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

by Clare B. Dunkle

“It’s an adjustment,” Brenda said. “Mrs. Dunkle, it isn’t as if Elena will be out on her own. She’ll still be here for ten to twelve hours a week. If we see that it’s too much for her, we can put her back into full-time treatment. Now, Elena, I’m going to write you a pass. Why don’t you and your mother go visit the nursing schools?”

  And I left with my somnambulant daughter again, my head in a complete whirl.

  Back into full-time treatment? But—when would she get better?!

  The minute we got into the car, Elena told me she wasn’t going to colleges. “Not today,” she said. “Let’s go back and look at the computer again. You can explain the budget to me. I’ll pay attention. And I can do things there . . . Make calls . . .”

  What could I do? Could I force my adult daughter to walk into a nursing school?

  “Okay . . . ,” I said.

  But when we got back to the room, all she did was crawl into bed and close her eyes.

  I begged her. I shook her and nagged her. “You can’t just lie here!” I said. “It’s the one thing I can’t allow. I’ll help you do anything else!”

  But Elena lay without answering. She didn’t move.

  “Look at how much you need to get done,” I whined. “Think about your recovery!” And there it was, that hand-wringing mother again: Please, darling! We need to talk!

  “My recovery? My recovery is a joke.”

  And, while the mother in me continued to wail, the writer took in that simple declaration. My character is a realist, the writer said again.

  We were running out of time. I could feel it. We were sliding over a cliff. I lay awake that night, and my imagination showed me that cliff edge, getting closer and closer. Elena’s last week in treatment was almost over. We had to do something—anything!

  “Did you know,” Elena said bitterly as she got into the car the next evening, “that I won’t even keep my same therapist and nutritionist? Clove House has staff who work with inpatients and staff who work with outpatients. This is bullshit. I’ll be starting all over again.”

  “Yes, but it’s a good program,” I protested, and I despised myself for the feeble, whimpering tone in my voice.

  “How do you know?” Elena snapped. “You don’t know the outpatient people. It could be a complete waste of time!”

  And, although I said every positive thing I could think of, I thought, That’s what I’m afraid of, too.

  I felt crushed by the responsibility of it all. I spent each day that week moving heaven and earth. On the laptop, on my scribbled pages of notes—even in my own imagination—I tried to weave together a future for Elena.

  But after all my numbers and budgets, after all my plans and visits, we ended up packing the car.

  I hadn’t known this on Friday morning, when I had dropped Elena off at treatment. But when I picked her up that afternoon, it was a fact of life. It wasn’t just the one last fight Elena had had with her therapist. It was the result of too many unknowns.

  “Why do we have to pack now?” Elena sighed as she emptied drawers. “I’m so tired! Why don’t we just leave in the morning?”

  This was the most practical thing to do, of course. I could get some rest and wake up ready for the long road ahead. But as I looked around at the familiar walls, at the familiar view out the windows, I realized just how much I hated this place. It had been my shelter in a time of great need. It had also been the scene of some of the saddest, worst, most horrible moments of my entire life.

  “No,” I said, “let’s hit the road. I’d like to see how far we can get tonight.”

  I left Elena packing while I took my printer to the car, and as I carried it out into the sunlight and found a place for it in the backseat, I felt my spirits soar in a veritable frenzy of fierce, unapologetic joy. At least—at least—tomorrow was going to be different! It wasn’t going to be another one of those dull, drab, hideously depressing days that dragged along in plodding monotony week after week after week and changed only in the amount of pain they brought me.

  I found myself smiling broadly at the cheerful volunteer as I paused at the front desk to check out.

  “We’re going home!” I told her.

  Home! I wanted to shout that word over and over until the halls rang with noise—those pained, hushed, sickly-silent halls.

  Maybe this is going to work out beautifully, I thought as I hurried back to take another load out to the car. Maybe Elena will give the Sandalwood therapists another try. Maybe—maybe—things will finally get better!

  Then I opened the door of our room and found Elena asleep next to her half-full suitcase, and my heart sank into my toes once more.

