Missing Mom (11 page)

More people! More people! If I can’t be happy myself I can make them happy
.

I’d been thinking a lot, about these words. What Mom had said to me in her kitchen, after the Mother’s Day dinner.

Since seeing Mom in the canoe-coffin, I was having difficulty recalling her as she’d been in life. Kept seeing her in that ridiculous thing, only her head exposed. The putty-face that wasn’t exactly Gwen Eaton’s face, the marcelled silvery hair that wasn’t exactly Gwen Eaton’s hair. Rouge, glossy shell-pink lipstick, ruffled scarf hiding her throat.

“‘Your mother’s cadaver.’”

I laughed. My face seemed to crack, I could feel fissures in my cheeks.

Through the kitchen window, the caterer’s assistants were probably watching me. Maybe some of Clare’s guests were watching me, too. I decided not to care. I swallowed down the last of the wine, left the glass on a table, and walked away.

I would leave my things upstairs in Clare’s guest room. On the bedside table was my broken wristwatch, the delicate little watch inscribed
To Elise
, somehow in the night stumbling to the bathroom I’d stepped on it where it had fallen to the floor, don’t ask how. I would leave without saying goodbye to family, friends. I would leave and neglect to call Clare for several times to apologize or even to explain, I would fail to return Clare’s numerous messages on my answering machine. I saw that my car, the sturdy Saab that Wally Szalla had helped me acquire, was hopelessly blocked in the Chisholms’ driveway but this didn’t deter me for I could walk: I could walk into Mt. Ephraim, and call a taxi. Not thinking
I could call Wally, of course there is Wally
even as I saw, a half-block away on Mockingbird Drive, a car idling at the curb, spewing exhaust like a smoker: a chunky Buick the color of tarnished brass, I’d recognized at once. The owner of that car had been criticized for being a man who hurt others, who was selfish, careless, “evil.” Yet this man had had the sensitivity not to attend my mother’s funeral, and not to show up at my sister’s house.

Clare would accuse me on the phone of having gotten drunk in her kitchen but that wasn’t so, I was excited and anxious but not at all drunk in my glittery black platform shoes fleeing out the Chisholms’ crowded driveway and into the street. I was breathless, muttering to myself. A gust of wind like a prank dislodged my wetted-down punk-purple hair. The tarnished-brass car had leapt into motion, pulling up beside me now as the smiling driver leaned out his window. In a blur of tears I saw that the side of the Buick was lightly splattered with mud like the finest lace.

“Darling Nikki! Climb in.”

1.

How quickly your life can change. A day, an hour.

Damn!—I was thirty-five minutes late for the interview with Wallace “Wally” Szalla. I was breathless, anxious and hopeful. I was prepared to apologize lavishly. But before I could ring the doorbell beside the hand-printed card
SZALLA
,
W
. the door flew open and a furious sloe-eyed boy of about sixteen in Snoop Dogg T-shirt, grungy khaki shorts, soiled Nikes (without socks, fashionably unlaced) charged past me. If I hadn’t stepped aside, he would have run me down.

“Troy! Come back here!”

In the boy’s wake a middle-aged man, heated in the face and despairing about the eyes, came shambling like a bear on its hind legs. He shot me a startled look in passing, but clearly had no time for me. The quarrel between father and son seemed to have exploded the door open propelling them outside onto the lawn like an antic scene on TV.

The boy was protesting, “I told you, Dad—I am going to the concert with the guys
exactly as planned
,” and the man was protesting, “Troy, your mother expects you home. You promised, she’ll be upset—” and the boy cried, “Who promised?
You
promised? Make your own fucking promises, Dad!” and the man said, hotly, “Don’t you use language like that with me, young man. This is a public place, young man, what have I told you,” and the boy said, “
Her
upset, what about me upset? Always it’s
her
, or it’s
you
, fuck what about
me
for a change?” and the man said, “Your mother is under the impression you’ll be back with her tonight, she’s sure that you promised her,” and the boy said, disgusted, “
I
promised her?—fuck I did not.
You
promised her. The only way to get out of the fucking house is to promise Mom some pathetic fucking thing nobody has any intention of doing—
jeez
.” Tears glistened in the boy’s stricken eyes. He had the preening public style of an MTV rock star. In his Snoop Dogg T-shirt trampling the heat-wilted lawn as his father followed after him, trying to reason with him. Here was my interview subject, a prominent Chautauqua Falls resident, something of a public figure, losing a quarrel with his teenaged son. His thinning gray-brown hair was disheveled, his white shirt was rumpled and stained with perspiration across his broad back like folded wings.

I would have slipped away and escaped but my car was parked at the curb, on the far side of the disputing father and son.

