Inheritance

Charlotte Robertson

It was raining for the eighth day in a row and I was in the library pretending to do my homework when I got a call from Ingrid. I picked up to the sound of my mother’s voice.

“How do I fix the WiFi router?”

“Mom?”

“Yes?”

“Why are you calling from Ingrid’s phone?”

“I can’t find mine.”

My mom was constantly losing things. For her birthday last year, Ingrid and I split the cost of one of those air-tags, for her keys, but she misplaced the box the next day. “I do see the irony in this,” she had said.

I told her to unplug the container behind the television, wait thirty seconds, and then re-plug it. She thanked me and quickly hung up.

I returned my focus to the piece of paper in front of me. I had signed up for Logic at the beginning of the semester because I thought it would help me become a more logical person. What makes an argument good or bad, in the strictest possible sense? We will study the conversion of natural written arguments into formal language and how to deduce the validity or invalidity of a given argument, the course description read. I liked the idea that anything could be parsed into truth or untruth. I liked the idea that words could be simplified.

But as it turns out, Logic uses a strange notation that is impossible to understand. It’s like a different language, but also somehow like math, without any of the rules of language or math. I tried meeting with the professor, a small, sweaty man. As I failed each practice problem in his office, I felt him growing frustrated with me. “Use modus ponens,” he told me, jabbing a yellow fingernail at the whiteboard. “What’s the antecedent here?”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

He let out a sigh. “It’s Q.”

For my latest assignment, I was supposed to translate sentences into formulas and then calculate the formulas for truth value. Only if Taylor doesn’t leave will Nick leave or Taylor and Nick and Lauren will all leave. I reread the sentence twice. It made me think about this time in high school when Mom and I went to see Ingrid perform in The Crucible. I drove while Mom drank vodka out of a plastic water bottle. When we arrived, Ingrid told us to go home.

“We came all the way here,” mom said.

“I don’t want you here. You’re drunk,” Ingrid said. My mom slapped her in the face and took her seat in the audience. Ingrid forgot all her lines for the first scene, then snuck out the window during her costume change. She spent the rest of the play in the parking lot, throwing pebbles into a puddle. The three of us drove home in silence.

My phone flashed Ingrid’s number again. I picked up. “Mom?”

“No?”

“Oh, hi. Never mind. Mom said she lost her phone.”

“Are you busy?”

“I have class in a few minutes,” I lied. That was one good part of college—the lying.

“Fine. Call me later, then.”

I decided to skip the Crucible problem and move on to the next. Julia, who will run, will win if and only if she does not quit. I assigned the letter J to Julia and drew some arrows in the wrong places. How was this a problem? Stupid Julia. All she had to do was keep running. I wished my life was that straightforward.

I crumpled my paper and threw it across the room. A boy sitting at a table adjacent to mine glared at me. I stood up and picked the paper from the floor.

When the rain stopped, I walked back to my dorm. Joan was sitting cross-legged in front of our mirror, applying lipstick. “Come out with me tonight,” she said.

I put my keys in the dish on my desk. “I have an appointment,” I said.

“When?”

“At five.”

“God. The concert doesn’t start until ten.”

“That’s sort of past my bedtime anyway,” I tried to joke. Joan just looked at me.

“If you change your mind, let me know,” she said. She rubbed the lipstick out of her teeth. It was so easy for her to be this way, I thought.

When she left, I took her position in front of the mirror and pulled the skin of my cheeks upwards, to make it look like I was smiling. Joan had left her bag of makeup on her bed. I unzipped it and rummaged through the sparkly tubes and compacts. She was always trying to get me to borrow stuff—clothes, perfume, jewelry. It’s not her fault that everything I tried looked like a costume hanging off my body.

The appointment I had was with the school-appointed psychologist. Ingrid told me to go. She thinks everyone needs therapy. The receptionist offered me Dove brand chocolates when I checked in.

“Why don’t you start by telling me why you’re here,” Norris began. He was a handsome man with messy hair. I had called him Mr. Lawley when I first sat down in the cushy armchair across from his desk, but he insisted he was simply Norris. He, too, offered me Dove brand chocolates.

