Hope and Other Luxuries (59 page)

In my mind, my goblin King brushed his striped hair out of his bony face and gave me a wry smile.

You, too!
I told him, and he nodded.

“Stories like that exist in every country, in every language,” I went on. “I think they explain how we deal with the psychological demands of our world. They may even have to do with how our brains are wired.”

“I see,” Susan said cautiously.

I could tell that Susan was disappointed. She'd probably been angling for emotional hot buttons between Elena and me. Maybe she'd hoped for a nice knock-down-drag-out fight over religion. But Elena was almost asleep. And I wasn't a professor's child for nothing.

“When it comes to anorexia nervosa,” I said, “the first thing I think of is Ophelia. Did you know that Ophelia-style mermaid stories occur all over the world?”

Susan fidgeted. “Ophelia isn't a mermaid.”

“The story repeats all over the world,” I said again. “Ophelia is just the best example. Think about it: think about who Ophelia is. She's the girl who's been used and tossed aside. She more or less admits that she slept with Hamlet, and she may even be pregnant. Then Hamlet turns on her.
He tells her that he doesn't love her and won't marry her, and that she can't marry anybody else, either. Presumably, he's reminding her that she's no longer a virgin. He insults and humiliates her. He even kills her father.

“So Ophelia does what wronged girls and unwed pregnant girls have done since the oldest days of story. She finds some water nearby, and she drowns herself.”

Susan glanced at Elena. “But to get back . . .”

“Compare that to the Little Mermaid,” I continued, ignoring her. “And I mean the real Little Mermaid, not the Disney one. Andersen's mermaid gives up everything to win her prince—not unlike Ophelia. But her prince doesn't love her. She even has to dance for him and his bride on their wedding day. Her sisters try to persuade her to kill the prince, but she throws herself into the water instead.”

As I spoke, I remembered the day when my mother first introduced me to that story, the story where the mermaid doesn't win her prince. So powerful was the spell it put me under that I could remember everything about where I was with the new book she had bought me: in my parents' room, sitting on the edge of their bed as the two of us turned the pages. My feet were swinging. They didn't touch the ground. That book was a board book, I was so little. It was designed so preschool children wouldn't spoil the pages.

A preschool board book about a woman, brokenhearted, unlucky in love, who can either commit murder or lose her own life. Wouldn't Susan have a field day with that!

Not that she would ever hear about it from me.

“So, I ask you,” I went on in my blandest lecturing voice, “why has the legend of the Little Mermaid stayed with us? Why is Ophelia one of the most memorable teenage girls in literature? Why are there pools all over the world, watched over by the spirits of drowned girls who pull men down to their deaths?”

Susan's brow furrowed. “Pools?”

“You've never heard of a
rusalka
?” I countered. “That's either a drowned girl who was wronged and killed herself, like Ophelia, or a water nymph, like the Little Mermaid. Either way, the
rusalki
are predatory
spirits that haunt sources of water, and they drown men without pity. Deadly female water spirits show up all over Europe and Asia. I know of a mythic water demon like that from Hawaii.”

Susan leaned forward, intent again—but probably just intent on bringing this lecture to a close. She asked, “But how does this ‘water demon' relate to you and Elena?”

That was a good question.

I didn't know.

“It's a pattern,” I concluded. “An age-old human pattern, like Pluto kidnapping Persephone. But this particular age-old human pattern has a special meaning for Elena. She surrounds herself with images of mermaids.”

And she didn't even grow up like I did
, I thought,
with the tragic mermaid who loses her prince. In her generation, they've tampered with the story to make it work out to a happy ending
.

When was it? I mused. When did my daughter first start showing me pictures of mermaids and Ophelias? She would do Internet searches and scour library books to find them. Most important was Millais's famous Pre-Raphaelite Ophelia, so delicate, surrounded by flowers.
Her clothes spread wide, and mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up
 . . .

Was it? Yes, it had to be. It must have been after the rape.

