“Really, Rennie? Would a last dinner with me kill you?” My mother ticked off all she’d done for me that day: schlepping me to New York City; buying hangers, an extension cord, a plastic bucket for me to tote my shampoo down the hall to the bathroom; helping me set everything up. “You have the rest of the year to spend with these strangers,” she said. Then she softened. “I’m sorry. I’m just missing you already.”
We found an Indian restaurant on Broadway. It looked questionable, with a cartoon Ganesh on the side of a threadbare awning, but we decided it had potential. When the waiter appeared to take our order, my mother told him she’d been raised in Bombay and Delhi and could handle real heat. “We want an authentic experience. As hot as the chef can make the vindaloo is how we’d like it,” she said.
Not me, I thought, imagining the stomachache that would follow. I studied the bread options: naan, roti, puri.
Then Malabar ordered a power pack in her usual rapid-fire staccato: “A dry Manhattan. Straight up. With a twist. No ice. No fruit.” When the waiter tilted his head quizzically, Malabar exhaled her annoyance and repeated the order at exactly the same speed. I asked for a Taj Mahal beer.
My eyes started to water at the first bite of lamb. To my satisfaction, perspiration beaded on my mother’s upper lip as well.
She gulped down water and we both started to laugh. It was rare for someone to get the better of Malabar in the kitchen. Either the waiter had taken her at her word—that she could handle the heat—or we were being taught a lesson and the entire kitchen staff was having a good laugh. We suspected the latter.
“You seem happy, Mom,” I said.
“Well, certainly not at the prospect of losing you again,” she said, frowning. “But at least now I’ll have a better excuse for all my trips to New York.” She took a dainty bite of vindaloo after wrapping the meat in a piece of naan. “I guess things are improving some. Life is so much easier with Hazel on the ground at home. I can do things like this—a night away—without worrying about Charles.”
“Does Hazel spend the night when you’re out of town?” I asked.
“No. Charles doesn’t need that level of help yet,” my mother said. “She just gets to the apartment before Charles comes home from work, tidies up, makes dinner, and double-checks that he takes his medications. She’s been a lifesaver.”
Their new apartment, in Boston proper, was closer to Charles’s office than their old one, but it was a more arduous walk uphill from the T at the end of the day. “The truth is, Hazel is as much for me as she is for Charles. Her presence gives me peace of mind. I’d never forgive myself if something happened to him and no one was there to help.”
“What does Charles think of her?” I asked.
“Hazel?” My mother puzzled over the question for a moment, as if she’d never considered it. “Hard to say. He tolerates her. It’s not as if she’s there to be his friend.”
“Is she an okay cook?”
My mother shrugged and then smiled. “She is certainly capable of putting a meal on the table. But let’s face it, the bar is rather high on the cooking front, isn’t it?”
I was looking for some level of reassurance that Malabar didn’t seem willing to provide. “Overall, he’s okay with the whole thing, right?” I asked.
“You know Charles. He doesn’t complain. But honestly, he doesn’t have much say in the matter. No doubt he’d prefer I was home every night to take care of him myself, but I just can’t do that. I simply can’t. I’d go mad.” My mother flagged down the waiter and ordered a glass of wine. “Not while you’re off doing your own thing again.”
I told myself not to take the bait, but I couldn’t help it. “Does going to college really count as doing my own thing?” I asked.
“Oh, Rennie, try to have a sense of humor,” my mother said. “Let’s not split hairs tonight.”
A cloud of tension spread and I found myself avoiding eye contact with her. With my fork, I plowed a path through the curry with a chunk of lamb, knowing that my mother hated for people to play with their food. As our dishes were cleared, Malabar asked—more courtesy than question—if I’d mind if she ordered another glass of wine. I told her that I wanted to get back to my dorm, a small assertion of will. That she was irritated was obvious, but she acquiesced and we walked out of the air-conditioned restaurant and into the muggy Manhattan dusk.
