The Rules of Inheritance

by Smith, Claire Bidwell

  Most people assume he is my grandfather, and I don’t bother to correct them anymore. Sometimes he makes a game of it. When some old lady in a diner approaches us, asking, Oh, is that your granddaughter? my father will lean back in his chair and chuckle.

  Nope, he’ll say. She’s my grandson’s aunt.

  We smirk at each other across the table as we watch her try to puzzle it out.

  He was fifty-seven when I was born. My mother was forty.

  My father, Gerald Robert Smith, was born in 1920 in Michigan. One of four children, he picked blackberries in the summer, delivered newspapers growing up, and enlisted in the air force the day after the attacks on Pearl Harbor.

  He was trained as a fighter pilot, flew B-24s over Europe, dropping bombs on Germany. His plane was shot down in 1944 and my father was captured and taken to a German prison camp for the last six months of the war.

  Although he likes to talk about the war, I find it impossible to follow along. War is a two-dimensional concept to me—a few pages in a history book read aloud in a class I don’t want to be in.

  There are more interesting parts to my dad’s life, I think. Like his other family.

  After the war, at age twenty-four, my father returned home to Michigan, to a wife he barely knew and to a son who’d been born while he was away. He finished college, went on to have a couple more children, and then moved his whole family to Southern California.

  My father then delved into a career as a mechanical engineer. He began working with men like Wernher von Braun, a German rocket-science engineer, whose name I will come across for the rest of my life. And for the next two decades my father traveled the globe, leaving his family alone in their little house in Pasadena, while he sat in smoky conference rooms with men who were trying to change the world.

  In my twenties my half siblings, who are all twice as old as I am, will tell me stories of the man they hardly knew, the one who came home late at night, the one who was gone first thing in the morning. The man with the temper, the guy who hardly knew his wife. This man they speak of, our same father, is one I never met, and sometimes I have to remind them of this when they question my devotion to him.

  In the early seventies my father moved his family again, this time to Florida. It was there that he finally divorced his wife Helen, and that his children became old enough to go to college.

  He married once more, this time for less than a year. I can never remember her name.

  By the time 1975 rolled around my father was living in Atlanta. He had three grown children, two divorces under his belt, and a prosperous steel-manufacturing company that afforded him more money than he’d ever dreamed of.

  1975 also found him wearing a funny blue suit he’d bought in Mexico as he rang my mother’s buzzer in Manhattan one warm June morning. The suit was stitched to look like denim and embroidered with brightly colored flowers.

  My parents had been set up on a blind date by mutual friends, but the night they were supposed to go out my mother stood him up. She’d gone to Long Island that day, with a friend, to pick strawberries, and by the time she came home the last thing she felt like doing was going on a blind date with some older businessman from Atlanta.

  My mother was thirty-seven years old and had lived in Manhattan for seventeen years by then. She had dozens of friends. She went to parties and art openings. She smoked pot in the Village and spent Tuesday nights in smoky jazz clubs, sipping martinis and recrossing her legs.

  My mother was funny and quick-witted, and always up for an adventure. She was uncommonly pretty, with those green eyes and that blond hair, that symmetrical face and easy smile. When she went to sleep that night in early June, in her little one-bedroom apartment on Twenty-eighth Street, she had no idea that her life was about to change.

  My father, at fifty-five years old, was just entering his prime. In spite of—or perhaps because of—the two divorces and three grown children, he was happier than he’d ever been.

  He flew first-class wherever he went. He stayed at the Watergate Hotel when he was in DC and the Plaza in New York. He winked at stewardesses and drank tumblers of scotch on the rocks. He wore hats and suits and left big tips at fancy restaurants.

  He wasn’t used to being stood up, so the next morning he rang my mother’s buzzer at 9:00 a.m. “Who dares call anyone before noon on a Sunday in New York?” my mother later wrote about that first encounter. “It had to be you, as they say, and I opened the door with wet hair asking if you wanted a Bloody Mary, which you did, thank God.”

  I try to imagine this moment between them. My mother in the doorway with her wet hair. My father on the threshold in his blue Mexican leisure suit. The moment of them not knowing each other eclipsed in one short breath.

  They went to the Sign of the Dove: “A very un–New York restaurant because it’s so pretty and light and which I hadn’t been to in years,” my mother wrote. “It couldn’t have been more beautiful and sunlit and green and smelling of fresh flowers and the oysters and eggs Florentine and bottle of Montrachet are what must have made me say yes to an invitation to go swimming in your pool in Atlanta that very evening.”

