Missing Mom: A Novel

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Following Alyce’s medical problems, the subject shifted abruptly to the trial. I was astonished to learn that Alyce regularly called the Chautauqua County district attorney’s office, the Mt. Ephraim police, several local newspapers and TV stations, for any news—“They all know me by now. ‘Miss Proxmire,’ they say, barely managing to be civil, ‘we will contact you if there is any new development in the Eaton case.’” Alyce laughed scornfully, to show she wasn’t taken in by such lame assurances. “At least the trial seems to be set now: January twenty-second. That awful defense lawyer must have run out of ‘motions.’ Imagine, demanding that the trial be held somewhere else, as if jurors in Chautauqua County where Gwen was known and loved couldn’t be ‘impartial.’ If I could be on the jury, I would be ‘impartial’—oh, yes.” Alyce was breathing hoarsely, through her mouth. Her sparrow-eyes were fixed fiercely on me. “To think that that man, that terrible man, the one who hurt Gwen I mean, all this while, Nikki, that monster has been living, breathing, eating and watching TV all day, while—”

  “Alyce. We don’t have to discuss the trial right now.”

  Here was a shaky moment. This woman in my house for less than ten minutes and it felt like ten hours. I had to fight an impulse to push past her and escape.

  Alyce sniffed indignantly: “—well! It’s just outrageous. I can’t wait for the trial to be over and justice to be done.”

  I’d set the tea things onto a cleared section of the dining room table. Mom’s cheery orange glazed-pumpkin teapot and matching mugs, which she’d made in one of her crafts classes, and Mom’s selection of herbal teas in shiny packets: Peppermint, Chamomile, Lemon Mist, Black Cherry Berry, Tangerine Orange, Country Peach Passion, Red Zinger, Raspberry Zinger, Cranberry Apple Zinger, Sleepytime. Alyce could be relied upon to choose the most boring of teas (Chamomile) but I found deeply consoling the array of samples from Mom’s cupboard, their names like poetry.

  That morning I’d baked bread especially for Alyce, with her dietary restrictions, from a recipe of Mom’s invention titled “Alyce’s Bread.” Hardly my favorite of Mom’s recipes, this was high-fibre but saltless and sugarless wheat germ carrot bread. Alyce blinked and smiled to see it murmuring, “Ohhhh Nikki! You shouldn’t have,” but was slow to eat until finally I asked, “Isn’t this ‘your’ bread, Alyce? Maybe I didn’t make it right…”

  Oh yes! Quickly Alyce assured me, I’d made it right.

  “…so thoughtful, your dear mother. Always so considerate of her friends. When Gwen first baked this bread for me, nine years ago, I’d been put by my doctor on a salt-free diet, and I try to avoid sugar, you know, but then a few years ago I was allowed off the diet, and somehow I didn’t have the heart to tell Gwen, by that time she seemed so, well—devoted to baking ‘Alyce’s Bread’ for me. It was like your father giving Gwen the identical talcum powder for her birthday every year, that pretty blue box with the silver tassels—‘Forget-Me-Not.’ Why, Gwen passed along to me enough ‘Forget-Me-Not’ talcum to last the rest of my life! But she could never tell Jon, she had a dread of hurting anyone’s feelings. When Gwen said, ‘Alyce, here is “Alyce’s Bread.” Special order!’ she seemed so happy, and in a way it made me happy, too. Because no one else likes this bread, really it hasn’t much taste except a kind of sawdust-carrot taste, so flat. But ‘Alyce’s Bread’ became, I guess you could say, a kind of…custom.”

  All this while Alyce was chewing and swallowing small chunks of bread with a look of stoic determination, smiling at me.

  Oh, fine. Bread no one liked, not even Alyce Proxmire, I’d wasted a morning on!

  Sometimes before going to bed, on those nights when Wally Szalla wasn’t coming over, I’d have a few drinks and lapse into a fantasy of doing good deeds as Mom had done, not out of a sense of duty but out of the bubbly goodness of my heart, seeing more of Alyce Proxmire, and more of Aunt Tabitha and other relatives, lonely women from Mom’s church, neighbors…I could trade in my Saab for a minivan to drive these women to luncheons, matinees, museums and flower shows, swim classes at the YM-YWCA…

  “Alyce, do you like to swim?”

  “Swim! Gwen was forever trying to talk me into joining her at the Y!” Alyce shook her head as if she’d narrowly escaped being seduced by some wild whim of my mother’s. “I tried to tell Gwen, chlorine can’t really kill all those microorganisms, absolutely not. As for swimming itself, you get wet, you start to shiver, you catch cold and next you know you have bronchitis, then pneumonia. You get wet, and then you need to shower to wash the wetness off, and then you need to get dry. And next thing you know…”

  Well, I’d tried. Even Mom would have to acknowledge my good intentions.