  Anyway, I thought, what choice do we really have?

  The moving sidewalk had ended. And we were stumbling away.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Joe and Valerie sounded a little panicked when I called and told them the good news. I had caught them completely off guard.

  Of course, they were happy we were on our way home—of course!

  “But you know Gemma’s still not sleeping, right?” Valerie said. “You know I couldn’t clean, right?”

  And I could hear the exhaustion in her voice.

  “I need to get to the backyard,” Joe said. “The lawn mower won’t start, and I haven’t had time to fix it. With the HVAC problem at the big VOQ, I’ve been gone a lot.”

  And I could hear the exhaustion in his.

  “It’s okay,” I told them both. “Don’t worry. I’ll be home soon. I’ll take care of it, don’t worry.”

  But they did worry. And they kept calling—anxious calls.

  Just so I knew: the freezer door wouldn’t stay closed. Dylan the fish still wouldn’t eat. The trash cans were full. There wasn’t much in the way of meals. The laundry—they should probably get to the laundry. The bills had been piling up. Clint had just gotten back from Georgia, and his stuff was in bags all over the house. They couldn’t put it in the garage. Simon was still in the garage, and still in the cone.

  “I’ve taken him back to the vet,” Joe said, “and so has Valerie. We’ve tried a bunch of different things. But he keeps tearing himself up, ripping his neck open the second the cone comes off.”

  Poor Simon!

  “He’s pretty much destroyed the garage,” Joe added bitterly. “The place absolutely reeks.”

  “Well, it’s okay,” I said. “I’ll work it out. It’ll just be good to be home.”

  Long hours later, with a feeling of happy optimism, I parked next to the Korean invasion. But what I walked into wasn’t home. It was a sad-looking, beaten-up, dusty little house that seemed to be bursting at the seams. Gemma’s toys and walker and playpen had taken over the living room, along with old fast-food cartons and random piles of junk mail. Odd new stains had bloomed across the carpet.

  “Ohh,” I said, looking around.

  “I know. I’m sorry, Momma,” Valerie said. “But hey, wait till you see Gemma again. She should be waking up any minute. You’re not going to recognize her!”

  Genny, the ratty old terrier, came bouncing up to me and danced on her hind legs. Given the sad changes in my house’s interior, she looked downright stylish. Which reminded me . . .

  “How’s my blue boy doing today?” I asked Valerie as I patted the dog.

  “Well . . .”

  The majestic blue minidragon I had left in his aquarium now looked like a pale sardine.

  “Good lord!” I burst out. “Dylan’s got fin rot! The poor guy’s fins are gone!”

  “Oh! Hey, they are!” Valerie said. “I’m sorry, Momma, I didn’t notice.”

  Poor Valerie—of course she wouldn’t have noticed. My older daughter was also pale and droopy-eyed. Having acted as a single parent to an infant daughter still waking up a couple of times a night, Valerie had been living with a pretty rigid set of priorities. And Joe’s job was like a buzz saw: people called from a couple of continents and a fair collection of islands to demand his attention every day.


  I couldn’t expect an overworked, overtime-working manager and a brand-new mother to notice changes in a fish.

  Out in the garage, things were even worse. Simon was frantic with boredom and discomfort, and the place smelled like a bad gas station toilet. I sat on the concrete step by the laundry room door, stroked the big cat’s dirty fur, and agonized.

  What was I going to do?

  Even though the wound had healed up nicely, Simon’s neck had stayed injured somehow. There seemed to be a constant itching in the area of the bite. The vet had tried creams and courses of pills, but nothing had made the slightest difference. Only the cone could keep Simon from tearing himself apart, and because of the cone, he couldn’t go outside.

  Now, I pulled the dirty white cone off Simon’s neck. He purred and rubbed his dusty head against my knee, and loose fur went flying up in clouds. Then he hopped up onto a stack of boxes and began to dig at the healed-up wound.

