Inheritance

When Alice was eight years old, her mommy took two suitcases, sat in an old blue Ford and drove away. She never came back and it didn’t matter that Alice stood on the stairs staring at the front door everyday after school. She started going in her parents’ bedroom and picking the reminiscences of mom’s things out of the closet. She took a pink sweater, a summer hat and some bead necklaces and hid them in the box under her desk. If mommy came to collect it, Alice would say she could not give it back unless mommy stayed. Then of course she could wear her sweater, her hat and her beads. She told dad that he should call mom and inform her that she forgot some of her stuff. Then we could have her back, mommy loved those necklaces, Alice said. And the hat, she would wear the hat on summer and it would create a shade on her face. Mommy will get sun burnt without it. Dad shook his head, he didn’t understand. It’s not important, he told her. Get rid of those things, she doesn’t need them. At first Alice didn’t agree but dad said she already had mommy’s eyes. Then it began.
Alice started observing herself in a mirror. Her thick eyelashes, heavy eyelids, small pupils and blue around them, the purest blue ever – everything belonged to mommy. She would try to see things in mommy’s way and evaluate them. She wore powder pink; she messed up her bedding and admired waves and wrinkles of the white blanket. She read books and imagined mommy staring at black letters, hearing sounds in her head, syllable after syllable. One day she found a word ‘inheritance’. Then she knew that mommy didn’t give her anything. Alice just inherited her eyes accidentally, without any plan. They were left like those necklaces, two round shiny beads in her childish skull.
After Alice turned fourteen, she didn’t want to live with mommy’s eyes anymore. She bought brown contacts and wore them all the time. She did her bed neatly; she dressed up in beige and turquoise, asymmetric dresses and big jackets. She refused wool, silk and velvet and chose synthetics. She hated mommy for that: limiting her choices, pushing her to watch TV instead of reading, making her eat a lot. Mommy would often lie in bed; Alice took swimming lessons and watched her narrow shoulders growing wider, her arm muscles blossoming. She never cried because mommy did.
On Alice’s sixteenth birthday they received a letter. It said that mommy was living in a big city and that she was cured. I am not unhappy anymore my dear Alice, she wrote. Alice sent her a pink sweater, a summer hat and some necklaces keeping only two beads for herself.