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

by Clare B. Dunkle

  No, Elena and I would be spending weeks—if not months!—at a charity house for thirty dollars a night.

  I was grateful, yes. I was very grateful. Our bank account needed the break. But whenever I thought of this hypothetical lodging, my overactive imagination presented me with a youth hostel: bunk beds, shared shower facilities, trestle tables, and bare floors. It showed me a refrigerator full of moldy yogurt and other people’s boxes of cold fried chicken. Uncomfortable folding chairs, and the smell of burnt toast. Children crying. Crumbs in the butter.

  At least Elena could go to Clove House every day. Me, I’d have no escape from this place for weeks—if not months!

  But the GPS hadn’t gotten the memo. It didn’t know it was supposed to take me to an ugly youth hostel. It led the car through a quiet neighborhood and up to a handsome brick building set back from the street in a green expanse of lawn.

  “Welcome!” said the cheerful volunteer behind the counter.

  It was a welcoming kind of place.

  In the 1980s, she explained, the building had been designed to be an orphanage, and its halls swung out from the main building in an X pattern to allow as much light and fresh air as possible into the large rooms.

  “Here’s our cafeteria,” she said, leading us through the clean, pretty space. Sunlight poured through French doors along two sides.

  “Of course, we have a wireless network if you’ve brought your own computer. But here’s our computer lab for the guests,” and she opened a door to a carpeted room as quiet as a library. Ten or twelve desktop computers hummed softly on its long office tables, and the screens were as big as my monitor at home.

  “You’re welcome to use the exercise equipment,” she said, walking us across a wood-floored gym to a line of treadmills and elliptical machines set up by tall windows at the back.

  “And feel free to use any of the parlors,” she added, pointing into cozy rooms filled with couches and easy chairs facing big-screen TVs.

  I looked around in wonder. The place was . . . fantastic!

  Thirty dollars a day—tax-free!

  Elena’s and my room was at the end of a long hall, with windows on two sides that looked out toward what had once been the playground: an acre or more of grass, and beyond that, a wooded suburb. Our room was plain but large, with white venetian blinds and simple furniture. Some kindly soul had decorated it with a couple of seagull prints and a small wooden lighthouse figurine. It held three twin beds, two desks, two nightstands, and a bookcase. The bookcase was particularly welcome.

  Peace and hope flooded through my worried soul as I walked in. Yes, I decided as I sat down on one of the beds, I will be happy in this room.

  That evening, Elena and I unpacked. Unpacking makes a place personal. I always do it as soon as I can. Elena quickly tired out and lay down to watch a video on her laptop, but I kept going. I needed my routines and my order. I needed everything to find its rightful place.

  Last of all, I set up my printer on the desk. Then I pulled up the venetian blinds and looked outside.

  A flock of Canada geese waddled by on the lawn, honking loudly and stabbing their big black beaks into the grass. They were massive. They were even a little bit scary. I’d never seen Canada geese up close before. And this part of the country had chipmunks. We don’t have them in Texas. Several chipmunks were digging energetically in the flower beds outside our windows, showing off their bear-claw-striped backs.

  Yes, I thought again, I will be happy here.

  The next morning, the alarm on my phone woke me up at seven, and I woke up Elena. She smoked a cigarette out on the patio at the end of the hall, and we watched the geese parade by.

  “What are they looking for in the grass?” Elena wondered. “Don’t they need a pond?”

  “No idea,” I said. “Bugs maybe?”

  I drove Elena to Clove House. It was about twenty-five minutes away, but the drive wasn’t stressful. Big trees, handsome houses, and broad lawns: the Texan in me was thrilled to see so much green.

  “The botanical garden here is really great,” Elena said. “I mean it: it’s world-class. You should go sometime while I’m in treatment.”

  I dropped her off and went home to do my writing work.

  But when I got back to the orphanage, I didn’t work. I slept. The last two weeks had been horribly stressful, as if I’d had the weight of all our futures on my shoulders. Now, Elena was back where she could be safe and get well. The professionals were taking care of her again. I could fade into the background and go back to a minor supporting role.