“It was my sister’s suggestion,” I said. “She thinks I’m depressed.”

“Do you think you’re depressed?”

“I don’t know. I was hoping you could tell me that.”

Norris seemed to think this was very interesting. He took a ball-point pen out of the mug on his desk and tapped it against his lips. He began asking me a lot of questions about Ingrid.

“She takes care of me in a way. And I take care of her. We take care of each other,” I explained.

“She’s older?”

“She’s twenty-one.”

“She’s in college?”

“No.” Ingrid had been enrolled in community college for three weeks before getting arrested for stealing and crashing her ex-boyfriend’s car. She was later hospitalized in Saint Mary’s psychiatric ward after she told the cops she was hearing voices.

“What’s your relationship like with your sister?”

“Good. Fine.” I said.

“Good or fine?”

I was getting irritated. I didn’t bike a mile to the Health and Wellness Center to talk about Ingrid. “Both. Can we talk about something else?”

Norris scribbled something in his legal pad. “Tell me about your social life,” he said.

Ingrid asked me this all the time. She wanted to hear about my friends, the parties. “I’ve got to live vicariously through you,” she would say. Most of the time, I’d make stuff up.

“There’s not a lot going on in my social life,” I confessed.

“Tell me more.”

I checked my watch. There were thirty minutes left in the forty-five minute session. I tried to be open-minded. “I don’t really know how to talk to people,” I ventured. “I don’t know how to function like a normal person.”

“What do you mean, function?”

“You know. Do stuff. Meet people.”

“You’re being very vague.”

“Okay.” I felt like screaming. “My roommate, for example, Joan. She’s good at everything. She’s very well-adjusted to the world.”

“And you aren’t?”

“I don’t think so. I think I have a hard time accepting my life as it is. And I have a hard time accepting that the world is the way it is.” I rubbed my eyes. Norris was patient. “It’s like there’s this invisible wall between the normal world and me,” I continued. “And somewhere on this invisible wall, there’s an even more invisible door. And somehow Joan and everyone else has managed to find the invisible door and make it to the normal world, but I can’t find it. I can watch, through the wall, because the wall is invisible. But I can’t get in.”

Norris made a humming sound, like I had just said something very profound. He wrote some more in his legal pad. “You keep using the word ‘normal.’ Elaborate on that.”

I told him I didn’t know what I meant. I didn’t know how to explain it to him.

Back in my room, I ate a bag of cashews for dinner and opened Foundations in Inductive Logic, a slim paperback I found in the used textbook section of the college bookstore. The first page listed all of the laws in a neat square, with their respective symbolic examples:

P ↔ Q : Bi-conditional

P ∧ Q : Conjunction

P V Q : Disjunction

~(P V Q) ↔ (~P) ∧ (~Q) : De Morgan’s

I liked the double-negative rule, because I could remember it: P is equivalent to not-not-P. I liked the idea that something was true so long as its opposite wasn’t, even though that’s not how anything really works.

I tried another problem. There were more symbols than before, a backwards E and an upside-down A. I pressed the tip of my pencil to my worksheet until it broke off.

Joan came home at three. I was reading. She dumped her body onto her bed, which was suspended high off the ground to make room for her dresser, then rolled over and threw up off the side. The vomit hit the linoleum floor with a smack.

“It’s okay,” I told her. She was crying. I went into the bathroom and found a roll of paper towels. There was a bottle of Windex in the closet. I took that too. I laid rows of paper towels over the vomit, soft and warm under my fingertips.

“I only had a couple of seltzers,” Joan whimpered. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” she said a few times. Her face was green. Her lipstick was intact. I told her to have some water. She nodded, then passed out.

When I was done cleaning up the floor, I dragged Joan’s duvet over her shoulders, which swelled and contracted with her breathing. I considered kissing her forehead.

I turned off the big light and switched on the little lamp on my desk. I knew I wouldn’t be tired for at least another hour. Norris had given me a questionnaire to submit online. Everything has homework, I thought to myself. He wanted to start meeting weekly. “I’m not sure that’s necessary,” I’d said.

List any and all medications you are currently taking.

Norris had already asked me if I was on drugs. “Do I look like the kind of person who is on drugs?” I’d asked, slightly alarmed.

