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

by Clare B. Dunkle

  I didn’t have to say it. Valerie knew what I was thinking about.

  “We’re not worried about money,” she assured me. “Don’t worry, we don’t need money. Clint and I know how to get by on nothing.”

  “But babies cost a lot more than nothing,” I said. No insurance, no employee benefits . . .

  My imagination showed me snapshots of Valerie’s own tiny nursery, with its handmade mobile and big paper animals that I had found in a teacher’s store somewhere. It all seemed so dingy and dreary in those memories, with only baby Valerie herself to brighten the room.

  Joe and I had had so little!

  And that was with two college diplomas, an engineer’s salary, and health insurance!

  “I know, I know, it’s not the greatest time,” Valerie said. “But we’re halfway there. Clint’s only got three more college classes to go before the Air Force lets him in. And you know Clint. He’ll get through them.”

  “That’s true,” I said with a feeling of relief. Clint was the sort of man who would get through them.

  “Clint and I are used to being poor,” Valerie reminded me. “When we didn’t have a car, we used to catch a ride into town and go to the dollar movies. When we didn’t have two dollars, which was a lot of the time, we’d go to the bookstore and read. Compared to back then, we’re rolling in it. And hey, now we don’t have to plan a big wedding!”

  Valerie’s voice was jaunty, but I could hear the edge of strain in it.

  “How are you feeling?” I asked.

  “Oh, you know,” she answered. “I’ve had better days. I’m starting to feel pretty sick. And I haven’t smoked a cigarette in three hours now, so I kind of want to punch somebody in the face.”

  Valerie without cigarettes was not a pretty picture. I’d seen that picture before.

  “How’s Clint?” I asked next.

  “Clint’s pretty thrilled about the baby,” Valerie said. “Which, right now, kind of makes me want to punch him in the face.”

  “Well, I think you’ll want to resist that urge,” I said. “It’ll get better in a couple of days, when the withdrawal symptoms ebb.” And the two of us said good-bye.

  A few minutes later, my phone rang again. This time, it was Elena.

  “Did you hear about Valerie?” she demanded, and her voice was genuinely angry. “Oh my God! I can’t believe it. You know Valerie’s not ready to handle this.”

  “It’s going to be hard on them,” I agreed. “They’ll need support to get through it. Fortunately, Clint’s mom and stepfather are nearby. I know they’ll help all they can.”

  “I can’t believe it!” Elena said again. “Really. I can’t believe it!”

  I was worried for Valerie and Clint, but Elena was sounding much more upset than I was. Her exemplary work as a resident assistant had impressed the managers, and she had earned an RA job slot in the fall. She had a tidy sum in savings from her jobs at the mall and the gym. She would have free room and board all next year. But I could hear for myself how high a price she had paid. She sounded sick, stressed, miserable, and exhausted.

  The three jobs, the being awake day and night—Elena had overdone it again. This summer that was supposed to recharge her had run her completely ragged. And in another week, she would be back in the classroom, stressing over grades. She was taking another crushing course load.

  Why is she doing this? my mind wailed. But I kept my voice steady and my worries to myself. One little flutter, and Elena would go off like a Roman candle. As worn out as she was, she was one raw nerve.

  “Your cold is still sounding pretty bad,” I said as casually as I could. “Did you make it to the doctor yet?”

  “This morning,” Elena said. “I saw the doctor’s assistant. He says it’s sinusitis again. He gave me drugs.”

  “Oh, good!” I said, and I really meant it. Good for my bear-pain-in-silence daughter for seeing the doctor. This was a win! “Did you fill that prescription yet?”

  “On the way home.”

  My worries rushed back. That was unusually prompt. Elena must be feeling horrible.

  “So, you’re not going to your other jobs anymore, right?” I couldn’t resist saying. “Not the gym one, at least. Especially not with that infection.”

  Please! I added silently. Please get some rest!

  “I quit the mall job last week. I go one more time to the gym, on Saturday. I’m not going right now because I’m in the middle of moving. RA Orientation starts tomorrow, and I got my new room and my floor assignment this morning. Why don’t you meet me at the pet store by the house? I want to get a fish for my dorm room.”

