by Lisa Wingate
Food. Of course, it always came down to food, and whether I was eating it, and how much I was eating, and when. “Dad.” The word ended in a sigh. “She didn’t have to—”
“It’s Joujou’s favorite,” he defended, clearly realizing that we’d slipped into the tenuous territory of my required daily intake.
Well, as long as she made it for the dog, OK. “Tell Mom thanks,” I said meekly. How could I blame them for hovering? After finding your daughter passed out in a pool of blood, it’s probably hard to let go. “Joujou will enjoy the chicken Florentine, I’m sure.”
“And you?”
“Yes, Dad, and me. Tell the food police to relax. I’m not going to give it all to the dog.” As soon as the words were out, I wished I could take them back. I sounded immature and ungrateful. Glancing toward the doorway, I checked the hall, making sure no one was lingering nearby.
“Don’t be flip, young lady.” That was more like the father I remembered—the man who ran the family as confidently as he did his brokerage company. This kinder, gentler dad, who called me at the end of each school day, was a new creation, a product of the hours when no one knew whether I would live or die, and of counselors at St. Francis Hospital’s eating-disorders unit, who warned that we needed to keep the family communication lines open. “Your mother is doing her best to help.”
Mom was doing her best to control the situation, as always. To make it neat and clean. Mop up all the stains and bleach everything white again, add some starch, and press out the wrinkles to perfection. “I know she is.” I slid the folders into my new briefcase—classy taupe leather with brown trim, a getting-on-with-life gift from my incredibly fashionable little sister, Bethany, whose new job as buyer for a chain of women’s boutiques allowed her way too much time to shop the trade shows for trendy attaché cases. Every time I put the butter-soft leather bag under my arm, I felt like I had Bett tucked right there close to me, propping me up and pushing me onward. No doubt, she was responsible for getting my parents to leave the house for an evening. “I don’t want Mom feeling that she has to cook for me all the time, Dad, that’s all. I can pick up McDonald’s, or Pizza Hut, Wendy’s, Taco Bell, Meals-On-Wheels, you name it. There are a dozen restaurants within two blocks of the school. I’ll even order something for the dog. Just tell Mom not to wear herself out. I’m all right. Really.”
Someone came into Dad’s office again, and I busied myself with putting on my coat, while he said something about SQLI, earnings, and ten thousand shares, then came back on the line. “That’s another thing. Mom and I don’t want you making stops in that part of town. It isn’t like it was when Grandma Rice lived down there. That neighborhood’s gone downhill. Remember, once you’re off the school grounds, there’s no chain-link fence, no campus security officer. Anything can happen. Especially this time of day.”
Backing out of my office, I pulled the door shut behind me, then headed for the exit, hoping I wouldn’t run into Mr. Stafford, the principal, or Mrs. Morris, who was still lingering in her room. As usual, the other teachers in the main hall had already closed their doors and gone home. “Dad, it’s rush hour. I doubt I’m in much danger at the McDonald’s drive-through. There are people everywhere. The street is full of cars.”
“Be careful in the traffic. The downtown streets are a madhouse,” he warned, and I slapped my hand over my forehead. I give up. I just … give up. No matter what I did, my parents were never going to get over my taking this job so soon after being released from the hospital. They would never again trust me to run my own life.
Mrs. Jorgenson, the school secretary, exited the administration door just in time to catch my look of dismay. Pointing at the cell phone, she mouthed, Dad? I nodded, rolling my eyes. Mrs. Jorgenson knew that my father called regularly at four forty-five, and that my mother often phoned more than once a day. She was kind enough not to ask why, and considerate in discreetly tucking the Mom messages under my DayMinder, so everyone wouldn’t see that Julia Costell’s parents called with an obsessive frequency.
“OK, Dad.” There was no point arguing with him. “Listen, I’m walking out the door now, so I’ll sign off. Traffic looks thick today. I’ll probably be close to an hour getting home. You and Mom go on with your evening, and have a great time, all right? Don’t wait for me to get there. I’m going to swing by Riverside Square on the way. I need to stop off for some feminine necessities.”
