We're sorry, but eCampus.com doesn't work properly without JavaScript.
Either your device does not support JavaScript or you do not have JavaScript enabled.
How to enable JavaScript in your browser.
Need help? Call 1-855-252-4222
Note: Supplemental materials are not guaranteed with Rental or Used book purchases.
Purchase Benefits
What is included with this book?
The New copy of this book will include any supplemental materials advertised. Please check the title of the book to determine if it should include any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.
The Used, Rental and eBook copies of this book are not guaranteed to include any supplemental materials. Typically, only the book itself is included. This is true even if the title states it includes any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.
mothers day
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.
Excerpted from Missing Mom: A Novel by Joyce Carol Oates All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.