone on their honeymoon.”

  “Oh, Nikki! You know Dad. He’d never get around to going.”

  “We could have encouraged them more. Dad wasn’t always so predictable.”

  “He was! More predictable than we knew, weighing himself every day and…Oh, God.” Clare laughed harshly, and began coughing. When I made a move to touch her she shoved at me reflexively, unthinkingly as you might shove at a small child or an animal annoying you. In the same instant she lurched to her feet, pushing out of the breakfast nook.

  “I guess—I don’t feel well. Excuse me—”

  Clare hurried to the bathroom in the hall. Quickly I began clearing away our plates, running water at the sink to muffle the soun
d of Clare being sick to her stomach.

  This was the “guest” bathroom kept in perpetual readiness for visitors. As girls we’d been allowed to use this bathroom with the understanding that we would not soil the dainty embroidered linen towels or the fragrant pink soap sculpted into ingenious flower shapes. We might use the toilet, but we must wash our hands elsewhere. Above all, we must not somehow “speckle” the sink or the spotless mirror above the sink.

  Dad had avoided the guest bathroom entirely. He’d joked it was the easiest way to stay on Mom’s good side.

  Strangers had examined that bathroom, I knew. Very likely, strangers had even used the toilet.

  Possibly, he had used it, too. The man I had not yet accustomed myself to identifying as my mother’s murderer.

  By the time Clare reappeared, deathly pale, sullen and repentant, I’d tidied up the kitchen and cleared away all evidence of our meal of leftovers. The last of the Hawaiian chicken, buckwheat pasta, tuna casserole and spicy cocktail sausages scraped into the garbage disposal, and gone.

  The remains of the bread, I wrapped in aluminum foil and returned to the freezer.

  We didn’t resume our sorting that afternoon, Clare wasn’t feeling up to it. Nor did she think she could drive home by herself, so I drove her.

  In the Saab, Clare began crying. I had never heard my sister cry so helplessly. She was saying she couldn’t make it without Mom. She was saying she didn’t love anyone anymore. It was too much effort, she wasn’t strong enough.

  “People make me angry! They seem so silly. I seem so silly to myself. Lilja screams at me, ‘I wish I was dead!’ and this terrible thought came to me, Why do people keep going, really? What is the point? Lilja won’t talk about Mom, not a word. Rob says give her time. I think she’s more embarrassed than grief-stricken, and I hate her. I hate my own daughter! And that man. At the hearing, I wanted to scream at him, ‘Why? Why our mother? Why us?’ Except I knew there was no answer. There is no answer. I don’t love Rob. I love Foster, but I don’t love his father. I made a mistake marrying Rob. I made a mistake quitting my job. I wanted to go back to school, I wanted to get a master’s degree. I wanted to study in New York City. I wanted to travel. Mom was so fond of Rob, and Dad liked him, too. Especially Mom was anxious for me to ‘settle down’—‘be happy.’ And I wanted to make Mom happy, of course! But it was a mistake. I don’t love him. I don’t even know if he loves me. We’re like these people who met at a party and got to talking and wound up trapped in an elevator together, stuck between floors. We try to be civil, we try not to panic or scream at each other, but we’re running out of oxygen. Oh, Nikki.” In this way my second day at 43 Deer Creek Drive ended early.

  love me?

  I was thirty-one years old and shouldn’t have had to beg.

  “Smoky! Come cuddle.”

  This lonely June night, I’d begun drinking early.

  Oh, not serious drinking: just wine.

  A glass. Just a glass!

  (What harm, a single glass? Let’s be serious.)

  This lonely June night when I’d made a sensible decision not to be exhausted/depressed/anxious. Two glasses of the terrific Chianti Wally’d brought the other evening, I could hardly recall why I’d imagined I should be exhausted/depressed/anxious.

  “Smoky? You’d better love me, buddy. All we have is each other.”

  (This wasn’t exactly true. At least on my part. For after all I had my current married-man-friend who adored me.)

  (He said.)

  (Well, he did! Said, and said, and said.)

  Except here I was being blackmailed by my mother’s orphan cat. Emotional blackmail it was. Though Smoky had no one but me, somehow Smoky didn’t trust me. Each time I unlocked the door to my apartment and stepped inside, Smoky seemed not to know who I might be, or who might be accompanying me.

  As Wally was allergic to Smoky, so Smoky was allergic to Wally.

  If I managed to entice Smoky into my lap, to settle down, allow me to pet him, lapse into a quivery drowse and even purr deep in his throat, as soon as he heard Wally’s footsteps on the stairs, more recently just the sound of a car door being slammed outside, Smoky would panic and leap from me, digging his claws through the fabric of my clothes into the soft flesh of my thighs.

  “Smoky, oh! That hurts.”

  The tiny scratches rarely bled. Maybe just a little.

  Still, I longed to hold Smoky in my lap tonight. Longed to stroke his bristly fur, that wasn’t so soft and lustrous as it had been in the days of Mom, but still it was fur, and Smoky was a warm creature with a potential to love me.

  It was early evening when I decided to have a single small glass of Chianti. Eventually, it become later.

  Time for WCHF FM’s “Night Train” at 10 P.M. Wally Szalla’s radio voice until midnight.

