Hope and Other Luxuries (64 page)

And my writer's mind pounced:
The rape!

I remembered the fourteen-year-old Elena, home from the boarding school—that intense, miserable, thin little fourteen-year-old whom Dr. Eichbaum had pronounced completely normal. That “normal” eighth grader was dragging me to the library . .  to check out books on babies.

What to Expect When You're Expecting
.

At the time, Elena had told me she wanted to learn about child-care for babysitting, and I had supported her desire to learn whatever she wanted to learn, to pick up any book the library had to offer. I did ask a few gentle questions, of course. They didn't get anywhere. But then, what had my character said about Dr. Eichbaum's questions?

I lied my ass off
.

That fourteen-year-old was carrying a horrible secret. She was terrified that she might be pregnant.

Helpless. Raped. Terrified. And maybe pregnant.

What does a mind do with a rape? What can it possibly do with such terror and disgust and shame? It buries the secrets, and like termites, those secrets eat their way out somewhere else . . .

Helpless—a coma. Assaulted—a feeding tube. Pregnant—pumped up into obesity . . .

And four years later, there was Elena at the children's hospital, lying helpless as the sitter and I nodded off. Pumped full of calories, absolutely petrified with terror and disgust and shame . . .

I couldn't think about this anymore. I couldn't talk about it anymore. I groped around in my mind for a distraction, something, anything—

“What about the puddings?” I asked.

Elena didn't move. She still had her hand over her eyes. Every now and then, she cleared the gunk out of her throat.

“What about them?” she muttered.

“Every day at the children's hospital, I brought you a pudding, and every day, you ate it. You acted like you couldn't wait. But at the same time, you were so obsessed with calories that you were passing out from the stress of having to eat. You were stuffing potato chips into your pillow case. You were staying up half the night to pump your own stomach.”

And, in the back of my mind, I was waiting for Elena to protest these incredible statements, to sit up and laugh:
No, I wasn't!

But instead, she just coughed and blew her nose again. “And?”

“And you anorexics can't bear to eat!” I said. “Five pieces of popcorn is enough to send you into a tailspin. It keeps you up all night, it sends you exercising, it brings your Critical Voice in to scream at you . . .”

As I said this, I knew what I wanted. I knew exactly what I wanted. I wanted Elena to say,
That's crazy, Mom! I don't think that way. You're being silly. You've got it all wrong!
And she would take me by the hand, and we would walk back to a normal life . . .

But Elena just said, “Yeah, so?”

I felt anger and confusion and pain rise up to choke me. It was all wrong! So wrong!

“And so, what about the puddings I brought you?” I snapped. “Did you just purge them?”

“No, I never purged the puddings.”

“But
why
?”

I was really angry now. The puddings had made me angry. Those puddings represented everything I didn't know back then, despite my best efforts to learn. They represented everything that
still
made no sense.

“You count every calorie!” I said—but I realized I wasn't saying it, I was shouting it. “You watch every bite! Those puddings—they must have been
torture
!
Why
did you let me feed them to you?
Why
did you act like you wanted them?”

She said, “I did it because it made you happy.”

I put down my laptop. I hurried off to the bathroom. I sat down in a corner on the tile floor, and I cried.

Those puddings were and are the saddest thing in this entire story. They were love and confusion and hurt and redemption. They were the gift of the magi.

Elena and I were on our commute to Clove House the next morning when I finally asked about Drew Center, that first treatment center—the one that had held her by force. I had been putting off talking about it, and I had to force myself to bring it up.

I myself could hardly bear to revisit those memories. Just the words
Drew Center
, spoken out loud, brought up in grim, ghastly detail that dark time, the lost time, when I had known my daughter was a prisoner and I had wandered all alone in that terrifying place inside my own head.

But, once again, Elena was calm about it in a way that I couldn't be.

“Institutions like that have to be careful,” she said. “They could have been sued if they had let me out and I did something crazy. They were just covering their butts.”

Good point
, noted the writer in me.

But the mother promptly pushed it away.

“It was my decision, not theirs!” I said. “If they were concerned, they should have shared those concerns with me. But they didn't—they didn't share! They didn't educate me, and they didn't help me. They treated me like an enemy.”

“Well, yeah, they did,” Elena said. “But it wasn't personal.”

The highway around me seemed to blur for a second, and I blinked and checked my mirrors. All good, no cars nearby, nothing to worry about.

It was just my mind, starting to boggle again.

“They—what?” I said. “They treated me like an enemy, but it wasn't
personal
? What do you mean, ‘wasn't personal'?”

I glanced at Elena, and my writer's mind noted that my character's profile was nonchalant. Maybe
too
nonchalant, in fact: carefully, deliberately neutral.

“At Drew Center,” she said, “they taught us that our families were the reason we had our eating disorder.”

I could hear the screech in my voice: “They
what
?”

“They told us—
all
of us, not just me—that our families were the ones who made us sick.”

The mother in me completely short-circuited. She was shocked right out of existence. She had frozen on that single screech:

What??

But time didn't stand still. Our exit came up, and I took it. I drove in silence, still hearing that screech in my head:

What??

Meanwhile, the writer in me did what she always does. She took in the evidence, and she started looking for patterns.

The careful generalities from the set of three psychiatrists. Their lack of information. Their look of polite disbelief.

Dr. Petras's angry voice:
I'm not going to argue with you!

The hostility of the Drew Center staff. The rolled eyes and contemptuous voices.

Dr. Moore:
So, you don't want your daughter to be treated for anorexia
.

And that baffling note in the hospital system, the one that had denied Elena medical care:
This patient AND HER MOTHER
 . . .

“It was the mother, wasn't it?” I said.

