Hope and Other Luxuries (36 page)

“This is important!” she said. “This is my college career on the line. What are you doing? Just writing stories!”

“I'm doing my best to earn your college tuition.”

Elena's voice rose. “So am I! You want me to get scholarships, don't you? Do you think I
want
to go volunteer? Do you think I wouldn't
like
to come home and sit around? You had all day to get that done! Why do you have to do it now?”

I would have argued, but I recognized that exhausted teenager. Decades ago, I had seen her in my mirror. And I had heard that exhausted, bitter girl yell at her mother, too:

Unload the dishwasher? Do you realize I'm trying to write my college essay? Do you realize I'm trying to earn scholarships with this? Why don't
you
unload the dishwasher?
You're
not doing anything important!

And I had seen my mother turn away, defeated.

So now, in penance, I set aside my laptop. I ran a brush through my hair and found my car keys.

It wasn't supposed to be this way
, I thought as I stepped into my shoes.
Or maybe it was—maybe, no matter what we mothers try to do, we can't escape the curse of the bad karma we earned as children. But—my children were supposed to be different! They were supposed to be happy!
And I remembered my two girls, dashing through the house, shouting and shrieking with laughter.

Where had it gone? How had we lost that happiness?

Anyway, this is the last year
, I reminded myself as I trudged out to the car.
Next year, she'll be away at colle
ge
. She hates being dependent on me, and besides, she has a point. I could have written more during the day. I should have
.

While Elena did an hour of volunteering, I bought groceries and ran errands to kill time. It wasn't worth going all the way home and back again. Then I swung back by to pick her up. And this—this was the time that made it all worthwhile, that made up for my stress and Elena's exhausted hostility.

This was the time when Elena told me stories.

The things Elena was seeing in that wartime hospital awed and inspired her. Even if she had wanted to keep them to herself, I don't think she could have done it. She was a born storyteller, and these were stories that cried out to be told.

Today, Elena had been working in the little building where wounded soldiers could stop by and receive free clothing and toiletries. Since they arrived straight from the battlefield, they usually had nothing of their own.

“One of last week's new arrivals came down in his pajamas and robe today,” she said. “He just wanted to get out of his room. He's not badly injured; he'll be going back downrange soon. He sat at the table while the volunteer coordinator and I set out the new clothes, and he talked—just talked, the whole time. He's been married for two years now, and he's only been home once. He got married to his high school sweetheart right before he deployed, and a month later, he was gone. He has a baby boy—he showed us photos—and he hasn't even gotten to hold him.

“First, he was deployed for a year. Then he and his wife were so excited, they thought he would be home for a while. But the Army came out and said he needed to go downrange again because he should have been gone for eighteen months—that's what the new terms are. So he was home for less than half a year, and then gone again, and this time, it's for eighteen months. Just think, the first three years you're married, and you're only home for maybe six months.”

“I can't even imagine how hard that would be,” I murmured.

“So his wife back home—he's practically frantic, he's so worried about his wife back home. She's young, she's pretty, all her friends are still single, or their husbands are right there, and here she is, she has no help with the baby, she might as well be divorced. And she tells him, ‘I don't know if I can keep doing this.' And he's so torn up, he can't stop talking about it. ‘I don't think she'll wait for me,' he says. He shows us her picture, she's just a girl like me, cute blond hair, nice makeup, she's smiling like she just wants to go have some fun, and he says, ‘What do I do? I don't think she's going to wait.'”

Elena fell silent, brow furrowed, watching the twists and turns of the little two-lane road as it took us through a town. I was dodging around parked cars, weaving and do-si-do-ing with oncoming traffic in a polite German automotive dance.
You first
, we signaled with our hands and headlights.
No, please, you go right ahead
.

It would never work in America. We'd smash right into each other.

My heart ached for the poor young soldier. It was what Elena did so well, I thought. She found people to care about, and she told me their stories, and they came to life for me. With just a few words, she could break my heart.

And maybe Elena was thinking about that, too.

“I want to write a memoir,” she said. “About my time in the hospital. An eating disorder memoir for girls like me.”

“I think that's a great idea!” I said. “You have a special gift for memoir, I think. You see the stories going on all around you.”

“The thing is, I don't know how to start.”

Several years of visits to writers' clubs and creative-writing classes had left me with dozens of minilectures stored away in my head. I found the memoir minilecture and started it rolling.

“Well, I wouldn't worry so much about how to start or where you're going to end up. I'd start first by capturing vignettes: little scenes, the details you remember, character sketches, the small stories you observed. That way, you won't lose them. Then worry later about how to string them together. That's the least of your problems right now.”

Elena was silent for a minute.

“You could help me,” she finally said.

It was a generous offer. Sharing anything with me seemed hard for Elena these days. But—did I hold it against my daughter that my own writing was going so badly? If I did, I disguised it well, even from myself. But I didn't consider the idea—not for a second.

“You know I'm not a memoir person,” I pointed out. “That's your gift, not mine. My writing mind works best when it's escaping to a world I can make up.” And I thought of what a writer friend of mine said whenever someone hit him up with a book idea at a party:
Thanks, but there's another book I'd rather write
.

“This is your book,” I reminded Elena. “I think you'll do a great job with it.”

“But I don't have any time,” she pointed out.

I thought of Martin's Word file, waiting at home.
Neither do I!
I thought.
In spite of what you seem to think, neither do I
.

But I didn't say that out loud.

“I know senior year is crazy,” I said. “That's another reason to record the little stories. Just fit in those vignettes where you have time so you don't lose the details.”

“Yeah,” she said. “That's a good idea.”