Before stepping into her taxi, Malabar hugged me tightly. “Rennie, I know I don’t always say it, but I appreciate all you do for me. I’m going to miss you desperately. I love you.”
“I love you too, Mom,” I said.
She got in the cab and rolled down the window. “Don’t ever forget that you and I are two halves of one whole.”
I watched the taxi speed off toward Brenda’s apartment, less than twenty blocks away. I’d heard somewhere that all the cells in the human body replaced themselves every seven years. If that was the case, I was already almost an entirely different human from the one my mother had woken up at age fourteen. If I wasn’t the same self I used to be, I certainly couldn’t be half Malabar.
When I got back to my room, I found a gift my mother had left for me on my desk: a small, leather-framed photograph of the two of us. I studied it, having no memory of when it had been taken or who took it. We were standing beside each other on Malabar’s deck, both of us leaning forward, vying for the last small slice of afternoon light. My mother had snagged it, of course; her right hand shielded her eyes. Her left arm was slung around me, vanishing behind my back and making it appear that she was missing that limb, like a pine tree bare on one side, competing for sunlight.
Eleven
College life was immediately engaging: I made friends with my hallmates, wrote essays and crammed for tests, and navigated what seemed like biweekly fire drills that left the occupants of our entire dormitory huddled on the quad in the predawn hours.
Then, late one night less than a month into my freshman year, I woke to the phone ringing.
“Rennie,” my mother said as soon as I picked up, her voice in a high register that made it clear she was struggling not to cry. I sat up in bed, disoriented. At first I wondered if I was having a bad dream.
“Are you there, Rennie?”
I rubbed my eyes. “Yes, I’m here. What’s wrong? Is Charles okay?”
“It’s not Charles. Charles is fine,” she whispered. “It’s me. Oh, darling, I’m in so much trouble.”
I waited, listening to her ragged breathing.
“I need your help. I don’t know what to do.” Then she burst into tears, a rare event, and cried inconsolably for several minutes. “I’m ruined.”
“What happened?” I asked. “Whatever it is, I know we can fix it.” I felt desperate to reassure her, but I could only hear sobs. “It’s going to be okay, but Mom, I can’t help you if I don’t know what’s going on.”
“That despicable woman—” she said, anger momentarily puncturing her despair.
“Breathe, Mom. Take three deep breaths.”
She inhaled and exhaled, gathering herself.
“Do you mean Lily? Are we talking about Lily?”
“No, no.” She started to sob again. “It’s Hazel.” She could barely speak. “That bitch found out about Ben. And now she’s blackmailing me. What a horrible, miserable person. I’m telling you, she’s had it in for me since the day she started working for us. And after all I’ve done for her. Trusting her in my home. Trusting her with my husband.”
Adrenaline surged through my body, that old familiar buzz.
“What exactly did Hazel find?” I asked, making my voice sound calm. “What evidence does she have?”
“Does it matter?” Malabar was hysterical. “If I don’t come up with ten thousand dollars, she plans to tell Charles and Lily everything. And if I do come up with the money, what guarantee do I have that this nightmare will end there? What will stop her from asking for more?”
I hadn’t met Hazel, but clearly she wasn’t as dimwitt
ed as my mother had suggested. “It does matter. Do you think she actually took something?”
“I don’t think so. I don’t know! What am I going to do?” Malabar was silent for a spell and then her voice returned, low and determined. “I will not let her take Ben from me. Ben is everything to me. Absolutely everything. My life isn’t worth living if I lose him.”
Even then, as a freshman in college, I still clung to the notion that somehow I was my mother’s favorite, more beloved than Peter or Christopher or even Ben. For better or worse, that was who Malabar was to me, the most central and important person in my life, even if I wished it were otherwise. For as long as her love affair had been going on, for me, the “we” had always been my mother and me. Not Ben and Malabar. If Ben was everything to my mother, then what was I? Was I not worth living for too?
