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

by Clare B. Dunkle

  She was sounding so relaxed but so animated right now. I must have sounded like that when I was lecturing Susan on folklore. This was something very close to this character I was studying, very safe for her.

  “Anyway, you control it, that’s the thing,” she concluded. “Some people purge just so much, but not more. It’s up to you. It’s the best feeling . . . It’s more addictive than smoking.”

  More addictive than nicotine? Wait a minute! How could that be right?

  “But what’s addictive about it?” I asked. “Is it the thought that you’re getting rid of calories?”

  “No. It’s just—well, think about it: you’re prone to anxiety already, and your stomach is full and unsettled. And then you purge, and you feel nice and empty inside, and your stomach is settled down, and you wipe your mouth, and you check in the mirror, and you go through your post-purge ritual . . .” She pauses. “I used to purge just water.”

  Okay, that was just plain crazy! I couldn’t understand it at all.

  Or . . . could I?

  Be fair!

  My imagination brought me feelings from when I had been very nervous. I could remember my stomach feeling so unsettled that I thought I was going to throw up. If those nervous feelings were very intense, day after day, never letting go—and I thought of that Critical Voice, yelling down its vulgarities and insults—wouldn’t I try anything I could to find a little relief?

  No! said the mother in me. No, no, no! Think of the waste! Think of the nasty acidic old used food!

  And I felt my stomach give a lurch.

  “But still, vomiting . . . ,” I protested.

  “No,” Elena interrupted. “Everybody thinks that, and it’s wrong. Vomiting when you’re sick is completely different. It’s very uncomfortable, and you can’t stop it. You can’t control it—it’s not anything like purging.”

  Control. I thought about that. I thought about this hidden skill, this secret sense of control.

  But then I thought about something else. How hidden had it been, really?

  “All those doctors I watched you talk to during the Summer from Hell,” I said. “Did they know you purged?”

  Did they lie to me? demanded the mom.

  “Nah,” Elena said. “Dr. Costello and the other hospital doctors probably thought they knew what they were looking for: dingy teeth, brittle nails, that kind of thing. I’ve always been very careful about that. It’s the little things that give you away.”

  Quieted, the mom settled down, and the writer took over again. In my imagination, I saw my character going through her daily life, using her body like a mask, like a shield. She was watching over its details in order not to give away the secret life going on inside . . .

  But at the same time, sadness was starting to well up inside me. It was exhausting, this strange new world I was having to see.

  “Did you tell Dr. Petras?” I asked. “Is that why he diagnosed you anorexic and put you in the hospital?” And, even though I tried my best to stay in my writer’s mind, I fidgeted at the thought. This was still a sore point with me.

  I couldn’t help it. I just despised that man!

  “No, he didn’t know,” Elena said. “And I don’t think he guessed, either. I didn’t tell him very much. He just got lucky with his diagnosis.”

  Lucky?! shrieked the mom. But I shut her down.

  “Well, what about the psychiatrists at the children’s hospital?” I went on. “What about Dr. Costello?”

  “No, I didn’t tell them. They seemed to think that there were anorexics and bulimics, and the anorexics restricted, and the bulimics purged. They knew it wasn’t that simple by that time, but it still seemed like a lot of them thought that way anyway.”

  This struck a chord with me.

  “You know, I think I remember reading that back then,” I said, “about the difference between anorexics and bulimics. It’s one of the reasons I didn’t think you purged.”

  “There is a big difference, but it doesn’t have to do with purging,” Elena said. “Tons of anorexics purge.”

  Elena and I worked all evening. She talked while I took notes, and if she wasn’t as vivacious and alert as the old Elena, she fought off the sedation more effectively than she’d done in weeks. Then she took her evening pills and vanished into sleep while I lay awake, studying my notes.

  This is amazing! I thought in a rush of excitement. She’s really committed to this! She really is letting me into her world.

  But it was a creepy world, a world that made my skin crawl.

  I thought of the Critical Voice, harping away day and night. I thought of vomiting, turned into an addictive pleasure. I thought of teeth and nails, not as parts of a regular person, but as a kind of disguise instead. I thought of doctors, not as professionals who healed and helped, but as bumbling detectives to be fooled and put on the wrong trail.

  Nothing that I touched in this new world was turning out to be the way I thought it would. A normal person couldn’t survive here for five minutes.

  My imagination called up scenes to show me, building them out of the comments tonight and out of the bits of information I’d learned over the years. Before, this information had been a source of worry for me. Now, it gave me important clues. I needed to see this strange new place. I needed to learn about the character who lived there.

  Toilets became faithful allies in the quest for independence. Trash cans guarded secrets. Kitchens became a frightening, bewildering muddle.

  This was a misty place, where details blurred and scenes swam in the fog of perpetual starvation—a fog I could relate to from my experience of serious blood loss. Touch and feeling, I remembered, had become stronger and more reliable than vision. Over time, touch must start to supplement sight in this foggy world.

  Touch. Hands wrapped around the thigh meant victory. Hunger pangs meant reassurance. The curve of the collarbone turned into a kind of worry stone, to be touched and rubbed again and again.

