The Rules of Inheritance

by Smith, Claire Bidwell

  Grief is a force and I am swept up in it.

  THE ONLY THING that anchors me is Colin. And he does so fiercely.

  When we fell in love it was exactly like that: falling. Deep and dreamless, love was like an opiate, rendering each of us powerless against the other. It was like we were the only two people in the world who spoke the same language. It was like we had no choice about falling in love.

  But there’s always a choice, isn’t there?

  Three years later we are at the bottom of a very deep abyss, each of us quietly looking for a way out.

  Colin is moody and intense. He is confident and confrontational. He moves with purpose. He is aggressive in a quiet way. He is suspicious of everyone, and about this he is not apologetic.

  Colin is never apologetic.

  He is demanding and intimidating and he rarely compromises.

  If Colin discovers a weakness in a person, he cannot help but confront it. His eyes will glow and a small smile will edge the corners of his mouth.

  He once told me a story about taking acid with a group of friends in high school. It was the middle of the night and they were hanging out on the banks of a river, tripping on the moonlit scenery and the rushing water. One of the girls was having a bad trip and had chosen to cling desperately to a plastic water bottle as her talisman.

  After an hour or so Colin ripped the bottle away from her and threw it in the river. Even as he tells me the story, his mouth curls into a little smile.

  Colin tells me what to wear and, more specifically, what not to wear. He is critical of my friends and suspicious of their intentions. He is withholding in his affections, and often I have to barter for hugs or comfort. Colin drinks too much and when he drinks he becomes explosive.

  I am often scared of Colin.

  Yet it is these qualities that also draw me to him.

  Colin loves me the way you love a child: ferociously and with a sense of propriety.

  A decade from now I’ll be a psychotherapist in a little clinic in Los Angeles. I’ll take on a client one day who lost her father when she was a teenager. Her mother deteriorated after that and my client and her sisters scattered into the arms of whoever happened to be nearby.

  When I come to know this client, she will be in her early twenties, living in a sparsely decorated townhome with an abusive boyfriend who closes his hands around her throat on a nightly basis. He follows her every move, seething with anger when she does not obey his instructions about who to be friends with, where to work, what to wear, when to come home. Every week she says she is going to leave him. She never does.

  I’ll immediately recognize in her that same need I had at age twenty-two. The need, not just to be loved, but to be owned.

  COLIN DOESN’T WANT to talk about Darren. In fact he doesn’t want to talk at all. He pours himself another drink, vodka with just a splash of soda water, and he pulls a chair in front of the stereo.

  These are the nights that frighten me the most. There is a rage building quietly inside him, like logs in a fire that have been lit from within. I curl into the futon in the living room, bracing myself for whatever is coming next.

  Sometimes Colin simply sits there until he is too drunk to do anything else, eventually heaving himself up and into bed.

  Other nights he becomes explosive.

  One night he slammed his fist into the plywood door of the living room, leaving a dent there for our remaining time in the apartment, a constant reminder of the darkness that lives with us. Another night he hurled a tumbler so forcefully that it lodged itself right there in the drywall, Colin falling to the floor with the effort of it.

  Sometimes he has night terrors, jumping out of bed in a daze, terrifying us both, yelling, and hitting out at the room around him, at the phantom intruder in our midst.

  Other times he just makes broad and cryptic declarations about his mortality. In the beginning I used to argue with him, sometimes even try to soothe him.

  Now I just do my best not to antagonize him.

  On milder nights he lines up the evening’s empty bottles in front of the door—a homemade alarm system built to alert us to intruders—and stumbles to bed. Colin is fanatical about locking doors, about safety. For years, after we are no longer together, I will leave every door open and unlocked, just because I finally can.

  Tonight could be any of these nights.

  Colin appears suddenly, swaying in the doorway.

  I’ll never fully understand what it was like for him to lose his sister. I may know grief, but not the kind he knows. Not the kind brought on by finding a sibling drowning in a pool of blood in your parents’ living room.

  I wish I could have killed him myself, Colin says about Darren, his voice slurred.

  I believe him.

  I WANT TO COMFORT Colin, but I know he won’t have it.

  On nights like this I feel trapped here, not that I have anywhere to go. Colin discourages me from making friends but I do anyway, being sure only to see them when he is working. I know he is afraid my friends will try to take me away from him.

  He should be afraid. My friends try to do exactly that. Always at the end of some evening one of my girlfriends will lean forward in her seat.

