Missing Mom: A Novel

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Rob said doubtfully, “Are you sure, Nikki? People in Mt. Ephraim want to do something for Gwen. I mean, in Gwen’s memory.” Awkward pause. Audible breathing into the receiver. “What happened is still so…raw. It’s like it happened to them.” Pause. Then, quickly, before I could register my objection by breaking into hysterical laughter, “They loved Gwen, that’s it. They don’t want to let go.”

  “Well, they’d better ‘let go’! I can’t be involved in their emotions.”

  This came out sounding like a plea. I’d meant to sound merely unpleasant.

  I’d meant to have a brief, reasoned conversation with my brother-in-law, in lieu of my mean-hearted sister who wouldn’t speak with me, but here I was being emotional. Probably sounding, to Rob’s startled ears, like Clare.

  Rob said, “Gwen would have liked this, I think. The memorial service, at least.”

  “Oh, Rob. She’d have been embarrassed to death.”

  What a thing to say. I would wonder afterward if in some weird jokey way it had been deliberate. Poor Rob could think of no reply except a mumbled, “Well. I’ll see what Clare thinks, she’ll probably agree with you.”

  Pause. I would not ask after Clare. I would not.

  “And how is Clare? I haven’t heard from her in a while.”

  Rob didn’t answer immediately. In the background were ambiguous noises. (I’d called Rob at his office, penetrating the barrier of his secretary with a steely Family matter! Urgent.) His voice sounded forced-bright: “Clare is, well—herself. More and more, it’s getting that way.”

  On that note, Rob had to hang up.

  All summer I managed to avoid Gilbert Wexley. I understood, I think, that a memorial service for my mother was inevitable, I could not interfere and maybe yes, Mom would have wished it. Some things, Mom would say, have to be done and so you do them, and try to be gracious about it. But I couldn’t bear seeing Wexley, I didn’t trust the man. I must have been offended by something bullying and condescending in his manner toward Mom, at that dinner she’d given. Your mother. Dear Gwen. Such a wonderful person. So missed! Like Dad, I had to wonder.

  “Nicole? Nicole Eaton? Is that—”

  “Mr. Wexley! Hello but sorry, I can’t talk now. A friend is waiting outside in his car, he’s come to pick me up, ’bye.”

  This encounter was in, of unlikely places, Voorhees Vacuum Cleaners: Sales & Service, in a strip mall on Route 31. (Where I was taking Mom’s hefty vacuum cleaner for repair. I’d grown to like the drone of vacuuming, the routine of sucking-up-visible-dirt into a disposable bag and tossing it away. Recommended for all grieving “survivors.”) Later I would figure out that Wexley had followed me inside, he’d been getting gas for his car close by.

  Another time, I saw Wexley, or a tallish bulky middle-aged man who resembled Wexley, with identical toupee-looking hair and pompous manner, approaching me in the ghastly warehouse-sized/frigidly air-conditioned Wal-Mart at the mall, quickly looking away I sprinted up an aisle to escape. (Almost into the arms of a sexy black guy in his twenties who laughed, “Hey man! Must be on the team.”) (Thinking afterward this might be a way to meet men: sprinting, colliding with them, stirring in strangers a wish to protect, advise.) (Thinking, too, that I hadn’t had sex in about as long as my dyed-purple punk hair had been growing out.)

  Another time I sighted a brooding bulky oldish man trudging up a graveled path in the Mt. Ephraim Cemetery, in the direction of Mom’s grave, and I ducked out of sight. And yet another time, one dozen white roses were delivered to the house with the card In Gwen’s memory always. G.W. I had to wonder if Gilbert Wexley who’d been Mt. Ephraim’s perennial bachelor-about-town had been in love with my mother.

  That would explain it, I thought.

  I’d only begun sorting through Mom’s massive accumulation of cards, letters, mementos, clippings and snapshots, scattered through the house in drawers and envelopes as well as in albums, but so far I hadn’t discovered anything pertaining to Gilbert Wexley, which was a relief.

  (Somehow, I was reluctant to examine Mom’s things. I still had a sour taste in my mouth, recalling how pitiless Clare had been rummaging through Dad’s desk drawers as if looking for evidence against him which she’d finally found in the calendars.)

