The Rules of Inheritance (2 page)

 

The doctors have recommended hospice, he says.

 

What's hospice?

 

My father is silent for a beat.

 

It's when you go home to die, he says finally.

 

It's here where everything becomes very still. Kids are laughing in the common room. The TV is on, and I hear glasses clinking. I pick at a flyer taped to the wall, pull at a corner of it until it tears away, watch it flutter to the floor.

 

My father calls several more times that week. First to tell me that my mom is home and that they have a nurse with her. Then to tell me that she's feeling better, not to worry. I should just keep going with school for now.

 

Can I talk to mom?

 

Not right now, sweetie. She's sleeping.

 

Both times he calls she is sleeping.

 

That weekend Christine and I go to New York with a couple of guys from our dorm. They're both named Dave. One of them has a rich dad, and drives a fancy, red Jeep. I cling to the roll bar as he swerves through Manhattan. The other Dave is an anarchist. He says things like “Fuck the Man,” and I nod my head gently, afraid to agree but even more afraid to disagree.

 

Dave with the rich dad takes us to a jazz bar in the Village that night. It's a tiny, smoky place, and we all pile into a corner together. I've never done anything like this before—go to bars, run around a big city at night. I feel at once exhilarated and terrified.

 

Suddenly rich Dave leans in and whispers at us excitedly.

 

Holy shit. That's Cecil Taylor.

 

I look across the room at an old black man tapping his foot along with the music. Throughout the night my gaze will come back to him over and over, taking in his frail frame and deeply wrinkled hands. Even though we are in the same room it feels like we are in different universes.

 

Later that night we crash at someone's apartment just outside the city, and I end up in bed with anarchist Dave. He kisses me and paws at my shirt. He whispers gruffly in my ear that if I scratch his back, he'll scratch mine. I cringe inside and turn my back to him, falling asleep to his grunts of dissatisfaction. I vow that after tonight I'm done messing around with boys for a while. Anarchist Dave is the sixth or seventh guy I've made out with in the last couple of months and no good has come of any of it.

 

When I call home on Sunday night, my father finally hands the phone to my mom.

 

Her voice is hoarse. She says she is in bed.

 

I tell her about the trip to New York and she tells me that when she and her first husband, Gene, a jazz musician, moved to New York, they crashed on Cecil Taylor's couch for a month.

 

I don't tell her about sharing a bed with the anarchist the second night.

I HAVEN'T GOTTEN a package or a letter from my mother in two weeks. During the first couple of months of college there was something in my mailbox every time I checked, my mother insistent that we stay connected. She was nervous about me being so far away, even though she liked the college I chose.

 

Marlboro sits on a mountaintop in southern Vermont, far away from my hometown of Atlanta. There are only 250 students; most of them are writers or artists or musicians. They have fucked-up parents, scattered backgrounds, no idea of who they are.

 

I live in Howland, a squat, two-story, coed dorm that houses twenty students. Even the bathrooms are coed, and I shower late at night, tiptoeing down the hallway, flinching at the sound of the water hitting the cold plastic curtain. Christine is the only one on campus who is from the small town nearby, the only local among a lot of wealthy kids who hail from rich Connecticut suburbs and sprawling California subdivisions.

 

For the most part, I'm a good fit for Marlboro. I'm a little weird and a little eclectic, in that disgruntled-suburban-teen-girl kind of way. At my high school in Atlanta I was the school poet, spending hours writing long and angst-filled verses about my boyfriend or my mother's cancer. I smoke Camel Lights and I'm a little daring.

 

At eighteen, I'm tall and thin. My wardrobe consists of a collection of white V-neck T-shirts that I buy in packs in the men's section of the department store. I wear jeans and combat boots, black bras that show through the thin T-shirts. My hair hangs long past my shoulders, dyed a silky crimson that offsets my blue eyes. Two weeks before leaving for college I lay back on a tattoo artist's couch and let him put a needle through my nose. I now sport a tiny silver stud in the hole he created there. I think all these things will help me stand out at college, but really I fit right in.

 

So far I love being at Marlboro, love being away from the drama of my high school friends in Atlanta, away from my mother's cancer and my father's sad attempts to support our small family. I love the changing leaves and my trek up the hill to the library where I read twentieth-century poetry for long hours. And even though I am outwardly ashamed of it, I love my job washing dishes after dinner in the dining hall. I love the camaraderie with the other work-life students; I love how angry I can be. I try to impress them by drinking beer as I work, by smashing cans with my boot for the recycling bin.

 

I'm not fooling anyone though.

 

Another week goes by. My father calls every day to update me on my mother's condition.

 

Do you want me to come home? I ask him this every time.

 

Not yet, sweetie. Your mom and I have talked. We want you to stay in school for now.

 

I nod, and I try to ignore the pit of doubt unfurling in my stomach.

 

I go about my business at school, running forever late to my poetry class on Monday mornings, stomping cans outside the dining hall after dinner, drinking whiskey in the common room at night with whoever else is around. It has begun to grow cold and the leaves are falling, skating across campus in big drifts.

