I think about how sometimes when my mother had too much to drink she’d want to come down here with me.
Let’s look at the stars and talk, she’d say, her voice pleasantly slurred.
What do you want to talk about?
Oh, whatever. You. Boys. School.
I was slow to open up to her though.
Trust me, honey, she would say.
I would tell her little things. About my classes or my boyfriend. We talked about what it will be like when I go off to college. I told her that I was nervous.
Oh, honey, she said once, leaning up on one elbow. You’re going to be fine. You’re so much more together than I ever was. You’re so smart. So self-aware.
I wanted to believe her. I wanted to trust her.
Smart and self-aware are the last things I feel right now.
This isn’t what she would have wanted for me. The drinking and the café, the unmade bed and the thick heavy depression that has settled over both my father and me. She wouldn’t have stood for any of it. Tears run down the sides of my face but I am too drunk to wipe them away.
By the time dawn seeps through the shutters I am unconscious.
I WAKE PAST NOON, push back the covers, and make my way upstairs. My father has left the coffee pot on for me and he is sitting at the dining room table, bills and paperwork spread out around him.
Rough night?
I nod. Yeah, a little.
We are still figuring out how to be with each other. For eighteen years my mother was the epicenter of our family, my father and I orbiting her like distant planets, never quite lining up enough to actually be in each other’s view.
Now that she is gone there is a gaping chasm between us. It’s not just that he is seventy-five and I am eighteen. It’s more that we have no experience of being me and him. Every move we make is new territory; we are still drawing the map of us.
Years from now, after he is gone, I’ll watch an old home movie that takes place on Christmas morning when I am only four years old. In the movie I throw myself frantically at my mother’s feet as she ignores me, marveling over a gift she is opening. My father scoops me up, smoothing the hair back from my forehead and distracting me by singing to me in his funny, warbling voice.
I’ll weep for how well he knew me, even though I thought the opposite for many years.
Most nights I linger on the couch with him after dinner, watching the news or flipping through movie channels. He drinks scotch from a tumbler, and I pour myself glasses of wine from a bottle in the fridge. We smoke cigarettes until there is a filmy haze hanging over our heads, until we are too sleepy or too bored to light another one.
I’ve been avoiding my high school friends, uncomfortable in their presence. Since my mother’s death I have felt as though we were on separate planes of existence. No matter how hard my friends try to engage me I am no longer the girl they once knew. All the more reason why I find myself drawn to Colin.
On the nights I stay home my dad tells me about my mother, about when they first met. He also talks about World War II—long, drawn-out stories that make my attention wander. I fade in and out to the subject of fighter planes and prison camps.
My mother never had any patience for his stories about the war. Because of this I’ve always assumed his stories were boring, but the more I listen, the more I realize they are not.
They are, in fact, incredible. As is the way he tells them.
My father leans back in his chair, a glass in his hand, and really settles in for it, unwinding each tale as though it is a cord of rope. He begins with the day and the year, the weather, his age. He fills in as many details as possible until the image of him at age twenty-four, standing in a base camp in Italy before a giant, gleaming B-24 Liberator, is swimming in the room before us, like some great conjured-up hologram.
It must be like writing, I think. The way he tells these stories, the way he seems to unearth them from his being. I feel the same when I write out a new poem or begin the first gray sentences of a story.
Some nights I can’t sleep, and after lying awake on the mattress in my room, listening to the ticks of the darkness around me, I go upstairs to my father’s room and push the door open softly. He is asleep on his back, the covers pulled up neatly across his chest. He sleeps in the guest room now.
Dad, I say into the darkness. He is snoring softly.
Dad?
Huh? He wakes with a start.
Dad, it’s me.
What’s wrong, honey?
I can’t sleep, Dad.
He pats the bed beside him. Come sit down.
I’m crying before I even cross the threshold. I sink down next to him, and he pushes himself back, props himself up, until he’s sitting. He rubs my back as I cry.
It’s okay, sweetie, he says. And we sit like that for a long time. Until the darkness has become an old, familiar thing again.
After a while, when I can speak, I say the things I’ve been most afraid to say. Here in my father’s room at two in the morning, it feels like he is the only person who will ever hear them.
