Hope and Other Luxuries

by Clare B. Dunkle

  At the time, I had said to her, “It sounds like you had one of your blackouts from the Summer from Hell.” But Elena had laughed it off and told us she’d been partying too hard. I had remembered my own freshman-year parties and put it out of my mind.

  But now here she was, calling it a blackout.

  “Turns out,” Elena continued, “there’s a place in town that works with eating disorder patients. Sandalwood, it’s called. I met with their director.”

  She found a Coke can in the fridge and took a few seconds to open it. I watched her in silence. Elena always opened her Cokes just a little bit, so that almost nothing could come out. I couldn’t remember how long it had been since I’d seen her finish a Coke.

  Elena said, “She told me that I do have anorexia nervosa.”

  “I know,” I said sadly.

  This wasn’t something I thought about every day. It was something I tried not to worry about anymore. Elena was an adult now. I wasn’t supposed to hover. There was nothing I could do about it. God knows, I had tried.

  But the mother who had lived through Elena’s senior year—the mother who had watched her measure out every single bite and avoid more than the tiniest ration of calories—that mother had learned a long time ago: Yes, my daughter does have anorexia nervosa. Maybe she hadn’t had it before the Summer from Hell. Maybe her eating disorder had been less severe. But, after the trauma of being forced into hospitals and psychiatric facilities—

  And, once again, my mind locked on to the image of Dr. Petras, blustering and issuing his threats.

  “The director said my anorexia isn’t the family’s fault,” Elena continued. “She told me, when it’s caused by the parents, it starts really young. Mine didn’t start till I was a teenager. That means it was caused by something else.”

  “Oh. That’s interesting,” I said.

  But I didn’t get it.

  I didn’t think to ask, So, why did this question come up? Does that mean you thought your anorexia was our fault? What gave you that idea? Was it something we did? Was it something somebody else did?

  Or, even better:

  What do you think caused your anorexia?

  I didn’t ask these questions. I just didn’t think. My imagination was still playing me the tape of Dr. Petras having his meltdown. It was so stuck on what it did know that it didn’t notice what it didn’t.

  “So,” I said, “how does the director think you’re doing now?”

  “Okay,” she said vaguely. “We talked about me joining a support group.”

  “How often does it meet?”

  “Doesn’t matter. She didn’t think it would help.”

  She didn’t think it would help? That sounded odd. “Really?” I said, trying to keep my tone light. “I thought those people love support groups!”

  But Elena declined to elaborate.

  “Anyway, you’ll see a bill,” she said. “They copied our insurance card.”

  I did see a bill. It got tangled up in our insurance system, and I wound up having to call both the insurance company and Sandalwood before payment came through. But I didn’t bring it up again to Elena.

  My daughter was an adult now. I needed not to hover. She had told me to let her deal with her business. I was ready to let her deal.

  I had an adoring, ratty little dog to pet and jogging to do. I had piano to practice and books to write. Whenever my daughters wanted to reach out, I was right there to cheer them on. But I was through minding their business and running their lives.

  I was done with being Elena’s evil witch.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  But over the next few weeks, I began to realize that this conversation had marked a turning point. Whether that was due to Elena or to me, I couldn’t quite figure out. For my part, I found that it had reawakened old fears. Against my will, I began to worry again.

  Elena seemed to have gone through a change as well. The fun and excitement of her freshman year had drained away. Now, everything she talked about involved more achievement—and more stress.

  Like the morning she called me during my jog to tell me about the ROTC scholarship.

  “The major says, with my grades, I’m a sure thing,” she told me on the phone. “Then the Air Force can pay for my nursing school.”

  “Genny, no! Don’t eat that. Dogs are so gross,” I said, dragging the little terrier away from something awful in the gutter. “But, honey, you don’t have to get a scholarship. We can help with nursing school.”

  “Mom, I don’t want to use all of your and Dad’s money! I thought you’d be happy that I’m trying to be independent.”

