Hope and Other Luxuries: A Mother's Life With a Daughter's Anorexia

by Clare B. Dunkle

  And a decade later, when Joe and I got married, he officiated at our wedding.

  So now, as I was falling asleep again, a real author with a real book contract, I gathered peaceful, happy thoughts to myself as I snuggled down into my pillow.

  We’re so lucky, I thought. Except, there’s no such thing as luck.

  There’s no such thing as luck.

  CHAPTER THREE

  A few days later, Elena was sitting on a high stool at the kitchen counter, talking to me while I cleaned the kitchen. Listening to Elena talk was an occupation that demanded just as much energy as the cleaning. An Elena talk was a rapid-fire barrage of new ideas, and I enjoyed it every bit as much as she did.

  Just now, she was educating me in popular culture.

  “So, I read an article about the Lord of the Rings actors,” she said. “Did you know they all got the same tattoo? Even Gandalf!”

  “You’re kidding!” My imagination tried to produce images of Gandalf with a tattoo. Nope! I couldn’t do it.

  “High school and college girls pick Orlando Bloom as the actor they’d want to date,” Elena continued. “But women your age pick Viggo Mortensen.”

  “My age?” I inquired, still struggling with the tattoo.

  “Well, you know, old women. The ones out of college.”

  “Old! Okay, got it,” I said. I gathered up the breakfast dishes and ran a sink full of suds.

  “So, anyway, the article said Elijah Wood is most popular among preteens and thirteen-year-old girls. That’s so mean! Think how he must feel. I’ll bet they tease him for it. And anyway, I don’t think it’s fair. I think he’s really cute.”

  “Hmm,” I said as I scrubbed oatmeal out of bowls. “And you’re—how old?”

  “Thirteen,” Elena replied. “Hey!” And then she laughed. “Oh, well, I’ll bet I’d think he’s cute anyway. But it’s a shame! The article said he’s a Kettenraucher.”

  “A Kettenraucher? What’s that?”

  “I dunno,” Elena said, helping herself to some Hershey’s Kisses. “I don’t know that word in English.”

  Languages have always been a passion of mine, and it doesn’t matter much to me which one I’m learning. It’s the thrill of absorbing new structures of thought that I love, the thrill of matching a familiar idea to a new one. It’s all those beautiful new words to pick up and marvel over, like ocean-washed seashells on a beach.

  Like Kettenraucher. As I wiped the kitchen counter, I took the word apart in my mind. Ketten. My imagination showed me steel links, rattling together and making metallic music. Raucher. Now my imagination sent me chimneys, incense holders, and spicy, heavy meats.

  “Chain smoker!” I cried, and I felt that little frisson of joy that comes from seeing something ordinary from an entirely new point of view.

  “Whatever,” Elena said as she dropped a handful of candy wrappers onto the counter. “Anyway, I think he’s cute, and so do all my friends.”

  “Speaking of which,” I warned, “you’d better get to packing.” And Elena, who did nothing by halves, flung herself out of the room and up the stairs, yelling for her sister in a messy mix of two languages.

  The summer was ending, and Valerie and Elena were getting ready for another academic year. September had just started, and tomorrow afternoon, my girls would be headed back to school. I felt wistful and a touch melancholy at the thought of the quiet days ahead, but the girls were feeling no such pangs about leaving me.

  All that day, the house was in an uproar. The old Dalmatian saw suitcases come out of the closet and grew nervous and started licking his paws. The old black cat assessed the situation and got out of the way. Late that afternoon, I found her curled up in a patch of sunshine in the garret room at the top of the house.

  “Where did that stack of photos go? They’re for the pinboard on my locker.”

  “You know we still need to go to the store, right? I need refills for my pens.”

  “Oh, no! We forgot to sew my name into my new shirts! Mom, can you help?”

  “Where did my sour straws go? Did you eat my sour straws?? I swear, if you ate my sour straws—!”

  By dinnertime, the suitcases were full, and only a couple of piles of clothes still waited next to our German washer. No matter how rushed we might feel, there was no hurrying that washer. It would get to those clothes in its own sweet, leisurely time.

