Hope and Other Luxuries (68 page)

“Coming through!” called Valerie, and she and Elena walked a headboard past me on its way to the garage. “Okay,” she said to her sister, “let's take a smoke break.”

“But . . . they're moving furniture!” I said helplessly into the phone. “There's not even anywhere to sit!”

“We won't be there for another couple of hours,” my sister-in-law said.

Another couple of hours in this place. What could I get done in a couple of hours? Ruined food in the freezer, God knows what in the
fridge, a guest bathroom with dirty clothes for a carpet, a dead fish on the kitchen counter . . .

“I just put down our fish,” I heard myself say. “Our cat's dead. Clint's digging a grave.”

I barely heard her efforts to persuade me. I was looking at my whole life through her eyes. It wasn't just the dust bunnies and carpet stains. It was the army of brown pill bottles by the breakfast table. It was the big white poster board sticking up out of our mound of suitcases, a sample of Elena's art therapy, with a four-letter word scrawled across it in black paint.

For one split second, I imagined my brother's family—that calm, quiet, thoughtful family—walking through the door of this house. My brother and sister-in-law don't raise their voices. Their four children are the most easygoing youngsters I've met. They would stand together in the middle of my living room, and they would look around and take it all in. There are happy, productive, I've-been-too-busy-to-sort-this-all-out dirty houses. And then there was the kind I had. No one would mistake this kind for the other kind. Not even the youngest child.

If my family saw it—if they walked through that door and saw it—then they couldn't possibly unsee it again.

I couldn't bear to let that happen.

“I'm not ready!” I cried in despair. “If you come later this week . . . If you go to your sister's house first . . . There's nothing clean here. There's no place to
be
! It isn't just that the cat's dead and the freezer doesn't work. It's everything, the whole place, the whole house!”

Stunned and small, my sister-in-law's voice murmured good-bye. I sat there with my squirming grandchild while my imagination played it out for me: the abrupt, shocked stillness inside the motor home. My brother would be staring straight out over the steering wheel, disappointed and angry. He would doubtless remind his wife that she should have worked out the details sooner, as he had doubtless been reminding her to do. The children would be puzzled. They would be asking unfortunate questions. And she would be the one who would have to answer them, her vacation suddenly grown meager.

Who could blame a busy farm wife for failing to plan? And how could she have planned for this anyway? In her wildest dreams, she couldn't have imagined that her godmother would turn her away. She couldn't have planned for this kind of pain.

I bounced Gemma recklessly on my knee while her baby face blurred and the chaos distorted around me. Then I wiped my eyes, stood up, set my grandchild on my hip, and walked out to the backyard to find the others.

“I'm going to Whataburger,” I said. “What does everybody want?”

W
ith the PS3 in the living room, I couldn't write at home anymore. The sound of exploding zombies seemed to find me wherever I went. So, once I had imposed order and my house was no longer filthy, I began exploring new places to write Elena's memoir.

The library
, I thought.
A library will be perfect!
I'm a librarian by training, and I worked as a university librarian for years, so I had happy dreams of sitting at a library carrel, typing away on my laptop. How could this solution not work?

But it didn't.

I tried three different libraries, but none of them worked.

Day after day, I started Elena's story over. I pulled up a clean, blank page, and I hurled sentences at it. For an hour or so, everything would go well. Then my thoughts would stop finding connections.

I would start deleting the things that were wrong. The sentences would break apart. The words would capsize into the endless white.

And at the end of the day, I would find myself staring at a clean, blank page again.

I moved that useless, empty file from one computer to another. I changed screens and put on my reading glasses, as if the problem were as simple as the font size I'd chosen—as if, with one little tweak, I could bring the whole thing into focus. And now, here I was, bouncing from library to library, as if the problem were as simple as that particular mix of patrons—the particular hiss of a whisper or the scrape of a library chair.

But I knew that wasn't what was wrong. It was that the story hurt. It hurt me so much that I could hardly bear to be in the same room with it.
It hurt me so much that putting my hands on the keys seemed to generate an electric shock. It was sending me, step by step, methodically and meticulously, through every single one of my worst memories.

Normally, when I write, I forget who I am in this world and become the god of another. I set tasks for my characters to achieve and watch over them as they struggle. Because I hate boredom, I create amazing things for those characters to find along the way: a magic plant made out of starlight, wizards who wrap themselves in mist, or a living cat of clear glass whose paws chime gently as he strolls across the floor.

When I write stories, I forget that I'm working with words. I don't see the computer screen anymore. I see monsters, hear shrieks, feel soft threads of moss, and smell the sharp, clean scent of snow. I don't stay in this world. I fall out of this world into a
new
world, a place I've designed myself—a place that is under my complete control.

But I was in Elena's story. Elena's story was in my world. When I wrote it, I couldn't escape.

When I wrote her memoir, I fell out of my world . . . into my world again. I closed my eyes, forgot the computer screen, opened them in that other reality . . . and saw my computer screen again.

I was transported to a place . . .

That was right here.

I was like a bird on a string. I was like a frog trying to fly. I would get a running start and slam into a brick wall.

Over and over and over.

One morning, having made my way through every room of the house over the course of the past week, I was back at the local public library again. I rubbed my toes along the tops of my flip-flops on the floor under the table, cracked my knuckles, and reread what I had written so far.

It was my character, Elena. She was talking about her memoir.

So, the way this book should go is the way things go in those after-school specials—you know, the ones with the two best girlfriends who do everything together. And they have the good times—cut
to scene of girls laughing and eating cotton candy at the carnival. And they have the bad times—cut to scene of girls throwing up behind the dumpster while flashing lights indicate that the cops are closing in.

And then, tragically, suddenly, like we didn't know it was going to happen all along, one of the girls (a) overdoses, (b) gets pregnant, (c) goes to jail, (d) drives drunk and ends up in a wheelchair, (e) dies dies dies dies dies.

And the other girl gets her act together.

It isn't that easy, of course. It requires several scenes of school counselors and teachers looking solemn, a tearful group hug with parents and siblings, maybe a short film clip of a doctor's office, perhaps a few scary seconds of a judge. And then, sooner or later, there's the scene where the girl has to be all boring and watch her friends go off to party without her. Oh, yeah, it's a long, hard process of recovery, taking at least five minutes of film time, but it pays off in the end with the glowing graduation speech:

God bless us, every one!

Well, I had a best friend, Mona. We did everything together. We cried together. We cut class together. We ate and ate and overate, and then we purged together.

And now my best friend has a job, and a life, and a healthy baby girl.

Where the hell does that leave
me
?

Anger and bitterness built up inside me as I read.
The world wants anorexia to be so easy
, I thought.
Well, this isn't an easy disease! It isn't just fooling around with green tea. It isn't just a diet gone wrong
.

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.