Missing Mom (19 page)

“Isn’t it strange, Nikki! Mom kept all this. You have to wonder why.”

I
didn’t have to wonder why.

Hard as it was for me to dispose of Dad’s clothes, it was much harder to dispose of Mom’s. Especially those she’d sewed or knitted herself. There were “outfits” here dating back to when I’d been in middle school, at least. Each had been an occasion, and each had seemed very special at the time. If Clare wasn’t vigilant, I retrieved items from boxes to reexamine. If I stuck red Post-its on something Clare protested: “Nikki! That isn’t your taste at all. Lavender? ‘Pretty pink pastel’? You with your pierced ears and punk hair, you’ve got to be kidding.” Or, meanly: “Sweetie, you can’t seriously think that could ever fit you. Mom was a petite size two, practically a midget beside you.”

I resented Clare’s tone. Midget!

Clare was just jealous, those hips of hers. The last time she’d fitted into a petite size two, she’d been eleven years old.

“All right, Clare. Not dresses, and not skirts. But shirts are different. Mom and I were almost the same size except in the bust. And sweaters. Especially a cardigan, like this. Isn’t it beautiful? And it has a belt. The one Mom knitted for me in this style, its belt has been lost for years. Look at the fine stitching, something I could never do.”

Clare laughed as if I’d said something witty.

“Nikki, I wouldn’t think so. Knitting and crocheting are hardly your talent.”

I resented Clare’s superior tone. “Are they yours?”

“Well, I was knitting for a while. In middle school. Mom tried to teach me, but it didn’t turn out. I was supposed to be knitting a sweater and it kept getting bigger and baggier, it would’ve fit Aunt Tabitha if I’d finished it. Such a pretty shade of purple, though.”

I protested, “Clare, that was my sweater. I knitted that baggy thing. Remember, you all teased me about it? Mom tried to help me but finally we gave up. I was so
frustrated
.”

“Nikki, that wasn’t you. Don’t be ridiculous, you’d never have had the patience to knit a sweater.”

“Actually, Clare, you never had the patience. I liked to help Mom out around the house, for years. Mom taught me to knit but she never taught
you
.”

“That’s just wrong. She
did
.”

“Maybe for a day. Maybe for an hour. Then you lost patience, you’d get angry when you couldn’t do something perfectly.”

“That was never an issue for you, Nikki: doing something perfectly.”

We were laughing, but the air between us had grown tense. How smug Clare was, how complacent and mistaken! I happened to know that she was wrong about the sweater. I was the one who’d labored at knitting the purple-baggy-sweater-for-Aunt-Tabitha, for weeks when I’d been in sixth grade. Clearly I remembered choosing the yarn, with Mom, at a little store called the Sewing Box: a beautiful heather-purple shade. Except somehow I’d tugged at the needles, and stretched the yarn, and finally I’d thrown away what I’d knitted in disgust.

Clare said quietly, stubbornly, “Mom told me not to be discouraged, we could try again. But I gave up, I guess. I was in eighth grade and getting involved in school politics.”

School politics! She’d run for class secretary and had won by a handful of votes.

“Clare, it wasn’t you. Really, it was me.”

“Mom would remember.”

“Absolutely, yes. Mom would remember.”

The impulse was to call for Mom, since we were here in Mom’s house.

In fact, in Mom’s bedroom. Why?

We were remembering how, when we were girls, in this very house, our quarrels over the most trivial subjects escalated in quick rising steps until suddenly we would begin shouting at each other and Clare might slap at me, and I might kick at Clare, and Mom would rush at us to intervene.

Mom would plead: “Girls! Don’t disturb your father, he’s trying to relax.”

Or, plaintively: “Girls! It breaks my heart to hear you like this.”

And one of us would cry, “I hate her!” and the other would cry, “I hate HER!”

We were quiet now, remembering.

We were breathing quickly, not daring to look at each other.

I was planning how, when Wally and I chose a date for our wedding, I would not even tell Clare. She would learn from other sources.
That
would embarrass her.