  When Wexley acquired my e-mail address he began to send me lengthy rambling messages about the memorial service and the citizenship award and what a “gaping hole” there was now in the world. I replied to the first of these messages in my staccato e-mail style—Thanks for your interest in my mother, I can’t be involved in your plans but I won’t interfere—but when the messages kept coming in a flood, I stopped reading them.

  Messages Wexley left on my phone voice mail, I erased without listening to.

  By late summer, things began to get strange.

  Uninvited, Wexley began to show up at the house. Dared to ring the doorbell. I happened to know from something Mom had said to Wexley at the Mother’s Day dinner that he’d never stepped into our house before that evening, and maybe I’m a hostile personality, maybe my sporadic efforts to be more like my mother are just spurts of optimistic zeal, but I would not open the door to Gilbert Wexley whom I distrusted, no matter how Mom might plead for me to behave graciously. As Wexley stood at the front door daring to ring the bell a second time and adjusting his hair/toupee I crept up to yell at him through a screened window to please go away, I had a visitor and could not be disturbed. I saw the abashed man retreat to his car parked in the street where he sat as if stunned, or waiting, now I was truly in a fury and contemplated dialing 911 to report a stalker except there appeared after a few minutes the familiar Mt. Ephraim Police cruiser, the sight of which must have frightened Wexley for he hurriedly drove away.

  More e-mail. More phone messages. Another unannounced visit, this time in the early evening of a day when I’d been feeling more mellow, not so prickly and mean, and there came Gilbert Wexley bravely up the front walk to ring the doorbell another time, carrying a briefcase to signal this was business, so I invited him inside explaining that I had only a few minutes to talk, and Wexley clutched at my hands avid-eyed, smelling of whiskey, speaking in a rapid incoherent flood of words that had only intermittently to do with the memorial service but mostly to do with how much Wexley missed my mother, how he’d grown to depend upon her, he feared he’d sometimes taken her for granted, such a good kind gentle decent generous woman, he feared possibly he’d even hurt her feelings, not intentionally of course but possibly he had, he was eager to see me, maybe he could take me to dinner, the Fayetteville Inn was a favorite of his, so much for us to talk about, he was “very impressed” with me, what he knew of “Nicole Eaton” and the few times he’d seen me, my articles in the Beacon, how smart and talented I was, and how attractive: “You have Gwen’s specialness, Nicole, especially when you smile. You should smile more often!”

  This was a cue. I was on my feet almost literally pushing Wexley out the door. Though he had something in the briefcase to show me, I wasn’t interested. Explaining that my man friend from Chautauqua Falls was due to arrive in ten minutes, he was the possessive type known to take down the license plate numbers of suspicious cars he saw parked in front of my house so that he could ask a state trooper friend to run them through the computer and find out where the owners of the cars live…

  Wexley fled. Except for a few e-mails and phone messages he never bothered me again.

  Clare: guess who’s stalking Mom. I mean, me. Pause. Only if you call me, Clare, will I reveal his name.

  The incident was too delicious to keep to myself. Like bait I tossed it out knowing that, this time, Clare would have to give in to curiosity and call me and so she did, with a pretense of only just casual, even grudging interest: “All right, Nikki, I give in. Who?”

  “Guess.”

  A pause. Almost, I could hear Clare’s forehead crinkle.

  “Gilbert Wexley.”

  “Oh! How’d you know?”

  I sounded like a balloon,
rapidly deflating.

  Clare laughed, in that thin-hissing-through-the-nose way of our father’s, when Mom had said something naive. “He’s been bothering me, too. But Rob dealt with him.”

  Hanging up, then. Quickly.

  secret

  Pulses are beating in my eyes. Mom? Mom? I am calling. At first I am not certain of my age: am I a little girl, or am I older? I am stumbling through the rooms of the house. I am pushing open the door to the garage. Oh! I am beginning to be impatient for what is this, hide-and-seek? Why is Mom hiding from me? A strange smell assails my nostrils. I am reluctant to switch on the light. I think that I can see in the darkness, I have no need of the light. I am annoyed, to have to switch on the light. For I can’t find the damned switch, my fingers grope in the dark. Outside it was brightly sunny, inside the garage it’s night. My mouth turns downward with the exasperated thought I don’t have time for games, for God’s sake.

