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

by Clare B. Dunkle

“I guess they were trying to get her to the point where she wasn’t angry all the time.”

  I thought about that last day, when Elena had called me up, absolutely fuming over something Brenda had told her.

  “Well, if that was the plan, it didn’t really work.”

  After Joe left, I spent a while in the smelly garage with Simon. I took off his cone and held him to keep him from scratching. “Sorry, big boy,” I whispered to him as he rolled back and forth across my lap. “We would fix you if we could, but we don’t know how to fix you.” Then I pondered that statement, dreary and dejected.

  Wasn’t that the story of my life?

  With a crack, the door to the house pushed open. “Momma,” Valerie said. “You need to come see this.”

  It was Dylan. A clear sheet of skin had peeled off his side and was hanging down loose.

  “Oh, my God!” I said.

  “It’s got to hurt,” Valerie agreed mournfully. “Fish may not feel much, but they’re bound to feel that.”

  She was right. Of course she was right! It was appalling—appalling!—that a creature in my house should be in so much pain. Poor little Dylan, my dragon boy! He had to be put out of his misery right away.

  With trembling fingers, I searched “fish euthanasia” on the Internet. Thank God for thoughtful hobbyists everywhere.

  “Okay, clove oil,” I told Valerie. “And vodka. I’ll be back.”

  I found the clove oil in a tooth repair kit at our neighborhood drugstore, along with cotton balls, a dental mirror, and some temporary cement. I was surprised to find a liquor store open at eight thirty in the morning, and they were probably surprised to find that I desperately needed a bottle of vodka.

  Then again, maybe they weren’t.

  I sped home and snagged the poor betta in a measuring cup. He didn’t do any of the things fish normally do to escape. He probably couldn’t imagine that his life could get any worse. Then I cleared off a few square inches of counter space in the unholy mess of my kitchen and dumped him out into a cereal bowl.

  Elena was up by this time, nursing a cup of green tea. Clint came wandering into the kitchen.

  “Mom’s killing Dylan with vodka,” Valerie informed him.

  “Oh!” Clint said amiably. “I guess if you’ve gotta go . . .”

  Meanwhile, I was busy dismantling the tooth kit. Two drops of the clove oil were supposed to put Dylan to sleep. But how would I know if he was asleep? It’s not like fish have eyelids.

  I knew, all right. The two drops of clove oil laid poor Dylan out flat on his side. I poked my finger into the water and stirred him around gently, but he didn’t move. He was probably already dead.

  I remembered the day when I had picked him out in the pet store, the handsomest, strongest betta there, and my heart broke for the beautiful little life that had floated so gracefully through mine.

  Valerie came up behind me. “Is it time to flush him?”

  “He doesn’t get flushed,” I said. “We wait another”—I looked at the clock—“five minutes. Then we replace part of his water with the vodka.”

  And I followed my painless-death recipe to the letter, even though I felt sure he was already gone.

  Deep breath. Time to take Simon to the vet. No negative thoughts or feelings, now. It wouldn’t be fair to pass along bad vibes to a helpless animal.

  “We’re so sorry, Mrs. Dunkle,” the receptionist said soberly when I came staggering through the door with Simon’s heavy cage. “Room 2 is all ready for you. You can go right in.” And I was grateful that the vet and technician came in at once and didn’t keep us waiting.

  Simon strolled about impatiently and bumped our hands with his head while we once again went over our lack of options. The sight of the big cat, so strong, apparently so healthy, set up an odd cognitive dissonance within me. I couldn’t see how it could possibly be true that this big bruiser of a cat needed to die. But in the short car ride, Simon had already scratched his neck bloody again, and I had to hold his back foot to stop him from doing more harm.

  Nerve damage. Joe had taken pictures of the savage bite into the black cat’s neck, down to the shiny gristle-covered bones.

  “Are you ready?” asked the vet.

  And just like that, Simon’s broad-shouldered, brawling days were over.

