He can’t even say the word
anorexic.
Properly censured, return to the kitchen. Your daughter eyes you with smug satisfaction and eats barely one half of a whole-wheat tortilla—no cheese, no avocado—with her fish. A vise of resentment tightens around you. Anorexia has rearranged your family.
di·vorce
[di-vawrs, -vohrs]—
noun,
verb
-vorced, -vorc·ing
noun
1. a judicial declaration dissolving a marriage in whole or in part, especially one that releases the husband and wife from all matrimonial obligations.
2. any formal separation of man and wife according to established custom.
3. total separation; disunion:
a divorce between thought and action.
verb (used with object)
4. to separate by divorce:
The judge divorced the couple.
5. to break the marriage contract between oneself and (one’s spouse) by divorce:
She divorced her husband.
6. to separate, cut off:
Life and art cannot be divorced.
Fantasize about how you will decorate your living room when you live alone, when you disjoin, dissociate, divide, disconnect. Imagine your new white bookcases lined with self-help books:
You’re filled with a thrilling flutter of shame. When did this become about you?
Snoop. Look through your daughter’s laundry basket for vomity towels. Stand outside the bathroom door and listen. Look in the trash for uneaten food. Though you want to call her school to see if she is eating the lunch she packs with extreme care every day (nonfat Greek yogurt, dry-roasted almonds, one apricot), don’t. When you find her journal, don’t read it. Her therapist has told her she should record her feelings, her fears. You are desperate to know what it says. The journal screams and whispers your name all day long. Later, when you are folding laundry and can no longer resist, go back upstairs to her room and find that she hasn’t written a single thing. Despair.
Visiting your parents at Thanksgiving, you realize that the difference between your father’s overdrinking and your daughter’s undereating is slim. Deny, deny, deny. The rest of the family is acutely aware, and between watching alcohol consumed and food left on the plate, your gaze ping-pongs between your daughter and your father. Both start out charming enough. Your daughter sets a beautiful table: plump little pumpkins carved out, their tummies filled with mums and roses, thyme and lavender, slender white tapers rising up from the center and flickering light over the groaning table. But as the afternoon progresses and Grandpa’s wineglass is filled and emptied again, the turkey carcass is removed and pies emerge, your daughter’s mood fades to black.
“Junk in the trunk,” Grandpa slurs, patting your abundant rear as he walks behind you. “Next year, we should all fast.” You want to kill him.
Your starving daughter pushes away her plate, her face pinched, disappointed, angry. You can see her mantra scroll across her eyes like the CNN news crawl: loser . . . failure . . . pathetic . . . chubby . . . What she calls herself is neither worse nor better than what she calls you. It’s a revelation, and you repeat your Cs: calm, consistent, compassion, communication, calamitous, collapse, cursed, condemned.
At the hotel, your daughter insists on taking a long walk,
stretching her stomach,
she calls it. You and your husband say no. She throws a tantrum and you are all trapped in the hotel room, staring at a feel-good family movie involving a twelve-step program, cups of hot coffee, and redemption.
God, grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change,
courage to change the things we can,
and wisdom to know the difference.
By the next doctor visit she’s lost six pounds and she cries and cries. Your body goes cold. You feel like a fool, slumped on the pediatrician’s toddler bench, staring at the wallpaper: Mother Goose and her fluffy outstretched wings hovers above you with bemused tolerance and extreme capability. An infant cries in the next room and you yearn for the days of uncomplicated care and comfort.
“I am so angry.” Your voice is not angry, it is depleted. You are not as competent as Mother Goose, you are the woman trapped in a shoe with only one child and still you don’t know what to do.
Your daughter agrees to go on antidepressants, to help her adjust to her changing body, the doctor says. When you leave the office you drive straight to the pharmacy and then to a bakery and watch her consume a Prozac and a chocolate chip cookie. Her eyes, her giant, chocolate-pudding eyes, drip tears into her hot milk; her hand shakes.
Antidepressants increased the risk compared to placebo of suicidal thinking and behavior (suicidality) in children, adolescents, and young adults in short-term studies of major depressive disorder (MDD) and other psychiatric disorders. Anyone considering the use of [Insert established name] or any other antidepressant in a child, adolescent, or young adult must balance this risk with the clinical need.
“It’s not my fault,” she sobs.
“Oh, Lovely.” You shake your head, review the many theories that Google dredged up: genetic predisposition, a virus, lack of self-concept, struggle for control, posttraumatic stress disorder.
“I didn’t want this,” she says.
“Of course you didn’t.”
“The voice scares me.”
“Voice?”
“My eating disorder. Tells me I suck and it never shuts up, only if I restrict.”
Pay attention. This is language that you haven’t heard before. Watch. Listen.
Mood swings. Suicidal ideation. Changes in behavior.
Be terrified about everything. Ask with nonchalance, “This voice, is it yours?”
She turns away from you. Her skin is the transparent blue of skim milk.
Later, when you are alone, call your husband on his cell phone. He is standing in line, waiting to board a plane. Don’t care. Scream into the phone. Imagine your tinny, bitchy voice leaking around his ear while men holding lattes, women with Coach briefcases, students, and grandmas try not to look at his worn face.
“Say it out loud.”
“She has an eating disorder,” he mumbles.
“Not fucking enough,” you shriek, your hands shaking. Until he says it loud, admits it fully to himself, you will not be satisfied. You may have gone crazy.
“My daughter is anorexic. There.”
You let it lie.
“Are you happy now?” he whispers.
Oddly enough, you are momentarily happier.
March
She’s back. Your daughter dances into the kitchen, holding a piece of cinnamon toast. She wants milk, 2 percent. She also wants a cookie and pasta, a banana, a puppy, and a trip to Italy.
