He’d reasoned that his wife’s depression wasn’t about her failing heart but due to some intuition about the situation with Malabar, heightened since Charles had died. Ben thought he could relieve Lily’s anxiety and assuage her fears by assuring her that although, yes, he was in love with my mother, he had no plans to leave his marriage. I recalled my phone conversation with my mother on this topic. How wrong she had been about the potential outcome.
Where was Lily? I wondered. Her eyes were all over this reunion, I knew. I could feel her presence but could not see her face.
Ben led us past the main house to a small guest cottage with a wraparound covered porch. He told us to freshen up and join them when we were ready for a drink, and then he left. We’d never stayed in the guesthouse as a couple before, though Jack spent summers there during his college years. Was I exiled from the main house? The single room was perhaps twenty square feet and might have felt cozy were it not for the mounted heads, antlers, and horns that covered every inch of the walls.
“Mom gives Dad a ten-trophy limit in the house,” Jack said. “The rest go here.”
I unpacked, kicked off my shoes, and stretched out on the sofa bed, which had been turned down. When I looked up, I found myself staring into the nostrils of an elk whose giant chin extended out over the pillows. Not so many years ago, I’d helped my mother grind the meat of an elk Ben had killed, dropping raw chunks of it into the top of her old-fashioned crank, which extruded them out the side in spaghetti-like strands. She used the meat to make a lasagna, adding extra ricotta to mitigate the gaminess. Now it occurred to me that the wild-game cookbook, our ruse to give Ben and Malabar time together, might never see the light of day. Jack lay down on his side, facing me.
“Am I crazy or did you once tell me that your father smooshed a bloody duck into your face?” I asked, vaguely recalling a disturbing story Jack had recounted when we were first dating.
“Affirmative,” Jack said.
Unlike his father, Jack had never been much of a hunter or fisherman. He didn’t like the cold and didn’t have the patience those activities required. Nonetheless, when Jack was a kid, Ben would once in a while succeed in cajoling him into a predawn duck hunt with Tor and Tap. On one of these outings, when Jack was around ten, he finally managed to shoot a duck. His father was overjoyed at Jack’s first kill and whooped and hollered when Tor retrieved the bird and dropped it at his feet. Ben picked up the duck, spread its feathers apart to reveal the wound, and excitedly beckoned Jack over. When Jack bent down for a closer look, Ben grabbed his son by the scruff of the neck and ground the bird’s bloody backside into his face, part of some hunting rite of passage.
I rolled onto my side so that Jack and I faced each other. Jack was not adept in the language of emotion, but his expression was full of love. “Ready?” he asked.
Who could ever be ready for this, I wondered.
“Ready,” I answered.
* * *
When we walked into the kitchen, everything looked more or less as it always had, and yet there was a disturbing quiet in the room. We were on high alert, our ears up and our noses twitching like rabbits’. There was Lily, leaning against the countertop. She was as thin and brittle as I’d ever seen her, but there was a new fierceness about her too. Her wiry arms were crossed. This was her kitchen, her home, her family. I was on her turf now and there were new rules. When she saw Jack, her face softened and she smiled, opening her arms. Jack walked past me to embrace his mother as Lily regarded me over his shoulder. It was not an unkind look, but it made me understand that Jack had been hers before he was mine and that she’d been waiting for me, for this encounter. It would be, perhaps, the closest she’d ever get to confronting her adversary, perhaps her only opportunity to say her piece.
In this moment, it was as if a new circuit in my brain’s fuse box had been flipped, suddenly illuminating Lily as a whole person. Until then I’d seen her only through Malabar’s eyes: an ordinary woman who was holding back an extraordinary man, keeping him from the life he should have been living. Growing up, I had viewed Lily as the character created by my mother, bookish, plain, practical to the point of boring. But she was before me now, looking as formidable as hell. Here was a woman who’d survived Hodgkin’s lymphoma, infertility, and now infidelity. I had been wrong on Harbour Island; Lily was not the Melanie Wilkes in this story. She was Scarlett O’Hara. And she wasn’t going down without a fight.
