Missing Mom by Joyce Carol Oates Read Free Book Online

her.
    “You’ve been distracted by him, haven’t you. All evening.”
    “Mom, please. Not that tired old subject.”
    My response was quick, sharp. I would realize later that I’d been waiting for this, for my mother’s murmured words of the gentlest reproach, and that quivery look to her face, the rapid blinking of eyelids signaling Your mother is blinking back tears . She is being brave on your account . She is a good loving mother of a willful self-destructive daughter intent on breaking her heart .
    “Nikki, it isn’t tired to me .”
    “Look, you don’t know him. You’ve met him once, you have no idea how it is between us. So, please. Let’s drop it.”
    “‘Drop it.’ What a thing to say. As if I could ‘drop’ my own daughter.”
    “Mom, your guests are waiting for you. We’d better go back.”
    “Oh, what do I care about them! I don’t know why I invited them, a kind of madness came over me. ‘More people! More people! If I can’t be happy myself I can make them happy!’—maybe that’s it. But I only care for my family, I care for you .”
    Mom made a clumsy move to touch me, and I drew back. Quick as if a darting little hummingbird had struck at me with its beak, I’d reacted without thinking.
    Suddenly we were speaking in low excited voices. My heart was beating with painful clarity, unless it was my mother’s heart beating. I could not breathe, she was sucking the oxygen out of the room. I wanted to push her from me, I was frightened of her power. I could not bear to be touched by her, as, in the waiting room at the hospital when we were told of Dad’s death, I could not bear to be touched by any of the family for the outermost layer of my skin had been peeled away, I stood raw, exposed. Mom was saying words I had heard in her mouth many times and imagined many times more, I must break up with that man, he has been such an evil influence in my life, even if he divorces his wife think how unhappy he has made her, and me. How can I expect him to marry me if he doesn’t respect me and how can he respect me if I don’t respect myself. How can I drift as I’ve been drifting. These years. Drifting downstream. As if I’d been rowing a canoe, and I’d let the paddle go, now the canoe is just drifting downstream, with me in it…
    “Maybe you haven’t drifted enough, Mom. Family isn’t all there is.”
    “Without family, what is there ?”
    Afterward I would think, Mom was asking this question sincerely.
    Wanting to know, and how could I tell her. I could not reveal to her I didn’t know.
    “Mom, you are not me, and I am not you. And thank God for that.”
    All that I said was true. I had thought such mutinous thoughts many times. Yet now, suddenly I was uttering them aloud in a hurt, childish voice.
    It was at this point Clare pushed open the kitchen door.
     
    By 9:40 P . M . the party had broken up. Finally.
    Driving back to Chautauqua Falls I thought I will punish her, I won’t call her tomorrow .
    Maybe the next day.
    Maybe not.

…then judge me
    When we were growing up. When we were harsh in our judgments of others as adolescents are apt to be. “‘Walk a mile in my footsteps, then judge me.’ That’s what my mother used to say.”
    Mom wasn’t scolding us exactly. She spoke gently, and she was smiling. Clare understood the rebuke but I had such a literal mind I’d try to work out how you could walk in another’s footsteps: in snow? in mud? in sand?
    Mom rarely spoke of her mother Marta Kovach who’d died when Mom was only eleven. She’d died of some mysterious “eating-away” nerve disease.
    Even decades later the subject was too painful for Mom to discuss. It alarmed Clare and me, growing up, to realize that our mother had been a stranger’s daughter, she hadn’t always been our mom but a little girl of eleven who’d come home from school one day to a shingle-board row house on Spalding Street in downtown Mt. Ephraim to discover that her mother had “passed