  A fish? I felt myself tense up further. By now, both girls had stressed me out enough that I was starting to feel jumpy about everything. And a fish—such a sad little life.

  But I felt like a total idiot when I heard myself say, “I don’t know . . . Fish don’t do well . . .”

  And I deserved it when Elena said, “Mom, it’s a fish! Will you please chill out?”

  “But you should get some rest,” I reminded her. “You should be in bed with that infection. You sound awful!”

  “Mom, you know I’m not going to bed.”

  This was true. Elena had never stayed in bed when she was ill, not even back in the days when she and Valerie had filled the house with their laughter. When she was sick, I had put her to bed over and over, only to have her drift into the room ten or twenty minutes later, all wrapped up in a sheet, pale, like a very small ghost.

  Little Elena had wanted to be wherever I was. That was her comfort when she was sick. She had stayed put only when I went to bed with her and we read books and told stories to one another.

  “Come on,” Elena said to me now. “It’ll be like resting to poke around in a pet store. It’ll be better than all the other work I have to do. And I’d like your opinion about the fish.”

  What mother doesn’t want to be part of her daughter’s comfort routine? So I met Elena at the pet store, and I prepared to enjoy myself.

  But fish . . .

  For a few brief days in childhood, I had owned a grocery-store goldfish. My mother had been quite upset over its rapid decline. The memory of her unhappiness, combined with my own unhappiness, had left me with an impression of improbability, fragility, and loss.

  Poor fish! Such sad little lives.

  “What about one of these?” Elena said, pausing at the collection of bettas.

  Of all the sights in a pet store, the collection of plastic drinking cups holding motionless betta fish has to be the most depressing one of all. I stepped closer to the poor prisoners. Most of them looked as if they were already dead. But Elena appeared to be immune to the aura of misery rising from the transparent prison cells.

  “Oh, look!” she said. “A red one!”

  But I didn’t look. I was already reaching out my hand. “How about this one?” I said.

  A blue fish rested on the bottom of my cup. But calling him blue doesn’t begin to do him justice. He didn’t look like a living thing so much as an elaborate piece of enameled jewelry. His body shone like metal tinted deep aquamarine, and in his fins, I could see hints of teal and emerald.

  I noticed a sticker on the top of the cup. His price was a mere fifteen dollars. It is absolutely wrong that such an impressive little animal should feed our collective American appetite for cheap toys.

  “How about this one?” I said again, and once I had picked him up, I found that I couldn’t put him back down. He rested gently against the clear bottom of the cup, looking out at the world. His body was broader and more muscular than the other bettas.

  “I don’t know,” Elena said. “There might be a better one.”

  “There isn’t a better one,” I said.

  While Elena looked through the other sad little captives, I studied this betta fish. As he swirled to the surface, his fins rippled and flowed like a ballroom dancer’s skirt. Yes, there was emerald in those fins. He was beautiful—absolutely beautiful.
/>   “Okay,” Elena said. “You’re right. He’s the best one.”

  We put the betta plus his habitat into Elena’s car—bowl, gravel, water drops, test strips, and of course a pagoda. Elena said, “What do you think I should call him?”

  “You could give him a Welsh name,” I said. “Dylan was the son of Arianhrod. As soon as he was born, he jumped into the water.”

  “Dylan,” Elena said in a pleased voice, and I knew she was thinking of Dylan Thomas, the poet. “I like that. I’ll call him Dylan.”

  It made me happy to hear her sounding happy, and I was glad we’d saved Dylan from his hideous cup. But when I looked at Elena out in the sunlight, worry gnawed at me again. She looked terrible. She looked really sick. Her skin wasn’t just pale, it was sallow. The healthy pink flush to her cheeks that I had seen last fall was gone, ground down by her relentless demands on herself.

  Why was Elena even out of bed?

