English Lessons

by Andrea Lucado

  The sky had been dark for hours when we got in the car to drive back to Oxford after the conference. Still not warm, I crossed my arms and looked out the window as my fellow passengers talked. Jisu had stayed behind in London with a friend, so it was just the four of us now.

  The car debrief began.

  “I feel like I’m always disappointed by Christian conferences these days,” the American said.

  “Oh yeah, why is that?” asked the Englishman.

  “The workshops were okay, but they didn’t say anything I haven’t already heard. And, I don’t know, conferences just seem to be lacking something for me.”

  “I know what you mean,” said the Englishman. “I was hoping they would address film more. They hardly spoke about film at all. Film is so central to a conversation about art and culture and faith. I can’t believe they missed that.”

  “What did you think, Andrea?” the American asked. I had remained silent on purpose, hesitant to share my real opinions with people I had just met. I paused for a few seconds.

  “Honestly? Besides the fact that it was freezing in that room all day, I loved it.”

  “Did you?” they asked.

  “Yeah, I’ve never heard Christians talk about art in that way.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know. I feel like for years I’ve sort of felt ashamed about the types of books I like to read, the stuff that everyone calls ‘sad’ and ‘depressing.’ But being with all of you guys there and hearing what the speakers were saying, I don’t know, I feel like the church just gave me permission to like the art that I like.”

  The car was quiet.

  “Hmm, yes,” someone finally said.

  “Yes, I hadn’t thought about it like that,” said someone else.

  We didn’t talk much after that. I returned to my internal dialogue and looked out the window and up at the dark sky. I tried to see the stars, but the city lights were too bright. The farther we got from London, the darker the sky got, and the darker the sky, the more I could see the stars. Something was happening to me, and in me, and I smiled to myself all the way home.

  As soon as I got back to my room that night, I scribbled Psalm 137 on a sticky note and stuck it on the wall above my desk.

  How shall we sing the LORD’s song

  in a foreign land?

  If I forget you, O Jerusalem…

  As I wrote down those words, I started to cry. I was in a foreign land as I wrote about the foreign land. I had forgotten who I was at times. I had dismissed who I was. I had denied who I was. This land was foreign, these people were foreign, and I had even started to look foreign to myself, trying to prove God’s existence in my journal, going over the arguments in my head, feeling the expanse that was darkness.

  So I wrote the words and I cried and I prayed fervently that I would not forget Jerusalem, that I would hold it above my highest joy.

  Maybe the darkness had not been all that bad. Maybe darkness was not about the absence of light but rather about something that forces you to really feel around for things. To really try to grasp them and understand them, to really get to know the world you are in until you can claim it as your own.

  The hangover from early in the morning had worn off now, and after months of feeling around for my faith, I finally felt a welling up inside me. A welling up of what, I wasn’t sure. But it felt honest and truthful and bubbly. It felt like an old desire that had never quite left and was returning to me, and it looked like the light from a hallway that squeezes through the cracks into a dark room, just before the door is pushed wide open.

  * * *

  *1 Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things (New York: Harper Perennial, 1998), 250.

  *2 Roy, The God of Small Things, 33, 321.

  *3 Roy, The God of Small Things, 292.

  *4 Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), 130.

  9

  English Gardens

  I spent a lot of time in a wild garden behind a house in east Oxford. I had taken an internship with a publisher in town. The publishing house turned out to be a shed in his backyard. It was a start-up specializing in travel books, his passion project. Two afternoons a week I would ride my bike up the hill to the house where he and his family lived, walk through the front door, through the kitchen, out the back door, and through the garden to the shed. The publisher sat at a desk on one side, and I sat at a desk on the other. One of his authors was writing a book about the Danube, Europe’s second largest river. This author didn’t like computers, so he typed his manuscript and mailed us the pages. It was my job to type them into a Word document. I learned more about the Danube than I ever cared to learn.

  I loved the garden that surrounded that little shed. My boss and his wife grew all kinds of things back there: tomatoes, zucchini, beans. There were hydrangeas and, since hydrangea is one of the only flower names I know, let’s just say there were lots of other flowers back there too. I house-sat for them once, and each day I sat on their back porch, looking at the garden while I ate breakfast.

  The English know how to garden. If you have a front yard in England, you don’t let it go untended. It seemed everyone had a garden, and each one was beautiful in its own wild way. They were not obsessively groomed. Bushes poked out from behind fences, and flowers were planted close to each other, so when they grew their colors overlapped. Vines were set free to grow tall and bend over onto the footpath. They were not trimmed or considered a nuisance. The English gardens I saw and noticed were overcrowded and out of control and unpredictable, and in this, they were free. Beautiful and free.

  The road connecting South and West Texas—Highway 84, 83, or 283, depending on where you are—is long, flat, and straight, but it leads you into the most vivid sunsets you will ever see. Because there are no hills or trees to block the view, sunsets in West Texas can be replicated nowhere else on earth. Of this I am sure. Before the sun sets, what you have to look at is sparse. Dead grass in summer; dead grass in winter. Tiny oil rigs in the distance, and flat-roofed ranch houses, houses that are home to kind, Texas-in-their-blood types of families. This is the land my father grew up in, the land where I visited my grandmother when I was a child, and the land where I attended college.