I wish I could have been a better daughter.
My dad shakes his head, starts to speak, but I cut him off.
I wish I could have been more loving. I wish I had told her how much I loved her.
The words take flight, like tiny birds escaping from the room.
My dad shakes his head again.
Do you remember when she came up to Marlboro for parents’ weekend?
I nod feebly at him.
She came back and she was so damned happy and proud of you and what you’re doing. I’ll never forget her coming off that plane and saying, “Gerry, I got in that car, left the college, started driving through Massachusetts, and it was a beautiful fall day and the leaves were turning colors. It was a sunny Sunday afternoon. There was a Russian opera on the radio, one of my favorites.” She said, “I was so happy with Claire being in that school and having friends like that. I was conducting the orchestra with one hand and driving with the other.”
It was a very important day for her. And it meant a lot to her, and it meant a lot to me, because I knew it was just going to be rougher than hell following that.
I listen as he talks, but I’m crying again.
I didn’t know, I say. I didn’t really think she was going to die. I would have been a better daughter.
The words burble forth.
My father sighs. She didn’t want me to tell.
I would’ve been more loving. I didn’t understand.
I know. But she didn’t want you to have that burden. She wanted you to leave the nest and go to college.
But I didn’t anyway.
Didn’t what?
I didn’t leave. I came home after she died.
I know, but she didn’t want you to go off to college worrying about her or not go to college at all because of her, and I think maybe she also knew that she was going to be a mess, and she didn’t want you to feel that you were any part of it, responsible for it in any way. You had nothing to do with that. You didn’t do anything—
I wasn’t even there when she died.
I know you weren’t, but you know what? She was so damned proud of you. It meant so much to her and her life to have had you. I mean you were the biggest thing that ever happened to her.
Just think if she’d never had you, if we hadn’t met and married, if she’d never had a child and had this cancer and died . . . She’d have had no one. Instead she had loving you and all the years I gave her, which were a hell of a lot better than had she stayed there, in New York, dating all those guys and living in that damned apartment building by herself. And she would’ve done that.
You’re better off to have the eighteen years so far and what you’ve got to go, you know? Love what you’ve got. Love what you’ve had. Think back and enjoy the past as you go ahead today, tomorrow. That’s what the world is here for, why we’re all here.
He presses a little blue pill in
to my hand after that. Here, take this, he says.
I don’t know what it is. Xanax maybe. I swallow it with water from the glass on his nightstand and go back downstairs to my room, to sleep.
MY RELATIONSHIP WITH ALCOHOL deepens by the day. That cool, clear fluid in my veins loosens and numbs me. It opens me up, let’s me feel what I spend most days pushing away.
I move from gin to vodka. From tonic to club soda. Tonic masks the taste of the alcohol too much; soda makes it just tolerable enough to swallow. I’m one of the regulars now in the group that heads across the street each night after we close.
Lila and Riley and Nathan. Another couple of waiters, the manager. And Colin, always Colin. Colin with his dark eyes and steady hands. Colin who killed his sister. Colin who drives me back to my car one night after we’ve all ventured out to another bar, farther away. I am supposed to meet some friends, they are waiting for me back in my neighborhood, but Colin and I sit in his car, the engine off, talking.
The windows are down to let in the night air, and crickets chirp as a breeze rustles the trees. Colin leans over and kisses me. It’s something we’ve both been waiting for. For weeks, ever since that night I first approached him, we’ve circled each other. In the café, at the bar, a careful dance, each of us afraid to get too close too fast.
His kiss feels like a drink—immediate warmth flowing through my whole body. I can feel myself opening.
We stay there in the car for a long time, leaning into each other quietly. My friends who are waiting for me back at home give up. Later I will find a note on my bedroom window, an empty bottle of whiskey in the grass. Nothing really missed. Not compared to the feel of Colin’s lips on mine.
The summer goes on like this. Kissing in darkened cars at the end of drunken nights. There are no real dates, no formal meeting of each other’s parents. The rules of this relationship are that there are none, that it isn’t a relationship.
The last thing either of us wants is something more to lose.
