Missing Mom (31 page)

“It isn’t far! You know that I have a friend there.”

This would be Clare’s old college roommate Amy Orlander. How could I forget Amy Orlander, invariably spoken of as “a friend in Philadelphia” when Clare wanted to trump those of us lacking a friend who belonged to a rich Philadelphia department-store family, in whose lavish wedding Clare had been a bridesmaid and with whom Clare stayed on mysteriously intimate terms, though other female friendships had been allowed to wither away. How could I forget that the Orlanders had long ago issued an “open invitation” for Clare to visit them whenever she wished and to stay for as long as she wished.

“Also, there’s an excellent private school in Philadelphia that specializes in challenged children, I’ve been able to enroll Foster in the middle of the term, with Amy’s mother’s help: she’s on the board. I’m just so very, very grateful—”

Challenged?
Since when was Foster, a sweet affable slow learner with a weakness for video games,
challenged
?

“—and Amy’s husband has put in a word for me with the dean of admissions at the Philadelphia Language Institute, I’m going to enroll in a master’s degree in ‘language psychology.’ So that I can teach, or go into private practice. The tragic thing was how I became burnt-out as a teacher, before I’d even begun a career. Stifled and exploited at that terrible school. The principal was a petty bureaucrat and he’d have never left, there was no hope for advancement for me. My creativity was stifled. My soul was stifled! You aren’t the only one who felt that Mt. Ephraim was a straitjacket.—Nikki, what’s this?”

In the midst of her excited speech Clare had wandered into the dining room where I’d set some of Mom’s and Dad’s things temporarily on the table. “These old records? Weren’t they in the garage for years? You’ve brought them back
in
?” Clare lifted out of a box
Classical Guitar Favorites, New World Symphony, Mormon Tabernacle Choir Sings Yuletide Classics
. I said, “I haven’t had a chance to sort through them completely. You know, some old records have become collectors’ items.” Clare snorted in derision, “‘Collectors’ items’! Do they even manufacture needles for hi-fi’s any longer?
Are
there hi-fi’s?” But she soon became engrossed in the records, which were covered in dust and cobwebs and randomly boxed. “Oh. These are mine, I haven’t heard these in
years
.” Clare had taken out
Dirty Dancing: The Original Film Score
and
Tango!
whose cover was a sexy Latino leaning over a near-supine Latina in silhouette.

“And what’s
this
?”

Also on the dining room table were photos and snapshots, mostly of Mom, I’d been arranging in chronological order. The earliest was sixteen-year-old Feather Kovach in her maroon cheerleader’s jumper, taken with sister-cheerleaders on the Mt. Ephraim cheerleaders’ “squad” (for, strangely, I had not been able to find any snapshots of my mother at a younger age): here was a girl with the most shining eyes and most hopeful smile you could imagine, dimples, wavy-curly darkish blond hair, pert little face round and luminous as a moon. There was Feather in pink-sherbert prom gown, and in a graduation gown that fitted her like a tent; there was Feather looking scarcely older than she’d looked as a cheerleader, in a dazzling white bridal gown beside her young, stiffly smiling groom (how thin Dad’s face, how thick and weirdly styled his late-1960s hair) in a tux. There, basking in an unnatural sunshine, was the happy couple on their honeymoon in Key West, Gwen in tank top and miniskirt posed with a bright-feathered parrot on her shoulder, as Jon looked on somewhat doubtfully. There was Gwen with a baby (Clare), and there was Gwen with a baby (Nikki); there was Gwen with a plumpish little girl (Clare), and there was Gwen with a fidgety little girl (Nikki). And so through the years, the decades, a rich profusion of images that left me dazed and shaken when I contemplated them. Clare had taken up the most recent photos, claiming she’d never seen them before: Mom, Clare, Lilja and me posed with arms around each other’s waist in front of a Christmas tree so overdecorated you could hardly see the tree. “This was taken at our house. It must’ve been Rob’s Polaroid.”

“Rob took these with Mom’s Polaroid. I’m sure you have copies, Clare.”

“No, I don’t. I’ll take this.”

Clare continued to look through the photos. I knew she was pissed with me about the Post-its. I laughed.

“I’m glad that you’re amused, Nikki. That’s in character.”

