Missing Mom (3 page)

Hearing the edge to her voice, and seeing our startled expressions, Clare broke off with a dazzling smile, “—and being just adorable to yourselves. And nobody to tell you they love you no matter
what
.”

Sonny Danto lifted his glass. In a hearty voice he declared, “
I
will drink to that, ma’am! Truer words were never spoken.”

Next, Mom was given her Mother’s Day presents.

Of course, Mom had told us not to bring her anything. Every year Mom insisted no presents, every year we brought her presents, every year she stammered in embarrassment, as sincerely as if for the first time, “Oh, you shouldn’t have. I…”

The burning blush was in her cheeks, she was blinking tears from her eyes. Glancing about the room at her guests, pressing a hand against her velour top, she gave the impression of being uncertain where she was.

I prodded Mom, a gentle little nudge on the arm. “C’mon, Mom! Open your presents, we’re dying of curiosity.”

I meant to be funny. I was the only person who’d given Mom a wrapped present.

Stiff-backed Aunt Tabitha had brought over a pot of pink mums with tinfoil twisted about its clay pot, which, with a grim smile, she’d presented to Mom in the way of one paying the price of admission—“From Walter, my youngest. In Sausalito, California. He won’t mind these mums going to you, Gwen.”

“Why, Tabitha! Aren’t these beautiful! Thank you.”

Mom accepted the pot of mums as if she’d never seen anything so exotic. She leaned over to smell the niggardly little bud-blossoms, though knowing that mums have no scent. Tabitha was complaining of her three children: “Now you’d think, wouldn’t you, but you’d be wrong!—that they would at least check with one another, to see what flowers to send me. Friday morning the delivery boy from Curtis Flowers comes to the house with a pot of mums wired from Wendy, in Toledo; Saturday morning, a second pot of mums wired from Aaron, in Scranton; Saturday afternoon, a pot of mums wired from Walter, in Sausalito. Can you imagine! Two pots of pink mums, and one pot of lavender. And the same identical size, which I happen to know, because I inquired, is the cheapest size for wired flowers, and the same identical note
LOVE TO MOTHER ON MOTHER
’
S DAY
, and the same identical delivery boy, I was mortified.”

“Well,” Mom said. “Mums are very beautiful anyway, Tabitha. You should—”

Tabitha interrupted sharply, “‘Should’? ‘Should’ what, Gwen? Be grateful as a craven little puppy-dog that my children have remembered me at all?”

“Well—”

“It isn’t as if they were actual children, for heaven’s sake. Wendy is forty-four, Aaron is forty-one, and Walter is thirty-eight. And they did more or less the same thing last year, except it was azaleas they wired.” Tabitha drained her glass of champagne vehemently.

From Alyce Proxmire’s hands came a cellophane-wrapped pecan-cherry kringle, an elaborately rich Danish pastry in the shape of a horse collar. At Mom’s gatherings, Alyce always brought pastries from a bakery in town, removed from the baker’s box and re-packaged in one of Alyce’s baking pans; Alyce had never outgrown a childish love of sweets, but couldn’t be troubled to bake. She was a plain-faced knobby woman with a fretful air, always ill, or convalescent, or “coming down” with something; shivering today in a baggy brown woollen dress, with a baggy white cardigan buttoned over it; the nails of her long bony fingers purplish-blue. Clare and I could recall our mother’s “oldest girlfriend” regarding us with looks of mild revulsion when we’d been small children urged to call her “Auntie Alyce” which we’d never learned to do convincingly. Alyce had never married of course. Alyce had had a “tragic” romance years ago. Alyce had been urged into early retirement as a public school librarian who’d been unable or unwilling to learn computer skills and who, at the end of her career, had developed a phobia about allowing certain students (germ-laden? destructive?) to check out books, or even to consult them in the library.

Mom was saying, “Oh, Alyce! You shouldn’t have!”—leaning over to squeeze her friend’s icy hand. “Thanks so much, love. I’ve made peach melba for dessert, now we’ll have kringle, too.”

Love!
Clare and I exchanged a resentful glance.

Lilja had made a watercolor card—
HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY GRANDMA EATON!
—that had obviously taken some time, and was embarrassed by our praise. From the rest of the Chisholm family came a comic Mother’s Day card, and a $150 gift certificate from Restoration Hardware in the mall. “Oh, Clare! Rob! Thank you!” Each year, practical-minded Clare gave our mother a gift certificate and each year Mom appeared to be pleasantly surprised.