“I just want to get a more well-rounded picture of your life,” he’d said. “Do you drink?”

“I’m underage,” I said.

“I’m not going to report you to the police,” Norris said kindly. “But I do need you to be honest.”

“I don’t drink.”

He studied my face for a moment. “Okay.”

I typed N/A in the text box under the question.

Is there a history of mental illness in your family?

I checked yes, and a new text box appeared. List all family members afflicted. What was it about doctors and lists? “I don’t trust doctors,” my mom had said to me once. “No one knows what you need better than you do.” She had just been discharged from Saint Mary’s intensive care unit after fainting from acute liver failure. She had been given a laminated booklet for a six-week rehabilitation center. She threw it out in the parking lot. If I explained Ingrid and my mom, what would Norris do? Would he send me to Saint Mary’s?

I scrolled up and changed my answer to no.

“I’m never drinking again,” Joan told me at breakfast. Her hangover sweat reflected the sunlight on her cheeks. She looked beautiful, somehow. I resented her for it. I offered her Advil. She asked me how my night went.

“Uneventful,” I said.

“That can be nice,” she offered.

“It can be. It was.”

“You don’t like going out,” she said, like it was a statement.

I wasn’t sure if I’d like going out. Joan had invited me to hang with her girl group a number of times on the weekend. She said I could borrow her fake ID whenever I wanted, since “we look similar enough.” (This is not true.) It’s not that I don’t want to join her. I don’t know how. I need someone to coach me on what to talk about, how to use my hands, how to stand and walk and sit, what to do with my facial expressions.

Joan and I were sitting in the dining hall, a table in the corner so as to appear as small as possible. It was late morning, which meant the entire student body was here. A lot of people waved at Joan as they passed. I hated the dining hall because of the lights. I could never tell what time it was in here.

I was looking at my bowl of cereal when an extremely thin man appeared in front of us. Joan brushed the hair out of her face and opened her eyes wider. She started giggling a lot. The thin man asked Joan if she was going to the Greece-themed party tonight.

“How can a party be Greece-themed?” I asked.

Both Joan and the man looked at me as if they had just noticed I was there.

“It’s Greece-themed. I don’t know,” the man said.

“Like, blue and white? Or mythology?”

“No. Grease. The movie from the 50s.”

I felt stupid, but not as stupid as the thin man for thinking the Grease movie had come out in the 50s.

Once he walked away, Joan said, “I’ve been trying to have a one-night stand with him for three weeks.”

“Is it a one-night stand if you plan it?” I asked, genuinely.

“I like him, but I only want to sleep with him once,” she explained.

“That makes sense,” I said, even though it didn’t.

I sent an email to Norris saying I wouldn’t be returning for our second session. Even though it was Saturday, he responded immediately. I am dismayed by your decision. I strongly encourage you to reconsider. Seeking the proper support systems is very important, especially as you enter this new chapter of your life in college. I sent the email to my junk folder.

Ingrid called me again. I picked up after the fourth ring. “Hello?”

“What are you doing right now?”

I looked around at myself. I was sitting in bed, my laptop open to New Girl. “Nothing.”

“Are you having a good day?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m having a good day too,” she said. She sounded like she was out of breath, like she’d just walked up a lot of stairs. I waited for her to ask for what she needed.

“That’s good.”

“And mom’s good.”

“Well. Good.”

“You know what isn’t good, though?” she asked. “The U-fucking-SPS. They keep losing my checks.”

“Oh,” I said.

“I don’t trust them. I never have. You’re telling me we send things in a thin little paper envelope and we just have to assume they’ll arrive at their destination?”

“Why don’t you get direct deposit?”

“Right, because that’s reliable. You’re telling me we send money through the Internet and it magically appears in my bank account?”

“I don’t think it’s through the Internet.”

“Whatever. Anyway. Can you spot me fifty bucks?”

This was the dance we did every couple of weeks. “Ingrid, I can’t.”

“A carton of eggs is four-twenty-five. Do you know that’s a price increase of over fifty percent?” Ingrid said. “Over fifty percent in one year. Google it.”

“It’s a recession.”

