Hope and Other Luxuries: A Mother's Life With a Daughter's Anorexia

by Clare B. Dunkle

  Dear Lord, I thought, why didn’t You let him finish this one?

  It was Wednesday night. Two more days of visits to go. I turned out the light and stretched out under the puffy down comforter, feeling very virtuous and sleepy.

  My cell phone rang. It was Elena. Wincing, I hit the talk button.

  “Hello?”

  “So, there’s something they want me to tell you,” Elena said. And the nice, sleepy feelings streamed out of me as if there were a butcher’s drain underneath my mattress.

  “Okay,” I said cautiously. “What is it?”

  “I was raped when I was at the boarding school. Not at school. At a party. It was a free weekend, and Mona and I went to a party with a bunch of the boys at the boys’ boarding school.”

  Raped? My girl? My little girl? Raped? And my imagination pulled up images of the young boarding-school Elena, of her awkward adolescent body and goofy grin.

  Who was he? my brain howled. WHO WAS HE?

  “Who was he?” my voice echoed.

  “I don’t know,” Elena said. “I didn’t see his face.”

  That idea dug its claws into me. Before I could stop it, my imagination started to work. Attacked, held so close to another person, an enemy! But still, a total stranger—an unknown.

  “You don’t know anything about who he was?”

  “He was German, I think. At least, he yelled at me in German when I bit him.”

  And I could feel myself scrambling back from these details, trying to shut down my imagination, pushing away the images it started to feed me, no—no—no—

  “Oh, dear God, Elena!” I said. “Why didn’t you tell us?” And my mind was still locked on that question: Who? WHO? WHO??

  “I thought Dad would kill him. I didn’t want Dad to go to jail in a foreign country. I thought, This is my fault. I thought I was going to hell.”

  This shook me out of my feelings of revenge.

  “But, Elena, you had to know that wasn’t true,” I said. “You had to know God would never punish you for another person’s evil like that. It wasn’t your fault . . .”

  “It was my fault I was there.”

  “Okay, so you were a kid, and you sneaked out when you weren’t supposed to. You were only fifteen . . .”

  Elena’s voice was like a whiplash. “Thirteen.”

  Thirteen? No. No, oh, God! And my brain got tangled up and tripped over itself, trying to fix dates to years, years to grades.

  “Thirteen,” I echoed, trying to keep my voice calm. “You sneaked out. That gets you grounded for two weeks. Not hell! Elena. It’s not your fault!”

  She just repeated in the same dull tone, “I felt like I was going to hell.”

  Here is the whole story as Elena told it to me later. Joe and I dropped our happy-go-lucky children off at boarding school and drove home to a house that still seemed to echo with their laughter. Then, three weeks later, Elena called me up and told me she wanted to go to her friend Mona’s house for the free weekend. Meanwhile, Mona called and told her parents they both were coming to our house.

  And then the two teenage girls took the train together and met their boyfriends from the boys’ boarding school.

  The boys’ boarding school was over an hour away, but the two schools got together for special events. Many of the girls at the girls’ school had brothers or cousins at the boys’ boarding school. It was considered quite a coup if a girl had a boyfriend there, and Elena and Mona were doubly popular because their boyfriends were good-looking upperclassmen. Secretly, the two thirteen-year-old girls exchanged letters and took phone calls from these “older men.” Other girls at the boarding school—even the senior girls—were green with envy over their good luck.

  And now, the two of them actually had a date!

  “It was almost my birthday, so they said we should celebrate,” Elena told me later. “We thought they were taking us somewhere nice.”

  In a glow of happy anticipation, the two underage girls got all dressed up. They were beautiful! They were desirable! They were being treated like grown-ups at last! But they didn’t go somewhere nice. Instead, their boyfriends took them to a party at the house of one of the boarding school boys. His parents were away on a holiday. And no other girls were there.

  The two boyfriends, too, were showing off their good luck.

  The party got loud and raucous: a bunch of high school boys with lots of beer around. It was a situation no thirteen-year-old would know how to handle.

