Joe was right. This was safe territory for me. This was very safe. I knew just what I would find when I arrived. My older brother, whip-thin and weather-beaten, in his daily uniform of white shirt and blue jeans, would be out on one of the tractors he’s salvaged from garage sales. Or he might be on the phone discussing course loads because he’s also a computer science professor at a California university. The produce farm in Texas is just his hobby—a hobby that comes with backbreaking daily labor. He and my father put up almost every building on the farm, including the two-story air-conditioned workshop and garage.
His wife, my godchild, would be puttering around the kitchen, checking on loaves of bread, or possibly brewing a batch of beer, while her four children came to her one by one with homeschooling questions. Or she might be stripping down and reprogramming another computer. My sister-in-law went to MIT on full scholarship. She has a PhD in computer science, and before she retired, she was a computer science professor, too.
But regardless of which role they were filling at the moment, dirt-under-the-nails farm couple or sophisticated academics, they would welcome me warmly: that I knew. My sister-in-law, the same one I had turned away from my door, would never turn me away from hers.
I called my mother from the highway to let the family know I was coming. They knew that Elena had been ill. What I said to my mother now, I didn’t know. Once again, I couldn’t seem to pay attention to the words coming out of my mouth.
It’s old news to me, I thought as I watched the interstate roll by while orderly processions of words marched into the phone. No wonder I can’t focus on it anymore. It’s boring to me by this time.
. . . Or maybe I’m just a little broken.
I got out and unlocked the big cattle gate and drove up to my parents’ white house. “Greetings!” called my mother from the door. My parents have gotten a little shorter and a little more stooped over the years, but they still make a handsome couple. My father has a chestnut sweep of hair across his forehead, even though it’s heavily frosted with white, and his mischievous gray eyes and pink cheeks would look right at home on Santa Claus. My mother, small and girlishly pretty, still has a dancer’s ankles, and her white cotton candy hair sweeps back into an elegant French twist.
The sight of them brought me instant contentment. Joe was right. It was good that I was there.
On this island of peace, this place of windswept meadow grasses and wildflowers I’d known since I was a little girl, I could let the gentle routines of family life pick me up and carry me along. I could sit down to the big meals that my mother and my sister-in-law cooked, and I could kneel down with them at night to say the rosary.
My family almost never argues. I’ve never heard my parents raise their voices. The most they do—and this my mother does regularly—is crimp their eyebrows together into The Frown.
“Do you want that second slice of cranberry bread?” my mother asked my father as he was stirring sugar into his tea.
“Do I want a well-priced blasphemy for my head?” he echoed in amazement. His hearing is bad, but he doesn’t do much about it—largely, I think, because it provides him such amusement.
And my mother gave him The Frown.
“Yes,” she said with dignity. “Yes, that’s exactly what I asked.”
For a week, I lay low there and licked my wounds. I sat with my parents at the kitchen table next to the windows with the hummingbird feeders, and I talked about everything and nothing: Japan during World War II, genetically modified food, German house construction— anything but what was going on at home. I walked through my brother’s greenhouses, and I listened to his brilliant and creative farming ideas. I followed my busy sister-in-law around her large well-equipped kitchen and listened to her stories about homeschooling. And every couple of minutes, one of their four children appeared at my elbow and said very politely, “You know what, Aunt Clare?”
Guess what! echoed the voice of the young Elena in my mind—the daughter who was surely lost to me forever.
What did I say to my family about Elena? I had no idea. Whenever her name came up, I could feel myself speaking—sometimes vigorously. But I retained nothing of what was said—
With one exception.
I think it was my last night there. My sister-in-law, my mother, and I were sitting at the supper table after the children and the men had left, and our conversation was ranging over topics of education.
I think I was saying that I didn’t attempt to regulate my children now that they were grown. Valerie and Elena knew right from wrong, I said, whether or not they chose to pay attention to it. They were women now—grown women—and they and I were separate human beings. I brought things to their attention, but I was no longer interested in being their police.