When Lily’s husband of forty-five years had explained to her that he’d been carrying on an affair with my mother—a woman she considered a friend—and wished to continue doing so, Lily disabused him of that notion at warp speed, jerking his chain so violently that he heeled immediately. Ben had grown up in this town of Plymouth, Massachusetts, where he was a pillar of the community, a successful businessman, a prominent Mayflower descendant, and a family man. Was he prepared to give all that up and have his good name dragged through the mud?
As it turned out, he was not.
I was still not quite sure how much Lily knew about my involvement. Had Ben told her everything? How often had Lily replayed moments from the past? Me at fourteen initiating the clamming expedition the day after that first kiss; me at fifteen grabbing their hands and tugging them out the door for countless evening walks; me at sixteen participating in their wild-game cookbook; me at seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, artfully and fully engaged in this affair. Had Lily tabulated all those after-dinner constitutionals? Had she been told that I used to meet him and Malabar at the InterContinental for drinks while I was in college? Had she identified me as the mastermind behind the false-letter-writing campaign?
And now I was about to marry her son. Lily knew that I loved Jack—I was sure of this—but she also understood the depth of my mother’s influence and, no doubt, could see things still invisible to me.
My heart was beating so fast it felt as if one of Ben’s pigeons were nailed to my chest.
“Who needs a drink?” my future father-in-law asked.
We all did.
The beverages were poured, consumed, and replenished, tequila for Lily, beer for Jack, red wine for me. Ben made himself a gin and tonic, something I’d never seen him drink before but that turned out to be his favorite cocktail. Why had he never had it with my mother? Because Malabar detested gin.
Dinner was Jack’s favorite, the New England classic of steamed lobsters and corn. To that end, an enormous pot filled with a few inches of boiling water rattled its lid on the stove. Ben grabbed four large lobsters out of the sink, two in each of his enormous hands. Lily lifted the lid, and in they went. Ben slapped down the top with a bang and held it in place as the lobsters thrashed for a minute before the steam quieted them permanently. Meanwhile, Lily removed a piping-hot cast-iron skillet from the oven and set it on the stovetop. She put in a dollop of oil and a measured teaspoon of salt, then poured in her special cornbread batter, which met the pan with a hiss. This recipe, passed down through Lily’s family, had found its way into one of my mother’s Do-Ahead Dining columns.
We sat down at the small rectangular table in the kitchen. Ben took his usual place at the head, and Jack sat opposite him on a built-in leather bench seat under the window. This left Lily and me to face each other across the shortest gulf, an expanse of a couple of feet; she was close enough to reach across the table and hit me if she wished.
Ben arranged the lobsters on oval platters and placed an ear of corn between each one’s claws, just like at a restaurant. As he dispensed tools to excavate the meat—nutcrackers, kitchen shears, cocktail forks, and a single large butcher knife—he launched into a rambling apology where he acknowledged his guilt and expressed regret for hurting Lily and putting us all in a difficult situation. But his remorse came across as broad and obligatory—more performed than felt—and when the monologue petered out, we were left staring awkwardly at our plates.
The silence was broken when Lily cracked the long tail section of her lobster, causing a projectile
of juice and shell to fly across the table and smack me on the cheek. She tore into the creature as if she had a personal vendetta against it, tugging off all ten legs, twisting the claws until they gave with a poof, and separating the body from the tail, allowing the gray-green tomalley to slide onto her platter along with a strip of fire-engine-red eggs.
The smell of ocean and carnage filled my nostrils and I felt a wave of nausea. Jack and Ben started devouring their lobsters, ripping them apart and using their teeth to compress the soft shell of the small legs and squeeze the meat toward their mouths, where they could suck it out easily. They tossed the empty legs into a wooden bowl in the center of the table; the shells landed with hollow thunks. Jack’s chin glistened with butter and juice.
“So, let’s talk wedding,” Lily said.