  “No, I am, I am. It’s just . . .”

  “It’s just what?” she wanted to know.

  It’s just that you get sick a lot, I thought. Your immune system isn’t robust, and I should know; you inherited it from me. It’s like that doctor told me when I was your age, “Some people can stay up partying all night, and then there’s you.” No way could my body have handled a military life, and I don’t think your body can, either.

  But I knew just how furious Elena would be if I were to say that out loud, so I hunted for a more acceptable response.

  “It’s just that I don’t want you to feel like you have to.”

  I could hear it in the dogged tone in her voice, however: Elena felt like she had to. Once again, she was driving herself to meet Herculean goals. She was doing exceptional work in her classes, and she had even won a rare departmental award. I was proud of her, but I could see that it was taking a toll.

  Sitting in one of the brown chairs a few days later, with my laptop open on my lap, I listened to her voice on the phone detailing her final exam schedule. Eight prenursing classes’ worth of final exams. The workload was absolutely crushing.

  Oh, well. At least she’ll be able to rest up this summer, I thought.

  But no.

  “Guess what!” Elena said on the phone a couple of hours later. “I’ve been selected as a summer RA!”

  “Hey, that’s fantastic!” I said. The resident assistants (RAs) had their meals and dorm room paid for and brought in a salary, as well. It was hard work to become an RA, and I knew Elena had worked at it for months. It would finally give her that financial independence she had pushed herself to achieve. Finally, she could say, “I’m taking care of myself.”

  “So,” I said, “you’ll be quitting the mall job now?”

  “I don’t need to quit the mall job,” she said. “It’s not like the RA job will take that much time.”

  Worry plucked at me.

  “Yes,” I said, “but you promised when you took all those classes this spring that you’d take some time to recharge this summer.”

  “Yeah, but the mall job doesn’t stress me out.”

  “Elena, you’re often there until one or two in the morning, and then you’re up before seven the next day. Maybe you don’t see that as stress, but your body does. It deserves a little rest.”

  “Yeah, maybe . . . I’ll see how it goes.”

  I was still working at my laptop a little while later when a call came in from a number I didn’t know.

  “This is Clint. From Georgia,” the voice said.

  Worry plucked at me again. Clint sounded upset. Had something happened to Valerie?

  “Oh, hey!” I said. “Is everything okay?”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  There was a pause on the line, and then came a sudden rush of speech, the verbal equivalent of a barrel ride over Niagara Falls.

  “It’s just . . . I want to marry Valerie. I mean, I don’t just want to, I’m going to ask her to marry me; I’ve got the ring and everything. But before I do—before I ask her to marry me—I wanted to ask you and Mr. Dunkle first. If it would be okay with you. Okay if I married your daughter.”

  My heart melted completely. How adorable was that!

  Valerie asked Elena to be her maid of honor, which was lovely in light of their old feud. But it also brought tension
to the surface.

  “You need to talk to Valerie!” Elena told me on the phone a couple of weeks later. “Aside from wanting to be barefoot at the beach, she hasn’t made any decisions at all about this wedding. She’s got to pin down a date. Maybe she can take off anytime she wants from her department store job, but I have to plan ahead. I’ve got two jobs to work and a full semester coming up.”

  More than the words, I picked up on the ragged edge in Elena’s voice. That brought out the worrier in me again.

  “Oh! Two jobs?” I said. “I thought you were quitting your mall job to do the RA thing.”

  “There’s no need,” Elena said. “I can make more money this way. You want me to be independent, don’t you?”

  “Well, you know I want you to get a little rest this summer. You keep getting sick!”

  And I couldn’t keep the flutter of anxiety and reproach out of my voice, even though I knew she hated it.

  “Chill out, Mom! I can handle it!”

  Sure enough, she had heard that flutter.

  Why couldn’t I leave my daughter alone and quit badgering her about her choices? Was I really one of those dreaded helicopter parents?

