Hope and Other Luxuries (43 page)

“It was a setup,” Elena agreed. “That crap with the head of Housing about being a good role model—they don't want to turn me loose with students because I'm anorexic. And everybody knows that anorexics recruit other anorexics, right? People say that about us, that we get
newbies hooked on our diets, we teach them our tricks . . . A lot of idiots treat anorexics like we've got a contagious disease.”

That tone of voice, grandfatherly and sorrowful:
I cannot put you forward as a role model
.

“No—that's crazy!” I said. “I can hardly believe it.”

But then again, the whole morning had been crazy. Overnight, our world had become crazy.

Again!

The plan. I clung to the plan. I didn't think beyond it. We had a deadline of midnight to move Elena's belongings out of her room. She was coming back home to live with us. The head of Housing had graciously removed the restriction against her living in the dorms, but Elena wouldn't do it.

We scrounged boxes and packed up Elena's pretty dorm room that she had just finished unpacking. My nerves were jangling like so many plucked guitar strings, and I just wanted to stand on Elena's balcony and scream. But she was strong and calm through it all. She had such dignity.

The Little Princess would have understood Elena that day. So would Heathcliff. So would a certain fiercely proud little freak in Goodwill clothes, sitting and reading next to the fence at the far corner of the playground.

It matters how you hold up your head in retreat. It matters how they look away when you look them in the eye.

We drove home and dismantled my tidy guest room, and Elena piled her boxes in the middle of its floor. She put Dylan's bowl on the counter of the hall bathroom. He was a bright blue spark of defiance in the red haze of the day.

The plan. I needed a plan. We had come to the end of this plan, so I started working on another one. “You can fight this,” I told Elena as we sat down with cups of tea. “I'll help you if you want.”

“Oh, yeah,” Elena said. “Let's do this.”

First, we went to the Counseling Center to check up on that odd morning appointment. The counselor who had spoken to Elena that day turned out to be surprisingly candid. Yes, she said, the new dorm boss had come in to speak to her as soon as Elena had left.

“She wanted to know if, in my opinion, you were competent to do your job,” the counselor said. “I told her we don't make those sorts of judgments.”

Competent to do her job! I felt the shock of that run through me. This girl who had assisted at surgeries, who had smiled and helped soldiers with bloodstained bandages on, with chunks of shrapnel still sticking out of them . . .

I felt the shock, and I felt fury. But I smiled, just as Elena was smiling. The plan. Stick to the plan.

“Would you be willing to write a letter to that effect,” I asked, “to help us in a wrongful-termination case?”

“Oh, absolutely,” the counselor said. “I'll be happy to do that. And to state this to a board of inquiry as well, if that comes up.”

There: That was some good news for a change.

Then we went to the campus police station and talked to the police chief. We needed a copy of the police report filed after the wellness check. The police chief invited us into his office. He heard Elena out without interrupting, and he was thoughtful and sympathetic.

“That man who runs Housing is an idiot!” he said. “But they train us to keep an eye out for self-harm when we talk to our students. And I have to say,” he said, taking Elena gently by the wrist, “that this looks like it might be self-harm to me.”

He pointed to a pink scar that spiraled down Elena's forearm. And he didn't ask the question, but his eyes did.

I leaned forward in my chair. I knew when the cut had occurred: it dated from the day last October when Elena had ended up in the ER with her blackout. I knew what Elena had told me about it afterward: it was an accident that had occurred while she was unconscious. I had seen how her arms circled during her dissociation blackouts, so I had assumed that that's how it had happened.

But what did I know about this scar—really?

Elena smiled at the police chief. She seemed completely at ease. “That,” she said, pointing at the scar, “was an accident. But I'll be honest: I was pretty drunk at the time.”

The police chief checked his department's records and discovered that his officers didn't even write up a report after the wellness check
because they hadn't seen anything worth reporting. In fact, they could see no reason why they had been called to Elena's room. So the police chief supplied us with evidence of the nonreport, as well as a statement that Elena had a completely clean record at the school.

“It certainly looks suspicious to me,” he told us.

That was more good news. The plan was going well.

That was all we could do for one day. We drove home and tried to busy ourselves with normal things. But I couldn't manage to do this. I was in complete turmoil. The more it seemed that Elena had been fired unfairly, the more upset I got. My brain couldn't stop scheming, making plans, making lists of questions and bullet points: meetings to set up, advice to gather, calls to make . . .

Nighttime came. Midnight came. I lay in bed and tried to relax, but it was completely out of the question. The minutes crawled by while I lay there, perfectly still, silently battling what felt like a kind of hysteria.

The ax had fallen.

Again.

Our normal, reasonable, safe world had blown apart.

Again!

Why?
I almost screamed out loud.
Why did this happen
again
?

Joe wasn't there. He had left for a dream vacation with my brother, hiking in the mountains of Wyoming. The two of them had planned the vacation for years. Now, poor Joe felt terrible. He couldn't help me at all. He couldn't even call to hear the latest developments unless he walked to a hill several hundred yards from their campsite.

“It's okay,” I tried to tell him. I didn't want to ruin his precious free time. I wanted him to know that I had everything under control. But each time we talked, I ended up crying on the phone. I could hold it together for everybody else, but I couldn't when I talked to Joe.

I tried my best to be normal. I cooked Elena and me fine meals, and I did everything I always did. But for the entire week after Elena's firing, I lost a pound a day.

It wasn't because Elena was home. That was no hardship. I loved her company, and I knew all too well that I would have plenty of years away from her. It was a blessing to share as much time with my daughter as I could.

But somehow, this shock had triggered PTSD for me. It was if time had telescoped, and it was the Summer from Hell all over again. It was as if the dorm boss and Dr. Petras had gotten together to attack Elena, and Valerie was walking into the room again, covered in burns.