As a girl, already a model of efficiency and frugality for whom sentiment was a secondary matter, Clare had solved the gift problem by buying items with a festive twist in quantity: boxes of gaily colored tissues, mouthwash and toothpaste in unusual flavors, giant boxes of Dad’s favorite cereal Wheaties and a full case of Mom’s most-used Campbell’s soup cream of celery; without irony or a wish to be cruel, Clare had given me such birthday gifts as flea collars for our cats, a bag of scented Kitty Litter, deodorant, a “giant economy” box of Junior Miss Sani-Pads.

“Oh, Nikki! What on earth…”

Mom was marveling over the rainbow-wrapped present that weighed so little. With comical fastidiousness she undid the yarn with which I’d tied it, anxious to preserve the wrapping paper to use another time. “So beautiful, Nikki! Isn’t this just like you, so—
imaginative
.”

Was it? I wanted to think so.

Inside the paper was a fluffy white ostrich feather boa, I’d found in a Rochester thrift shop. Mom exclaimed with childish delight, pulling the boa out of its wrapping and positioning it on her shoulders. There was something comical and touching about her, like a little girl playing grown-up. “Nikki, just what I was needing. However did you guess?”

Mom leaned over to hug me. She smelled of white talcum.

After Dad’s death, which had been abrupt and unexpected, Mom had lapsed into a phase of showering frequently, washing her hands compulsively until the skin began to wear out, brushing her teeth until the gums bled. She’d dusted herself obsessively with the fragrant talcum powder Dad had given her, even the soles of her feet, so that, when Clare and I dropped by the house we’d be startled by ghostly white powder footprints on the floor outside the bathroom.

Eventually, Mom had returned to normal. We thought.

“
I
found a feather boa once, ostrich feathers, too, white mixed with black, in my grandmother’s attic. I asked the old woman if I could have it to play with, I was just a little girl, and d’you know what my grandmother said?—‘No you may
not
.’”

Aunt Tabitha delivered this little speech in an amused voice, as if she’d shifted her loyalties to the long-departed grandmother, not the long-departed little girl. You had to guess that Tabitha didn’t much approve of my whimsical present to Mom. And Alyce Proxmire shook her head, frowning in wonderment as at the spectacle of a girl classmate making a fool of herself. Of course, my big sister Clare smiled indulgently: “Nikki always buys us things she’d like for herself.”

I felt the sting of that remark. Damn Clare, it wasn’t true!

Sonja Szyszko was so exclaiming over the “beautiful”—“glamorous”—boa, Mom draped it over her sturdy shoulders. I felt a moment’s concern that Mom would impulsively give the boa to her as Mom often did with things that “looked better” on others than on her.

Talk shifted to thrift shops. On this subject, I was the expert. For Mom’s guests I showed off a watch I’d found in the same Rochester shop, slightly tarnished but still very beautiful silver with a delicate midnight-blue face that hadn’t conventional numerals, but pale, luminous little stars instead. On the back was engraved:
To Elise with love
. High on champagne, in an excitable mood, seeing how the men were watching me, I heard myself prattling on like an airhead TV personality about my “insatiable” love of browsing in secondhand stores. I seemed to be drawn to old things, as if what was new, raw, untested and “not-yet-loved” hadn’t any appeal to me; I seemed to need to acquire things that had already belonged to someone else as if I wasn’t sure of my own judgment and had to follow where others had been: “Clothes, jewelry, men.”

My slender purple-silk legs were crossed, my waxy-white naked left foot (toenails painted magenta, to match fingernails and mouth) was jiggling in the gold-spangled high-heeled sandal. I’d spoken as if whimsically. I had a way of saying what was serious in a bold-innocent fashion to elicit startled laughs.

Except Clare wasn’t laughing. Or Mom, still fussing over the ostrich feathers draped across Sonja Szyszko’s shoulders, marveling at their beauty.

Another woman’s husband! How can you, Nikki.

How can you expect him to marry you, if he doesn’t respect you.

Because if that man respected you he would get a divorce and marry you.

Yes he would! I don’t care what century this is.

And if he doesn’t marry you he doesn’t respect you.

Nikki don’t you laugh at me! Your father would be upset about this, too.

Honey I’m your mother. I just don’t want you to be hurt.

Everyone marveled at Mom’s cooking. Of course.

