A Dual Inheritance

by Joanna Hershon

  Vivi picked off a slice of bark, flung it far away. “I’ve trusted you since I saw your expression that first day of school, when I was about to lay into Brian.”

  “You did? What did I look like?”

  “You looked at me as if to say: Don’t. As if to say: Just walk away. And I did. Such a better tactic.”

  “Huh,” said Rebecca. “Well … I’m glad.”

  “Do you trust me?”

  “What?”

  “Do you trust me? Like, instinctively.”

  Rebecca nodded.

  “No, you don’t.” Vivi smiled, as if this wasn’t such a bad thing.

  Rebecca looked at her and, instead of maintaining that, yes, she did trust her, she jumped off the tree branch, landing on both feet. “What does trust even mean?” Rebecca asked. “I’m not sure I really trust anyone. I think I’m like my father that way.” And it was only as she said it that she realized it was true. “It’s ingrained or something.”

  “So … your dad’s suspicious?”

  “I guess. I don’t know.” She didn’t know how to explain either of her parents. She’d wrongly assumed that one of the perks of boarding school would be that she wouldn’t have to. Her father was suspicious and demanding. Her mother was doting. Her father was generous. Her mother was selfish, a total bitch. Her father took her to every museum he could think of. Her mother went to theater and symphonies by herself. Her mother was the smartest, most beautiful, most kick-ass corporate lawyer working in New York today. “My whole family is totally bourgeois. Let me tell you, nobody is running health clinics. Actually, to be honest, it’s way beyond bourgeois. You don’t even want to know. By the way, Monsieur Simonet seems to really love saying that word. There was a girl in my class who didn’t know what it meant, and when she asked, he nearly fell out of his chair, he was so excited to tell her. He promised we could have a screening of a movie called The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. Isn’t that a great title?”

  “Who’d never heard the word bourgeois?”

  “Oh, I don’t remember her name,” she said, feeling suddenly protective of Allison McEvoy from Maine.

  Vivi stood up on the tree so that she was towering above Rebecca. She was wearing a long flowery dress over a brown turtleneck. On anyone else, the whole outfit would have looked downright puritanical, but on Vivi it looked like she was the lead singer of an original band. She squinted, as if she was trying to make a decision. “I slept with him, you know.”

  “You slept with who?”

  “Monsieur Simonet,” she said. Then she jumped off the tree and landed clumsily, brushed dirt and leaves off her dress.

  “You did?”

  “I did. He was … disappointing.”

  Rebecca’s heart was beating fast, but she wasn’t exactly sure why. She’d assumed Vivi had slept with plenty of boys, probably even some men. “But—”

  “What—I’m seventeen.”

  “Oh, sure. I mean, of course.” Rebecca lit another cigarette.

  “So I actually do want to know. When you said your family was way beyond bourgeois? What did you mean?”

  “Oh, you know,” she said, taking a long exhale, “the whole culture of spending, of constant accumulation.”

  “You mean—you’re rich?”

  Rebecca blushed and undid her scarf, which suddenly felt as if it was strangling her.

  “I just want to hear about New York,” said Vivi firmly. “The whole package.”

  “Why?”

  “This might sound weird to you, but everything there seems so … clear.”

  Rebecca squinted at Vivi. “Did you really sleep with Monsieur Simonet?”

  Vivi started to laugh. “No; I was kidding about that.”

  “Screw you!” Rebecca said, but she was laughing, too.

  “Sorry,” she said, “but I’ve only slept with Brian. At least in terms of here, where the pickin’s are—in my humble opinion—pretty slim.”

  “Is Brian your boyfriend?”

  “Well, not right now, but it’s been kind of on and off with us since pretty much the first day of freshman year.”

  “Do you fight a lot or something?”

  Vivi shrugged. “He repulses me.”

  But Vivi’s repulsion clearly meant something more than repulsion, and it was something Rebecca knew that she herself had never felt.