  Mom is hiding from me, Mom is lying on the concrete garage floor in her pretty blue clothes. This is ridiculous, I am thinking, this is going too far! I am angry with Mom, lying in a pool of something dark and oily, with a sickening odor. She is lying with her face turned to me. She is lying with her arm stretched toward me. She is lying with her eyes open and pleading. Nikki help me! Nikki don’t leave me! At once I begin to cry. I am not angry now, I am very frightened. Clumsily I kneel beside Mom. Her skin is so cold! Just to touch her is to feel that cold go through me, into the marrow of my bones. I am trying to lift Mom but she has become heavy. My arms are too weak. If I could lift her! If I could help her to her feet. But I am not strong enough. I am not brave enough. I am helpless. For it seems that I am a little girl after all. I am crying so hard, I am a little girl who has disappointed her mother. It will never be made right between us. I leave my mother in the garage on the dirty concrete floor, I abandon my mother to strangers.

  This is my secret, I am revealing now to you.

  the moth

  Waking in the night. I’d heard a sound. As of something dropped, or falling. In another part of the house. The garage.

  The garage! I had not entered the garage for a long time.

  I knew: the overhead garage door was locked—“secured,” as the police say. The door to the kitchen was locked. Each door of the house, each window (including basement windows) was locked. In several rooms low-voltage lightbulbs were on. In the kitchen, the bulb above the stove was on. Close beside my bed in my old girlhood room was a telephone, and my cell phone was nearby. I must have been sleeping twisted in damp bedclothes. I was relieved that I’d been sleeping alone, not beside Wally Szalla. For lately when Wally and I slept together, in Chautauqua Falls, we were not so comfortable as we’d been, it is more practical to sleep alone if you’re prone to insomnia or nightmares.

  In fact I’d been sleeping with Smoky cradled in the crook of my left arm but Smoky had jumped down from the bed, I must have frightened him away. I kicked off the damp sheets. I told myself it was nothing. It was a dream. I knew perfectly well that it was a dream yet still my heart beat like an angry fist. I fumbled to switch on the light: 3:10 A.M. I’d been awake and reading in bed, only an hour before. As soon as the light came on, moths began to throw themselves against the window screen a few inches away.

  Moths! The largest was the size of a hummingbird, beautifully marked with powdery-gray wings throwing itself against the screen.

  On the floor beside my bed, another excellent reason not to have a two-legged bed companion, I kept a claw hammer. For protection. This I picked up now, to take with me. My hand was badly trembling but the weight of the claw hammer helped. In the hall, there was Smoky with pricked-up ears staring at me. In the switched-on light, tawny cat-eyes regarded me warily. As I advanced, Smoky retreated. I spoke to him to placate him but he didn’t trust me: disheveled, smelling of my body, gripping a claw hammer.

  Joking, “What’s not to trust? Come on.”

  Joking with a cat. Was Nikki her old crazy self, or what.

  In the kitchen, though I wanted to laugh, I stood very still. I intended to approach the door to the garage and I intended to open it if only to assure myself that there was no one, there was nothing, inside, for the garage was fully “secured” and I knew this. Yet I did not approach the door, still less did I unlock and open the door. I stood without moving for several minutes listening to the silence in the garage. I told myself, “No one. Nothing.” My hand gripping the claw hammer still trembled. My mouth was dry as old newspaper baked and yellowed by the sun. It was consoling, the lightbulb above the stove was burning. Though it was only thirty watts, yet my father would have disapproved. He’d been impatient with weakness, “acting silly.” In a family of three females, he’d often been impatient.

  I opened the drawer where Mom had kept cards. Plumbers, carpenters, lawn men, electricians. “Sonny” Danto the Scourge of the Bugs would be there. And the Mt. Ephraim detective whose name I kept forgetting. Call me. Day or night. If you need me. Or just to talk. I found Strabane’s card, went to the phone and dialed the number and heard the phone ring once, twice, a third time before quickly hanging up. “Crazy! What are you doing!”

  I was weak with relief, like one who has narrowly escaped a terrible danger.

  By this time it was 3:15 A.M. The sun would rise at about 5:30 A.M. The new day would begin, that would have nothing to do with the old for no trace of the old would remain.

  getting along

  Three days later he appeared.

