The Rules of Inheritance

by Smith, Claire Bidwell

  A salesgirl approaches. Can I help you with anything?

  We both shake our heads, trying not to make eye contact.

  She pushes on: Are you looking for anything in particular? Something for spring formal maybe?

  Nope, Liz says. I keep my mouth shut. We shuffle to another rack, trying to put some distance between us and the salesgirl.

  We’ve got some really cute dresses over here, she says, pointing in the opposite direction.

  We’re fine, I say, turning my back to her. She doesn’t give up though, and follows us over to the next rack. I’m starting to burn a little inside. I wish she would just go away.

  I’m really happy to help you if you would just tell me what you’re shopping for, she says.

  Something inside of me snaps.

  I’m shopping for a dress for my mother’s funeral, I say, turning to face her. The words are hard, sharp things. They fall to the floor around us with a clatter.

  I watch the salesgirl’s face go flat, and then crumple just a bit. She is young, trying to do her job. Her mouth opens and then closes. I wait to feel remorse, but it doesn’t come.

  I’m . . . I’m sorry, she mumbles finally before turning away and slinking back to the cash register.

  I feel something spreading inside me, slick and black. Like tar. Like anger.

  I settle on a dress shortly after that, a simple black wool thing. At the cash register the salesgirl keeps her eyes trained on her hands. She takes my money, folds the dress, opens a bag. I silently dare her to look up.

  She doesn’t.

  I don’t know it now, but this won’t be the last time I force someone else to try on my pain just so I can see how it looks.

  THE SERVICE IS A BIG, stupid affair. Everything is stupid now. Most of all me, with my shaved head, walking down the aisle of this church, holding my father’s hand.

  The scent of flowers is thick and nauseating. My dress turns out to be shorter than I thought, and I tug at it, feeling like an utter disaster, like I have failed my beautiful mother in every way possible.

  I walk down the aisle with my father as though it is my wedding.

  I try to keep my eyes on the floor, but I can’t help looking at the people around me.

  There is my math teacher Ms. Cusak. Why is she here? I never liked her and almost failed math. Standing next to her is the principal of my tiny high school. Even though I always liked him, I can’t help but hate them both for being here.

  There are my mother’s two best friends, both named Ann. They react with shock at my appearance—the shaved head and the too-short black dress coupled with my rapidly decreasing weight and under-eye circles. I give them credit for not bothering to hide it.

  My friends sit together in a cluster. They are wearing cobbled-together outfits. Church shirts with black skirts, tights, wrinkled jackets that have been hiding in the back of a closet somewhere.

  After the service I stand outside with them in a haze of cigarette smoke.

  I’m going to move to San Francisco, I tell them.

  They nod gravely.

  THE DAYS BLUR together after that.

  My father and I go to Cape Cod for a second service with my mother’s family. I take a detour to Vermont to pack up my things from my dorm room.

  I retch into a trash can as I carefully sort through the letters my mother sent me during those first few weeks of school, and then I drive to a tattoo parlor in town, where I instruct the artist to ink a perfect black circle on my shoulder.

  A few days later, on Cape Cod, I peel up the bandage and pick at the black scab that has formed there. The blood beading up feels deserving, and I press my fingernail into it even harder.

  There is a hatred forming inside me that grows deeper and darker everyday.

  I curl into a corner of my aunt’s house on Cape Cod, thinking about my mother. It is January and the wind whips around the eaves, masking the scent of the sea with one of quiet cold.

  My mother and I traveled to the Cape every summer, staying at my grandmother’s house for two weeks, sharing the queen-size guest bed in the back room, and falling asleep to the salty smell of the ocean filtering through the screens at night. My mother’s relationships with her sisters and her mother were complicated, and as I grew older she leaned into me like a friend during these trips.

  One night she dragged me on a walk with her to the beach. She was crying. It had something to do with her mom. We sat in the curve of a sand dune, the wind whistling through the reeds around us, and we shared a cigarette. I’d never seen my mother smoke and was surprised to see her do so with such ease.

  Years later that moment, that shared cigarette and my mother’s crying, will become the only hint I have of the kind of relationship we might have had as adults.

  On our last day on Cape Cod, as I am walking through an upstairs bedroom, I see my father through the window. He is standing in the driveway, in front of the open trunk of the car. I squint my eyes, but I can’t tell what he is doing.

  I hurry down the stairs, calling his name as I approach. He looks up, sighs, and straightens his shoulders.

  You might not like this, he says.

