Hope and Other Luxuries: A Mother's Life With a Daughter's Anorexia
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That was all we could do for one day. We drove home and tried to busy ourselves with normal things. But I couldn’t manage to do this. I was in complete turmoil. The more it seemed that Elena had been fired unfairly, the more upset I got. My brain couldn’t stop scheming, making plans, making lists of questions and bullet points: meetings to set up, advice to gather, calls to make . . .
Nighttime came. Midnight came. I lay in bed and tried to relax, but it was completely out of the question. The minutes crawled by while I lay there, perfectly still, silently battling what felt like a kind of hysteria.
The ax had fallen.
Again.
Our normal, reasonable, safe world had blown apart.
Again!
Why? I almost screamed out loud. Why did this happen again?
Joe wasn’t there. He had left for a dream vacation with my brother, hiking in the mountains of Wyoming. The two of them had planned the vacation for years. Now, poor Joe felt terrible. He couldn’t help me at all. He couldn’t even call to hear the latest developments unless he walked to a hill several hundred yards from their campsite.
“It’s okay,” I tried to tell him. I didn’t want to ruin his precious free time. I wanted him to know that I had everything under control. But each time we talked, I ended up crying on the phone. I could hold it together for everybody else, but I couldn’t when I talked to Joe.
I tried my best to be normal. I cooked Elena and me fine meals, and I did everything I always did. But for the entire week after Elena’s firing, I lost a pound a day.
It wasn’t because Elena was home. That was no hardship. I loved her company, and I knew all too well that I would have plenty of years away from her. It was a blessing to share as much time with my daughter as I could.
But somehow, this shock had triggered PTSD for me. It was if time had telescoped, and it was the Summer from Hell all over again. It was as if the dorm boss and Dr. Petras had gotten together to attack Elena, and Valerie was walking into the room again, covered in burns.
The ax had fallen.
Again.
The ax had fallen again!
By day, I joked with Elena and petted my dog. But each night, I lay awake, hyperventilating, while the hours crawled slowly by, and I thought, It’s happened again! It’s happened again! This cannot be happening again!
So we fought it this time. We didn’t just sit there and suffer. We collected our statements and our reports. Our last stop, after we had everything put together, was the university’s Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) office.
The lawyer we talked to looked over our material and admitted that the sequence of events looked suspicious. He wasn’t sure he could treat the case as an EEO violation, but he promised to look into it as carefully as he could. He told us he’d get back to us in two or three weeks.
Then we left campus. We had done all we could do.
“Can I get a manicure?” Elena begged. “I’m tired of thinking about this. I just want a nice distraction.”
So I drove her to the mall and sat beside her while she got French nails. There were small bamboos in clear glass vases all around us, and the floor and the counters were gray slate. The young Asian lady who worked on Elena’s hands applied the French nails with lightning speed. Meanwhile, she carried on an equally rapid and entirely indecipherable conversation with the nail salon worker next to her.
Their language fascinated me. It was like the liquid music of songbirds.
Meanwhile, Elena delivered an engrossing lecture on the purposes of all the mysterious tools and potions on the nail salon tray. Then she ventured on a brief but highly entertaining roundup of nail-salon scenes in recent movies. She ended with a description of favorite manicures and explained why she liked French nails best. The variations are more interesting, she said, and if they’re done well, they’re the most natural-looking nail.
I paid for Elena’s new French nails, and she walked out, smiling.
But the next morning, as I passed the hall bathroom, I caught her peeling them all off.
I didn’t know then, but I know now: Elena had gotten the manicure to distract herself from engaging in the kind of behavior that fed her eating disorder. And maybe it had worked for one day. But not for two.
Elena’s world had blown apart—again. And whether she liked it or not, her mind was reaching for the only defense it knew. Against the bullies, all Elena had was starvation. It was the only force strong enough to stop the monsters and silence the humiliation and fury.
Or, as Elena would put it later: “Ah, yes . . . the vomit hand.”
My daughter’s anorexia nervosa was back.
With a vengeance.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
School didn’t start for another week, so Joe and I sent Elena out to Georgia to Valerie’s apartment, to have a vacation with her sister. Unsettled, I wandered through the house, finding new places for things. Elena had taken down my decorations from the guest room and left them in a neat stack on the bed. She wanted to put up her mermaid picture when she got back.
I stood in the guest room—now, her room—and remembered when this had been Valerie’s and Elena’s room. Their bunk beds had been right over there.
While I was lost in wistful memories, Genny trotted past me and jumped up onto Elena’s bed.
“No, come out of here,” I told the old terrier. “I have to shut this door.”
From the depths of Elena’s pillow, the little dog eyed me sadly.
“Genny, come on!” I said. “I have to shut this before . . .”
And, sure enough, Simon strolled in.
“Okay, now, both of you,” I said, picking up the black cat. He wasn’t fat, but he was so big that he overflowed my arms. “Now, Genny. Come on!”
But Genny just continued to gaze at me, so I put down Simon and went to pick up Genny instead. I pitched her through the door and gave the double-clap that meant exit. Simon ran out of the room. He might be a cat, but he was better trained than the dog was . . .
