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

by Clare B. Dunkle

  Deal with it, world! Deal with it!

  But then my writer’s mind stopped me. Was this really Elena’s voice?

  Was that my character speaking? Was that really Elena? Or was my character standing there, silent, while her author wasted time ranting again?

  Because God knows, these days I was feeling angry and bitter.

  Elena was doing badly. After all our labor and sacrifice and savings and time apart, after six months of around-the-clock treatment—at the end of it all, Elena was doing very badly. She hadn’t gone through with her plan to work with the Sandalwood staff. Furious nagging from me had forced her to pick a psychiatrist, therapist, and nutritionist more or less at random off our list of preferred providers, but none of them had much experience with eating disorder.

  Elena barely interacted with us these days. She barely even held her new niece. All day and all night, she did almost nothing except sleep. The powerful medications Clove House had put her on left her feeling nothing at all, and her new psychiatrist, overbooked and overworked, was seeing her for only about fifteen minutes a month. Time after time in these rushed, hectic, brief appointments, the psychiatrist declined to make changes, so Elena was still on massive doses of sedatives.

  Even worse, she hardly ate these days. And what she ate was never enough.

  So here I was, trying to write Elena’s memoir while she slid back into the danger zone. Why had I said I would do this? It was causing me nothing but pain. The closer I came to Elena’s character, the more she made me doubt that she would ever find a way to recover.

  Tell the truth: strangely enough, that’s the motto of the fiction writer, whose stories take place in worlds that don’t exist. And the more I learned—the more I read through Elena’s agonized poems and journal entries—the more painful my quest for her truth became.

  My hands are frozen blocks of ice, she had written right after the Summer from Hell.

  I am so cold

  all the time.

  I hope when I die

  the dirt wraps me like a cocoon,

  soft and dark

  like fainting,

  but a deeper smothering

  than that.

  Sitting there in the library, stepping on the tops of my flip-flops, I read those lines from three years before. Then I thought of Elena on the couch last night, curled up under her fuzzy blanket. She had looked like she was in a cocoon then. And she wouldn’t wake up to eat dinner.

  Had anything changed for the better in the three years since the Summer from Hell? Had anything good happened during the whole six months of full-time therapy?

  A group of teens passed me, giggling and shoving. They looked happy . . .

  That was it! This place wasn’t working out. I couldn’t work under these conditions! I hit the sleep button and folded up my laptop.

  A coffee shop, I thought as I got into my car. Of course! I’ll try a coffee shop. After all, coffee shops are practically a habitat for writers: they sit at their little tables, frown magnificently down at their computer screens, sip their lattes, and create exquisite prose. So I drove to the nearest coffee shop, purchased my very own latte, and attempted to create some exquisite prose of my own.

  Lately, I’d been working on short monologues, attempting to find Elena’s true voice behind the incessant jabber of my own fears and worries. I chose topics and tried to write about them from Elena’s point of view.

  Treatment, I thought now as I sipped my latte. What does my character—that is, my daughter—say about treatment?

  As I stared at the white screen and the blinking curser, I flipped my right hand over and held it palm up. This was a habit I’d acquired from a library school professor. She told us she did this whenever she was thinking about how to classify something. The answer, she told us, should not be too broad and not be too narrow—it should fit into the palm of a hand.

  Now, as I stared at the screen, my open hand waited for that perfect answer. What words would fit Elena’s attitude toward treatment centers? What writing would match who she was—who she really was?

  The palm of my hand began to fill up with words.

  I wish we did something crazy for treatment. I wish I could tell you:

  Today they strapped wires to my arms and sent electricity through me, and I smelled smoke and heard a crackle in my ears, and orange and purple spots appeared in the center of my vision, and afterward I had to lie down with a hot water bottle pressed to the back of my neck while I trembled and shook for a couple of hours.

  Because then you’d say:

  That’s horrible! You were so brave! You’re working so hard to get better!

  But that’s not what I can tell you.