“I’m a recession. I’m a barista.”

“I’m a student,” I said.

“Don’t rub it in,” Ingrid said. This was what she always said. “You get to go to college and live a normal life. Don’t you know how lucky you are?”

I sent fifty bucks to her Venmo account. She thanked me.

“It’s seriously the last time,” she said. “I’m meeting with my boss next week. Maybe they can, I don’t know, pay me in cash.”

“Sure.”

“What do you have planned for tonight?”

“There’s a Grease party. Not the country.” I told her. “I’m not gonna go.”

“Why not?”

“Don’t feel like it.”

“You’re supposed to go to parties. That’s the whole point of college, besides the education thing,” she said. I looked out my window. It was raining. “If I were you, I would go.”

“If I were you, I’d have fifty bucks.”

“Fuck off.”

“Sorry.”

I told Joan I needed a costume for the Grease party. She was delighted. “We can be matching Sandys,” she said. “Is it okay if I’m the slutty one?” I told her it was.

An hour later we were standing outside an apartment. I was wearing a skirt with a felt poodle stitched to the front. Did everyone just know to bring skirts with felt poodles on the front to college? “We did Bye Bye Birdie in high school,” Joan had said, like that explained anything.

There was music seeping through the second-floor window. The apartment belonged to a guy named Phineas. He was a computer science major and he sold magic mushrooms in the laundry room of his basement. “Have you ever done magic mushrooms?” Joan asked me.

“No. Should I have?”

“I want to, someday. I’ll do everything once.”

She took out her phone and dialed the thin man’s number. I could hear his voice on the other line, telling her the front door was open. She pushed through with ease.

The apartment was damp and smelled like people. Joan was in her element. She shed her expensive jacket and draped it confidently on the side of the pea-colored couch. I hid mine on the top of the short refrigerator in the kitchen while Joan prowled around for the thin man. Someone’s hand touched my shoulder.

“What?” I asked, a little meanly.

“You’re in my way,” this guy said. He was chubby and had a wispy mustache. He was trying to get to the short refrigerator. “Hey. You want something to drink?”

“I’m okay,” I said. He shrugged and found a bottle of beer. He put the top in his mouth and bit off the cap. I frowned and wondered when parties got fun.

“Who are you?” he asked me. “I’ve never seen you before. I’m Phineas.”

“Oh,” I said. “This is your house.”

“Yeah.”

“It’s nice,” I lied. There was a poster of Bob Dylan hanging above the sink and one of those mirrors that looked like it was lined with shaving cream in the hallway. “Nice decorations.”

“I have seen you before.” Phineas was squinting at me. “You’re in Logic. I’m your TA.”

“Oh,” I said again, like an idiot. “I didn’t recognize you.” I actually didn’t even know there was a TA for Logic.

“Do you like it so far?”

“I want to like it.”

He laughed. “What does that mean?”

“I’m not doing very well. I’m sort of struggling with the material.”

“It’s a tough class. What are you, a freshman? Are you going into CS?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t declared anything. But probably not, I’m more of a humanities person.”

“Why would you take Logic, then?”

“I didn’t realize what it was,” I said. I looked behind him to see if there was a line that was leading to a bathroom.

“Someone should have warned you.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I agree.” I spotted the bathroom line. I excused myself.

I woke up the next morning at 11. Joan wasn’t home, which meant she had finally gotten her one-night stand. That, or she went to breakfast without me. I stretched a hand to the floor to pull my computer up to my bed. I hated this raised bed-situation. It felt like I was on an island. I opened my email. My results for my previous Logic exam were posted. Before I even clicked on the link, I knew I flunked.

I closed my laptop and turned on my phone. I had a missed voicemail from Ingrid. It was only a few seconds long. “Sweetheart. If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound?”

Panic surged through my cheeks. I quickly called my mom.

“Hello?”

“My phone must have been on Do Not Disturb. I got this scary voicemail—where’s Ingrid? Is she okay?”

“Ingrid’s in the hospital.”

“What?”

“She overdosed a little,” mom said.

“How do you overdose a little?”

“She’s going to be fine. She’s alive and everything, ‘full recovery,’ they said.”

I looked around my floor for a pair of socks. “What happened?”

