Hope and Other Luxuries Read online

  I can’t stand it!” Elena wailed. “I hate my life!”

  I’m not surprised, I thought. But I didn’t say it.

  Valerie had finished her few credits and was done with high school. Now Elena was stuck doing schoolwork by herself. Even though she didn’t get along with her sister, she hated the loneliness even more. The girl who had once been at the center of an adoring throng now had not a single friend.

  “Let’s go to base right now,” I offered. “We can enroll you today, and you can start class tomorrow. It won’t take you long to make up the work.”

  “No way!” Elena answered. “The semester started weeks ago. They’ve all already made their friends. Nobody would talk to me.”

  “But Elena, it’s a military base! Students move in and out all the time. New students show up at that school every single day and have to make friends.”

  “No!” And she reached for her stack of textbooks to emphasize her decision.

  “Elena, think! How could it be worse than this?”

  She flipped open her Latin textbook and pulled out a sheet of paper.

  “It could be worse,” she said.

  The frustration I felt drove me out of my office chair to pace the room. We had this same argument almost every day. I couldn’t understand why Elena wouldn’t see reason. She had started from a different culture at boarding school, for goodness’ sake! That hadn’t kept her from making friends.

  I stopped by the bookcases and stared out the window. Valerie was strolling down our village street. At least Valerie seemed to be doing better. She was out and about every day now, making friends with all the village widows. They absolutely doted on her.

  “Look at our couch potato,” I said, “out soaking up a little sunshine.”

  “It’s because she’s smoking,” Elena said with gloomy satisfaction. “You think she’s walking to get fresh air and meet new people, but what she’s really doing is smoking and then walking long enough that you can’t smell the smoke when she gets home.”

  “Elena!” I said. “Why do you have to be so hateful about your sister?”

  If there was one bad habit I despised, it was cigarette smoking. It combined the worst aspects of hedonism and self-loathing. Its contribution to society consisted of stains, stink, trash, and slow, unnecessary death. It was foul, that’s what it was—foul!

  And here Elena was, throwing around accusations about it. She knew how much I hated smoking!

  “I’m not lying, Mom,” Elena said. “She’s stealing money to smoke. I’ll show you.”

  She slipped out of her chair. A minute later, she was back with the euro coin holder in her hands. It had round slots to hold each kind of coin from every euro nation. We had bought it several years ago, when the euro first came out, so that we could collect the designs from each European Union country.

  I opened it up. All the little change was there. But all the one-euro and two-euro coins were gone.

  I set the holder down on the table and ran my finger around the empty circles. So many memories came up: checking change at the museums in Vienna, squirreling away coins in the bottom of my purse in Rome. They were happy memories from family vacations. This had been a family project.

  Or had it been? Wasn’t it really just me, admiring the interesting designs, wanting to do something as a family?

  Check your coins. Which countries did you get? Oh, good, that’s a new one!

  At that moment, it all felt so trivial and silly, so sad, almost painfully embarrassing. There I had been, exclaiming over shiny, pretty coins. The Greek owl. The French mask. The odd Italian coin that looked like a skater wearing bricks strapped to his feet. They had meant something to this happy-go-lucky woman, out on vacation with her workaholic husband and two grumpy teens. But the coins weren’t special. Not special at all. They were nothing but cold, hard cash.

  “Look,” I murmured. “The Portuguese euro is gone. When am I going to see another one of those?”

  But it was a rhetorical question. I knew my coin-collecting days were over.

  Valerie didn’t deny it when I confronted her. Instead, she yelled at her sister. “You’re such a little sneak!” she shouted. “You’re such a hypocritical little shit!”

  “You’re a liar and a thief!” Elena shouted back. “How does it feel to steal from your own parents?”

  My girls are amazing, I reminded myself as I lay in bed that night. They’re just going through an ugly stage. They just need time. They need the right guidance, that’s all.

  I was spending a lot of time lying awake.

