Wild Game

by Adrienne Brodeur

  The only hard part about taking care of Charles was the lying.

  I had to confirm Malabar’s alibi, corroborating her story if only with my silence. At first, it felt simple. But over time that silence became a heavy weight. When you lie to someone you love—and I did love Charles—let alone when you lie so often that the lie seems truer than the actual truth, you lose the only thing that matters: the possibility of real connection. I lost the ability to connect with Charles the day the first lie fell from my lips.

  Over time, I began to lose it with myself too.

  By the second half of tenth grade, I had stomachaches all the time. My mother took me to a specialist, who suggested the pain might be stress-related. Without my mother in the room, the doctor asked me about my extracurricular activities, my social life. Did I have lots of friends at school? I assured her that I did, but the truth was I had not knit myself into the fabric of the Milton community. I had more acquaintances than close friends, did not play team sports or involve myself much in afterschool clubs. Did I have a boyfriend? she wanted to know. “A pretty girl like you must have a lot of suitors,” she said.

  I did not, but I knew better than to explain that the bulk of my romantic energy was spent in the service of my mother.

  “Oh, you know, I have some crushes,” I said truthfully, and this seemed to satisfy her. “But most of the boys in my grade are immature. Plus I need to focus on my schoolwork.”

  “What kind of grades do you get?” she asked.

  “Pretty much straight As,” I said.

  She nodded knowingly. “That’s likely the problem. You’re a perfectionist. I think perhaps you need to relax your standards. Go easier on yourself.”

  When my mother joined us in the examining room, the doctor suggested the demands of Milton’s academic environment might be the source of my stress and that I could be developing an ulcer. She suggested that I avoid sodas, caffeine, and spicy and acidic foods.

  “Thank you so much,” my mother said to the doctor with a sigh of relief. “I’m sure this is all my fault. As Rennie probably told you, I can be a bit exuberant with the cayenne.” She laughed and looked at me. “And you, young lady, have to concern yourself less with the As and get out more. Honestly, life’s too short!”

  On our drive home, I thought about my latest reading assignment, The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. I wondered if my mother felt any of Hester Prynne’s shame, if Ben was beset by Arthur Dimmesdale’s guilty conscience, or if they would have dismissed the novel as puritanical schlock, as my father had.

  My mother insisted that she felt not one whit of guilt about the affair. “Here’s how you need to think about it, Rennie,” she told me. “Ben and I didn’t mean to fall in love. It just happened. The important thing is that we have chosen to put Charles and Lily first. Neither of us wants to hurt them. You understand that, right?”

  I nodded.

  “Leaving them would wreck their lives. Divorce is messy and painful, and it’s nothing anyone wants. Plus, Charles and Lily are not in good health. This news would make their situations worse. So, really, Ben and I are acting altruistically here. As are you, sweetie.” She patted my thigh. “You are helping us to do the right thing. The plan is to honor our wedding vows—until death us do part. Does that make sense?”

  It did and, oh, how I loved it when my mother spoke to me this way, woman to woman, absolutely nothing but trust and honesty between us. At last, I understood the immensity of my mother and Ben’s sacrifice. The plan was to wait for Lily and Charles to die. It was the narrative they’d settled on. At the time, it struck me as noble and even kind.

  Six

  With Charles and BEN’S long friendship as cover, my mother courted a relationship with Ben’s wife. Lily was famous for her English-style flower gardens, abundant and robust, that stretched along both sides of their large lawn and wrapped around their house. She did all the work herself, spent hours bent over digging, planting, fertilizing, and weeding, and her gardens were immaculate. My mother cooed over them, showered Lily with compliments. To me, she confessed that she didn’t understand the fuss. “Tidy rows. Sturdy stems. Color, of course. But, really, where’s the creativity?”