Each time I thought Lily’s voice couldn’t possibly grow any weaker, it had. Her words evaporated as they exited her mouth. How did this couple fight, Lily without a voice, Ben unable to hear? I imagined her scribbling her bitterness down on paper, and Ben reading and growling a response.
“I want to know exactly how events are going to unfold,” Lily said.
I looked at Jack and started tentatively with the basics. “The wedding will begin at four thirty,” I said. Originally, we had planned on five, but Malabar told us it was good luck to marry on the half hour, when the hand of the clock was moving up.
Lily wanted to know the flow of the program: Who would walk her down the aisle? Where would she stand in the receiving line? Where would Ben be? I understood that she was trying to ascertain Ben’s and her positions relative to my mother at every moment. She wanted to know how far their table would be from my mother’s. Could they face away from her? The goal was to make sure Lily and Ben were kept at a discreet distance from Malabar at all times. There was to be no communication between them whatsoever.
Jack described the string quartet that would usher everyone in, where on my mother’s property the ceremony would be held, and the procession to the reception, which would take place next door on the expansive front lawn of the guesthouse. As he drew a map for his mother and placed a star over where the tent would be alongside the house, I wondered if Lily knew how often Ben and Malabar’s constitutionals concluded with visits to that cottage. I tried to move the conversation away from the guesthouse by describing the jazz band my father had found for the reception.
“A temporary dance floor will be built under the tent where the dinner is taking place,” I said.
At the mention of dancing, something snapped in Lily. Her hands were wrapped around a nutcracker, which was clamped over her lobster’s large crusher claw. Lily delivered a powerful squeeze and the claw gave way with a pop, releasing congealed white clumps of lobster blood onto her plate.
“There will be no dance,” she said.
“What?” I said, incredulous that Lily was ordering us not to have dancing at our wedding. I had to draw the line somewhere. I wanted Lily to be okay, but this was our wedding, after all.
“You heard me. There will be no dancing between Ben and Malabar,” she said, tossing the entire claw, meat and all, into the shell bowl. “The father of the groom and the mother of the bride will not dance at this wedding. Do I make myself clear?”
I understood that Ben’s deafness prevented him from hearing this exchange, but surely he could see it. The situation was readable. I looked at him. It was Ben’s job, not mine, to assure his wife that he wouldn’t dance with my mother. He did not meet my eyes. I looked to Jack for help; nothing there either. I was on my own.
“I am not asking you, Rennie, I’m telling you,” Lily went on softly, her rage gathering with a ferocious calm. And then, the eye of the storm: “Tell your mother to stay away from my husband at this wedding.”
I felt furious at the situation, at Ben’s and Jack’s silence, at the thought of our wedding as the stage for some as-yet-unwritten showdown.
“Okay,” I said, keeping my gaze on the ruined lobsters.
Nineteen
I was not looking FORWARD to confronting my mother’s heartbreak in person; it had been daunting enough from a distance of three thousand miles. That Malabar was suffering was undeniable. In the days, weeks, and months since learning that Ben had decided to stay with Lily, my mother had pivoted from heartbreak to fury, from incredulity to despair.
“I can’t believe I’ve lost them both. First Charles, now Ben,” she cried over the phone, repeating herself, as the heartbroken do. “What do I have to live for?”
Her periods of anguish were relieved by bouts of rage. If once upon a time Malabar had quietly hoped that Lily would drift off to sleep and never wake up, now she actively fantasized about her rival’s death, an essential part of her happily ever after. My mother felt sure that Lily had been in the room with Ben during his breakup phone call, listening to her husband’s side of the conversation, making sure he stuck to an agreed-upon script.
“They weren’t his words, Rennie,” my mother insisted. “I know Ben too well.”
It was Lily’s finger, my mother was convinced, that depressed the button that ended their call just a few minutes after it began, truncating their final goodbye midstream. “I was telling him I would always love him,” my mother said. “There’s no way Ben would have hung up on me. Only a monster could do that to a person. Only Lily.”
