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