  I drove home with my hand resting on his white cardboard coffin. They had barely managed to wedge him inside. When Simon had first come home with me as a kitten, his family had found him a white cardboard box for the ride. That had been only a few years before Valerie’s overdose and the Summer from Hell.

  It seemed to me in those sad moments as if my family’s collective life had been contracting ever since those grim years, like lifeboat survivors throwing the weaklings overboard. First I had thrown overboard my story characters, who still tried to visit me from time to time, but I couldn’t clear my mind enough to deal with them anymore. Then Dylan had gone, and now Simon.

  They had been too demanding and too delicate. They had taken risks. They had asked too much of my strained abilities: attention, protection, loving care.

  I brought the coffin into the jumbled, trash-strewn living room. It joined the rest of the debris from our fractured lives. “Clint,” I said, waving vaguely at the box, “I need to ask a favor.”

  He stood up at once. “Sure thing.”

  Gemma was awake. I claimed her from Valerie, and while Clint was out back digging a hole large enough to hold a cat and a fish, I sat down with my grandbaby to get reacquainted.

  This isn’t a contraction of our lives, I reminded myself. This is a wonderful addition to our lives. Gemma and Clint are both wonderful additions.

  But then again, that was Valerie’s doing, not mine.

  Gemma had grown so much in the two months I’d been gone that she was already bored with just lying in my arms. Now she wanted to wriggle around and pull up on things. She stiffened her little body and tried to stand up on my lap.

  “Hey, Elena!” Valerie said, poking her sister, who had curled up in one of the armchairs. “Crib! Move it! Let’s go!”

  Elena muttered something inaudible, but she opened her eyes and got to her feet, and the two of them headed off down the hall.

  I stayed behind with my granddaughter on the dusty, hair-covered couch, and looked into her wide blue-gray eyes. “A, B, C, D, E, F, G,” I crooned, bouncing her in time with the letters. But around Q, my voice turned husky, and by S, I had to stop.

  It’s perfectly ridiculous, I told myself, to cry in the middle of the ABCs. Think of the vet: he has to put down animals all day long.

  Valerie emerged from the hallway and balanced a long slab of slatted crib against the cluttered piano. “Gotta put it out here while we move Elena’s mattress.”

  I stroked Gemma’s fine flyaway curls. Her hair had lightened up. I, too, was a blond baby. Was it just wishful thinking, or did Gemma look a little bit like me?

  Elena came out with another piece of crib to stack against the first.

  My phone rang. I propped up Gemma with one hand while I swiped the answer button with the other. The gentle voice of my sister-in-law was on the line.

  “Hi, Godmother,” she said, and I could hear the smile in her voice. “I was supposed to call you last week—but . . .”

  My brother and sister-in-law had been talking about coming down for a visit, something they do a time or two a year. It isn’t the easiest thing for him to leave the produce farm, or for her to pull their four children away from homeschooling. So, since they hadn’t chosen firm dates—and since I’d been dealing with everything else—I hadn’t paid too much attention. That was all their vacation planning had been so far: just talk.

  Up to this point, at least.

  “We’re about halfway there,” my sister-in-law told me, and I could hear the happiness in her voice. A vacation—getting away from the farm and the stacks of papers to grade—the chance to visit people she was fond of . . . “I’m sorry we’re not giving you much
warning, but you don’t need to feed us. I’ve got things for supper right here in the motor home. Is it all right if we stay in your driveway tonight?”

  Even while making these apologies, my sister-in-law’s voice didn’t lose its happy warmth. She knew what the answer would be. If there’s a person on this planet I adore, it’s my sister-in-law. She’s my godchild, too. I would do anything in the world for her happiness, she knows that. Anything in the world.

  I cast a frantic eye around my chaotic living room. Clint came walking in the back door, having propped the dirty shovel outside, to take the cardboard coffin with him and see if it would fit. Valerie and Elena sidled by me, lugging an armchair between them. The flat-screen teetered in the middle of the coffee table, along with half-empty soda cans and the remains of Subway sandwiches. A pile of dirty laundry was spilling out of Elena’s suitcase on the floor by the cluttered piano bench.