  The drive looked the same all the dozens of times I made it. The familiar succession of cities: Coleman, Santa Anna, Brady, Mason, and Fredericksburg. All towns that look like what you think of when you think small Texas town. Depending on which way you are going—toward Abilene or away from it—they grow or get smaller in size.

  On this trip toward the big city of San Antonio and away from Abilene, I rode with my friend Ashley. We were going to be volunteers for a youth group retreat at my church, and as we drove the Beast We Needed to Talk About sat on the console between us.

  Ashley was one of the first girls I met freshman year. I remember her standing in the doorway of her room. She had auburn hair—real, natural auburn hair, the type you don’t see very often. We were going to be friends; I knew it right away. Ashley was enthusiastic about all things college. She was enthusiastic about the dorm, about being a freshman, and especially about finding our future spouses at Abilene Christian University, so we could all have ACU-bound babies together. She endeared herself to all of us with her energy and the way she told stories. Her thin arms sort of flailing about and her hair in a ponytail up high on her head. She was our lanky, fun, auburn-haired friend.

  Perhaps I wasn’t the only one who felt this way about Ashley, but when we sat together and talked, I felt our spirits link up. She got me, and I sort of got her. Ashley and I were friends, good friends. I had a confidence with her.

  By our sophomore year, though, right before our road trip from Abilene to San Antonio, I began to wonder if Ashley was okay. She was not as enthusiastic or energetic. She didn’t come around as often. I didn’t meet up with her for lunch after chapel the way I used to, and I noticed something else. She was getting thin. I didn’t thin
k much about it at first because she had always been thin, but one night in my friend Laura’s dorm room, I got the feeling something was off.

  “So Ashley thinks she can’t eat with us in the cafeteria anymore,” Laura said.

  I looked at Ashley. “What? Why? I know you haven’t been eating with us, but I thought that was just because you like being by yourself sometimes.”

  “No,” interjected Laura, “the other day she told me—”

  “Excuse me. I’m sitting right here,” said Ashley. “We don’t have to talk about this right now, okay?”

  “Fine,” Laura said.

  “Okay,” I said. And we quickly changed the subject.

  The whole exchange was a little unsettling. Ashley looked upset. I had not thought to question her motive for always eating alone, for never coming to the cafeteria with us, for always having excuses to not eat out at restaurants. Ashley was independent. But this was college. And in college even we independent types don’t like eating alone when a cafeteria full of our friends is nearby.

  I had been thinking a lot about that dorm room conversation, and now, on this particular road trip from West to South Texas, it was What We Needed to Talk About.

  We passed through the tiny no-name towns of populations like 132. We looked out the windshield at miles of earth that was cracked and dry and had always been that way. Lifeless fields. I’m sure we talked like we normally did, about boys and friends and school—and boys. Each lull in the conversation a reminder of what we weren’t saying.

  There is something about a car, isn’t there? And a road trip? And the no-escape feel of it all? The person in the seat beside you is your captive audience or you are theirs. And where there is something unspoken between the two of you that has been hovering for a few days or weeks or even just hours, it will now sit between you for the duration of your journey. You can’t glance at the other person without seeing it—the thing you need to say, the question you need to ask. When you talk about anything other than the thing, you will have to yell over it or around it until you give up and say nothing at all. Until one of you stumbles upon a brave moment and addresses the sitting Beast between you. The moment you do, it disappears so you can see each other again.

  I was no expert in eating disorders. I wasn’t even willing to speak the phrase aloud. It sounded so…disease-like. I didn’t even know if that was what she had. I didn’t know the warning signs. I certainly wasn’t the most qualified person to speak to her that day, but I was a friend, and I couldn’t ignore the evidence. Not eating meals with us, being distant, and of course the evidence her body itself provided. It was beginning to disappear. Little by little, a centimeter here, an inch there. Ashley had shrunk, and maybe that’s what she wanted. Maybe she wanted to shrink until she disappeared. And if that was true, how do you tell someone to stop disappearing when she is doing all she can to fade away with as few people noticing as possible? Like we would all just look up one day and—no Ashley.

  So as we drove along the highway, I knew if I was going to be a good friend to Ashley, like she had been to me, I couldn’t let something like this go. Good friends don’t let you get away with potentially self-destructive behaviors. Good friends sometimes have to be my least favorite word, confrontational.

  “So, what Laura said the other night in the dorm, what was that about?”

  “Oh nothing. I said something the other day about food or whatever and…I think she just didn’t get what I was saying.”

  “Hmm. Okay, yeah.” I was quiet for a minute. “Well, I have noticed that you don’t eat with us anymore.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And I have noticed that you’ve lost weight this year.”

  Ashley was quiet.

  “Do those things have anything to do with each other? Maybe?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, yeah. Probably. I have lost weight. You’re right about that.”

  I looked over at my friend from the driver’s seat. She looked so small, snappable. And even though she was sitting right there, she looked far away. I wanted to pull her back, but not too hard.

