I don’t want to talk to them; I want to avert my eyes, put my fingers in my ears, and chant la la la so I don’t have to see or hear them. I want to run to the car without looking back.
But that would hurt their feelings. They’re here to help us, after all. And so we stay and talk to Abby, a lank-haired college sophomore whose smile does not reach her tired eyes, and Sarah, a high school senior who fingers the end of her curling ponytail. I glance across the table, trying to see, surreptitiously, how thin they are: Abby is skinny, too skinny, but not as thin as Kitty. Sarah wears a bulky sweatshirt and pants, so it’s impossible to see what her body looks like.
Sarah tells us she’s been dealing with anorexia for four years. She’s just come home after several months in a hospital eating-disorders unit, where she landed, she tells us with disarming frankness, because she tried to kill herself. “Actually, I tried a couple times,” she says, lounging in the plastic chair.
I sit beside my neighbor, nearly mute with fear, imagining my daughter with this air of weariness and quiet despair. My daughter trying to kill herself. My daughter succeeding.
I turn to Sarah; I can’t bear the look of exhaustion in Abby’s eyes. “What’s it really like?” I ask. “What does it feel like?”
Sarah swings one foot, considering. “It’s like having an angel sitting on one shoulder and a devil on the other shoulder,” she says earnestly. “And it’s like they’re fighting all day long.” Her foot goes back and forth hypnotically under the table. “And it gets so bad I can’t concentrate on anything else, you know? It’s like I’m watching a movie, only I’m in the movie too. The angel says, ‘Eat this chicken, you know you should!’ and the devil says ‘Don’t eat it, you’re already gross and fat and disgusting.’ Honestly, I don’t remember very much from when it was really bad. Just that feeling.” She twirls a strand of hair around one finger and grins, and suddenly she’s an ordinary teenager with a dimple. She might be talking about a bad date or a bummer of a math test.
My neighbor and I walk out the revolving door an hour later. I feel like all the words have been drained out of me. The night air is humid and thick and seems to press on my chest, making it hard to breathe.
I never talk about the evening again. But I think about it often, imagining the angel and the devil on Kitty’s shoulders. Kitty’s head twisting from side to side as if she’s watching a tennis match, her shriveled body jerking as if she’s in the grip of something electric. I try to feel what she’s feeling, my own head twitching, my mind jagged and disconnected, and wonder if I’m getting a glimmer of what she’s going through—not just what we can see from the outside, which looks nightmarish, but her inner experience. I can hardly bear it: my firstborn, the child of my heart, suffering like this.
I have to bear it, though, because she has to bear it. More than anything I want to make it better. That’s been my role and Jamie’s role for fourteen years—to make it better for Kitty, whether “it” was a skinned knee or hurt feelings. And we’ve always been able to. Until now.
Later that night I lie awake for hours thinking about Kitty in the ICU, hooked up to monitors and wires. How did this happen to our daughter? What have we done, and how can we undo it? No, that’s not right. What have I done? Because my husband has no issues with food. He eats when he’s hungry and stops when he’s full. He’s never counted a calorie in his life, and, as far as I can tell, he doesn’t care how much he or anyone else weighs.
I, on the other hand, grew up in a household obsessed with food and weight. I went on my first diet at fifteen, the first of many where I would lose, and then gain back, the same twenty-five or thirty pounds. Maybe Kitty’s fear of fat is really a fear of being like me? Maybe if I were thinner, she wouldn’t have to be so thin?
Or maybe it’s my own obsession with food and being thin that’s infected her. I’ve tried, I’ve really tried, to be a good role model for Kitty