“‘Pissed over Post-its.’
That’s
in character.”

A quarrel was flaring up, but we decided to let it fade. Not just now.

“…I thought, if the memorial takes place, we could use some of these as mementos. I was thinking of putting together a little booklet of Mom’s life, there’s this printer in Chautauqua Falls who did a memoir of Jimmy Friday, remember him? It’s not posthumous but it has pictures, it’s very attractive…”

“Jimmy Friday? That old bluegrass singer? Why are we talking about him?”

“We’re not. We’re talking about a memorial booklet for Mom.”

“Oh, that. The memorial.”

Clare spoke flatly, as if annoyed.

“You don’t want a memorial for Mom?”

“I don’t know, Nikki. Do you?”

“Well. If it could be for Mom…”

“Exactly! But it can’t be. It’s for Mom’s relatives, friends…for us.”

“Not for us. I don’t think that I could bear it.”

“
I
won’t be here. I’ll be in my new home.”

“Clare, you’d have to be here! For your own mother’s memorial, you can’t think of not coming.”

“Yes, I can think of not coming. It’s a thought I’ve already had.” Clare laughed, daringly. For a moment she seemed almost elated. “In fact, Gilbert Wexley isn’t well. So plans for the memorial are suspended.”

“Wexley isn’t well? What’s wrong with him?”

I only now realized that the man had stopped bothering me, for weeks. I felt a small stab of hurt on Mom’s account.

Clare said, not very concerned, “Rob says he’s heard that Wexley has been drinking ‘heavily.’ He seems to have collapsed at the Arts Council last week. His female staff has been covering for him for months, people say. He and the ‘reverend’—I won’t say his name—but you know who I mean—have been disagreeing over some aspects of the memorial, what sort of music Gwen Eaton really liked, religious or ‘secular,’ I’ve stayed out of it, I refuse to become involved with these two male egos. Some of the Eatons—you know how suspicious Uncle Herman is—are grumbling that maybe Wexley has been misappropriating donations for the memorial and the award in her name, there’s no evidence for this that I know of, but you know how Dad’s family is. Not that any of the Eatons want to organize the memorial themselves.”

“I hadn’t heard about Wexley. That’s very sad.”

“I thought you couldn’t stand the man, Nikki!”

“I can’t. But I think he means well. I think he was in love with Mom and didn’t realize it and now his heart is broken, he’s confused and clumsy with grief…”

Clare shrugged. “It’s hard to feel sorry for someone whose heart is ‘broken’—it seems like a luxury, somehow.” She gestured at the photos scattered on the table and I knew exactly her meaning: to be alive was all that mattered, the rest is extra. “Anyway, thank God Wexley never got around to asking Mom to marry him, she might’ve said yes. Now we’d be Gilbert Wexley’s step-daughters.”

“‘Dad’ Wexley. Jesus!”

We laughed and shuddered together. For a moment we were girls again, in a sudden alliance against someone adult. Neither of us wished to think that, if Mom and Gilbert Wexley had married, Mom would surely be alive now.

We were standing close together, but not touching. Clare’s skin looked as if it would be hot to the touch. Perspiration was oozing through her fastidiously applied makeup. I remembered how, after Mom died, I’d stayed at the Chisholms’ house for several days and had had glimpses of my sister’s splotchily pale, unmade-up face: the shadowed eye sockets, the lines bracketing her mouth, the way after she washed her face most of her eyebrows vanished. This was my sister’s vulnerable face, I hadn’t seen since we’d been girls.

Those days, I’d felt powerful surges of love for Clare. An anxious need to please her, placate her. She’d seemed so much stronger than I was. So much more capable, responsible.

At the time, it hadn’t fully sunk in: what had happened to Mom had happened to Clare and me, too.

Clare was looking at more Christmas photos. There were several that had been taken in Mom’s house, in front of Mom’s Christmas tree that was smaller and less ostentatiously decorated than Clare’s. We tried to determine when these had been taken, and by whom.

Clare sighed. “Oh, Mom always looked so happy! You can see why they called her ‘Feather’ as a girl.” She paused, swiping at her eyes. “To think that that man killed this woman.
This woman
.”

“He didn’t know her, Clare.”

“But he did! He knew Mom.”

