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

by Clare B. Dunkle

  Then I noticed that Elena’s purse and car keys were still on the piano bench.

  “Where’s your sister? I thought she got up thirty minutes ago.”

  “I haven’t seen her,” Valerie said.

  “But the alarm went off!”

  “Yeah, and it kept going off until I went in there and made Her Highness stop it. But you know that doesn’t mean anything.”

  And that, of course, was true.

  I pushed open the door to Elena’s room. Immediately, Genny jumped down from the bed and trotted out. She wasn’t the brightest little dog in the world, but she had learned the routine by now.

  “Elena!” I said, shaking the blanket.

  “Nnnnnn!” it protested.

  “Elena, you’re going to be late for class!”

  Again! I thought. But I didn’t say it.

  Elena rolled over and announced with perfect composure, “Class is canceled. The professor called. She’s sick.”

  “The professor called,” I echoed. “She called you.”

  “Mm-hmm,” Elena muttered, her face in the pillow.

  “A class of ninety students, and she called you to say she was sick. Get up, Elena! You can’t miss class again.”

  “I will,” she murmured mechanically.

  But I didn’t believe it. I kept shaking her. “I’m not stopping until I see you sit up.”

  Muttering darkly, Elena sat up.

  There! That wasn’t so bad. I walked back out and sat down next to Valerie and Gemma. My granddaughter greeted me with a happy gurgle and handed me the purple ball, now slippery with baby spit. Her eyes were lightening up and changing color, with green flecks and blue flecks. They did look a little bit like mine.

  Half a minute later, Elena appeared in the living room doorway. “What the hell!” she cried. “You let me sleep too late!”

  Valerie and I exchanged a look.

  “My alarm didn’t go off!” Elena continued, frantic. “It didn’t go off! You didn’t wake me up! Thanks a lot, you two!”

  A second later, the bathroom door slammed.

  “I’m going back to work,” I told Valerie, standing up. “I have writing to do. I am not driving your sister to school.”

  Fifteen minutes later, I was in the car, driving Elena to school.

  Elena was in her pajamas. Once upon a time, she had assured me that many college students go to class in their pajamas. Once upon a time, I had actually cared. Nowadays, pajamas out in public were the last thing I worried about.

  Elena looked out the window and sighed. “Oh, school, how I hate thee!”

  My cynicism vanished in an icy blast of fear. The hair actually prickled on my arms. Of all the things this sad creature next to me could say, this was the one statement least like my daughter.

  Elena loved school. She had loved it from the very first day of preschool. She was absolutely passionate about learning. Her curiosity extended to everything in the universe. I had never once seen her bored.

  Dear God! What had happened to my daughter?

  That afternoon, I sat down at the kitchen table and ate the last piece of Disney princess cake. As it turned out, Elena hadn’t had more of it than those two bites. Her partially eaten piece had stayed on the counter until its blue frosting had dried out. Finally, I had thrown it away.

  While I ate, I opened up my laptop and reread what I had written on her memoir that morning.

  When you recover . . .

  Yes, of course, anorexics support one another in recovery. But they don’t, on the whole, understand it very well. Recovery is like death: a closed door, a complete unknown. A lot of anorexics never make it through that door.

  Treatment—now, that’s something anorexics come to know backward and forward, and they enjoy meeting up with their friends at the treatment center. “Are you going back in?” they say. “I’m going back in, and Leslie’s there, and Tracy’s there, and Jenna’s coming next week. Come back to treatment, we all miss you so much!”

  But recovery . . . that’s a different matter.

  Not good. Not bad. Just unknown.

  When you gain weight, you don’t look like an anorexic anymore, and that means you don’t belong in the club. You can’t meet back at the treatment center when you’re at a healthy weight.

  Hence the question anorexics ask one another as they’re sitting around the treatment center, sipping their Boost Breezes:

  “How much weight are you going to lose the month you get out?”

  I read this little snippet, and I thought of all the things I knew about Elena now. I took out a sheet of paper, and I made myself stay cold and calm. I didn’t let myself be a mother about this—that feeble, fluttery mother. I made myself stay in my writer’s mind.

  What did I know about my character’s time since she had left treatment? What had she done in the last three months?

  The sheet of paper started filling up with bad news.

  weight: as bad as before treatment, maybe worse

  mindset: definitely worse now—before, at least she wanted treatment

  habits: same as before treatment

  health: very bad, at least as bad as before

  medication: takes it, doesn’t try to abuse it or overdose—but it isn’t helping

  After I was finished, I read it through, then drew a line underneath it and summed it up:

  WORSE THAN BEFORE!

  And in January, they said she was weeks away from dying!

  I stared out the window at the bright, beautiful day. My writer’s mind—I needed my writer’s mind for this. I needed my imagination.

  Where are we? I asked it, just as I had asked it thousands of times before. Where are we? What is my character doing?

  The answer came back:

  My character is coming to the end.

  When I had first offered to help Elena write her memoir, what I was really trying to offer was a happy ending. That’s what I offer my characters, after all. I don’t like sad endings. In the back of my mind, I had had the silly idea that if Elena were in a story of mine, Elena would find her happy ending, too.