The ax had fallen.

Again.

The ax had fallen
again
!

By day, I joked with Elena and petted my dog. But each night, I lay awake, hyperventilating, while the hours crawled slowly by, and I thought,
It's happened again! It's happened again! This cannot be happening
again
!

So we fought it this time. We didn't just sit there and suffer. We collected our statements and our reports. Our last stop, after we had everything put together, was the university's Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) office.

The lawyer we talked to looked over our material and admitted that the sequence of events looked suspicious. He wasn't sure he could treat the case as an EEO violation, but he promised to look into it as carefully as he could. He told us he'd get back to us in two or three weeks.

Then we left campus. We had done all we could do.

“Can I get a manicure?” Elena begged. “I'm tired of thinking about this. I just want a nice distraction.”

So I drove her to the mall and sat beside her while she got French nails. There were small bamboos in clear glass vases all around us, and the floor and the counters were gray slate. The young Asian lady who worked on Elena's hands applied the French nails with lightning speed. Meanwhile, she carried on an equally rapid and entirely indecipherable conversation with the nail salon worker next to her.

Their language fascinated me. It was like the liquid music of songbirds.

Meanwhile, Elena delivered an engrossing lecture on the purposes of all the mysterious tools and potions on the nail salon tray. Then she ventured on a brief but highly entertaining roundup of nail-salon scenes in recent movies. She ended with a description of favorite manicures and explained why she liked French nails best. The variations are more interesting, she said, and if they're done well, they're the most natural-looking nail.

I paid for Elena's new French nails, and she walked out, smiling.

But the next morning, as I passed the hall bathroom, I caught her peeling them all off.

I didn't know then, but I know now: Elena had gotten the manicure to distract herself from engaging in the kind of behavior that fed her eating disorder. And maybe it had worked for one day. But not for two.

Elena's world had blown apart—again. And whether she liked it or not, her mind was reaching for the only defense it knew. Against the bullies, all Elena had was starvation. It was the only force strong enough to stop the monsters and silence the humiliation and fury.

Or, as Elena would put it later: “Ah, yes . . . the vomit hand.”

My daughter's anorexia nervosa was back.

With a vengeance.

S
chool didn't start for another week, so Joe and I sent Elena out to Georgia to Valerie's apartment, to have a vacation with her sister. Unsettled, I wandered through the house, finding new places for things. Elena had taken down my decorations from the guest room and left them in a neat stack on the bed. She wanted to put up her mermaid picture when she got back.

I stood in the guest room—now, her room—and remembered when this had been Valerie's and Elena's room. Their bunk beds had been right over there.

While I was lost in wistful memories, Genny trotted past me and jumped up onto Elena's bed.

“No, come out of here,” I told the old terrier. “I have to shut this door.”

From the depths of Elena's pillow, the little dog eyed me sadly.

“Genny, come on!” I said. “I have to shut this before . . .”

And, sure enough, Simon strolled in.

“Okay, now, both of you,” I said, picking up the black cat. He wasn't fat, but he was so big that he overflowed my arms. “Now, Genny. Come on!”

But Genny just continued to gaze at me, so I put down Simon and went to pick up Genny instead. I pitched her through the door and gave the double-clap that meant
exit
. Simon ran out of the room. He might be a cat, but he was better trained than the dog was . . .

. . . in some ways.

The reason all the bedroom doors were closed was that Simon had taken to spraying again. He was an indoor cat, and he was upset that the dog got to go outside. He longed to get at the birds and—even more—at the other cats, who came and taunted him through the window. Simon was neutered in body but most certainly not neutered in mind.

Before Genny had come along, Simon had been heading into sleepy old age. But the sight of the terrier cavorting in the Saint Augustine grass outside every day had fired up his cat spirit. Now, he sang battle songs through the window at the feral cats, and when they sprayed the back door, he sprayed back—in my house.

Everybody wants things I can't give them
, I thought with a sigh as I gathered up the pictures.
Where to put these? This place needs more storage
.

My quest for storage options took me into the hall bathroom, where Dylan was circling around and around his little stone pagoda. I stopped to admire his shiny blue beauty, and he puffed out his fins for me. The pleated fins fell in soft waves around his blue body like the cascades of hair on a pampered show dog.

“It's easy to take care of him,” Elena had told me before she left. “Here's his food. Here's his chemical drops. Change twenty-five percent of his water one time while I'm gone.”

But as I watched Dylan sail grandly past in a parade of one, I worried. Fish are fragile. Such sad little lives . . .

My overactive imagination immediately started supplying me unwanted snippets of film: Simon, with his long black arm stretched into the bowl, raking open Dylan's gorgeous blue skin. Tor, bumping his tabby face against the glass and rolling the round goldfish bowl off the counter.

How improbable is it, anyway
, I thought,
that fish need to take their entire habitat into our world? What if dogs and cats had to do that?

And my imagination promptly supplied me an image of a cat in a space suit, hooked up to a portable breathing machine.

Besides
, I worried,
isn't that bowl too small? And what about the temperature? The air conditioner is blowing right on him. And won't he go crazy, swimming around and around? He doesn't have anything to
do
!

By the time Elena got home at the end of the week, Dylan was living in a five-gallon tank with its own heater, light, filter, and locking lid. He loved threading his way through his new silk plants. I even found him sleeping on the leaves.

“I think he likes the background I printed out for him,” I told her. “I catch him studying it sometimes. The book says you should move his
plants around each time you change the water so he'll have a little variety. And look, I got him ping-pong balls to float on the top. I read that some bettas like to play with them. And I'm teaching him to bite my finger for his food. I practice with him four times a day.”

“Mom,” Elena said, “I
seriously
think you're overthinking this.”