“Okay, calm down. Let’s think. We can figure this out,” I said. “First of all, your life is absolutely worth living. Please don’t say stuff like that. It upsets me. Where are you right now?”
“In the kitchen,” she whispered.
I pictured my mother sitting on the stool, elbows splayed on the marble countertop. I heard ice cubes clink and the familiar glug of a bottle upturning.
“Go to sleep,” I said, realizing how much she must have had to drink already. “I’ll figure something out. I promise.”
“Oh, Rennie, I love you,” Malabar said, the words thick and heavy in her mouth. I knew she would take one final gulp of her drink to knock herself out. Before I could respond, there was a click and then a dial tone.
From there, I knew, my mother would bump her way down the hallway and slip into my bed, as she often did when I was away. I didn’t mind. In fact, I took comfort in the idea that she slept there. I almost never did. The new apartment would never be my home. Stashed in the drawer of my bedside table was a container of her sleeping pills. My mother would swallow a couple—part of her chemical lullaby—to ensure that she’d sleep like the dead for the next ten hours, her face surrounded by pillows. I thought of Christopher, the original source of her insomnia. Our shared birthday had just passed. I had turned nineteen and Christopher would’ve been twenty-three.
After hanging up, I pulled the first all-nighter of my college career. I paced back and forth the length of my short room, approaching the Hazel problem from every angle. If the woman had evidence, we would have to undermine it. If she didn’t, we would have to poke holes in her story. Hazel, this caregiver whom I’d never met, had become my enemy. I needed to figure out how to discredit her, show that she was unhinged, envious, greedy.
At four in the morning, an idea appeared, fully formed.
* * *
Later that day, I called my mother while Charles was at work and had her scour the apartment looking for whatever had tipped off Hazel. I remained with her on the phone while she flipped through the stack of letters crammed into the oval-shaped velvet container on her desk. Nothing. The contents of both of our bedside nightstands. Nothing. The drawers of her dressing table. Nothing.
I thought about the photographs of our family that hung in the hallway: Peter and me growing up on Cape Cod, my mother and Charles on various trips, a few shots of my stepsiblings, grandparents, and other more distant relatives. There was a single shot that included Ben. Taken on the Southers’ lawn, the photograph featured an enormous taxidermied crocodile that Ben had killed, a canoe of equal length behind it, and Ben and my mother kneeling next to each other behind that. They were leaning forward, beaming into the camera, their knees no doubt secretly touching. Charles was standing to one side, looking down at his shoes, his expression inscrutable. Lily, presumably, was the photographer. The shot was revealing only if you already knew about the affair. It was an odd choice to exhibit on a family wall, to be sure, but hardly evidence.
“I have a plan, but for it to work, I need to have some idea of what Hazel knows,” I said. “Can you think of anything?”
After a long pause, Malabar said, “Oh God, Rennie. I know exactly what Hazel saw.”
“What?”
“I can’t believe I did something so stupid.”
“Mom?”
“Give me a minute,” she said.
I heard her put the receiver down and then, a few seconds later, pick up another in a different room.
“You’re going to think I’m an idiot.”
“No,” I assured her, bracing myself. “Just tell me what it is.”
“I kept a file.”
“A file?” I repeated. “What do you mean? A file on you and Ben?”
I heard a metal drawer slide open and suddenly understood. In my mother’s office, beside her desk, was a nondescript three-drawer file cabinet. I knew its contents well. The top drawer held travel- and food-related information—notes for articles Malabar planned to write, clips of her published pieces, pamphlets for resorts where she hoped to vacation. On my most recent visit, my mother had proudly shown me her signed contract with Globe Pequot, the publishing house that was to publish a compilation of her Do-Ahead Dining columns in the coming year. In that same file, she kept her notes and test recipes for Wild Game.
