Missing Mom Read Free

seem to be fazed by an exotic name.
    “Aunt Nikki, tell us what it was like, interviewing Waylon Syp?”
    Waylon Syp was a local Rochester boy who’d achieved something of a national career as a white-boy rapper in the sulky/sullen mode of Eminem except not so talented as Eminem and, as an interview subject, a dud. His manager had answered most of the questions put to him by local journalists at a press conference in Rochester and I’d written them up, with a professional sort of zest, for a front-page feature in the Beacon . I hadn’t acknowledged how ordinary, how bland, how dull, how not-very-good-looking Syp was close up, and seeing the expectation in Lilja’s face, I wasn’t going to now.
    I saw that even Clare was interested. Even Mom, who couldn’t have known anything about rap music, and would have thought that Eminem was candy.
    “Help Grandma and me set the table, sweetie. And I’ll tell you.”
     
    Aunt Nikki . Weird!
    I’d always been ambivalent about being an aunt but I was fond of my sister’s children. I guess I was.
    Sometimes, I wasn’t sure if I liked anyone, much. How I’d have felt about my own mother, if I’d met her as a stranger.
    Yet my sister’s children had brought Clare and me closer together. Especially when they’d been babies and Clare had been vulnerable and needy for once; not so judgmental about me, in her obsession with judging herself.
    Clare liked me less, now. I wasn’t sure how I felt about her.
    One thing I knew: I didn’t want children of my own. I didn’t want to be married. Maybe because my parents had been so happily married, my mother was such a wonderful mother, I knew that I could never measure up.
    And maybe I don’t want happiness. Not that kind.
     
    Eleven guests at Mom’s for Mother’s Day dinner!
    When we’d last spoken on the phone, Mom had promised there would be “only” seven or eight guests. Originally, weeks before, Mom had assured Clare and me that there would be “only family.”
    Out of the side of my mouth, into Clare’s ear as we were smiling brightly being introduced to the latest, last arrival who looked like an aging Cher in tumbledown silver-streaked hair, layers of witchy swishing black taffeta and red fishnet stockings and high heels, “Why does Mom do such things ,” and Clare never slackened her smile sighing in return, “Because she’s Mom .”
    This exotic guest, Mom’s newest friend from church whom she’d met, it seemed, only last week, spoke heavily accented English and had to repeat her name several times: “Szyszko, Sonja.” Mom introduced her as a “prominent” ballerina who’d performed in Budapest, Hungary, and who had had to leave the country for political reasons, now she lived in Mt. Ephraim and was a housekeeper (house cleaner?) and a seamstress and a singer with a “flawless” soprano voice, who’d just joined the choir at the Mt. Ephraim Christian Life Fellowship Church where Mom was also a member of the choir.
    “Mrs. Aiten, I am so, so sorry! I am lost, driving in this, this roads with so many tvists and end-dead where you cannot get out . I am looking for ‘Deer Creek’ in all the wrong place.”
    Sonja Szyszko fluttered like a flag in the wind, mortified as if she were hours late instead of a half-hour. Mom assured her she wasn’t late, not at all. And how beautiful she looked, like a “radiant young dancer”! (In fact, Sonja Szyszko was a hefty middle-aged woman with an eerily white-powdered face, penciled-in black eyebrows and eyelashes so stiff with mascara they looked like a daddy longlegs’ legs. Her mouth was a shiny lewd crimson and her fluttery hands were so large and big-knuckled, you’d have almost thought she was a man boldly impersonating a woman.)
    Why did Mom do such things? I had an urge, not for the first time since Dad’s death, when Mom’s “hospitality” began to become frantic, to run away.
    But there was Clare watching me. Don’t even think of it, Nikki!
    So I