  By the end of June, Elena was busy enough that we rarely got to see her anymore, so Joe and I met her for lunch one day at a restaurant near her dorm. As I hugged her hello, panic shivered through me. I could feel ribs. I could feel spine. And Elena was pale again—sickly pale. She had a washed-out, anemic look.

  The place was busy. Old-time advertising signs on the walls and waitresses in baseball caps—it was supposed to look homey. Actually, it was a massive chain, and the dining room held a couple of hundred people. That saddened me. I missed the little European restaurants, the ones with about ten tables. They actually were homey.

  While we waited on long wooden benches for our name to be called, Elena dazzled us with stories of RA work. She enjoyed it, and she was good at it. She was pretty sure she was becoming a favorite of the RA managers, too—a set of young people who each controlled several of the dorms.

  “We got a complaint about this one room,” Elena said. “The roommates said it smelled so bad they couldn’t stand to live there. It wasn’t my floor, but the RA in charge of it doesn’t like confrontation, so she talked me into going in with her. We were walking down the hall, and you could smell it already. Something strange—like garbage, but worse.

  “‘What is that?’ my friend asks.

  “Then the guy opens the door, and this wall of stink hits us. It was so bad, it was like the air looked dirty. It felt as if we were looking through a haze, but it was probably just our eyeballs saying, No, please! Don’t open me in here! It’s not safe!

  “This guy had a hot plate set up in the kitchenette, and he had these jars everywhere—everywhere! Jars of fish oil, jars of sauces, sitting out, sitting right in sunlight, oily brown, with these weird blobs floating in them—it straight up stank in the whole place like rotting fish. The other RA couldn’t stand it! She had to run out. I thought she was going to throw up in the hall.”

  My imagination pulled up the whole scene for me: beige dorm walls coated with that dirty, oily stink, the jars, the blobs, the light green face of the RA as she ran from the room . . .

  I loved that! I loved Elena’s stories.

  But once we got to our table, Elena switched to an activity I found more worrisome these days: sketching out plans for her nursing school future. Planning was good, but Elena, like her father, tended to be a bit of a pessimist. She saw the future through gloom-colored glasses. It wasn’t open doors and opportunities; to her, it was an obstacle course. And nursing school was an obstacle course with forty-foot-high walls.

  The waitress took our drink orders and brought us a hunk of bread on a cutting board. Elena pushed it aside.

  “Here’s my grades so far in the prenursing classes,” she said, writing out numbers on her paper napkin. “Composition, Intro to Psych, Developmental Psych, Nutrition, Anatomy. I haven’t taken Physiology yet; that’s a blank.” She drew a line and wrote Physiology. “Now, the nursing school liaison says that five years ago, these grades would have been good enough to get me in. But not now. They’re getting more applicants than they used to.”

  “They’re all As and Bs,” I pointed out.

  “They should have been all As!”

  Joe and I were hearing more and more about this lately. Elena had begun fretting constantly about whether or not she would get into nursing school. In her mind, she was already grappling with that letter of rejection. Sometimes, it seemed as if she were already living through the shame and disgrace of it.

  “I’m sure you’ll be fine,” I said as I sawed off slices of bread. This didn’t seem like a good topic for us to be talking about right before a meal, and I could see already that Elena was struggling to eat again. I handed her a piece of bread, and she dropped it on her plate as if it had burned her. “So, what else is going on?” I asked.

  “I got a new job,” Elena said proudly.

  “Congratulations!” was Joe’s response.

  “Oh! Another job?” was mine.

  I could hear the flutter of worry in my voice again, and I tried to steady and brighten it. But Elena was working two jobs already!

  “It’s just that—when do you have time for more work?”

  “It’s no trouble,” Elena said. “It fits in the schedule because it’s at night.” And she named a posh gym across town. “It’s not hard,” she said. “It’s a lot easier working there at night than during the day. Not very many people come in after one in the morning.”

  Joe looked interested. “That place is supposed to be beautiful,” he said.