  Gingerly, I tested out my theories about this dim world, which rippled with unforeseen dangers and unusual suggestions. It was an austere place, that I could easily understand. There was no abundance here of any kind. Everything had to be measured out and rationed, from food to action to breath.

  Little by little, the world I was building began to feel like the undersea world of the mermaids Elena loved so much.

  This was a lesser world.

  It was a fragile, attenuated existence.

  It survived on borrowed light.

  It was such a hard place for the delicate creature who drifted through it! No wonder so many of her brothers and sisters ended up dead.

  The next morning, Elena fought off her drug-induced fatigue to continue the discussion of her memoir. “I’ll leave you my journals,” she said, taking them out of her nightstand drawer. “Read anything you think will help.”

  And, as she got out of the car at Clove House, she told me, for the first time in years: “Write lots!”

  I drove home slowly, trying to think of how to write about what I was learning. The more I tested this world, the more like the bottom of the ocean it seemed, and I couldn’t stifle my suspicion and concern at finding myself there. The cute daydream substitutions of the Disney mermaid’s world—water for air, fish for birds, seaweed for grass—seemed like nothing more than a pretty fiction set up to hide the grim reality. Because what was the bottom of the ocean, after all? A dreary gray underwater wasteland that stretched for mile after barren mile.

  Back at the orphanage, I brewed a double-strength cup of coffee. I brought it down the hall to my room, opened up my laptop, and tried to write. I conjured up my own daughter and studied her traits and attitudes as if I had only just met her.

  Who is she? I wondered. What does she have to say for herself?

  Elena had never put up with bullies. She had always had a chip on her shoulder. That cocky attitude appealed to me. I let it do the talking:

  For every woman who sighs to her girlfriends,
“If I could just drop fifteen pounds”—check this, bitches, I’m proof that you could. For every girl who cracks on Day Three of the diet and wolfs that chocolate shake—tough for you, babe, here’s what you could have had. I’m all your insecurities, the ones you try to pretend don’t matter—but the minute you see me, they do.

  Hey, we all feel them. I’m just the one who’s strong enough to do something about them. The rest of you, you don’t have the drive. You don’t want it badly enough.

  You’re not willing to die.

  I am.

  Oh, God! I thought. That can’t be right, can it? That can’t be what she thinks—not my little girl!

  Like a balloon deflating, the writer side of me faded away. It was the mother who was reacting now. I saw my daughter as a toddler, clutching my finger for support. I remembered her grabbing for Joe’s and my hands and swinging on them, skipping, almost jerking our arms out of our sockets as she jumped as high as she could.

  That exuberant little girl never simply walked anywhere. Everywhere she went, she danced.

  And I found myself starting to type.

  My daughter is disappearing. Fading away. Letting go of everything she loves. My youngest baby, my little girl, is dying.

  What do you say when someone you love is standing on a building ledge? What can you do besides scream?

  Tears were on my cheeks now. I wiped my eyes angrily. Why was I writing this? This wasn’t helping me understand Elena!

  But I couldn’t stop myself. I kept typing.

  Every parent has nightmares. We try our hardest not to think about the worst thing that could happen. But when we hear a father interviewed on the news . . . When we read a family’s released statement . . . When we catch sight of a milk carton photo, we think, That could be my child.

  Over the years, my worst fears for my daughter have crystallized into a terrifying daydream, a daydream so frightful that I have never told it to a single human being until now. It has stayed in the realm of things too terrible to mention. I haven’t wanted to bring it to life.

  I stopped. Was I really going to do this? Was I really going to write it down? Because this was one of my secrets.

  My daydream is this: I am receiving The Call. A voice is saying, “I’m so sorry. It’s about your daughter,” and I continue to hold the phone, but I can’t hear anymore. It doesn’t matter. I already know what the voice is going to say.

  This nightmare scene has been with me for years. For decades, in fact. I’ll see that news story, read about that grisly discovery, and The Call plays out in my mind:

  “I’m so sorry. It’s about your daughter.”

  And I know what’s coming next.

  In all the years that The Call has been with me, I’ve never imagined past this point. I’ve never figured out my reaction. Never even begun to consider the funeral. Never pictured myself living with the news, moving on, making sense of it all, healing.

  “It’s about your daughter.” And after that, a hole that my thoughts can’t get past. A bright red hole, endless, perfectly round, like the entry wound of a bullet.

  “I’m so sorry. It’s about your daughter.”

  And after that:

  Nothing.

  I pushed away the laptop and stumbled up from the desk. I forced myself to stare at the green field outside until its wavering image finally came into focus. Tufts of grass six or seven inches tall swayed back and forth in the breeze. Time to mow. Three songbirds flew past the window very quickly, in a tight jet-fighter formation. The dumpster in the back parking lot was filling up. The door to the orphanage kitchen was ajar.

  This isn’t going to work, I thought. I can’t hold these two different people in my head, the daughter who’s cocky and oblivious and the mother who’s desperately afraid. I’ll go insane before this story is finished.

  But then the writer in me woke up and stretched again.

  Cocky? Oblivious? Is that really true?

  No.