 

I try to focus on my classes but it's not easy. I'm having trouble with a paper for my cultural history class. I can't seem to form the paragraphs, can't seem to construct sentences to support my thesis. I write in circles, saying nothing. Finally one night I head over to the little building where the writing tutors work. Upstairs I sign in on a clipboard and print my name on the last available slot: 11:00 p.m.

 

I return to my dorm, to a note on the door that my father has called. Downstairs in the phone booth his voice is resigned.

 

She's not getting any better, my father says. The doctors here say there isn't anything else they can do.

 

There is a pause. Suddenly I hate this phone booth, hate the little metal stool I am sitting on, this stupid poster on the wall that I'm always picking at.

 

My father continues. I found a hospital in DC with a doctor who's willing to operate on her though. It's worth a shot, he says.

 

I listen, saying nothing. I don't know what to believe anymore. My mother has been sick for five years. Ever since she was first diagnosed with colon cancer, when I was fourteen, our lives have been a roller coaster of operations, chemo, and carefully researched alternative treatments.

 

I've changed your ticket to go to DC next week instead of coming home for Thanksgiving, my father says.

 

I listen for a while longer, my father's words rising and falling against me like waves.

 

When we hang up, I go back to my room and lie across the bed. I feel pinned there, like an insect.

 

After a while I look at the clock. It is almost eleven. I gather my books and head back to the writing center. A single light glows in the upstairs room. The stairs creak as I make my way up them.

 

The tutor is a senior named Michel. He's French Canadian and his name is pronounced
Me-SHELL
. I say it out loud a couple of times, and he looks at me quizzically.

 

We've never spoken, but I've seen him in the dining hall, observed his height, the angle of his jaw, his blue eyes. He is handsome but doesn't seem to know it. He wears an old coat with worn elbows. There's something about the coat. It's not like the ones the rich kids get from thrift stores. The coat is real; it's the best he can do.

 

I sit down opposite him and push my paper across the table. I am ashamed. I know it is badly written. I know that he has been reading papers all night and that he surely wants to go home.

 

I sit quietly while he reads, and I stare out the windows at the snow and parked cars. I think about my mother, about when I will see her next, about yet another hospital we will all become familiar with.

 

Suddenly I am crying.

 

Michel looks up from my paper and narrows his eyes. He says nothing.

 

My mother has cancer, I blurt out. She's going to a hospital in DC. I'm supposed to go there for Thanksgiving, instead of going home. My father says she is going to die.

 

I'm aware of my voice, young and husky. I don't know why I'm telling him all of this, but it feels good to say it out loud.

 

Michel sets my paper down on the table. It will remain there, forgotten. Somehow the following week I'll finish it, hand it in.

 

My father committed suicide a year ago, he says in response.

 

He just says it. Not without emotion, but as if he can't bear for me to go on without knowing this.

 

The sentence hangs there in the air between us.

 

The room is electric. It feels like we are touching, even though we aren't.

 

Michel says it again: My father committed suicide.

 

After that our conversation unspools like smoke. We sit at the table for the next couple of hours, long past the time the center is closed, talking, leaning forward in our seats. Michel tells me about his father. I tell him about my mother. In some moments we are shy, our eyes seeking out the corners of the room. In other moments we are brazen, the room charged with the strange energy we have created.

 

It's my father's birthday, Michel says. Right now, tonight. He tells me this at midnight, and then together we watch the second hand on the old clock on the wall sink over into a new date with an audible click.

 

Now it's my birthday, he says.

 

Our birthdays are one day apart, he continues. When we lived in different time zones, my father would call me when it was eleven here, midnight there. For that one hour, we shared a birthday.

 

I am dumb with awe. I can think of nothing to say.

 

Michel begins to cry, and I watch the tears drip down onto his sweater. This boy who is almost a man, who is almost a stranger, begins to cry.

 

He tells me that he's never told anyone all of this, that he's never cried for his father, not once in this whole last year.

 

I am silent, marveling at the power we have to unlock a person.

 

We stay up all night, talking. At some point we move to the empty dining hall. It is always left unlocked, giant cereal dispensers and milk available for students all night. We fill bowls with granola and sit across from each other, the food in front of us an afterthought.

 

Michel tells me all the things he wished he'd told his father. He is stern in his insistence that I not make this same mistake with my mother.

 

You have to tell her this stuff now. You might not get another chance. He leans forward, his blue eyes barreling into me.

 

Okay, I nod.

 

And sitting there across from Michel, I really think I will. I feel energized and empowered. I feel awake and alive and more determined than ever. Before tonight my mother's cancer just seemed like this thing that was just happening to all of us. But Michel has made me feel like I can actually play a part in what happens next.

 

Hours later, when dawn breaks, I am lying awake in my top bunk, replaying the evening. Michel's instructions, his careful and urgent sentences, float down over me until I am covered in them, breathing in lightly through my mouth.