Dad coughed and sputtered into the phone. “Oh … well … uh … all, all right, honey. Bye now.”
“Bye, Dad.” I closed the phone with a silly sense of satisfaction at having finally found an excuse my father wouldn’t question. Normally, when I mentioned shopping, he and Mom got anxious—worried, no doubt, that I’d be buying secret supplies of diet pills, or guzzling laxatives in the store restroom.
God, how had my life come to this?
Pausing to button my coat on the ancient, ivy-covered steps of Harrington, I tried to plot the path from where I had been to where I was now. It seemed an impossible distance from rising teenage protégé, Harrington student with talent and a real chance at professional ballet, to college kid drifting through an education degree while dancing in the University Ballet, to grad student throwing up every meal I ate, and finally to new member of the corps de ballet at the Kansas City Metro Ballet Company, convinced that if I got just a little thinner, if the body line were a bit little cleaner, I could break through the glass ceiling to a leading role.
Soloist. Principal dancer. If it doesn’t happen by the time you’re out of your twenties, it never will. If they find you lying on the dressing room floor with your stomach hemorrhaging up your throat, you can forget the dream altogether. They won’t even speak to you after that.
Stop. Stop it. The voice in my head was philosophical, emotionless. That was then. This is now. You were there; now you’re here.
Everything happens for a reason. The portly, round-faced nun at St. Francis Hospital told me that. Every day, during the initial deprogramming phase in the eating-disorders unit, when I was isolated from my family and all visitors, Sister Margaret stopped by to ask how I was doing. We talked about the weather, or the Kansas City Chiefs, and then she’d pat my hand and say, “Have faith. Everything happens for a reason,” as if, behind the conversation, she could read all the things I wasn’t saying.
She knew I didn’t believe that any of this was happening for a reason… .
A slice of February wind slid under my collar, pushing the questions away. In spite of the unusually springlike day, it was going to be cold tonight. Hurrying down the steps, I got in my car and left Harrington behind, cutting through the side streets out of downtown, rather than squeezing into the bumper-to-bumper traffic on the main thorough-fare. The decaying row houses and businesses made me feel at home, despite what my father had said about the degeneration of the neighborhood. The streets were lined with memories of my grandmother, whose tall, art deco brick house stood less than two miles from the school. It never occurred to me, growing up, that there was anything unusual about living with her during the week and with my parents on weekends. It seemed perfectly normal that Bethany focused on being a cheerleader, lived at home full-time while I took the separate path of staying at Grandma Rice’s house so I could participate in Harrington’s dance program. For me, nothing mattered more than ballet.
Passing by my grandmother’s neighborhood, I gazed down the street, but didn’t turn in. Things weren’t the same there anymore. The grand old homes that had once housed the families of Kansas City’s high society were slipping into disrepair and being divided into apartments. Overgrown iris beds and winter-bare forsythia bushes lingered as the only reminders of what were once neatly landscaped yards. Antique stained-glass windows were covered with plywood and tinfoil, and portable air conditioners hung crooked in their rotting frames. Here and there, yuppies had moved in, taken over the old mansions, renovated them to their former beauty, and reclaimed neglected yards and goldfish ponds. There was
hope for rebirth, but still far to go. The neighborhood hung suspended in a search for identity, caught between past glory and future potential, in need of vision, and elbow grease.
It seemed an appropriate metaphor for my life. Each night as I left Harrington and traveled toward my parents’ house in Overland Park, my mind slid into analysis mode. On a good day, I could confine myself to the here and now—focus on some problem with conflicting class schedules or unexcused absences, and avoid the larger questions of the past year. Tonight, Mrs. Morris and Dell Jordan rode with me to the other side of town, through the grocery store, and back home to the neighborhood of new redbrick minimansions with tiny lots and manicured flower beds, where Mom and Dad had moved after selling the house in which Bett and I grew up.
Joujou had lost her battle with incontinence by the time I walked in the door. Carrying in my grocery bag, I stepped in a puddle in the entryway. At the end of the hall, Joujou wagged her tail and smiled with her lips drawn back from the underbite in her little pug snout.
