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

by Clare B. Dunkle

  Only once, when I was newly arrived, did I attempt to assert to her my right to an adult existence. I had showed her a photo of baby Gemma. “I’m a grandmother,” I had bragged.

  And her black eyes, soft at the sight of the little one, had twinkled with amusement. “Great-grandmother,” she’d said, jerking a thumb at her chest.

  Time to pick up Elena. I shoveled in the last forkfuls of casserole because that great-grandmother, my only mother in this state, stood over the dirty-dishes trolley to take our plates from us. I didn’t dare hand her my plate half empty. She wouldn’t say a word, but her eyes would measure me.

  The commute to pick up Elena was like a rubber band, sometimes short and sometimes long even though it was always the same. This evening, it was very long. The light came stabbing through my sunglasses. I felt feverish. My bones ached.

  This is turning into sinusitis, I thought.

  Elena climbed into the car and sat huddled like a lump of clay. She didn’t return my greeting.

  I couldn’t help myself. I heard myself say brightly and downright idiotically, just like a mother with a grade-schooler, “So, did anything happen today?”

  Not that I had ever needed to ask Elena that when she was in grade school. That Elena hadn’t waited to be asked.

  The middle school Elena wouldn’t have waited, either. With her high spirits and merriment, she would have had me laughing over the way a therapist cleared her throat. Even the senior-year Elena would have told me. Hostility or not, she hadn’t been able to resist telling me stories. She would have had me crying over the way a patient looked out the window.

  If this were the freshman-year Elena, I would have known that twenty-five minutes’ worth of commute meant twenty-five minutes of fascinating information on any subject under the sun. “Oh my God, guess what!” she would have challenged before she’d even gotten the car door closed. And the answer might have been anything from viper bites to death row confessions. I couldn’t possibly begin to guess.

  But this Elena, the new Elena, drooped against the window with her eyes closed.

  “Nope,” she said.

  And then we drove in silence.

  I couldn’t stand it. I was so lonely! “Well, what did you do?” I prodded.

  “Slept.”

  “You slept again. Did you talk to Brenda? Did you tell her that this medicine just makes you sleep?”

  “Yep.”

  “And what did she say?”

  “Keep taking it.”

  “That’s it? That’s all she could tell you? Just keep taking it?”

  Elena opened her eyes and forced herself upright. She gazed out the windshield for the first time.

  “This is shit,” she said. “I’m not getting better. I want to go home.”

  Anxiety came fluttering at me, and I could feel it again: my transformation into that helpless Victorian mother who utters feeble protests in the background. The woman who is absurdly careful about drafts. The woman who never dares to wear her best jewelry.

  I couldn’t be weak like that. I had never been weak like that, not even when I was little. I couldn’t turn into an invalid now and wring my hands and utter feeble cries. I needed to remember who I was. I needed to be strong.

  But when I heard my voice, all I was really being was whiny.

  “You wanted to come here,” that whiny voice said. “No one made you do this.”

  “So? So now I want to go home.”

  And then later, I thought, you’ll cry and tell me how you should have stayed—and I’ll be the one left with the guilt!

  “I’m not going to leave,” I said. “I believe in your recovery. Your recovery is important.”

  “My recovery is bullshit. My recovery is a joke.”

  If only that didn’t feel honest and true! If only I could point to all the progress she had made! But, since coming back here, what had Elena done besides sleep?

  The Victorian mother in my head sobbed and waved her handkerchief. This isn’t working! It isn’t doing any good! And anger boiled up inside me—anger born of frustration.

  It had to work! We had no other choice!

  I pulled up in the horseshoe drive alongside a new crop of cars from out of town, and Elena actually summoned the energy to walk into the orphanage ahead of me. I followed her down the halls, arguing with myself.

  I had to remember what was important here. No matter what, I had to hold on to what was important. This wasn’t about me. It was about Elena’s recovery. That was what mattered.

  I couldn’t whimper and fuss. I couldn’t let myself give way to panic. That had never been who I was.