“He was ignorant. Of what he did. Even of what he was doing to himself.” My voice trailed off as if unconvinced. It was a man’s voice echoing in mine, faintly.

“He
knew
! It was to get back at me, he hurt Mom. For the way I’d mocked him, insulted him. Ward Lynch stabbed a defenseless woman thirty-three times. He was stabbing
me
.”

Quickly I said, “Clare, that isn’t so. How can you think such a thing…”

For a moment I felt dazed, light-headed. What Clare had said was so terrible, yet so logical…I couldn’t accept it.

“The police said it was a ‘crime of opportunity,’ Clare. It’s ridiculous to blame yourself.”

“You’d thought of it, though. Hadn’t you.”

“No!”

“Yes. You did.”

“No, Clare. I never thought of it, and it isn’t true.”

Clare said bitterly, “Well, Rob thought of it. The night after the court hearing, when I was pretty upset. Right in the courtroom, that man
yawning
! I couldn’t get over it. And Rob said, ‘If you hadn’t insulted him, Clare. Didn’t you know that a man would want to take revenge?’ Rob says these things that come into his head, it’s like he has pulled back the bedclothes and discovered a nest of spiders that have to be my fault somehow.” Trying not to cry, Clare looked angry.

Now I did touch Clare, or tried to touch her. The way a cat eludes you without seeming to, sliding away from your hand, Clare eluded me.

“Clare, no. Rob didn’t mean it. He was just…”

“Saying what came into his head. Exactly.”

“I’m not going to let you blame yourself, Clare. This is like Mom’s friend from church Mary Kinsler, ‘confessing’ and crying to me that if she’d picked Mom up for their crafts class that morning, as she sometimes did, unless Mom picked her up, none of what happened would have happened.”

In a voice heavy with sarcasm Clare said, “Who do you want me to blame, then? Mom?”

It was nearly noon. Clare used the guest bathroom to freshen up her makeup. Clare then made three brief calls on her cell phone, took into her possession the
Dirty Dancing
and
Tango!
records and a clutch of photographs to take with her to Philadelphia. In mounting panic I followed her to the door. It seemed unbelievable that Clare was leaving Mt. Ephraim in a few days, as if it were the most natural thing to be doing. It wasn’t just Rob from whom she was separating, obviously. It was all of us. It was Mom.

Seeing my face Clare said, exasperated, “I’m moving to Philadelphia, not to the moon.” When I said, “But you’ll return for the trial, Clare, won’t you?” she seemed not to hear.

It was a humid October day. The sky looked like clotted cobwebs.

I walked Clare to her Land Rover, parked on the road and not in the driveway. Clare must have noted the closed garage door, my car not in the driveway, which meant I’d cleared out much of the cluttered garage, but she’d said nothing.

My selfish sister! I hated her.

At this moment, the Mt. Ephraim Police cruiser turned onto Deer Creek Drive. You’d almost think it was headed for us, Clare stiffened, staring, but of course it glided past at about fifteen miles an hour. The young uniformed officer behind the wheel lifted a hand to us, in greeting.

Clare said sharply, “That’s new here. A patrol car.”

“Not so new, any longer. Since May.”

Clare climbed into the Land Rover. I could see that she was eager to be gone. I wanted to clutch at her, to pull her back. I wanted to hurt her. I said, “Clare, don’t you love us?”

Clare said frankly, turning the key in the ignition, “Nikki. It’s hard to love people now. Without Mom, I’m forgetting.”

The invitation arrived.
Wedding nuptials, Szyszko and Danto, Mt. Ephraim Christian Life Fellowship Church, twenty-second of November at ten o’clock in the morning
.

Yes, I’d promised to attend. But damned if I would go.

Knowing that Mom would have been disappointed in me.

There came my brother-in-law Rob Chisholm to see me.

Less than eighteen hours after Clare and Foster had left Mt. Ephraim.

On the phone he’d pleaded: “Nikki! We need to talk.”

Fifteen years we’d been in-laws. My sister had been the apex of the triangle.
Brother-in-law
is a taboo category meaning
no sex
. I knew, I had to see Rob now that Clare had left him; I could not push him away, not cruelly as Clare was doing. Yet I knew it was probably a mistake.