  It felt blissful to have Elena back where she could get better.

  I woke up at one and ate lunch in the sunny cafeteria. It was almost empty. The cook looked as if she were about forty, but she had to be in her sixties. She told me she had fed the “babies” twenty years ago, when the orphanage was still full of children. Her lasagna was amazing—and free. And she pointed out the pieces of cake she’d baked that day, waiting in the glass-doored refrigerators. Her black eyes were on me, patient but expectant. It would be impolite not to try a piece, now, wouldn’t it?

  Her cake was amazing, too. It was pure comfort food. I lingered over the sweet frosting and thought sadly about all the joy Elena was missing. Memories of every person who was important in my life came to me with happy memories of food: either the food we had fixed together or the food we had shared. From my grandmother’s lemon pies to Joe’s and my halved Cadbury chocolate bars, food was an important way I had been shown love.

  I wondered: Was it the food that wasn’t good enough for Elena? Was she simply blind to that love? Or was it Elena herself who wasn’t good enough for the food and the love that came with it?

  At six thirty, I drove back to Clove House and picked up Elena. She climbed into the car, excited and purposeful.

  “Brenda’s my new therapist,” she said. “I actually kind of like her. She asked me to write down the things I want to accomplish while I’m here.”

  She opened her notebook and read out a very ambitious list. She wanted to be sure to pay attention this time because she knew now how strong the eating disorder was. She wanted to make the most of her time here. She didn’t want to go home and repeat the same cycle again.

  I almost sang as she read these sentences aloud. I felt over the moon to hear her putting together hopes and goals again. I felt as if I had wings, as if I were floating above my seat, as if the car were floating effortlessly down the highway.

  “Oh, and this,” Elena said, pulling out a handful of prescriptions. “They want me to start the new doses tonight.”

  The car and I thumped back down to earth.

  “More pills?” I said in dismay. “They haven’t seemed all that helpful.” And I remembered Elena’s wild rages from a couple of months ago.

  “Six different kinds,” she said, fanning them like a poker hand. “They’re not all new, though; some are new doses. This one’s morning and night now. This one’s just morning. This one’s three times a day. So’s this. This one is just at night.”

  So many pills! But if Elena needed them . . .

  “Are they sure this is necessary?” I said. “I didn’t know anorexia needed so many different pills.”

  “Mood stabilizer,” Elena explained, shuffling through them again and reading off the names. “SSRI. Anti-anxiety, anti-OCD, panic disorder . . .”

  “Good Lord! Isn’t that one for schizophrenia?”

  “Yep, but for me, since I’m not schizophrenic, it’s just supposed to make me sleep and help me gain weight.”

  “Well . . . That’s good, I guess . . .”

  But—an antipsychotic? Really?

  Then again, it wasn’t as if I knew what my daughter needed. She had made progress here before, and she was back here again because she needed help from the professionals. I sighed. Best to leave it to Elena’s care team. They already had the insurance company second-guessing their every move.

  Next door to our orphanage was a
twenty-four-hour Walgreens. They were bound to have our pills. I parked in the orphanage’s horseshoe drive next to today’s crop of farm trucks and SUVs, and Elena and I hiked through the trees and the goose droppings to the Walgreens parking lot.

  A Canada goose–size dropping is no joke.

  At the pharmacy, we turned in her winning hand of prescriptions and then separated to waste time until they were ready. Elena found a horror title in the Redbox outside the door and came to fetch a credit card to coax it out. “It looks like it has awful special effects,” she gloated. I found an air freshener for our room that smelled like warm cookies, then wandered into the candy aisle and discovered almond M&M’s. Elena found me again with her hands full of beauty products that for some reason seemed to be named after vegetables. I hadn’t thought about vegetables being beautiful before. I decided I’d better get a packet of thumbtacks.