My mother disagreed with this approach, and so did my sister-in-law. “As long as they’re in my house,” they said firmly.
I looked at my sister-in-law, her face serene and sure, her arms still accustomed to the feel of hugging small, adorable bodies. And then I thought of Elena, shrunk down to bone and gristle, dying in her bedroom at home.
“You have no idea,” I said.
In an instant, my sister-in-law’s beautiful face changed to stricken sorrow. “Oh, Clare!” she gasped. “We made you cry!”
The next instant, she was around the table and was holding me in her arms.
“Oh, Clare, Clare, I’m so sorry! We made you cry.”
Was I crying? I didn’t feel it. I felt as dry and dead as dirt. What I’d just seen on my sister-in-law’s face—pain, regret, love—should be my feelings, too. But I couldn’t feel them. I didn’t feel anything.
I was severed from my feelings.
The almost-an-argument was over. My sister-in-law would no more say another word to hurt me than she would think of turning me away from her door. But inside that warm, heartfelt hug, I couldn’t shake this strange sense of who I had become.
I had pretended all week to be normal, but I was not like my normal, healthy family. I was like the prophet who has seen things no one should have to see. I had traveled out to some terrible country where my sister-in-law—God forbid!—might one day have to follow. And so, once again, I delivered my message—the truth from that terrible place:
“You have no idea. No idea.”
When I got home, Joe wanted to know if I was feeling better. I thought so. I didn’t see why not.
The girls were back home, but they were giving me some room. Valerie watched me carefully. Elena was quiet.
Joe said, “Do you think you’ll get some writing done today? We could use the money from that Holt book.”
That sounded like a good idea. Why shouldn’t I do some writing? So, after breakfast, I carried my laptop into the bedroom again and piled all the pillows up against the headboard. Then I leaned back against them and opened up my latest Word file.
This file contained Elena’s memoir. I read the last few pages I’d written, but they didn’t seem to have anything to do with Elena or me. I stared at them for a while, but I couldn’t think of anything to add.
That seemed odd.
I had no memory of how to do this.
The problem is that I’m too close to this story, I thought—although I felt very far away. I’ll write a new story. I want to write my mermaid story now. I’d been planning to write it for some time.
So I went looking inside my imagination for the mermaid.
But there was nothing inside my imagination. It was an empty room. Nothing moved there. Nothing lived there. It was just dead white space—white like the blank Word page in front of me.
Once upon a time, a mermaid had lived inside my imagination, and I had daydreamed a story for her. How long it had been since she went missing, I couldn’t say.
Tor scratched at my bedroom door and meowed, and I welcomed the interruption. But he jumped onto the bed and curled up and fell asleep, and it was just me and my Word file again.
The problem is that I haven’t thoug
ht about my mermaid in a few weeks, I concluded. I need to bring her back into focus. So I brainstormed a page of ideas about mermaids, based on the mermaid who used to be inside my head.
But when I read through those ideas, they were as dry as class lecture notes—dry and boring.
The inside of my imagination was boring. Nothing moved there now—not even dust.
During the difficult days of Elena’s senior year, six months after the Summer from Hell, Elena had asked me to write her a book about mermaids. Busy with poor Martin, I hadn’t done that, but I had written her a page about one. I found that page now and pulled it up on my laptop and read it while Tor twitched slightly in his sleep.
When you ask about the ocean, I do not understand you. I only know that once I could fly. I soared above the reefs and sands of my world, and wonderful creatures soared with me. Like your birds, they were bright and colorful. Like your birds, they gathered in flocks. They sang, and I sang with them. I was never afraid.
When you speak of tails, I grow confused. Tails are for your world, for elephants and monkeys. What I had was a broad sail to tame the wind. With it I could swoop and dip and twirl through my blue sky, and I needed nothing else to make me happy. You know of such sails, but you turn them into brooms and tell yourselves that the women who ride them are hags. You are afraid of those women. You are afraid of me.