  What my mother chose to see in Lily’s industriousness was a lack of imagination and a rigidity, an attempt to wield control and impose order, and she assumed that this was how Lily conducted herself in her marriage as well. “Ben is like a wild animal,” my mother said in a way that made me understand that we’d left the topic of gardening. “The man needs a jungle.” My thoughts went to the untamed tangle of rose hips that scrambled along the banks of our property and the shorebirds that feasted in the sand flats below. I imagined Ben would be happy here.

  My mother also developed an interest in Ben and Lily’s two children, Jack and Hannah, who were in their early twenties when the affair began. I had yet to meet either of the Souther kids but I became intrigued by them too. Jack was a California lifeguard in the summer and a Colorado ski patroller in the winter; Hannah was an equestrienne in Massachusetts. My mother speculated that these professions might be disappointing to their MIT graduate and businessman father. Lily had kept a series of leather-bound diaries of her children’s early years, with lengthy entries describing their dispositions, activities, and which foods did and did not appeal. And although Malabar pored over these pages with Lily admiringly, she scoffed at them to me privately. “So much time spent on pureed peas!”

  That said, in her own children’s baby albums—Christopher’s, Peter’s, and mine—Malabar did much the same. She wrote hilariously about our likes and dislikes, taped tufts of our white-blond hair to the black pages, and drew diagrams of our open mouths with arrows and dates to indicate which teeth came in when. In entertaining captions, she listed our talents and aversions, attempting to capture each of our baby essences at age one. Christopher: Crawls forward and backward, shreds newspaper, grabs everything! Peter: Bad temper and willfulness! Rennie: No talents, but appetite!

  And there were the Southers’ trips. All those trips, dozens of expeditions to far-flung places, from China and India to the Galápagos, to Mexico and Argentina, all over Europe—Scotland, Denmark, France, and Spain—to Africa and every part of America. Ben had run a company in Boston that had subsidiaries in thirty different countries, so many of these trips had been work-related, but just as many had been for pleasure. Aghast, my mother told me of week- and even month-long gaps in Jack’s and Hannah’s baby journals when Lily was off gallivanting somewhere with Ben. “What kind of mother could leave her children for so long?” Malabar wondered aloud. “It’s monstrous.”

  I was appalled right along with Malabar, adopting her feelings as my own, but I could tell that the Southers’ trips were a genuine source of envy. Although Ben was retired, he was still active on many boards and organized his life around fishing and hunting adventures. My mother coveted a life of travel like the one her father had had with her stepmother, Julia. Between Julia’s stays at the Betty Ford Center, my grandparents were always in some fabulous hotel in some exotic country. Charles had given my mother a comfortable life, but his globetrotting days were far behind him.

  The long and short of it was that even Lily found Malabar beguiling. Who could blame her? When my mother aimed her light at you, let it shine on you and allowed you to feel that you held her interest and amused her, it was nearly impossible to look away. Malabar could be intensely charismatic, a breath of fresh air, an irresistible combination of clever and irreverent, and Lily was enchanted. Soon enough, the two couples were spending even more time together and the Southers became our most frequent summer houseguests on Cape Cod. They visited regularly, allowing my mother and Ben’s romance to carry on apace, nearly in plain view.

  Still, it was never enough. My mother was ravenous for more time with Ben. She felt despair during the weeks and sometimes months between their encounters.

  “Rennie, I don’t think I can stand this anymore,” she said once, frant
ic after Ben and Lily had postponed an upcoming weekend visit.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “Some damn flower thing of Lily’s. There’s a group touring gardens in Plymouth and Lily’s is part of the circuit.”

  We were on Cape Cod for a late-September weekend, a bittersweet time full of reminders of previous pleasures—our hammock down, the boats pulled, the marsh grass becoming golden brown. My mother and Ben had just celebrated their one-year anniversary. I was about to turn sixteen.

  “Think, Rennie. We need to think. How do we get the Southers to the Cape more often?” my mother asked. “The more time Ben spends with me, the more time he’ll need to spend with me.”

  We were in the kitchen, as usual, my mother testing a recipe for the next week’s Do-Ahead Dining column, a savory autumn stew. She tossed a handful of smoked sausage into a pot of French lentils, stirred angrily.