To my surprise Clare said, as if this were the subject we’d been discussing all along, “Fine, Nikki. Keep anything you want of Mom’s. You always were one to encourage her to sew you things, knit you things, she’d spend days and weeks on things you had no intention of wearing. Poor Mom was always asking me, ‘Clare, why doesn’t Nikki wear that velvet dress, why doesn’t Nikki wear that blouse,’ so why not hoard her things now, now it’s too late? But don’t bog us both down, please. This sentimental bullshit of yours. I can’t believe how much time has passed and we’re still with the damned clothes and we have the rest of the house ahead, we’ll be doing this for
days
.”

I was shocked at Clare’s outburst. For a moment, I couldn’t speak.

“—for
weeks
! We’ll be stuck in here, together, in this house where I can’t
breathe
.”

I’d been noticing, Clare was short of breath. Her face that had been so artfully made up when I’d arrived was now flushed with an oily sheen and most of her lipstick had been gnawed away.

“Clare, Jesus! Why are you so hostile?”

“This is a strain, Nikki. I keep waiting for some nosey neighbor to knock at the door, you can be sure everyone is aware of us. ‘The Eaton sisters, the ones whose mother was murdered in her home.’ I keep looking up expecting Mom to be in the doorway, or Dad, or—what was the name of Mom’s gray cat?”

“S-Smoky?”

Even more shocking, that Clare seemed to have forgotten Smoky’s name. I’d been wondering why she hadn’t asked me about him, how he was adjusting to life with me in Chautauqua Falls?

“I keep expecting something! Some awful unspeakable thing! I’m not the one who’s been bristling with hostility, Nikki: that’s you. The way you’re dressed, that ridiculous hat on your head, hasn’t anyone ever told you it’s rude to wear a hat indoors, especially a hat advertising some tax shelter of some married-man friend of yours, the way you pull the rim down to hide your eyes so I can’t see you when I’m talking to you, that’s plain
rude
. And I live with a thirteen-year-old so I am accustomed, let me tell you, to
rude
. Since you’ve arrived our progress has been one step forward and two steps backward and I believe it’s deliberate. I could do this so much more efficiently without you, Nikki!”

I’d been squatting on the floor, awkwardly. Now I managed to straighten my legs, wincing with pain. I saw that Clare was glaring at me with hot acid eyes. I said, stammering, “Because you don’t care about Mom, or Dad. All you care about is putting the house ‘on the market.’”

“That is not true! Except that I have a family, Nikki, I have responsibilities you could never fathom. My life is other people!—not
me
. I wasn’t the one to break away from Mt. Ephraim and lead a selfish life—I didn’t practically abandon our mother when she became a widow—I’ve never slept with a man married to another woman—I’ve never broken our mother’s heart humiliating her in front of relatives and friends: that’s you, Nikki. Don’t look so wounded, you must know this. That’s why you’ve been so hostile to me, I know you’re angry from yesterday, when I couldn’t get over here. As if that was my fault! As if I can control my life! Lilja blackmails me with her hysterics and Rob practically runs out of the house to escape us and poor Foster keeps asking about his grandma, children at school are tormenting him, he’s begun wetting his bed after years and half the people I see when I go out, including women I’d believed were my friends, turn away or duck into stores to avoid me because they feel so sorry for me. It’s a nightmare, Nikki, you seem to have been spared, not living here. As usual, you’re spared! It’s just me, I am so sick and tired of being
me
.”

I fumbled to touch her. This sudden reversal of roles made me shy and ungainly. “Clare, I’m so sorry, I—”

Clare pushed at me, glaring. “Nikki, you are not
sorry
! All you are is
Nikki
.”

Clare ran from the room, clumsily. I heard her in the bathroom next door, running water loudly. Then I heard her in the living room, shoving furniture around. Then she was on the telephone, speaking sharply.

I had thought she might leave, and I would have the house to myself. I took advantage of her absence from the bedroom to retrieve several articles of clothing from the boxes. The lime-green velour top, I tried on in front of a mirror. (Tight in the shoulders and a little short at the waist, otherwise fine.) A white silk blouse with a lacy bow, I knew Wally Szalla would admire. (My lover had a weakness for old-fashioned ladylike girls, I’d discovered. He much preferred white underwear on me, whether silk or cotton, to anything more spectacular.) And there was the poppy-colored scarf, and there was the tortoiseshell hand mirror cloudy with age, that had once belonged to my mother’s mother. Also, several of my father’s neckties I had given him years ago, looking as if they’d never been worn. I would make a present of them to Wally Szalla.

“
Nik
-ki! Come look.”