  Instead, I have to say:

  We had ice cream for afternoon snack.

  And you say:

  Mmmm! Ice cream!

  You say:

  I love ice cream!

  There is nothing I can say to make you understand.

  I closed my hand around that answer. It felt right to me. It felt real. And it made me want to cry for my miserable, miserable child until the little wooden table in front of me floated away on a wave of tears.

  At that moment, the music blaring out over the coffee shop speakers changed. A woman’s voice started telling me a story. She sang in malicious triumph about slashing up her cheating boyfriend’s pickup truck. With a feeling of relief, my imagination turned to her.

  Where is she? I wondered.

  My imagination brought me images of a dim parking lot at night: lumpy, crumbly, poorly laid asphalt. I saw black potholes cratering down to the dirt. Light glittered off broken glass.

  Where am I? I wondered.

  Outside a windowless honky-tonk bar.

  That honky-tonk—what is it like?

  Like a view through binoculars that comes into focus, the scene before me began to clear. I saw a squat, square, one-story cinderblock building, with a string or two of those old big-bulb Christmas lights tacked up along the frame of the scuffed-up door. There was a sign beside the building up on a thick iron pole, the kind of sign with those black plastic moveable letters:

  FRI 1 7TH, RAPSCALLIONS

  $1 DRAFT BEER

  And there was the young woman who was singing to me. She didn’t care who saw her. She was striding toward that shiny custom-painted crew-cab pickup in her favorite pair of tight jeans, a leather jacket, and Lucchese cowboy boots. She had a baseball bat in one hand and a pigsticker knife in the other.

  Then she took a wide swing at the left headlight: a loud, musical shower of glass.

  Yes! I cheered. Let the consequences fall where they may!

  And then the woman—let’s call her Amanda—she sees her ex come charging out of the bar. And her ex—let’s call him Brad . . .

  Another song came on over the loudspeakers. Another person wanted to tell me a story. But I closed my laptop, threw away my latte, and walked out.

  Exquisite prose in a coffee shop? Who were they kidding?

  I drove home through the hazy late-summer heat and turned the last corner. Such a litter of small, smudged Hyundais clustered these days outside the tired ranch house! Four Hyundais in four different colors. Each, more or less, with its own designated parking place. One Hyundai was missing: the silver one. Joe, of course, was at work.

  And one Hyundai—the tan one—was pulled into a clumsy tangent with the curb. It was facing the wrong way—again!

  That was Elena’s car. Late at night, she had roused herself from her stupor and gone out with friends. Now, worries fluttered up and clutched at me. Had Elena been drinking, even with all her meds? Was she drunk when she drove home last night?

  And why was the tan Hyundai even here? Elena was supposed to be at her therapist’s appointment!

  Valerie was kneeling on the living room floor next to Gemma’s exercise bouncer. She glanced up and saw the look in my eyes.

  “I tried,” she told me. “She wouldn’t budge.”

  I marc
hed past her and pushed open Elena’s bedroom door.

  For a few seconds, the darkness disoriented me, and I couldn’t immediately register whether anyone was there. Shutters and shades kept Elena’s room in a state of perpetual twilight.

  “Elena!” I barked, snapping on the light.

  “Ugggghhh . . . ,” groaned the bed by way of answer.

  I stepped gingerly across sliding mounds of brightly colored laundry. Elena’s closet appeared to have burped its contents out into the room. The closet itself was open and empty of everything but some boxes, a few pink plastic hangers, and a red satin prom dress held up by one white loop.

  “Elena!” I said again, prodding the one living mound in the room. It was sharing the bed with half a suitcase’s worth of underwear and pajama sets, two blankets, three pillows, Genny, and Tor. The old terrier rolled a cautious eye up at me, decided she didn’t need the drama, jumped down, and walked stiffly from the room. The old cat gave a stretch, flipped onto his back, and closed his eyes again. He was going to ride it out.

  Various groans and snarls had been rising steadily from the mound of purple blanket. Now it gave a sudden lurch, and Elena’s face appeared, creased from the wrinkles on her pillow.