  Claire, she will implore, hapless concern in her eyes, can’t you just leave him?

  I shake my head. She doesn’t understand. None of them do.

  I don’t understand either.

  The truth is that I am afraid of staying with Colin, but I am more afraid of leaving him.

  In a way Colin is all I have. After my mother died it wasn’t just the house we packed up, her things that we got rid of. It was everything. For days I sifted through her clothes, beautiful designer dresses she had worn to elegant events with my father, scarves she bought in Paris, sweaters from Ireland. I opened and closed drawers, my hands roaming over the contents, breathing in the essence of my mother while the piles of her discarded belongings grew in heaps behind me.

  We even had to find new homes for our two dogs, Welsh corgis named Russell and Rosie. They were nine and ten years old when my mother died, near the end of their own lives, but neither my father nor I could keep them after the way everything was dismantled.

  I think about the dogs late at night, after Colin has fallen into a drunken, dreamless sleep. I remember when Tonia and I held a wedding ceremony for them when I was in fourth grade, and I weep to have abandoned them, weep because I have been abandoned too.

  My father lives in California now, and not a day goes by when we don’t connect in some way. Mostly we talk late at night, when I am on my way home from work, when it is still early on the West Coast. He is watching movies, drinking scotch, missing me and my mother.

  He tells me about his appointments, about the neighbor kids who stop by in the afternoon to say hi to him. He tells me that he planted some flowers on his patio, that he hopes I’ll come out to visit him soon.

  I feel a twisting in my stomach when he says this. I know that I should be in California with him. I promise that I’ll move there when I graduate. Two more years, I say.

  He came to visit me once, the first summer I moved to New York. We had to pause on each landing as we made our way up the five flights to my apartment. Afterward he sat in the kitchen, breathing heavily, his face flushed with exertion. He was diagnosed with emphysema shortly after that, putting a stop to any more traveling.

  On that one visit to New York he showed me around the city, taking me to places he used to go with my mom. We ate béarnaise burgers at P. J. Clarke’s, and my dad pointed out the table where they were sitting the day Jackie Onassis came in. We stood in front of my mother’s old apartment building on Twenty-eighth, and I tried to imagine him that morning, twenty-five years earlier, wearing the funny blue suit as he rang my mother’s buzzer for the first time.

  The plan is to move to California when I graduate.

  It’s where Colin wants to go too. He is a doorman at a club in Chelsea. He has been taking acting classes b
ut hasn’t found any parts. He thinks all that will change in California.

  I think I will finally escape once we get to California.

  For now, I just find freedom in little ways.

  One of them is school. Colin couldn’t care less about my writing, scoffing at me when I hesitantly ask if I might read something aloud to him, but I will have the same writing teacher for my entire four years at the New School. Joan and I meet in coffee shops for my independent study sessions, and I write furiously for her, reading aloud in my soft, breathy voice.

  My real escape, though, is at work.

  I will work at Republic for four years, hostessing, waitressing, and eventually bartending. I will memorize the menu, and those pale, sleek dining tables will imprint themselves into my psyche. I will make friends that I will keep in touch with for decades. And years later, even when I find myself dining in elegant four-star restaurants, some part of me will always wish I were on the other side of the table, forever nostalgic for the camaraderie of waitstaff.

  The moment I walk through the doors of Republic I feel a softening through my whole body, a palpable sense of relief. Sure, it’s like any restaurant job. The customers are annoying, our managers are idiots, and the drama among the staff is more interesting than any TV show, but it’s also home.

  Most of the other waiters have worked here as long as I have. We spend the slow hours leaning against the counter, talking about our lives. Even if we’re not the kind of people who ever would have been friends, we know one another intimately.

  The cast of waiters, bartenders, hostesses, and busboys is a fluctuating hierarchy of anorexic models, hopeful actors, ambitious screenwriters, and flaky fashion students. There are scandals and affairs and there is theft and betrayal. Friendships are formed and dissolved and all of it is discussed over cigarettes on the back stoop.

  I have a crush on a waiter named Haynes. He’s part of my secret life. He’s an actor too. He went to Juilliard, or somewhere impressive, and he acts in plays on a regular basis. He is gruff and disgruntled and bitingly funny. He has a crush on me too.

  We go as far as to match our schedules, both of us arriving early for our shifts, lingering in a little hallway downstairs, as we smoke cigarettes and flirt shamelessly. In these moments I feel like a girl again, not the fearful and drained young woman I have become in the last few years.