  But I knew the answer to that. Elena was out of bed because she had forced herself out of bed. She allowed herself no rest. Somehow, the very idea of rest brought this girl no rest. I thought of her driven, type A father as a young man, before the Zoloft had calmed his anxiety.

  “Don’t forget to take your medicine!” I begged as she climbed into her car. “And sleep tonight—please!”

  “Sure, sure,” she said as she waved her fingertips good-bye.

  A couple of days later, the phone by the bed jangled its shrill tone at four thirty in the morning. I was so deep asleep that, at first, I tried to turn off an alarm.

  “Room! My room!” Elena was babbling. Or sobbing. Or shrieking. Or all three.

  I sat bolt upright. Every nerve in my body tingled. “Slow down! Calm down! I can’t understand you!”

  It’s true that I couldn’t understand the words, but the message got through anyway. The hair stood up on the back of my neck, and gooseflesh enveloped me. On a purely physical level, my body knew what my mind was still puzzling out. My body knew: Elena was in fear for her life.

  “My room!” she sobbed. “She’s here! She’s in my room!”

  Joe woke up with a grunt, and I tossed him the phone. My hands were already shaking so badly that I could hardly pull on my clothes. I grabbed my keys and drove through the dark streets. The steering wheel was slippery with sweat.

  On a very ordinary day decades ago, my mother and I stood in line in a bank lobby. Suddenly, from the offices, a piercing scream rang out:

  “No, no, no, no, no!”

  It was a sound I had never heard before, but I knew what it was. We all knew what it was. It was the sound of the banshee wail. I’ve heard thousands of screams in hundreds of movies, and some of those movies won Oscars. But I have never, before or since, heard a scream like that.

  Instantly, I knew, just as every person in the silent lobby knew: somebody somewhere was dead.

  When I asked about it later, I learned that one of the employees had just lost her son in a car wreck. But I didn’t need to ask. There could be no doubt. The woman herself had told us.

  Communication is older than language. Anguish and heartbreak are much, much older than the words we use to describe them. And terror . . .

  Elena was in fear for her life.

  Dawn was breaking when I got to her. She was sitting outside on the stairwell that led to her dorm room, still talking on the phone to her father. By this time, she was calm, but the tears were still running down her cheeks.

  “She was in my room,” Elena told me after she hung up. “I saw her out of the corner of my eye. She put a hand on me. She pressed against me; she leaned into my back, and I saw her raise a knife over my head! And then, she wasn’t there. She just wasn’t there!”

  I felt relief so intense that I thought I might burst into tears myself. This was what my brain had been telling me had happened, even while my body was undergoing the terror Elena had transmitted to it so well.

  Joe suffers from night frights: pavor nocturnus. His father had them, too. He rouses out of sleep in complete terror, thrashing around and striking out violently, yelling about the bugs or rats that only he can see.

  Night frights are the reason Joe and I don’t have guns in the house. When I tell people this, they think I’m joking. I’m not. The intensity of the experience far exceeds normal nightmare, and night terror victims have an impressive ability to carry out complicated tasks while still asleep. Some have driven cars, and some have killed their family members while trying to save themselves from the monsters they see.

  But fortunately, Joe’s unconscious mind usually recognizes me. All I have to do is put a hand on him and say, “It’s all right.” Then he goes limp, drops straight back into deep sleep. The next morning, he may not remember anything about it.

  Elena, too, has suffered from night frights since she was barely older than a toddler. In one of them, she came running down the hall to me, screaming, chased by a cat-size spider. Both Elena and her father have gone years at a time without a single night fright, but stress, poor sleep, and unfamiliar surroundings bring them on.

  It all fit. Elena had just moved into a new dorm room, and I had seen for myself how exhausted and stressed she was. As for poor sleep, with three or four nights a week awake until five in the morning on gym nights, and two or three nights a week awake until one or two in the morning on mall nights, it’s a wonder Elena’s body had relaxed long enough to get any sleep at all.

  “You know you have night frights,” I reminded her, “just like your dad does. His night frights get worse with stress, too.”

  “She was there!”