  We drove along on the dry road ahead, and we talked for a good long time. Ashley began to explain something to me that, even though I hadn’t gone through what she was going through, made sense somehow.

  “It’s kind of become a game for me,” she said. “I weigh myself at the same time every day. If I’ve lost weight, I get a point. If I haven’t, I don’t get a point. I don’t go out to eat with y’all because I’m afraid to. I’m afraid eating regular food would make me gain weight. I don’t want to gain weight, and I feel like if I go with you, I’ll gain four pounds. I know that sounds crazy, but it’s how I feel.”

  We drove through yet another tiny town and down the barren road that would take us to the next one.

  At some point Ashley cried, and at some point I began to pray while driving, with my eyes open. I don’t remember my words, but I’m sure they were clumsy. I wonder if they fell empty onto her lap. If what she was facing was still at such an early stage that praying for “freedom” from it was premature? The first step toward freedom is wanting it. I wonder if she simply stared out the window on her side as we passed through Brady and turned right at the furniture store with the giant carved-wood bears out front. The land got drier and drier, and we saw no trees.

  Later, Ashley told me that our conversation in the car that day was the first time she had articulated aloud what she was going through. Until then, it was this very private game. Now I knew, and soon others would know. She would tell her family. She would tell other friends. She would tell a counselor. It didn’t happen at once in the car that day, but Ashley’s fears and entrapment in the game eventually began to let go of her, or she let go of it. She started a new path, a new way, a greener one, and we were all so thrilled when Ashley, the Ashley I had met freshman year in the dorm, began to come back to us. When she started eating with us again and being with us again.

  I didn’t gain the “freshman fifteen,” but my “junior study-abroad fifteen”? It was something to behold. Add to that a “heartbreak fifteen” due to the recent breakup—the one that had sent me wandering the streets of Oxford alone, listening to Coldplay on my iPod—and an entirely new wardrobe was in order.

  I gained the weight happily at first. I was traveling with friends on the weekends—to places like Italy, where I ate cheese and bread, and to France, where I drank hot chocolate and ate crème brûlée as my afternoon snack. In England we ate late-night sandwiches and large bowls of chocolate granola before bed. I didn’t know I was eating my feelings. I didn’t really know what eating your feelings meant.

  But then I returned home at the end of the semester and reached into my drawer for a pair of pants I had left behind. I pulled them on, and the pants would not button. A few months earlier this pair of pants was loose, almost too big. Someone had shrunk them. My mom must have dried them while I was away instead of hang-drying them. The possibility I had grown a full pants size over the course of a semester didn’t cross my mind. It took several pairs of pants before I agreed to even consider what had happened. That, while the chocolate granola I devoured in England was not available in US grocery stores, I had brought some of it home with me, permanently.

  That summer my family loaded the suburban to drive the road to West Texas, this time to say good-bye to my dad’s mother, Thelma. I sat in the middle of the backseat, between my sisters, me and my extra fifteen-plus pounds, and I stared at the dry, familiar earth ahead. I devised a plan for myself right then and there on the way to my grandmother’s funeral. I was going to lose the weight I had gained and then some. No matter what it took, I was going to lose it.

  On the way there, we stopped at a small Subway restaurant in a gas station. My first test, I thought. I ate only half my sandwich and put the other half away. I smiled to myself when I realized what I had done. I had dug deep and found an ounce of self-control. I didn’t know I had that—self-control. I had always had a stra
nge relationship with food and my body. I ate what I wanted when I wanted, but then I would feel guilty, so I’d exercise. I began exercising regularly at age fifteen. I knew exercise. It wasn’t a problem for me. But food? That was different. And how I saw myself in the mirror? That was bad. I wasn’t overweight, but I was never the weight I wanted to be. Even at a young age, I remember wishing I was thinner. Always thinner. Just a few more pounds. But I didn’t think I had it in me to lose weight. I didn’t know how. Food had always felt like a power beyond me, too great for me. That’s why eating half my sandwich at the gas station that day felt like a miracle. I had tapped into whatever it was that other skinny people had tapped into. And with the strongest grip I could muster, I held on tight.

  The Lucados met up in a hotel lobby in Andrews, Texas, where my dad had grown up and where my grandmother would be buried the next day. Then we caravanned to the nearest Mexican restaurant. We were there to catch up, share stories of grandmother, to be together. But I was not with them. Externally, I was having conversations with my cousins, but in my head was a stressful dialogue and debate.

  How many chips should I eat? How much cheese would be on this taco versus this salad? If I got dressing on the side that would help, and avocados are good for you, but they have a lot of calories, right? And the Mexican rice, I wonder if that’s cooked in oil. Is it better to balance out the carbs in the chips with extra beans instead of rice? Oh, but the beans are cooked in lard? No. Off. Limits. Dessert is certainly out of the question, and so is Coke. But Diet Coke—I could drink that because the bubbles will make my stomach feel like it’s full and then I won’t want to eat as many chips.

  It sounds insane, especially written out on the page like this, these incessant thoughts that occur over a simple decision on a menu. But I’ve heard of people having panic attacks from looking at restaurant menus. It happens.