  “It was when I went upstairs to the bathroom,” Elena told me much later. “One of the ones I didn’t know attacked me. I tried to bite him because his hand was over my face, holding me down, but it was his palm, and I couldn’t close my teeth on much. I thought he was going to put my eye out. His finger was in my eye, and I was afraid he would gouge it out. That’s what I remember most.”

  When it was over, Elena stumbled downstairs and threw a fit and yelled at the two boyfriends, and then she and Mona left. “My boyfriend said, ‘You’re ruining our good time.’” And that was the end of the two girls’ romantic date, and the end of Elena’s exciting birthday celebration.

  Elena didn’t tell me all this on the night of the phone call, but I knew enough to guess some of it. No wonder the laughter died in my house, I thought. No wonder that girl—that poor, lost, miserable girl—

  But Elena cut into my thoughts again that night, and her voice was flat and hard. “There’s something else,” she said.

  Something else? Something worse—I could feel it. But how? What could be worse than that? And I felt my body tense up, as rigid as a board under the puffy comforter, bracing for whatever came next.

  “This January,” Elena said, “when I stayed in bed, I was pregnant. I lost the baby.”

  I grappled with this new catastrophe. “When?” I managed. “Who?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” she said. “He was a loser.”

  Memories flooded me, and I was reliving my own miscarriage over twenty years before. I remembered the flood of grief. Again, I felt the sorrow nestle inside me, the emptiness—literal and emotional.

  I am a grandmother, I thought. I am a grandmother twice. I have my grandbaby Gemma. And the other baby.

  “That was my fault, too,” Elena was saying. “Because of the eating disorder.” And she said it matter-of-factly, completely without pity, as if she were passing judgment on someone she barely knew and didn’t like.

  I pushed past the sorrow. My thoughts dug in and found traction. Grief was a luxury I couldn’t afford right now.

  “But, honey,” I said, “lots of miscarriages are normal, natural things. Many pregnancies can’t progress—one in five, I think. There may not have been a baby there at all.”

  “There was. I heard the heartbeat,” she said.

  Once again, pain from the past caught me off guard and stabbed through me. The heartbeat. My baby’s heartbeat, fast and light and perfect. The obstetrician’s voice: “Mrs. Dunkle, don’t worry. You’re not going to lose this baby.”

  The joy. The relief!

  And the very next day: The poker-hot bursts of agony. The blood. The loss. The grief.

  Who would that baby have been, my child of the light, perfect heartbeat? What adventures would we have had together? No way to know . . .

  There’s no time for this! I told myself sternly. Because Elena was speaking into the silence again, and her voice, for the first time, carried emotion.

  Which emotion? What was I hearing? Excitement? Anxiety? Eagerness?

  “Maybe you don’t believe me,” she was saying.

  “No,” I heard myself answer. “No, I believe you. I lost . . . I heard my baby’s heartbeat, too.”

  I am a grandmother, I thought again. I was a grandmother. My grandchild died in my house.

  And somehow, this thought just destroyed me.

  In my house.

  In my own house . . .

  “No, about the rape,” Elena said quickly. “It happened years ago, an
d nobody knew.”

  I rallied once again. This was important.

  “I don’t have to believe you. I know,” I said. “I could almost tell you when it happened.”

  “You didn’t know,” Elena said. “Nobody knew.” And she sounded a little bit like my teen had sounded the other day, stubbornly insisting that Kate’s eyes were brown.

  “Elena, remember when you came home for the free weekend, and I started following you around, asking what was wrong? You had changed. You were like one raw nerve. You couldn’t eat, and you couldn’t sleep. I would wake up at one, two in the morning, and you would be wandering around the house.”

  And you turned mean, I thought. Overnight, you became cynical and hard. You turned against your sister and pushed her away. Your hope, your idealism had been scorched right out of you. Your laugh . . . how long was it before I heard you laugh again? And it wasn’t the same . . .

  “I always had trouble sleeping,” Elena answered. “I always had nightmares. You didn’t know.”

  “But this was different,” I said. “Remember the child psychiatrist? Remember how he tested you for hours? That was because we were worried about you. We knew something was wrong.”

