Wild Game My Mother, Her Lover, and Me - Adrienne Brodeur Page 0,73
a colleague whose husband developed a drug problem. In the graph of my feelings, joy and sorrow had inched closer to the median. I had difficulty concentrating at my job and little interest in writing in my journals, something I’d been doing since I was thirteen.
On the surface, life appeared normal. Jack and I had a wide circle of friends and a routine of work and play that included hosting large dinner parties and caravanning across the border to a town south of Tijuana where there was a charming hotel nestled into the side of a cliff overlooking the Pacific. We’d reserve a large table in the hotel’s restaurant, drink pitchers of fresh margaritas, and wolf down homemade tortilla chips served alongside bowls of jalapeño-laden salsa and bright guacamole speckled with cilantro. A mariachi band crooned sped-up songs in minor keys, making sad tones sound happy, and our boisterous group sang along to “Bésame Mucho” and “Cuando Calienta El Sol,” talking over one another—mostly about nothing, local gossip and sports—until we surrendered to the hypnotic thrum of the waves below, our bellies full of carne asada, our minds blank with tequila. But it was here, surrounded by all these friends, vibrant flavors, and lively music, that I was at my loneliest. I felt as if I were watching myself from above, unable to comprehend the happiness of the people around me.
For Jack’s part, getting married had settled something in him, seemingly paving the long stretch of highway ahead upon which we could cruise for the rest of our lives. When Jack looked into the distance, the sight of all those mile markers—our thirties, forties, fifties, and beyond—put his mind at ease. A planner above all else, my new husband had already envisioned and could articulate a clear path to retirement. I was twenty-four; security in my dotage was the last thing on my mind. I wanted off the highway and onto country roads where we could explore, find secret meadows, have sex under the stars. If I saw a pendant at a museum, I’d imagine the love story behind it. If I passed a stooped-over old woman on the street, I’d wonder what her burdens had been. I wept at passages in novels, memorized poems. Jack was rational and practical and coveted stability. He was the most dependable man I’d ever known, but was I looking for dependability?
Margot and I grew closer. She continued to oversee my development as a serious reader, and our conversations about literature became my lifeline. As books emerged as an essential part of my everyday life, beneath the bustle and noise of it all, I was able to listen more deeply. Margot married my father that spring on his sixtieth birthday, becoming my stepmother and a permanent force for good in my life. She was the first person to intuit that I was in real trouble. We didn’t discuss my rising desperation directly at first. Instead, we would meet at the café adjacent to her bookstore, where she’d offer literary fiction as antidepressant. She gave me novel after novel: Love in the Time of Cholera, Their Eyes Were Watching God, The Lover, Vanity Fair. Each told stories of how characters coped with adversity, bad choices, life’s onslaughts.
“Books come into your life for a reason,” Margot said as she handed me another stack.
At the time, I didn’t quite grasp what she meant, but I craved the escape of plunging into these characters’ lives and figuring out their motivations and reactions. The novels wrenched me with their confrontations, pronouncements, and reversals, but they also brought into focus some of my hazy thoughts, providing moments of clarification. Like a woman possessed, I bought packs of three-by-five notecards and started compulsively jotting down my impressions of every book I read. On the front of each card, I detailed my overall response to the book, transcribed lines I loved, and highlighted essential themes, noting when those themes intersected with my own story. On the back, I wrote down words I hadn’t known and their definitions.
At Margot’s encouragement, I also signed up for a creative-writing workshop taught at UCSD, where, in my juvenile attempts to write fiction, my subconscious revealed its ongoing devotion to Malabar. In an early story called “The Pigeon Slayer,” I even managed to create the happy ending I felt my mother deserved. The piece was about an unhappily married hunter who smothers his terminally ill wife with a pillow and thus liberates himself to pursue his great