Wild Game My Mother, Her Lover, and Me - Adrienne Brodeur Page 0,54
marriage to my first stepmother, my charming father had been a bachelor for twenty years with a steady string of interesting and attractive girlfriends. That he was settling down now surprised me. At first glance, Margot seemed lovely but unremarkable, a sprightly and bespectacled blonde about a decade his junior. But beneath her bookish exterior was an unconventional and sharp-witted woman, a seismologist when it came to emotional tectonics. Margot had an eye for art and small treasures, rivaled my mother in the kitchen, and owned a beautiful independent bookstore in Del Mar, a tony community known for its horseracing track.
She became a great friend to me and, over time, my confidante—an older, wise woman who was maternal in ways that Malabar was not. She asked probing questions and listened fully to my answers, a first for me.
Margot and my father threw dinner parties with their eclectic friends—writers, artists, and other intellectuals—and I never once left their home without Margot pressing a book into my hand, usually a novel. Somehow Margot divined that despite being the daughter of a New Yorker writer, I hadn’t had a proper literary education. It was as if she knew that I had not been one of those kids who sneaked flashlights under the covers to read at night. At 100 Essex, I’d had a television within arm’s reach of my bed and fell asleep every night to the ghostly sound of static.
“Books will change your life, Rennie,” Margot told me, handing me a copy of A Room of One’s Own. (I would later learn that Virginia Woolf held a special place in Margot’s heart; she owned a notable collection of the author’s first editions as well as other scholarly materials.) “You have no idea how much you can learn about yourself by plunging into someone else’s life,” Margot said.
I smiled at her, not fully understanding what she was saying but feeling a small ping of comprehension, an olive pit smacking the wall of my consciousness.
“You can read your way into a whole new narrative for yourself,” Margot promised.
* * *
During one of my regular phone conversations with Kyra, with whom I had remained close since that first summer, I told my friend that I’d finally put a healthy distance between myself and Malabar.
“Three thousand miles is no small thing,” I boasted.
Kyra laughed.
“What?” I said.
She stopped laughing. “Come on. You’re joking.”
“No. Why?”
“Never mind,” she said.
“You have to tell me,” I insisted.
“Look around you, Rennie. Look at who you’re living with.”
The cat was curled on the sofa beside Jack, who was watching the news.
Oh, that. I felt my face redden. “Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “The two are completely unrelated.”
My mother’s romance with Ben, going strong for eight years, was the alternate reality I’d grown up in. I was so used to it that it didn’t seem remotely strange to me. I’d been their sidekick and chief collaborator all along, weathering close calls, suspicious spouses, a blackmail threat. By now my mother’s friends knew about the affair and my role in it, and none of them had ever questioned the propriety of my involvement. I didn’t understand Kyra’s fixation on the coincidence. But she wouldn’t let it go; so many people knew, but Jack did not. Didn’t that concern me?
It did, and it didn’t. The thought roiled in my mind constantly, like a pebble caught in the ocean’s swash. I let myself believe that I was protecting Jack by not telling him and found comfort in the fact that he was not particularly interested in his family. He was not in touch with his sister, with whom he felt he had nothing in common. He was not particularly close to his parents. And he definitely had no interest in finding out about his biological roots. None. Here, his lack of curiosity fascinated me. How could someone not want to know where he came from? I didn’t understand it at all.
“Have you ever thought about whether you have biological brothers or sisters?” I asked Jack. We were taking an early-evening stroll on the boardwalk of Pacific Beach, one of Jack’s favorite places. Surely he must be curious about how the genes that made him might express themselves differently in someone else.
I stared out at the long expanse of gray—the boardwalk, the drab wedge of sand, the dark ocean—and couldn’t help but compare it unfavorably to Nauset Beach. I missed the dunes and plovers and the nooks of inlets where egrets balanced on one leg in the shallows.