  “Oh, yeah. I remember him . . .”

  “And he told me—” But my throat closed up unexpectedly, and I had to start again. “He told me nothing was wrong with you.” I could hear the hurt in my voice. “He said—I remember exactly what he said—‘She is very ambitious and a little dramatic, but what teenage girl isn’t? You have nothing to worry about, Mrs. Dunkle. Your daughter is completely normal.’”

  Silence. And in that silence, sadness began to well up inside and around me, a gentle, invisible force. The dark walls of the hotel room, illuminated by the tiny blue light on the front of my laptop, seemed to waver a little, like the sides of a marine trench deep below the surface of the ocean.

  That poor little child, wounded and scared, shocked out of her high spirits and laughter and her trust in goodness and mercy. Yelled at, attacked. Cast off to crawl back to her life. Guarding her secrets, face-to-face with hell.

  “Why did the doctor say that, Elena?” I asked. “Why did he tell me you were fine?”

  “Because I lied my ass off,” she said.

  After Elena hung up, I didn’t move. I just lay there, holding the phone. Sadness drowned me, weighed me down, crushed me flat under the heavy comforter. I didn’t think. I didn’t do anything. I just lay there, unable to move.

  Sleep didn’t find me for a very long time.

  The next morning, I got up and went on with my school visits. That was just as good as anything else I might be doing. I seemed to stand next to myself and watch myself, as if I were an interesting stranger. I listened to my own voice lilting up and down, and I marveled at how natural it sounded.

  Just as if I were an ordinary woman.

  Just as if today were an ordinary day.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  A week and a half passed, a week and a half of gray highway under fast-moving clouds and stormy spring rain. A week and a half of being on the move.

  After the hard truths I had had to hear, it felt good to be on the move.

  The time and the travel brought me to Valerie’s living room in Georgia. They were waiting for me when I arrived. We were going to leave again within minutes.

  “Here,” Valerie said. “Take Gemma while Clint and I pack the cars.” And she handed me my grandchild. I felt so much in that moment, it was as if my body weren’t one creature but a committee of separate personalities.

  My arms, especially. My arms had feelings all their own. Ah, yes, they were saying, this is how a baby feels. We remember! We remember!

  And the rest of my body was clamoring for data: Eyes, eyes! Tell us what you see!

  Gemma was a chunky little one-month-old, and she was staring straight at me, serious and slightly cross-eyed. She opened her mouth to cry, and the cry came out in even, expressionless wails. Then she closed her mouth and gave me another long, earnest gaze.

  That’s a newborn cry, my ears reported, feeling important and wise. Yes, we remember. That’s a newborn cry.

  My mind was on tiptoe with awe and respect. A new little person! A universe of potential. What would she grow up to be? A writer? A professor? A scientist? Because she would, of course, grow up to be brilliant.

  Who would she grow up to look like?

  Valerie already thought she might look like me.

  It’s a joke in our family that Valerie and Elena look exactly like Joe but not at all like me. They both have his dark eyes and dark brown hair. Put a pile of photos together, and anyone would sort them out to stand next to their Dunkle aunts. Elena also looks like my mother, girlish and arch, back when my mother was a popular young professor with bewitching long black hair. But, no matter who they look like, neither one looks a thing like me.

  When we went to Italy, I was curious to see how my one-quarter-Italian girls would fit in. Up by Lake Como and Venice, Valerie was already blending in, with her warm brown eyes and creamy skin. But Elena, smaller and darker-eyed, didn’t fit in until we moved south. Then, in Rome, she suddenly vanished. She could be standing right next to me at a crowded crosswalk, and I would have to scan the crowd twice before I could find her.

  I didn’t mind this, of course. I had fallen in love with Joe’s dark Italian good looks. But what would it be like to have a person take after me? Might Gemma be that person?

  So I studied my grandchild, and my whole body tingled with excitement and delight, except for my arms, which were entirely at peace. They felt the feel of baby again, as heavy and solid as a bag of flour, and they ignored everything but the holding.

  Valerie broke in on my reverie. “Hey, Mamacita! Car keys. Clint and I have stuff for your backseat.”