  We hauled Elena’s pills home in a bulging white paper sack and retired to our separate beds to watch DVDs. Elena giggled over her horrible horror movie and called me over from time to time when things got particularly silly: “Mom, check this out!” Meanwhile I wasted an enjoyable hour watching Lost. Elena and I had both become severely addicted to that series. We compared notes off and on and shared thrilling plot twists or witty lines.

  I loved the character of Ben best. He was such a magnificent monster.

  Companionable quiet reigned as we watched our computers, each one turned down very low. Then, “I’m going to go smoke,” Elena said. “Want to come with?”

  I did. We sat in plastic chairs on the back steps while Elena breathed in her soothing poison and brought me up to date on the latest gossip.

  “Sylvia unzipped one of the Foofs and crawled inside,” she said, referring to Clove House’s massive beanbag chairs. “She fell asleep in there, and the staff couldn’t find her for hours. Someone even came and sat on her Foof, but she’s so little, she had curled up beside the cushion, and even when you were sitting there, you couldn’t tell.

  “The staff were going out of their minds! They ransacked the entire place. They were going to have to call nine-one-one and report that they had lost a patient. That’s very bad.

  “Then, all of a sudden, there’s Sylvia! She’s sitting up, blinking, saying, ‘What did I miss?’”

  I laughed. “I’ll bet they unzip every single Foof from now on.”

  “You’ve got that right!” Elena said.

  We walked back to our neat, pleasant room. “So, where’s my drugs?” Elena asked.

  I picked out the two pastel circles that made up her nightly regimen and fetched her a glass of water. Then I put away the DVDs and her socks and lined my shoes up and went to change into pajamas.

  By the time I got back a few minutes later, Elena was already out. Not asleep—out like a snuffed candle. Her laptop still spun and glowed with life, but she didn’t. She looked like a fallen statue.

  I watched my daughter for a minute, and the hold that the medications had on her felt so viscerally disturbing to me that the hair prickled up on my arms. She was barely even breathing! Once again, I wondered: did she need such powerful drugs?

  But that was silly. She was asleep, and that was good, right? It was better than insomnia, anyway. She wouldn’t be lying awake and fighting her compulsions.

  I turned off her laptop and went to bed.

  The next morning, when my alarm rang at seven, Elena didn’t wake up well. She could barely follow what I was saying, and she certainly couldn’t hold a conversation.

  I doled out another round of pills: five pills this time. And then I packed up the medication she was supposed to take during the day.

  The drive in was quiet, but that was okay. This wasn’t the excitement of the first day, after all, but Elena had her hopes and goals to sustain her. She wanted to work hard. She would get through this.

  “Do good work!” I urged as she got out of the car.

  That evening, when I picked her up, I asked, “How was the day?”

  “Slept through it,” Elena muttered. And she fell asleep in the car on the way home.

  The next morning was just as bad. And the next. And the next. Gone was Elena’s enthusiasm and excitement. Gone were her lists of goals. My formerly lively daughter struggled just to keep her eyes open. She didn’t tell me stories anymore. In fact, she could barely concentrate enough to speak.

  “Have you told Brenda you can’t stay awake?” I asked. “Have you told Dr. Greene?”

  Elena grunted an affirmative.

  “And what did they say?”

  “. . . Have to get used to it.”

  “But why? Why do you need these horse tranquilizers?”

  No answer. Elena’s eyes were closing again.

  “Mrs. Dunkle, they’re important,” Brenda told me when I brought up the subject. Elena’s new therapist was a pretty, dark-haired young woman with a no-nonsense attitude. “Elena needs significant help controlling her impulses.”

  “But why? She wasn’t on this level of medication before.”

  “She had mood swings and anger issues then, too,” Brenda noted. “Don’t worry. We’re monitoring this. If the doses need to change, they will.”

  But when they did change, they only increased.

  Clove House’s program ran seven days a week. Nothing broke our routine. Each morning I woke up, roused Elena, fed her pills, carted her to the center, and watched her shuffle off through the door. Each evening, I picked her up and tried to exchange a few words with her. She almost always fell asleep in the car, and any spark of life left in her got finished off by the evening round of pills.