In a voice that sounded almost gleeful Clare called me from our father’s study at the end of the hall. I’d been hearing her laughing in there, a sign that her good spirits had returned and she’d forgiven me, or anyway wasn’t angry at me any longer.

Immediately, as when we’d been girls, my animosity toward my sister dissolved.

Since Clare’s outburst we’d been working in separate rooms, much more productively. We were aware of each other without needing to see each other or to speak. I’d sorted through most of Mom’s and Dad’s personal items and had moved on to impersonal things like bedding, towels, shower curtains. I was becoming as proficient with the Post-its slips as my sister.

The only temptation was to return to things in boxes destined for “sell” or “donate.”

“You’ll never believe this, Nikki. Goodness!”

Clare was kneeling on the carpet in front of Dad’s old desk. She’d kicked off her shoes. Her white cotton shirt was no longer so crisply ironed but she’d replenished her lipstick and powdered her face. It was like Clare to abruptly switch moods and expect you to switch moods with her.

Weird to be walking into Dad’s “home office”! This room we’d been forbidden to enter as girls except at Dad’s invitation. (Which was rare.) Since Dad’s death, Mom had kept the room more or less unchanged. We joked together, Clare and me, that she was maintaining it as a shrine.

Dad’s desk, filing cabinets, bookshelves. His collection of mostly American history books, known as “Jon’s library.”

It was unsettling, to so freely enter this room, as an adult. To see how ordinary its dimensions were. Its furnishings. Dad’s desk had seemed massive and very special to me as a girl, but it was just a standard office desk, aluminum and wood veneer with a simulated stain, smooth and practical as Formica. Somehow, seeing Dad at this desk had seemed so impressive: always I’d wondered what he was doing, what were the documents he frowned over. But now, I could see that the desk was no larger than the table I used as a makeshift desk in my apartment, purchased for fifteen dollars in a secondhand store and painted lipstick red.

On top of Dad’s desk was his old electric typewriter, affixed with a green Post-it. Dad had a computer at Beechum Paper Products of course but he’d refused to have a home computer in the belief that the so-called electronics revolution was all about product obsolescence: getting silly people to spend money. If Dad had lived into our era of universal cell phones he’d have been outraged.

“Nikki, come
on
. Nobody’s going to scold us.”

Clare had pulled out the desk drawers as far as they could go without falling out. She’d been sorting through Dad’s meticulously kept records dating back to the early 1980s: New York State and Internal Revenue documents, insurance policies, volumes of cancelled checks and receipts (for purchases as low as $2.98). Mom had said of Dad that he kept everything out of a fear of losing something and I think she meant this approvingly.

Not like me, I’d thought. Who kept almost nothing, out of a fear of losing it.

“The weirdest thing, Nikki: Dad’s calendar collection! This stack, I found in the bottom drawer here. They go back to 1981.”

These were uniformly large, somewhat bulky calendars with generic landscape and wildlife photographs. What was most striking about the calendars, which Clare had spread out on the carpet, was the maze of emphatic
X
’s, in black ink. Each day of each month of each year had been methodically crossed out, not missing a single square including the very last day of December of each year. The last x’d-out date was December 31, 1999, eight days before Dad’s death.

Clare said, “Can you guess what these mean? These numbers?”

You could see, past the black
X
’s, abbreviations and cryptic codes. Not every date contained these, but each date contained, at the bottom, a miniature numeral. In January 1999, the numerals were 188, 186, 1871?2, 190, 189, 189, 1891?2, 191, etc. In the earliest calendar, in the month of January 1981, the numerals were 171, 173, 1701?2, 1711?2, 173, 173, 173, 1741?2, etc.

I crouched over the calendars to study the numerals. So carefully recorded in Dad’s hand! Day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year. I didn’t want to think what this was.

(Dad’s weight?)

“I think it must be Dad’s weight, Nikki. Imagine, Dad weighed himself every day and kept a record. We never knew, did we? It must have been a secret, he was always teasing us about watching our weight, at least he teased
me
. I’m sure that Mom didn’t know. You can see, looking through the calendars, how Dad had slowly gained weight, he’d never been what you’d call heavy but he’d gone from 171 in 1981 to 196 by the time he, well”—Clare paused, suddenly swallowing, as if the enormity of what she was saying in her archly bemused voice suddenly struck her—“died.”