  It wasn’t just the smoking. Valerie had changed a great deal while she was at the boarding school. The darkness she felt on the inside was starting to show on the outside. She favored black nail polish and dramatic eye shadow. When she couldn’t find the clothes she wanted in her closet, she raided her father’s closet and started wearing his old black T-shirts.

  Valerie was eighteen now. She had her diploma. It was time for her to figure out what to do with her life. But, no matter how nicely Joe or I tried to bring it up, we couldn’t get Valerie to talk about the future.

  “I’ve found you a list of good careers,” Joe told her at dinner that night. “It’s put out by the Department of Labor. Why don’t you see if there’s anything that interests you?”

  “Sure,” Valerie said brightly.

  But the next night, when he brought it up again, she hadn’t looked at the list. No, she hadn’t lost it. It was right on her bed. She just hadn’t found the time to get around to it.

  “What was she doing?” he asked me after dinner. “What does she have to do?”

  “Let’s see. Singing. Listening to her music. She was out for several hours, walking.” Or—I felt my heart ache—maybe just smoking.

  “Well, she needs to sit down and do this.” And before he left the next morning, he asked me to remind her about it.

  I did remind her. Several times, in fact. “Do you want me to look at it with you?” I asked.

  “No, Momma,” she said. “I’ve got this.”

  But that night at dinner, she admitted that she didn’t.

  “What the hell is she doing?” Joe worried to me as we got ready for bed. “Why isn’t this on her radar? I had my career figured out by the time I was a senior in high school.”

  “I don’t know,” I confessed. “I couldn’t wait to leave for college. I had everything lined up, got myself into the school I wanted, won my scholarships, packed my room into boxes . . . I even gave my mother an inventory list so if she needed to look for something, she’d know which box it was in. But Valerie’s not that way. I feel as if she breaks rules just so I’ll ground her, as if that’s what she wanted all along. Then, while she’s grounded, she’s as sweet and cheerful as anyone could want.” I paused, trying to put my finger on what it all meant. “It’s as if she makes a great child. But she makes a terrible adult.”

  “Well, she needs to get with the program,” Joe said. “She’s an adult whether she likes it or not. Get her to look at that list and think about colleges.”

  A day or so later, I noticed Valerie’s hand. I stopped and took a closer look. It wasn’t the alternating blue and black nail polish on her fingers. I was used to that by this time. Joe threw out her bottles of dark nail polish, but she kept getting her hands on new ones.

  No, this was different: a round red scab. It looked odd. It looked . . . wrong.

  “Valerie!” I said. “What happened there?”

  “Oh, that,” she said. “It’s no big deal. It’s just a burn.” And then, looking oddly pleased: “It doesn’t even hurt.”

  Doesn’t hurt? What kind of burn doesn’t hurt?

  “Is that—Valerie, were you smoking? Is that a cigarette burn?”

  “Yeah, Momma, but it wasn’t me, it was Matthias. Just an accident— you know, talking with his hands.”

  “Oh. Okay . . .”

  That afternoon, I went up to the garret room and tried to spend time with
Martin. I stared at the keyboard and tried to go to his colorful, artificial world. But instead, it was another character my imagination kept showing me, a beautiful auburn-haired girl, richly dressed, with a Mona Lisa smile on her face. Her brown eyes were cool and worldly, but her fingers, quick and nervous, were ripping away at torn skin.

  It was an old habit. Miranda had hoarded her injuries even when she was very small for the pleasure of watching Marak heal them. Later, she had sneaked the nursemaid’s scissors to administer her own cuts. It made her proud to bear pain without a murmur: she felt that she had mastered herself. Some days, when the household was particularly harsh to her, it seemed the only thing she could control.

  I hadn’t intended to write about this topic. It was Miranda’s own idea. But I could pinpoint the exact moment when I had learned her secret. I was watching her carry on witty conversation with the goblin King. Her face was a perfect mask, smiling and beautiful. But down at her side, her fingers—those nervous fingers—

  Miranda’s a cutter! I had said to myself with that shock of true discovery that comes when a character does something unexpected. Of course! She’s under so much stress, she has to have an outlet. Pain brings her a little relief.