I had never bothered much with the second drawer, which held dull financial records—bank statements, real estate appraisals, copies of old tax returns. But the bottom drawer was a gold mine of information. In it were alphabetized files on every member of our family: Christopher—photographs, his birth certificate, the many condolence letters; Charles—their wedding announcement, information on Plimoth Plantation, his health records; Peter and me, separate files but with similar contents—birth certificates, report cards, childhood drawings, scribbled love letters to our mother. Malabar also kept a file for each of her parents, another for correspondence with friends, and one for unpublished short stories, which I hadn’t known she wrote. And at the very back was a hidden file that contained the makings of a scrapbook of her love affair with Ben.
“I kept it where I thought it would be impossible for Charles to reach,” my mother said. “Not that he would ever snoop.”
My mother was right. Charles was not the sort to spy; that wasn’t his style. Nor was it possible for him to stoop over or get down on his knees easily.
“It never occurred to me that anyone else would look,” she said.
“What’s in it?” I willed my voice to conceal my panic.
“Everything,” Malabar said.
I heard contents rustling. “InterContinental hotel stationery. Matchbooks from every restaurant we’ve been to. Cocktail napkins. Amtrak ticket stubs. Delta Shuttle receipts.” Then she paused, and I could hear a smile in her voice. “A love note.”
“I thought Ben didn’t put his feelings on paper,” I said.
“I talked him into it exactly once,” she admitted. “He used initials, not names. It reads ‘M., I love you absolutely. B.’”
I wondered if Hazel had crosschecked the dates of my mother’s travel with Ben’s various board meetings, which she marked with line drawings of fish in her calendar.
“Anything else?” I asked.
What followed was a silence so long that I thought my mother had put down the receiver.
“Six Polaroids,” Malabar finally said. “I promised Ben that I would destroy them, but I never did.”
“How bad are they?”
“Very.”
So Hazel had seen a full dossier on my mother and Ben’s love affair.
“Can you tell if anything is missing?”
“I don’t think so,” my mother said. I heard paper shuffling. “No. Nothing’s missing. It’s all here.”
* * *
Our plan was this: My mother would tell Hazel she needed at least a week to get the money together. During that time, we would finalize every detail of our operation. My mother, pretending to be Hazel, would send letters to a handful of married friends who ran in Lily’s circle, including Ben’s two sisters, alleging that Malabar was having affairs with their husbands. Our hope was that in the tsunami of
preposterous accusations of infidelity, the real one would get lost, a ripple in a vast ocean.
I skipped classes for several days.
Over the phone, Malabar and I struggled for the perfect opening phrase. We decided that there was no good way to soft-pedal an adultery accusation, so we settled on I regret to inform you. Paragraph two varied from woman to woman but essentially introduced specifics and provided a scenario: Malabar was seen with your husband leaving the Four Seasons Hotel . . . There are receipts for a weekend flight to New York . . . A photo of your husband and Malabar was found in her bedside table. The closing lines required the greatest consideration. Hazel needed to appear to be making her case, but at the same time there had to be a flaw in the scenario she presented, a refutable fact that would undermine the credibility of her accusation. We accomplished this by selecting a date on which we knew the purported lover had an ironclad alibi—a major family occasion, such as a birthday or anniversary—that made it impossible for him to have participated in the alleged tryst.
Malabar drafted, redrafted, and polished these letters, imitating Hazel’s handwriting. She read them aloud to me over the phone, and if she had any doubts about the final product, she redid the letter. When they were all finished, she tucked them into envelopes and drove around Boston and Cambridge and Newton, mailing each from a different post office.
As the phone calls came in from various shocked friends, I could picture Malabar in her kitchen, leaning against the wall for support as she held the receiver. She would likely be nervous at first, but I knew my mother would find her groove quickly. The plan was for her to act like she’d been fielding these calls for days.
Can you believe it? I imagined Malabar saying as she roped the phone cord around her long, elegant fingers. I’m so sorry that this caused you even a moment of distress.
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