Anne Siddons - Fault Lines

I got up and went to her and put my arms around her.

“I’m sure of that. I promise that. Your daddy isn’t going to leave us, ever. Not of his own will. We’re at the very center of his heart, you and me. Don’t you ever doubt that.”

“Sometimes you can’t tell,” she whispered against my shoulder, but I could feel her body relax slightly. I could also feel her ribs, sharp and separate, even under the thick, swaddling terry cloth. I went very still, resisting the impulse to feel all over her body with my hands. It would, I knew, be a terrible violation.

“He won’t always have to work so hard,” I said. “Mommee won’t be with us much longer. She just can’t be. Things will get better. I’m heartbroken for Jess, but that’s not going to happen to your father and me.”

“I thought for a minute she was going to die,” Glynn whispered.

“Whatever happens, she won’t do that,” I said. “She’ll have you and all her other friends, and maybe what you heard wasn’t as bad as it sounded—”

“It was.”

I was silent. It probably had been. Then I said, “Tell you what. Since we’ve got a free Saturday, why don’t we go over to Lenox Square and Phipps Plaza and buy you a whole raft of new summer clothes and then treat ourselves to lunch somewhere fancy? Your choice. Spare no expense.”

After a moment she smiled reluctantly, and I felt a great stab of love at the way her face bloomed into life.

“Anywhere I want? The Brasserie? The Tavern?”

“You call it.”

“A black spandex miniskirt?”

“Oh, Lord, Glynn…we’ll see.”

“ Yessss !” my daughter exulted and slapped me a high five, and disappeared into her walk-in closet, restored, for the moment, into childhood and safety.

“You know we have to talk about it. You know we do,” I said.

“I know,” Glynn said, staring into the banana split she’d ordered for dessert. She had managed the hamburger and some of the french fries, but I knew that the sweet mess pooling in the glass boat before her was making her physically sick.

“And you don’t have to eat that,” I said, smiling so that she would not catch the fear under my words. “I don’t insist that you eat stevedore’s meals. I just want you to eat something substantial consistently.”

“I know. I’m going to do better with it. I was going to start up at Big Canoe, and I did…I ate real well until we…you know, came home. After that I just couldn’t.”

“You know I’m not trying to bully you or spy on you, don’t you? I wouldn’t do that,” I said. “I wasn’t peeking at you. I saw you in the mirror beside the door when I was leaving, when you were trying on the bikini. It scared me. Glynn, if you could really once see yourself with other eyes and not the eyes of this illness—”

“I know it must be pretty gross. Everybody up at Big Canoe said I looked like a skeleton when I put on my bathing suit. I thought I looked great. I know it’s like last time, and I know I promised I’d tell you if it started again. But you all have been so upset about Mommee, and I thought I could handle it this time. And I was, except for last night—”

“When did it start, baby?” I said.

She looked around the leather banquette. In the dimness of the Tavern, the shopping bags holding her new clothes gleamed with gilt letters and logos like the plunder of an emir, and she looked, in their midst, like a young princess with her smooth hair and her loose, silky, new ivory tunic. But I knew that under the tunic her young bones thrust like spears. I had indeed seen her nearly naked in the betraying dressing-room mirror and lost my breath in terror. In the unforgiving, greenish fluorescent wash she looked worse than she ever had, literally starved. Somehow bruised, maimed. How could I not have seen?

“I’m not sure,” she said, pushing aside the melting dessert. “It hasn’t been all that long. I really haven’t lost all that much weight. I’ve been overdoing the swimming, maybe—”

“Are you running again?”

During her first bout with anorexia she had run constantly, for miles along the river or on the track at school. Since it was winter then, she ran in sweatclothes, and we did not notice the increasing thinness. I did worry sometimes that she was overdoing it; she must have run five or six miles a day, and more on weekends. But Pom was pleased.

“She’s got a runner’s build, and it’s a good habit to get into,” he said. “She’ll be active all her life. I’m glad she’s not a couch potato. I can’t stand fat women.”

When the illness surfaced both her therapist and internist forbade the running and limited her to swimming, and she agreed. But I know that she missed it.

“Some,” she said, turning her head away. “A little, after swim practice. I know. I promised. I’ll stop that, too.”

I reached over and took both her hands and tugged them, and she looked back with tears standing in her eyes. They swam like liquid blue light in the gloom.

“You can’t stop by yourself, Glynn,” I said. “That’s what this is all about. You remember what Dr. Flint said, that anorexia is about control and the control gets to be such an obsession that it starts to control you? This is not a calamity; you remember Dr. Flint saying that it would probably crop up a few more times till you got a handle on it, and that the important thing was to catch it early. So I really do have to know how long it’s been going on. We can help you, but we have to know that.”

“Mama, not we, please! You, I’ll tell you, but please don’t let Daddy know yet—”

“Okay, all right,” I said. “Not yet. Tell me. I’m not going to fuss at you.”

“I guess maybe a year or so—”

“A year !”

“It didn’t get…it didn’t start to go so fast until lately.”

“Is it something at school? Is it us, your daddy and me? Or Mommee—”

Mommee. Of course it was Mommee. Mommee, demanding, deposing, dethroning, unstoppable. Uncontrollable. I should have seen that, too; Pom should have.

“It is Mommee, isn’t it? Oh, honey, you should have said something. We could have talked about it—”

“Yeah, but what could you have done about it?” Glynn said. “You can’t change her and she can’t help it and nobody can stop it. I know all that. I can’t blame her, but Mama, she sucks all the air out of the house! She takes up all the space in it! She gets every bit of everybody’s attention all the time! And I work and work and swim and swim and paint and paint and my grades get better and better and I get zero . Zip. Or a little pat on the head, and ‘Way to go, old Tink,’ and then Mommee hollers again.…And I feel so guilty because it bothers me and I know she can’t help it! I feel guilty all the time about the way I feel about Mommee.”

She whispered the last, and the tears overflowed and ran down her cheeks to her chin. She did not move her hands to wipe them away but finally her face contorted and she jerked her hand from mine and scrubbed her face with it and gave a great, rattling sniff.

“I didn’t mean to cry,” she gulped.

My own eyes filled. I found a Kleenex and handed it to her.

“I think you have every right to cry,” I said. “We haven’t been very considerate of you, have we? You must know that we are both prouder of you than of anything we’ve ever done ourselves, or ever will do. I think maybe it’s that you’ve been such a great kid that we take you for granted while we try to cope with Mommee. That’s going to stop, I promise you. The first thing we’re going to do in the morning is have a family conference about this the way we used to do. Daddy said he’d be home all day.”