That night, as I lay in bed, I thought again about Elena and her memoir. It was touching that she thought of my writing skills with such faith. It had made me happy to be asked. But—write about the Summer from Hell? Me?

There's another book I'd rather write!

Martin's sullen face intruded into this reverie.
Or maybe not
, he pointed out,
considering how little writing you're actually doing
.

Poor Martin!
I told him in an agony of guilt.
Don't give up on me!

As I lay there, guilty and unhappy, a vision floated up in my memory of a glorious day back from the time when the girls were still at boarding school. Back then, I had a bad cold that had deepened into a sinus infection. I was feverish and thoroughly miserable. But the scene I had been working on the night before was boiling away in my brain.

Eventually, on that glorious day, I couldn't contain myself any longer. I had to get out of bed. I pulled on my bathrobe, made some tea to soothe my aching throat, and shuffled upstairs to the garret room and my computer.

Marak's goblins were meeting a traditional band of elves for the very first time—which meant that I, too, was meeting them for the first time. What did they look like? How were they dressed? What did my goblins think of them? What were these newcomers thinking of the goblins?

That day, I was nowhere, and I was everywhere. I hid behind trees, and I looked into the minds of strangers. I didn't feel aches and pains. I didn't even exist.

Not a sound or a worry interrupted my concentration. The girls were still happy at school. Joe was working late. Our old dog and cat were sleeping like the dead.

After a while, an annoying little problem began to tug at me. Misspellings were starting to appear on the computer screen. My fingers weren't finding the right spot on the keyboard. And why couldn't I see my hands?

I pushed my chair back and looked around. Night had fallen while I'd been working.

I had been with my goblins and elves for
ten straight hours
!

I didn't feel like an author that day—not at all. I wasn't published yet, and I couldn't have cared less about genres or markets. All that mattered was that I had gone somewhere amazing and had seen things no one else in the world had seen. My house was a mess, and dinner came out of a box, but I was wildly, exuberantly happy.

And that night, the night after that glorious day, as I went shuffling off to find the cough syrup, I couldn't wait to wake up and do it all over again.

Now, as I lay in bed and agonized over Martin's stalled story, I recalled that day with wistful disbelief. My house was tidy, but my imagination was a total wreck. I was extremely lucky if I could forget my nagging fears and worries for as long as twenty minutes. And even when I did manage to forget for a little while, I seemed to interrupt myself on purpose. It was as if falling into my other world had become a dangerous pastime. I would get close to it, just close enough to feel the gravitational pull, close enough to find myself start to light up with interest . . .

And then I would jump up and run away from the keyboard to go iron a shirt or defrost a chicken.

Maybe if I were just writing something different.

If I can't bring myself to care about you
, I told Martin sternly,
then the reader won't care about you, either
.

You always criticize me!
Martin said.
Nothing I ever do is good enough for you
.

Meanwhile, Valerie, far away in Georgia, was making a happy life for herself among people I had never met. She'd found a job as a waitress, and she and Clint had been dating for a year. Clint's mother sent me an email with photos of the two of them.

“Why aren't you proud of your daughter?” she wrote to me. “I'd be proud if I had a daughter like Valerie.”

This comment made me very sad. I knew Clint's mother adored Valerie. I knew that she wasn't being mean. She was only trying to reach
out—to build a connection with that stern, disapproving woman who had driven Valerie away. It wasn't Clint's mother's fault that that woman didn't exist . . .

. . . Because she
didn't
exist, did she?—that stern, unhappy woman?

“I am proud of Valerie,” I wrote back to her. “And I'm so glad she has you there to help her while we're far away.”

Valerie and I were emailing back and forth very often by this time, but we still rarely spoke on the phone. I could tell that this hurt Valerie. She was missing me.

“When you call, it's only for five minutes,” she said one evening. “I'm not much for writing letters. Why can't we really talk? I said I was sorry for leaving. Are you still mad at me?”

“No,” I said. “It's hard to explain. Each time I hear your voice, you sound better than the time before. When you left home, there was no color in your voice. It was flat and disinterested. But, little by little, the life's coming back. You're getting better. I can hear it. And I'm afraid, if we get close to you—”

“—that I'll screw up again?”

“No, that we'll make you worse. Because maybe it was
us
, Valerie—our fault. Maybe we're the reason you didn't get better here. What if our family is toxic?”

Valerie's voice on the phone was small and sad, as it used to be sometimes when she was a little girl. “You're not toxic, Momma,” she said.

“You don't know that, honey,” I said. “You don't know what made you sick. I miss you, too, but I want you to have the chance to keep getting better.”

Because your sister is sick now
, I thought but didn't say.
And she surely seems to think that I'm the one to blame
.

My relationship with Elena had never been worse. Not in my wildest dreams had I imagined that it could be this bad. Day after day, she berated me, exhausted and angry. But if Elena had transformed into the evil witch of my world, I had become the evil witch of hers.

With the best will in the world, day after day, I nagged and scolded her. I could hear the whining edge in my voice these days, but I couldn't stop. It was because I watched every single bite that went into Elena's mouth now. And it wasn't enough. It was
never
enough.

So I had to speak up. I had to say
something
.

Day after day, I stood in the kitchen and wondered and worried and agonized. What should I cook? What would Elena eat? I tried out meals she had liked last year, but that didn't work anymore. I tried the food she'd liked when she was younger, but she seemed to hate it now.

No matter what I cooked, Elena hated it.

“What would you like to eat tonight?” I would ask her on the drive home.

Elena would shrug. “I don't care.”

But she did care. She cared deeply. And not in a good way, either. Never—never in a good way.