  Rebecca’s eighth-grade year had been the zenith of not only her popularity with but also her own interest in boys. She’d wrongly assumed that she’d go from being asked out for pizza after school and playing a bit of Truth or Dare in the Meadow to having an actual boyfriend one of these days. But freshman and sophomore year had each passed by uneventfully, without so much as even an unrequited love, and she’d spent the better part of this past summer by herself, mostly reading or writing anti-apartheid letters to corporations, urging them to divest from South Africa. She’d gone to exactly one party at a loft in SoHo, where a boy from Collegiate went from trying to kiss her in the stairwell to telling her that she was dead inside by the time they made it to the roof. The sky was murky and violet; it was a hot summer night and the boy was cute; there was nothing wrong with this boy. Did she take a step closer, as he obviously was challenging her to? As Vivi certainly would have done? No, she did not. Instead, she’d countered: I am not. I am totally not dead inside. She’d proceeded to hold forth about how she just so happened to be consumed with important issues. The boy had leaned on the roof’s railing. He’d asked her, sincerely, what could possibly be more important than desire, and she had lectured him on how all anyone cared about was pleasure and consumption and it was making her sick. And she hadn’t stopped there. She’d gone on to outline the horrors of apartheid. As if they weren’t obvious to anyone with half a brain. Especially to a boy whose father was (she later found out) a famous civil rights lawyer and whose mother was black.

  “So,” Rebecca ventured, wrapping her scarf around her neck one more time, “are you and Brian … y’know … these days?”

  Vivi shook her head no.

  “I thought you were serious about Monsieur Simonet.”

  “Oh my God, Rebecca! You want to sleep with Monsieur Simonet,” cried Vivi. “You want to have French teacher sex! And by the way,” she said, openly looking Rebecca over, “you totally could.” She chanted, “Simonet, Simonet, Simonet,” as she ran down the hill.

  Rebecca didn’t run but instead walked slowly, savoring her last few delicious puffs before tearing her cigarette into strips, the way she’d learned about in history class. Soldiers did this, Mr. Marshall had mentioned, in order to leave no trace, and Rebecca had felt as if he were speaking directly to her. When Rebecca didn’t run, Vivi turned around and backtracked. Rebecca noticed how Vivi’s grace was tinged with something awkward, as if she’d grown up quickly and was still figuring out how to catch up with her own range of motion. Though she’d noticed this before, it surprised her.

  “Okay,” said Vivi, “so what I mean about New York—at least bourgeois New York—is this: It just seems like there are the schools and the restaurants and the hotels and traditions, and it sounds as if everyone follows the same basic social rules. Or at least tries to.”

  “I have to tell you,” said Rebecca, pretty certain that Vivi was being at least slightly patronizing, “I don’t really get what you’re saying.”

  “Come on, yes you do. I can tell you do. And you think I’m being condescending, but I’m not.”

  Rebecca shrugged and kept walking. She stuck her hands in her pockets, looked straight ahead toward the cluster of pines. She found herself testing Vivi, seeing how far she could push her before she looked the way she had that first day—with her green eyes narrowed and her rangy body tense.

  “This idea I have of New York—it must come from my mother and her stories,” Vivi continued, and they were walking together now, down the dirt path, and it felt good to be moving. Rebecca had no idea what Vivi was going to say and how, in turn, she was going to respond. She k
new if they became real friends, this novelty would wear off and that she’d know what to expect from Vivi, and part of her wished they could skip this preamble. She wanted to be able to instinctively figure out when Vivi was stoned, and how often, and whether or not these kinds of conversations would happen during the times that Vivi was also sleeping with Brian. The wind was picking up.

  “Did your mother live in New York?” asked Rebecca. The sky shut down the last of its lights; outside Manhattan, night seemed to come out of nowhere.

  Vivi shook her head. “She just thinks it’s the greatest city.”

  “I do, too,” said Rebecca.

  “You’d love my mother, by the way.”

  “Where did you grow up?” She remembered someone saying something about Vivi and Africa (about the cornrows?), but Rebecca couldn’t remember the specifics.

  “Tanzania, then Haiti.”

  “Wow.”