We keep it a secret from the other kids at the café, avoiding each other for the most part but making sure we’re always the last to leave, pushing against each other as we walk through the darkened parking lot.
Some nights I leave with the rest of them, angry at Colin, angry at myself, too drunk to know what I’m really angry about. My mother’s death drags behind me, heavy and unidentifiable in the dark.
We sleep together a few times, and it’s more than I want it to be. Colin inside of me is too much. It’s too real. We push off each other, afraid of what we’re starting.
I’m frightened by Colin. Not just by his anger and his intensity, but by the way he seems to know me. He sees straight through everything I’ve ever tried to cultivate about myself, sees past the girl with the dyed crimson hair and the nose ring, past the authors I’ve read, the music I listen to, the way I hold my cigarette. All these things I’ve worked so hard to become are immediately discarded in his eyes. He sees a much simpler version of me, a version I’d long forgotten about.
A month goes by and Colin and I stop seeing each other. I can’t figure out what happened, but all of a sudden we’re avoiding each other in the café. On the nights that I go out after work he’s not there, and on the nights that he goes I find something else to do.
Part of me is glad for this end to things. No good would have come of it, I am sure. I force myself to go on dates with the kind of boys I think I should see. One night I let a tall, sweet customer named Chad take me to dinner. We sit across from each other in a restaurant downtown, and he stammers as he tells me how pretty I am. Later I let him kiss me in the bucket seat of his convertible, his lips dry and quivering against mine. I can’t help but think about Colin, about the deliberateness of his kisses.
I start hanging out with some of my high school friends again too, going to their parties, leaning against balconies in depressing apartment complexes as I listen to some boy describe some band he plays in. I exhale my cigarette in long, thin streams and wish I were somewhere else.
One night when I show up to work at the café everyone is jittery with conversation. Riley pulls me aside excitedly.
Did you hear what happened last night?
I didn’t.
Colin and Lila got arrested for beating up some cop.
What?
I won’t see Colin for another day, and when I do the black eye he has will have deepened into a flushed eggplant, fading down one cheekbone. The skin will look tender and fragile, and I’ll want to place my finger there. I’ll turn my back instead, cry in the car on my way home.
They’d been drinking at a friend’s apartment when some off-duty cop with anger issues got aggressive, asking them to turn down the music. Colin told him to go fuck himself, and the cop pulled a gun on him. Colin went ballistic. Lila, drunk and fierce, jumped on the cop. It’s a wonder that none of them were shot. It all ended in handcuffs, black eyes, fuming anger, café gossip.
When I see his black eye, the skin there soft like a bruised fruit, I realize that I miss him.
It’s obvious that something is going on with him and Lila though. I feel foolish for thinking it was me who was taking a break this last month. I avoid them both, leave each night as soon as I’m finished counting my tips.
One night Colin grabs my arm before I can walk out the door.
Can we talk?
I have to meet friends, I say.
Just have one drink with me.
I know he’s going to tell me that he’s moved on, that he’s seeing Lila now. I feel like glass, transparent and breakable.
Just one drink, he says. I wait while he finishes counting out his drawer.
We drive in my car to a bar nearby. Once we’re settled at a table he looks at me with a mischievous glint in his eye. I am annoyed.
Why did you bring me here?
I wanted to have a drink with you, he says, grinning.
Colin is arrogant. He’s overly confident. In years to come we’ll argue with each other wildly, debating for long hours absurd subjects like the idea of immortality and the malleability of one’s core values. He never budges, never backs down. It’s always me who gives in, gives up.
This is stupid, I say. I’m leaving.
No, wait. He touches my hand lightly and in that moment I know.
I sink back into my seat.
I miss you, he says. I made a mistake. I was afraid.
My insides are tightening. His hand on my wrist is like electricity, reaching into me.
After the bar closes we sit in my car in the parking lot. We are smoking cigarettes, listening to the Allman Brothers.
Let’s go somewhere, I say.
Sure. Where?
New Orleans?
Okay.
Really?
He shrugs, and I start the engine.
Can I stop at my house first? I need a couple of things.
The Rules of Inheritance Page 22