Would I be sharing that with Susan?

No.

“So, if you sum up the patterns,” I concluded, “the mermaid/Ophelia embodies a history of sexual violence or mistreatment. She wanted a normal life, but it was a man who took that life away from her. Heartbreak drove her into the water—or back into the water. It was a step from life toward death, and the mermaid is happy to repay the favor. Think about this: the mermaid is the strong one when she meets a human man. He's the one who needs to fear for his life. Is that why mermaids bring mistreated girls such a sense of satisfaction? Is that why they seek out water? Because mermaids have transcended a man's mistreatment, and now they can kill?”

Susan declined to comment.
I brought up religion
, she was probably thinking.
I wanted indignation, vulnerability, and a reexamination in a new
light of this family's most fundamental structures. I wanted to break something open, to get something started. This has nothing to do with what I wanted
.

Well, no. Because her approach had been idiotic.

The therapy session ended. I woke up Elena to say good-bye, and then I drove home to the orphanage. I walked quickly through the silent halls, temporarily buoyed up by the talk I'd had. It had been fun. For one hour, I had had fun.

At the turning to my hall, I bumped into a young woman with a black ponytail. Her toddler son was rolling a tricycle down the center of the hallway. I didn't want to interfere with his play, so I fell into step next to the woman. She gave me a wan smile and looked away.

He's sick
, I thought with swift, instinctive recognition.
He's very sick. That's why she has that look in her eyes
.

The first night Elena and I had spent at the orphanage, I'd thought,
I'll bet I make lots of friends here
. But I hadn't. I had discovered that I didn't want to make friends. No one here wanted to make friends. We didn't wish one another ill, but our children, our parents, or our spouses were here for reasons that terrified us. We didn't want to have to ask or answer painful questions.

So, as I walked beside the young woman, neither of us spoke. We just smiled vaguely down at the busy little boy. At the end of the hall, he turned around and rolled back the way he had come, and I unlocked my door.

“Bye,” I said—the first word I had spoken.

“Bye,” the woman answered, turning away.

The minute I walked into the room, my happy mood popped like a bubble. Sad feelings and dreary memories detached themselves from the walls and rushed over to cling to me. Too many angry words and wretched silences . . .

This room was filling up with unhappiness.

It was too late in the day to get any work done now—or, at least, that's what I told myself. I shook a blanket out over my neatly made bed and curled up underneath it.

I could lecture Susan about myth and folklore to put off talking about the truth, but the fact was that I had begun to feel a deep alienation
from the drab, silent person my daughter had become. She wasn't a thing like the Elena I had known. We felt so far apart now that I didn't know if we would ever manage to bridge the gulf between us.

Elena and I had done it before. I had looked inside my angry, dramatic teenager and felt a spark of kinship with that young person struggling toward adulthood—yes, and respect, too, because the birth of a grown-up is as messy and painful as the original birth was. And Elena had looked inside me and felt pity for the sad, anxious worrier her mother could be.

But this Elena wasn't like that. I couldn't find my way to her.

And this Elena couldn't find her way back to me.

So I slept. It felt like all I could do. I had nothing more useful to contribute. I woke up long enough to answer the phone and fend off Joe's concerned questions and Valerie's down-to-earth comments, and I made them tell me things so they wouldn't notice that I wasn't telling them anything anymore.

Day by day, Joe and Valerie had their own bad news to report. Simon was getting worse. His neck hadn't healed right, and the new treatments weren't helping. Dylan, my blue beauty, wasn't eating. Clint had left to go work in Georgia, and Gemma had colic again. She was waking Valerie up hour after hour every night.

If I were there, I could do something to help. But I was stuck where I was. And I wasn't in a position to help anybody.

I snuffled and sniffled with sinusitis so bad that it sent me to the emergency room twice. I took cold medicine day and night. I woke up to drive Elena in, and I came home and fell asleep, and I woke up to drive her home, and she fell asleep, and I fell asleep.