  We turned our attention to Mom’s photo albums. This was really why Alyce had come over, not to visit with me. With childish eagerness she sought photos of Gwen in which she herself appeared, of which there were a surprising number. Though I was sure that Mom had made copies of these for Alyce, Mom was always making copies of photos for friends, Alyce reacted as if she’d never seen most of them before. “Oh, Nikki, may I borrow this? I will have a copy made and return it, I promise.”

  Alyce was most fascinated by the oldest photos, which were likely to be creased and wrinkled. How young Gwen was! How young Alyce was! These were Kodak snapshots of the 1960s, my mother and her best-friend-Alyce hardly more than girls, Gwen dimpled-smiling and Alyce shyly-smiling for the camera. Alyce was taller than Gwen, Gwen was prettier and more compact than Alyce, the two looked nothing alike and yet, arms around each other’s waists, there was something sisterly about them.

  I felt a stab of envy. Clare and I had never liked each other, really. I was sure we’d never posed like this, so naturally leaning into each other.

  Alyce’s hand trembled with excitement, passing me another snapshot of her and Gwen, taken outdoors. Here was Gwen in a summer dress captured in the midst of laughter, half-turned to her friend Alyce in something shapeless and dun-colored but sporty, and in Alyce’s arms was what appeared to be a baby in pink polka dots, kicking her feet in little white booties. Gwen had fluffy blond hair and Alyce was looking startled and almost-pretty with reddened lips and hair trimmed short in a pixie-cut. The date on the back of the snapshot was June 1974.

  Alyce whispered: “That’s you, Nikki! I mean…us.”

  Strange: middle-aged Alyce Proxmire in November 2004 gazing wistfully at her younger self of June 1974, holding a baby in her arms; and that baby, now an adult, regarding both Alyces with what you’d have to describe as mixed emotions.

  Somehow, I was touched. I hadn’t ever known that “Auntie Alyce” had held either Clare or me.

  “…loved babies, you know. Oh, she wanted more than just two.”

  Seeing that I looked doubtful, Alyce said emphatically, “She did. Even before she was married, she’d talk that way. ‘My parents had just me. It was like they were worried about running out of space, or money, or love. Like they worried there wouldn’t be enough to go around.’” Alyce’s laugh was a thin sad echo of my mother’s more mirthful laugh. “When she was just a girl, in high school, Gwen was hoping to have four, five, even six children. All the Kovachs had big families except for hers, I think that was why. In St. Joseph’s parish where they went to church, all the families were large. Only Gwen’s family was just her and her mother and father, and then her mother died, and there was just Gwen and her father, but Mr. Kovach worked for the New York Central Railroad so he was gone a lot, and Gwen stayed with relatives, all the time I knew her. After she had Clare and you, and you were going to school, she was all dreamy-like talking of how she’d like more babies, but it wasn’t realistic, the Eatons were not the Kovachs, it wasn’t the Eaton way to have big families. Once Gwen confided in me, Jon had been reluctant about having children, actually. ‘He’d thought he would be the baby of the family, and one of him was enough,’ Gwen made a joke of it, that was Gwen’s way, to joke about things that were serious to her. Why, Gwen once told me she’d had to pretend h
er pregnancies were ‘accidental’ and ‘meant to be’—not anything she’d wanted. Later, when you and Clare were teenagers, she got it in her head that she and Jon could adopt a baby, but Jon wouldn’t hear of it of course—as if Jon Eaton would want to bring up some strangers’ crying baby!” Alyce spoke in a girlish rush of words, biting her lower lip. “Poor Gwen. I tried to explain to her, why Jon felt the way he did, it made sense to me. But Gwen was such a dreamer. Over and over she’d say, ‘When the girls grow up and leave, what will I do, Alyce? They can’t wait to get away.’ Gwen was desperate to be needed, you see. She couldn’t respect herself if she wasn’t needed.”

  I was stunned hearing this. For a moment I couldn’t speak.

  Can’t wait to get away. This was not true!

  “Alyce, Mom never said anything like that to me. Never.”

  Alyce said primly, swiping at her nose, “Well, Nikki. Naturally Gwen didn’t say such things to you, or to Clare. Or to Jon. These are things she only confided to me.”

  “It isn’t true, Clare and I couldn’t wait to get away…”

  Alyce pursed her lips, not wishing to reply. I tried to remain calm.

  “Mom was happy with just Clare and me. She was a very happy person. Of course she respected herself! Everyone knows this.”

  I think this was so. I wasn’t sure.

