Hope and Other Luxuries (71 page)

“Like it's supposed to be
her
fault you screwed up!” Valerie was saying. “Like you didn't do
every single thing
she taught us not to do! Hey,
I
was an idiot,
I
know my way around psych wards, but at least I didn't blame
other
people for the shit I did!”

The glare had left Bea's eyes. She had figured it out. That was good: one item off my to-do list. At these words, however, Bea gave a little shake and said, “You mean, you were in an institution, too?”

“Eight weeks in England with the rich and famous,” Valerie affirmed. “Tea and crumpets on the lawn every afternoon.”

“Anorexia?” Bea asked.

“Depression,” Valerie answered calmly. “I burned and cut the shit out of myself. A lot of it, right there at the hospital.”

She held Gemma with one hand while she stretched out the other hand. Once again, I saw the shiny lilac dots of the burns.

They've faded out so well
, I thought.
You'd hardly even know they were there
.

Bea studied them. Then she turned to me. “That must have been very painful for you,” she said.

Was it?
I found myself thinking in surprise.
Was it painful?

My imagination found the memory and played it for me: Valerie walking into the kitchen, humming softly, oddly excited and jubilant. And her hands . . . the oozing round sores on the backs of her hands . . .

It was as if a crack had opened up in the earth at my feet—a crack that went all the way down to hell. Violent anguish shot through me. I had had no idea that I could still hurt so much.

The next instant, rage came boiling up inside, the closest feeling to hate that I'd ever known. How
dare
this woman try to touch my injured feelings! She'd made herself
part
of my injury now! That little drama she'd played, ordering me into her presence—and, once she'd found out that she was wrong, to come schmoozing up to me and actually force me to
feel
 . . .

I lifted my head, and I glared her down.

“Well,” Bea said, shifting a little and sighing, “I still think it's a good idea for Elena to go into the hospital. She's in a very poor frame of mind.”

An hour and a half later, I was sitting with Elena in the waiting room of a very large and very busy hospital. At least fifty other people were waiting there, too. One man was waiting in handcuffs, with police.

When I had woken up this morning, I hadn't had this in mind for my day. But things were starting to improve: at least now we were sitting down. For the first fifteen minutes, there had been no free chairs, and both of us had had to stand.

Elena and I hadn't spoken to one another on the way home. After what she had put me through that day, I hadn't even bothered to suggest that she eat breakfast. But after she had changed clothes, she'd brought a bowl of cereal over and sat beside me while I'd made my insurance calls. Now she was reading a book while I people-watched. A waiting room is a great place to meet new characters.

“Listen to this, Mom,” she said.

Half of my brain listened to the passage she read out while the other half thought back fondly over all the thousands of times in her life when I'd heard that invitation. Valerie and Elena were both huge readers, devouring several new books a week, and they often read out passages to me. Elena had probably given me summaries of three-quarters of the books she'd read.

Or, at least, she
had
been a huge reader—back when she'd had a life.

After a little conversation about the book Elena was reading, she began to share amusing stories with me about the party last night. Lisa had been involved in it in some way, so her statements to me hadn't been complete lies.

“My friend Steph's roommate had a party last week,” she said, “but Steph's in summer school, so she decided she'd be good and stay in her room and study for her exams. She kept the door shut and studied all evening. She didn't come out and have a single drink. Around midnight, she needed to go to the bathroom, but the party was going full force. She didn't want to attract attention and have someone call for her to come drink with them, so she tiptoed across the hall to the bathroom without turning on the light. She took one step into the bathroom and fell flat on her face. A guy was lying on the floor in there; she fell right over him.

“Steph got a concussion and broke her nose; they had to call nine-one-one. And the guy she tripped over—of course,
he's
fine. So, she's sitting there, holding a towel up to her nose, she's bleeding all over her shirt, and she yells at the guy, ‘Why were you lying down in the bathroom?' And he says, ‘Because I wasn't feeling good.' And she says, ‘Yeah, but in the dark?' And he says, ‘The light hurt my eyes!'

“So now Steph's back in class, and she's got two black eyes and a broken nose, and she says everybody wants to know what happened. So she says, ‘I fell in the bathroom,' and they giggle and say, ‘So—a party, right?' And she says, ‘Yeah, but I didn't drink!' And they say, ‘
R-i-g-h-t
, sure you didn't drink!' ‘The one time I'm good!' she says.”

I laughed. This felt like the old Elena, the one I missed so much. I hadn't heard her talk like this in ages. And then it hit me: Elena had missed her medication that morning—all those powerful, mind-altering, mood-stabilizing drugs.

Elena was watching a young Hispanic mother with two children. The baby was the sick one. Its black eyes were bright with fever, and it gave a weak, exhausted cough every now and then. I could tell that the mother hadn't slept lately. Her eyes fixed and drifted in a stare of self-hypnosis.

The toddler sitting next to her wanted to be in her lap, too, where the baby was, so he scaled her periodically, using handholds and toeholds, in the manner of a small rock climber. Each time he reached a certain point, she detached him and plopped him back down on the seat beside her.

“So, what did you want to ask me about the book?” Elena said. Even though all I had was a fragment of a manuscript, she always called it
the book
.

“Recovery,” I said. “Talk to me about recovery. What does that word mean to you?”

Elena didn't answer right away. She continued watching the young mother with the baby.

The toddler had reached his maximum altitude again, placing one sneaker on his brother's blanketed form. His mother disentangled him and moved him to his seat. But she didn't scold him. Her hands were gentle.

At last, Elena said, “I don't know.”

When the topic of recovery had come up before, it had been in the middle of arguments. But we weren't arguing now. So I waited.

