The Rules of Inheritance

by Smith, Claire Bidwell

  This woman, this twenty-eight-year-old woman.

  I am frozen. I know that if I move I’ll lose her. She’ll go back to being the girl I think I am, and I’ll no longer be able to see this woman standing before me.

  And so there I am, frozen in front of a mirror in a yoga studio on Westwood Boulevard in Los Angeles, and it is four in the afternoon on a Wednesday and I am twenty-eight years old and my life has in fact continued.

  THE FIRST YOGA CLASS I ever took was at Marlboro College when I was nineteen.

  I hated it.

  I felt self-conscious and awkward. My body didn’t do the things the teacher was urging us to try. I had trouble concentrating on my breath. I couldn’t stop the constant waves of thoughts coursing through my mind.

  I didn’t try again for nearly ten years.

  When I went to my first class in Santa Monica, I still felt awkward and insecure. But I felt something else too. It was a few months before Ryan and I broke up, and I was desperately searching for something to quell the buzzing in my head.

  Walking home along Main Street after the first yoga class, with my friend Elizabeth, I felt the tiniest sensation of relief. A hint of serenity. My mind was relaxed for the first time in weeks.

  The feeling wasn’t much different from the one I had after an afternoon spent tutoring kids. All the anger and frustration that I’m always carrying around inside of me, all that self-hatred and despair, it suddenly felt soothed.

  It was an addictive feeling, and the very next morning I found myself back in another class. I went the day after that too. In fact I went to yoga almost every day that week. The feeling growing inside me was too good to let go of.

  Yoga was hard though. I’d grown so used to filling up my life with distractions that it was startling to strip them all away. On the yoga retreat with Paul I sat out in a hammock on the first night and just cried.

  All my usual distractions were absent. My evening glass of wine was missing, my phone didn’t get any service, and there was nowhere for me to be.

  I sat in the hammock, looking up at the bright stars above the canyon, and had no choice but to deal with everything inside of me.

  My dead parents. All the years of hospitals and surgeries and bedpans and oxygen tanks. All the years of drinking. All the years of disappearing into relationships and jobs and parties.

  After a while I found myself staring, not up into the night sky, but instead into myself. Looking right into all the things I’d been trying so hard not to see.

  I’d been running for so long that I didn’t even know what I was running from.

  When I got home, I went right back to my old habits though. My hectic schedule, frantic social life, and frenzied drinking started up right where they had left off. The only difference was that I knew there was another choice.

  That knowledge is what gave me the courage to finally leave Ryan. To quit drinking. But it’s still not easy.

  The night after the car accident I take another bath. This time I just sit in the scalding water.

  The apartment is quiet. I pull my knees to my chest and look around the bathroom. The window is cracked and I can smell the ocean air wafting into the room. The shower curtain blows just a bit.

  I look at the shampoo bottles and the towels hanging on the rack. I look at the soap sitting in its dish.

  I feel a wave of disappointment. I have no idea who I am. My whole life seems like a series of reactions to my parents’ deaths.

  I wonder if I’ll ever be able to get my shit together.

  I don’t yet realize that just by sitting here I’m beginning to do exactly that.

  I START TAKING BATHS every night. In the beginning I hate listening to the thoughts in my head. I constantly battle the urge to get up, to turn the TV on, to call someone, to go somewhere.

  Sit here, Claire. Listen to yourself. You owe yourself at least that.

  And so I listen.

  At first what comes is nothing new. A report I have to finish at work tomorrow. A paper due at the end of the week for my personality theory class. A client I’ve been seeing who keeps cycling through the same damaging relationships.

  Then older stuff.

  Those last months with Ryan. The denial we were both in about the state our relationship. The look on his face that last morning before he moved out.

  I squirm in the warm water, uncomfortable at having to relive these memories. I lean my head back against the cold tile and take slow, deep breaths.

  More memories come.

  The last few days with my father. What his hand felt like in mine after he was gone.

  I cry, but I force myself to stay still, to keep my eyes closed.

  My mother comes next. The color of her skin on the last day that I saw her. That awkward hug we shared. The distant sound of her voice.

  I sit up now, lay my cheek on my knees.

  I think about all the things she missed. My college graduation. My first time reviewing a restaurant. My father’s death.

  I dry-heave over the side of the tub. There is a lake of grief inside me, churning open. I can’t believe how much this hurts.

