Wild Game: My Mother, Her Secret, and Me

by Adrienne Brodeur

Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it. —GABRIEL GARCíA MáRQUEZ

THE USES OF SORROW by Mary Oliver (In my sleep I dreamed this poem) Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.

Deception takes commitment, vigilance, and a very good memory. To keep the truth buried, you must tend to it.

For years and years, my job was to pile on sand—fistfuls, shovelfuls, bucketfuls, whatever the moment necessitated—in an effort to keep my mother’s secret buried.

Ben and Ben’s wife, Lily, promised an abundance of all. I’d known the Southers since I was eight, when my mother married Charles. I knew them in the way that a child knows her parents’ friends, which is to say not well and with indifference. I was fourteen.

My older brother, Peter, made his entrance after a long day’s work as a mate on a charter fishing boat out of Wellfleet. He was sixteen,

My mother had been coming to this town on Cape Cod since she was a young girl. Orleans

As a child, Malabar lived in Pochet; while married to my father, she owned a tiny cottage in Nauset Heights; and a few years ago, no doubt with some assistance from Charles, she’d bought a couple of acres of waterfront. She’d

My stepfather beamed and said, “To my sweet.” Charles adored my mother, who was his second wife and nearly fifteen years his junior. They had both been married to other people when they met through friends and fell in love.

Charles and Ben had been boyhood friends, brought together by a shared love of the town of Plymouth where Ben, a direct descendant of the Mayflower Pilgrims, lived and where Charles had spent summers in his youth.

Then she poured one for Peter. “The Pinot goes perfectly with the squab,” she said to us, as if we regularly paired wine with our meals. When I looked surprised, she shrugged, amused. “If we lived in France, you would have had wine with dinner starting when you were eight!”

We all knew the drill: Peter said good night and eased back inside, and Ted and I drifted around the house and down the wooden steps to the shore below. We didn’t have much to say to each other, this boy and I, so we didn’t talk. We went to our usual spot, lay down on the coarse sand, and started to make out as we’d been doing every night for almost a week.

“Ben Souther just kissed me.”

Ben was married, too, of course, to Lily. The Southers had been married for thirty-five years. Mom and Charles. Ben and Lily. The four of them had been couple-friends for as long as my mother and stepfather had known each other, about a decade now.

“He wants me to meet him in New York next week.

Charles must never find out.

I was happy for her. And for me. Malabar was falling in love and she’d picked me as her confidante, a role I hadn’t realized I’d longed for until that moment.

Maybe someone as vital as Ben could startle my mother out of the malaise she’d been in since Charles’s strokes and that had appeared, at times, in the years before.

Once I chose to follow my mother, there was no turning back. I became her protector and sentinel, always on the lookout for what might give her away.

Peter had turned sixteen in June, had a separate apartment over the garage (a source of envy), owned his own boat (another), and already had an eye toward the person he planned to become.

In our family, being right trumped being truthful.

Since our parents’ divorce, a decade earlier, it had been the three of us: Mom, Peter, me. My father was on the sidelines, of course, occupying the every-other-weekend-and-alternating-holidays real estate, and my stepfather, Charles, was present, too, with his four grown children from his previous marriage, now my stepsiblings. But our fundamental family unit since the divorce had always been a triangle,

Peter’s side would be cut loose, and once untethered from him, my mother and I would shape-shift into a single straight line, the most direct conduit for her secret.

she’d lost some essential piece of herself when she gave up her career as a journalist in New York City and opted for a gentler life and financial security by marrying Charles, who had family wealth.

Charles had made my mother wealthy, but she was doing the lion’s share of caregiving. Malabar would be forty-nine in the fall

Ben Souther had just publicly declared her marvelous, and that act had awakened the dormant marvelousness within her.

my first orgasm and my mother’s illicit kiss. Although I had long kept a journal,

my mother telling me secrets

she admitted that she’d been depressed for years.

Malabar confessed that after Charles’s strokes, she’d felt she had no choice but to marry him. “Before he got sick, I’d never been so in love in all my life,” she told me. “But none of the doctors could tell me if he’d ever be the same.

But now our mother would abruptly stop talking and regard her son with impatience

The sting of rejection would cross Peter’s face—easier

From here on out, I would be lying to everyone.

Mom, Ben, and I slipped into a pond

my parents split up, when I was five, my mother had been chasing a new and better life. That was in the early 1970s,

He remarried in 1971. Then my mother followed suit, remarrying in 1974.

Peter and I were nine and eight, respectively, when our mother married Charles

Overnight, my brother and I acquired four adult stepsiblings—none of whom lived with us—and vaulted up several rungs on the socioeconomic ladder.

frozen in a 1970s acrylic-cube frame, are six photos of Peter and me taken during this period. In every shot, our eyes look vacant and our expressions radiate worry and loss.

My father wrote daily, loved to fish and garden, and was content to live within his means. My mother was insatiable and acquisitive, always striving for a better, more fabulous life. To me, my parents have always seemed like polar opposites.

Born in Bombay, India, in 1931, Malabar was the only child of Bert and Vivian, two charismatic and narcissistic people whose epic and alcohol-fueled relationship resulted in their being twice married to and twice divorced from each other.

my grandmother accepted his proposal, and the two remarried in 1940. A year later, my grandfather secretly sired a son with a woman he promised to marry.

My grandparents split permanently after my mother finished high school, and Malabar ended up with the necklace.

my father, Paul Brodeur, who was then a staff writer for the Talk of the Town in the New Yorker.

My brother was two and a half years old when he died.

sixteen months after Peter, I came into the world. I was born on Christopher’s birthday, October 15. My birth has always felt like the result of a powerful and subconscious maternal urge to replace the life that had been lost.

Monday’s child is fair of face Tuesday’s child is full of grace Wednesday’s child is full of woe Thursday’s child has far to go Friday’s child is loving and giving Saturday’s child works hard for a living And the child that is born on the Sabbath day Is bonny and blithe and good and gay.

He’d been her cherished firstborn, a boy whose birthday I had unwittingly hijacked. Christopher became my obsession, but there was no competing with a ghost. I couldn’t help but think that if my parents had been given their choice between Christopher and me, they would have picked him.

our older brother had died before Peter and I were born, and we would always live in his shadow.

Lying wasn’t wholly new to me. It comes with the territory when your parents get divorced