  “What?!” she demanded, rubbing her eyes. “Leave me alone! I just got to sleep!”

  “It’s noon,” I said. “You’ve been asleep. You slept through your therapy appointment!”

  “Oh.” Elena blinked for a few seconds. “Why didn’t you wake me up?” she asked.

  I felt my frustration rising in a suffocating wave. And here I was, shouting already: “Why is it our job to wake you up?”

  “Fine, forget I asked then,” Elena grumbled. “I can’t stand that lady anyway.”

  “You picked her! So find another therapist you like!”

  “I will. When I wake up.” And Elena rolled over. She muttered, “Why do you always have to yell at me first thing every morning?”

  Why? Why did my life have to be like this? Why did it have to run like this, day after day after day?

  “It is not the first thing in the morning!” I said. “Your sister and father and I have been up for hours! You missed another appointment with Bea, and that means we have to pay another seventy-five dollars for nothing. You know the insurance company doesn’t pay their share when you miss an appointment!”

  Elena grumbled into her pillow at this. It might have been an apology or an admission of guilt.

  Then again, it might not.

  “And another thing. You parked facing traffic again. They’ve already left us a warning. Next time, it’ll be a ticket! Why is it so hard for you to turn your car around? Were you drinking last night? Were you drunk?”

  “No, I wasn’t drinking!” Elena cried, and when she did it, I realized that her loud, angry voice was only matching my own. “I was spending a little quiet time with Meghan. We were eating Mexican food, if you have to know!”

  She spit out the words Mexican food with pained and vicious hatred, in the tone of voice I might use for maggots in the trash can. Implied but still included in her virulent hostility were the tacos last night, all meals on all nights, and me, for being the person who made her eat.

  It seemed, during the course of these last few weeks, that all food had become my fault again, even if I wasn’t there to serve it to her. I fell silent in the face of such resentment. How did her therapists stand it?

  In the silence, Elena rolled over and hitched the blanket up to her chin. “Turn out the light,” she muttered.

  “But—no! Elena, you have to get up. You need to”—I hesitated, then decided to brave it out—“You need to eat some breakfast! You need to take your morning pills, or you’ll get withdrawal symptoms again—God only knows what they’re doing to your brain! You need to park that car correctly, and you need to call up Bea and reschedule.”

  And before she could sit up and rip into me again, I picked my way back across the loose laundry and out the door.

  “Come on, Genny, you need to go outside,” I said to the little terrier as I came back into the living room. I went outside with her and sat on the patio and thought gloomy thoughts while she trotted and nosed her way around the yard.

  The back door opened. I looked up, hoping for an olive branch, but it wasn’t Elena, it was Valerie. She had a pack of cigarettes in one hand and a Shirley Jackson novel in the other.

  “I don’t suppose she’s eating,” I said as Valerie fished for her lighter. She shook her head and concentrated on that first long, luxurious drag.

  “Nope,” she said, and then exhaled in a steady gray stream. “She’s back in her room again.”

  I sat there for another minute, building courage for the next salvo, until my desire to say the angry things I probably shouldn’t say exceeded my desire to avoid a fight. Then, once again, I marched inside, pushed open the bedroom door, and flicked on the light.

  “Mom! Turn it out!”

  “You need to get up.”

  “I did everything! I parked the car. I called Bea. Tomorrow at eleven thirty.”

  “Did you take your medicine?”

  “Yes, I took my medicine!”

  “Did you eat your breakfast?”

  Silence.

  “You need to get up, Elena. You need to eat. You need to do something”—I kicked at the laundry—“with this messy room.”

  Elena pulled the blanket over her face.

  “I’ll do it later, I promise,” she said. “Meghan and I ate a huge meal at four o’clock in the morning. That makes it breakfast.”

  She subsided into a mound again. I stood in the doorway, struck with pain. Now that she wasn’t yelling and I was no longer angry, the Elena in this room and the Elena in my laptop suddenly felt frighteningly close.