  (Those years, adolescence and beyond, when I’d been scornful of Mt. Ephraim and Deer Creek Acres: dinky look-alike ranch houses, silly suburban lawns and the Moms and Dads who came with them like matched doll sets.)

  (…when I was negligent about calling home, frankly bored with Eaton family life, “disappeared” with boyfriends/men without always telling Mom where I was going…)

  Alyce said, with a quick smile, “Oh! Here is ‘Feather’ in her cheerleader jumper. Isn’t she sweet!” As if wishing to change the subject Alyce showed me several photos of Gwen taken at Mt. Ephraim High School in the mid-1960s, Gwen Kovach as the cutest American-girl cheerleader you could imagine: buoyant blond hair, dazzling smile, trim curvy little size-two body in a maroon jumper and long-sleeved white cotton blouse. In one of the photos, Gwen was leaping with arms widespread as a soaring bird’s, head flung back and frozen in an ecstatic smile. We’d teased Mom plenty about these long-ago photos. I’d seen them many times of course but never looked at them, exactly, not wanting my scorn for high school jocks/cheerleaders/“popular” personalities to affect my feelings for my mother.

  Alyce continued to look through the photos, which I’d sorted into decades. Exclaiming, smiling, wiping at her eyes. I was still upset and wary of the woman. She is jealous of Gwen’s daughters. She wants Gwen for herself. Casually Alyce began to recount how she’d first met Gwen Kovach, in eighth grade: the “pretty little doll-faced girl” who’d been the only child in Mt. Ephraim Junior High to befriend her. (Was this true? I doubted it. But no one was likely to budge Alyce Proxmire from her sweetly bitter memories.)

  “‘Light as a feather—that’s what I want my soul to be. Blown in the wind, and no one could catch it.’” Alyce spoke with sudden lyricism, sparrow-eyes glistening at me. “Gwen had the strangest, most magical way of speaking, all dreamy-like, so you wanted to believe she must be right. In some way, somehow.”

  I was wondering suddenly if Alyce had ever stepped inside the house on Spalding Street. The run-down woodframe house where Gwen Kovach had lived as a child. Past which repeatedly she’d driven, as an adult.

  Damned if I would ask her, though! I would not.

  It was then that Alyce said, casually, as if her memory had been roused by one of the photos, “Before she met your father, when she was sixteen, Gwen was in love with a boy. It happened very suddenly with Gwen, like a sickness.” Alyce paused, considering her words. “He’d graduated from the Catholic school De Sales. They met in the summer at Wolf’s Head Lake where Gwen was a waitress. I never trusted him, the way he smirked. Why, he wouldn’t even look at me, Gwen introduced us just once and he hardly saw me, so rude. Gwen insisted he didn’t smirk, ‘it’s just Brendan’s way of smiling,’ but I knew better. He was eighteen, and seemed much older than we were. He’d be going to St. Bonaventure in the fall. There was some high-ranking priest in his family, a bishop in Albany. His mother wanted him to be a priest, she thought high school cheerleaders were ‘immoral’ and ‘common’ and she didn’t approve of Gwen, not that she ever met Gwen. Ohhh, it was an emotional time! It was a very upsetting time, for Gwen but also for me, as Gwen’s closest friend.” Alyce had been speaking in a rush of words, all breathy innocence like a girl confiding in another girl behind the back of a mutual friend. I felt that faint panicky sensation I’d felt with Aunt Tabitha. Don’t ask! You don’t want to hear more.

  Yet I heard myself say, encouragingly, “You were girls together, you and Mom. Like sisters.”

  “We were! Yet we weren’t equals. Gwen was ‘Feather’ Kovach already in eighth grade, and all through high school boys looked at her as they’d never look at me. Though she behaved younger, sometimes very young, Gwen was actually older than me in her heart—because her mother had died, she ‘boarded’ with Kovach relatives and didn’t have a room of her own exactly. Her father worked for the railroad and was away from Mt. Ephraim a lot, especially after her mother died. Gwen was only eleven then. I didn’t know her then. We moved to Mt. Ephraim two years later. Gwen never talked much about her mother, you couldn’t ask her certain things. She’d just change the subject, or hum! What I’d heard was that Mrs. Kovach had had some terrible wasting-away nerve disease, or cancer, she’d gotten weaker and weaker and died at home and when Gwen came home from school that day they wouldn’t let her see her mother, she was never allowed to see her mother again. But she wouldn’t talk much about it, and I wasn’t one to ask.”

  Now I did ask about the house on Spalding Street: “You were never inside it, Alyce? I guess?”

