Missing Mom (32 page)

“…‘sexually incompatible’ is what she means. Right?”

Rob’s hurt mouth twisted in a grimace of lewd despair. I was shaking my head no, avoiding his eyes. All this was utterly new to me.

“Nikki! No bullshitting. No need to protect your sister, it’s all out in the open like spilled guts.”

Still I seemed not to know. Not me! I would play this scene inscrutable as Smoky the cat.

Rob plunged on, miserably, “…she must have confided in you, Nikki. She says it’s been ‘years.’ But I thought she was happy! I mean, I never thought she wasn’t. Now she’s saying she ‘can’t breathe’ in our marriage. ‘Suffocating’ she says and if I try to touch her she throws off my hand like a snake. I mean, like I was the snake. This woman that, how many times, she’d become emotional saying
I never touched her
which wasn’t true, I swear. Or, if it’s true it was only true sometimes…”

I didn’t want to hear this! My teeth clicked against the glass, I hadn’t quite realized I’d lifted to my mouth.

Thinking how expensive liquor is so smooth going down, like liquid fire. The very opposite of yet near-identical to ice cream which when swallowed immediately begins to melt. One is fiery and consoling, the other icy-sweet and consoling.

Party gal.
Well, maybe. Back when my hair was sexy-punk-purple and my satiny-elastic micro-skirts so snugly fitted my crotch. And my naked feet in black platform glitter shoes!

Rob Chisholm hadn’t ever glimpsed me in quite such a costume. In Mt. Ephraim and vicinity, in the suburban homes of the Eatons and the Kovachs, Nikki’d been pretty well behaved.

It wasn’t exactly true that a friend was scheduled to drop by that evening. At 10
P
.
M
. I’d turn on “Night Train” to listen to Wally Szalla’s dreamy/sexy voice introducing dreamy/sexy jazz and at midnight when the program ended and the D.J. signed off over the melancholy notes of “Night Train” I would feel a pang of loss, I would wonder where Wally was headed now, to his upscale bachelor quarters in Chautauqua Falls or across town to his upscale family house or (but I didn’t want to wonder this!) another place, unknown to me. I had to wonder though knowing it wouldn’t be Mt. Ephraim, tonight.

Nikki I’ve been missing you. Give me a call darling.

Nikki are you angry with me? If it’s about last Friday, having to cancel…

Lately when I didn’t return Wally’s calls, Wally didn’t keep calling back as he’d once done. Didn’t send flowers as he’d once done. Didn’t show up unexpectedly with a bottle of Italian red wine. Didn’t bring me miniature books of inspiration. By now, Wally had to know that Nikki Eaton had either been inspired or wouldn’t ever be inspired, it was a project beyond his powers.

“…every flaw in a man, like he’s stripped naked, on one of these afternoon TV talk shows, so humiliated, every time the phone rings it’s ‘Aunt Maude’—‘Aunt Tabitha’—‘Aunt Lorraine’”—Rob’s voice rose to a sudden mock-soprano—“‘Ohhh Rob! What have I been hearing! How can you and Clare be separating! What about the children, how can you do such a thing to your children, can’t you talk sense into Clare, the woman is your
wife
.’” Rob paused, breathing hard. He’d clawed at his shirt collar, his face glowered with perspiration. His expression had become savage. “The worst is, God-damned ‘Uncle Herman’—‘Uncle Fred’—calling me at the office. ‘Rob, what on earth is happening with you and Clare? A “separation”? For no reason? And your children so young? You must know that such behavior is unacceptable in our family.’ And I’m, like, wanting to say, so shove the family up your ass, ‘Uncle.’
I’m
not one of you.”

Unacceptable
. An Eaton expression we’d been hearing all our lives, and had joked about. Even Dad had made a joke of it, sometimes.

“…funny, Nikki? Glad you think so.”

I jammed my knuckles against my mouth to keep from breaking into hysterical laughter as Rob stared at me with aggrieved eyes. He was misunderstanding my reaction, that I should seem to be laughing at him when I was only just recalling how
unacceptable
began for me in ninth grade when suddenly I’d discovered *SEX* or, more accurately, *SEX* discovered me.

And how powerfully it was coming now, suffused through my body like liquid fire, the old, lethal impulse to drink with a companion.

Especially a male companion.

A not-bad-looking rumpled-sexy mistreated husband. A guy whose eyes had been moving on me, over me, in-between the crevices of me, for fifteen years.