Insomnia plagued Malabar’s nights. She drank more heavily than usual and ate less, allowing her pain to become visible in the hollows of her cheeks and the concavity of her abdomen. Even though I understood that she’d been in the wrong, the way I saw it, my mother had already suffered plenty in her life. It all seemed unfair. I was about to get married; Ben and Lily still had each other, even if in a newly hostile situation. Only Malabar had ended up all alone. I worried that she was suicidal. Or, if she didn’t quite have the nerve to kill herself intentionally, it seemed possible that she could do it accidentally—a night of too much booze followed by a handful of sleeping pills.
Ben’s love had sustained her for years. Without it, what did Malabar have to look forward to? She was in her late fifties and of a generation and class of women who’d been brought up to feel obsolete without a man. It seemed possible that my resilient and determined mother had reached a point where she’d lost enough of her elasticity as to be unable to bounce back. This mistake, this miscalculation of Ben’s commitment, could cost Malabar permanently.
On the drive to Orleans, I warned Jack that the situation would likely be grim when we arrived. I told him that I would probably need to spend time alone with my mother, that she was in trouble. Jack grimaced but didn’t object. Since the affair had been exposed, Jack and I had stepped gingerly around the subject of Malabar. I carefully avoided talk of my mother’s anguish. In Jack’s estimation, his mother was the only one who deserved sympathy, a perspective I understood. I rested my head on the passenger-side window and watched as the backdrop changed the closer we got to Malabar’s Cape home, flocks of starlings over birch trees giving way to gulls over pitch pine and scrub oak. An imagined scene between Malabar and me played constantly in my mind: my lonely mother was propped up on a pillowed daybed in a heavily curtained bedroom, a tumbler of bourbon in hand, as I tried to help her imagine a future without Ben.
When Jack took the right turn onto our driveway and the pavement changed to gravel, I took a deep breath to prepare myself. He eased the rental car past the center circle around which the driveway looped and where a gardener was hard at work weeding, trays of plants at his feet. Two pickup trucks were parked on the widest part of the drive, one with its front door open, an oldies rock station blaring. A shirtless worker, balanced on a ladder propped against the side of the house, scraped paint from the trim. Two men in wheat-colored work boots and shorts banged nails into new shingles.
In the center of all this action, sitting on a director’s chair on the porch and wearing oversize sunglasses, Malabar waited for us. By the look of everything that was going on, my mother was prep
aring for our upcoming nuptials as if her life depended on it.
Not a year earlier, a few months after Jack and I became engaged, my mother told me in no uncertain terms that lavish weddings were a foolish waste of money. She didn’t need to do much convincing. Neither Jack nor I wanted a big to-do, and we were even less interested in the prospect of managing the details. A deal had been struck: if we agreed to keep things simple, my mother would handle the bulk of the planning. What was a wedding if not a big party? And Malabar knew more about how to throw a party than anyone I knew. Besides, I found tiny decisions like choosing among shades of white for tablecloths disproportionately stressful. Malabar’s choices would be exquisite, and I felt relieved not to have to be the one making them.
Malabar waved to us from her elevated perch.
“Un-fucking-believable,” Jack said.
“Rennie!” My mother leaped to her feet.
“Mom!” I extricated myself from the car.
Jack got out of the car but stayed next to it, folding his arms over the top of the vehicle’s door. “Malabar,” he said, nodding as he took in the scene. He made no move to ascend the three steps to greet her properly. This was when I realized that Jack’s understandable-but-not-acceptable mantra did not apply to Malabar, whom he now abhorred. “Looks like you’ve been busy.”
I bounded up the stairs to my mother, eager to protect her from Jack’s affront. We embraced for a long time.
“I guess a catch-up for you two is in order,” Jack said, still leaning against the car.
“What’s all this about, Mom? What’s going on?”
“Just giving the property a little face-lift for your big day,” she answered, stepping back to get a good look at me. “I’m so glad you’re here, darling. I’ve missed you so much.” She hugged me again. “Are you ready for the grand tour?”
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