  “Ohhh, that house! Never.” Alyce shuddered, as if I’d suggested something obscene. “That was where her mother died, Gwen would never go near it. Gwen would never walk on Spalding Street. She’d go way out of her way not even to cross Spalding on Van Buren, which was where one of her aunts lived. It was just something you didn’t talk about and anyway, with ‘Feather,’ there was always so much to talk about, that was happy.” Alyce paused to chew sawdust-carrot bread with a faint, sad smile. “That was why Gwen wanted to be light as a feather, I think. So she wouldn’t take up space in her relatives’ houses where she felt she didn’t belong.”

  Was that it! I didn’t want to think so.

  “…I always thought that people called Mom ‘Feather’ because she was so lighthearted, and happy. Because…”

  “Don’t be silly, Nikki. Most people called her ‘Feather’ because they’d heard other people call her ‘Feather.’ There was no more logic to it than that.” Alyce paused, grimly breaking off another piece of bread. She’d discovered, as I had, that there was just perceptibly more flavor in the crust, and was concentrating on nibbling crusts in her hungry-rabbit way. “I never called Gwen ‘Feather,’ not for a moment. Between Gwen and me, it would not have been right.”

  I’d been waiting for the subject to revert to mysterious Brendan, the boy Mom had loved: what had happened to him?

  Alyce said evasively, “Oh, nothing ‘happened’ to him. He just went away to college. I think he became a priest. His last name was Dorsey, the family lived out on the Ridge Road. They weren’t rich—nobody in Mt. Ephraim is ‘rich’—but Brendan’s father had a car dealership, so the family could put on airs. And there was the uncle, or whoever it was, ‘Bishop Dorsey’ you’d hear of. Lots of other boys had asked Gwen out, she had more boyfriends than she could count, but none of them were serious, until Brendan. He was handsome, if you like that type. A momma’s boy, is what I thought. That smirk of his, and the way he’d be always running his hands through his hair, that was wavy and silvery-blond. He was tall, too. Gwen was always attracted to tall boys. ‘He has such good manners. He’s so nice’—
Gwen was always saying. But he wasn’t so nice to Gwen, after a while.”

  Alyce paused, as if she’d said too much.

  “How wasn’t Brendan ‘so nice’ to Mom? You can tell me.”

  Alyce said, sighing, “Oh, at first he was. He took her to movies, and swimming, and summer concerts at Lake Ontario. He had some kind of fancy convertible, he loved to show off driving it. And Gwen loved that car, too. Brendan was a singer, almost good enough to be a professional, people said. He’d sung tenor in the De Sales choir. But, you know, boys can be ‘nice’ and then, when they get what they want…” Alyce’s mouth was downturned as a fish’s. You’d have thought from her profound expression that no one had ever uttered this insight, or these words, before. “Well. There was this Youth Retreat at Star Lake, that the church I belonged to had every year in the fall, a weekend at a campground, it was mostly a Bible study retreat and I’d been going through some phase of ‘doubting’ God, and being kind of emotional about it, and all this I’d shared with Gwen, I was truly afraid that Jesus had forsaken me, or didn’t even exist, now it all seems exaggerated and silly but I’d cried a lot at the time, and Gwen was always so sympathetic. She’d never have tried to interrupt and argue like my parents. Gwen was the only person I knew who believed in God but didn’t belong to any church and never argued about religion, in any way. Most of the Kovachs were Catholic except for Gwen and her father but Gwen never talked about that religion, ever. When I was a girl, I was very religious. I invited Gwen to come to church with me sometimes and she would, but that was all. She never converted like the minister was hoping she would. At the Youth Retreat at Star Lake, we were all at an evening prayer service except for Gwen. I didn’t know where Gwen had gone to, I looked for her and couldn’t find her and a panic came over me she’d run away with Brendan Dorsey somehow, but later that night I found her in the top bunk bed in our cabin shivering under a blanket, where she’d been kind of hiding, and she told me she’d been afraid for the past forty-three days, thinking she was pregnant, but that night ‘It all came out in blood’ she told me. I was so shocked! Poor Gwen was white as chalk. She couldn’t stop shivering. I gave her my blanket, and tried to warm her by holding her hands, and I got her to pray with me, and that helped, some. ‘God has spared you, Gwen. This is all for the good,’ I told her. Because by this time Brendan Dorsey was gone away to St. Bonaventure, he’d just forgotten her it seemed. ‘It all came out in blood, Alyce,’ Gwen said. She’d had cramps, and went to use the bathroom, and if she’d been pregnant it ended in that way, and nobody had to know. Gwen took it hard and was broken up for a long time, she could hide it from other people, but I knew. She never told anybody but me, of course. She’d never have told him.” Alyce spoke scornfully. “I vowed, right there at Star Lake that night, I would never fall in love with any boy. A ‘nice’ one especially. And so I never did.” Alyce spoke with a spiteful sort of pride, loudly blowing her nose.