The Rules of Inheritance (19 page)

 

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.

 

There is an abandoned building full of squatters next to ours. Sometimes we have to step over homeless people sleeping under tarps on the sidewalk and we crane our necks upward, listening to the fights filtering out of windows.

 

Our building is of the solid brick sort and we live at the very top, on the fifth floor. I will trip on these stairs over and over, sometimes drunk, sometimes carrying bags of groceries, other times for no reason at all. In the base of the building is a little deli where we go to buy cigarettes and six-packs of Bass Ale and pints of Häagen-Dazs in the summer when our little window unit air conditioner isn't enough to combat the sweltering heat.

 

An older Puerto Rican couple lives next door to us. The wife never emerges from the apartment, and all day long the husband travels up and down the stairs carrying enormous plastic bags filled with empty bottles and cans for recycling money. For years, I'll say that this is how they pay their rent, and then one summer when they finally go out of town I'll sneak a peek at the rent slip when I see it wedged in their door.

 

Because of New York's rent-control laws, and because they have lived there so long, their rent is only $65. Ours, for the same size apartment, is $1,450.

 

As we trudge up the stairs, to our little apartment on the top floor, I can hear the phone ringing from halfway down the hall.

 

Colin fumbles with the keys, his fingers cold. The phone bleats just inside. We push through the door finally, and into the darkened kitchen. Colin is the first to reach the phone. A cursory hello, then silence. He hands it to me.

 

It's Julie, he says.

 

I'm still tugging off my gloves, unwinding my scarf from my neck. Why is Julie calling? We spoke two days ago.

 

Julie is one of my best friends. She is twenty-two years old, a student at the University of Georgia. We went to high school in Atlanta together and despite the disparate landscapes of London, Vermont, New York, and Athens that pepper our post-high-school life, we have remained close.

 

But still we only talk every few weeks, filling the interim with fat, handwritten letters and the occasional e-mail. Why is she calling only two days after such a catch-up session?

 

I hold the phone to my ear.

 

Julie?

 

Colin rolls his eyes and disappears into the living room.

 

Claire?

 

Her voice is soft, like the freshly fallen snow that drifted across the windowsill two nights ago. She continues without pause.

 

Claire, I have something to tell you.

 

And then she just says it:

 

I'm in the hospital and I have leukemia.

 

Her voice breaks here, her breathing cascading into rough whispers across the phone line and into my ear.

 

Everything stops.

 

What do you mean?

 

It's all I can manage.

 

Her explanation unfolds like an instruction pamphlet: backward, forward, upside down, all of it connected, all of it unavoidable. My brain turns her words over and over, trying to fit them together in a way that makes sense, but it's impossible to fold it all back together into a neat package, into something palatable.

 

Yesterday, at her medical science internship, she blacked out while peering into a microscope. She was taken to the hospital, where blood tests immediately revealed an invasion of white blood cells. More than she would ever need. Millions. Trillions. Filling her up, destroying everything in their path.

 

Leukemia.

 

It was a simple diagnosis. The news was delivered with one brutal blow, everything shifting in an instant. Chemo, radiation, radical tests and treatments, a college semester dropped out of, a life completely changed.

 

I sit on the couch with Colin after I hang up the phone. We each light a cigarette.