in we went, to Dr. V.’s blandly beige office, where she commenced interrogating Kitty in the same gooey tones. I didn’t care how idiotic or patronizing she sounded, as long as she could tell us what to do and how to do it. If she’d come up with a workable plan, I would gladly have given her all our disposable income for the next ten years. If I’d trusted her, even a little, we would have been in her office twice a week. Alas, no plan was forthcoming, and trust was not an option after Dr. V. informed me that anorexia “isn’t about the food” and was typically caused by “the mother’s unresolved conflicts.”
“Now, Mom, don’t be the food police!” she admonished me as she ushered us out of the office. I wanted to bite her head off. How in the world could Dr. V. be considered an expert on adolescents when she talked to Kitty as if she were two years old? She hadn’t a clue how to relate to a teenager.
“What did you think?” I asked Kitty in the car. She shrugged apathetically, but I thought I caught the tiniest hint of something—amusement? sarcasm?—in her dulled gaze. It cheered me immensely, which I needed when I imagined coming back to Dr. V.’s office week after week, offering up our family’s dysfunctional moments as Kitty grew thinner and weaker and paler. Dr. V., it was clear, was not going to save Kitty. But if she couldn’t do it, who could?
That night, Emma ran away from home. She didn’t go far—only to the end of the block—and she was easy to find, because she stood on the street corner and screamed, “I have the stupidest, most lousy parents in the world!”
Man, was I jealous. I wanted to stand on the corner and cuss someone out too. I just didn’t know who.
In the second week of July, the weather turned even steamier, with three-digit temperatures nearly every day. One of those days was our city’s annual opera in the park concert, which we went to every year, eating a picnic dinner on a blanket in the grass.
Kitty spent that entire afternoon in our sweltering kitchen, frying chicken and making carrot cake, the oven and range going full blast. The room was like a sauna, but she wore a long-sleeved gray sweatshirt over a T-shirt, heavy jeans, fuzzy socks—and still she did not sweat. Nor would she drink, even when I followed her around with a glass of ice water, begging her to take a sip. “For God’s sake, it’s a hundred degrees in here,” I said.
“I’m not thirsty.”
“Promise me you’ll at least eat some of what you’re cooking,” I said, my voice raised in frustration.
Kitty looked at me calmly. “Of course I will,” she said.
Of course she didn’t, not really. She peeled every speck of fried coating from a drumstick and picked at the meat. She produced a small bag of red grapes and ate three, turning down the carrot cake, the potato salad, the apple juice. “My stomach hurts,” she said. “I’m not hungry.”
I got angry. Furious, actually. Furious enough to turn my back on Kitty in her sweatshirt, zipped up to the neck. I sat at the opposite end of the blanket, denying her contact, avoiding her icy hands, her now nearly constant need for physical reassurance. Fine, I’d thought. OK. You want to starve yourself to death? Go right ahead.
The chicken and carrot cake were, no doubt, delicious. I don’t know, because none of us ate a bite. I went to bed angry, feeling like things were about as bad as they could get.
And that’s when Kitty came to me in the dark, her hand on her chest, her voice full of fear.
I can see from the look on the nurse’s face that the news is not good. She ushers us back to the emergency room cubicle, where an earnest young doctor shakes my hand and opens Kitty’s chart. He seems to be a long way off, his voice tinny and low as he explains there’s a problem with Kitty’s EKG. The electrical impulses that initiate each heartbeat are coming from the wrong part of her heart, a sign that her body is stressed. She’s also dehydrated, and her heart rate is too low, only thirty-five beats per minute. The number penetrates the gray fog that’s descending over my whole body. Kitty’s heart rate has dropped since our visit with Dr. Beth two weeks earlier. This isn’t good.
“I’m