  I was sitting on the couch in the living room, sewing laundry labels into things, when Joe came home. I heard the front door open downstairs. Only one of the many oddities of that house was the fact that the living room was on the second floor.

  Joe appeared at the top of the stairs, unknotting his tie. “They threw me out,” he complained. Behind him, from the kitchen below, came the clatter of metal pots and the sound of girlish chatter.

  “They wanted to make dinner,” I explained. “Alone.”

  Joe paused, his tie still half undone. “Um . . . Do we know what it is?”

  “I think it’s going to be spaghetti.”

  “Oh, good!” he said, resuming work on his tie. “It’s hard to mess that up.”

  As if in answer, a loud crash sounded from the kitchen. I dropped my sewing.

  “Is everything all right?” I asked.

  “Don’t come down! Don’t come down!” called Elena’s voice.

  “Just a teeny situation,” added Valerie’s.

  And then both voices joined in shrieks of laughter.

  A few minutes later, the girls called us downstairs and ushered us to the table, where four green salads waited in bowls. The spaghetti was excellent, and Joe and I refrained from asking if any part of the meal had landed on the floor.

  “Gotta finish packing!” Elena cried, darting up from the table as dinner drew to a close.

  “Cooks don’t have to clean up!” Valerie reminded us joyfully as she followed her sister up the stairs.

  Joe and I stayed behind to face the kitchen, which looked as if it had never been clean before in the history of the world. Towers of pans and bowls created their own skyline on the counter, and red splotches accented the tile on the walls. Not for nothing do they call that tile a backsplash.

  “Did those two make another dinner that we don’t know about?” Joe wondered mournfully.

  The next day, we drove Valerie and Elena back to school. The whole trip was one long, animated gossip session. It would have been easier for Joe and me to follow if half the girls hadn’t had overlapping names.

  “Wait!” I said. “Is that the Gabrielle who slipped on the grass last year and dislocated her thumb?”

  “No, no!” Elena replied. “You’re talking about Gabrielle Theiss. This is Gabrielle Hermann, whose brother Timo is the sailing instructor.”

  “Okay . . .”

  “You remember,” Valerie prompted. “You know about Gabrielle. She’s the one with the baby brother who hit his head on the—”

  “Frau Hermann is hilarious!” interrupted Elena. “Gabrielle told me she sat the kids down one day and told them she’d read an article that teenage boys think about sex every seven seconds. And she says, ‘I want to talk to you all about this,’ and the girls, you know, they’re giggling, but the boys are just bright red, just staring a hole through the wall like they’re getting tortured. And Frau Hermann waits, but they don’t say a word, so she says, ‘Timo? Matthias? Well, what do you think?’ And Matthias jumps up and says, ‘I am not having this conversation,’ and he bolts out the door!”

  That made me laugh. But then I registered something unusual. Both girls had actually stopped talking. I glanced at the backseat and found that they were looking at me expectantly.

  “Well?” Elena prodded.

  “Well what?”

  “Well? Do boys think about sex every seven seconds?”

  Joe flicked a glance at me out of the corner of his eye, but I knew he wasn’t about to field this one. I thought for a minute. It was my policy to try to give a good answer to every question, if only so that
the girls would keep asking me things.

  “Think about Matthias’s reaction,” I suggested. “Think about what the boys did.”

  There was a pause. Elena said, “I don’t get it.”

  “Well,” I said, “did they deny it?”

  “Criminy! You’re right!” Valerie said. “If it was wrong, they would have just said it was wrong. They would have said, ‘Hey, Mom, that’s stupid.’”

  “So it’s true?” Elena said. And she and Valerie burst out laughing. “Oh, I can’t wait,” Elena said, “I can’t wait to tell Gabrielle!”

  We drove through massive Cologne, over the wide gray Rhine River, and took the turn off the highway onto curving country roads. Once again, we threaded our way along the steep little street—more of a driveway, really—up to the top of the hill.