“Nikki, can you? Tell me? I feel as if I’m drowning, I can’t grab hold of anything solid to pull…”

I set down my glass, that was nearly empty. I hadn’t been conscious of drinking. I was feeling like a Christmas tree warmly lighting up. Especially the lower parts of me. The parts that were lonely for my married-man-lover.

Fuck you, Wally Szalla. Go back to your precious Isabel, I don’t need you.

I shook my head to clear it. Shifted my legs out from beneath me, that had begun to ache. Damned if I would seduce my brother-in-law, at such a time. In Mom’s living room!

I tried to assure Rob, who stared at me with glistening-hungry eyes, that Clare hadn’t said a single word to me that was critical of him, still less a violation of his privacy. Whatever the relatives were telling him, they were exaggerating as usual. “It’s just that, as far as I can understand her, Clare wants to have a career again. She wants to enroll in graduate school, get a master’s degree and—”

Rob interrupted angrily, “But to leave me? Lilja and me? Our house she’s spent a fortune on? To walk out? Take my son with her? Instead of enrolling at Rochester or Brockport where she could commute, enrolling somewhere in Philadelphia? ‘I have a friend in Philadelphia’—that’s some kind of riddle? All our married life, I’ve been hearing that. Are Clare and this college roommate of hers conspiring? Behind their husbands’ backs? Like Philadelphia is some kind of safe house, Clare can escape to? How can Clare walk away from Mt. Ephraim with all that’s going on here? After what happened to your mother, and what’s happening with you, and the trial coming up in January—she says she isn’t coming back, incidentally—and making up her mind practically overnight, and calling a lawyer before she’d even told me, and drawing up a ‘legal separation,’ and—abandoning me? Nikki, I thought she loved me! I thought she loved our family life! I thought she wanted all that we have!” Rob was speaking in short, choppy fragments as if he’d been running and was out of breath. My heart went out to him, I felt his distress but didn’t want to be drawn in, I was fearful of such raw emotion as I’d have been fearful of a rapidly spreading fire. “
She
was the one wanting to get married so soon, not me.
She
was desperate to quit her teaching job, hated her job, the school was ‘suffocating’ her, she ‘couldn’t breathe,’ she wanted to ‘start a family,’ wanted babies, wanted to stay in Mt. Ephraim where her parents lived, where she knew everyone and felt important, safe, when I could have worked in California, Texas, even Hawaii!—I had excellent offers from American branch offices in Tokyo, Sydney, Rome—I’d have liked to try the Peace Corps for a couple of years, the Ivory Coast, Kenya, but Clare squelched that fast—‘And come home with some disgusting parasite?—our heads shrunken?’” Rob so perfectly mimicked Clare’s voice of indignation/outrage, I heard myself snort with laughter.

“And your parents didn’t want us to, either. Especially Gwen, the idea of Clare going to Africa seemed to terrify her.”

Rob splashed more whiskey into his glass. Swished it, sniffed it, glowered at me, and drank.

When in doubt, blame Mom.

The few mouthfuls of whiskey I’d had had gone to my head. Since not-seeing Wally Szalla as often as before, and not-daring to drink when I was alone, I’d become more susceptible to alcohol.

“Glad I’m so amusing, Nikki. I should be on TV.”

“Rob, I’m not laughing at you! I’m not laughing—”

“Maybe it is funny. Women on afternoon TV talk shows, they’d find it hilarious.”

I tried to speak somberly. Soberly. “I—I think it’s temporary, Rob. The ‘separation.’”

“You do?”

“Judging from what Clare has told me. About leaving Mt. Ephraim.”

I wasn’t sure if this was so. Vaguely I seemed to recall Clare having said—well, something vague.

Rob asked carefully, “She’s told you—? What?”

“That she’ll be back. When she gets her degree. I think. And when Foster begins improving in school…”

“Clare said that? She’d be
back
?”

“She has to come back, Rob. She can’t abandon Lilja.”

“Lilja! What about me?”

Quickly I said, “I didn’t mean that, Rob. Of course, Clare loves you. She told me, just before she left, ‘I love Rob but I need to be away, for just now. I love you all but…for just right now…’” This wasn’t sounding like my sister, exactly. But Rob, gazing at me with hurt-hungry eyes, seemed to find it plausible.

I was distracted by Rob’s hurt-hungry mouth. Thinking what a long time it had been since Wally Szalla had seriously kissed me.

Since any man had seriously kissed me.

Since any man had seriously made love to me.