“I guess, at first, I hoped that recovery would mean that my critical voice would shut up,” she said. “It yells at me all the time. It's like living with a witch. But now, I don't know what I hope for. I don't hope for anything, I guess.”

My heart sank. But I wasn't surprised.

“I think,” she continued, “that recovery means doing the things you know you have to do, even though you don't want to do them. You build up your willpower. You know you have to eat breakfast, so you do, even though your critical voice is yelling. You know you have to eat a snack, so you do. And so on, and so on, every day. You make yourself buy food, and you make yourself eat it. It never stops being a struggle.”

“So, for me,” I said slowly, trying to internalize this bleak picture, “it would be like—I don't know. Like going on a very severe diet, where everything I wanted to do was the opposite of what I did.”

“Does your critical voice call you a bitch if you go on a severe diet?”

“No,” I said. “I mean, I don't know because I've never done crazy diets, but my critical voice doesn't usually call me names.”

“Then no,” Elena concluded. “That's not what it's like.”

And we fell silent again.

The toddler had given up mountain climbing for the moment. He'd turned his attention to his mother's ring. He was holding the ring with both small hands and turning it in the light, even though it was still on her finger. This involved a certain amount of impossible bending, but his mother accommodated him without protest.

The baby in her lap stirred every now and then and opened its mouth as if it wanted to cry. But all that came out each time was a little cough.

“What about your friends, then?” I said. “What do you think they'd say recovery was like?”

“They don't know, either,” Elena said. “I've never met a real recovered anorexic.”

“Not one? Don't they bring them back to give pep talks or something? If you don't meet them, how are you supposed to know what to aim for?”

A note crept into Elena's voice. Bitterness? Sadness?

Maybe fatalism.

“They haven't recovered,” she said. “None of them. There's Sheila: she's been in treatment off and on since 2004. She never finished high school. There's Paula: she's been anorexic since her car accident. Five months of full-day therapy didn't change a thing. There's Stella: since leaving Clove House in April, she's been in the hospital twice. She didn't sign up for classes this fall, either. She hides out in her room all day.”

This sounded like somebody I knew.

“There's Erin. She's been at Clove House four times already. Each time they send her home, she gets worse until her heart starts showing damage, and then they put her back in again. I don't know a single anorexic who's gotten a job. I don't know anybody who's managed to finish school.”

“What about your friend, the master's student?”

“Dropped out. Her parents had to move her back home.”

“What about Mandy? She looked great the last time I saw her. She actually was at full, normal weight.”

“Clove House kicked Mandy out of the part-time program last month because her attitude was so bad. We keep track of one another, but nobody knows what happened to her. We haven't heard from Mandy since.”

I could feel a chill rising through me, as if ice had been piled around my body. It was all I could do not to shiver and rub my hands. I wasn't asking interview questions anymore, I was starting to argue and plead. I took a breath and willed myself to calm down.

“Okay then, what about your anorexia books?” I said, trying to keep my voice neutral. “All those memoirs and biographies you've read that I won't read—they're bound to talk about recovery.”

“They talk shit,” Elena said in a matter-of-fact tone. “They go along for a while, maybe telling the truth, maybe not, and then all of a sudden, it's rainbows and unicorns. I don't know those people. I don't know whether they were ever like me. Show me a person who says she's a recovered anorexic, and how do I know she ever felt the way I feel?”

I could understand that. The writer in me could feel the truth of that.

“What I'm waiting for,” Elena continued sadly, “is for one of my friends to recover. I still haven't seen that happen.”

The toddler finally gave up climbing and exploring. He sat down flat on his rear in the chair and started to whimper. The young mother roused herself at this and gave him a smile. He stopped crying, but he went right back to climbing.

“Maybe it has to be you,” I said. “Maybe they're all waiting for you.”

“What makes me so special?” scoffed Elena.

Besides everything?
I thought to myself.

“You're extraordinary,” I said. “How many people do you think could have tackled boarding school in a foreign language? None of the other English-speakers there mastered German—only you and your sister. How many high school students could have handled volunteering at the ER? You handled everything there from infant death to battle fatigue.”

“We call it PTSD, Mom,” Elena murmured, but I could tell she wasn't really listening. “They're all back, you know,” she continued in a low voice. “All my friends. They're already back.”

“Back where?” I asked.

“Back at Clove House. They go on crash diets as quick as they can, and then they get back in. It's all they used to talk about, some days, how much they were going to lose to get back in once they got kicked out.”

“But I thought they all hated that place!” I protested—maybe with more force than I should have. I took a second to bring my voice back under control. “Why would they work so hard to get back in if they hate it as much as they say they do?”

“We do hate it . . . ,” Elena said slowly. But I could see it in her eyes. Elena wanted to go back, too.

Go back to
what
? Not to recovery. That much I was sure of. Elena's feelings about Clove House didn't have anything to do with recovery.

Did
any
of her feelings have to do with recovery?

As if Elena guessed what I was thinking, she gave a little shrug. “They're my friends,” she said.

A staff member in blue scrubs came through the door and called out a name. It wasn't our name, and it wasn't the name of the baby with the cough, either.

“This is bullshit,” Elena said. “That therapist was a fruitcake. I don't need to go into the hospital, and I don't want to. School registration starts tomorrow. Classes start next week. I have things to do. Let's get out of here, and can we go by Whataburger? I want a Number One combo meal.”

She knew me so well. Just as she had done with Bea, she was playing on all of my weaknesses. She was saying all the things she knew I wanted to hear. Even now, after everything I'd learned, I couldn't help hoping that she was ready to make a fresh start.

We left and picked up our Whataburger order. With an inward sigh, I chose chicken tenders. I had put on eight more pounds so far this year, but I didn't want to look like I was afraid of food.