  I felt puzzled by Elena’s vehement response. Why wouldn’t she want to take comfort in this simple explanation? What made this episode different from the other times she had woken up in terror?

  “Your dad always thinks his bugs are there, too,” I said. “Remember the time he started yelling in the middle of the night, and he scared me so badly, we were both jumping up and down on the bed before I could figure out what was going on?”

  “I know about night frights, Mom. I wasn’t asleep. I was awake! I’m telling you, she was there.” And Elena stood up and went indoors. I could see her shutting down, turning away from this uncomfortable topic.

  “Did anybody else come by?” I asked. “Did they hear you yell and come check on you?”

  “No,” Elena said. “The RAs around me haven’t moved in yet. That reminds me, I have RA Orientation in an hour,” she added, and I could see the relief on her face, the relief of being able to go back to work.

  Poor girl, her cold still sounded so bad, but even when she tried to sleep, she got no rest.

  “How about staying while I take my shower?” she said, and I knew she still wasn’t feeling safe.

  “Sure,” I said. Anything to provide her nerves a little relief—to let this driven, ambitious, exhausted young woman relax on some level, even if she couldn’t get any more sleep.

  While Elena took her shower, I wandered through the apartment, willing myself to calm down, too. My hands were still shaking from the jolt of adrenaline I’d received. I turned my mind to more soothing subjects. Elena’s new place was starting to look nice. She had her favorite mermaid picture up in the tiny living room, and I paused to study it.

  This was no cartoon. It was real art. It was the signed print of a photograph done by an award-winning underwater photographer. The mermaid was slightly blurry, as if she were a real underwater creature the photographer had spotted and captured in only one quick shot. The photograph was full of those gentle blue and sea-green tints that Elena had matched in her decorations throughout the room.

  Underneath, on the brown couch that came with the furnished dorm apartment, were her Zen pillows, steel blue with chocolate stitching. And here was Dylan in his bowl on the coffee table, the perfect counterpoint to the mermaid swimming on the wall. I greeted him: “Hey there, little fishy!” And he rewarded me with a couple of nervous azure-blue circles of his pagoda.

  What
a remarkable little creature!

  On the counter in Elena’s kitchenette were several bottles of pills: Advil, Tums, and two brown prescription bottles. I picked up one. It was her antibiotic. The other was an antianxiety medication.

  “I didn’t know you were taking this,” I called through the closed bathroom door. “This drug for anxiety, I mean.”

  “Yeah, the doctor gave it to me a few weeks ago,” her muffled voice came back. “I’ve been getting a little stressed out.”

  Tell me about it! I thought. Hopefully, the medication would bring her some relief.

  The white bag the antibiotic had come in was still lying on the counter, and its information sheet was poking out. I opened it up. For a simple antibiotic, it had an impressive list of side effects.

  Including hallucinations!

  “Hey, Elena,” I said, coming to the door of the bathroom again. “Your antibiotic can cause hallucinations!”

  Elena popped the door open. She was putting the finishing touches on her makeup. She had her mask in place again, too: calm, competent, and disinterested.

  “And?” she said.

  I had the information sheet in my hand. “See? Hallucinations,” I said, pointing to the word. “It also says you’re not supposed to take it with the other type of drug you’re on. They interact. They intensify the side effects.” I thought angrily of Elena’s already high stress level and her loss, once again, of a good night’s sleep. “The doctor should have been more careful! She shouldn’t have given you both these drugs together.”

  Elena leaned toward the mirror and made a moue with her mouth, smoothing out her lipstick.

  “The doctor didn’t,” she said. “The PA gave me that one.”

  I felt upset that she was taking the news so calmly. She was always so hard on herself but so easy on everybody else.

  “I’ll bet this antianxiety drug can cause dream problems, too,” I said. “It’s a double whammy that you took them together. No wonder you had such an intense night fright!”

  “Mom! She was there,” Elena said.

  She picked up her sweater and purse and slipped on her shoes, and we headed out the door together. She took the turn to walk across campus to RA Orientation, and I walked back to the parking lot.