“What?”

“It was the
mother
who caused her daughter to have anorexia.”

Elena was silent for a moment. Finally, she said, “I guess.”

So there it was.

There it bloody well was!

While I was back at the hotel, agonizing over how to help my sick child recover, doctors and therapists at Drew Center were busy explaining to Elena that
I
had made her sick. That's right: the woman who had dropped everything and flown halfway around the world next to her stretcher. The mother—the cause of all her problems!

Did
any
of them have a single shred of evidence for that? Did
any
of them try to find out anything about me?

“Hey, can we stop for coffee?” Elena asked. A Starbucks drive-through was coming up.

I whipped into the lane and waited behind the other morning commuters. I drummed my fingers on the steering wheel. My whole body vibrated with emotion.

The child abuse case.

The
child abuse
case!

Oh, my
God
—!

“Those people hadn't even
met
me!” I said. “They made up their minds before they asked a single question. No, wait—they never
did
ask a single question!”

“It wasn't personal,” Elena repeated in the same neutral voice. “They said the same thing to all the patients.”

We arrived at the Starbucks window. I paid in silence and reached for Elena's coffee. It took all I had to keep from hurling it across the parking lot. The way I was feeling, it wasn't the best thing for me to have a sloshy projectile in my hand.

“Those
bastards
!” I said as I made my right turn back onto the street. “Those arrogant, preening, self-satisfied
bastards
! Blame it all on the mother, right? Lord knows
she
deserves it!”

“Mom,” Elena said. “It doesn't matter. I didn't believe them.”

Really?

While the mother in me continued to rave, my writer's mind examined this new piece of information. It studied the patterns. It tested the facts.

Elena's shift in attitude. Her distant expression. The bitter tone in her voice. It was all right there, as early as the very next day, on the car ride to Texas:

Chill
out,
Mom! Dad, Mom doesn't trust me!

“Of
course
you believed them!” I snapped. “What teenager in pain wouldn't? You're out of your mind with grief and anger, your sister's run away, you're locked up against your will . . . and then a doctor cozies up to you and says, ‘Here, let me set you straight. Simple answer: your
mother
did it!”

“I told them they were wrong.”

The writer's mind studied that: the conviction in my character's voice, the look of pained memory.

“Yes, you did,” I agreed. “You defended your family, but that doesn't mean their crackpot nonsense didn't poison your mind.”

And my imagination played out scenes of Dr. Moore and the other therapists, so smooth, so sure of themselves, tormenting that sick, desperate young woman with their trumped-up pseudoscientific theories . . .

The
suffering
! The
suffering
they had caused!

“They knew
nothing
about your family, those people!” I said. “Dr. Petras didn't ask us a single question, not one. I was tried, judged, and executed before I even stepped into his office. Before he even laid eyes on me!”

“Yeah, well,” Elena said. “Dr. Petras had his own problems.”

But I couldn't stop to hear this. I was still locked in a hell of my own.

“As if you and your sister weren't the most important people in my world! As if I wasn't by your bedside every night, reading to you. Reading to
you
—you used to read to
me
more than I read to you! Every book you picked up, you told me all about it. Every class you took, every friend you made, you came home and said, ‘Guess
what
!' Did those doctors want to hear about that? Did they ask about the hours I set aside to hear about your day, to talk over what was going on in your life? And I didn't do it because it was some kind of duty, either. I
wanted
to be an audience! I
love
being a part of your life! I—I—there I was, worried out of my
mind
over you—and they all thought I was the
enemy
!”

“Not all of them,” Elena said. “If it makes you feel any better, a lot of medical doctors think everything a psychiatrist says is bullshit.”

But it didn't make me feel better. I wasn't listening.

“The riding lessons,” I went on, “when you were little. I drove you half an hour each way and stayed there the whole time.
You're
the ones who asked for them. I didn't pressure you! I wanted you to learn what interested
you
! The folklorico dance lessons you begged me for—
I'm
the one who made them happen. And how many parents listen to every new song their child wants to play for them? How many times have you and
your sister said, ‘Hey, Mom, listen to this'? And I did. I do! I'm
glad
to! I want you to be able to talk to me! I want—I want to be a
positive
part of your
life
!”

Elena's voice was stoic: “You're a great mom.”

Unfortunately for us both, I was listening this time. And this, of course, was the wrong thing to say.

I hadn't been a great mom. I had tried—God knows, I had tried. I had gone into this with the intention to be extraordinary. And I had been a
good
mom, I felt sure of that—a
good
mom. But a
great
mom . . .

Or had I?

Had
I been a good mom—
really
?

My imagination obligingly found memories for me, dozens and dozens of them. Little snappy comments. Impatience. Frustration. Exhaustion. No time . . .

And my girls, my two little girls, with looks of disappointment, of dismay . . .

They were so precious, those little children! They were like flowers. Like stars! Those two little girls had deserved the
best
!

So maybe it was true. Maybe I
had
been a bad mom. The stakes had been so high! I had tried, yes—I had
tried
. But there, that bright, bouncy, goofy, happy little girl had gotten raped—gotten raped on my watch.

I sank to the bottom of a pool of misery and regret.

“Maybe if we hadn't moved to Germany,” I mourned.

“Screw that!” Elena said. “I love Germany.”

But I didn't care. I abandoned myself to that inky-black ocean of remorse.

“Maybe if you hadn't gone to boarding school.”

Elena gazed out the window in silence.

“Mom, this is stupid,” she said after a minute. “You know it's not your fault. Nobody believes that anymore, not even the psychiatrists who used to tell people that. The theory got discredited. Remember what Dr. Leben told me? Teenage anorexia comes from
outside
the family.”