  I round the corner of the car and look into the trunk. A thick plastic bag of my mother’s ashes sits there. My father is using one of my aunt’s wooden serving spoons to transfer some of them into a smaller ziplock bag.

  Dad, what are you doing?

  I watch in horror as he digs in for another scoop. A gust of wind blows a layer of ash off the top. It scatters across the interior of the trunk and even beyond, onto the gravel driveway.

  I want to take some of these up to Nauset Beach, he says. His voice is tired, resigned.

  I look down into the bag of ashes. They are darker than I expect, with grainy bits and tiny shards of what must be bone.

  I watch him finish filling the ziplock bag and then I wait as he goes inside to get his hat.

  I’m coming with you, I say.

  We drive to Nauset Beach, the place where my father asked my mother to marry him.

  After only two months of dating, my father had whisked my mother down to Atlanta, away from her life in New York, literally sweeping her off her feet. At the end of that summer he surprised her with a trip to Cape Cod, where he proposed.

  About that day my mother wrote this in a letter to my father:

  You announced on Monday, August 4, that we were driving to Cape Cod to see my mother. Into the car we poured, with a full bar in the backseat, and immediately to the Watergate Hotel and the last decent bed we’d have until our return trip here. Then the champagne corks flew as we bubbled our way into New York, me passing out just before the Holland Tunnel as you subtly asked me where Tiffany’s was.

  Oh God, an engagement ring from Tiffany’s, and I had never been properly engaged before and had made that request also and here you were filling it. I felt alternately like a spoiled brat and like a woman who knew it was finally okay to want the things I’d always wanted.

  You went to New Jersey the next day, for a meeting, and said you’d be back by three, and you weren’t and I knew where you were and what you were doing, and I was having heart failure but tried to be very cool.

  Friday morning we left for Cape Cod and you asked my mom for my hand and she was as nervous as I was and almost followed me to the bathroom when I excused myself after I heard you getting serious. I was so proud of you and moved beyond belief by what goodness was happening for both of us, and we spread it that evening with everyone, knowing that we were committed to one another, and we were more awed and in love than ever.

  So, darling, it’s Saturday, August 9, 1975, and the ring is in Boston at some obscure airport and we are on Cape Cod, two hours away, and the place closes at 1:00 p.m. and no one seems to know anything about anything, and we are in the car tearing up there, you driving superbly, me with plans of outracing any cop who dares try to stop us.

  I love you, Massachusetts police force, because you all must have stayed
home. We made it, threw the box in the trunk, and then drove two more hours to Nauset Beach, where I’d hinted I wanted to become engaged. It’s a place that held indescribable magic for me as a kid, a place I’d always return to as an adult, and a place I’ll always remember because you asked me to marry you there.

  And I said yes, more out of nervousness than anything else, and you told me to be quiet and you started and finished this time and almost left me speechless for the first time in my life. And I said yes again, and you gave me the now famous box and the most beautiful diamond ring that is so flawless and full of fire and fit so perfectly and I LOVE IT.

  It is here, on this same beach, where I watch my father wade out into the soft sand dunes by himself. After a while I can see only the top of his head bobbing through the sea grasses, and I realize, for the first time, how alone we are in our grief.

  MY FATHER AND I spend the next two months back in Atlanta, sitting around in the living room, until one day he decides that I should to go to Europe to meet Liz.

  We can’t just sit around here smoking and looking at each other, he says.

  I know he’s right, but I’m afraid to him leave alone.

  Don’t worry about me, he says, as if reading my mind.

  Liz lives in a small city called Santander on the northern coast of Spain. She’s supposed to be attending university and taking a year off before college. But really she just spends her days lounging around her Spanish family’s house, skipping class, and fucking their oldest son.

  I fly to Madrid and Liz meets me at the airport. As the plane touches down something inside of me snaps. I have been unmoored, set adrift in the world. It’s the first time that my grief has made sense.

  Grief is like another country, I realize. It’s a place.

  Liz and I only spend an afternoon in Madrid. We are thrilled to be together. The world is ours for the taking. We hop a midnight train to Paris, smoke cigarettes in the couplings between cars. We meet a handsome young Spanish boy our age, and the three of us lean back against the wall of the coach, averting our eyes as we try awkwardly to bridge the language barrier.

  Paris and then Basel, Brussels, and Amsterdam, Rome for a week, and then into Barcelona. We pass ourselves from family friends to bunk-bedded hostels and then back to family friends again. We sit in bar after bar, smoke a thousand cigarettes, huddle over crumpled maps, flirt with boy after boy. We fight too, grow sick and tired of each other, and walk silently down empty, echo-filled streets.