When you speak of dark waters, of struggle, of drowning, I begin to understand. Once I was light and could dance like a bubble. Now I am crushed down to the ground. In your world, my body is as clumsy as a crawling sea star, as heavy as a boulder dragged under the mud. I lie immobile, helpless, anchored by chains I cannot see, while you spurn me with the narrow blades of your feet.
You have taken my tail, but you have not given me wings.
I reread the simple paragraphs. I couldn’t really remember writing them. I couldn’t remember being the kind of person who could write them. I absorbed their graceful images and compared those images to the dull, empty room inside my head.
Nothing lived there anymore. Nothing could possibly live there.
It seemed impossible that those words had come from me.
In a state of disbelief, I jumped up from the bed and went to find my books. I brought the whole stack of them back to my bedroom and shut the door again. I opened a book and read the first thing I saw.
The silent woodcarver glanced up quickly to study Lady Mary. His lean face was the color of bones, and his eyes were the clearest, brightest green. There was caution in those eyes—intelligence, too—and he stared after the old woman hungrily, as if he were learning her by heart. One long, penetrating glance, and he was working at his carving again as if he had never stopped.
I was in the garret of our German house, I thought, when I wrote this paragraph. I was staring at the ceiling of the bedroom at night when I first saw my werewolf’s green eyes.
But, to save my life, I couldn’t remember where the werewolf had come from—how it had felt to bring his character to life. And when I looked inside my imagination, he wasn’t there anymore. All I found was a memory of him from the book, going through the motions that were trapped on its pages.
It was a good thing, I realized sadly, that my werewolf’s story was written down. Otherwise, I’d never get to see him again.
One by one, I went through my books, but all that moved were their pages. The lives I had caught there—the lives that had been so much broader and deeper than the books themselves: every single one of them was gone.
Last of all, I picked up my very first book, the one with my oldest child-characters in it. If anyone could live for me, they would.
I flipped it open at random.
Kate felt them shift as if the horse had stumbled. She took her eyes off the pursuing moon and glanced ahead. They were on a level field, but the horse’s racing feet were sinking into it as if it were quicksand. He was not slowing his gallop; if anything, he was running faster, his legs invisible below the earth. In another few seconds, Kate’s feet were gone, too, and just as if the field were a mist or sea, only the horse’s head plowed along above it. Now the horse’s head was gone, and the ground was rising up around her, lapping at her without waves until it reached her chest and then her neck. She screamed in terror, the goblin’s arms clamped tightly around her as she threw back her head for one last glimpse of the moon.
I remember writing this, I thought. I remember thinking that I wanted something interesting to happen. And now this paragraph was down here on the page.
But how did it get here? How did I see this scene? I didn’t know what had happened to bring it to life.
Once, I had sat in a corner and watched my characters as they went about their busy days. I couldn’t stop watching them even when I wanted to. They had never once left me alone. The inside of my mind was like a bus station, crowded with imaginary life. I had put only a few of the many things I saw there down in the pages of my books.
But now, there were no more characters left inside my mind. There weren’t even statues of characters. There weren’t even pictures on the walls.
It was white—dead white, like an empty page.
I used to be a writer, I thought as I felt the books’ hard boards and ruffled the pages and ran my hands over the slick covers. These books are proof. They have my name on them. I used to be a writer.
And I put them down and went off to load the dishwasher.
Valerie came to find me to chat, and I listened to her with pleasure. But after a while, she broke off and grew quiet.
“Hey, are you all right?” she asked with a frown.
I was matching socks as I talked to her. It felt pleasant to do mindless work.
“Sure, I’m fine,” I said.
This was absolutely true. The pain I had felt while running away was something I couldn’t quite remember. It seemed to have vanished down the cracks between my bones.