Seven days a week, nothing varied our routine.

But one morning, Elena called to me from the bathroom, and her voice had a new tone in it. There was a quickness there—perhaps a hint of excitement.

“Mom, can you come here?”

Elena, excited? Finally excited? Maybe today would be a different day—a better day.

“What's up?” I asked, coming over.

Elena was standing in front of the sink with her back to me. “I can't get it to stop,” she said.

A swiftly flowing stream of dark-colored blood was sliding down her arm into the sink. Maybe it was the white porcelain and the stainless steel drain that made that stream of brownish blood look dirty. All I know is that I felt the ugliness of it like a physical blow.

The blood was slipping from a deep gash on Elena's forearm near the bend of her elbow. It was a razor cut—a deliberate cut. I grabbed a blue-checked hand towel off the top of the stack of clean towels on the shelf and clamped it over the wound.

“Lie down,” I said. “Right here on the floor.”

Elena lay down on the tile with her head on my lap, and I held her arm up in the air over her head. Simple first aid, learned out of boredom one summer in my lonely childhood, when I had devoted myself to the study of my brother's Boy Scout handbook.

A gash. An ugly, vicious cut. A deliberate mutilation. Damage, deliberate damage to the precious body I had cherished and nurtured—to the body I had guarded with my own life since before she was born!

I should understand. I had understood my character, Miranda, when she had cut herself to find relief from her mental anguish. I had even tried to understand the lost and wounded Valerie, with her patterns of burns. But now, I felt nothing but cold, hard anger. I was done with all this. I didn't want to understand.

It took more than ten minutes of pressure before the wound began to close, and the whole time, there was nothing to look at but the underside of the sink.
I should get that cobweb after we get up
, I thought. And then, unhappily,
This hand towel is probably ruined
.

“What did you use?” I asked.

“My razor.”

“Why?”

“Because I had a panic attack.”

“Elena, I was right here!” I said. “Why didn't you call me if you were in trouble?”

“It was last night. You were sleeping. I didn't want to bother you.”

“And you thought
this
wasn't going to bother me?”

We both fell silent at that. Elena's logic was eluding me. As usual.

Elena herself was feeling not only excited but also upbeat. She looked happier than she had looked in days. Her high spirits disgusted me. I was done with understanding. There was nothing about this I wanted to understand.

This, Susan, is why the whole thing feels demonic
, I thought with grim fury.
There's a hideous feeding off pain here, a hideous perversion of happiness
.

Elena's excitement only served to make me act deliberately, excessively sensible. “Here, hold this towel in place while I grab my purse,” I told her. “And take a book. We'll probably be there a while.”

“I'm not going to the ER,” she said.

“What? Elena, we have to go! That cut needs six or seven stitches at least!”

“I won't go,” Elena repeated. “I'm not waiting at an ER for hours. I need to get to treatment.”

My sensible demeanor was gone. I was back to yelling again. “All you do is
sleep
through treatment!”

But Elena had already picked up her backpack and was walking through the door. “If you take me to the ER, I'll refuse care,” she said over her shoulder. “When I get to treatment, Ms. Carter can tape it.”

Steaming mad, I stalked after this awful stranger through the orphanage halls. Was Elena doing this just to upset me? For the sake of the cheerful volunteers, I kept my mouth shut until we got into the car, but once there, I couldn't contain myself.

“Okay, that's not just crazy,” I said. “That's stupid!”

“
Crazy. Stupid
. Thanks, Mom,” she said.

“Can you give me one good reason why you're refusing to be responsible about this?”

Elena stared out the window at the morning traffic. We were stopped at a light, with cars all around us. Traffic was heavy. Everywhere, commuters were heading to work. From outside our car, we must look like just another carpool.

“I don't want to have to wait,” she said finally.

“Well, you should have thought of that before you sliced yourself up,” I said. “That's too big not to stitch, and even so, it'll leave a scar.”

Elena settled back and closed her eyes.