  “Elena,” I tried again when I caught up with her at our room. “I know this is very hard, but you committed to this, and your father and I have, too.” But then the bitterness and loneliness overwhelmed me, and I couldn’t keep the frustration out of my voice. “Do you have any idea how much we’ve invested in your recovery? Do you know how much this is costing us? You have to make progress. You have to make this work!”

  “There you go,” she snapped. “Drag money into it! That’s all you ever think about is the money.”

  All I ever think about—!

  A vision rose up in my mind to taunt me: a few of the plans we’d had for that year’s money. There was the bathroom remodeling Joe and I had planned to do this summer, the one we had been promising ourselves for years, the one that would finally replace those nasty scratched sinks and smudgy mirrors and the garish ’70s wallpaper. There were the cute outfits for Gemma that we hadn’t purchased, and nice clothes to replace Valerie’s threadbare ones. There were the movies I had wanted to watch with Clint. There was Joe’s beautiful white BMW.

  “Well, yes,” I said, “if you really want to go there, I do think about the money, and maybe you could think about it, too. You could think about the hundred-plus dollars each day here is costing, and you could decide not to sleep through your therapy! Maybe then you’d make some progress and get a little better instead of thinking everything is just shit.”

  “All you do is see the negative!” Elena cried, throwing herself down on her bed. “That’s all you’ve ever done. Well, screw you for your negativity, and your invalidating, and your undermining! Screw you for keeping me here!”

  And now I was shouting, too.

  “You know what? I’m not keeping you here! You go right ahead and leave. You’re an adult: you can do anything you put your mind to. But don’t think you’re going to use my car or my gas to get yourself out of this, and don’t think you’re staying in a nice hotel on my credit card. Because I’m an adult, too, and I’m going to spend my money on the things that matter to me!”

  “Bitch!” snapped Elena, hurling the word out through sagging lips, and even now, her eyes were still half closed. “You’re a bitch, Mom! That’s all you are is a bitch!”

  “And you’re a spoiled little plastic girl who’s treating therapy like summer camp!” I yelled in return. “You’re hanging out with your plastic friends and giggling together and having Spa Day and Nail Day and Pedicure Day. All you’re doing, all of you, is sitting around, using up your parents’ money! Well, you can all just go ahead and grow the hell up! You’re an adult, damn it—an adult! Now, act like one!”

  Elena jumped up, snatched her medicine bottles from my drawer, and stomped by me on her way to the bathroom. I watched through the open door as she ran a glass of water and gulped down her two nightly pills. Then she flopped onto her bed again and closed her eyes. She didn’t move for the rest of the evening.

  She had escaped and left me mired in a swamp of guilt.

  Why had I done that? Why had I lost my temper? I had no idea what she was going through. She’d been through horror and hardship, and I was just making it worse. I felt as if I’d been wallowing in mud.

  It wasn’t Elena herself who had made me lose my temper. I felt sorry for that poor sallow-faced creature who couldn’t stay awake for five minutes anymore. No, it was the fear of my own
fear that drove me to it: my fear of that timid woman living in my mind, the one who fluttered and submitted and worried and did nothing.

  I couldn’t just sit there. I had to do! Or else . . .

  Or else Elena disappeared into her room. Forever.

  That thought skewered me and roasted me over hot coals. That thought ran itself under my fingernails, bit through my body, and crunched my bones. I found that I was walking, hurrying around the room, swinging my arms and cracking my hands together. My head hurt, but my heart hurt more. I could hear my pulse thumping in my ears, and my breaths were fast and shallow, as if I were running.

  The white-hot agony of that thought made me want to grab Elena’s unconscious body and shake her back and forth like a rag doll, shake her until she opened her eyes and smiled at me and said, “Hey, Mom, guess what?”—until she was normal, happy, lively Elena again.

  Do something! Do something! I screamed in my head. This has to work. Do something!

  But in the end, just what could I do?