“Geez, Joujou.”
She whined, then growled, as I kicked off my wet shoe and stepped around Lake Joujou. Mom and Dad might have been happy to have me back home, but Joujou was not. In her view, I was the competition. There was room for only one prima donna in this house, and as far as Joujou was concerned, she was it.
Setting down my grocery bag, I scooped her up and carried her, growling and squirming, past two more puddles to the sliding glass door. She yipped as I put her out on the patio.
“Out here to potty.”
If she felt scolded, it didn’t show. Wagging her tail like a propeller, she ran to the flower bed to start digging. Mom wouldn’t care. Everything in the patio existed for Joujou’s pleasure. The problem of the dog wetting in the house could have been solved easily enough, if Joujou spent more time on the patio. She even had a doggie dream palace, a tiny replica of Mom and Dad’s house that Mom had commissioned as a canine Christmas present. Joujou loved to run in the front door, dash up the stairs, and scramble down the ramp from the second story window. She did it over and over again. She probably would have kept at it all day, but Mom allowed only short, supervised trips outside, for fear that dastardly Pekingese kidnappers would scale the fence and make off with her in all her rhinestonestudded glory. One could never be certain a hyperactive, incontinent house dog was safe.
Mom was as obsessive about the dog as she’d always been about us. With me and Joujou to focus on, Mom was more content than she’d been since Bethany graduated from design school, found Jason, and moved into her own apartment. Even with a bad case of empty-nest syndrome, Mom was surprisingly supportive of Bethany’s traveling the path to grown-up independence. Until I moved home, Mom had contented herself by joining Bett on her trips to trade shows and the Market District down in Dallas. All of that stopped as soon as my eating disorder came to light. Now, Mom had me to worry about, and my sister was on her own.
But that was all right, because Bett was the sensible, competent one. The real daughter, I had begun to understand when I was seven and my grandmother made a perfectly innocent comment about family resemblances and the possible origins of my talent for dance. Suddenly, I fully comprehended why there were no baby pictures of me with my father, why Bethany had his dark hair and brown eyes, his short fingers and stubby toes, and I didn’t. Life came into focus with a bang.
I wasn’t his. I came into my mother’s world before my dad did. It wasn’t a family secret, really. It was just something they never brought up and I never asked about. I was too afraid that if I did, Dad would say, “Well, no need to continue that sham anymore,” and suddenly, he wouldn’t love me.
But deep inside, I’d always wondered if he loved me as much as he loved Bett, and how he possibly could. She was his, and I was … I couldn’t even imagine who I was. In my mind, my real father was everything from a touring member of the Imperial Russian Ballet, for whom my mom may have repaired costumes when she worked for the wardrobe mistress at the KC Metro Ballet, to a stranger who had grabbed her in a dark alley as she left the studio late at night.
There was no way to know… .
Without asking.
Leaning against the sliding door, I pressed my face to the cold glass and tried to decide whether that was where my identity crisis began? Or was it at auditions for sixth-grade spring repertory, when the guest instructor, an ex-Communicated artistic director from St. Petersburg, made some comment about aesthetics and body line? The dancers he cast were tall and slim—“like the willow,” he said. I was sure that if I lost a few pounds, I could achieve that line, as well.
The counselor at St. Francis thought my crisis was caused by a combination of factors, including a tendency toward compulsiveness and a family history of mild depression.
Sister Margaret thought it was because I didn’t have enough faith in God’s plan. “Be patient,” she said. “God makes all things known in His own time.”
Lately, my life was playing out as if someone had failed to give God the script, and the cast had gone haywire due to lack of direction. I was supposed to be in New York by now, dancing, all my little secrets neatly hidden behind brilliant performances and a perfect aesthetic. Instead, the cat was out of the bag, and I was in Kansas City, living with my parents, trapped in the body of a guidance counselor.
In the meantime, the dog puddles were spreading across the tile, and the frozen food I’d bought was melting.