  I began to feel lonely and depressed. When Joe or Valerie called me, I couldn’t think of any good news. But when I asked for their news, that wasn’t all good, either.

  “Simon’s neck is torn up,” Valerie told me. “We took him to the vet, and he’s in a cone in the garage.”

  Guilt flooded through me. I had always taken such good care of my cats! I had never left them outside to fight. But with Elena’s worrisome problems and the Dunkle slumber party, the cats had gone outside almost full-time. I just couldn’t manage everything at once.

  My poor black beast, locked up in the garage—he must absolutely hate it!

  “How long will he have to be in the cone?” I asked.

  “Until the stitches are out. At least ten days.”

  Poor Simon! It was my fault. I knew he was a fighter. Tor had the good sense to stay inside the screen porch and out of trouble. But not Simon. Now he was paying the price.

  “Can’t he be in the house?”

  “Considering the fact that he promptly pissed in the living room,” Valerie said, “no, he can’t.”

  “It’s the stress,” I explained. “He does that when he’s upset.”

  “Yeah, well,” Valerie said, “I got the message.”

  That night, I tossed and turned. My head hurt, and I felt horrible. My peace of mind was gone, and so was my comfort.

  “I don’t feel good,” I told Elena the next morning as she smoked and we watched the Canada geese. “I’m getting a cold. I couldn’t sleep last night.”

  Elena flicked the ash away. There were big bags under her eyes, and her face looked puffy. “I feel like shit,” she groaned, in agreement or in competition. “My head is killing me.”

  “It’s going to rain again,” I ventured after a minute. “More thunderstorms on the way. No wonder those great big peripatetic geese don’t need a pond.”

  Elena rested her aching head on her hand as smoke dribbled out of her lips. She didn’t bother to come up with a reply. And when she went to treatment, she didn’t bother to change out of pajamas, either.

  “Why get dressed,” she muttered, “if I’m just going to sleep?”

  The next day, or maybe a day three days later, or maybe a day a week later (they all felt the same), I dropped Elena off at Clove House and went back to the room to read manuscript printouts. The Wuthering Heights manuscript full o
f ghosts that I had written when Valerie ran away was back again, all grown-up like she was. It had reached the line-edit stage, the very last stage before my editor passed it along to the art department and it got made into a book. All I needed to do at this point was to make sure that every single word sounded perfect.

  That was good because it distracted me from the fact that I had no other writing to do. Since bringing Elena to Clove House, I hadn’t found the time or courage to start another new manuscript.

  Now I carried the printout to the bed, picked up my red Sharpie fine-point pen, and got to work.

  I was not the first girl she saw, nor the second, and as to why she chose me, I know that now: it was because she did not like me. She sat like a magistrate on the horsehair sofa, examining me for failings.

  “I mustn’t take a half-wit, though,” she said reluctantly, as if she would like to do it. She seemed to consider idiocy the greatest point in my favor.

  “Oh, our Tabby’s no half-wit,” countered Ma Hutton. “She just has that look. You did say you wanted to see an ugly one, miss.”

  Miserable and sick, blowing my nose until tissues littered the bed, I lingered long and lovingly over this manuscript. The descriptions were so firm and decisive. The characters—even the dead ones—were so vivid.

  Could it be true? Was this really my writing?

  The supper bell rang. I brushed my hair and my teeth and my yellow tongue and dragged myself to the cafeteria. The old cook considered me gently as she filled up my plate with chicken casserole.

  “Still got that cold!” she said, shaking her head.

  Lonely for my family, I felt glad that she was worrying over me. She was the only person besides Elena and her therapists who noticed that I existed. Worried and dispirited, I hadn’t tried to make friends with the other travelers there. They changed on a daily basis, and besides, they had worries of their own.

  So now, I submitted meekly to the amount of food the old cook dished up. If I could have, I would have followed her around the kitchen at this point, like her “babies” from days gone by.