Hope and Other Luxuries (72 page)

“I want to get my room cleaned up,” Elena said as we walked into the house. “Hey, Val, didn't you want to go to Babies“R”Us?” And she headed over to the mob of pill bottles. “I feel like death. My head is pounding. Did I forget my drugs this morning? Hey, don't let's eat in here, let's watch a
Futurama
.”

Watching television helped Elena get through the ordeal of eating. How sad to think of a burger and fries as an ordeal.

While we moved the various white paper bags and large plastic cups to the living room, Elena and Valerie discussed what Valerie needed at Babies“R”Us. But by the time the
Futurama
episode was over, Elena was starting to blink with sleepiness.

“I think I'll go nap for an hour,” she muttered.

“But what about your room?” I prodded hopefully. “What about going to the store?”

“In an hour,” she said as she trailed across the living room, fluttering her fingers good-bye. “I'll be up in an hour, I
promise
.”

We didn't see her again until noon the following day.

T
hree months after Elena and I came home from Clove House, the nutritionist she was working with called me up.

“Mrs. Dunkle, I have good news!” she said. “Elena gained two pounds this week!”

“But . . . ,” I said. “How is that even possible?”

“Well, she did very well on her meal plan last week,” the nutritionist answered, nonplussed. “It's clear that she's been working hard . . . What do you mean, how is it possible?”

“Elena didn't follow the meal plan you sent home,” I said. “Not at all.”

“Oh! But she gave me a food diary, all filled out . . .”

“And she ate very little. She didn't even
pretend
to eat more than one meal a day, not to mention the possibility of purging.”

“Oh. Well, I don't know. I take her weight on the same scale each week. Maybe it's possible that she's eating, Mrs. Dunkle, and you're just not seeing it.”

No, it isn't
, I thought.
No, it isn't possible
.

I was on my way to pick up Elena from that appointment. Once again, she had started talking me into driving her around. The way I saw it, it was better than having her sleep her life away at home, and she was so drugged and gaunt that I worried about her endangering herself and others. What if she passed out behind the wheel?

I pulled into the parking lot, and Elena slid into the front seat.

“Did you hear?” she asked. “I gained two pounds!”

I stared at my daughter. She looked worse than I had ever seen her look before.

Elena's hair was weedy and dry. It tangled constantly. The skin of her gray, gaunt face was scaly. It sagged in little wrinkles over her cheekbones and pinched in around her temples. Her dark brown eyes were sunken and lifeless, and she looked closer to forty years old than twenty. I stared at her and thought,
My beautiful daughter isn't beautiful anymore
.

“So,” I said casually, “what
is
your weight these days?”

Elena named a number only three pounds off her ideal weight.

And I can fly
, I thought sadly.
Who do you think you're kidding?

But I didn't say a word out loud.

We drove to the grocery store. Elena wouldn't have gone there on her own, but if she was riding with me, she had to put up with it. She trailed behind me around the store, exhausted, begging me to hurry up.

I took my time.

“We should get a cake!” Elena announced suddenly. “To celebrate my two pounds.”

Once more, I stared at her.

Did she mean it? Would she actually eat?

“Absolutely!” I said. “Any cake you like.”

So Elena hauled me to the bakery and studied the cakes with interest. Remembering her former love of fudgy chocolate cakes, I pointed out several of those.

“No, I want that one,” she said.

“That one?” I said in astonishment. “But that's . . .”

I didn't finish the sentence, but the disconnect between reality and my day grew even wider. Elena's choice was a “Disney princess” cake, the kind that looks like a doll. A plastic doll of Cinderella was poking up out of the center, and the round blue-frosted cake was her gown.

It was the kind of cake designed to appeal to preschoolers or early grade-schoolers inviting their whole class to their birthday party. It certainly wasn't the choice of your typical twenty-one-year-old.

But there was a
slight
possibility—
very
slight—that Elena might actually eat some of it. I would give a great deal to make that happen.

“Any cake you want,” I repeated with hollow cheerfulness, and I purchased the plastic princess cake. When we got home, I cut a slice for Elena, Valerie, and myself. To my surprise, it turned out to taste fantastic.

Fork in hand, Elena talked ninety miles an hour while Valerie and I ate our pieces of cake. Finally, she took a couple of nervous bites and then told us she didn't feel well.

“But save my piece,” she said. “I'll eat it later.”

Valerie and I watched her go. Then Valerie got up and cut us each another piece of cake. She said, “So, Clint says, now that he's graduated, they should assign him to a tech school pretty soon.”

This was a constant hopeful refrain around the house these days. Like me, Valerie is an optimist.

I had been very impressed at how well she and Clint were handling their separation. During the eight long weeks of his basic training, they had been able to talk on the phone only twice. Nonetheless, Valerie had stayed upbeat and relaxed. We had had endless cheerful conversations about babies and baby care, and if she was lonely, she had kept it to herself.

Clint's graduation had been a grand, beautiful ceremony, but afterward, he had been able to spend only two days with his family. On our way back to the car after dropping him off at the dorms, we had passed a young woman who was sobbing as her new airman said good-bye.

“Look at that!” Valerie had said scornfully. “Like he needs that, with everything else he's got going on! I wouldn't do that to Clint, no matter how bad I felt. That's not what it takes to be a good Air Force wife.”

Now Clint was coming home each weekend while he waited to be assigned a specialty. But once he went into tech school, he might be far away again, and it might be months before their family could be together.

“Does he have any idea what they might choose?” I asked.

“No,” Valerie said. “The tests don't just spell it out. They look to see how you do, and then they look to see what they need. But here's the thing: most tech schools are only about three months long. That's not too bad. And if they send him to learn something really complicated, they'll send Gemma and me, too. They do that with the longer schools.”