  The next morning, on the drive in to treatment, Elena managed to keep her eyes open, and she was deliberately even-tempered. We both talked about a few unimportant things, just to prove that we could. But we didn’t say any of the things that mattered.

  God, my head ached! I could feel the toxic slime of evil bugs gathering in my sinuses. My imagination presented me with a picture: green and yellow beasts, vaguely cow-like, pasturing in the open caverns of my cheekbones. Their manure was running into my nose, a poisonous fluorescent goo that choked me and made my breath stink.

  I gave a little groan. Now my stomach was upset. People with imaginations shouldn’t get sick.

  I dropped off Elena, turned around in Clove House’s parking lot, and made the twenty-five-minute trip back to the orphanage. I pulled into the horseshoe drive. Ample parking. The SUVs had scattered to hospitals and clinics for the day.

  As I passed the offices in the main hall, the cheerful staff member popped out of a door. She didn’t look so cheerful today.

  “Mrs. Dunkle,” she said, “I was touring guests through the building last night, and we couldn’t help hearing the yelling and the four-letter words coming from your room. It was very embarrassing for this facility. I’m going to have to ask you to keep that from happening again.”

  So painful was this scolding—so unexpected, after the miniscule amount of social contact I’d had lately—that I almost burst into tears. I felt blindsided by it, completely unprotected. I didn’t seem to have any emotional defense.

  It was true. My daughter and I had been bad guests. We had failed to maintain the basics of good manners.

  I hung my head and quickly scurried away.

  In the safety of my room, I stood for a while and stared out the window. Thunderclouds massed behind the suburb and rolled in over the deserted playground. Rain hissed down on the gray sidewalk outside, and then hail tapped and rattled on the glass.

  The chipmunks and the geese were gone.

  If I were at home, Joe would be making special runs to the grocery store to bring home medicine and snacks for me. And Valerie wouldn’t let me hold baby Gemma with this cold, but she would bring me cups of tea. She might even show up at my bedroom door and say, “Get dressed, woman! Dad called and got you an appointment. I’m driving you to the doctor.”

  But Valerie and Joe weren’t here, and I didn’t have the strength to go down the hall to the kitchenette and make that tea myself. So I huddled under the blankets and shivered and reached for my line-edit printouts.

  Soon I was safe in familiar scenes I’d plotted three years ago, watching two little children play with their dolls by a crackling fire while ghosts crouched in the shadows nearby. I let myself get lost in the story, as if it weren’t my work at all but an old book I’d found in a forgotten corner of a library.

  Did I really write this? It sounded so confident—so unlike the person I’d become.

  Would I ever have the nerve to write like this again?

  Hour after quiet hour ticked by while drops of rain dribbled down the windows and I tried to do my work. Finally, the nausea and headache took a firm enough grip that I couldn’t escape anymore. So I let the printouts slide to the floor, and I rolled over, aching, and the misery I felt flowed through and through me.

  Elena was gaining weight, yes.

  But she wasn’t getting any better.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  On the morning of our weekly family-therapy appointment, the one day a week when I got to have a pleasant chat with a real living, breathing person who was looking me in the eye, Susan, the therapist, leaned toward me and remarked brightly:

  “Elena says you think she’s possessed by a devil.”

  Well, isn’t that lovely! I thought.

  Elena and I had been at Clove House for about a month. She was marginally more wakeful but still very subdued. To me, she seemed like a zombie, and our relationship had gotten so bad that neither one of us tried to converse anymore. Elena wanted to go home; I wouldn’t take her. That was where things stood.

  It was true that I hated Elena’s eating disorder so much that I pictured it as a devil. My imagination showed it to me as a big, ugly, flabby demon with shiny, sweaty skin, crouching at the center of her soul. It opened its wide, froglike mouth and guzzled down great gulps of loneliness and isolation. It grew fat and sleek on her misery. Meanwhile, it let fall just a few crumbs of peace now and then—just enough shreds of satisfaction to keep Elena working hard to feed it that feast of hunger and pain.