“I want some of those,” your husband whispers, nodding to the prescription bottle on the windowsill.
You want this to continue. She may not be eating Brie and baguettes, but she’s laughing. Her collarbones are less prominent. She’s. Given. Up. Gum.
“The voice is leaving, Mom,” she confides. “It polluted everything.” She smiles, hopeful and charming, so wanting to please. Even though it may not completely be true about the voice, she wants it to be and for now desire has to be enough. That she talks about the voice without anger or tears takes a grocery cart of courage.
“Quit worrying and watching me so much,” she says.
You nod and smile. You will never quit worrying and watching.
Weak spring sunlight fills your kitchen. Your daughter, with a hand on her hip, stands before the open refrigerator, singing. You still are not certain keeping her home and in school is the right choice. A clinic may be inevitable. You’ve followed advice, you have your team, yet letting go of watching and worrying would require a grocery cart full of courage that you do not have. Just yesterday you checked her Web history and found she’d visited caloriesperhour.com.
“I’m hungry,” your daughter says.
You haven’t heard those words from her for nearly a year. Grab on to them, this is a moment of potential. Look for more. Remember them. String them together. Write Post-it notes for the inside of your medicine cabinet.
Almonds! I hear me! Two percent milk!
I’m hungry!
Dream of the day when your cabinet door will look like a wing, feathered in hopeful little yellow squares.
Then Gretel, suddenly released from the bars of her cage, spread her arms like wings and rejoiced. “But now I must find my way back,” said Gretel. She walked onward until she came to a vast lake. “I see no way across . . .”
Picture
you people:
your husband, the physician, the therapists and nutritionist, family members—all standing across the water, waving, calling; a part of her remains listening on the other side, afraid to lose control, afraid to fail, afraid to drown.
Open your arms wide. Your daughter is getting nearer. Know that it is up to her. Say her lovely name. Know that it is up to her. Shout her lovely name.
Ruby Jewel
When she stepped off the train, her father honked from the Dodge, three sharp blasts, like elbow jabs to her ribs. His thick arm dangled out the window, the sleeve rolled up, exposing sunburned skin. “Ruby-Ruby, the college gal,” he called, a pipe clenched in the center of his grin.
Black land crabs scuttled across the gravel in front of her. Ruby hurried, stepping carefully to protect the Bergdorf pumps her New York aunt had sent along with the tuition check and a little extra walk-around money. “Hi, Daddy.” Pabst empties littered the passenger-side floor. She wiped the seat with her hand and dropped the rattling bottles, five of them, into the back before setting her suitcase beneath her feet.
“Cars cleaner up there?”
She leaned over the seat, brushed her lips against his bristled cheek. “Doesn’t matter.” He hadn’t removed his inked pressman’s apron, and the cab was filled with his familiar smells. Sometimes, though not this afternoon, the father-odors of newsprint, tobacco, and sweat were rounded out with whiskey or the Lava soap he used to scrub at the ink beneath his fingernails.
Her father shifted gears and the truck lunged onto Beach Boulevard. Outside her window, the Gulf, flat and black as the bottom of a cast-iron pan, stretched away.
“How’s Mom?”
“Your mother . . .” His voice trailed off, as if he had something to decide.
Ruby waited, watching the ball of his fist on the gear knob, his biceps flexing each time he shifted. “Is she drawing?”
“No. Nope. She’s rearranging the furniture. She’s got the couch crisscrossing the corner now. Every goddamned morning I have to double-check where the coffee table is. I’m afraid she might move the john and I’ll end up pissing in my chair.” His jaw tensed around his pipe stem as he spoke. Everything about him was tight, ready to spring, like a flea. “And, she’s pasting Green Stamps to get herself a new dryer.”
Her mom could camp at the kitchen table for hours on end, a lit cigarette perched in the ashtray and a sponge resting in a saucer of water to moisten the stamps. Five, ten, twenty-seven booklets filled with stamps and so far all she’d earned was a percolator, a pipe stand, and an electric fan. Ruby rolled down her window and a whoosh of hot air filled the cab. From her pocketbook she retrieved a scarf and tied it over her new hairstyle, short like Audrey Hepburn’s in
Sabrina,
only blond.
“The pool nice up there?” her father yelled against the wind.
“I made the dive team.” Each morning at practice, she swallowed panic to climb up to the platform, her eyes fixed on the pale, cloudless sky. She pushed off with her toes, flinging herself headlong into it. Fifteen or twenty dives, and every time she thrust herself into the air, Ruby fought her fear. That was worthwhile effort.
“You don’t miss the Gulf?”
“I do,” she said. It was true. She missed swimming along the shore in Tampa. One mile up the beach to the green-bellied water tower and back again. “I’ll swim tomorrow.” What she didn’t miss was coming home from her swim to laundry on the line, a dutiful pot of something on the stove, another of her mother’s pastels, taken from the pages of
National Geographic,
propped on the desk. Kimonos, giraffes, tribal women, sea anemones, the Taj Mahal—beautiful renderings of far-off places. Her mother never drew home. That was before she’d settled on the Green Stamps.
Her father pulled into the Winn-Dixie lot, rumpled up his pressman’s apron, and threw it in the back with the beer bottles. “Give me a look,” he said, twirling his finger in the air, illustrating what he expected of her.
She pushed her door closed with her hip. “I’m no baby.”
“Turn around.” He hit his pipe against his callused palm, spilled the hot ashes onto the gravel.
She touched her hand to her neck. While she was tempted to show off the change in her, it was the change in her that would not let her comply.
Her father stared, his gray eyes clear and sharp, his thin lips pressed together in a wry smile. He crossed his arms over his chest as if he had all afternoon to wait her out in the parking lot. This was another thing she didn’t miss about home, hot-tempered caprice.