The Rules of Inheritance

by Smith, Claire Bidwell

  How about some yogurt? I say gently. This suggestion is met with dramatic eye rolling and scoffing.

  I try again. A smoothie?

  West Coast Editor drops her head to her desk. She is nearing fifty, single, and surprisingly unkempt for someone who runs the LA office of Big Fancy Magazine. She is wearing jeans and an ill-fitting blouse. Her blond hair hangs limply past her shoulders and her face looks puffy from too many cocktails at whatever event she attended last night.

  Nooooo, she moans.

  It’s important for you to eat, I remind her. I try to tamp down the rising sense of panic swelling in my sternum. This is not going well.

  West Coast Editor offers no response. She doesn’t even lift her head from the desk.

  We could order something from that macrobiotic place, I say.

  Or how about just a bar? I’ve got a box of raw-food bars at my desk.

  All these suggestions are ones I have been instructed to use by the girl who had my job before me. Her last day was yesterday, and when she walked out of the office for the final time she had a look on her face like I’ve only seen on newly liberated kidnap victims in Lifetime movies: shattered and disbelieving, no longer able to recognize freedom. I know I should take this as a warning, but I’m too excited to actually be working at Big Fancy Magazine to care.

  No, West Coast Editor says sulkily in reference to the raw-food bar.

  She picks her head up and inspects her computer screen, scanning the new e-mail waiting there. Her hair is clearly unbrushed. One side of it is snarled. The other side stills retains some of yesterday’s blowout from the salon.

  A beat passes.

  Fine, she says suddenly. A smoothie.

  West Coast Editor swivels away from me, and I follow her gaze through the windows of her office. Buildings spread out against the backdrop of the distant mountain range that separates the city from the valley. The Hollywood sign is faintly visible in the background and palm trees dot the landscape.

  I’ve been living in LA for three months. The city feels like the opposite of New York, where I lived for the past four years. The palm trees, the wide-open boulevards, the ocean air, and hazy sunsets all play with my head. I miss Manhattan. I miss the sidewalks and the throngs of people. I miss my walk-up apartment in the East Village. I miss my bartending job and my magazine internship.

  It was a hard decision to leave New York. After my mother died I dropped out of my quaint Vermont college, with its white clapboard buildings and ruddy-cheeked students, and moved to Manhattan, where my first friend was the shirtless old man across the street who wore a pair of pearl earrings every day and had built a sixty-foot structure made of wood scraps in the community garden next door.

  It had taken the better part of four years to feel like I actually belonged in New York. Not to mention that I had just been asked to apply for a job at Time Out New York, the magazine where I’d been interning during my final semester of college at the New School.

  I cried that afternoon, walking home along Second Street, through the East Village, past the vintage clothing shops and little cafés, knowing that I would have to turn down the job. I had promised my father that I would move to California when I graduated. He’d been waiting patiently, storing up doctors’ appointments for me to take him to, and planning day trips for just the two of us.

  But then the Big Fancy Magazine thing happened and suddenly the move didn’t seem so bad.

  I think about this as I tap my high heel impatiently, waiting for the smoothie. I can’t shake the gnawing feeling that taking this job was a mistake. I glance at my watch: 9:04 a.m. My father should just be arriving at the hospital for his third day of radiation treatment.

  A month after moving to LA, my father found out that his cancer was back. Ten years ago my mother discovered she had stage 4 colon cancer in the very same month that my father was diagnosed with his. He was forced to choose radiation over the more successful prostatectomy since my mother was the one who needed immediate surgery.

  The radiation has kept him cancer free for ten years, but last week, in the office of a tired-looking doctor at the VA hospital, we were informed that his tenure was up. We had been waiting patiently, tension building, as the doctor shuffled through a stack of files on his desk.

  My dad was wearing one of his favorite no-iron shirts from Robinsons-May, and the white hair around his ears tufted out, gracing his collar. My father had always looked old, but never more so than in that moment.

  Ah, here it is, the doctor finally said, pulling a file out from the stack.

  Hmm, let me see. Biopsy results, right?

  It was immediately clear that this guy had no recollection of my father. I watched the doctor scan the contents of the folder.

  Well, he said, I have some disappointing news.

  I felt a prickle in my spine. My father has had a small lump in his jaw and the biopsy was to determine if it was cancerous.

  The results do indeed show a malignancy, the doctor said. And it’s likely that the tumor in your mouth is a metastasis of the prostate cancer. Looks like it finally decided to spread. Impressive that you kept it off this long though.