  “Tell me about it! We have five pools. It looks nicer than a bank!”

  The waiter brought our entrées. Chicken-fried steak for Joe, chicken with mixed vegetables for me, and spaghetti for Elena. No matter where we went, she ordered spaghetti. She’d done that since she was a little girl.

  I used the interruption to try to figure out how to react. You’re supposed to be recharging! is what I wanted to say, but I knew what would happen if I said it.

  “The thing is . . . ,” I began.

  “Oh, here it comes,” Elena commented to her father. “I knew Mom would find something to gripe about.”

  My heart sank. I was back to being the evil witch again. Why? I didn’t want to be! But I held on to my poker face and didn’t show my hurt. I tried to put together a persuasive argument—not that I had ever managed to persuade Elena to do anything.

  “It’s just that staying up all night is hard on the body,” I said. “You have trouble sleeping already, and you just said you don’t feel hungry. Well, keeping the body awake at night throws it off in all kinds of ways. It affects appetite, number of hours of sleep, everything.”

  The argument certainly convinced me. It made me worry even more. I knew that others of us might listen to our bodies and make up for that lost sleep. But Elena? When it came to taking cues from her body, that girl was completely tone-deaf.

  “I eat just fine,” Elena said emphatically. But she didn’t look it. She was eating her spaghetti, but not the sauce. All the meat was falling off to the sides.

  If I was already the evil witch, I might as well say it.

  “You’re doing too much, Elena. You promised when you took all those classes in the spring that you’d take a break in summer and rest up.”

  “I am resting up,” she said. “I’m not taking summer school.”

  “Three jobs isn’t resting!”

  I could hear it in my voice: that whiny, nagging edge. I hated to hear it, too, but I couldn’t help it. She drove me to it! All the frustration I’d felt during Elena’s senior year resurfaced. Why was she doing this to herself? Why was she doing this to me?

  “You know,” Elena said, “most people would be happy if their children got a job. No matter what I do, you’re never satisfied!”

  The same old song, I thought. But I kept quiet.
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  “It’s only a summer job, Mom. It’s just for a few weeks. I think I can handle staying awake nights for a few weeks!”

  We finished our meals—or at least, Joe and I finished our meals. Then we hugged Elena good-bye, and she drove off in her dusty tan Elantra. I went back home to my adoring little dog and my piano and my writing. But worry—the same old worry—followed me home.

  It followed me from room to room. It got between Martin and me when I tried to revise his manuscript. It floated in the air in front of the keys when I sat down to play the piano.

  But I didn’t do anything about it. I just kept it to myself. I need to quit hovering, I thought.

  A couple of weeks later, Valerie called up. “Hey, I’ve got some news,” she said in her abrupt, practical way. “Clint and I are having a baby.”

  “Oh!”

  Valerie knew better than most young women what sort of reaction this comment would get. She knew she wouldn’t face a lecture. She knew I would be too busy remembering a similar phone call—a call I myself had had to make.

  I remembered that call. I remembered the disbelief. I remembered the disappointment. But more than anything, what I remembered was my own fierce determination. I had been scared—no, I had been more than scared, I had been petrified! But I had made a promise to this scary new ghost who had just joined me in my graduate school apartment.

  You will not be the one to suffer, I had said. This was my mistake, not yours. No matter what we decide we need to do, you will come first. You will have a family, and you will have a loving home.

  That scary new nameless person haunting my life, that morning nausea and surprising result on the pregnancy test—that baby who, no matter what, was going to come first—

  That baby had been Valerie.

  “Oh!” I said, caught up in past fears and present worries. “What . . . what are you going to do?” And my mind immediately started running down the list: High school diplomas, low-paying jobs, fleabag apartment . . .

  I didn’t have to say it. Valerie knew what I was thinking about.

  “We’re not worried about money,” she assured me. “Don’t worry, we don’t need money. Clint and I know how to get by on nothing.”