The Rules of Inheritance Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Part One - Denial

  Chapter One - 1996, I’M EIGHTEEN.

  Chapter Two - 1992, I’M FOURTEEN YEARS OLD.

  Chapter Three - 2002, I’M TWENTY-FOUR YEARS OLD.

  Part Two - Anger

  Chapter Four - 1997, I’M EIGHTEEN.

  Chapter Five - 2000, I AM TWENTY-TWO YEARS OLD.

  Chapter Six - 1993, I AM FIFTEEN YEARS OLD.

  Part Three - Bargaining

  Chapter Seven - 2003, I AM TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OLD.

  Chapter Eight - 1998, I AM NINETEEN YEARS OLD.

  Chapter Nine - 2008, I AM THIRTY YEARS OLD.

  Part Four - Depression

  Chapter Ten - 1997, I’M EIGHTEEN YEARS OLD.

  Chapter Eleven - 1999, I’M TWENTY-ONE YEARS OLD.

  Chapter Twelve - 2003, I’M TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OLD.

  Part Five - Acceptance

  Chapter Thirteen - 2007, I’M TWENTY-EIGHT YEARS OLD.

  Chapter Fourteen - 2003, I’M TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OLD.

  Chapter Fifteen - 2011, I’M THIRTY-TWO YEARS OLD.

  Acknowledgements

  HUDSON STREET PRESS

  Published by Penguin Group

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published by Hudson Street Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First Printing, February 2012

  Copyright © Claire Bidwell Smith, 2012

  All rights reserved

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Smith, Claire Bidwell.

  The rules of inheritance : a memoir / Claire Bidwell Smith.

  p. cm.

  ISBN : 978-1-101-55986-4

  1. Smith, Claire Bidwell. 2. Children of cancer patients—United States—Biography. 3. Daughters—United States—Biography. 4. Bereavement—Psychological aspects. 5. Psychotherapists—United States—Biography. 6. Women psychotherapists—United States—Biography. I. Title.

  RC265.6.S647 2012

  616.99’40092--dc23

  [B]

  2011025136

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  To my mother and father—I have nothing but gratitude for all that I have inherited.

  Part One

  Denial

  There is a grace in denial. It is nature’s way of letting in only as much as we can handle.

  —Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

  Chapter One

  1996, I’M EIGHTEEN.

  MY FATHER’S VOICE is tinny through the phone line. I am in the booth at the bottom of the stairs in Howland dorm. It is my freshman year of college.

  Claire, he is saying, your mother is back in the hospital.

  It is a Tuesday. My mother was just here two days ago, visiting for parents’ weekend, and I am immediately confused as to why she is in the hospital.

  Claire, are you listening to me?

  I take a deep breath.

  I’m here, Dad.

  Listen. I don’t know how to say this. The doctors, they don’t think there is anything else they can do. The cancer is too far gone.

  What do you mean?

  I don’t like the words “too far gone.” They make me think of a ship lost at sea.

  As I listen to my father run through the details of my mother’s hospital visit, the previous weekend replays in my head on fast-forward, scenes flashing by in blurred succession.

  My mother had arrived on Friday. We drove along the winding mountain roads together, Vermont like a foreign country to both of us, the autumn trees like bursts of flame—orange and gold and deep, deep red. There was a weird silence between us, a space that had never been there before.

  The two months since I’d been at college were as long as we’d been apart in my whole life.

  My mother worked hard to close the new distance, acting chipper, and I tried to fill the gap too, telling her about my classes and my roommate, Christine. That night we ate dinner at an Italian restaurant in town. She ordered two glasses of wine, let me have one. Around the room two or three other students sat at tables with their parents, and for no real reason I felt embarrassed for all of us.

  On Saturday we strolled around campus, the white clapboard buildings and rolling green hills like a New England postcard. I pointed out my poetry teacher, an old hippie with a scruffy beard, and the boy I have a crush on, Christopher. From the steps of the dining hall we watched Christopher swing one leg over an old motorcycle, kick the thing to life.

  He has a girlfriend, I told my mom.

  Of course he does, she said. I watched her watch him, knowing that she already knew that kind of boy.

  That afternoon we went shopping, and she bought me a shirt and a pair of hiking boots. In the coming months I’ll cling to that shirt as though I’d cared about her that weekend, as though I’d actually been grateful for her visit. As though I hadn’t wanted her gone already so that I could get back to my life.

  As the weekend went on my mother grew too loose with me. She let me ignore her, let me smoke cigarettes in her rental car, and invited my friends out to dinner with us on the second night. She seemed desperate for me to let her in.

  But I had only just discovered how to be without her. Why would I want to let her in?

  On Sunday I watched her drive away, my lip between my teeth, blood on my tongue from the force of it.

  That was two days ago.

  I tune back in to what my father is saying on the phone. Something about hospice.

  Wait, wait, I say. Back up.

  She collap
sed in the bedroom this morning, sweetie. There wasn’t anything I could do.

  I picture my mother in one of her long Yves Saint Laurent nightgowns in their bedroom in Atlanta. Picture my elderly father stooping to help her back to bed.

  But she was just here, I say.

  I know she was, sweetie. I know.

  Months later, after she is gone, my father will tell me that he thinks she stored up that last burst of energy just to visit me. He will tell me that once she saw me safely ensconced in my life there, she was finally able to let go. When he says this, I will immediately wish that I had been more of a mess.

  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.