  And when I had said that—was I remembering myself as a little grade-school freak, tearing open scabs of my own?

  The pain was like a friend, sharing her silent vigil . . .

  Oh, yes. I had understood.

  Now I left my computer and went to find Valerie again. She was sitting on the couch, strumming her new guitar.

  “So, about that burn,” I began. And I looked at it again, the ugly maroon hole in the pale skin of her hand.

  It was so round. So perfectly formed. So . . . deliberate.

  “Yeah, Momma?” Valerie said with amiable good cheer.

  I could ask. I could cross-examine her, make her tell me again and again. But would it do any good? And an image of the euro coin holder drifted through my mind: all those empty brown circles.

  “I just wondered,” I said. “Would you talk to somebody if I got you an appointment? A psychologist, psychiatrist, somebody like that?”

  “Sure,” Valerie said. “Will they give me pills?” And she left the room, singing softly.

  I watched her go, both worried and comforted, while my mind chanted in a soft singsong: Better to be on the safe side, the safe side, the safe side . . .

  It provided the background music to my plans.

  I dug out the base phone book. There it was: the phone number to the psychiatric department at our local military hospital. Except for Elena’s one visit to Dr. Eichbaum, nobody in the family had ever seen a psychiatrist before. I had no idea how it was all supposed to work, but it felt like a positive step.

  Know thyself. Isn’t that what psychiatrists and psychologists help us do? How could that knowledge ever be a bad thing?

  “This is Mrs. Dunkle, and I need to make an appointment for my daughter Valerie to see somebody in your department. Yes, we’re civilian dependents. No, she’s over eighteen. Well, yes, I do know about the confidentiality rules. I’m not asking questions, just trying to get it set up. Yes, of course I’ll hold.”

  Long pauses. Other questioners. The same questions.

  “Yes, we are, we’re civilians. No, she’s too old for the child psychiatrist. I understand, I know you’re busy with the war, but I think she may be cutting herself. Well, not cutting, burning . . . Yes, I can hold.”

  More blank spaces on the phone. More unhelpful questions and unhelpful answers.

  “Yes, this is Mrs. Dunkle. Yes, I have our insurance card right here. No—really? You don’t have a single appointment time this whole month? You mean you don’t set time aside for emergencies? Well, yes—I mean no—I mean, it’s not a serious burn, not this time, but it could be. Well, no, I’m not positive . . . No, no, I see your point. I do. Yes. Yes, of course I’ll hold.”

  In the end, holding was all I could do.

  Meanwhile, Joe continued to try to brainstorm ways to get Valerie involved in her future. “Maybe you should talk to the recruiter on base,” he told her. “You could take the test, at least, and see where your aptitudes lie.”

  “Sure,” Valerie said. “Why not?”

  So the next morning, I drove her to base.

  The recruiter was thrilled with Valerie. Here was a straight-A honors student—bilingual, no less!—as well as strong and healthy. Maybe Valerie was a procrastinator, but the recruiter wasn’t. He soon had her finished with the basic forms.

  Then Valerie knocked the top off the ASVAB test. The recruiter just gushed about her score. Joe was pleased. Even Elena was impressed. And Valerie seemed as serene as always.

  “But do you want to do the Air Force?” I asked her that night. “It’s a lot of structure.”

  “I can give it a try,” she said.

  I let Valerie’s calm reaction comfort me. It seemed as reasonable a plan as any. Since she was so hazy on what she wanted out of life, maybe a few years in the Air Force would help her focus.

  Then her recruiter upped the ante. He signed her up for the language training program at Monterey Bay. That took away my sense of comfort. I had been through the pressure cooker of intensive language programs, but Monterey Bay was something else again. It just didn’t sound like the right place for my easygoing daughter.

  “Are you sure you’re ready for that?” I asked her. “That program is a killer! Long, long days, hard work. You’ll really have to toughen up to get through it.” No more lazy days with the guitar, I thought to myself. “It’s just—I’m not sure it’s for you, Valerie. Do you even want to do it?”

