My daughter, my beautiful, big-boned, broad-shouldered, nose tackle of a daughter, has an eating disorder. So said her therapist when we were called in for group therapy and I said, “we’re not a group though, we’re a family,” which was an important distinction I thought, vital, even, because lots of people and things can group, congregate, come together, conglomerate—friends, teams, parishioners, bullets around a bullseye if you’re a capable shot—whereas family is family, irreplaceable, unique.
My wife said, “not now, Harold,” and then, as if to apologize for my nitpicking, she said, “go on, doctor, please,” which smarted too because I’m 60 to 70 percent certain the therapist isn’t a doctor but a social worker or some other, lesser credentialled listener, but no matter—I’m not a snob. I believe in mental health. I believe in proactive parenting. I believe my daughter is suffering. She went from a solid, sturdy 180 pounds to a lean, but still powerful, 170, then a less sturdy, even somewhat fragile, 158. Now she’s 134 pounds and I barely recognize her. I barely recognize myself when I’m with her, alternating between cloying support, calling her sweetie again as if she were the tender age of six and not a surly, secretive 16. Alternating between these nicknames screeched out of me in a higher pitch than I thought I was capable of, and anger. Snapping at her. Slamming plates. Dumping whole dinners in the trash.
Not that she doesn’t ever eat, exactly. She does. She just vomits it all up later like a fighter before a weigh-in and she’s fighting something but I don’t know what, just that she seems determined to take it on alone and I told her, yelled, I said, “even Iron Mike Tyson had D’Amato! Even Ali, that smooth-talking, butterfly-floating, stinging bee, had Dundee! We all need someone, honey,” again with that sick sweetness bubbling to the surface on that final word, sugar melting into simple syrup, “someone to love and guide and shelter us,” then she stormed out of the kitchen, a tropical storm morphing into a hurricane right before my very doting, distraught, fatherly eyes, and slammed the bathroom door. Through its hollow core I could hear her vomiting up not just our dinner, a meatloaf with the three-meat blend that makes it juicy, the mashed potatoes covered in chopped up chives, the Brussels sprouts, those little cabbage brains coated in a balsamic reduction, but seemingly everything she’d ever swallowed, every meal and judgement, every idea and feeling, every scrap of culture, every memory—she puked it all up. A violent, voluminous fountain of vomit. I spared one second for a practical thought, wondering if I needed to call Sal our trusty, albeit pricey, plumber. Then I did what I think any caring father would do in a similar situation: I wept.
Eventually the therapist said I needed to inhabit my daughter’s perspective, to walk in her shoes, but she’s a size eight and I’m a thirteen and she’s a child of the internet, of screens and apps, and I still read the physical newspaper. But I realized perhaps I just needed to simulate one sliver of what she’s feeling and that this could build a bridge to her, maybe not a whole bridge, not some concrete Roman affair to carry entire armies across continents, but a rope or two, a line of connection from my side to hers.
So, despite what my doctor said about ulcers and avoiding pickles and hot sauces and spicy curries, I decided to create as much acid reflux as I could. To induce it. I’d feed my reflux because I couldn’t feed my daughter. I started eating fried chicken wings smothered in ghost pepper sauce and entire buckets of sour dill pickles and jars of Turkish tursu, vinegar-soaked cauliflower florets, slices of carrots, chunks of celery, even little plastic containers of pao cai I picked up at the local Sichuan restaurant from Mrs. Chen and boy that brine was fiery, spoon after spoon of diced daikon hotter than a fresh habanero. If it was sour, I consumed it. I was lost in the task, drunk on sourness, as my wife committed our daughter, the wasted creature that had been our husky, gorgeous girl, the glue that held together our marriage, to the mental hospital four towns over. A drab, brick compound off the highway that, until now, I’d thought was a rehab for wounded veterans. Though in a way, perhaps it still was: my 16-year-old daughter already a veteran in the war called Life. But there were still many battles to be fought, I wanted to say, still allies to make, campaigns to organize, and, with some luck, perhaps even a victory or two on the horizon.