For Mother’s Day dinner we had: the much-anticipated Hawaiian Chicken Supreme, a gooey mélange of very tender chicken, chopped green peppers and onions, hefty pineapple slices, soy sauce and white rice and almonds. Also, asparagus spears, corn soufflé, beet salad with chopped mint. Also, Mom’s home-baked raisin/yogurt/twelve-grain bread. And for dessert peach melba with ice cream and cherry-pecan kringle. Except for sulky Lilja who ate only asparagus spears and a teaspoon of corn soufflé, and infuriated her mother by asking to be excused after ten minutes, we all ate hungrily. Even Aunt Tabitha who commented stoically that the Hawaiian chicken was “a little too sweet for my taste” and the rice “just a little undercooked”; and prissy Alyce Proxmire with her habit of cutting her food into tiny portions to be eaten with excruciating slowness as if she were expecting to bite down on broken glass.

One of your mother’s lame ducks, Dad used to say of Alyce Proxmire with a bemused roll of his eyes.

For a while as a child I’d actually thought there might be “lame” ducks Mom had rescued, somewhere. She was such a soft touch for stray creatures, predominantly women, calling at all hours or dropping by the house (“I’ll only stay for a few minutes, Gwen, I promise”) so it would be just like Mom to take pity on limping ducks.

So many people at the dining room table, we’d had to add extra leaves. Rob and me struggling to fit the sections together. Our hands brushing. Maybe it’s harder to relate to a brother-in-law if you’ve never had a brother.

At dinner, the table seemed too crowded. You’d have thought it was Thanksgiving or Christmas and that we were all family, talking and laughing loudly. Trying to sound festive. My eyes smarted with tears, though I was laughing. I kept looking for Dad amid all these faces and was baffled to see Rob Chisholm in Dad’s place, across the long table from Mom.

More annoying, the exalted Gilbert Wexley was seated to Mom’s right, speaking pompously to the table—“The president will be reelected by a landslide in November, the patriotic American people will never be soft on terrorism”—while Mom looked on smiling and anxious. I couldn’t bear to think that my mother might care about this man who so reveled in his own self-importance.

Fifty-six was too old to “date.” If Mom didn’t know this, Clare or I would have to clue her in.

Beside me sat Sonny Danto, as I’d feared. Before dinner I’d tried to switch name cards, placing myself between Mom and Lilja, Mom had caught me and slapped playfully at my hand.
Nikki no!

One good thing about Danto, he vied with Wexley for dominance at the table. Though he knew virtually no one here, he wasn’t shy in the slightest. Talking, gesticulating, eating and drinking with the zest of a swarm of cockroaches. Even his attempt to speak with me was bustling, aggressive: “‘Nicole Eaton’—your name? In the little local paper?”—smiling with his large stained teeth, leaning toward me so that I wasn’t spared seeing each hair, each follicle of the Presley pompadour with unnerving intimacy—“my favorite of all the local writers, I always look for your columns.”

“Do you.”

Mom must have talked me up shamelessly to Sonny Danto, he seemed to have come prepared. In the local library quickly scanning back issues of the
Beacon
.

Danto confided in me, in a lowered voice, he intended to write his memoir someday—“
The Scourge of the Bugs: A No-Holds-Barred Account of a Real-Life Terminator
. Terrific title, eh?” Or maybe, if he could find the right collaborator, it would be one of those “as told to” memoirs.

He’d been inspired by his grandfather in Tonawanda, who’d been the original “Scourge of the Bugs.” Except Danto’s grandfather’s specialty had been termites, his were carpenter ants. “It reveals a lot about a person, which is his specialty. In the field of pest extermination.”

I said, “I think my specialty would be moths. Those little fluttery paper-looking things? That are kind of pretty? Though I guess, I’d have to kill them, wouldn’t I. I don’t think I would like that.”

Danto laughed extravagantly. He must have thought that I was flirting with him. Like an infomercial he began to lecture on the subject of moths, drawing the interest of most of the table away from Wexley: “Now your so-called paper moth can infest a household worse than ants! One day you see there’s a few of them, next day you see there’s a dozen of ’em, suddenly they’re all over the house and know why?—it isn’t just woollens they eat. No, they lay their eggs in cereal, crackers, pasta, dry pet food, birdseed, even in tea, anything in your cupboard that isn’t canned or packaged airtight. People just don’t know! Like poor Mrs. Eaton yesterday who despite a pretty clean household was about overrun with red ants and had no clue how to deal with ’em, which is where the Scourge of the Bugs comes in. You don’t ever want to underestimate the power of bugs to take over your house, you need professionals to exterminate ’em.” I saw Mom force a smile at
pretty clean household
and exchanged a look of sisterly irony with Clare across the table. How could our mother have plucked “Sonny” Danto out of the yellow pages and foisted him upon us, at this table!