“If you say so,” Valerie said suspiciously. And she picked up her book and went outside.
I told Joe about this little conversation that night as we were brushing our teeth. “I guess I still hurt,” I said philosophically. “So do you. We all hurt, we just don’t notice it anymore.”
“I notice,” Joe said sadly, and I spared a few seconds to feel sorry for him, the way I might feel sorry over an item in the newspaper. But I felt a little complacent, too. I was glad I didn’t have to feel like that.
“So, did you get any writing done?” Joe asked as he hung up his shirt. “Do you think you’ll be getting that manuscript to Holt before the end of the year?”
I couldn’t very well explain to Joe about the day I’d spent reading through old files—about how the last few sentences of a broken-off story should feel like a signpost pointing which way to go, but instead they felt like crude wooden crosses that said HERE LIES.
I couldn’t tell Joe that I used to be a writer.
“I didn’t get very far today,” I said.
“On what? On Elena’s memoir? You need to ditch that memoir.”
“On anything, really,” I said.
Joe stood by the closet door, and he frowned at me, too, as I walked around the room, straightening things up. But I wasn’t frowning. No longer was I split between two worlds, between reality and make-believe. Instead of seeing ghosts or goblins hanging in the air, I saw the small, neat room before me.
It was a relief, really. It felt good to have a grip on the real world.
“What’s the Holt book going to be about?” Joe asked. “I’d like to read a chapter if you’ve finished one.”
This generous offer made me smile.
Once upon a time, long ago, I had positively pestered my family to read my stuff. I had printed out chapters and met Joe at the door with pages in my hand. Once upon a time, long ago, my girls would pause a dozen times a day to read the latest paragraphs over my shoulder. “Write lots! Write lots!” they shouted as they raced off. And I did write lots.
Once upon a time, I could
n’t stop writing. I couldn’t turn off the nonstop movies I saw behind my eyes. I couldn’t quiet down the mob— the zoo!—of characters milling around inside. Me next! Me next! they had clamored.
Now, as I squared my books into a neat stack, I paused to take another look inside the white room of my mind.
Not even the goblin King was there.
And if he was gone, there was truly nothing left.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
When I got up the next morning, Elena was already out of bed. She had been out of bed quite a bit the last few weeks. The lineup of pill bottles had changed, too. She was seeing a new therapist, who was working with her new psychiatrist. Certain powerful drugs were now gone.
Was Elena eating more? I didn’t know.
Was it my business? She surely wouldn’t think so.
But when Elena asked me for a ride to her new therapist’s office, I was perfectly happy to provide it. In fact, I was perfectly happy to fill up my time with all kinds of routine tasks. It would be an opportunity to get out and run some errands. It would help me use up the day.
There was no need to hold on to writing time anymore.
So I drove Elena to her new therapist’s appointment and ran errands while she was there. Then she called, and I swung back by to pick her up. Driving was such a nice, safe, enjoyable activity: I moved my hands a little bit, and the world went by. I hardly had to do a thing.
Elena opened the car door and sat down in the passenger’s seat in silence. In silence, I drove us to the grocery store. Once, I would have begged her for details about her day. Once, she couldn’t have stopped herself. But those people—those long-ago, far-off people: we weren’t those same people anymore.
As I pulled into the grocery store parking lot, Elena cleared her throat and said, “The therapist agrees with you.” She said this in a formal tone, as if I were her professor instead of her mother.
“Oh?” I said without particular interest. After all, it would be impolite to say nothing.
“Yes,” Elena said. Then she elaborated as carefully if she were giving a business presentation, “I told her that I was very upset with you and that contracts are bad for anorexics because they force us to give up control. That control is all we have left to count on, I told her. But she said you were right to take drastic action. She said that psychological treatment is expensive, and I’ve only got insurance for another year. This is an opportunity, and I’m running out of time to use it.”
Hope and Other Luxuries: A Mother's Life With a Daughter's Anorexia Page 57