  “Once, Mona and I sneaked outside after lights-out,” Elena told us as we were walking up to the dormitory, “and we surprised a hedgehog on the side of this steep part here. It rolled up into a ball, and the next thing we knew, it rolled out of sight! We could hear the poor thing squeaking all the way down the hill. Hey! Hallo, Andrea!” And Elena went racing off to give one of her friends a hug.

  As Joe and I lugged suitcases and boxes from the car to the new dorm rooms, throngs and knots of girls swept by and robbed us of one or the other daughter. Then, a few minutes later, another little crowd would sweep by and bring that daughter back again.

  “This is Birgit,” Valerie announced. “Birgit, meine Mutter und Vater,” and our hands were shaken, and German sentences whipped by our ears faster than our brains could decode them. Joe and I did our best to look knowing and thoughtful and not make too big a fool of ourselves before Birgit and Valerie headed off down the hall together and we could sigh in relief and recommence lugging.

  “It’s really impressive,” Joe said. “I mean, I know they speak great German now, but here, you really get to see what that means.”

  I watched my two girls, happy and animated, chattering away with their friends. My daughters are popular, I thought in amazement. They are actually popular at school. I realized that even if I told them what school had been like for me—about how it had felt to be the school freak for years—they wouldn’t be able to understand.

  That was a strange feeling for me, both happy and sad.

  Finally, the last bag was up in the room where it belonged, and Joe and I felt the welcome needlessness of our presence. So deep were our girls in catching up with their friends that they had to make an effort to remember we were there.

  First, I went to Valerie’s room and hugged her good-bye.

  “Look after yourself, Mom,” she said with her usual wisdom. “And hurry up and send me that new chapter.”

  Then I made my way down to Elena’s room and hugged her.

  “I love you, Mom,” she told me. “Write lots!”

  “And you will, too, won’t you?” Joe said as we walked to the car. “Write lots, now that they’re back at school.”

  I gave a little sigh of happiness.

  “I certainly hope so.”

  The atmosphere of the house reverted to quiet. The cat moved back down to the living room sofa. The dog caught up on his rest. I missed my girls, but I had a new youngster to worry about now: Paul, a woodcarver who lived in the Middle Ages in the Highlands of Scotland.

  There was a fragile quality to his hands as they turned the wood. They were bone-white, the fingers long and slender. There was a fragile quality, too, to the hunch of his lanky shoulders. Shaggy black hair fell into his face as he bent over his work.

  Like the changeling child of my own early years, Paul was an outcast. He was carrying a terrible secret. His kind—the werewolf kind—kill the people they love . . . if they aren’t killed first, that is.

  When the first free weekend of the school year came along, neither one of my girls came home. Elena wanted to go stay at her friend Mona’s house, and Valerie went home with her roommate.

  “You understand, right, Mom?” Valerie said, sounding a little worried. “Hey, you just had us for a whole summer.”

  “No problem,” I said. “Dad and I are happy that you like to spend time with your friends. That’s what growing up is all about.”

  “Okay,” she said. “And by the way—if that woodcarver’s story doesn’t have a happy ending, I’m going to be really upset.”

  Aha! My reader was hooked!

  “You know I can’t tell you how a story ends,” I reminded her.

  “I know,” she said. “I’m just saying.”

  When I drove to the train station three weeks after that, I couldn’t wait to see my girls. Even with a tragically afflicted werewolf for company, I had found six whole weeks without their lively chatter a little bit too boring and lonely. It would soon be over, though, and the hour-long ride back to the house would be an excited, colorful, jumbled download of everything that had happened since the very first second of the school year.

  The problem wouldn’t be getting those two girls to talk. It would be getting them to talk in turns.

  I was waiting on the platform when they climbed down from the train. I waved, and they spotted me, but their faces didn’t light up. Valerie’s expression was distant and guarded, as though she were thinking private thoughts. Elena’s looked like a thundercloud. She looked furious.

  Uh-oh. Something must have happened on the train.