I cleaned up Joujou’s mess, hurried upstairs and put on my sweats, then carried the grocery bags to the kitchen and started emptying them. The next thing I knew, I was standing at the bar, halfway through a quart of Häagen-Dazs. Gazing into the container, I awakened like a sleepwalker. My stomach rolled over, my head whirled through a mental calorie count, and I wanted to be sick. Popping the cap on the container, I found myself searching frantically for a place to hide it. The food police would go ballistic. Mom would never believe I hadn’t immediately rushed to the bathroom and thrown it up.
I wanted to throw it up… .
“Whatever you do, Julia, never let yourself cross the line into purging again.” The parting words of Dr. Leland at St. Francis Hospital. He looked me straight in the eyes, laid his hands on my shoulders, and said, “There’s no room here for halfway. If you start again, Julia, you’ll be dead.”
I heard his voice every time I felt myself sliding—his and Sister Margaret’s. This time, they stopped me from eating more ice cream, and from purging what I’d consumed. Instead, I tucked the half-empty container inside a Wal-Mart sack, grabbed a jacket, put Joujou on a leash, and headed out jogging. As we passed the public Dumpster at the park, I tossed in the ice-cream container, treating it like the evidence of a crime.
By the time we returned to the house, my lungs were burning from taking in frigid air, my legs felt like rubber, and Joujou was exhausted. She searched the rooms for my parents, then flopped down on the kitchen tile, too tired to consider making protest puddles. She’d worked up an appetite, and was happy to eat her portion of chicken Florentine, and mine too.
I put two plates in the sink, even though only one was used. The ice-cream spoon I washed and tucked away. The fork I left with chicken strings on it, beside a glass with milk dribbled inside, a perfectly placed display.
I did not purge the ice cream.
Grabbing my briefcase from the dining table, I walked to the entertainment room and sat on the sofa, feeling triumphant. Left alone for an entire evening, and the worst I’d done was binge on some ice cream and jog until my legs gave out.
Not bad. This was progress.
Joujou limped into the room, jumped onto the sofa, and curled into a ball by my thigh, then yawned a breath that smelled of chicken Florentine. Rolling her bug eyes upward, she smiled at me with her protruding bottom teeth, like we’d just been through a bonding experience—a couple of dingy dishwater blondes, partners in crime.
Neurotic sisters in Mom’s button-down world.
I worked on a feder
al grant application for the school’s new performance hall for half an hour, then set the application booklet aside and opened Dell Jordan’s cumulative folder and the confidential file. Thumbing through her paperwork, I pictured her sitting in my office, doe-eyed and silent like one of those sad, soulful Indian maidens painted on Tshirts and coffee mugs in roadside tourist traps.
Maybe I shouldn’t have let her off the hook so easily. She needed support, someone to talk to. I should have set up a regular schedule of appointments, kept the essay as leverage, and insisted she come back. I probably wasn’t handling her situation correctly. I was undoubtedly failing, and Mrs. Morris, as awful as she was, was correct in insisting that I shouldn’t have returned the essay.
What if the girl in the river really did have a death wish? Did I know enough to distinguish a serious emotional problem from normal teenage angst?
I should have paid more attention in my psychology classes, back when I never intended to become a guidance counselor, back when I thought grad school was just a way to avoid getting a real job. My part-time teaching position with the college’s high school outreach program had paid for my apartment and basic necessities. Most important, it had allowed me to focus on dancing in the college ballet and traveling to auditions for professional companies, until I could finally get into the corps somewhere. Who knew that the break into full-time professional ballet would almost be the death of me, and the counseling degree would turn out to be what really mattered?
Sister Margaret would have said, “Life happens according to a plan.” The problem is that when you don’t know the plan, you can’t adequately prepare.
Looking at the file in my lap, I couldn’t imagine what the plan might be for Dell Jordan. Half Choctaw Indian, no father in the picture, mother a habitual drug user who abandoned her child to be raised in the small town of Hindsville by a grandmother—now deceased. Finally taken in by foster parents, Karen and James Sommerfield, who enrolled Dell in Harrington, where she could pursue her gift for music. Now she was having difficulty adjusting.