  Finally I allow myself to get up. I towel myself off, put myself to bed. But the next night I make myself do it again.

  After a few weeks the baths actually become relaxing. The bad memories are replaced by softer ones.

  One afternoon I clean out all the soap-scummed shampoo bottles and replace them with candles and sea sponges. I grow familiar with the way the shower curtain moves in the night breeze, begin to feel comfortable with the way my thoughts come and go.

  I start to find new parts of myself, places that exist beneath the pain. I hadn’t realized there was anything there at all.

  Each night I put myself to bed, and each morning when I wake up something is a little looser.

  MY DAY-TO-DAY LIFE stays the same, but I can feel something breaking open inside me.

  Something is changing.

  On the ten-year anniversary of my mother’s death I write her a letter, like I always do.

  Dear Mom,

  You have been dead for ten years.

  This letter will be different from the others. Things aren’t the same anymore. It has taken a decade for me to really care about myself. In my last letter to you I wrote that the upcoming year would be one of my biggest because I would spend it helping other people. I’ve actually spent it helping myself.

  I never realized how much I hated myself. How afraid I was. This last year has been terribly hard and wonderfully healing. I’m alone now. All alone. No more men, no more alcohol, no more self-destructing, no more hiding.

  I miss you so much. Ten years feels like a lifetime. I no longer know the girl I once was, the girl who had a mother.

  But the thing is: I don’t want to do this anymore. Obsess over your and Dad’s deaths. I don’t want my whole life to be about those experiences. I am grateful, so incredibly grateful, for who I have become because of these losses, but I don’t want to live my life based on them anymore.

  I don’t want to be terrible to myself anymore. I don’t want to hide. I don’t want to feel desperate or lonely or hateful anymore. I want to stride forward. I want to shirk the heavy weight of all this loss. I want to throw it off like a coat worn on a summer day. I am tired of it all. I just want to be me.

  I want to let you go.

  I think that maybe, just maybe, in trying not to hold on to you, I can be at peace. I haven’t been at peace, Mom. All these last ten years I’ve been in so much pain. It’s been so hard. And I don’t want to do it anymore. I need you to release me as well.

  I’m so proud of myself now, Mom. I’m twenty-eight years old and I’m living alone in Los Angeles. I have a lovely little home filled with pets and plants and music. In the mornings I get up and make coffee, feed the cats, get ready for work. At night I tuck myself into bed, the curtains drawn, the door locked. I am almost finished with my master’s degree. I help people every day. Doing so has tau
ght me how to help myself.

  I discovered yoga last year and it has helped me to discover my body again. I’m not afraid of it anymore. I kind of even love it. I hated it for so many years, was so frightened and ashamed of it. And now it’s mine again and it’s beautiful and strong and young.

  Oh Mom. Ten years. I don’t need you to be proud of me anymore. I’m proud of myself.

  I’m letting you go this year.

  Your only daughter,

  Claire

  SPRING COMES AND with it a torrent of happiness. I feel free for the first time in my life.

  I say yes to everything. I won’t have a drink for another couple of months, but even when I do it will never again be like it was before. I go to parties and out with different people all the time. I even start going on dates. I’m slow and careful though, afraid of taking things too far with any one person.

  Once I stay up all night talking with my neighbor’s best friend. He’s a young movie producer, and I like the way he uses his hands when he talks. I like the way he looks at me. I go on a blind date with a friend of Timbre’s husband. It’s not a match, but it’s fun all the same. I exchange e-mail with a guy in Chicago who writes for the same literary website I do. The e-mails we write are lengthy and full of an unrelenting kind of honesty.

  Everything feels strangely magical. Nothing feels serious.

  My grandmother dies on my twenty-ninth birthday. In an odd way I find the date kind of beautiful. My mother’s mother, she was my last remaining grandparent. She lived on Cape Cod with my aunt Pam and uncle David, and over the last ten years, since my mother died, I made a point of visiting her at least twice a year.

  It took me a long time, after my mother’s death, to feel comfortable going to Cape Cod without her. Aunt Pam’s persistence in offering herself as a parental figure won out eventually, and after a while Cape Cod began to feel like the only place in the world that really resonated with tones of home.

  My grandmother was a big part of that though.

  I’ve been thinking of you, she’d say each time I saw her.