The way sometimes you see an accident looming ahead. You are driving into an intersection, you have the right of way. Except you see a vehicle approaching the intersection from the side and you see that the vehicle isn’t slowing for the stop. And in protest you think
But I have the right of way!
And then you think
But I have the power to stop, I have the power to prevent the accident
.

It was dusk when Rob arrived. Immediately I saw he’d been drinking. His jaws were unshaven and his face appeared gaunt. His white shirt was rumpled. Though it had been blustery and rainy through the day, he wore no coat. He stumbled in the doorway, laughed and muttered something meant to be funny. His eyes, snatching at mine, were red-veined and glassy.

I wondered if he’d left Coldwell Electronics early. Or if he’d even showed up that day.

Rob surprised me, he’d brought a bottle of whiskey. Without asking me he rummaged in the kitchen for glasses. I knew the whiskey was expensive since Wally Szalla often drank this brand. Rob was hoping we might share it, he said. He’d also brought a rain-splattered copy of last week’s
Rochester Sun-Times Sunday Magazine
for me to inscribe.

“For this old friend of mine, his father is a vet in the Adirondacks. He’ll appreciate this.”

A feature I’d done for the
Chautauqua Valley Beacon
had been reprinted in the larger Rochester newspaper under the title “The Lady Is a Vet.” This was one in my series of interviews with Chautauqua Valley individuals of local distinction: in this case Dr. Eve Spicer, a seventy-eight-year-old veterinarian whose specialty was horses and the “larger farm animals.” Dr. Spicer was a small fierce shock-white-haired woman who’d become something of a legend in the Chautauqua Valley, as much known for her eccentricities as her veterinary skill. Dr. Spicer had been married four times. Dr. Spicer “thrived” on emergencies and beat out her competition by making home visits at any hour of the day or night in her
SPICER VET MOBILE
minivan she’d painted all the colors of the rainbow because such colors signified “hope.” Dr. Spicer boasted of “psychic rapport” with most animals and I saw no reason to doubt her, considering the way she’d peered at me through her bifocal glasses and with a look of astute sympathy pronounced me “wounded.”

Rob was saying vehemently, “—this friend of mine from Colgate, lives in Potsdam, Clare knows him but you haven’t met him I don’t think, it’s his father this is for, he’s been a vet in the Keene Valley for thirty years, he’ll get a kick out of ‘Dr. Spicer.’” Rob was looming over me holding the magazine open to my article, so that I could sign above the byline
Nicole Eaton
. His breath smelled like gasoline fumes. He was being maudlin, sentimental as I’d seen him only a few times, at Christmas with his children. You’d think that Clare was somewhere within earshot, all this attention focused on her sister was for her benefit.

I was embarrassed, signing my name. As if “The Lady Is a Vet” was such an accomplishment! But I understood that some people who don’t write and never see their names and words in print attribute a magical power to the printed word. Mom had always revered books, any kind of serious writing. My newspaper journalism was, in Mom’s words, “parts of you that go out from you and into other people.”

I’d never wanted Mom to know, and wouldn’t want Rob Chisholm to know now, how quickly I began to forget these profiles. I spent hours interviewing subjects and conscientiously—sincerely!—“relating” to them; I spent more hours transcribing tapes, to the point of becoming mesmerized with the very tedium of the task; and then there came the hours of writing, and rewriting. (Most of “writing” is “rewriting.” This is another fact non-writers don’t know.) Since moving into this house I’d become obsessive about my work, staying with a piece until it was finished no matter how exhausted I’d become in the process. It was a way of missing Mom, or maybe a way of not-missing Mom, while I was working. But once I e-mailed a piece to my editor at the
Beacon
, a kind of misty-gray amnesia set in and I began to forget. By the time the profile appeared under the byline
Nicole Eaton
it would seem almost the work of another person, a stranger.

It was rare for me to see my interview subjects a second time. Sad to say, I forgot them, too.

Except in one case. Where maybe it would have been better if I’d never seen him a second time.

“Nikki, thanks! I appreciate this and I know that Hank will, too.”

Hank? What were we talking about?

In an excess of drunken gratitude Rob squeezed my hand, hard. For an edgy moment I thought he might kiss me.