  They flew to Atlanta that afternoon and made daiquiris with the strawberries my mother had picked on Long Island the day before. They swam in my father’s pool and smoked Camels and talked into the night, their legs dangling into the water lit from below by the pool lights.

  They were married three months later on Cape Cod. I was born two years after that.

  The next ten years were a blissful time for our little family. My father whisked my mother away from New York and set her up in a big house in a nice neighborhood in Atlanta. He paid off all her debts, bought her a cream-colored Alfa Romeo, and opened an account in her name at every department store.

  When I was growing up, we spent the winter holidays on Grand Cayman, the summers in Mexico or Europe. My parents threw lavish parties that were well attended by Atlanta’s upper echelon. I went to private schools, carpooled with moms who drove Mercedes-Benzes and Saabs, and I posed for professional pictures year after year.

  I don’t think it ever occurred to any of us that it wouldn’t last forever.

  In 1987 the stock market crashed and so did the steel industry. My father’s company went under and he declared bankruptcy. In an attempt to escape the shame of it all, we moved to a small town in Florida.

  Destin is known to tourists as the World’s Luckiest Fishing Village. It sits on an isthmus, its population of almost twelve thousand residing on a low-lying mass of land sandwiched between the Choctawhatchee Bay and the Gulf of Mexico.

  At night little green tree frogs press their stomachs soft against my bedroom windows and Spanish moss filters down, almost audibly, through the trees. We live in a house on Indian Trail, a lonely street that stretches out long and flush against the bay. The homes are all on the bayside, our only neighbors across the street the dense and scraggly forest, a winding twist of dried-out trees and lichens, with lizards that snake underfoot and opossums hanging hidden in the harsh noon sun.

  By the time I am fourteen and in middle school, our life in Atlanta seems like just that—another life.

  ON THE WAY HOME from the restaurant I carefully pull the bottle of nail polish from my pocket and hold it down low, close to my leg, where neither of them will see it if they happen to turn around. I turn it over, admiring its shiny exterior, the full liquid contents inside. It’s like a prize, this bottle of nail polish. But a prize for what, I’m not sure.

  I slip it back into my pocket and tune in to what my parents are saying.

  Your stomach still hurting? My dad turns to look at my mother as he asks this. She is pressing one hand into her side.

  Mmmm, she says, not really my stomach, more my side. I keep thinking maybe I pulled something playing tennis last week.

  Honey, she says then, twisting in her seat as she addresses me, what do you want for dinner?

  I shrug at her, my heart racing with how close she c
ame to seeing the bottle of nail polish.

  You all set for school tomorrow? Any more homework?

  Nope. All set, I say.

  I am in the eighth grade at Max Bruner Junior Middle School. Each morning I bury myself in a book in the backseat of the school bus, lifting my head only as we cross over the Destin bridge, heading north into neighboring Fort Walton Beach. It is my favorite time of the day, this moment of suspension between home and school. To my left the Gulf of Mexico is choppy and sparkling in the morning sun, and to my right the bay, brown and shallow, is held softly by the land. The air, warm even so early in the morning, lifts the hair from my face, and I tilt my head to the sun. And then the gears shift, my back is pulled flush against the sticky seat, and we roll down the ramp and closer to school.

  I hate school. Each morning I count the hours until I am back on the bus, heading home to my room and my books, to my walks under the dock. I am impossibly tall and awkward, with a lanky frame, braces, and relentless acne. The girls at school are vicious, and the boys think I am intense. I write copiously in my diary and complain to my mother about the girls in Home Ec who make fun of me. She smoothes the hair away from my face and lifts my chin to meet her gaze.

  Trust me, she says, it won’t last forever.

  I want to believe her. My mother can always make me feel better about myself. But in doing so, she often makes my life a little bit worse.

  Sure, she says when I wonder aloud if I should wear one of her oversized sweaters. It has little scraps of fabric hanging all across it, in some misaligned early nineties attempt at fashion. At school the next day the kids call me “rag doll” and I skulk through the hallways, trying to make myself invisible.

  No, she says another time, when I beg her to let my best friend Tonia’s mom give me a perm. I have watched countless times as Tonia and her sisters sit dutifully at the messy kitchen table in their house, their mother carefully winding their locks into tight curls, then lathering on the chemicals.

  That’s tacky, my mom says.

  That night at dinner she asks me about Tonia.

  You haven’t had her over in a while, she says. Everything okay?

  Yeah. I shrug.

  Actually, things aren’t okay at all. Tonia has been hanging out with a different crowd lately. With girls who are more into going to the mall on the weekends than playing with Barbies. I have yet to completely relinquish the latter.