The outburst resembled TV except, unlike TV, it wasn’t scripted. It was a true family quarrel limping and lumbering and careening on like a train wreck in slow motion. It reminded me of quarrels I’d had, not with my parents, no one in my family, but men whom I had misunderstood or who’d misunderstood me, the fury of wounded pride, the need to wound another. When Szalla tried to touch his son’s arm in a restraining gesture, the boy threw off his hand as you’d throw off a cobra: “This sucks, Dad! This totally sucks! All this summer has sucked, Mom acting crazy on account of you, and you living in this dump, but tonight is different, I’m going to Rochester with the guys, I’m not giving up that ticket.” The resemblance between the boy and his father was striking: what was sharply chiseled in the young, brattish, good-looking face was thickened and creased and apologetic in the middle-aged face. Both son and father were of the same height, about five feet ten, but the boy was trim and lean as a weasel and the man was at least thirty pounds overweight, his bulk concentrated in his midriff. Like an aging athlete, he was panting and left behind, outmaneuvered by his opponent who suddenly changed directions and rushed past his father, back into the apartment building. It was an unexpected move, as in a hotly contested basketball game when the star player rushes away with the ball.

Panting, protesting, Szalla clambered after the boy. “Troy?
Troy
—”

It was late afternoon, August 8, 2001. Not an auspicious day in my life, I wouldn’t have thought. My much-anticipated interview with Wallace “Wally” Szalla had already been postponed twice, by his snotty assistant. I was a novice “features” reporter, aged twenty-eight, for the
Chautauqua Valley Beacon
. I was eager to do well, for I was in need of steadily paying employment. I was unmarried, unattached. (Until fifteen days ago I’d been “involved” with a man in Rochester whom I’d known intermittently for several years but this past year gotten to know too well. The involvement had ended abruptly and would not be renewed.) I was style-conscious, maybe just slightly preening myself, wearing, for this interview a very short tight white cord skirt and a lacy red top with boxy shoulder pads, Italian wedge-heeled sandals, a lavish assortment of rings, bracelets and ear-studs, plum-black lipstick and matching finger- and toenail polish. At the time I was blond, dark-streaked blond looking as if someone with a wicked sense of humor had sprayed acid on my hair and teased and air-blown it into a frizzy halo. At the
Beacon
, where everyone was white, middle-aged, and paunchy, Nikki Eaton was known as the “new girl.” I’d overheard fellow staffers refer to me without irony as the paper’s “voice of the new generation.” (Which generation? Had these folks observed our local mall-cruising teenagers lately?) You’d expect that most of the
Beacon
staff would cordially dislike me but actually they seemed fond of me, as a kind of exotic mascot. Probably it was an open secret, how modest my salary was.

I looked more confident than I felt. Since high school, I’d learned.

Inside Szalla’s apartment, the two were still quarreling. I could hear their raised voices. I wondered if I should wait for Szalla to re-emerge: he’d seen me, he’d have figured out who I was. Already this afternoon I’d been given the wrong home address for him by my editor (who fumed and fumed over the “slovenly” fact-gathering of his reporters) so that I’d wasted twenty minutes driving to the far side of town, made a fool of myself breathless and beaming like a girl TV anchor ringing the doorbell of an impressive old-style red-brick colonial on prestigious Ashburn Avenue, being nervously informed by a Guatemalan maid that “Mr. Zal-la” was no longer “resident” at that address even as I distinctly heard, in the background, a woman on the brink of hysteria crying, “Tell her to go away, Nina! Whoever it is, go away!
We don’t know where he is
.” Several frantic calls on my cell phone later, I was directed across town to Riverview Luxury Apartments, 8A: a ground-floor apartment with a door that opened directly onto a front stoop. This stoop was so littered with old newspapers and flyers, I would have thought no one was home except as I uneasily approached the door I could hear voices inside.

All this was disheartening! The name
Szalla
was close to our Chautauqua Valley equivalent to
Rockefeller
in the larger world. But Riverview Luxury Apartments wasn’t and Wally Szalla, that overweight dad trotting pathetically in the wake of his adolescent son, had the glamour of a well-worn old shoe.

Szalla! And I’d been hearing he had the reputation of being a “womanizer.”

Troy came charging back out the door, carrying a black backpack into which he was stuffing a cell phone. He’d jammed a rakish Buffalo Bills cap on his head and his expression was fierce and triumphant. Behind him, Wally Szalla followed in the self-punishing way of a large aging dog trailing a smaller, faster, younger dog. As Troy jogged down the street without a backward glance Szalla paused at the curb cupping his hands to his mouth: “All right! But you call me, Troy! God damn, you use that cell phone at eleven
P
.
M
. and call me and if I call you you’d better answer or I’ll have you picked up by state troopers! You hear?” By this time, Troy was out of earshot.

I’d had plenty of time to study Wally Szalla by now, and wasn’t much impressed. A deflated-looking middle-aged man, staring after his vanished son. Not just he reminded me of an old shoe, he was wearing old shoes: the kind my father had called “moccasins.” Dad had owned a favorite pair of these shoes, meant to resemble deer hide, something Native Americans might have “tanned” and “sewn” in frontier days, now machine-made with floppy little tassels: slipper-shoes so worn, so splayed, Dad had shuffled around the house in them like an elderly invalid, exasperating the rest of us. Mom had tried to dispose of the moccasins but somehow Dad managed to retrieve them from the trash saying in a wounded voice: “Gwen, these shoes
fit
.”

