Evan Hunter - The Moment She Was Gone

“Annie asked me to find one.”

“With a little noodge from her brother, hmm?”

“Mom, she told me she wanted to...”

“Sure, and you listened to her. A person who’d just been through a traumatic experience in Italy...”

“Where she was diagnosed as schizophrenic, by the way,” Augusta says.

“Thank you for reminding us of that again, darling.”

“I merely speak the truth,” Augusta says, and shrugs.

“Hey, everybody, knock if off, okay?” Aaron says.

“I don’t see any harm in calling Dr. Lang.”

“She’ll just want to lock your sister up again.”

“I didn’t get the impression...”

“Psychiatrists.”

“... that she wanted to lock Annie up, Mom.”

“It was a psychiatrist who locked her up in Sicily, wasn’t it?”

“I’m going downstairs for a cigarette,” Augusta says.

“Sure, smoke yourself to death,” my mother says.

“I’ll see you later,” Augusta says, and takes her handbag, and heads for the front door.

“I’ll come with you,” Aaron says, “this neighborhood.”

“There’s nothing wrong with this neighborhood!” my mother says.

“I meant, this hour of the night.”

“Any hour of the night!” my mother snaps, and cuts him a sharp look, but he doesn’t notice, he’s already out the door. Besides, we both know his going downstairs has nothing to do with the neighborhood. He is going down to have a smoke with Augusta. Five years ago, he told us he quit smoking. We both know this is a lie because even his clothes smell of tobacco. But he keeps up the pretense because he thinks it improves his stature in our eyes. He knows I can’t stand Augusta. And he knows that however much he may achieve professionally, he will never quite earn Mama’s approval. In that respect, Aaron and I are in the very same boat. Mama doesn’t think much of my professional status, either. Then again, I haven’t ever really achieved anything.

Once upon a time, I wanted to be a writer.

Before my father left, he used to read to me and Annie and Aaron at bedtime. One of our favorite books was The Once and Future King. Annie loved all the parts where Merlin changes the Wart into a fish and all kinds of flying birds and finally a badger. I liked the Wart’s adventures with Robin Wood, which of course was the legendary Robin Hood’s true and honorable name. Listening to my father read to us, I thought if I could ever write like T. H. White, I would be the happiest person in the entire world. Then my father left home, and from what I could gather he had gone to live with his mother for a while, so I wrote him a letter and asked my mother to mail it to him.

The letter read:

Dear Daddy,

Mom says you are with Grandma Kate. I miss you and love

you very much. Please come home.

Your loving son,

He never came home.

I sometimes wonder if my mother ever mailed that letter.

The crying was one thing.

When I stopped eating, that was another story.

I was never a picky eater until my father left home. Then everything seemed to taste rotten.

One night, I was playing in the living room with this dart set my grandmother sent me for my sixth birthday — we weren’t allowed to see Grandma Kate anymore, but she still sent us gifts, which my mother didn’t dare keep from us.

The dart set had a target with circles on it and a bull’s eye and six darts with different colored feathers on them for different players. I put the target on a piece of plywood so the darts wouldn’t damage anything if I missed. My mother was already annoyed that Grandma Kate had sent me a game with pointed things in it; she’d have taken a fit if I threw a dart and wrecked a wall or a piece of furniture.

When she called us in to dinner, Aaron came from where he was pounding on the piano, and Annie came from where she was playing with one of her dolls, and I came in from practicing darts, carrying one of the darts with me, the one with the red feathers. I was sort of twirling the dart around on my fingers when my mother came in with our dinner. She prided herself on her cooking, my mother did. She cooked about as well as Aaron played piano, but all her friends kept telling her she was a terrific cook.

That night, she was serving these thick veal chops Aaron loved, with mashed potatoes and creamed spinach she made herself that wasn’t frozen. She had just put everything on the table when a fly started buzzing around the kitchen. This was an old apartment, what they called pre-war, and it had no air-conditioning, which meant we kept the windows open winter and summer, though not as much in the winter, and there were flies in it year round.

Through the open doorway connecting kitchen and dining room, I watched the fly as it landed first on the refrigerator and then the cookie jar in the shape of a pig on the counter near the stove, and then zipped out of the kitchen and into the dining room and landed on the wall someplace behind me. I whirled around in my chair and without even taking aim, threw the dart, and hit the fly smack behind its head, pinning it to the wall. A gooey white fluid came oozing out of the fly, and I went “Ick!” and turned back to the table to find sitting in front of me a big bowl of mashed potatoes that looked just like the gooey white stuff coming out of the fly.

My mother didn’t know I’d nailed a fly to the wall with what had to be the luckiest shot in all New York City, even better than a bull’s eye. She’d been busy running in and out of the kitchen carrying platters and plates and now she saw me looking down at the bowl of mashed potatoes she’d worked very hard to make creamy and smooth, and she saw me nulling a face, and heard me saying “Ick!” and she said at once, “What now?” because ever since I’d stopped crying over my father leaving, I’d been a pain in the ass about eating.

“I don’t want any potatoes,” I said, and Aaron said, “He just killed a fly,” and my mother said, “Shut up, Aaron,” and then, to me, “Why not?” and I said, “They’re icky,” and Annie said, “You should’ve seen it, Mom!” and my mother said, “Shut up, Annie,” and to me, “Icky? Icky?” and Aaron said, “Can we start eating, Mom?” and my mother said, “Shut up, Aaron!” and picked up the bowl of potatoes in both hands and dumped it onto my head. Just turned the bowl over on my head like a helmet.

The potatoes were every bit as creamy and as smooth as my mother might have hoped. They streamed over my forehead and into my eyes and down my cheeks and mouth and dripped from my chin. I began crying again, the way I had after my father left. “And I’ve had enough of that goddamn crying!” my mother shouted. “Go to your room!” My sister started crying, too. “And you, too, you little pisspants!” my mother shouted.

I went first to the bathroom where I wiped off my face with toilet paper and then washed it and dried it with a towel, and then went into my room where I discovered there was mashed potato all over my pants, too. I wiped that off with my handkerchief before I got undressed. Then I crawled into bed, and cried myself to sleep. Next door, I could hear Annie crying, too.

Aaron and my mother ate dinner alone that night.

The next morning, I was afraid to talk to her.

When Annie, Aaron, and I were kids, we used to hide under the dining room table, eavesdropping on the conversation of the grownups. Once we heard Grandma Kate use the word “shit,” and we burst out laughing, and Mama sent all of us to our rooms — but she was laughing, too. This was before my father abandoned us. The moment he was gone, my mother changed a lot. It was like night and day. Two different people. Aaron told us she was grieving. Neither Annie nor I knew what grieving meant.