  “Sure, why not?” Valerie said with even-tempered carelessness. Then she wandered off to listen to her music.

  When Joe came home, I called the girls for dinner. Valerie came downstairs, humming. Her long, straight brown hair hung like satin over her shoulders, down to her ripped, ragged black shirt.

  She had covered the backs of both hands with third-degree burns.

  If my life really is going to flash before my eyes as I die—if every single memory of my life will play out again as it dissolves into a gentle mist of nothingness—then I think this moment will be the very last one to go. Not the first time I held my babies. Not the day I first met Joe. Not the news that my books were sold, or the first time I held a copy in my hands.

  This moment. Because it changes everything.

  Valerie had literally decorated herself with burns: decorated, like some mad, evil artist. The suppurating red dots had something of the style of henna tattoos. They were like flourishes from Persian art.

  She couldn’t seem to understand why we were so upset. She herself seemed to find them thrilling. It was as if these sores were not injuries she had inflicted but messages that had emerged from deep within. Their mysterious patterns seemed to reveal to her an unexpected ability to find beauty in pain.

  Only one good thing came out of this horrific damage. At least now I was able to get her an appointment with the psychiatric staff.

  “They put me on drugs,” she said as she came out to the psychiatric waiting room. She waved the paper at me. “Zoloft!” she said, smiling.

  I smiled back. Zoloft is an old family friend.

  Before our children were born, Joe and I didn’t have a single argument. He was witty and funny, and the two of us were madly in love. But when two small children came along to add their unpredictable demands to our days, Joe’s personality seemed to change. He became a coiled spring. He simmered with anger. And we never knew when that anger would erupt.

  It wasn’t as if my young husband was abusive or controlling. He wasn’t trying to scare me, and he didn’t. I found Joe’s outbursts more of an annoyance than anything else. To me, they were a breakdown, a loss of control.

  But the little girls found his yelling episodes terrifying, and that upset all of us.

  “I’ll fix it,” Joe said whenever his temper got away from him. “There’s noth
ing to say. I’ll fix it.” And if he could have, he would have. He tried even harder to keep control—which only wound the spring even tighter.

  One morning when Elena was about eight years old, Joe stopped by my office at the library. In his hand was a plain brown paper bag.

  “Do you want to go have lunch?” I asked, reaching for my purse.

  “It’s from the doctor,” he said.

  I looked in the bag. It was full of Zoloft samples.

  “We were talking about my chest pains,” Joe explained, “and the doctor asked about my stress level. I started to tell her about the projects we’ve got going on right now in California. And then she said to me, ‘Are you happy?’”

  I looked across the desk at my husband. Joe didn’t look happy. His mouth clamped shut in a tight line, and his eyes flicked around my office as if he were hunting for the source of an aggravating sound. His knee bounced in a nervous tic, and his fingers drummed on his pants leg. He kept picking things up off my desk, turning them in his hands, and putting them back down again.

  “Well?” I said. “What did you tell her?”

  “I said, ‘My wife asks me that all the time.’”

  I reached into his paper bag and pulled out one of the sample packs of Zoloft. It wasn’t a drug I’d ever heard of.

  “This says it’s for depression,” I said. “You don’t look depressed to me.”

  “I told her I get angry all the time, and she said, ‘I think you have anxiety problems.’ This stuff also helps with anxiety.”

  Anxiety? A light bulb seemed to blink on in my brain. I said, “That actually makes a lot of sense.”

  So Joe decided to try the Zoloft. We agreed that he could stop at any time. He washed one down at the water fountain on the way out of the library, and I went back to work.

  Saturday morning two days later, I was in the kitchen making a cake. It was a chocolate cake. I was beating the frosting. Joe wandered into the kitchen and sat down to watch me. After a minute, he started talking.

  “Did you ever have a crush on an actor when you were a kid?”

  I kept beating the chocolate. I held on to my poker face.

  Okay, I thought. This is weird . . .