  “Bite?” she asked, blowing on a spoonful.

  I nodded and opened my mouth. I’d been taste-testing for my mother for as long as I could remember. I rolled the mouthful over my tongue—toasted cumin seeds, still-firm lentils, a rich tomato base, some spice. The kielbasa was deliciously salty but hadn’t yet mingled adequately with the rest of the mélange.

  “Good, not great,” I said. “Needs something.” I didn’t remind my mother that this was the type of spicy, acidic dish that bothered my stomach.

  “What a food snob you’ve become,” Malabar said with pride. “I suppose you’d prefer Tibetan yak in your stew? Or perhaps the perfectly marbled earlobes of a Wagyu cow, massaged just to your liking?”

  Suddenly my mother’s expression changed as the shards of an idea raced toward her like iron filings to a magnet.

  “Oh. My. God. Rennie. That’s it.” Malabar leaned across the counter, took my face in her hands, and kissed my forehead. “Rennie, you are the most brilliant child in the world.”

  I lived for moments like this with Malabar. Even though I didn’t understand exactly what I’d said or done to solve my mother’s problem, it was enough to know that I had helped. As I listened to my mother tell me her grand idea, my heart raced with excitement. Together, we’d come up with just about the most ingenious plan ever concocted.

  A few weeks later, we were able to launch our rocket of an idea. My mother had looped Ben in on the details during one of their exceedingly rare phone calls, and they both agreed that my participation was key.

  It was early October by then, the harbor empty of all boats other than those belonging to the most intrepid commercial lobstermen, and even those would be pulled in the coming days. Ben had just returned from his annual black-tailed deer hunt at a ranch in San Felipe, California, and he and Lily arrived bearing venison steaks and a pound of lustrous liver, which my mother immediately skinned, sliced, and placed into a dish of buttermilk to extract the blood. Charles, seated on his usual tall stool, the one closest to the bar with its shakers and stirrers, perked up at the sight of his dear friends. Immediately, Ben started telling us the story of how he’d fallen out of a pickup truck, unnoticed by his buddies, after consuming a fifth of bourbon.

  “On that note, Ben, why don’t you make everyone a cocktail?” my mother suggested.

  Charles yielded his host duties without a word, and Ben made a round of drinks while my mother got busy with the liver. She pinched oregano and sage leaves from her herb garden and sautéed them in butter and garlic, infusing the kitchen with their heady fragrance. Next, she caramelized shallots and other vegetables and, in a separate pan, sautéed the shiny slabs of liver.

  Malabar was still in the kitchen when the rest of us put on jackets, went out into the crisp autumn air, and sat in a semicircle around the deck table, its center umbrella lowered and strapped for the season. The sun was making its descent behind us, casting long shafts of light across the harbor and creating the illusion that the marsh grass was on fire, glowing golden from beneath the surface of the water. From inside, the whir of the Cuisinart sounded as my mother blended the liver and vegetables, no doubt adding chunks of soft butter and salt flakes. Across the windswept bay, we heard terns screeching, and suddenly dozens materialized before us and dived toward some underwater disturbance. Then the surface of the water broke with a thrash of fins—what my father called “a bluefish blitz”—and thousands of minnows leaped to escape the fish hunting them below, only to be snatched up in the beaks of black-capped terns above.

  I studied Ben as he observed the carnage. His body twitched the way some men’s bodies do when they watch a football game, imagining that they are catching the pass. I could tell he would have liked to grab a rod and dash down to the water—which was what my father or Peter would have done—but instead, hearing the rapping on the glass slider, he turned to help my mother, who stood on the other side holding a large round serving board. They beamed at each other as she slipped past.

  The birds dispersed and their feeding frenzy ended as ours began.

  Malabar lowered the artfully arranged predinner offerings: paper-thin slices of ruby-red venison carpaccio under dollops of horseradish crème fraîche, a bowl of wrinkled and briny olives, two triangles of overly ripe cheese oozing past their soft rinds, and a dish of her ethereally smooth venison pâté tucked in beside a collection of cornichons and slices of pickled onion. The tray was a thing of beauty, each delicacy separated by sprigs of rosemary from my mother’s herb garden and garnished with Lily’s nasturtium flowers.