  I think about Haynes late at night when I’m trying to fall asleep. About what it would be like to go on a real date. About what it would be like to be a real girl again, to feel free to smile and laugh and move through the world unchained by grief and all that it’s led me to.

  My heart races when I think about what Colin would do if he ever found out. He came in once when I wasn’t expecting him and found me behind the counter, doubled over in laughter with a waiter named Eric, whom I adore. Colin stormed out before I could even wipe the smile from my face.

  I was careful about work after that.

  SOMETIMES I TRY to tell someone at Republic about my mom. I don’t know how to explain myself without the context of her death.

  It’s late afternoon and the tables are empty. I lean against the bar, next to another waitress, and we chat idly. Boyfriends, school, who on staff has a coke problem, hostess Melissa’s crazy outfit behind the cash register.

  Sometimes the talk runs deeper. Where we grew up, who we live with, where we’re going.

  My mom died a couple of years ago, I’ll say tentatively.

  I’ve learned quickly, though, that this is a conversation stopper. Unless the person I’m talking to has been through something equally terrible or sad, they don’t know what to say. They usually mumble some kind of awkward apology, and it’s not long before they push off from the bar, walking purposefully toward a customer.

  I stay there a minute longer, resting my back against grief’s chest.

  I don’t know who to be without my mother. More important, I don’t know how to be.

  One day I wait on a mother and her daughter out to lunch together. After they have paid their check I sit outside, by the dumpsters in the alley, sobbing.

  I miss her so much sometimes that I can’t breathe.

  I obsess over the last year of her life. What I said and didn’t say. What I did and didn’t do. Over and over I replay that particular afternoon in the hospital when my aunt Pam rubbed lotion into my mother’s legs and feet, smoothed Vaseline across her lips.

  Why couldn’t I have done those things for her myself? If I could go back to that moment, I would crawl right into bed with her. I would put my arms around her, tell her how much I love her, and I would stay there forever, just me and my mom.

  I curl over into myself as I think these things. It is afternoon and I am alone in the apartment. My sobs bounce off the walls and I tear at the skin on my arms. I want her back.

  I want any tiny moment of it back.

  I am drowning a little every day. There is a chasm inside me, a lake of grief so deep and so wide that I fear I’ll never be able to swim to shore.

  As I go about my days, trudging up Ninth Street to class, hailing a cab home from work late at night, I am drowning. The light at the surface is growing farther away; my chest is tightening; my whole body is a lead weight sinking slowly toward the bottom.

  I would do anything to have my mother back.

  One day I walk to Twenty-eighth Street after work. The building isn’t anything interesting. A simple, ten-floor brick number with a little awning out front. I stand in front of the door for a long time and then push my way through the entrance. A tired-looking doorman stands sentry at a desk, an old fan blowing a stale breeze.

  Can I help you?

  I make eye contact with him.

  Um, no. I just . . . I trail off.

  I just want a minute here, I want to say. One minute to close my eyes and be in this place where my mother was so many times. Every day I walk through Manhattan and wonder if she walked down this street or once ducked into this bodega, but here—I know she was here. The doorman eyes me suspiciously though, and finally I back away and push out the door.

  On the sidewalk grief takes my hand, leading me home so that I can cry myself to sleep, flushed and sweaty, like a little girl.

  BARELY A COUPLE of days go by and there is another phone call. Nothing ever came of the night Darren died. Colin stumbled drunkenly to bed like usual, and I stayed up until dawn, smoking and scribbling in my journal.

  There is a cycle occurring, one I won’t fully recognize until later, but one that is there all the same. There is a softening after each of these nights, a honeymoon period. Colin’s steel grip releases just a bit, and I find myself unable to remember why I am so desperate to leave him.

  We go to a movie the night the second call comes, and afterward we trudge home through the frozen streets of the East Village. It’s one of those late January nights in Manhattan when the whole world seems frozen over. There was a big snow a few days ago and the once soft, fragrant heaps have hardened into great crystalline mountains streaked through with sludge and grime from the passing cars.

  Walking home, we take each step on the icy sidewalks carefully, reaching out now and then to steady ourselves with the coarse fabric of each other’s wool peacoats and slipping anyway. We make our way down Avenue B until we reach the heavy door of our apartment building.

  Over the course of the four years that we’ll live here gentrification will slowly spread its way east until Avenue C is where all the hippest boutiques and bars are. But right now, in 2000, Avenue B is still a little sketchy.