  The girls were quiet on the walk to the parking lot. I was surprised at Elena’s reserve. She usually had trouble getting a polite distance away from a crisis before she started filling me in on the details. But there it was—she was growing up and learning discretion. There would be no more comments about that man over there while he was still within earshot.

  As soon as we get to the car, I thought, she’s going to launch in and tell me all about it.

  But Elena didn’t. She put her suitcase into the trunk and sat down in silence. I pulled out of the parking space, and we made our way into traffic.

  No stories. No chatter. No nothing.

  I glanced in the rearview mirror. Each girl was staring out her side window, with no particular expression on her face. Had they been fighting? Maybe. But even if they were having an argument, silence wasn’t their style. Toe-to-toe shouting matches: that was more what I was used to from them.

  “Is everything okay?” I asked.

  “Oh, sure,” Valerie said.

  “Why shouldn’t it be?” said Elena.

  “It’s just that you’re both so quiet.”

  A long pause.

  I glanced in the mirror again. Valerie was staring at the back of the seat in front of her. Elena was glaring at the world outside her window and chewing on her bottom lip.

  “Everything’s okay, Mom,” Valerie said in the same calm, patient tone of voice I had once used to soothe frightened preschoolers. I knew what that tone meant. It didn’t mean things were okay. It only meant that she didn’t like to see me worry.

  “Elena, how was your birthday?” I asked next. Elena had had her fourteenth birthday a couple of weeks before. It still seemed strange to me to have the girls gone on big days like that.

  I was sure that this question would break through Elena’s bad mood. She had given me extensive rundowns of school birthday parties in the past. Germans love birthdays, and I was sure that the girls had gone all out to make hers special.

  But today, Elena only shrugged. She said, “It was okay.”

  “Oh . . . Well, I’ve got a cake ready for you at home. We’re going to have our own celebration.”

  I waited, but Elena didn’t respond. Valerie spoke instead. “That’s nice, Mom.”

  Puzzled and worried, I lapsed into silence, too. We were back on the highway now, climbing up the tall, steep cliffs that closed in the Mosel River valley. Two thousand years ago, the Romans had planted these dizzying slopes with grapevines. The Romans were gone, but the grapevines were still there.

  “So . . . ,” I said. “So . . . What’s ne
w at school these days?”

  Another pause. Then Valerie spoke up. “It’s about the same.”

  “Elena? What about you? What’s new for you this year?”

  One word from Elena: “Nothing.”

  Nothing? Nothing? Six weeks of new experiences, and that was all she had to say? This bubbly, sparkly chatterbox, who could turn a ten-minute trip to the store with her father into twenty minutes’ worth of stories for me?

  “You’re sure nothing’s happened? Not a single thing has happened?” I prodded, trying to joke. “Come on! Don’t you have any stories for me?”

  Valerie spoke up then. She volunteered a few observations about how her new classes were going. But what I heard from Elena was . . . nothing.

  Elena was sick, I decided. That must be it. She was getting sick. She just didn’t feel good. So, half an hour later, as we walked into the house, I laid my hand on her forehead.

  To my surprise, she whipped around and jerked out of reach. “What are you doing?” she snapped.

  “All I was doing . . . ,” I faltered, cut to the quick by her reaction, “I was just trying to see if you had a fever . . .”

  “I’m fine, Mom!”

  She clattered up the stairs.

  I turned back to the door. Valerie was standing there, looking at me with something like sympathy.

  “She’s kinda been like that to everybody.”

  “Do you think she’s sick?”

  “I don’t know. I thought maybe she’d had a fight with Mona. I don’t think their weekend together went very well.”

  Valerie stayed in the kitchen with me while I prepared dinner. Freed from her little sister’s glowering presence, she loosened up and shared her thoughts about the new school year.

  Valerie’s all right, I thought to myself while we chatted. It’s just Elena. Something’s wrong with her.

  Elena’s mood didn’t improve all evening. Even her birthday presents failed to put a smile on her face. And as for the celebration dinner I’d prepared for her, Elena barely touched it. All she did was move things around on her plate.