  My body began to cave in on itself. My father let out a breath.

  So, what now? he asked through clenched teeth.

  Well, the doctor said, because of your age and other health concerns, your options are somewhat limited. More radiation is probably your best bet.

  I stopped paying attention. My whole body was tingling.

  In the car on the way to this appointment my father had tried to prepare us both for this, but it obviously hadn’t worked.

  No matter what happens, Claire, he had said, we should feel grateful that I’ve had as long as I have. No one ever thought I’d outlive your mom, yet here I am.

  I nodded at him.

  Except the thing is that I’m not that grateful.

  I’m sick of cancer, sick of hospitals and doctors, and I’m sick of fucking radiation.

  I don’t expect my father to live forever. I’ve already come to the conclusion that I will probably be parentless by the time I am thirty.

  But not yet. I’m not ready.

  IN A BIZARRE COINCIDENCE my dad’s radiation treatment starts the same day that I begin at Big Fancy Magazine. When we found this out, I immediately offered not to take the job. I’m going to just take care of you instead, Dad, I told him.

  Are you kidding? Your mother would kill me if you didn’t take this job.

  It’s true. My mother may have imagined great things for me, but a job at Big Fancy Magazine, one of her favorite glossies, would have blown her away.

  We argued back and forth about it a bit longer, but by that time my father had already started carrying a copy of the magazine around with him, proudly showing it to anyone in his path.

  My daughter works here, he would exclaim, flashing a recent issue featuring an Oscar-winning actress on the cover.

  And so it was decided. Each morning, Monday through Friday, my father will drive to a hospital in Loma Linda, where the doctors will zap his mouth with radiation. And I will drive to work so that I can spend eight hours taking orders from a demanding magazine editor.

  The day I completed all the paperwork in the Big Fancy Magazine HR offices I drove to the beach and put my toes in the great, swelling Pacific. I allowed myself to imagine some incredible life unfolding before me. For no particular reason I pictured myself living in Paris, traveling through Uganda; I saw myself penning insightful and meaningful journalism, stories that truly explore the unbounded humanity the world has to offer. Well, I could hear myself saying to some faceless biographer, I started working at Big Fancy Magazine when I was twenty-four and it all just unfolded from there.

  I think about this as I wait in line for the smoothie. I bet West Coast Editor has already forgotten my last name.

  Back upstairs, I step carefully into her office and set the smoothie down on her desk.

  She takes a sip without lo
oking at me. And then she coughs, choking on it.

  Blueberry? Her eyes are narrow slits. I think it’s the first time she’s looked at me all day.

  I wanted peanut butter, she says.

  She pushes the smoothie away, swiveling back to her computer. I am officially dismissed. I deduce that I’m getting the silent treatment from her for the rest of the day since she e-mails me duties and tasks from behind her closed office door—curt little sentences written in lowercase letters.

  As per her instructions, I spend the afternoon dropping off a sack of her high heels to be resoled, buying groceries, and delivering them to her house, carefully wedging a bottle of vodka into the freezer, just as she said to. I fret over the brands I choose at the grocery store, knowing that I could easily be reprimanded for buying the wrong kind of protein bars.

  My dad calls in the middle of it all. I’m trying to let myself into her house, my arms full of grocery bags and an armload of West Coast Editor’s dry cleaning.

  Hey, kiddo, he says.

  Hi, Dad, I respond breathlessly, trying to sound chipper.

  How’s Hollywood?

  Oh, you know. Demanding.

  He chuckles and tells me about his morning radiation session. He has been characteristically upbeat about it all, making friends with the nurses and preparing a new joke every day for his radiologist.

  I wedge the phone between my shoulder and ear as I stuff West Coast Editor’s groceries into her cupboards. Her dog yaps and dances around my ankles.

  I’m sorry I’m not there with you, Dad.

  Don’t be, sweetie. I’m doing great. The doctor said today that he can already tell that the tumor is shrinking. I want to make sure you’ve got an old man to look after for a few more years.

  He chuckles again and I smile into the phone. The dog is starting to paw at the dry cleaning that I tossed over a chair, and I shoo him away from it, nudging him gently with the toe of my high heel.

  Dad, I’ve got to go. I’ll call you later.

  I hang up and take one last glance around the house. It’s a small one bedroom, and even in the daytime there’s not a lot of light. I try to imagine West Coast Editor at home here, lounging around in her pajamas, but three days into the job and I can tell that she’s hardly ever here.