  It was horrible. It was unspeakable! And, once again, I fought down that feeling of claustrophobia, as if I were being crushed alive in a loaded garbage truck.

  “I—I—you know I just got home yesterday,” I heard myself babble. “I—we—I haven’t—I don’t know—”

  For the first time, my sister-in-law sensed that something was wrong.

  “You know it doesn’t matter how the place looks,” she assured me. “We’re just looking forward to seeing you.”

  That was true. That was absolutely one hundred percent true. I could welcome my brother and sister-in-law in my pajamas, and they wouldn’t mind. They love me as sincerely as two humans possibly can.

  And yet—and yet—

  A strong odor of urine curled around me from the open garage door. That stain on the floor—was that Big Red? Was it going to come out?

  When my brothers and their families come to see me, I do my very best to spoil them. I cook big meals and every dessert I know they like. It matters to me what my big brothers think of us. I want them to feel proud of us, to feel that we’re doing well.

  “Coming through!” called Valerie, and she and Elena walked a headboard past me on its way to the garage. “Okay,” she said to her sister, “let’s take a smoke break.”

  “But . . . they’re moving furniture!” I said helplessly into the phone. “There’s not even anywhere to sit!”

  “We won’t be there for another couple of hours,” my sister-in-law said.

  Another couple of hours in this place. What could I get done in a couple of hours? Ruined food in the freezer, God knows what in the fridge, a guest bathroom with dirty clothes for a carpet, a dead fish on the kitchen counter . . .

  “I just put down our fish,” I heard myself say. “Our cat’s dead. Clint’s digging a grave.”

  I barely heard her efforts to persuade me. I was looking at my whole life through her eyes. It wasn’t just the dust bunnies and carpet stains. It was the army of brown pill bottles by the breakfast table. It was the big white poster board sticking up out of our mound of suitcases, a sample of Elena’s art therapy, with a four-letter word scrawled across it in black paint.

  For one split second, I imagined my brother’s family—that calm, quiet, thoughtful family—walking through the door of this house. My brother and sister-in-law don’t raise their voices. Their four children are the most easygoing youngsters I’ve met. They would stand together in the middle of my living room, and they would look around and take it all in. There are happy, productive, I’ve-been-too-busy-to-sort-this-all-out dirty houses. And then there was the kind I had. No one would mistake this kind for the other kind. Not even the youngest child.

  If my family saw it—if they walked through that door and saw it—then they couldn’t possibly unsee it again.

  I couldn’t bear to let that happen.

  “I’m not ready!” I cried in despair. “If you come later this week . . . If you go to your sister’s house first . . . There’s nothing clean here. There’s no place to be! It isn’t just that the cat’s dead and the freezer doesn’t work. It’s everything, the whole place, the whole house!”

  Stunned and small, my sister-in-law’s voice murmured good-bye. I sat there with my squirming grandchild while my imagination played it out for me: the abrupt, shocked stillness inside the motor home. My brother would be staring straight out over the steering wheel, disappointed and angry. He would doubtless remind his wife that she should have worked out the details sooner, as he had doubtless been reminding her to do. The children would be puzzled. They would be asking unfortunate questions. And she would be the one who would have to answer them, her vacation suddenly grown meager.

  Who could blame a busy farm wife for failing to plan? And how could she have planned for this anyway? In her wildest dreams, she couldn’t have imagined that her godmother would turn her away. She couldn’t have planned for this kind of pain.

  I bounced Gemma recklessly on my knee while her baby face blurred and the chaos distorted around me. Then I wiped my eyes, stood up, set my grandchild on my hip, and walked out to the backyard to find the others.

  “I’m going to Whataburger,” I said. “What does everybody want?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  With the PS3 in the living room, I couldn’t write at home anymore. The sound of exploding zombies seemed to find me wherever I went. So, once I had imposed order and my house was no longer filthy, I began exploring new places to write Elena’s memoir.