Rob queried me further about what Clare had allegedly said. I had to wonder if I was inventing dialogue for my sister in the way that Dad used to accuse Mom of so badly wanting people to make up the differences between them, she invented their dialogue for them.

Mom always defended herself, passionately. In her mind, the dialogue was 100 percent authentic, she swore she’d heard it with her “own ears.”

I could almost swear, yes I’d heard Clare with my “own ears.” If she hadn’t exactly said these sensible words, she’d meant to say them.

“…she does love you, Rob. That’s the main thing.”

Rob was on his feet, swaying. I hoped he wouldn’t stumble into the pedestal table, that weighed a ton: people were always banging their shins on it, especially men. I was on my feet also. Oh, my head was spinning! But it was a comforting sensation, I hadn’t felt in a while.

One of those sensations you feel lonely for. Like a man’s hands touching you, a man’s mouth kissing you. Almost, the exact identity of this man isn’t relevant.

I roused myself to say, staring at my wristwatch, “Well! It’s getting late…”

Rob roused himself, too. He’d finished most of the whiskey himself and would leave the bottle behind. Though he pointedly ignored my hint he seemed to know that it was time to leave. Thanking me not once but several times and calling me
Nik-ki
in a voice tremulous with emotion. “…why I came here, I knew, if I saw you, things would make some sense. Of the two of you, Nikki, you and Clare, this goes back years, Nikki, it needs to be said, of the two of you, you are the one who…” Rob jammed his fist against his heart in a sudden forceful gesture, as if words were failing him. “…no matter what people say about you. See, people don’t know
you
. They think they know Clare, Clare Eaton is the ‘sensible’ sister but oh man, I happen to know otherwise. You don’t live with a woman like Clare for fifteen years and not know otherwise. Also you’re nicer, Nikki…And smarter, and better-looking, and, well…sexier. Oh, man.”

When words like this come lurching at you, maybe they’re the fantasy words you’ve been wishing to hear, always they come too quickly, too suddenly, before you’re prepared, and the man is coming too quickly at you, lurching also, in this case stumbling against the pedestal table. Rob must have banged his shin hard but in his emotional state seemed scarcely to notice. His fumey breath was in my face. His fingers took hold of my shoulders in the mohair sweater. Before I could react, he stooped to me, brushed his lips against my cheek and then, hot-mouthed, kissed my mouth. His lips were rubbery and wet and not so comforting as I’d anticipated yet a sensation like an electric shock ran swiftly through me, chest to groin.

“Nikki, hey. I’m crazy about you.”

Rob was pleading. Yet it was a forceful pleading, and he wasn’t relaxing his grip on my shoulders.

I was pushing Rob away, or trying to. Didn’t want this to escalate into anything like a struggle. My brother-in-law was drunker than I’d guessed and a drunken man is very hard to budge.

“You’re crazy about your family, Rob. Not me.”

“No, Nikki.
You
.”

Suddenly, in the confusion of the moment, it seemed utterly plausible. My brother-in-law Rob Chisholm was crazy about me. Not Clare but me.
Me!

The way he was looking at me, preparing to kiss me again if I didn’t squirm out of his grasp, if I didn’t decisively wriggle free of his fingers gripping my shoulders which I meant to do, or tried to do, except my knees were weak and my reactions slow as if underwater, or in a dream: one of those sweet/shameful taboo dreams you hope to forget as soon as you wake.

“Nikki, you like me, too, don’t you? A little?”

“Rob, I…”

“Hey c’mon: you know you do.”

This was so. This was true. Those years of flirting between us. In Clare’s very house, and here in Mom’s house. At family gatherings innocent and gregarious as outdoor barbecues, where Rob Chisholm himself was in charge of steaks, chicken, hot dogs sizzling on the grill. Always there were opportunities. Sly-secret opportunities. Moist-lipped smiles, unmistakable in meaning. Squeezing my brother-in-law’s fingers even as, teasing-quick, I released them. When we spoke together—and always, at some point in the evening, we’d find ourselves speaking together earnestly and at length—lightly touching my brother-in-law’s arm. Sometimes Rob Chisholm and I were so highly charged, except not always, especially at the end of a festive evening when we’d each had a few drinks. When I’d say goodnight to my brother-in-law in a luxuriant display of full-frontal teasing: “Goodnight, Rob! Love ya!” The full length of Nikki against the full length of Rob.

Once, at a noisy wedding, I’d given Rob a hot wet goodnight kiss at the edge of his mouth and Rob responded by grabbing my derriere with both hands, to press me against him a little harder.

I’d only just slapped at him lightly, and laughed.