  Of course, Elena knew perfectly well that my imagination showed me everything in images like that. It pictured problems in metaphor and story. That’s how I could write. But Elena must have known that Susan wouldn’t get this, and she hadn’t made any attempt to explain. She must have gotten a good laugh out of telling Susan about this devil and watching the therapist’s shocked reaction.

  Possessed by a devil—what a stupid thing to say!

  “Well, I certainly don’t think Elena needs to go through an exorcism with bell, book, and candle, if that’s what you mean,” I said.

  Susan tilted her head, very professional and interested and coy.

  “Can you tell us what you do mean?”

  Us? There was no us, as Susan knew perfectly well. Elena was sitting beside me on the couch, but mentally, she was a world away. Her eyelids were drooping, and she had sunk into the cushions. Ten to one, she was already half asleep.

  That left Susan, and Susan had brought this topic up with that slightly smug smile that says, Until proven otherwise, I am going with the assumption that you are a superstitious, ignorant moron.

  Oh, yeah? I thought.

  Time to open up a big ol’ can of academia.

  “You know I’m a writer,” I said. “My writing is based on folklore— on myths. These are the oldest stories we have, and even today, we still can’t stop telling them. They center on themes that are ancient and universal. Pluto drags Persephone off to the underworld; the Phantom of the Opera drags Christine off to the caverns below Paris.”

  In my mind, my goblin King brushed his striped hair out of his bony face and gave me a wry smile.

  You, too! I told him, and he nodded.

  “Stories like that exist in every country, in every language,” I went on. “I think they explain how we deal with the psychological demands of our world. They may even have to do with how our brains are wired.”

  “I see,” Susan said cautiously.

  I could tell that Susan was disappointed. She’d probably been angling for emotional hot buttons between Elena and me. Maybe she’d hoped for a nice knock-down-drag-out fight over religion. But Elena was almost asleep. And I wasn’t a professor’s child for nothing.

  “When it comes to anorexia nervosa,” I said, “the first thing I think of is Ophelia. Did you know that Ophelia-style mermaid stories occur all over the world?”

  Susan fidgeted. “Ophelia isn’t a mermaid.”

  “The story
repeats all over the world,” I said again. “Ophelia is just the best example. Think about it: think about who Ophelia is. She’s the girl who’s been used and tossed aside. She more or less admits that she slept with Hamlet, and she may even be pregnant. Then Hamlet turns on her. He tells her that he doesn’t love her and won’t marry her, and that she can’t marry anybody else, either. Presumably, he’s reminding her that she’s no longer a virgin. He insults and humiliates her. He even kills her father.

  “So Ophelia does what wronged girls and unwed pregnant girls have done since the oldest days of story. She finds some water nearby, and she drowns herself.”

  Susan glanced at Elena. “But to get back . . .”

  “Compare that to the Little Mermaid,” I continued, ignoring her. “And I mean the real Little Mermaid, not the Disney one. Andersen’s mermaid gives up everything to win her prince—not unlike Ophelia. But her prince doesn’t love her. She even has to dance for him and his bride on their wedding day. Her sisters try to persuade her to kill the prince, but she throws herself into the water instead.”

  As I spoke, I remembered the day when my mother first introduced me to that story, the story where the mermaid doesn’t win her prince. So powerful was the spell it put me under that I could remember everything about where I was with the new book she had bought me: in my parents’ room, sitting on the edge of their bed as the two of us turned the pages. My feet were swinging. They didn’t touch the ground. That book was a board book, I was so little. It was designed so preschool children wouldn’t spoil the pages.

  A preschool board book about a woman, brokenhearted, unlucky in love, who can either commit murder or lose her own life. Wouldn’t Susan have a field day with that!

  Not that she would ever hear about it from me.

  “So, I ask you,” I went on in my blandest lecturing voice, “why has the legend of the Little Mermaid stayed with us? Why is Ophelia one of the most memorable teenage girls in literature? Why are there pools all over the world, watched over by the spirits of drowned girls who pull men down to their deaths?”