My mother has been missing for nine days now. Not dead, but missing.
I first found out when her tennis instructor, Bart something-or-other, called me around dinner time, asking if I knew why she hadn’t shown up to her lesson.
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The last conversation I had with my mother was about silverware. She called me in a fuss while I was at work and about to enter a meeting, fretting over the price of a spoon as if I had been the one to write out the price tag.
“I can’t believe this, twelve goddamn dollars. This is ludicrous.” Her voice hardly stood out against the noisy street or crowded room behind her, wherever she might have been.
“I guess that is expensive,” I tried to keep this sort of exchange brief. My mother would have had the same interactions with her doorman had he been around, she simply needed a channel for her anger, and on this occasion she’d chosen me as the source.
“I tried to argue with the guy, but he wouldn’t budge. He almost called security on me too. People these days are so unbelievable.”
“That sounds rough.” I tucked the phone in between my shoulder and my ear, the speaker sliding uncomfortably across my face as I cradled a large pile of papers in my arms.
“What do I need a twelve-dollar spoon for? I’ll eat with my hands, thank you very much.”
“What about soup?”
“That’s beside the point. What matters is principle.”
“Sure.” The last time I had spoken to my mother had been over a month before, a time when she also happened to be angry about something unremarkable. It almost seemed as if she never stopped being angry, that we were simply picking up where we had left off.
“I swear, it ruined my afternoon.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.” It was difficult to have sympathy for my mother in these sorts of conversations, to share her misery over such mundane injustices, when we were no longer aware of the more significant happenings in each other’s lives. She would have been better off talking to the doorman; he would have given her more or less the same reactions, and at least she could have talked to him face to face. “Mom, I’m sorry, I’d really love to continue talking but I’m about to step into a meeting.”
“That’s fine,” she said, and with that, her line went dead.
I turned off my phone and walked into the meeting. It’s something that has now crossed my mind once or twice, that had I left my phone on, she would have called again with something more significant to tell me, something that might help us to tearfully understand each other. But this is real life, and knowing who she is, I also knew that my mother had no intention of calling me again.
I sat down at a desk and took off my coat, the image of a twelve-dollar spoon lingering on my mind.
My mother has been missing for nine days now. Not dead, but missing. I first found out six days ago, when her tennis instructor, Bart something-or-other, called me around dinner time, asking if I knew why she hadn’t shown up to her lesson.