Three months!
I thought.
I'd hate that!
And I remembered how depressed I'd been, away from Joe and the rest of the family at Clove House. But that wasn't what I said out loud.

“Three months will go by quickly,” I said.

“Yeah, they will,” Valerie agreed. “I just feel bad for what he's missing out with Gemma. He missed her learning to roll over when he was in Georgia. He missed her learning to sit up when he was in basic. He's already pretty much guaranteed to miss her first Christmas, and if they keep messing around, he'll miss her birthday, too. I just wish they'd get off their butts and send him
somewhere
.”

That was on Monday. On Wednesday, Elena's alarm went off and once again failed to wake her up. It was so loud that the whole house could hear it, including Gemma, who started to cry. But somehow, right next to it, Elena still slept on.

In the bedroom, trying to write, I listened to it blare. Then I heard Valerie yell. Then I heard Elena yell.

Good
, I thought.
That means she's up
.

Half an hour later, I walked into the living room. Valerie was on the floor with Gemma, feeding bright plastic balls into a toy contraption. With a
whoop
, the balls popped up into the air: red, yellow, blue, green. Each time a ball popped up, Gemma gave a scream of delight and made a swipe for it.

I paused to watch for a minute. Gemma was growing up so fast! Valerie handed her a purple ball, and Gemma held it in both her chubby little hands and brought it up to her mouth to taste it.

Then I noticed that Elena's purse and car keys were still on the piano bench.

“Where's your sister? I thought she got up thirty minutes ago.”

“I haven't seen her,” Valerie said.

“But the alarm went off!”

“Yeah, and it kept going off until I went in there and made Her Highness stop it. But you know that doesn't mean anything.”

And that, of course, was true.

I pushed open the door to Elena's room. Immediately, Genny jumped down from the bed and trotted out. She wasn't the brightest little dog in the world, but she had learned the routine by now.

“Elena!” I said, shaking the blanket.

“Nnnnnn!” it protested.

“Elena, you're going to be late for class!”

Again!
I thought. But I didn't say it.

Elena rolled over and announced with perfect composure, “Class is canceled. The professor called. She's sick.”

“The professor called,” I echoed. “She called
you
.”

“Mm-hmm,” Elena muttered, her face in the pillow.

“A class of ninety students, and she called
you
to say she was sick. Get up, Elena! You can't miss class again.”

“I will,” she murmured mechanically.

But I didn't believe it. I kept shaking her. “I'm not stopping until I see you sit up.”

Muttering darkly, Elena sat up.

There! That wasn't so bad. I walked back out and sat down next to Valerie and Gemma. My granddaughter greeted me with a happy gurgle and handed me the purple ball, now slippery with baby spit. Her eyes were lightening up and changing color, with green flecks and blue flecks. They
did
look a little bit like mine.

Half a minute later, Elena appeared in the living room doorway. “What the
hell
!” she cried. “You let me sleep too late!”

Valerie and I exchanged a look.

“My alarm didn't go off!” Elena continued, frantic. “It didn't go off! You didn't wake me up! Thanks a
lot
, you two!”

A second later, the bathroom door slammed.

“I'm going back to work,” I told Valerie, standing up. “I have writing to do. I am
not
driving your sister to school.”

Fifteen minutes later, I was in the car, driving Elena to school.

Elena was in her pajamas. Once upon a time, she had assured me that many college students go to class in their pajamas. Once upon a time, I had actually cared. Nowadays, pajamas out in public were the last thing I worried about.

Elena looked out the window and sighed. “Oh, school, how I hate thee!”

My cynicism vanished in an icy blast of fear. The hair actually prickled on my arms. Of all the things this sad creature next to me could say, this was the one statement
least
like my daughter.

Elena loved school. She had loved it from the very first day of preschool. She was absolutely passionate about learning. Her curiosity extended to everything in the universe. I had never once seen her bored.

Dear
God
! What had happened to my daughter?

That afternoon, I sat down at the kitchen table and ate the last piece of Disney princess cake. As it turned out, Elena hadn't had more of it than those two bites. Her partially eaten piece had stayed on the counter until its blue frosting had dried out. Finally, I had thrown it away.

While I ate, I opened up my laptop and reread what I had written on her memoir that morning.

When you recover . . .

Yes, of course, anorexics support one another in recovery. But they don't, on the whole, understand it very well. Recovery is like death: a closed door, a complete unknown. A lot of anorexics never make it through that door.

Treatment—now, that's something anorexics come to know backward and forward, and they enjoy meeting up with their friends at the treatment center. “Are you going back in?” they say. “I'm going back in, and Leslie's there, and Tracy's there, and Jenna's coming next week. Come back to treatment, we all miss you so much!”

But recovery . . . that's a different matter.

Not good. Not bad. Just unknown.

When you gain weight, you don't look like an anorexic anymore, and that means you don't belong in the club. You can't meet back at the treatment center when you're at a healthy weight.

Hence the question anorexics ask one another as they're sitting around the treatment center, sipping their Boost Breezes:

“How much weight are you going to lose the month you get out?”

I read this little snippet, and I thought of all the things I knew about Elena now. I took out a sheet of paper, and I made myself stay cold and calm. I didn't let myself be a mother about this—that feeble, fluttery mother. I made myself stay in my writer's mind.

What did I know about my character's time since she had left treatment? What had she done in the last three months?

The sheet of paper started filling up with bad news.

• weight: as bad as before treatment, maybe worse
  
• mindset: definitely worse now—before, at least she wanted treatment
  
• habits: same as before treatment
  
• health: very bad, at least as bad as before
  
• medication: takes it, doesn't try to abuse it or overdose—but it isn't helping
  

After I was finished, I read it through, then drew a line underneath it and summed it up: