Deep Down True (7 page)

Dana wanted to ask Morgan what she thought of this girl. Was it satisfying to see someone who presumably had everything plummet to the bottom of the social soup just like anyone else? Or did Morgan see, as Dana did, that somewhere behind the overpriced clothes and the capped teeth, the girl was a real person, with real pain, and was far too young to be abusing herself like this? But Morgan’s eyes flicked across the pages, soaking in every detail, and Dana knew interrupting her would provoke nothing more than an irritated shrug.

Dana’s glance fell to the magazine in her own hands. It featured an older actress on the cover, hands on narrow hips, victorious smile exaggerated by high-gloss lipstick. The inset picture was grainy and showed her stepping off a curb clutching a plastic grocery bag. She wore sweatpants and an oversize coat that billowed out to one side, making her seem large and ragged. The caption read, “Back in a Size Two, I’m Me Again!”

Dana remembered this actress as the cute, bouncy one from a 1980s sitcom. A comeback of sorts. And Dana was happy for her, if a little bit jealous.
Size two,
she thought.
I’d be happy with a size eight.
But then it occurred to her:
Comeback to what?
The woman’s career hadn’t been revived. She was just thinner.

The waiting-room door opened, and Marie the hygienist said, “Morgan, we’re ready for you now.” With effort, Morgan gave Marie a polite half smile, an attempt to cloak her anxiety. Dana wanted to give her some indication of motherly encouragement, but she knew the rules. Parental affection prohibited, except under cover of utter privacy and, if possible, darkness.

Dana was soon bored by the shimmering starlets and hunky boy-men whose names she didn’t recognize. She closed her eyes, rested her head against the back of the chair, and ran through a mental checklist.
Get paper goods for Morgan’s party . . . Have car cleaned—floor has more crumbs than a cracker factory . . . Grady’s game on Sunday . . .
Football. Coach Ro. That perked-up look he gave when she said she was divorced. The squareness of him, the warm, frying-pan-size hand on her back . . .
Taller than Kenneth and broader, though not quite as handsome . . . but nice enough . . . and warm enough . . .

“Mrs. Stellgarten?” said a deep voice.

Dana’s eyes fluttered, and she sat straight up. “Mmm?” she muttered, “Yes?”

Dr. Sakimoto’s face wavered before her. “I hate to wake you,” he said. “You look so serene.”

“Oh!” She passed a hand across her lips to make sure she hadn’t drooled. “I was just—”

“It’s Friday,” he said, smiling. “Who doesn’t need a nap? Sometimes I go into my office and close my eyes—I’m out like a light. Marie has to throw something at me.”

Dana sighed. Dr. Sakimoto had such a talent for putting people at ease. “Is her appointment over already?” she asked.

“No, not quite.” His face settled into a strangely pensive state. “Would you come to my office for a quick chat?”

Dana rose and followed him. Something was wrong. Dr. Sakimoto never called her into the office.
The insurance,
she thought. Kenneth was always trying to “get the best bang for the buck.” It was so like him to change their coverage and not tell her.

“Please, have a seat. This one’s more comfortable,” he said pointing to an upholstered chair with a pale green paisley pattern.
It’s the bad-news chair!
Dana realized. Meant to cushion the blow of unpaid bills or the necessity of a root canal. He seated himself in the other chair, a battered Windsor with the stain worn down on the arms. “Mrs. Stellgarten,” he began.

“Please call me Dana,” she said, realizing she’d never bothered to give him the right to this familiarity in all the years she’d known him. It was only now, with some obvious unpleasantness in the offing, that she was taking him into her circle of friendship, in the unlikely event it would provide some small protection from . . . whatever this was.

The smooth skin around his brown eyes crinkled warmly. “Dana it is, then.” He took a breath. “So. I’m seeing a change in Morgan’s enamel that worries me a little.” He seemed to be waiting for her consent to go on, or perhaps giving her a moment to prepare herself.

“Okay . . .” she said.

“Tooth enamel, it’s kind of like glass—very smooth, especially at Morgan’s age. All those adult teeth are fairly new, so they should be in pretty good shape. What I’m seeing with Morgan is the beginning of some erosion, especially on the backs of her front teeth and the insides of her molars.” He paused again. “Dana, this pattern of erosion—it’s consistent with purging.”

For the briefest moment, Dana’s brain blocked his meaning.
Purging
, her brain mollified her,
getting rid of stuff you didn’t need was a good thing, right?
But then it came to her in small pieces. Apparently Morgan was getting rid of something she needed.

“Could there be some other reason for this . . . pattern?” Dana asked tightly, trying to stanch the steady flow of panic that was seeping into her chest.

“A very reasonable question.” He nodded. “For instance, constantly sucking on something acidic, like lemons, or chewing sticky candy causes enamel to deteriorate.”

Morgan didn’t like lemons and preferred chocolate to chewy candy. But in that moment, the fact that something else—anything else—might explain this came as a relief.

“Dana,” he said gently. “Candy degrades enamel in very specific places, mostly the crowns. And lemon tends to erode the fronts of the teeth, not the insides. It wasn’t either of those things.”

“I would know,” Dana insisted, pressing the words from her lips in an even flow, trying desperately not to reveal the panic that was now filling her head like rushing water. “I would certainly know if she were . . . doing . . . that.”

“You are a very concerned, conscientious parent. Anyone can see that. And teenage girls can be incredibly secretive. Believe me, I had my own to deal with.”

Dr. Sakimoto was a father? Dana clung to this distraction like a life jacket. “How old are they?”

“I have two daughters—a college sophomore and one in medical school.”

“That’s wonderful! What kind of medicine is she pursuing?”

“Undecided,” he said. “Dana, we need to think about getting Morgan to stop purging. I can give you a list of resources. . . .”

Purging.
That word would never be the same to her again. “No,” she said, unable to take in any more information. “Not right now.”

There was a knock on the door, and Marie’s voice, raised slightly, said, “Morgan’s all set.” Dana ejected herself from the bad-news chair and fairly lunged for the exit.

On the car ride home, Morgan flipped open the vanity mirror and ran her tongue across her teeth. “I just love when they’re all smooth and clean,” she said. “It’s like you get to start over with a whole new set of teeth.”

But you don’t,
Dana wanted to say.
The body you’re born in is the one you die in.
Driving home with her possibly bulimic daughter, Dana realized she could no longer indulge in that fantasy about waking up with upgraded parts. There were no do-overs. Ruined teeth would never be new, a middle-aged body would never be young again, a collapsed marriage would never go back to the point before you knew it was over.

As she pulled in to the safety of her own driveway, Dana could hear her mother’s raspy voice saying,
You play the hand you’re dealt.
Then Ma would glance at her husband sitting in the far corner of the couch staring blankly in the direction of the television, and take another drag of courage from her Marlboro Light.

T
HE ISSUE OF WHAT TO DO NEXT.

Should she talk to Morgan now? And say what, exactly? “Please stop making yourself vomit, honey. It’s ruining your teeth”? Or maybe, “WHAT COULD YOU POSSIBLY BE THINKING?” Or should she be honest and say, “I’m so sorry that I’ve obviously failed you in some massive, bottomless, irretrievable way”?

No, probably not.

Dana had spent the last twelve years feeding her children. Within moments of their births, she had nursed them. Since then she’d spent hours of every day planning, buying, preparing, and offering meals to them. She’d imitated a wide variety of vehicles as she drove spoonfuls to their lips, and always asked the direction in which their sandwiches should be cut, because they would refuse to eat squares when they wanted triangles. She’d had countless conversations with other mothers about what and when to feed them and what to do when they refused to eat anything but buttered saltines. She’d learned to have a certain amount of high-calorie, non-nutritious snacks on hand, because other kids were less likely to come over if there wasn’t anything “good” to eat.

Vomiting all that effort back up was inconceivable to her, a conversation she didn’t know how to begin. She should tell Kenneth, she knew. Yet food had been
her
job. And it was hard to imagine calling her ex-husband, who had chosen some other, somehow better woman instead of her, and say, “You were right about me, I’m inferior. A factory second as a wife and a mother.”

Dana didn’t call Kenneth. Locked in her room, she called Polly, possibly her best friend, the only one she trusted not to make her feel even worse. “Hey, do you have a minute?” Then she started to cry in soft, gulping gasps, and Polly said, “Take all the time you need, I’m right here.”