  The library, I thought. A library will be perfect! I’m a librarian by training, and I worked as a university librarian for years, so I had happy dreams of sitting at a library carrel, typing away on my laptop. How could this solution not work?

  But it didn’t.

  I tried three different libraries, but none of them worked.

  Day after day, I started Elena’s story over. I pulled up a clean, blank page, and I hurled sentences at it. For an hour or so, everything would go well. Then my thoughts would stop finding connections.

  I would start deleting the things that were wrong. The sentences would break apart. The words would capsize into the endless white.

  And at the end of the day, I would find myself staring at a clean, blank page again.

  I moved that useless, empty file from one computer to another. I changed screens and put on my reading glasses, as if the problem were as simple as the font size I’d chosen—as if, with one little tweak, I could bring the whole thing into focus. And now, here I was, bouncing from library to library, as if the problem were as simple as that particular mix of patrons—the particular hiss of a whisper or the scrape of a library chair.

  But I knew that wasn’t what was wrong. It was that the story hurt. It hurt me so much that I could hardly bear to be in the same room with it. It hurt me so much that putting my hands on the keys seemed to generate an electric shock. It was sending me, step by step, methodically and meticulously, through every single one of my worst memories.

  Normally, when I write, I forget who I am in this world and become the god of another. I set tasks for my characters to achieve and watch over them as they struggle. Because I hate boredom, I create amazing things for those characters to find along the way: a magic plant made out of starlight, wizards who wrap themselves in mist, or a living cat of clear glass whose paws chime gently as he strolls across the floor.

  When I write stories, I forget that I’m working with words. I don’t see the computer screen anymore. I see monsters, hear shrieks, feel soft threads of moss, and smell the sharp, clean scent of snow. I don’t stay in this world. I fall out of this world into a new world, a place I’ve designed myself—a place that is under my complete control.

  But I was in Elena’s story. Elena’s story was in my world. When I wrote it, I couldn’t escape.

  When I wrote her memoir, I fell out of my world . . . into my world again. I closed my eyes, forgot the computer screen, opened them in that other reality . . . and saw my computer screen again.

  I was transported to a place . . .

  That was right here.

&nbs
p; I was like a bird on a string. I was like a frog trying to fly. I would get a running start and slam into a brick wall.

  Over and over and over.

  One morning, having made my way through every room of the house over the course of the past week, I was back at the local public library again. I rubbed my toes along the tops of my flip-flops on the floor under the table, cracked my knuckles, and reread what I had written so far.

  It was my character, Elena. She was talking about her memoir.

  So, the way this book should go is the way things go in those after-school specials—you know, the ones with the two best girlfriends who do everything together. And they have the good times—cut to scene of girls laughing and eating cotton candy at the carnival. And they have the bad times—cut to scene of girls throwing up behind the dumpster while flashing lights indicate that the cops are closing in.

  And then, tragically, suddenly, like we didn’t know it was going to happen all along, one of the girls (a) overdoses, (b) gets pregnant, (c) goes to jail, (d) drives drunk and ends up in a wheelchair, (e) dies dies dies dies dies.

  And the other girl gets her act together.

  It isn’t that easy, of course. It requires several scenes of school counselors and teachers looking solemn, a tearful group hug with parents and siblings, maybe a short film clip of a doctor’s office, perhaps a few scary seconds of a judge. And then, sooner or later, there’s the scene where the girl has to be all boring and watch her friends go off to party without her. Oh, yeah, it’s a long, hard process of recovery, taking at least five minutes of film time, but it pays off in the end with the glowing graduation speech:

  God bless us, every one!

  Well, I had a best friend, Mona. We did everything together. We cried together. We cut class together. We ate and ate and overate, and then we purged together.

  And now my best friend has a job, and a life, and a healthy baby girl.

  Where the hell does that leave me?

  Anger and bitterness built up inside me as I read. The world wants anorexia to be so easy, I thought. Well, this isn’t an easy disease! It isn’t just fooling around with green tea. It isn’t just a diet gone wrong.