“I don’t really know.”

“Are you with her now?”

“I’m at work.”

“Is anyone with her?”

“I don’t know.”

“You left her in the hospital, alone?”

“She’s surrounded by nurses. She’s not alone.”

“That’s not what I meant,” I said. I located my socks and pulled them onto my feet. “Why didn’t you call me?”

“Honey—”

“I’m going to drive over.”

“You’re in school.”

“I’m leaving right now.”

In the hospital, Ingrid was chatting loudly with her doctor. She was smiling in her obnoxious way. She looked like death. When she saw me, she rolled her eyes.

“What the hell?”

“Ingrid,” I said. Her doctor nodded at me and gracefully exited.

Ingrid lifted her arms above her head. “You found me.”

I wondered if she was still high. I spoke briefly with someone when I came into the hospital. Apparently she had peed herself in front of Trader Joe’s and then blacked out. “Who brought her here?” I’d asked. The receptionist told me they didn’t know.

There had once been a time when Ingrid hated our mom for being an addict.

“I’m glad you’re alive,” I said. I sat on the edge of her bed. She had two IVs, one in each arm. The machine behind her was beeping quietly.

“Are you mad at me?”

“Yeah.”

Ingrid will buy drugs if and only if she has fifty bucks. I have fifty bucks. I do not want Ingrid to buy drugs. I give Ingrid the money.

“Do you remember that time mom was in the hospital?” I asked.

“Which time?”

“A few weeks after The Crucible.”

“I remember.”

Ingrid had found mom passed out on the toilet seat. We tried to wake her up for several minutes. Ingrid put her in the bath and ran cold water over her body, but it didn’t do anything, so we called an ambulance.

“Do you remember yelling at her?”

“Right when she woke up? I remember that, yes.”

Ingrid had pulled mom’s face close to hers and yelled I need you to be better. I had to

drag her out into the hallway to calm her down.

“Are you going to yell at me now?” Ingrid asked. “You can yell, it’s okay.”

“I don’t feel like yelling.”

“I’m alive.”

“This time.”

“I’m not going to change,” Ingrid said. “I want to change, but I’m not going to change. This is how I’m wired.” She gestured toward a cup of ice chips that was sitting on the windowsill. Many of them were already melted. I picked up the cup and handed it to her. “I wish I could be different for you.”

As I drove back to school, it poured.

On Monday I knocked on my Logic professor’s door. He let me in. He was expecting me. I sat across from him in one of those chairs with the tiny desks attached to the side. He was sweating, as always.

“I’m going to fail your class,” I said.

“Yes.”

“And it’s too late to drop it.”

“That’s true.”

“So I’m going to get an F on my report card.”

I started to cry. I had never failed a class in my life. I wondered if my professor would take pity on me, allow me to turn in corrections for my final. I probably couldn’t write any corrections if I tried. I thought of Julia the runner and how badly I wished to stop running.

“There’s really nothing I can do at this time,” my professor was saying. I could tell he didn’t pity me for crying, but was actually very uncomfortable.

“You know, this class was nothing like I thought it would be,” I said. “I wanted to learn how to be a logical person.”

He smiled. “I can’t teach you how to do that.”

“What?”

“I don’t think there is such thing as being a ‘logical person,’ not really.”

I stared at him. “I don’t understand.”

He took a sip of water from a cup on his desk. “I didn’t get my PhD in Logic because I believe in it.”

“You don’t believe in Logic?”

“In my class, you learn how to deduce validity from specific arguments with static premises.”

“Well, maybe not me.”

He laughed then. “The real issues of life—whatever that means—aren’t simple enough for validity.”

My mouth was open. “Then what’s the point?”

“You aren’t going to get anywhere in your life if you’re constantly wondering ‘what’s the point?’ Some things don’t have a point. They just are.” He told me to close the door on my way out.

I went home that night and wondered if being a logical person was something that was wired. I wondered if I could ever be logical at all.

Charlotte is a rising junior at Vassar College studying English. She is currently the News Editor for The Miscellany News. Her creative work has previously been published in The Incandescent Review, TheatreMania, and The Vassar Student Review. She lives in New York.