  Malabar admired her handiwork and let loose a hearty laugh. “If something on this board doesn’t kill us, I’m not sure what will,” she said, raising her glass. “To salmonella!”

  “Legionnaires’,” Charles toasted.

  I raised my glass and took a big swig of ginger ale.

  “Bring on the bacteria!” Ben said, taking hold of Malabar’s free hand. My mother had long, slender fingers that curved up like ski tips at the ends. She kept her nails filed into sharp points, ten tiny daggers. Ben kissed her palm. “Malabar, I can think of no better way to go than to be poisoned by you.”

  The ice-cold soda got stuck on a knot of remorse in the back of my throat.

  Lily registered my distress by rolling her eyes at me, a look that I took to mean I’m not worried, so don’t you be. Pay no attention to these old fools. Seeing Lily’s lack of concern, I relaxed a bit. Still, something on my face had given away my concern, and I felt sick that Lily had seen it. Stupid, I chided myself, and I willed Ben and Malabar to be less obvious.

  My mother spread generous scoopfuls of venison pâté over thin slices of toasted and buttered French bread and placed one round onto each of our open palms as if bestowing the Host at Communion. We popped them whole into our mouths; the flavors and textures settled over our tongues as the whipped and gamy layers revealed themselves in slow motion.

  “Heavenly,” Ben said, his words muffled around his mouthful.

  Charles nodded.

  “Wait! Everyone, I have an idea,” my mother announced dramatically, bringing her hands down on the table.

  I perked up. This was my cue. My mother and I had practiced how to mortar each brick into this storyline, and it was critical to get Charles and Lily onboard. This conversation could not be solely my mother and Ben. That wouldn’t look good. My role was crucial.

  Malabar took a leisurely, palate-cleansing sip of her power pack. Her audience leaned in. “What do you think about”—she paused for effect—“a wild-game cookbook?”

  I took another sip of ginger ale and waited a beat.

  Charles’s eyebrows lifted in contemplation; he was no doubt imagining what the next year of test dinners might promise. He’d been enjoying the fruits of Malabar’s labor with her Do-Ahead Dining column, but this had not always been the case. Early in their marriage, my mother had agreed to put together a charity cookbook for the middle school that Peter and I attended. The other parents, decidedly unsophisticated cooks, submitted recipes, and for one very long year, Malabar tested the gelatinous, one-dish cassero
les. Charles would arrive home in the evening, take a look at my mother hunched over the stove, the telltale red notebook on its stand, and cringe. “Sweet, no. Not another test night.”

  “What exactly counts as wild game?” I asked now. “Sounds a bit gross—just meat, meat, and more meat?”

  “Oh, Rennie, not at all,” my mother said. “Our cookbook can be whatever we want it to be. It should definitely include seafood; just look at the bounty out there. And vegetables, the types you can forage for. Lily, you could teach me about mushrooming.”

  Lily smiled at the thought of having a role.

  “But who would buy it?” I said, playing devil’s advocate, my tone hinting that the adults were out of touch. “Not everyone has a hunter in their midst. You guys are the exception, not the rule. All this”—I pointed to the tray of appetizers—“is not exactly normal.”

  “Normal, my dear,” my mother said in her most regal voice, “is not something I’ve ever aspired to be.”

  “Okay, fine. You’re not normal, Mom. But not one kid at my school eats pheasant or rabbit. There will be, like, ten people who’ll buy this book.”

  “I disagree, Rennie,” Lily said.

  I exhaled; she had taken the bait.

  “Think of all the people who are becoming dismayed by the food industry these days, with how we raise meat in this country,” she continued. “The chemicals. The pesticides. The conditions.”

  Hook, line, sinker.

  My mother blinked love my way, Morse code–style, and Ben tapped his knee against mine under the table.