  And maybe even Elena thought that.

  Characters have story arcs. They do stupid things, but they learn, and they grow—at least, that’s what’s supposed to happen. But no author can force a character to do anything if that character doesn’t want to do it.

  I consider it my most sacred duty to be true to my characters. I want to see them do well. But sometimes, the only thing a writer can do is be with a character while that character fails. We’re our characters’ only witness—the only one who really understands. We have to be honest and fair right through to the very last minute. We have to watch. We have to watch right to the end.

  When it came to my daughter, the mother in me wanted to make excuses. She wanted to see hope and fresh starts wherever she could. The mother in me saw every request for fast food as a step toward recovery. She saw every request for a ride to school as a chance to get out and meet new people—a chance to gain a new interest in life.

  But the writer in me—she knew what was going on.

  I stared at that piece of paper, and I didn’t cry. I didn’t wring my hands or have hysterics. I found my cell phone, and I called Joe.

  “Let’s meet for lunch,” I said.

  We left my car in the parking lot, and Joe drove us to a restaurant near his work. At first, neither one of us spoke. Joe knew better than to ask for updates. The most innocent question—“How’s your day going?”—could lead to painful surprises.

  Finally, when we were parked next to the restaurant, I said what I had come to say:

  “Elena isn’t going to make it.”

  That sentence hung in the air, and I heard it echoing in my mind. But I didn’t feel anything at all. Years and years of titanic struggle had brought me to this moment. I had hoped—how I had hoped! I had seen hope everywhere I could.

  Now I could see only the reality:

  The end.

&nb
sp; Joe burst into tears. “Do you think I don’t know that?” he said. “That’s why . . . that’s why I don’t like to be the one to wake her up for dinner. Because I know . . . I know that one day soon, I’ll walk into her room, and she’ll be dead . . .”

  And he sobbed out loud and ran his hand over his face while I went hunting through my purse for a tissue.

  “. . . She’ll be dead,” he went on when he’d gotten a little calmer, “lying right there on her bed. I can see it like it’s already happened! Every time I stand outside her door, I see it.”

  And he broke into sobs again.

  I put my arm around Joe’s shoulders. So I’m not the only one, I thought sadly, who lives with a mental image of the death of my daughter. Joe’s image was different from mine, but I couldn’t say that it was wrong. It was right, in fact. It was exactly right.

  Joe drew in a breath. “I don’t want her to die! I don’t want my daughter to die!” And that’s when I said the other thing I had come to say.

  I said, “I have a plan.”

  Inside the restaurant, we talked it over. I had realized that Elena might be detaching from life, but she was still attached to her comforts. She might not eat, but she still gave me a list of shampoos and scrubs to buy at the store.

  “She doesn’t like risk,” I pointed out. “The routine of the house makes her feel secure. It’s giving her the security she needs to set up everything so that she can die in peace.”

  Joe nodded. “She’s using us to help kill herself.”

  “So my plan is this,” I said. “We take it away. Each week she fails to improve or gets worse, we take away something else. We don’t let her just close her eyes and go to sleep and lose it all. We make her feel that loss step by step. Phone, car, computer, hot water, everything we’re providing for her. We take it all, if that’s the way she chooses to go.”

  Joe’s brows creased together. “Until when?” he asked.

  “Until she has to die under an overpass bridge.”

  I said it—the most horrible thing a mother could possibly say. I said it, and I felt nothing at all. Pain, panic, and fear were nothing but the flip side of hope, and Elena had learned how to use that hope against me. She played on my hope just as she had played on Bea’s protectiveness. It was a luxury I could no longer afford.

  “Under a bridge,” I repeated firmly, “with nothing but the clothes on her back. No home to hide in, no car to crash, no shower, no safety, no nothing.”

  As I said it, my imagination showed me the whole horrible scene: my daughter, skeletal, dehydrated, curled up high in the little space between the bridge beams and the slope of the embankment, alone and unattended, taking her last rattling breaths.

  I made myself stay with it. I didn’t look away.

  This plan was the last, best hope we had. So far as I could tell, it was our only hope. But if we let ourselves feel that hope, we wouldn’t be able to bear the cruelty of it. We wouldn’t follow through. And if Elena didn’t believe that we would follow through, she would go right ahead and ignore us—and die.

  So it was her death against our death now: death at home or death under that bridge. We had to see our goal just as clearly as she saw hers. We had to work toward that goal, that death—that awful, uncomfortable death. Only then did we have a chance that she might back down.

  No hope: that was our only hope.

  The line between Joe’s brows remained. “Under a bridge?” he echoed, and I heard the pain and bewilderment in his voice.

  Maybe Joe could have a little hope, then. He probably needed it.

  “If that’s what she chooses,” I said. “She can turn this around at any time. We’ll set it up so that she can earn her privileges back as soon as she starts putting on weight.”

  Joe thought about this for a few minutes.

  “It’s the only chance we have,” he said. “We can’t help her die. That’s what we’re doing now.” He picked up his fork but put it down again. This conversation wasn’t exactly helping our appetites. “But she’s falsifying her weight,” he pointed out.