. . . in some ways.
The reason all the bedroom doors were closed was that Simon had taken to spraying again. He was an indoor cat, and he was upset that the dog got to go outside. He longed to get at the birds and—even more—at the other cats, who came and taunted him through the window. Simon was neutered in body but most certainly not neutered in mind.
Before Genny had come along, Simon had been heading into sleepy old age. But the sight of the terrier cavorting in the Saint Augustine grass outside every day had fired up his cat spirit. Now, he sang battle songs through the window at the feral cats, and when they sprayed the back door, he sprayed back—in my house.
Everybody wants things I can’t give them, I thought with a sigh as I gathered up the pictures. Where to put these? This place needs more storage.
My quest for storage options took me into the hall bathroom, where Dylan was circling around and around his little stone pagoda. I stopped to admire his shiny blue beauty, and he puffed out his fins for me. The pleated fins fell in soft waves around his blue body like the cascades of hair on a pampered show dog.
“It’s easy to take care of him,” Elena had told me before she left. “Here’s his food. Here’s his chemical drops. Change twenty-five percent of his water one time while I’m gone.”
But as I watched Dylan sail grandly past in a parade of one, I worried. Fish are fragile. Such sad little lives . . .
My overactive imagination immediately started supplying me unwanted snippets of film: Simon, with his long black arm stretched into the bowl, raking open Dylan’s gorgeous blue skin. Tor, bumping his tabby face against the glass and rolling the round goldfish bowl off the counter.
How improbable is it, anyway, I thought, that fish need to take their entire habitat into our world? What if dogs and cats had to do that?
And my imagination promptly supplied me an image of a cat in a space suit, hooked up to a portable breathing machine.
Besides, I worried, isn’t that bowl too small? And
what about the temperature? The air conditioner is blowing right on him. And won’t he go crazy, swimming around and around? He doesn’t have anything to do!
By the time Elena got home at the end of the week, Dylan was living in a five-gallon tank with its own heater, light, filter, and locking lid. He loved threading his way through his new silk plants. I even found him sleeping on the leaves.
“I think he likes the background I printed out for him,” I told her. “I catch him studying it sometimes. The book says you should move his plants around each time you change the water so he’ll have a little variety. And look, I got him ping-pong balls to float on the top. I read that some bettas like to play with them. And I’m teaching him to bite my finger for his food. I practice with him four times a day.”
“Mom,” Elena said, “I seriously think you’re overthinking this.”
She was right. But as I watched Dylan drift majestically through his watery realm, I felt happy. “Such a beauty you are!” I crooned to him. “You’re such a blingy boy!”
Three weeks after our earlier visit, the campus lawyer called us back, and Elena and I went to his office for a meeting.
“Here’s the thing: I can’t pursue this under EEO,” he said. “There’s precedent right now that’s not allowing it. But I called in the manager who fired you and questioned her anyway, and I’m positive she was telling me lies. She told me she fired you because you had failed to report a suicide attempt.”
“That’s not true,” Elena said. “I told them about a suicidal RA before he made an attempt.”
“That’s what I told her you had reported to me, and then I asked her if that RA was still working for her. She couldn’t explain to me why she had fired you for not reporting an attempt but hadn’t fired him for making an attempt. She was very uncomfortable during the interview,” he added.
This brought a smile to Elena’s face. It wasn’t a pleasant smile, but at least it was there. And it probably matched the one on my own.
“I’m sure you can win if you take this to the university employment office,” he said. “If she’s going to use that rationale, then there’s no excuse for her firing one of you but not both of you. I hope you do pursue it,” he concluded as he gave us a copy of his written report.
Good, I thought as we walked back to the car. The plan is working. It’s going well.
“So,” I said, “we can call the employment office when we get home.” And my mind was already filling up with lists: phone call to the employment office; best times for a face-to-face meeting; where did I put those copies of the reports and letters we collected?
“No, Mom,” Elena said. “I don’t want to do it.”
This stopped my list-making cold.
“Why not?” I said. “You heard him say you’ll probably win.”
“Win what?” she said. “My job is already gone. They put somebody else in my place. So what are they going to do if we pin them to the wall? They’ll get rid of the RA who has my floor now, or they’ll fire that other RA. Mom, he’s a pathetic loser. Without that job, he can’t finish school.”
“That pathetic loser probably did all he could to get you fired.”
“So?” Elena’s voice was sad. “He’s fat, and he’s ugly, and his parents control his whole life. I was his only friend. I know he’s evil, but his world is very small—I knew that when I spent time with him. I don’t want to be what he is—I don’t want to be the kind of person who works to get somebody else fired. Honestly, Mom, I just want to forget about it.”
I fell silent. I had encouraged Elena to pursue this appeal because I had hoped to force the university into giving her the job back. But it hadn’t occurred to me that some other enterprising RA now had her floor. And it hadn’t occurred to me to think about how the bottom would drop out for that other student if he or she suddenly lost the income and the free room and board.