I’d been hoping that Rob would be content with remaining in the kitchen where I could offer him coffee to sober him up, and a slice or two of Royal Apple Bread (I’d baked the day before, from Mom’s recipe), but Rob headed for the dimly lighted living room, whiskey bottle in hand. Before I could invite him, he collapsed with a wheeze on the sofa.

“Drink, Nikki? Join me.”

I told him thanks, but—

“C’mon, Nikki! Party gal like you.”

Party gal
. If there was a term that didn’t apply to me at the moment,
party gal
was it. In fifteen years of knowing him, I’d never heard Rob Chisholm call anyone
gal
.

Rob splashed whiskey into the glasses, and handed one to me.

“‘Auld lang sign,’ Nikki! You and I go way back, about as far as Clare and me.” Rob lifted his glass in a swishing festive gesture, and drank.

“I think it’s ‘auld lang syne,’ Rob.”

“Whatever. Fifteen years is ‘
auld
.’”

This was meant to be a joke, but came out sounding wistful.

I pretended to drink. Damned if I’d let myself get drunk babysitting my sister’s distraught husband.

Rob said, with maudlin emphasis, “Fifteen years is ‘
auld lang whatever
.’” His laughter sounded like wet gravel being shoveled.

Before she’d left Mt. Ephraim, Clare had called to warn me—unless it was a kind of boast, the way she’d used to speak of guys in high school she’d broken up with—that Rob was taking their separation “pretty badly.” I had to wonder how she’d expected him to take it after fifteen years and two children—“pretty nicely”?

With every day that passed I was becoming more furious with Clare. Everyone in the family seemed to be furious, too. It was fascinating how family members united in fury against one of their own who has behaved badly: relatives who hadn’t spoken with me since the day of Mom’s funeral had been calling all weekend, incensed. I was made to realize that in their zeal to condemn Clare, the formerly “good” sister, they were willing to ally themselves with “bad” Nikki, who’d long disgusted the Eatons by seeing (i.e., sleeping with) a married man.

“Hey Nikki! You’re looking good.”

Rob meant to sound genial but this came out like reproach. He hadn’t seen me in weeks, we’d only just talked on the phone when sometimes I’d been emotional if not upset.

“Well. I’m trying.”

“‘Trying’?”

“Not to let missing Mom make me a wreck.”

Here was a surprise: I wasn’t looking bad, considering. My hair (shades of darkish blond laced with silver) had grown out to fall in loose crimped waves around my face and in several strands I’d braided purple yarn to match a purple-and-heather mohair turtleneck sweater Mom had knitted for me at least ten years ago, I’d rarely worn. My jeans were faded, just snug enough to show my derriere to advantage. I was skinnier than Wally Szalla “preferred” me but I was making an effort to eat more regularly, fret less and not to forget: lipstick!

Without my rich-luscious-moist-grape mouth, my face seemed to bleach out like overdeveloped film.

“You’re no wreck, Nikki. I got to hand it to you, you’ve got guts.”

Guts!
About as appropriate, applied to me, as
party gal
.

Seeing me wince, Rob said quickly, “I mean, living in this house. Dealing with what happened to your mother…”

To this remark, I had no reply. I stared smiling at the glass of amber liquid in my hand. I was noticing with a small stab of embarrassment that the rim of the glass was slightly dusty. Rob had found these glasses on a shelf of rarely used “good” glasses and china. I’d slipped into a chair across from Rob on the sofa, a hefty pedestal coffee table between us, feet drawn up beneath me, meaning to be polite, to keep smiling. Though I hadn’t done more than wet my lips with the whiskey, I was feeling suddenly reckless. That old, lethal impulse to match a (male) companion drink for drink…

“…d’you think? How soon?”

Rob was circling his true subject, Clare. I thought he must be asking when the house would be ready to list with a realtor. Vaguely I mumbled what might’ve been “soon” but which meant
None of your business. This house was left to Clare and me, not you
.

Rob stiffened as if he’d heard all of this. Saying, with an air of detachment, for this wasn’t Rob speaking but Clare, “…upset! Oh, man! Saying you’d removed her Post-its from the furniture, and boxes she’d packed you’d unpacked, you were having some sort of ‘selfish nervous breakdown’ and ‘reverting to childhood.’ But I said to Clare, on the phone Nikki sounds perfectly—I mean, almost perfectly—under the circumstances what you’d call”—Rob lapsed into a wheezing cough and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand—“normal.”