  “I thought of that,” I said. “She’s bound to hit a limit in the ways she can add weight to herself during weigh-ins. She can’t exactly stick her feet in cement.”

  “And considering how far the weigh-in weight is from reality right now,” Joe said, “she should be hitting that limit pretty soon.”

  I pulled out a notepad, and during the rest of the meal, we brainstormed our penalty scale. We set down three weights for Elena: a “green” weight, which was her ideal weight, according to Clove House; a “yellow” weight, which was five pounds under the ideal weight; and a “red” weight, which was anything below that. Losing weight moved Elena down the penalty scale. Gaining weight moved her back up.

  This was what it looked like when we were done:

  GREEN WEIGHT: no penalties apply.

  YELLOW PENALTIES: 1st yellow week: grace period (no change in penalty scale).

  1. I lose my debit card and the right to regulate my own smoking. My parents will provide 6 cigarettes a day provided I complete my food plan and food diary.

  RED PENALTIES: 1st red week: grace period (no change in penalty scale).

  2. I lose texting features on my phone.

  3. I lose my MP3 player.

  4. I lose movie rental privileges.

  5. I lose Internet capability on my computer.

  6. I lose three cigarettes from my daily ration and drop to 3 cigarettes a day.

  7. I lose smoking privileges (i.e., go cold turkey).

  8. I lose my computer.

  9. I must start paying $50 a week for rent. Failure to do so results in a move down the penalty scale.

  10. I lose my car. I will be given bus fare if I can show the routes I intend to take.

  11. I lose my house key. I must arrange for someone to be home to let me in. Failure to observe this penalty results in a move down the penalty scale.

  12. I may not be home from the time my father leaves in the morning till the time he returns at night (7:00 a.m.–6:00 p.m.). Failure to observe this penalty results in a move down the penalty scale.

  13. I must move out and finance my own life and education. I may take the car, registered in my name, provided I have paid for six months of automobile insurance. My parents will not cosign any leases or loans with me. I will have one month from the date of this penalty to save up money and move out.

  When Joe came to the end, he sighed.

  “The Clove House people said not to focus on weight or numbers,” he said. “But I don’t see what else we’re supposed to do.”

  “Clove House’s advice hasn’t gotten anybody in this family very far,” I pointed out. “And they made her sign several contracts with them.”

  “She’s going to hate this,” he said. “She’s really going to hate it.”

  “That would be progress,” I said. “Hate is better than what she’s doing now. What she’s doing now is letting go. But I know she’ll fight it. It’s the disorder above everything else at this point, and this directly challenges the disorder. She’ll say anything. She might even do anything. We’ll be the enemy—no two ways about it.”

  “I hate being the enemy,” Joe said sadly.

  “If we back down on this,” I said, “it’ll mean she can go right back to sleep. We have to mean this because Elena means it. She knows that she’s dying.”

  “She has to,” Joe agreed.

  “Well, if Elena can accept the reality of dying in her bed, then we have to accept the reality of packing her stuff up and pushing her out the door. It’s our reality against her reality, and our reality has to win. She has to know that overpass bridge is waiting for her.”

  “I know,” Joe said. “It’s the only way.”

  And again, I heard the pain in his voice.

  This is going to be very hard on Joe, I thought. He isn’t made for this. He can get angry and yell, but he can’t resist tears. He can’t be mean on purpose.
/>   So it would have to be me.

  I would have to be mean on purpose.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  That evening, Valerie and Joe and I sat down together, and we called Elena out to sign the contract. Valerie was prepared. She had had us wait until Gemma was up. “This is going to get pretty loud,” she predicted.

  I went in to wake up Elena. “You need to come out here,” I said.

  “What?” the mound of blankets answered. “I’m not hungry.”

  “It isn’t dinner. You already slept through that. You need to come out here.” I left and sat back down on the couch.

  We waited. But Elena didn’t show up.

  This time, Joe went to fetch her, and this time, she came out. “What?” she said angrily when she saw Valerie and me waiting on the couch.

  She already knows, my writer’s mind observed. She knows what’s going on here.

  “Elena, we need you to read this, and we need you to sign it,” Joe said, and he handed her the contract. Elena tossed it aside without a glance.

  “What is this?” she demanded. “I’m not reading anything!”

  “It’s a contract that says that you’ll gain weight,” I said. “If you don’t gain weight, you’ll lose privileges week by week: phone, computer, car.”

  Elena glared at me. “I’m not signing anything!”

  “Then you can pack up and move out,” I said.

  Cue the expected eruption.

  “You know I don’t have anywhere to go! You know I’m sick! You’re blaming me. You’re blaming me for being sick!”

  “We aren’t!” Joe said. “Elena, we just want to help.”

  “Like hell you want to help!”

  I didn’t say anything.

  Once upon a time, I had lain awake nights, thinking, How do I say this? How can I make her understand? Once upon a time, I had spent my days agonizing and engaging and explaining. For years and years, I had hoped and struggled. I had moved heaven and earth.

  Now, there was only the reality—the single reality: Elena was going to die. But she was not going to do it here.