It had occurred to Elena, though. In the middle of her own pain, she could feel compassion for that unknown RA. She could even feel compassion for the scummy RA who had probably contributed to getting her fired—and who undoubtedly would pay the price if her appeal succeeded.
My daughter is a better person than I am, I thought. She’s better in so many ways.
But stopping the appeal didn’t just mean taking the high road. It also meant accepting defeat. It meant reliving the pain and rejection of that hard, bitter day.
As we reached the parking lot, Elena pulled out a pack of cigarettes and lit one. I looked away. Filth and dirt and slow destruction, all the worst aspects of self-indulgence and self-contempt . . . And now, after having fought it in Valerie’s life, I was having to watch it sink its teeth into Elena.
For the sake of her unborn baby, Valerie had immediately stopped smoking cigarettes. I’d had exactly one week to celebrate. Then Elena had told me that she had taken up the habit. She’d started it during the stress of the summer, as a way to handle the pressure of three jobs.
The weeks passed. Joe and Elena and I settled into a pleasant rhythm together in the house. Once again, we had her lively company to brighten our days and make us laugh. And I certainly didn’t get lonely now when Joe needed to go on long business trips.
But Elena lived on a different schedule than Joe and I did. Thanks to the gym job, she had gotten used to staying up at night, so she went to bed when she got home from class. Then, late at night, when Joe and I were heading to bed, she got up to study or go out with friends.
This should have been good for me. It meant that I had all afternoon to do quiet things, like writing and updating web pages. But I quickly figured out that it also meant Elena was skipping lunch and dinner. And that started up the worries again.
“I eat when I get up, after you’re in bed,” she told me. I wanted to believe her, but I couldn’t. I was the one who bought groceries and cleaned the kitchen, and I didn’t see any food disappearing. So I started developing strategies to keep Elena awake in the afternoon long enough to get her to eat.
“Hey, do you want to watch Gilmore Girls with me?” I said when she got home from school. “I’m working my way through the series.”
“Sure thing,” Elena answered, and she curled up in her fuzzy blanket on the media room floor while I put in the DVD.
“I’m getting some ice cream,” I added casually. “You want some? Rocky road . . .”
“Sure! I’ll take a scoop,” Elena answered.
Day after day, I filled two cups with rocky road ice cream, or butter pecan, or chocolate fudge, and we ate it while we watched old movies and television shows. It was the perfect plan. While they were on, Elena couldn’t use talking to block the food.
Elena and I had a great time together. After the show, we would sit and talk for hours sometimes. I started to put on a few more pounds from the rich snacks, but I could always lose them later. And it was good to see Elena having a good time and eating a little ice cream, even if she never seemed to finish her cup.
After a couple of hours, Elena would get up, blinking sleepily, wrap the fuzzy blanket around her middle, and shamble off to smoke a prenap cigarette on the patio.
“Mom!” she would call about half the time. “Simon and Tor got out again!”
At first, I chased them down and brought them back inside. But then I gave up.
Would the cats be okay? It was just one more thing to worry about, but I couldn’t fight on every front at once. Joe, Martin, Elena, Simon and Tor, Valerie and Clint and the grandbaby . . . I was starting to have to pick my priorities, and Martin and the cats were losing.
Oh, well. At least the cats loved it outside. And Martin—
Martin was having to grow up.
Last year had been the most successful writing year I’d had. I had brought in almost as much money as Joe did. But this year had been completely miserable. Martin’s first adventure had come out, but the publishing house had shoved it down a hole. They had done no marketing at all. Almost no one knew that his first book even existed.
First, I had failed to help Elena. Now I’d failed Martin, too, and my sadness over these failures soaked into his world. They didn’t change who Martin was, but they changed what happened to him.
One afternoon, I sat at the kitchen table and sipped my coffee. My laptop was open, and I was rereading a marked-up Word file, working on some last-minute revisions. But I wasn’t seeing words. I was seeing what Martin was seeing. He was face-to-face with heartbreak and loss.
Martin couldn’t make up his mind about the skeleton slumped over the table. One second, it seemed small and pitiful. The next, it seemed uncanny and horribly inhuman, and he wanted to smash it with the nearest heavy object he could find.
Rudy had told him that the people who hadn’t gotten picked for the domed suburbs had lined up to be given euthanasia shots.
“I guess I’d want to die at home too,” Martin murmured to Chip. “You know, have a little peace and quiet.”
Because skeletons were only people, after all—people who had faced the ultimate rejection and experienced the ultimate failure.
Martin plucked up the courage to come closer. Dry brown skin encased the bony hand in a glove of its own making. It lay in that flattish nest of fur that was piled up in the basket. A pet basket to match the little paw print bowls in the kitchen. A cat bed. The pale fur belonged to a cat.
A vision wove itself together in Martin’s mind of the house before the dust, when the neat row of potted plants in the kitchen had been green and flourishing. The world was ending, and people were forming long lines to get their shot. But this man with the paw print bowls couldn’t do that. What would happen to his cat? He couldn’t just put her outside and not come back. He loved her too much. So he gave his cat poison and stroked her until she lay still, and then he took poison himself. And the soft fur of his cat was the last thing he felt as he drifted away into death.