  I was not meeting my grandchild under the best of circumstances. Valerie’s apartment was small and dim, and it reeked of mildew and poverty. Valerie and Clint were hurrying by with what appeared to be random pieces of appliances and trash bags full of laundry and clothes hangers.

  It was The Grapes of Wrath, twenty-first-century-style.

  “Okay, Momma,” Valerie said, returning and whisking Gemma out of my hands, “let’s start up the cars while I take the apartment key to the front office. Itty Bitty’s coming with me, so Clint goes with you. Keep your phone on!”

  And we pulled out of the parking lot for the long drive back to Texas.

  Once we navigated to the highway, I had attention to spare for my traveling companion. Although Clint had a slight smile on his face, his blue-green eyes betrayed flashes of nervousness, like the uncertain look in a dog’s eyes when it’s afraid it might be going to the vet. I could imagine what he was thinking: Four hours alone in a car with the mother-in-law!

  “So, how’s life as a new dad?” I asked him.

  “It’s okay,” he said. Then, after a pause, “Not much sleep, though.”

  Yes, announced the committee of my body. Yes, we remember those days. The eyelids remembered heaviness, and the brain remembered drowsiness, while the feet remembered small, quiet, monotonous steps, back and forth.

  Meanwhile, the arms—the arms sang with happiness. We remember! they sang. We remember!

  “Any idea what job the Air Force will train you for?” I asked.

  Clint appeared to consider this new question carefully.

  “You know,” he said after a minute, “I don’t really know.”

  A few more casual questions and a few more thoughtful but equally brief answers later, I thought, I’m just torturing this poor sleep-deprived boy. So I pushed American Idiot into the player, turned it up, and started singing along.

  I have to sing along. And I have to think about the words. That’s how my imagination finds things to look at while I’m traveling along a boring highway.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Clint give me a couple of sidelong glances. I sing loudly but horribly. It’s just something my family has to cope
with.

  Then Clint started singing along, too.

  By the time another day was up and we were driving through Louisiana, Clint was talking to me. “Tell me a story,” he would say from time to time.

  What writer could resist such an appeal? I ransacked my ghostly lore for interesting hauntings to tell him. And in return, he related Stephen King stories he had read. Clint told ghost stories very well.

  We reached home at last, after three days on the road. We drove up to the house and filled the driveway with small sedans: Valerie’s avocado-green Elantra next to my white Elantra, with Elena’s tan Elantra out at the curb. Three identical Hyundais in three different colors. It was the Korean invasion.

  Joe opened the garage door, and we hauled in the contents of the cars: cracked plastic drawers full of random silverware and pots, trash bags stuffed with T-shirts and scuffed Converse sneakers, and electronics in cheap plastic silver-colored cases, sprouting black wires out the back. No household item looks good when it’s not in a house, but Valerie and Clint’s meager possessions looked particularly sad.

  “These kids are worse off than we were!” Joe marveled as he surveyed the pile of trash bags and appliance parts. “At least when you and I got married, I had a ten-speed bike and a plastic desk.”

  Valerie and I set up Gemma’s portable crib. Meanwhile, the men were supposed to move in the essential stuff. This turned out to be Clint’s black nylon folder of PS3 games. By the time Gemma had settled down for a nap, Clint was blasting zombies with a shotgun while explaining to Joe the best use of the various weapons available. Joe seemed to favor an ax, which his avatar was wielding with untiring vigor. Perhaps he hadn’t progressed far enough to get his hands on a gun yet.

  “Valerie wants tacos,” I announced from the doorway. “We’re going to Taco Cabana. Who wants what?”

  The next few days varied from this pleasant script in only a few particulars. Clint’s avatar might be shooting a crossbow at dragons instead, or Valerie’s avatar might be jumping from rooftop to rooftop, pursued by a gang of medieval knights. But the routine was the same: playing with baby Gemma when she was awake and playing games on the PS3 when she was asleep, occasionally varied by movies, some of which were based on games for the PS3. In the meantime, we ate lots of candy, and I cooked or baked all of Valerie’s most fondly remembered meals and desserts.