  Vivi nodded. “I think I’m lucky. But you’d be amazed at the questions some people here have asked me.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like, Did you have elephants in your yard?”

  “Come on. Nobody asked you that.”

  “Oh, yes they did. I’m used to it now, and, no offense, but Americans are pretty ignorant.”

  “Not to generalize,” said Rebecca.

  Vivi smiled. “You know what I mean.” Rebecca couldn’t help but feel just a little bit special, the way that Vivi was excluding her from the ignorant majority. “Both my parents are from here, so I’m technically American, I do realize that. And I’ve been at this school for almost four years, so if I wasn’t American before, I certainly am now.” She smiled sheepishly. “It’s so funny, because I remember when I was in primary school, in Tanzania, I used to play with this American girl and we’d talk about how much we missed American things. I remember saying how much I missed cheeseburgers, although I’d never actually had one.”

  “Do your parents ever talk about moving back?”

  “My mother did when I was little,” Vivi admitted. “But she’s very adaptable. She loses herself in the present. She meditates a lot—she has for as long as I can remember—so maybe that’s why. But she has a thing about New York. She always said that if she could have more than one life, she’d want to live in Manhattan.”

  “How about you?”

  “Oh, I want to live lots of places, though I’m not in love with the idea of men having more than one wife, which was the norm everywhere I looked, growing up.”

  Rebecca couldn’t help but smile.

  “What.”

  “But not really,” Rebecca said.

  “What do you mean, not really? I’m a jealous bitch.”

  “I mean, where did you go to school? And you probably knew some missionaries and embassy people, didn’t you?”

  “Jeez,” said Vivi, sounding—if anything—impressed, “someone’s been paying attention in world history. Okay, so not really, but let me tell you, you can feel it.”

  “Do you think it affected your father or something? Did it make him, you know, want more wives?”

  “No,” said Vivi quickly. “My father adores my mother.”

  “And she adores him?”

  She nodded. “I know,” she said. “It’s rare.”

  “I don’t know if my parents ever adored each other.”

  Vivi stopped walking. “Well,” she said, “I bet they adore you.” The lamps along the campus path all lit up at once. “Voilà,” Vivi said. “I love when that happens.”

  Over peanut butter, granola, and honey sandwiches (they made it to the dining hall as it was closing), Vivi talked about her mother and father as if they were characters in a movie, a timeless classic of family solidarity, romance, and adventure. Only after Rebecca pushed for something not so perfect did Vivi acknowledge that, okay, sometimes her father drank too much and, yes, at times her mother could seem a bit … far away, but these admissions only made the Shipleys sound more intriguing. And when Rebecca skipped studying in the library for the first weekday night since the beginning of school in order to go to Vivi’s room—a single in a turret above the infirmary—Vivi showed Rebecca her family photos, bound in a large black sketchbook. The room smelled like some kind of spice (not patchouli) and was adorned not with van Gogh or Pink Floyd posters or photo collages but an African batik and a sequined cloth embroidered with a two-tailed mermaid. Above her cluttered desk hung a map of the world with an intimidating number of pins stuck into all the places she’d presumably been. There was writing in the sketchbooks, too—entries that Vivi obviously didn’t mind if Rebecca read as she sat on the floor, on what Vivi described as a Muslim prayer rug. As Rebecca turned the pages, Vivi narrated as if this was a book that someone else had put together and that she and Rebecca were—just then—discovering for the first time.

  This is when I was a baby and we lived with my grandparents in Connecticut—I’d been airlifted out; I almost died. Here’s the first time I had my hair braided. The lady couldn’t find rubber bands; with black hair they just burn the ends, so she tried to burn bits of rubber onto my ends. What a disaster. When I came home and my mother saw my hair, I was so afraid she was going to lose it—she loves my hair—but she just laughed. Here’s my mother with our best friend from Haiti. We became so close, but I always called her Madame. Her house looked like the one in Scarface. There were men with guns who patrolled her roof. Haiti’s poison, its corruption—it’s everywhere, you know?