  And I knew she really had been. Thinking of me. It felt good to know that someone was.

  She was ninety-three, so I’m not sad that her life is over, only that I won’t see her anymore. I sit on my deck that morning, the morning of my birthday, and lean my head back into the warm sunshine that’s peeking over the roof.

  I can’t help but feel like I am part of something bigger. Like there really might be a purpose to it all. Like I’m not alone.

  I get on a plane a few days later, to go to Cape Cod for my grandmother’s memorial service. I haven’t been away all spring and the feeling of the plane lifting into the air feels good. I peer out the tiny window at Los Angeles glimmering on the very edge of the continent.

  I feel like I can see my whole life from up here. As the plane climbs higher and higher I see all the progress I’ve been making in the last year. All the yoga and the baths, the dimly lit back rows of the few AA meetings I went to. I see myself happy too, padding around my apartment in the mornings, making coffee, turning on music. Alone but happy.

  A feeling of lightness spreads through me.

  THE FEELING ONLY GROWS when I arrive in Cape Cod. I’m so happy to see my family. My family. My aunts Pam and Penelope. My uncle David. My cousins. These old, weathered houses on the beach that I’ve been visiting since I was a kid.

  At my grandmother’s funeral I look around and I am so filled with gratitude. All these years I’ve been focusing on what I don’t have and not appreciating what I do.

  After the service we all go back to Aunt Pam’s house, and I take up residence in a hammock in the yard. It’s Memorial Day weekend, and beachgoers trickle by on their way to the water. My cousins are down at the beach. I’ll join them soon. I just want a moment to be still.

  I have no idea that just over a year from now I’ll be getting married in this very backyard. That it will, in fact, be the happiest day of my life.

  I can’t possibly know that. Yet I do know something.

  I know that everything about the last few months of my life has been magical.

  I know that I’ve changed.

  I know that I’m happy.

  I know that I’ve finally learned how to listen to myself.

  I smile as I think about all the things I’ve said yes to in the last six months, all the adventures I’ve had, all the people I’ve met.

  And then I frown for a moment.

  There’s one person I haven’t said yes to.

  The guy I’ve been e-mailing in Chicago: Greg. He’s been asking me to come visit him for weeks.

  Each time I said no.

  After we became friends in April it wasn’t long before we were e-mailing almost every day. Greg is twenty-eight. He works at some boring job in Chicago that I can never retain the details of. He has curly brown hair, blue eyes. He’s a writer.

  I quickly came to depend on my morning e-mails from him, loved the funny notes he sent me when he got to work. Both of us single, living in big cities, trying to figure out who we are—there was never a lack of things to say.

  Eventually we started talking on the phone. I liked the sound of his voice, husky but kind too. Before long we knew everything about each other. The farm he grew up on in Northeast Ohio. His five siblings and MFA. That he shares my father’s birthday.

  It wasn’t long before he suggested we meet.

  I’ll come to LA for the weekend, he said. Or you could come here.

  I shook my head into the phone.

  No way. It would be awkward. We wouldn’t live up to the ideas we have about each other. And then we couldn’t talk on the phone anymore.

  Greg laughed. Come on, he pleaded.

  Nope.

  So we broke up. Or whatever it’s called when two people who only know each other online and the phone stop talking.

  That was two weeks ago. I miss him though. I miss his e-mails and his voice. I miss his stories and his insights into my silly LA adventures.

  Why didn’t I want to meet him? I, a person who goes on yoga retreats with people I hardly know and gallivants around the Philippines in search of sharks?

  I know it’s because I’ve been afraid of losing this newfound ability to be on my own. I’m afraid of disappearing into another relationship. But I also know that I can’t let that hold me back for the rest of my life.

  At some point I’m going to have to test my new strength.

  I look toward the beach. The breeze carries the scent of salt and suntan lotion up to me.

  I pull out my phone and text Greg.

  What if I stop in Chicago on my way home from Cape Cod tomorrow?

  Hardly a minute goes by before my phone beeps with his response.

  Yes. Please. Do it.

  THE NEXT MORNING I find myself, not on a plane back to LA, but instead on one bound for Chicago.

  I’m nervous and I stare out the window, watching Boston Harbor recede below us. I went out with my cousins last night. When I told them about my Chicago plans, my cousin Chris laughed.