  I stood up to pet him and distract him, but Simon wouldn’t stop. I held his back foot so he couldn’t scratch anymore, and he started twisting to try to reach the spot with the other foot. So I put his cone back on, sat back down on the step, and called the vet.

  “Mrs. Dunkle, at this point, there’s not much left for us to try,” he said. “The last time I saw it, the injuries had healed up with no sign of infection.”

  “The fur is back to normal,” I agreed. “Could it be nerve damage then?”

  “It certainly could,” the vet said.

  “Meaning that it won’t improve,” I summed up. And we were both silent for a few seconds, thinking about that.

  “There’s a test we can do,” the vet said. “It’s a special test that we send off to Houston. It takes a tissue sample and tests it for every kind of skin problem you can think of. I think it’s around six or seven hundred dollars. I can look it up and get an exact price.”

  “But that test,” I said. “Haven’t you already given him the treatments we’d try for those skin problems anyway?”

  “A good number of them, yes.”

  “Are there any other treatments we can try that we haven’t tried yet? Can’t we just skip the test?”

  “Well, at this point, we get into really complicated things. And without an idea of where we’re going—with healthy-looking skin, healthy blood values, no symptoms but the scratching—I just don’t see a way forward unless we do that test.”

  I stroked Simon’s big head and scratched his ears inside the cone.

  “This isn’t the kind of year,” I said, “when we have that kind of money lying around. We’ve had some big medical bills.”

  “I understand,” the vet said. “Believe me, I do.”

  The garage got quiet. Outside, not too far away, a lawn mower began its monotonous drone.

  “If we knew it would help . . . ,” I said at last. “But it sounds like you’ve already tried the basic treatments. Six or seven hundred dollars, and probably nothing to show for it. I just can’t justify it on a gamble.”

  “I understand,” the vet said again. “I’ve made these kinds of decisions myself.”

  And there was silence again.

  Simon sprawled next to me, purring, on the cool concrete, and I ran my hand down his dusty side. I remembered when Elena and I had chosen him as a kitten: the one black kitten in the whole litter. The only one who had purred.

  The vet was waiting for me to say it. I didn’t want to. But I had to.

  “When can I bring him in?”

  We set up a time for the following morning, and I put down the phone. Simon wriggled on his back on the concrete and looked up at me from inside his white cone. Execution by lethal injection at ten o’clock tomorrow morning, and I couldn’t even let the poor guy have a last night out of the cone. He’d tear himself up. He’d have his neck in tatters.

  I stroked his soft fur.

  Dead cat purring.

  With a lump in my throat, I gave Simon a last pat, climbed to my feet, and walked back inside. The kitchen was an unspeakable disaster. The counters were jammed. Swirls of pet hair, gray with dust, gathered in the corners of the floor. The freezer had popped open again—probably needed defrosting.

  But at least . . . at least . . . my family was back together. Valerie was here, and Gemma was here, and Clint had just gotten back, and Joe would be home from work soon. And, after sleeping straight through on the drive home, at least Elena was up and walking around.

  Now Valerie headed toward me from the back hallway, her tired face animated and purposeful. Clint and Elena trailed behind her into the living room.

  “Hey, Momma, we’ve got an idea for where to put everybody,” Valerie said. “Next time Gemma wakes up, we’re going to move her crib into the media room. Then we’ll put Elena’s furniture back in her room, and I can stay in the office, with the air mattress.”

  “But what about the media room furniture?” I asked.

  “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. We need to move the PS3 and the flat-screen out here. We can put the big living room chairs in the garage and turn the sofa around over here, and then if we want to play a game or watch a movie, we won’t wake up Gemma.”

  “Okay, but . . .”

  But the fact is that I hate a screen in the living room. Not once in the girls’ entire lives had there been a screen in the living room. A living room is for people, not machines.

  Valerie was right, though. We were running out of rooms. A media room was a luxury we couldn’t afford anymore. I glanced around the living room, piled to the window sills with trash and displaced belongings, and my shoulders sagged with discouragement. Cleanliness appeared to be a luxury we couldn’t afford, either.