  Rebecca did not know. She did not know about Papa Doc or Baby Doc or the Tonton Macoute or the time that Vivi and her classmates had to go to school in secret because it was too dangerous to be anywhere except houses under embassy protection. She did not know that Haiti was the only country to have been born from a slave revolt or what it was like to have parents who thought nothing of flying in a single-prop plane over Lake Tanganyika to show their daughter 18 percent of the world’s freshwater supply.

  It was unnerving the way Vivi never complained about her mother and father during any of her many anecdotes. Rebecca wondered if this was what happened when your parents did irrefutably cool things like move to Tanzania in the 1960s and Haiti in the 1980s. How could you roll your eyes at opening health clinics and ministering to the poor? You couldn’t. Or at least Rebecca couldn’t. Much of the time, Rebecca walked around thinking about other people’s pain. In European history class, Mr. Marshall started the last class by writing numbers on the board. What’s with the numbers? called out Sean Riggs, who still hadn’t removed his well-worn baseball cap. Death, said Mr. Marshall, sitting on his desk. First World War. And though Rebecca didn’t think of herself as much of a cryer, she’d been suddenly overcome by those numbers and had felt as if she had a choice between breathing and crying or not breathing at all. Those numbers—they somehow made more of an impact than any books she’d read or photographs she’d seen. But what could it mean, other people’s pain? And what good was feeling for others if there was no way to actually contribute—forget about contribute—if there was no way to literally remove their pain? She’d excused herself to the bathroom and wept in a stall. Wasn’t all this endless feeling, those tears, weren’t they just another kind of consumption? If she ever met Vivi’s father, this was something she wanted to ask him. And had he chosen his work based on his inability to only think about pain anymore?

  One of Vivi’s biggest themes of the evening was how her dad believed in forging one’s own path in the world; he believed in what he called leaving the camp. Evidently he had been expected to go into business or law and instead he’d chosen to serve the Third World. He’d made a career choice of setting up health clinics (he wasn’t even a doctor, didn’t even have that title to appease his family), and his work, these choices—it was all completely impressive.

  “Hey,” said Rebecca, “it’s nine. I have to go sign in.”

  “Okay,” said Vivi. “This was the best day.”

  Rebecca was so surprised by this assertion that she just nodded
. “Good night,” she said. “See you around.” As she was closing the door, she became convinced she’d somehow sounded rude. “Um, Vivi?” she asked, standing in the doorway. “Do you want to come to the city next weekend?” As soon as she’d asked, she instantly regretted it. “My dad’s going to be out of town.”

  Sending Vivi to boarding school was, evidently, the most difficult thing Vivi’s father had ever done, because he had gone to boarding school—to this boarding school, in fact, before it was coed—and had hated it. He’d agreed to let Vivi go only because she frantically wanted to and because the options in Haiti were—even he had to admit—pretty limited. Her father had warned Vivi about the kind of kids she’d meet at boarding school, the types of ostentatious houses to which she’d be invited. And since Rebecca knew that she was (at least on paper) one of those kids, and since she herself disapproved of her own upbringing (had she and most of her classmates really needed Louis Vuitton purses at the age of thirteen?), she was embarrassed for Vivi to see where she’d grown up.

  Still, once she’d put together that Vivi’s grandparents were, in fact, most likely rich themselves (they lived in Connecticut and belonged to a country club that didn’t allow Jews), Rebecca often found herself searching for holes in Vivi’s stories, and the whole chronology confused Rebecca so thoroughly that she wanted to ask Vivi to write—along with the one Rebecca had suggested for Vivi’s European history exam—a timeline of her own life.

  And Rebecca could never quite tell if Vivi truly shared her father’s disdain for ostentation. She seemed awfully interested in every detail of Rebecca’s former Manhattan-bred classmates—their clothes and country houses and vacations—but every now and then she’d make some kind of cutting comment about unnecessary displays of wealth. Rebecca couldn’t tell if Vivi might not be more than a little covetous along with being disapproving or if she simply enjoyed reveling in the fact that her father was right. That people really did live this way.