In pieces, Dana got it out. Polly was skeptical. “Morgan’s too sensible for that. She’s a good, smart girl. How does this guy know for sure?” Dana explained how Dr. Sakimoto had ruled out other causes. Polly didn’t buy it. “How many bulimics do you think they have in China, huh? Not that many, I’m guessing. So how much experience could he have?”

“China?”

“Sure, isn’t he Chinese?”

“Um, I’m pretty sure Sakimoto is a Japanese name. And his first name is Anthony, so maybe he’s part something else, too.”

“Does he have an accent?”

“Somewhere between Boston and New York. Sort of Rhode Islandish.”

“Oh,” said Polly. “Well, still. I don’t believe it. I’ve known that kid since she was in diapers. She’s eaten over here hundreds of times. She’s not a puker.”

Dana sighed. Polly was so reassuring. Not inasmuch as she was right. The more Dana thought about it, the more she saw that it might be true. Morgan often raced to the bathroom after dinner and sucked on breath mints in the evening. She’d gained weight and was disgusted with herself.

But Polly’s disbelief was comforting nonetheless. Polly had taken a particular shine to Morgan right from the beginning. While Dana bemoaned Morgan’s moods and stubbornness, Polly admired them. “So she’s headstrong,” Polly would say. “It’ll serve her well.” As a little girl, Morgan would “run away” to Polly’s house when she’d been denied her inalienable right to jump from an upper limb of the crabapple tree in the front yard or have a cell phone in third grade. The two of them had reveled in being in cahoots against Dana. Then Polly would gently set her straight, and Morgan would come home full of Nilla Wafers and newfound compliance. So if Polly, with all her motherly confidence, hadn’t seen it and didn’t even accept it in the face of dental evidence, Dana felt she had permission to loathe herself a little less completely.

 

 

At dinner Dana’s eyes were lowered toward her green beans, but she didn’t actually see them as she severed them into smaller and smaller pieces. Her peripheral vision, and every last one of her brain cells, was focused on Morgan’s plate. There went a piece of chicken, then a forkful of rice. The fork dropped onto the plate when Morgan stopped to tell Grady to quit jumping around like a hyperactive hamster. “I swear you need medication,” she grumbled. Dana waited for the fork to rise from the plate again, but it lay there, abandoned.

“Do we have to go to Dad’s?”

Dana stopped mincing her green beans and looked up.

“Mom, hello? Are you, like, with us?” Morgan asked.

“What? Yes.” Dana glanced around the table. They were all looking at her.

“Yes you’re here?” said Morgan. “Or yes we have to go to Dad’s?”

“Yes to both. Why wouldn’t you want to go to Dad’s?”

Grady and Morgan looked at each other. Grady sat down and started to eat his rice. Morgan sighed. “It’s just not that fun. You know, since Tina moved in. It’s kind of boring.”

Tina
moved in
? Instinctively Dana’s face froze, every muscle held hostage by the need to seem calm in the midst of panic.
Nobody move
, she ordered those muscles.
Nobody take a breath
. Her mind sped through a list of acceptable responses, sifting for the one with the fewest possible implications. “Why is that boring?”

Grady huffed, unable to keep quiet. “Because! She’s, you know, a
girl
, and she’s a
grown-up
. And she wants to play
board games
! She bought Trouble, the one with the popping thing in the middle so if you’re three years old you won’t lose the dice? It’s so BORING and DUMB!”

Dana sifted for another vanilla-flavored response. “I guess she thought you’d like it.”

“Dad wants us to spend time with her,” said Morgan. “He wants us to like her, and it’s kind of . . . I don’t know. Exhausting.”

“I see.” And Dana did see. The very thought of it wore her out completely. She was aware that Kenneth’s new girlfriend had started dropping by during the kids’ weekend visits over the summer. He’d been seeing her for . . . Dana guessed it was about two years now. So she wasn’t really the “new” girlfriend. She was old. Not in age, of course. But she was probably closing in on thirty, that magic number when, for most women, being single loses its shine. Funny how all that had gotten past Dana until this very moment. This day of all days. This bad-news, screwed-up, nerve-shredding day.
Damn him,
she thought.
I do not need this now.

“Well,” she said, “that seems like something you should take up with your father.”