I ate. And ate. And ate and ate and ate until I had acid reflux every seven minutes, a gurgling and burning as if I were throwing up but nothing came except heat, like a witch’s cauldron in my gut bubbling and popping its invisible spells into my esophagus. Is this how my daughter felt upchucking every meal we made her regardless of the love and desperation we sprinkled liberally into them like so much needed salt and pepper?
But I’d convinced myself she didn’t need sustenance but understanding, or rather that the latter was a necessary condition for the former, so I rush over for the one hour a day the facility allows visitors, shake my head at the automated camera check-in when it asks me if I have COVID or a weapon or a complaint to lodge, and they buzz me in. I reflux through white halls as masked janitors sweep and wipe and other patients shuffle about in sweatpants of varying colors and bagginess, saying “personal space,” or, “got a cigarette,” or, in one case, just mumbling the word “cunt” over and over again. I don’t stop to discover who the cunt in question is because I see my daughter in a molded plastic chair. My love. My purpose. My ill and wasted world.
“Honey,” I say, in that cloying tone that has taken me over since this crisis began, but before I can get another word out, the reflux has its say. At first, just a dribble of acid slips over my tongue, past my teeth, and onto my lower lip. My daughter notices. Her eyes, otherwise a bit hazy from the sedatives they’ve pumped into her, widen and grow alert. Finally, a sign of progress. My joyful daughter is still in there! She may have shed much of her weight but her essential goodness and her fierce will are unsheddable.
Cheered by this bit of life, this bit of light, I let the rest of the acid come, spewing out of me with explosive hope like air rushing out of the spiracle of a suddenly surfacing cetacean, and my daughter cracks a smile, the foreshadowing of a grin, and I spew on, now expelling not just acid but all manner of me-ness, memories: my mother wrapping my toddler self in a wool blanket and then blowing on my feet when she could tell they itched; me as a young father hoisting my daughter on my shoulders so she could feed a cabbage leaf larger than her to a giraffe at the zoo, its neck reaching over the fence like a curious, dexterous crane at a savannah-themed work site; me framing my daughter’s football jersey after they won the championship in fourth grade, the first girl to be on the team and the first time the team, in our tiny town’s humble history, won the county championship; and objects d’art: desk-top gimmick memorabilia from our trip to the Cone Collection in Baltimore for my daughter the art lover, mini replicas of figurative sculptures, the fat women of Botero and the rail-thin and haggard stickmen of Giacometti and the abstract void-bellied families of Hepworth and the prone twisting women of Moore; my mother’s serpentine urn marbled and green like a hunk of moldy meat; my wife’s collection of jangly gold bangles, shaking over me when my daughter was conceived and over my daughter as we rocked her in her crib a mere miraculous nine months later, a metallic melody; and more, much more, whole scenes from my life peopled with players minor and major, dead and alive, even emotions personified spew forth: Envy like an emaciated ballerina gracelessly floundering on the floor in the acid, kicking and screaming; Pride smoking a stogie and lounging in a plastic chair in the corner, tipping his bowler at us both, portly and satisfied; and Fear, that slippery, tenacious prick, doing the Charleston, fast as the most coked up Flapper, tireless and having a ball, knees and ankles twisting with supernatural agility, with metaphysical certainty, and inviting my daughter to join him.
My spewing somehow ceases. My daughter looks at me. I look at her. We both look at Fear and he at us. This staring threatens to last an eternity but eventually my daughter’s promise of a smile matures into a full-blown grin and she crosses this sea of spewed thoughts and feelings, past Pride and Envy and yes, even that clever fop Fear, and she takes my hand. Together, we exit the room, the hall, the facility, the parking lot, and drive to our favorite diner where we order one of everything. After I pop three Pepcid, we dig in like two gluttonous seniors at a cruise buffet—to the victors go the many tasty and nourishing spoils—father and daughter together again, laughing and chewing and belching and you can bet your ass we’ll keep it all down.