  I go home after that, driving up Fairfax, turning right on Hollywood Boulevard and driving past Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, past the bums sleeping on the stars on the sidewalks, past the sex shops and the palm trees, turning left on Ivar and up to the top of the hill where I share an apartment with my boyfriend, Colin.

  COLIN AND I HAVE BEEN together for six years. We lived together for the whole four years that I was in New York, and he’s part of the reason I moved to LA. Colin is an actor and thinks he’ll have better chances of finding work here.

  Hey, I say, as I step through the entrance to our apartment. Colin is in the living room, smoking a cigarette, watching CNN. He’s always watching CNN.

  Hey, he calls back, without turning around. I kick off my heels, a pair of black Isaac Mizrahis that I shelled out for when I got the job. I’m hoping no one at work will notice that I’ve worn them every day.

  How did it go today? Colin asks, still focused on the television.

  I walk into the kitchen, where I remove a bottle of beer from the fridge.

  It was okay, I sigh. I got her the wrong kind of smoothie.

  So?

  So, she didn’t talk to me for the rest of the day.

  Fuck her, Colin says.

  Colin is good at saying things like that. He’s always angry. I’ll never know if his rage was there from birth or if it is a product of his sister’s murder seven years ago.

  I’m going outside, I say.

  ’K, Colin says without turning around.

  I walk between the two columns that mark the entrance to the living room. The hardwood floors gleam in the late afternoon sun and the rushing sound of the freeway is a distant thrum through the French windows.

  Outside I sink down onto an old set of wooden steps that lead to the little backyard. In the middle of the yard sits a tree, fat with waxy blossoms that fill the air with the scent of orange and vanilla. My neighbor told me that he’s only seen trees like it in Hawaii, and this bit of information makes me like LA a tiny bit more.

  My beer bottle drips condensation into the railing, and I gaze out across the cityscape of Los Angeles. I can see the Capitol Records Building, and beyond that Hollywood dips down into a maze of squat buildings crosshatched by palm trees. The early evening air is balmy, like a warm swimming pool.

  I let out a sigh. Nothing in my life is the way I thought it would be. Not my relationship with Colin, not my dependent and elderly father. Not this strange city or the aching loneliness that keeps me from falling asleep at night, despite the warm body next to me.

  I think about the morning we left New York, almost three months ago. It was a bright, hot Monday, and we drove through the Holland Tunnel and out of the city. For five days we streamed across the flat plains of the country, through cornfields and long, empty desert stretches. I curled against the passenger window as Colin drove, staring out at the road rushing past and trying to imagine what we were driving toward, unable to conjure up anything specific.

  In Kansas we drove over a family of ducks, a mom and her fuzzy little ducklings crossing the two-lane highway. We were going too fast to stop, Colin explained, and even though I repeated that sentence over and over in my head I couldn’t shake the queasy feeling that settled over me after that.

  It’s been three months though, and I can no longer deny that the feeling has less to do with the ducks and much more to do with me and Colin, and the swiftly growing distance between us.

  Six years is too long for anyone our age to be together, I’ve determined. We met a few months after my mother died, when I was eighteen. I had just moved back to Atlanta, dropping temporarily out of college, and moving into my old room at home. My dad slept in the guest room upstairs, unable to bring himself to sleep in the bed he had once shared with my mom.

  While my friends continued on with their normal college lives, I started waiting tables at a café. Colin was the bartender. One night some of my high school friends sat on the patio of the café. I ignored my tables and leaned against the backs of my friends’ chairs, chatting idly.

  Holly leaned forward suddenly. Hey, she said, isn’t that the guy who killed his sister?

  I turned around to follow her gaze. She was watching Colin.

  Tall with thick blond hair and dark eyes, Colin was the person at the café I’d talked to the least. He was always there at the end of the night, hanging around the bar with the rest of the staff, drinking beer and counting cash until we locked the doors and headed across the street to a corny piano bar that stayed open late and never carded us.

  Colin? I said in response to Holly’s question.

  That’s the guy who killed his sister, she repeated.

  Oh yeah, Laura said, squinting at him. I recognize him from the newspaper.

  Their faces were serious, watching Colin intently as he moved behind the bar, pouring drinks, wiping down the counter with a rag. I looked at my friends blankly.

  It was all over the news, Laura said.

  I think you were out of town, Holly finally said.

  I had gone to Europe for six weeks with my friend Liz right after my mom died, and I suppose that was enough time for a big local news story like this to escape my attention.