Wild Game My Mother, Her Lover, and Me - Adrienne Brodeur Page 0,17

I just loved to hear her talk about it.

“It’s like that moment in the Wizard of Oz when everything goes from black-and-white to color,” she said, twirling her stool to face me, a strand of henna-covered hair slapping across her upper lip and sending beads of conditioner flying, making us both laugh.

“I’m not sure Ben is going to love you with a mustache,” I said, returning the stray tress atop its swampy pile and tucking the whole green mess into a clear shower cap. It had left a dark line below my mother’s nose, which I wiped clean with a warm washcloth. We did these treatments about once a month, usually on the Sunday before Malabar was to see Ben, when she was at her most jittery.

“Or maybe it’s more like diving into a wave,” she said. “You brace yourself for what you know is going to happen, but still, it’s a shock, right?”

There was so much tightly coiled inside my mother’s affair—love, sin, lust—that the situation seemed destined to explode sooner or later. I saw my job as protecting her, and all of us, really, from this eventuality.

I swiveled her around to face the mirror on the back of the door, my head above hers in our reflection. “Mom, what will you do if someone finds out?” I asked.

“No one will ever find out,” she assured me. “We’re being very careful, Rennie. Plus, we have you, our secret weapon,” she added, patting my hands as they rested on her shoulders.

I started the timer. The henna had to stay in for an hour. “But what if someone does?” I persisted. I worried constantly about this. What would happen to her, to us, if the truth came to light?

She leaned in close to the mirror, examining some flaw I couldn’t see or perhaps just buying time. “Well, that would be terrible, and I don’t even like to think about it, as it would kill Charles and Lily too,” she said. “They’re both fragile enough as it is. But if it were to happen, Ben and I would stay together. We’ve made that promise to each other.”

In the beginning, Malabar had been as nervous as I was about getting caught, so we were meticulous in covering her tracks. We developed complex alibis for her trysts in New York; she was either visiting her best friend, Brenda, who was single and had a busy career, or, more often, attending to her ailing stepmother, Julia, my grandfather’s much younger second wife. Julia, just a couple of years older than my mother, was a binge drinker with a long history of alcoholic episodes; “benders,” our family called them. It was a perfect ruse. My grandfather had died a year earlier, so my mother’s cover would not require his corroboration. Also, she had intervened to help Julia in the past, so the lie felt close enough to the truth that it passed effortlessly from our lips.

When I felt bad that we were hiding my mother’s secret by exposing my step-grandmother’s, Malabar assured me that Julia’s alcoholism was not remotely under wraps.

“When you’re a falling-down drunk, it’s not a well-kept secret, even if you live on Fifth Avenue. Trust me, Rennie, despite what Julia wishes to believe, everyone knows she has a serious problem.”

This was likely true. Julia did fantastically outlandish things when drunk, from stripping down to her underwear at dinner parties to passing out in a hallway where unsuspecting guests might stumble upon her in a pool of urine. With stories like Julia’s at my disposal, it would be easy to throw people off Malabar’s scent if it came to that.

When the timer went off, Malabar showered and washed the henna out of her hair and we moved from the master bathroom to her dressing room, possibly the only room in 100 Essex that could be described as cozy. It was our favorite place to talk. Furnished with a twin bed, a floral-skirted dressing table, a matching upholstered stool, and complementary drapes, the room was heavy with fabric and felt feminine in an old-fashioned way. My mother, who’d suffered from insomnia since Christopher’s death, usually slept in this room, ostensibly because Charles snored. When I roused her in the mornings, never easy, her head was sandwiched between two pillows with only her nose peeking out.

I took my usual perch on her bed, my back against the wall and my feet tucked under me to make room for her suitcase, which lay open at the foot.