  That afternoon when I’d returned from Mt. Ephraim, having taken my weeping sister home first, there’d been two messages from Wally on my answering machine. (There were other messages, too. I wasn’t paying too much attention to these.) The first, recorded at 1:48 P.M., was a promise to “Nikki darling” he’d be over immediately after the radio broadcast, which was airing live that evening. The second, recorded at 4:20 P.M., was a harried and evasive message saying he “hoped” he’d be there “as soon as I can get away.”

  It had been our plan, Wally would be staying with me tonight.

  (I think. I’d thought.)

  Vaguely I knew there were “new complications” with Wally’s family. Not only his “emotionally unstable wife Isabel” but his “very demanding” daughter (whose name I seemed to be blocking though by now, I should have known it as well as I knew my own). And, of course, there was Troy.

  I wanted to protest I’m a daughter, too. Love me!

  Smoky poked his tomcat-face out from beneath my bed. I’d been drifting through the apartment, seductively rattling a package of seafood cat-kibble, pausing now in the doorway of my bedroom. “C’mon, buddy. Midnight snack, then we’ll cuddle.”

  Begging a cat for affection. This poor animal kept prisoner in my apartment.

  Smoky’s wedge-shaped head had not lost weight, like the rest of his body. If a cat can have jowls, Smoky had jowls. Though I spoke cajolingly, shamelessly to him, still he regarded me with suspicion as if Wally Szalla was somehow crouched behind me ready to spring.

  “Nobody here but me, Smoky. And you know me.”

  Smoky resented it, he wasn’t allowed outdoors. At Mom’s house he’d been allowed absolute freedom but there was too much traffic in my neighborhood and anyway I knew he would run away, if I let him outdoors, and I’d never see him again.

  Smoky is safe with me, Mom. I promise.

  I shook a small amount of kibble into Smoky’s green plastic bowl in a corner of the kitchen, watching as the gray cat ate in the quick-darting way of a traumatized creature. I would make Smoky love me, I vowed. I would win him over, as Mom had done when she’d brought the scrawny skittish six-month-old cat home from the animal shelter.

  Any cat that qualifies as a lame duck, Dad said dryly, your mother will locate. And bring home with her.

  “…and now, here at WCHF FM in the heart of the historic Chautauqua Valley, as the hour moves past eleven P.M. ‘Night Train’ is going to take us on a sentimental journey to the Sweet Basil Jazz Club in New York City, 1953…”

  I had to keep the radio volume low. Smoky glanced up nervously hearing the D.J.’s familiar voice: low throaty sexy as an alto saxophone.

  This was Wally’s radio voice, not exactly his own voice. But you could recognize it. Smoky’s ears pricked, his stubby tail switched restlessly.

  “He isn’t here, I said. Not yet.”

  Since I’d become involved with Wally Szalla, I listened to WCHF FM obsessively. In my car, and in the apartment. Every waking hour, and more. “Night Train” (10 P.M. to midnight, five evenings a week) was naturally my favorite program. If I couldn’t be with Wally, next best thing was listening to him.

&n
bsp; Sipping a third glass of wine, listening to Dave Brubeck. To console me for my loneliness. To prepare me for Wally’s arrival.

  Wally would ask how the “sorting-through” had gone. I would tell him, fine!

  No, I wouldn’t tell my lover about my sister’s breakdown that day. I hadn’t told him about Gladys Higham the day before. (I hadn’t told Clare, either.) When a man shares with a woman his marital/domestic problems, the kind of problems that seem never to be solved but only to morph into yet more complicated problems, like hair snarls proliferating, sympathy flows in one direction only. By instinct a woman knows it’s naive to expect the flow to reverse.

  And maybe I didn’t want sympathy, really. From Wally Szalla or anyone.

  Much of the programming on WCHF AM-FM was taped. But Wally preferred to do “Night Train” live. He liked the edgy excitement of live radio, the thrill of receiving calls while on the air. There was something boyish and appealing about his D.J. personality you’d mistake for a lonely middle-aged guy with no one to love him, no one waiting for him when he left the studio.

  Clare had called Wally a “type.” As if Clare knew the first thing about him!

  “…a special request has just come in for ‘N.E.’…who I hope is listening somewhere out there in the Chautauqua Valley on this mellow June night…‘N.E.’: this is from ‘someone who adores you…who hopes you will be patient with him’…the incomparable Duke Ellington in a 1943 recording of ‘Mood Indigo’ followed by ‘Pretty Woman’ followed by ‘Just Squeeze Me.’ Mmmm!”

  I laughed aloud. Smoky, who’d settled at last in my lap, almost asleep, glanced up irritably.

  Soaking in hot fragrant sudsy water preparing for our lovemaking.

  If Wally left the radio station as soon as “Night Train” went off the air, he’d be here by 12:30 A.M. I had a luxuriant hour to anticipate his arrival.

  I’d decided that I would save Dad’s neckties for another time, to give to Wally. Or maybe I should give the ties to him singly. I had brought them home from the house, neatly laid out on a closet shelf. Clare needn’t know. What I took from our parents’ house was none of Clare’s business.