  “Ms. Eaton?—Nicole? Need some help?”

  I was clearing out the garage. For months I’d avoided the garage. But that morning I’d forced myself to enter the garage. The single place I hadn’t been able to enter since moving into Mom’s house: the garage.

  Garage!—garage! beating in my head like deranged rock music.

  I glanced up shading my eyes. A man? A man in dark glasses, swarthy-skinned, with weird bristly quill-hair at the crest of his head? A man approaching me in the driveway, with an urgent smile?

  I was stunned to see Strabane.

  But you can’t know that I called you, the call didn’t go through!

  It was a balmy September day. I was dragging a clumsy lawn chair-recliner out of the garage, its canvas slats so rotted and cobweb-festooned they looked like cheap lace. Already at the curb awaiting Saturday morning pickup were boxes of household trash, rusted garden tools, a cracked birdbath, grimy lamp shades.

  Strabane took the bulky chair-recliner from me and carried it to the curb with no more effort than if it had been made of plastic. He was a stocky-shouldered man, flushed with self-consciousness, edgy and excited. I wanted to run back into the house and shut the door against him, I wasn’t ready for this.

  “What else you got for me, ma’am? Those suitcases?”

  Strabane grinned, flexing his fingers. In his unease he was trying to be funny. Playing the role of, what?—a handyman, trashman?

  I tried to laugh. Well, it was funny!

  Trying not to show the surprise and fury I felt. Tears of indignation welling in my eyes. But there was Mom’s sensible advice: be gracious to all visitors.

  I had dragged the “matched leather” suitcases out of a shadowy corner of the garage and into the sunlight. There were five of these including an overnight bag of my mother’s she’d tried to press upon Clare first, then me, when we’d gone away to college. The suitcases were scuffed and covered in cobwebs but still handsome, impressive. What Dad called “high-quality.” I had been staring at the tarnished brass initials GAE, JAE. Trying to imagine my parents as newlyweds, young and deeply in love and not yet parents, thrilled with such a luxury gift that must have seemed to promise travel, a romantic future.

  Exactly when the matched luggage had been shifted from a closet to the musty garage, I don’t know. It was too sad to contemplate.

  I’d been thinking that maybe I shouldn’t throw out my parents’ luggage? Maybe not this morning.

  But there was my unexpected visitor R
oss Strabane, grimacing as he managed remarkably to grip the handles of all five suitcases simultaneously, even bending his knees in the way of a competitive weight lifter. For a man of moderate height he had big hands. The deftness of his movements, a swaggering sort of confidence in his strength, were fascinating to observe. I didn’t know whether I admired such strength, or scorned it as show-offy. But I knew that I couldn’t have lifted more than two of the large suitcases, in both hands.

  Strabane hesitated, seeing something in my face. “No? These don’t go?”

  “I…I think so. Yes.”

  “This is real leather, I guess? Nice.”

  Strabane stooped to smell the leather. After years in the garage the russet-red leather still exuded a faint, luxuriant aroma.

  “They were wedding presents to my parents, from my dad’s parents. See: ‘GAE, JAE.’ Their initials.” Suddenly I heard myself telling Strabane about my parents, in a halting voice that sounded unused, scratchy. As if I’d been saving up such a family tale for the first person who came along, out of sheer loneliness. “Mom would have loved to travel more than they did, but Dad was, well…He always felt he needed to ‘stay close to home’ because he had a responsible ‘executive’ position at Beechum Paper Products and he didn’t trust ‘subordinates.’ They’d gone to Key West on their honeymoon and every winter there was the vague idea of going back, Dad would sort of promise Mom but then something would come up, and they never got there. Actually it was sort of a joke in the family. Mom had wanted to go to Europe, too, in fact I’d been planning to take her this summer…” Was this true? I was stunned at what I was saying, so impulsively. And to a stranger, a police detective who’d led the investigation into my mother’s death.

  Strabane was listening sympathetically. He seemed interested in whatever I was saying. I felt uneasy, not able to see his eyes behind the dark hyper-reflective lenses of his glasses, in which my own miniature distorted face was reflected as in a cartoon. “Anyway, the farthest we went as a family was usually just Star Lake in the Adirondacks where my dad’s family had a cottage and then sometimes we’d come back a day or two early, Dad got so restless.”