  Tonia and I got in a fight a couple of weeks ago and things haven’t been the same since. She has a crush on a guy named Regan. I was supposed to go home with Tonia after school one day, a few weeks ago, but at the last minute she told me she was going to meet Regan on the playground instead.

  Regan is a grade older than us, and I’ve heard bad things about him. Mostly that he’s kissed lots of girls and that he smokes some kind of sandweed or something. When Tonia told me she liked him, I got really mad.

  You’re never going to be president, I told her. And I know that hurt her feelings. Ever since we were in fourth grade Tonia has said she’s going to be the first female president. And I think she really might be. She’s the most organized person I know.

  My mom comes to my room after dinner. We lie back across the bed together to have one of our talks. It’s a ritual we have.

  Is everything really okay with Tonia?

  No.

  Do you want to talk about it?

  No.

  Okay.

  She’s got a new best friend.

  That must hurt. My mother leans up when she says this, propping herself on one elbow and training her gaze on me. I keep my eyes focused upward.

  Yeah. Jamie and I used to be friends too, but now she doesn’t talk to me either. The two of them act like I don’t exist. There’s, like, this whole group of them now that hates me.

  My mother sighs.

  It’ll get better, sweetie.

  When?

  I’m not sure. But it will.

  Tonia and I will be friends again? I look at my mother when I ask this.

  Well, maybe not, but life won’t always feel so . . . so . . . confusing. Okay?

  I guess.

  I lie back again, looking up at the ceiling.

  Look at me, she says all of a sudden.

  I turn my tear-filled gaze to her pretty face. She tucks an errant strand of blond hair behind her ear.

  This won’t last forever, she says.

  The world is a much bigger place than Bruner middle school. Those kids who make you feel bad? They’re never going to know that. They’ll grow up here, stay here, get married here, and have kids here. They’ll never find out anything more than the petty grievances they’re learning to inflict now.

  Her gaze is steady as she continues.

  But you, kiddo? You have bigger fishes to fry. I predict great things for you.

  I nod at her. I want to believe her.

  My mother lies back again and we are quiet, both of us looking up at the ceiling. Our arms are touching and I feel sleepy.

  I think about how, when I grow up, I want to be just like my mother. I’m going to have a daughter too, and we’re going to lie in bed at night just like this.

  MY MOTHER WAS BORN in New Canaan, Connecticut, the second of four daughters. The first, Phyllis, was the most beautiful and the last, Pamela and Penelope, were fraternal twins. Sally Edith Chatterton, my mother, was set apart from her sisters by more than the first letter of her name.

  She grew up in a big white house in a good neighborhood. My grandfather struggled with depression, and his wife was stern with desperation. The four girls, fueled by jealousy, driven by competition, tore at one another in their claim for parental approval.

  The Thoroughbred, my grandfather called my mother.

  Penny was pudgy, with red hair and freckles; Pammy was plain but perfect; and Phyllis, “Oh, Phyllis . . .”

  My mother’s sister Phyllis died at thirty. She died of a cat scratch, of blood poisoning. Phyllis was an alcoholic. Every story I’ve heard about her is the kind you forget immediately, the details at once jumbled even as you’re crossing the threshold of the room you heard it in.

  There’s much I don’t understand about my mother growing up, about the venom whispered after lights out, about the pinches, the dress stealing, the silent treatment, the lap claiming. I only saw the aftermath.

  My mother left home early. She went to Endicott Junior College, several hours away from New Canaan. She cried herself homesick before she even got there, but once her trunk was unpacked she flung herself into the nearest pack of girls and did what she knew best: flashed her ready smile and charmed her way into this new existence. She was class queen; she was never without a date; she was blond and loudmouthed and everyone loved her.

  She went straight from boarding school to Rhode Island School of Design. She and her roommate, Nancy, both of them painting majors, shared an apartment on Benefit Street. They flirted with the boys in the apartment across the alley, giggling as they sipped martinis and pretended not to look. Both of them met their husbands at RISD, my mother the first to date Bob, the man that Nancy would end up marrying.

  It was 1958 when my mother met Gene, a painter, a jazz musician, Gene who drove a motorcycle and Gene who, without a moment’s hesitation, swept my mother off her feet. I won’t actually hear about Gene until I am in high school, and when she talks about him a look will come across her face that I have never seen before. She will tell me about how they eloped one night, just before she graduated, and moved to Manhattan several months after that. The first night there they crashed on jazz musician Cecil Taylor’s couch.