Missing Mom (29 page)

I was saying, excited: “Clare promised to help me clear out the garage but you don’t see her here, do you! She wants to sell the house but she can’t force herself to come back. This matter of leaving garage doors open permanently, my dad thought it was a moral failing in homeowners. Garages filling up with junk and cars parked outside. ‘People don’t respect privacy any longer not even their own.’ Dad would drive us around the subdivision pointing out lawns, houses, garages that were ‘well kept’ and those that were ‘disgraceful.’ He judged by appearances, the outsides of things, because after all that’s what people see. ‘A garage door open to the street is like a wall missing from someone’s house so you can see inside where they’re sitting around in pajamas or worse yet naked.’ The way Dad said ‘naked’ was funny as a laugh line on
Saturday Night Live
.”

The way I’d been speaking, rapidly and meant-to-amuse, was a definite signal, my visitor should leave. I was becoming overly excited, upset. My skin felt feverish and the nerve in my eyelid was hopping. Strabane edged closer to me, regarding me with worried eyes. He’d meant to console me, somehow. He hadn’t meant to antagonize me.

He said: “I’ve got part of the day off. I’m here offering to help you. If you want help. I was hoping I’d hear from you.”

“Well, you didn’t hear from me. You won’t hear from me. I don’t need you.”

Through much of this edgy exchange, Strabane had been glancing past me into the garage. It was a tic-like gesture, he couldn’t help himself. Thinking how he’d been summoned to this garage, that evening in May. He’d been the chief detective at a “crime scene” in that garage. Not four months ago but it seemed like four years. The bright-lit interior of the utterly ordinary suburban garage where my mother had been struck down, fallen to the concrete floor. A woman’s small broken body on that dirty floor, in torn and blood-soaked clothing. I’d wanted to ask if the professional cop had noticed how carefully sewn the blue linen jacket was, with its pale-blue silk lining. How beautiful the floral-print blouse.

Women’s things, women’s bodies. Women’s lives of so little consequence, finally.

Strabane was watching me, curious. He was one who’d made a profession out of decoding secret thoughts.

I said, “I appreciate your help, Detective. But—”

“‘Detective’ is my rank. ‘Strabane’ is my name.”

“Yes, I know. Mr. Strabane—”

“People don’t call me ‘Ross,’ my first name. Somehow, it’s always been, even in middle school, ‘Strabane.’ Weird, eh?”

I had no reply to this. Something strange and tight was happening to the lower part of my face.

“—I don’t need you, ‘Strabane.’ It’s too much effort now.”

“What is?”

Becoming involved. Inviting you inside the house. Inviting you inside my life. Or, just offering you coffee, banana nut bread baked from Mom’s
Breadcraft
book.

Inviting you to wash your hands, soiled on my account.

“There’s a man, we’re planning to be married. He…”

Afterward I would realize, Strabane knew about Wally Szalla. For sure, Strabane knew about Wally Szalla.

He’d been “investigating” our Eaton lives. I knew this. Though exactly how much he knew I didn’t care to imagine, except I resented this, I resented this stranger knowing anything about me.

“Right, Nicole. Got it!”

He’d replaced the dark glasses. Immediately he looked just slightly sinister, sexy. The lenses were flat and hyper-shiny and I couldn’t see his eyes any longer and Jesus, what a relief. I hoped I would never see those eyes again.

Still, he didn’t leave. You’d think
Good, fine, this is over, you’ve got it, goodbye
. He was saying, “Soooo. Well…If, y’know, you need me, Nicole, give me a call, O.K.? Any time it comes over you, like you want to talk?”

His hand moved toward a pocket, until he remembered he’d already given me one of his cards. At least twice.

I thanked him, I said yes. I wasn’t even looking at him now.

Not wanting this man to take away the wrong impression of me. That I was attracted to him though I couldn’t stand him. That I wanted him, not to go away but to come closer, so that I could shove him away with both my hands, shut into fists.