I laughed. Damned if I’d be provoked into further fury against Clare. “Thanks, Rob! I think you’re ‘almost perfectly normal,’ too.”

“You do?” Rob peered at me doubtfully.

I’d told Rob, as soon as he’d arrived, that a friend was coming to the house in about an hour, so I couldn’t speak with him very long, but I had the idea that Rob hadn’t taken in this information, or hadn’t wished to. The “friend”—in theory, at least—was my married-man-lover Wally Szalla, whom Rob knew, and knew of. From Clare, he’d certainly heard a good deal about Wally and me, none of it complimentary.

I made a mental note to remind Rob, after about thirty minutes, that he’d have to leave soon. I hoped, by that time, Rob was still in a condition to drive.

In the living room, Rob was glancing about with a look almost of dread. Though he’d been coming to this house, he’d been a guest in this living room, since 1988, he seemed spooked by the place now.
He has never been here, never sat on that sofa, without Mom close by. Probably in the kitchen, and in another moment she’ll appear in the doorway
…

My breath was coming quickly. I could almost see the expression on my mother’s face and I could hear what she was saying, her greeting to Rob Chisholm, except at a crucial moment static intervened.

Rob, too, shivered. He’d almost seen, almost heard, too.

Though you know better, you don’t somehow “know.” I’d become fairly adjusted to living in Mom’s house without expecting Mom to walk into the room at any moment but now that I had a visitor, and the visitor was Rob Chisholm, who was family, it was very hard to shake the feeling that, at any moment, Mom would appear in the doorway.

“Oh! God.”

Rob gave a start. Nearly spilled whiskey onto his wrinkled white shirt. For suddenly there had materialized in the living room doorway what appeared at first glance to be a steel-colored burly rat, but was in fact just Smoky: glaring at the intruder with hostile tawny eyes as if, though Smoky had surely seen and sniffed Rob Chisholm many times in the past, the damned cat had never seen him before.

Like Dad, Rob Chisholm wasn’t crazy about household pets. Yet he held out his hand as if the stolid little tank of a tomcat might be coaxed into coming to him and leaping on his lap.

“Smoky? Hey c’mere, kitty. You know me…”

I assured Rob that Smoky knew him, of course. But Smoky remained wary of most visitors.

Still Rob called, as if to a small, stubborn child, “Smok-y! Kit-ty! Don’t you know me? You
do
.”

Absurdly, Rob sounded hurt. There was something in the big gray cat’s pose, the way his stiff white whiskers bristled with indifference, withheld acknowledgment, that stung my brother-in-law in his weakened state.

My strategy was to ignore Smoky. Calling a cat with a twitching tail is an exercise in futility. It’s a struggle of wills, you can’t win. You make a fool of yourself begging a cat to come to you and the cat will simply walk away, when he’s had enough of embarrassing you, as Smoky was doing now.

Rob was saying, “…the one who ran away? That night? Your mother’s cat? After…”

I told Rob yes. Mom’s cat. He shouldn’t be offended, Smoky wasn’t friendly with anyone much, any longer.

Rob fell silent, brooding. His unshaven jaws appeared longer and leaner than I recalled. His graying-brown hair, thin at the crown of his head, glistened with perspiration. His red-veined eyes, too, were glistening with moisture. From time to time, thinking I wasn’t watching, Rob would swipe at his eyes with his fingers.
He has never been in this house without Clare. Rarely without his children. Never in this house with just his sister-in-law Nikki
.

I knew, I should ask Rob why he’d come to see me. Obviously the subject was Clare and the “separation.” But out of stubbornness, or a kind of shyness, I could not bring myself to ask.

“Well, Nikki.” Rob sighed. “I…guess…she’s told you…”

I wasn’t drinking but lifted the glass to my lips. Wanting to hide behind it.

“…after all these years, more than sixteen years we’d ‘been together,’ Clare has discovered…we are…‘temperamentally incompatible.’”

Vaguely I found myself taking a small swallow of whiskey. Though the sweet-fiery taste going down was anything but vague.