dots of relief that he popped into his mouth at least a dozen times a day. I learned to make excuses and bury the truth with whatever I could throw at it.
Lying wasn’t wholly new to me. It comes with the territory when your parents get divorced and the two people you love and need most become adversaries. When I saw something disturbing at one parent’s house—an overnight guest or a dozen pills on the bedside table—I knew better than to seek comfort from the other because that bit of information would be used as ammunition in their warfare.
What’s more, lying and stealing were never truly discouraged in my home. The taking of “small liberties” to ensure that my mother got what she wanted in every situation was routine and often great fun, usually part and parcel of some elaborate game Malabar devised for our family’s amusement. There was our annual raid of the Millers’ vineyard to filch grapes for her homemade jelly. “They’re old friends, they won’t care,” she would insist, but she left the station wagon idling as we sneaked onto their land at dusk, furtively snipped off vines, and filled the trunk with fragrant bunches. Those adventures were as inexorably tied to the sweetness of her jelly as the wax seals that covered each jar and gave a delightful pop when pressed with the back of a spoon.
When I was about five, I decided to cheer my mother up by picking her a bunch of flowers. That day, my mother had been moping around our cottage in Nauset Heights, looking forlorn. She might have had a fight with her own mother, or maybe she felt frustrated by how long Charles’s divorce was taking; I’ll never know. Perhaps she was just hung-over from a party the previous night. Whatever the cause, I wanted to make her happier. I always wanted to make my mother happier.
Determined to pick her the most beautiful and bountiful bouquet she’d ever seen, I grabbed the kitchen scissors and embarked upon my mission. I dismissed the daisies that grew weed-like down the grassy center strip of our long dirt driveway, the random tiger lilies that poked through the brush, the dainty tea roses that twined around our picket fence. None were quite right. Then I saw them, the flowers for my mother’s bouquet, beckoning me from the top of the hill beyond ours: a zigzagging line of lipstick-colored zinnias in bright oranges, pinks, and purples, winking at me from the garden of our next-door neighbor. Undeniably cheerful flowers. I leveled the patch in three minutes, leaving a trail of decapitated stalks in my wake, never pausing to worry what the neighbors would think.
I floated home, my pinkie looped through the scissors’ handle, my arms barely long enough to go around my bounty. At the screen door, I was greeted by my mother with unabashed delight.
“Oh, Rennie,” she said, scooping me up along with the flowers and placing me on the counter. “You are the sweetest girl.”
My mother must have recognized these were someone’s zinnias, but there was no talk of right or wrong, no lecture about private property, no nod toward creating what today is known as a “teachable moment.” Instead, my mother arranged the flowers in a vase one stem at a time, first brushing the petals against my nose, then christening each zinnia with a lavish and silly name—Francesca, Philomena, Evangeline—and plunking it in the water. Pleasing my mother came with warm and immediate rewards. A week or so later, when Philomena and her friends started to droop, my mother handed me the scissors and nudged me out the door. I brought home bouquets all summer long.
Then there’s our flatware. To this day, among the flotsam that can be found at the bottom of the junk drawer in Malabar’s kitchen are errant pieces of Pan Am cutlery, circa the 1970s, tarnished reminders of my early life of crime. After Charles and my mother fell in love, when they were in the thick of their contentious—and, in Charles’s case, protracted—divorces, the four of us started to travel by plane with some regularity, flying to Boston, where Charles lived, to Martha’s Vineyard, where his family had property, and to various vacation spots.
This was at a time when air travel was luxurious, and we were treated like customers at a fine restaurant; even in coach, hot meals were served with cloth napkins and petite metal silverware. My mother coveted those Pan Am forks and knives.