  I have nightmares most nights, my mother in a bathtub of blood, my mother like a zombie, my mother, my mother, dead over and over again.

  Liz strokes my hair as I dial the numbers that reach my father’s voice back at home. I sob into the phone, and his voice is metallic through the line, in between my halting breaths. I am worried about him. Is he lonely, is he sad too?

  Yes, Claire, I am.

  FROM Barcelona, we go up to Bilbao, where we take a bus to Santander. I lean my head against the window and my tank top clings to the sweat on my lower back. We’ve been traveling for a month now. My life back at home seems incredibly far away.

  In Santander we spend our days at the beach, giggling, as we lie topless on the sand. At night we sit in dismal bars and smoke Ducados because they are the harshest, smelliest cigarettes we can find. My trip is coming to an end. In a few days we will travel back to Madrid together. I will fly home, to Atlanta, to my father, to that gloomy and hushed house.

  I shudder when I think about going home. It’s easy here in Spain to forget about my life in Atlanta. These foreign streets have quelled the blackness gnawing inside me.

  But it is still there. I feel it at night when I lie in bed next to Liz, trying to fall asleep as I listen to her quiet nighttime breathing.

  I hate myself.

  I dig my fingernails into my palm.

  I actually hate myself.

  Fat, hot tears roll down my cheeks, and I lie still so that I don’t wake Liz.

  We spend the last few afternoons seated on the patio of a little café, sipping espresso and beer and writing postcards. I write a few to Christopher and think about those cards traveling halfway across the world to the PO box on Haight Street.

  Sitting there at the café, my skin feels lonely and tight. I miss being touched. I tilt my neck, stretching the muscles from my collarbone up through my jaw, and I catch the eye of a young man a few tables over. I look away and out at the ocean. I can feel his eyes on me, traveling through my red tank top, across my breastbone, over my lips. I look back and he looks down, marks a page in his book, and gets up from his seat.

  As he walks toward our table, his coffee cup in one hand, I reach into my bag and withdraw my camera. In Spanish I ask if he will take a picture of us. Liz looks up from her book. She’s been lost in reading, has no idea of the careful dance that has gone on between us. He answers me in English, takes the camera, and stands back a few feet. Liz and I lean into each other. We’ve done this a hundred times in the last month.

  His name is Alvaro. He is Spanish, has been studying at Oxford. He comes from a wealthy family, is home on break, just out for the afternoon, enjoying a coffee, the sunshine. His hair is thick and lustrous and his dark eyes sparkle in the afternoon light.

  Do we want to meet him for drinks later that evening?

  We do.

  Years later I won’t remember anything about the landscape of Santander. The layout of the city, the size of it, the streets will escape me completely. But I will remember the bar where we meet Alvaro. The three of us sit upstairs at a little table, and I do all the things I always do for boys. I match him drink for drink. I talk about Vonnegut and Hesse. I quote Kerouac and I French-inhale my cigarettes. I lean forward so that the shallow curves of my clavicles become deeper, and I look away when he looks at me.

  The moment Liz leaves for the bathroom he is kissing me.

  I already know I will sleep with him. I knew it the moment I reached into my bag at the café, my fingers closing around the sturdy weight of my camera. Knew, as I handed it to him, my fingers brushing his, that this was the final piece of the trip. I will sleep with a perfect stranger.

  Do I want to see his family home, he asks between kisses. I do.

  Liz is worried and I am drunk.

  I’ll be home by dawn, I reassure her as I climb into Alvaro’s convertible.

  I wave to her, my gaze fastening on her frame for just a moment before I swing back around in my seat, lifting my face to the wind that whips down over the windshield.

  If Alvaro and I talk during the drive, it’s only about trivial things. Mostly there is the road, dark and rushing before us. Despite the alcohol swirling in my veins, I feel incredibly present to this moment. I am distinctly aware of what I am doing. I know that I am eighteen years old and that my mother is dead. I know that I am in the passenger seat of a strange boy’s car, that we are winding along a nighttime road, that there is a town glimmering with little lights below us, that I am somewhere in Spain.

  It’s one of those moments that will be easy to return to, for years to come.

  The house is impressive: beautiful stonework makes up the exterior, landscaped pathways lead to various entrances, and the whole property is perched on a cliff overlooking the Bay of Biscay. We stumble through the rooms under the pretense of a tour. I am never scared of him. He is young and clumsy. It is obvious that he comes from a good family, that he is trying to impress me.