  Elena wasn’t a clueless plastic Little Mermaid, shouting insults from the safety of her coral towers and deadly water-air. That wasn’t my character. I didn’t have her right yet. Before I could conjure her, I needed to learn more.

  So I sat down with Elena’s journals and notebooks and worked my way through them.

  Elena had written beautifully about Drew Center, I discovered. Her fellow patients came to life on the page. And this episode with her friend Mona in boarding school was quite vivid. I was sure there would be a place for it.

  As the hours passed, I skipped around, pulling folded sheets of paper out of notebooks and skimming their contents. Senior year was brief and laconic, as I had expected it would be. Elena’s image was perfect by that time. Her shield was impenetrable. Even her journal couldn’t get inside anymore.

  And here, at the beginning of college, was a long list of impossible daily rules:

  No junk food.

  Exercise every day.

  Study hard.

  Work hard.

  BE hard.

  No tears.

  No meat.

  No eating after 9 p.m.

  Get up at 6 every day.

  Bed before 1 a.m.

  800 calorie max on weekdays.

  Weight day is Friday.

  Days will be planned, and that plan will be followed.

  Tidied room. No slacking. No laziness.

  I will not be a failure!

  I felt a stab of pain. This wasn’t what Joe and I had wanted for our daughter as she embarked on her college career. We had wanted her to love learning and make lifelong friends. Where had she learned to be so harsh and strict with herself? Not even a monk could keep all these rules!

  Yes, yes, the writer in me said, but never mind that now. Look closer! What does this say about my character? And my imagination brought me the image of Elena, writing down the list of rules, firm, purposeful, and satisfied.

  I felt a little tug of self-recognition. I, too, liked to write down lists of priorities and rules. Of course, I also had the good sense to break them almost at once. Elena, it would appear, held on to hers. Was that better discipline? Or was it desperation?

  I didn’t know. I needed to see more.

  I picked up another journal, the one I hadn’t wanted to read. Reluctantly, I edged into the year we had all spent dealing with Valerie’s depression. Elena’s entries reflected my own thoughts at the time: turbulent, alternately furious and despairing. No, this was no perfectly poised mermaid, gliding triumphantly through her strange, poisoned world.

  But maybe it was too soon. Maybe the eating disorder hadn’t taken over yet.

  I turned to the beginning of the next year. Let’s see: where were we all then? Joe and Elena were already back in Germany. They had flown home without me. I was staying in the States for another week to get Valerie settled in at college . . .

  The college she would run away from three months later.

  I put my hands over my eyes. They were still wet, the eyelashes slippery with tears. Suddenly, I felt so exhausted that I wanted to curl up right there and pull a blanket over my head. I couldn’t do this! Why did I say I would do this? It was too hard! Too hard to go back there . . .

  But my writer’s mind kept prodding me: What about the character? This isn’t about you! What about her?

  So I dropped my hands and picked up the journal again.

  This past year was not a sweet sixteen, Elena had written, but I did learn a lot about inner strength, about holding on.

  Inner strength—yes! This was a character I could bring to the world. She wasn’t sassy and silly. She was a realist. She was fighting. She knew she had to hold on.

  Resolutions? I have a few, some good, some bad. But right now, I am starving, my throat aches, and my hands are kinda shaking. I better lie down.

  So it was already here. The eating disorder was already eating her alive.

  Then came the sentence that told me my character saw it all. She knew she wasn’t floating through some
coral wonderland. She saw the whole dreary, empty truth. I read it over and over while the tears ran down my face, and it was the saddest, simplest, clearest, wisest statement about anorexia nervosa that I have ever read. It stood like an epitaph for all Elena had lost, and like a verdict that summed up all she would have to suffer:

  I miss so many things that were beautiful.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Two weeks later, Elena was the one with the cold. Even though she had gained weight again during this stay at Clove House, each day seemed to suck away a little more of her strength. The only thing that brought her to life anymore was the memoir we were writing together.

  But if the memoir had become Elena’s lifeline, it had become my little slice of hell.

  I had to understand things, and that meant I had to ask about things. That meant I was learning things that I would never have wanted to know—such as the truth about what had been going on during the Summer from Hell.

  It began simply enough—but then, I was starting to learn already that I never knew how easy or how painful an interview with Elena would be. Elena was lying on her bed, with an arm up to block the light from the windows. I was sitting beside her with my laptop, taking notes.

  “So, I mentioned in an email to a librarian that I’m writing your anorexia memoir,” I told her, “and the librarian says she’s afraid it’ll reveal tricks. She says we don’t need any more anorexics out there teaching today’s teens new tricks.”

  Elena smiled—a grim, sad smile. “She doesn’t have any idea what anorexia is.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “It’s a prison. It’s twenty-four-hour-a-day life in a jail cell. We never get out, not even for one second. All we can do, all day long, is look for ways to survive. Nobody needs to teach us tricks. We brainstorm our own tricks all day long. When real anorexics compare notes, we’ve already figured out all the same tricks—and each one of us did it on our own.”

  Okay, prison, I thought. That’s very interesting. I had already known about the walls that kept others away from my character. So those walls kept her in, as well.

  And what about the blackouts? Were those walls, too?