The Rules of Inheritance (41 page)

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.