  “So, we’re going to get started, okay?” Valerie said. “Clint, grab the other side.” They heaved, and a sedate wingback chair rose from the floor and levitated its way across the room.

  “Wait!” I said. “Not the garage. Let’s not move things now. Tomorrow, you can put things into the garage.”

  They stopped and looked at me again—a careful look. Valerie said, “You mean you called the vet?”

  “Ten o’clock in the morning,” I answered, and then I hurried away from those sets of sympathetic eyes.

  If only I’d never let that stubborn cat outside!

  I remembered the bouncy kitten Simon had been. Why did all the bounce and happiness have to die in my house?

  With a lump in my throat, I went back into the filthy kitchen and started unloading the dishwasher. “I’m sorry, Momma,” Valerie said, following me. “Dad and I did our best, we really did. I went out and sat with Simon every day.”

  I nodded briskly. “I know that, honey.”

  But her comment reminded me of Dylan, my ailing fish. He needed to be my next priority. So I abandoned the dishwasher only partly emptied, grabbed my purse, and drove to the pet store.

  Fifty dollars’ worth of fin rot drugs, an aquarium vacuum, and filter inserts later, I was cleaning up Dylan’s home as well as I could while the little guy huddled under his favorite plant.

  Poor pale sad little fish! He was so changed from the lovely and confident creature I had left behind two months ago. Back then, he would swim onto my hand and perch there like a bird. Now, I wasn’t sure he could even swim.

  When everything was as clean as I could make it and the water values were right again, I poured in the fin rot treatment—the maximum dose since this was such a drastic case.

  Poor Dylan didn’t even have fins left to rot.

  As I worked, I tried not to look anywhere but at the aquarium. The bathroom was unspeakable, too: empty toilet paper rolls, dust and dog hair in the corners, and a layer of cast-off clothing underfoot. The bathtub was gray, and the sink was so crusted with fallen makeup and dried toothpaste that it had lost its original color.

  I can’t stand a lot of different kinds of dirty, but a dirty bathroom is the worst. A filthy house gives me a sense of physical desperation akin to claustrophobia. It feels as if chaos
is raining down on me, as if I’m drowning under piles of trash—as if the earth itself has vomited all over me. So, as I cleaned Dylan’s aquarium, I had to pause every now and then and take deep breaths.

  Priorities! I reminded myself firmly. It’ll be all right in a couple of days. Just hit one thing after another—one thing after another.

  Then I walked into the media room, where Valerie and Clint were playing with Gemma. And my grandbaby was happy and beautiful. She was blooming with health.

  I picked her up, and my arms wrapped around her, and my whole body relaxed. Gemma and her immaculate clothes and her pink, perfect skin positively glowed with care and loving attention. The chaos in the house hadn’t touched her at all.

  My imagination pulled up memories for me of another baby being carried through a dusty, gray-tinged house: baby Valerie at this same age, also pink and perfect and blooming with health, with dirty dishes and dirty clothes piled up all around us.

  Yes, I thought. Yes, I remember.

  Valerie had done the right thing. This was what had needed to happen during the months when I was gone. And she and Clint didn’t have much time together, either. In another week, he would be in basic training, getting yelled at and stressed. I could leave them alone to have a few happy days.

  I’ll get to it, I thought. It’s not a big problem. Dirt isn’t fatal.

  Next morning, I got up early with Joe. While he ate his bowl of cereal in preparation for another long workday, I told him about my worries at Clove House.

  “Elena never got traction,” I said. “She was a zombie more or less the entire time.”

  “I thought things were going badly,” Joe said. “You weren’t telling me much. You try just to tell me the good stuff.”

  “In that case,” I sighed, “it’s a wonder I told you anything at all.”

  Joe frowned. “Maybe the sleep is a kind of dissociation. Maybe she’s avoiding the stuff that makes her uncomfortable.”

  “That wouldn’t explain why she nods off during movies, too,” I said. “She begged me to take her to see this one ballet. Then she got so sleepy that we ended up having to leave halfway through.”