Squatting in the garage tugging at boxes of aged, warped records Mom had packed away after, sometime in the early 1990s, Dad had “given in” (his expression, uttered with philosophical disgust) and finally purchased a cassette-CD player like the majority of his fellow Americans. Oh, what to do with these records! I understood Mom’s predicament.

How could I dispose of these warped classics in their grimy yet still colorful covers,
Highlights from Bizet’s “Carmen,” Boston Pops Orchestra at Tanglewood Summer 1981, West Side Story, The Sound of Music?
I brushed away cobwebs, and reboxed them. I worked until my knees throbbed with pain, from squatting. I had totally forgotten my visitor. I was not going to think about my visitor. Instead I was thinking
See, I am getting along
.
This is proof
.
If you require proof. I am not Nikki now exactly but I am coping in a way Nikkie could not cope
.
I have opened the garage at last
.
Proof that I am unafraid of the garage is, I have opened the garage at last
.
From now on, I will be parking my car in the garage
.
I will lower the garage door
.
None of you will know by driving past when I am home, and when not
.

It was so, I’d begun experimenting with recipes from Mom’s much-thumbed flour-smeared
Breadcraft
book.

I wasn’t a natural baker. Never much of a cook. Maybe I suffered from ADD like half the U.S. population. Lacking in patience, and patience is a kind of maturity.

In the kitchen, at the bread board, kneading dough in the way Mom had tried to teach me, I felt peaceful, and I was happy. For—almost!—I could see Mom in the corner of my eye. Almost!—I could hear Mom encouraging me.

Kneading is easy, Nikki!

Flour your hands. Add flour to the board until the dough stops sticking. Good!

Don’t wrestle the dough! Just push pull roll the dough, push pull roll the dough, that’s right, sweetie, find your rhythm, no need to hurry, use your instinct, take your time, kneading is happiness, when you knead bread you enter a zone of happiness, when you observe bread rising it’s happiness, when you smell bread baking it’s happiness, when you cool bread (always on a wire rack, honey) it’s happiness, when you share bread with others it’s happiness and it is happiness you deserve, Nikki, not sorrow.

Salt tears dripped from my eyes sometimes, into the sinewy bread dough. If I couldn’t wipe them away fast enough leaving flour-smears on my face.

Miracle Bread. Whole Wheat. Cracked Wheat. Twelve Grain.

While the bread was baking I expected the worst to emerge from the oven and sometimes I was right and sometimes I was what people describe as pleasantly surprised. When I messed up, I tried not to despair but just avoided the kitchen for a day. And when I returned, there was Mom awaiting me in the oversized white apron we’d given her inscribed
MASTER BAKER
, that tied at the waist and around the neck.

Bread baking is fun, Nikki! Not like life that gets too serious sometimes.

Sourdough. Buttermilk. Oatmeal/bran. Raisin/yogurt/twelve grain. Banana nut.

These were Mom’s recipes, I baked. The familiar smell of Mom’s bread-baking filled the house. If I shut my eyes as in the sweetest dream I could see myself running up the driveway from having gotten off the school bus, pushing open the kitchen door to a smell of bread baking that meant that my mother was home and calling out
Hey Mom I’m home!

I baked. I messed up but I baked. I became exasperated, I lost my temper and dumped rock-hard bread into the trash but I baked. I quarreled with my married-man-lover but I baked. I regretted not having invited the bristly-quill-haired detective into my kitchen, to give him a taste of Mom’s banana nut bread that had turned out pretty damned good, but I didn’t call him; I baked. Thinking
You don’t need more excitement in your life right now, you need less
.

I baked.

Quarreling with Wally Szalla was a prologue to making-up with Wally Szalla which was always worth it. I think.

For Wally, I baked sourdough. Something simple, for a man who claimed to like things simple. “Nikki, this is
good
.” A look of surprise. “You baked this, Nikki?
You
?” For my thirty-second birthday in early October, Wally took me for a romantic weekend at the Hotel Chateaugay on the St. Lawrence River, north of Massena at the Quebec border. He gave me a bracelet watch of white gold inscribed on the back
to N, love W
that was the most beautiful jewelry I’d ever been given, and made me cry.