Well, Szalla was wearing moccasins. And summer trousers that might have been stylish in another season but were badly worn now, and soiled across the buttocks. His limp damp incongruously formal long-sleeved shirt had pulled out of his trousers at the back, looking like a pajama top. I was embarrassed to see Szalla panting so badly, wiping his eyes on his shirtsleeve.

Vaguely I was headed for my car. A mud-colored Datsun compact so nondescript I kept forgetting what it looked like, in parking lots. Szalla saw me, and quickly tucked in his shirttails. With unconscious vanity he tried to suck in his stomach. “Excuse me: you must be Nikki from the
Beacon
?”

I said yes but we could re-schedule the interview, if he wanted. I could see that this wasn’t an ideal time for him.

“No, no! I mean, yes. I can’t think of a more ideal time. Please don’t leave.”

The way Wally Szalla was headed toward me, across a patch of grass near the curb, you’d think the desperate man meant to block my escape.

Quickly I said, “Mr. Szalla, I think I’d better call your secretary, to reschedule. I know what adolescents can be like, pure hell.”

“You do? I mean,
you
do? You’re too young to have a sixteen-year-old.”

“Not have one, Mr. Szalla: I used to be one. Made my parents anxious over me, it doesn’t seem that long ago.”

Szalla laughed eagerly. “Rock concerts? Ten thousand screaming fans? ‘Heavy metal’? ‘Ecstasy’?”

“‘X’ is after my time, Mr. Szalla. If that’s what you mean by ‘Ecstasy.’”

“Not what I mean by ecstasy. No ma’am.”

Szalla stood close beside me, considering. He was looking less distraught, eyeing the very short very tight white cord skirt and lacy red top that fitted my torso snug as a sausage casing. I felt the powerful swerve of his interest. My heart was beating just a little quickly. And I felt sympathy for the man: I knew the wish not to be left alone as evening came on.

Thinking, in my naïveté, that Wally Szalla would have to spend any evening of his life alone if that wasn’t his wish.

Still I felt obliged to say, “Mr. Szalla, it doesn’t seem appropriate. A reporter could take advantage of you, asking pushy questions. You’ve had an upset just now.”

“‘Mr. Szalla’ is my eighty-two-year-old father, Nikki. Please call me ‘Wally.’”

“Well. ‘Wally.’”

I felt my face burn pleasantly. “Wally” was such a comfortable old-shoe kind of name.

Apologizing profusely for his rudeness in ignoring me and for his son’s rudeness, Wally Szalla escorted me into his apartment. I was conscious of his fingers lightly on my elbow. Szalla was saying of his son Troy that his rudeness wasn’t intentional, it was purely unconscious: “That age, most of life is unconscious. Other people, especially older people, don’t register.”

I wasn’t sure how true this was. But I saw that a father would want to believe that his son had no conscious wish to defy or wound him.

“May I get you something, Nikki? Coffee, or a soda, or—?”

Szalla was wanting to say “something stronger” but decided against it. I declined his offer, setting up my Japanese-manufactured tape recorder near an electrical outlet, on a low, glass-topped table in Szalla’s surprisingly small living room. To find a space for the recorder, we had to push aside layers of clutter—newspapers, magazines, an empty pizza carton, scattered CDs (heavy metal rock, white rapper) that must have belonged to Troy. I could see Szalla hovering over me preparing to ask if I needed help with the machine which, as I paused and fumbled my two-inch polished fingernails and muttered to myself, it appeared that I did. But Szalla decided against interfering, he meant to keep a respectful distance.

I was grateful for this. A father who knows not to crowd his children. Daddy had crowded Clare and me, sometimes. Not that he showed his impatience but you could feel it, a quivery heat and exasperation lifting from his skin.

Szalla rubbed his hands vigorously. “You don’t mind if I have a drink, do you, Nikki? Having your heart chewed up by a bratty kid makes a man thirsty.”

In the kitchen Szalla got himself a cold beer from the refrigerator and, for me, a can of Diet Coke.

Saccharine, caffeine, and chemicals! Exactly what I craved at this hour of the day when my blood sugar was dipping and it was too early for a serious drink.

The “luxury” apartment was chilled with air-conditioning but the air smelled of beer and stale pizza and something more intimate: unwashed laundry, sweaty socks. Through the kitchen doorway I could see the kind of casual mess you’d expect of a father and son who’ve been camping out together for a few days.

Despite the name “Riverview,” there was no view of the Chautauqua River from Wally Szalla’s windows: his apartment faced the street. Venetian blinds on the living room windows were partly drawn, each at a different height. Furnishings looked as if they came with the apartment: stylish but charmless leather sofas in neutral colors, chromed-edged chairs and tables, rugs like wild boar skins strewn casually about. An upscale bachelor’s pad you might see in a
Playboy
photo feature except this one had been invaded by a teenager and bore signs of incipient shabbiness, like Riverview Apartments itself, that had opened only a few years before but was beginning to look tacky on the outside. Monthly rentals here were several times what I paid for my funky third-floor brownstone apartment in a less prestigious part of Chautauqua Falls but I didn’t have much envy for the residents.

“And are you a ‘career’ journalist, Nikki?”