usual ritual: cleaning windows grimed with salty spray. We grabbed squeegees and old plastic buckets and filled them with water and vinegar and carved ourselves out a clear view of the cold ocean visible in a great molten welter from our cliffside promontory. It was fun, chattering work and Breck’s mood seemed to elevate. I’d already convinced her to read Anna Karenina , and the first night we were there she stayed up late laughing and crying over it. I lay in my bed in the room adjacent, worrying about her, deluding myself with the idea that literature is always a balm—Tolstoy, with your great baggy novel, you’ll help her get a handle on this self-destructive phase, won’t you? But soon I realized that grand narrative sweep had done little to break my daughter’s compulsion to starve herself, that the fresh lobsters we bought in the harbor repulsed her (she said their meat reminded her of dried red cottage cheese), that the wild blueberries we picked right off the bushes resembled blood clots, that rice tasted like pebbles. The only thing she could eat was egg whites cooked until they were crisped and which she laced with ketchup. However, some days she found it impossible to get anything down at all, even lozenges of milk chocolate, which as a last resort I tried to press on her just to provide some calories.
Shortly after we returned to Vermont, Breck allowed me to place her in a psychiatric facility down in Brattleboro. The medical staff forbade me to see her for two weeks, making me feel that I was the cause of her illness. Wasted from her self-inflicted starvation, her organs were functioning weakly. She had to be put on intravenous sustenance and the hospital feared that her heart might give out. When they told me this bit of news, I remember looking through the antique rolled-glass windows of my study at my red barn with its sagging, rusted metal roof, to my exuberant garden of tiger lilies, Cherokee sunsets, and golden jubilee. The heads of the flowers bowed over, looking dried and sapped of life as though a fierce spell of winter had suddenly invaded July. I knew Breck’s life was in peril and, having already lost my husband, I didn’t know how I would go on if my daughter died.
I lived from day to day in a stupor of anxiety, hardly eating anything myself, waiting for bulletins that were never very promising. “She’s the same today. Not eating. She sleeps mostly, even without medication. She’s too weak to walk very far. She’s dizzy.” What they didn’t tell me, couldn’t tell me, wouldn’t dare to tell me was “She wants to kill herself.”
And it was just when things were looking particularly dire that Breck responded to the idea of having some white toast with butter and maple syrup spread on it. It was the first good-news phone call, and the flood of relief allowed me to sleep for several hours, the first substantial bout of sleep I’d had in days. The small meals increased over the next ten days and slowly Breck found her way back into the rhythm of regular eating. After a few more weeks of gradually expanding food intake and intensive therapy, she was released from the hospital.
But the problem persisted, particularly whenever she felt depressed or overly anxious. She left for college that autumn, ironically in Maine, and while most women report gaining weight during the first semester, Breck returned home five pounds lighter. The doctors had already explained to me: now she’d come so close to dying she’d be more susceptible to bouts of anorexia—I suppose the way fingers and toes, once frostbitten, are forever prone to it.
* * *
The day after Breck and I conducted our exchange of text messages, I returned home late in the afternoon to find that UPS had left leaning against my back door a small package with her return address in Morristown. I tore off the wrapping to find a book whose antique vellum dust jacket was inscribed with an etching of a huge willow tree
Shortly after we returned to Vermont, Breck allowed me to place her in a psychiatric facility down in Brattleboro. The medical staff forbade me to see her for two weeks, making me feel that I was the cause of her illness. Wasted from her self-inflicted starvation, her organs were functioning weakly. She had to be put on intravenous sustenance and the hospital feared that her heart might give out. When they told me this bit of news, I remember looking through the antique rolled-glass windows of my study at my red barn with its sagging, rusted metal roof, to my exuberant garden of tiger lilies, Cherokee sunsets, and golden jubilee. The heads of the flowers bowed over, looking dried and sapped of life as though a fierce spell of winter had suddenly invaded July. I knew Breck’s life was in peril and, having already lost my husband, I didn’t know how I would go on if my daughter died.
I lived from day to day in a stupor of anxiety, hardly eating anything myself, waiting for bulletins that were never very promising. “She’s the same today. Not eating. She sleeps mostly, even without medication. She’s too weak to walk very far. She’s dizzy.” What they didn’t tell me, couldn’t tell me, wouldn’t dare to tell me was “She wants to kill herself.”
And it was just when things were looking particularly dire that Breck responded to the idea of having some white toast with butter and maple syrup spread on it. It was the first good-news phone call, and the flood of relief allowed me to sleep for several hours, the first substantial bout of sleep I’d had in days. The small meals increased over the next ten days and slowly Breck found her way back into the rhythm of regular eating. After a few more weeks of gradually expanding food intake and intensive therapy, she was released from the hospital.
But the problem persisted, particularly whenever she felt depressed or overly anxious. She left for college that autumn, ironically in Maine, and while most women report gaining weight during the first semester, Breck returned home five pounds lighter. The doctors had already explained to me: now she’d come so close to dying she’d be more susceptible to bouts of anorexia—I suppose the way fingers and toes, once frostbitten, are forever prone to it.
* * *
The day after Breck and I conducted our exchange of text messages, I returned home late in the afternoon to find that UPS had left leaning against my back door a small package with her return address in Morristown. I tore off the wrapping to find a book whose antique vellum dust jacket was inscribed with an etching of a huge willow tree
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