In Wally’s fleshy arms (the man was muscled, but you had to squeeze to find it) in an uncomfortable antique bed high as an operating table I cried. As Wally made love to me, I cried. Not asking why I cried as if, in Wally Szalla’s experience, a naked woman crying in his arms was to be expected.

This was the romantic weekend away from Mt. Ephraim and Chautauqua Falls both, when Wally meant to speak seriously to me about our future. But somehow in the mist of champagne, wine, vodka and brandies, and Nikki’s tears, the future was displaced.

This man wants me to adore him. Then he won’t need to adore me.

I returned home to Mt. Ephraim, thirty-two years old.

I baked.

Your life will begin again. After the trial.

In Mom’s sewing room was her Chautauqua Valley Shelter Animals calendar. When I took it over, I was surprised to discover that it was an eighteen-month calendar, from January 2004 through to June 2005. So, as the date of the trial kept being postponed, into the so-called New Year, I could keep rescheduling: TRIAL.

Mom’s calendar! Eighteen color photos of orphaned, abandoned, neglected and abused animals who’d been taken into the local ASPCA-affiliated shelter, prior to being adopted into “good homes.” These were dogs, cats, horses, even a goat, a Vietnamese potbellied pig, and a glorious white cockatoo.

I’d taken over Mom’s calendar when I moved into Mom’s house, it seemed only logical.

Clare hadn’t objected. When she’d seen the calendar, the days neatly annotated in different colors of ink that looked, from a short distance, like a combination crossword puzzle and spiderweb, she’d backed off.

Mom had never kept a diary, so far as we knew. (Oh, we were certain we’d have known!) But her calendar was so annotated, almost you could read it as a kind of diary.

As a kind of puzzle, in part. For while most of the initials and abbreviations were obvious, others were mysterious or indecipherable.

It was painful to see. To retrace Mom’s days, weeks. She’d led what looked like a “busy” life. A glance at her crowded calendar suggested this. Each Sunday was church of course. Often on Sunday evenings were church-related activities. Mondays through Fridays were dense with initials:
chur com mtg
(church committee meeting),
SSC
(Senior Swim Club at the Y),
lib
(library, where Mom did volunteer work at the checkout desk),
hosp
. (hospital, where Mom did volunteer work in the gift shop),
HH
(Hedwig House, an assisted living facility in Mt. Ephraim where one of Mom’s elderly Kovach relatives lived whom she visited regularly),
art mtg
(arts council meeting). There were numerous initials that had to refer to friends and relatives, mostly women Mom’s age, with whom she had lunch frequently. There were initials referring to medical appointments. Hair salon appointments. On May 9, the day of Mom’s Mother’s Day dinner, the last time I’d seen Mom alive, she’d marked the date with a column of red-inked initials headed by
Cl/Nik
—meaning
Clare
and
Nikki
.

The first of Mom’s guests to have been invited.

May 11, the day of Mom’s death, had been marked in blue ink:
class 10
:
30 A
.
M
.,
HH 5 P
.
M
.

May 14, the day of Mom’s funeral, had been marked in green:
SSC 11 A
.
M., hosp. 1–5
.

From January through to the end of May, the calendar was heavily marked. Most of the week of May 16 was marked, the last week in May had been less marked, turn the calendar to June and there were only a few scattered dates marked.

Beyond that, blank days. Stretching into eternity.

On a childish impulse, I checked October. And there, in red ink, on October 8, was marked NIKKI. My birthday.

Clare’s birthday, on June 2, had also been marked in red.

I checked to see that both January 8, 2004, and January 8, 2005, anniversaries of the date of Dad’s death, had been marked with a small black
in the upper right-hand corner of the date.

I could hear again Mom’s breezy remark, she couldn’t live without her calendar: “If I don’t write the least little thing down, I’ll forget it. So I always write everything down, and I never forget.”