  “Please get up,” I tried in a softer tone. “We miss you! We haven’t seen much of you lately. Come out to the couch and spend some time with us. You can tell me how Meghan’s been. I haven’t seen her in ages.”

  The mound on the bed quivered slightly.

  “Meghan’s okay,” it finally said.

  Could this inert lump really be my quick, bright daughter Elena, the girl who could turn a five-minute trip to the drugstore into three different thrilling, gossipy stories lasting ten minutes apiece? “Mom! Guess what!” She would be so excited she would almost be jumping out of her skin with the need to tell.

  And I could never guess.

  “I’ve been trying to work on the memoir,” I said. “There’s something I need help with.”

  The blanket quivered again. But that was all.

  This had worked longer than any other appeal. It had worked even better than time with Gemma. Elena wanted her memoir to happen as much as she wanted anything in the world. But for the last couple of weeks, even this appeal hadn’t worked.

  “I’ll help later,” her muffled voice said at last. “I’ll get up and help you with it. Promise I will. Just let me sleep for an hour.”

  I left the room. And I didn’t see her for the rest of the day.

  Late that night, after Joe had already gone to bed, I was walking through the house, collecting dishes for the dishwasher. I paused in the hallway. From behind Elena’s closed door came laughter. There was a certain sound, playful and confiding, in the tone of her voice. Elena was flirting with someone on the phone.

  At least she’s awake, I thought, walking away.

  A few minutes later, her bedroom door opened, the bathroom door shut, and the shower came on. Elena was up at last.

  Maybe she would finally help me with the memoir. That was good. Since leaving the coffee shop, I hadn’t done a thing. So I started the dishwasher, picked up my laptop, and settled down in the living room to wait.

  Genny came galloping in from the backyard and jumped up into my lap. Valerie walked in behind her, yawning.

  “This woman is a genius,” she said firmly, holding up the Shirley Jackson book. “I’m reading this for the fourth time. Every sentence is amazing.�
�

  “Too right you are,” I agreed. “I’d die happy if I could have written her last novel.”

  Valerie put the book down on the coffee table. “So. I’m off to bed. And why are you still awake, woman? Didn’t Dad go to bed, like, an hour ago?”

  I stretched and sighed. “Your sister’s up. Maybe we can finally get some work done.”

  Valerie pulled out her phone and looked at it. “At eleven o’clock? Screw that! Make her get her work done tomorrow morning.”

  She disappeared down the hall, and I heard the door to her bedroom slide shut across the carpet and click into place. Of all of us, Valerie was the quietest at shutting a door. She was the one who had to live with the consequences if she wasn’t.

  Genny put her fuzzy head down on my knee, and huffed, and I scratched her wiry coat. Maybe it would be a good thing that Elena and I would have this time together after everybody else was in bed. In spite of the nagging and yelling I did, she was still wonderfully candid about the details of her illness when we worked together on her story. That honesty impressed me as much as it saddened me.

  But when Elena came into the living room, it was clear that she wasn’t ready to work. She was wearing a minidress so tiny that I could only stare.

  Where had that thing come from?

  “Oh, hey,” she said, surprised but not pleased to see me, and she went over to her purse and hunted for her keys.

  I pondered various comments and rejected several.

  “So, you said you’d help me with the memoir,” I started off in as neutral a tone as possible.

  “Oh, yeah. Can we do that tomorrow? I’m headed over to Lisa’s. She’s having a bad time.”

  “Lisa’s,” I echoed, trying to catch her gaze with mine, but her eyes kept sliding past my face. “Look, I don’t want you to go, Elena. Not this late. And certainly not looking like that.”

  Elena tottered by me on high heels into the kitchen and came back with a bottle of water. Her legs were like matchsticks. The dress was made to hug a rear end, but there was no rear end there to hug.

  “It’s just Lisa,” she muttered. “It’s the only thing I have that’s clean.”