Joyce Carol Oates - Missing Mom (P.S.)

Last time you see someone and you dont know it will be the last time. And all that you know now, if only youd known then. But you didnt know, and now its too late. And you tell yourself How could I have known, I could not have known .

You tell yourself.

This is my story of missing my mother. One day, in a way unique to you, it will be your story, too.

May 9, 2004. One of those aloof-seeming spring days: very sunny but not very warm.

Gusts of wind rushing down from Lake Ontario in mean little skirmishes like hit-and-run. A sky hard-looking as blue tile. That wet-grassy smell lifting from the neat rectangular front lawns on Deer Creek Drive.

In patches lilac bushes were blooming up and down the street. Vivid glowing-purple, lavender like swipes of paint.

At 43 Deer Creek, my parents house, where Mom lived alone now that Dad had died, there were too many vehicles parked in the driveway and at the curb. My brother-in-laws Land Rover, my Aunt Tabithas old black hearse-sized Caddie, these made sense, but there were others including a low-slung lipstick-red sports car shaped like a missile.

Who did Mom know, whod drive such a car?

Damned if I wanted to meet him. (Had to be a him.)

My mother was always introducing me to eligible bachelors. Since I was involved with an ineligible man.

It was like Mom to invite people outside the family for Mothers Day. It was like Mom to invite people who were practically strangers into her house.

I parked the car across the street. Id begun to whistle. It seemed to tamp down my adrenaline, whistling when I was in danger of becoming over-excited. My father had whistled a lot around the house.

Mothers Day: I was bringing Mom a present so soft, so gossamer-light it seemed to have no weight but lay across my outstretched arms like something sleeping. Id spent a frustrating half-hour wrapping it in rainbow tin foil, crisscrossing the foil with multi-colored yarns instead of ribbon; I had a vision of the sort of wild/funny/funky look I wanted for the gift, and had to settle for this cross between New Age and Kindergarten. Id taken a half-day off from work to find an appropriate gift for my mother who presented a riddle to her grown daughters, for she seemed in need of nothing.

Anyway, nothing we could give her.

Wed wanted to take Mom out, of course. My sister Clare and me. Why not, for once, a Mothers Day meal in elegant surroundings, the Mt. Ephraim Inn for instance. No need for Mom to prepare one of her complicated meals, work herself into a state of nerves inviting guests at the last minute like a train hooking on extra cars, careening and swerving along the tracks!

No need. Except of course Mom resisted. Maybe when Dad had been alive, if hed insisted on taking her out shed have consented, but now Dad was gone, there was just Clare and me hoping to persuade our mother to behave reasonably.

You know how I love to cook. This is the nicest Mothers Day present you girls can give me, my family visiting and letting me cook for them.

Then, vehemently as if protecting her innocent/ignorant daughters from being swindled Pay prices like that for food? When I can prepare a meal for us for a fraction of the cost, and better?

There were three ways into Moms house: front door, side door, through the garage. Most days I used the side door, that opened directly into the kitchen.

The door to which Mom had affixed little bells that tinkled merrily, like a shopkeepers door, when you pushed it open.

Ohhh Nikki! What have you done with your hair !

First thing Mom said to me. Before I was through the doorway and into the kitchen. Before she hugged me stepping back with this startled look in her face.

I would remember the way Moms voice lifted on hair like the cry of a bird shot in mid-flight.

Mom had a round childlike face that showed every emotion clear as water. Her skin was flushed as if windburnt, her eyes were wide-open greeny-amber. Since Dads death shed become a darting little hummingbird of a woman. Her shock at my appearance was such, Id have sworn what I heard her say was What have you done with my hair?

Innocently I said I thought Id told her, I was having my hair cut?

Cut.

Meaning, what an understatement!

I was thirty-one years old. Mom was fifty-six. Wed been having these exchanges for almost three decades. Youd have thought we were both accustomed to them by now, but we didnt seem to be. I could feel Moms quickened heartbeat like my own.

This time, the situation was pretty tame. I hadnt run away from home as Id done as a teenager, or, worse yet, returned home abruptly and unexpectedly from college refusing to explain why. I hadnt announced that I was engaged to a young man my parents scarcely knew, nor even that Id broken off the engagement. (Twice. Two very different young men.) I hadnt quit my current job in a succession of boring jobs. Hadnt gone off with a not-quite-divorced man nor even by myself cross-country in a rattletrap Volkswagen van to backpack in the Grand Tetons, in Idaho. All Id done was have my hair cut punk-spiky style and darkened to a shade of inky-maroon that, in certain lights, glared iridescent. No strand of hair longer than one inch, shaved at the sides and back of my head. You could say this was a chic-druggie look of another era or you could say that I looked like someone whod stuck her finger into an electric socket.

Mom smiled bravely. It was Mothers Day after all, there were guests in the other room. Wasnt Gwen Eaton known in Mt. Ephraim, New York, in the Chautauqua Valley seventy miles south of Lake Ontario, as uncomplaining, unself-pitying, good-natured and good-hearted and indefatigably optimistic?

Hadnt her high school nickname been Feather ?

Well, Nikki! Youd be a beauty, no matter if you were bald.

Rising now on her tiptoes to give me a belated hug. Just a little harder than ordinary, to signal how she loved me even more, because I was a trial to her.

Each time Mom gripped me in one of her fierce hugs, it seemed to me she was just slightly smaller, shorter. Since Dads death her tidy little body that had seemed to have a rubbery resilience was losing definition. My hands encountered fleshy pouches at her waist and upper back, I saw the raddled flesh of her upper arms and chin. Since turning fifty Mom had more or less abandoned shoes with any kind of heel, mostly she wore crepe-soled shoes so flat, small, and round-toed they looked like a childs play shoes. Wed been the same height briefly (five feet three, when I was twelve), now Mom was shorter than me by several inches.

I felt a pang of loss, alarm. I wanted to think there had to be some mistake.

In my party voice I said, Mom, youre looking good. Happy Mothers Day.

Mom said, embarrassed, Its a silly day, I know. But you and Clare wanted to take me out, so this is a compromise. Happy Mothers Day to you .

For the occasion, Mom was wearing a lime-green velour top and matching pants, shed sewed herself. Pink shell earrings shed made in one of her crafts classes at the mall and a necklace of glass beads Id found in a secondhand shop. Her graying-blond hair was attractively if modestly cut, her skin looked freshened as if shed applied some sort of cold cream to it, then rubbed the cream vigorously off. Since Dad used to tease her about having been a glamor girl when theyd met, Mom had become self-conscious about any visible sort of makeup and used even lipstick sparingly. In long-ago snapshots of the 1960s when shed been a teenager, Mom had certainly not seemed glamorous. Shed been a blandly cute high school cheerleader with the doll-like features and achingly hopeful smile of thousandsmillions?of other girls immediately recognizable to any non-U.S. citizen as American, middle-class .