Fervor, page 18
FIFTEEN
The girl who came back was not the same girl who went missing.
When the police dropped her to our door, Elsie was swamped in someone else’s jumper, with its knitted sleeves coming unravelled at the ends. They said they’d found her on the Norfolk coast, hiking the coastal trail. Her face was cut in several places, her hair was sopping, and streaks of mud lined her neck. I had the strange sensation that she shouldn’t be in here, that I was now looking at a wild creature, hauled into domesticity by strong-armed men.
“Darling,” I said, “let’s get you cleaned up.”
Cold, hungry, and obviously confused, she ignored me. She went straight up to her grandfather’s old room and started opening cupboards. “Who moved all my things around?” she said to no one. “Who came up without asking?”
I ran her a bath which, at length, I persuaded her to take.
I’d asked Gideon to call his father, but he said that when he tried the number was busy. As I dialled Eric’s chambers, it struck me how awful it was that he should still be living under the most painful of uncertainties. After a few rings, a female voice came through the phone. I was in luck. The receptionist informed me that Eric wasn’t due in court for another hour and was around to take the call. Not having planned what I would say when I heard his voice, I was overcome with excitement and simply blurted the name: “Elsie.”
From the other end of the line came a sharp intake of breath, then two flat monosyllables, “She’s dead.”
“No! Thank G-d, she’s in the bath!”
There was then a silence that went on far too long. As I held the phone to my ear, the image of the Talmudic Sarah, killed by good news, flashed before me. I saw a white-haired woman, mad with grief, eyes rolled back in her skull, limbs spasming.
“My love? Are you there?”
The silence lasted a few more seconds before it was finally driven out by waves of laughter. Miraculous, self-generating laughter, the kind that might never run dry.
“What do we need? Beef! The prodigal daughter is returned, so we must ready the fatted calf, yes? And champagne! We shall have gallons of champagne! We shall have oceans of champagne!”
We lit many candles that night, and all three children were up past their bedtimes. Even Tovyah had a small glass of Laurent-Perrier. It should have been one of the happiest evenings of our life. And yet it was as though a pall hung over us; the dining room was a sealed coffin. Around the table, we hardly spoke. Afterwards, as I cleared the plates, I saw that Elsie had spent a long time cutting up her meat into smaller and smaller pieces, then left most of it untasted.
Elsie’s reabsorption into family life was not easy. Gideon, always competitive, was enraged to see his sister unpunished. He began staying out, sometimes past midnight, and soon made a daily habit of asking for money. “For what?” his mother would ask. “For stuff!” Tovyah, never the most robust child, was often found sulking about the house, teary-eyed. And as for Elsie herself, she was distant. “She had come back, yes,” her mother wrote, “but not fully. Some part of her was still out there, still wandering the coastline.” Eric took a couple of weeks off to put in time with the family. But as he failed to reach his daughter, he grew bad-tempered, hissing at his sons on the smallest provocation (a muddy shoeprint on the landing, a sabbath candle extinguished by mistake). His presence dampened the mood of the house, and Hannah was not sorry when he decided to go back to the office early.
Though it was obvious something was wrong with the girl, the idea that Elsie had an eating disorder only came up when it was suggested by Ms Varden. The phone call was supposed to be about Elsie’s attitude to learning (she often sat in class with her head slumped on her desk), but here they were, talking about anorexia.
“Based on what?” Hannah asked.
“Her figure.”
Though she couldn’t deny how skinny the girl was, Hannah refused to accept the inference. “Look at her classmates, they’re all like that. Twigs and string!” She thought about the night Elsie returned. How, after all that manic roving, she had diced up her beef and left it to be thrown out cold in the morning.
One time. Anyone can be off their food one time.
Soon enough, Hannah’s certainty fractured. One school day, she took a break from the piece she was drafting about dog-whistle anti-Semitism to clean out her daughter’s room. Elsie had been such a tidy kid growing up, a girl who folded her own laundry, and had to have everything, all her things, just so. Suddenly, she was a slob. The room put Hannah in mind of a busy street after winds have played havoc with the bins. Elsie no longer made her bed, left the duvet bunched in the middle. Lidless pens on the floor, used underwear too.
Eric, working from home that day, was less disturbed by the state of Elsie’s room. When Hannah called him in to take a look, he shrugged. “You remember the one about the boy who falls in the river?” he asked.
“Remind me.”
“Mother cries out, ‘God, God, have mercy on my boy, he can’t swim!’ And sure enough, the boy washes up on the bank. Wet-through, spluttering, a little frightened, but alive. The mother addresses God once more. ‘What happened to his hat?’ ”
“Yes, very good.”
She didn’t laugh.
“Hannah, you see what I’m saying. It’s possible to look a gift horse in the mouth.”
“I got that.”
After shrugging again, Eric returned to his books.
How could he be so blasé? Something was happening to their daughter. It had begun in the summer, around the time of Yosef’s death, and it wasn’t over, even now. Elsie’s room had filled with words: books everywhere, and countless pages of her own writing. There were at least three languages on display: English, Hebrew, and Latin. Was it all schoolwork? The English was mostly poems and fantasies. As she gathered pages together, Hannah skimmed one of the stories, something about a house with a hidden room, a chamber no one knew was there. A little spooky, but mercifully free of domestic violence and sexual assault. When she moved the bed to hoover, she found discarded scraps. Bits of sweetcorn, dried up pasta shells, breadcrumbs, a few grains of hardened rice, and numerous shrivelled peas all heaped in a dusty nook. So then. Varden wasn’t imagining things.
She confronted Elsie the moment she got in from school. But rather than sheepish or apologetic, her daughter was indignant.
“What were you doing in my room?”
“If you don’t fulfil your responsibilities, there are consequences. You have to keep your room clean. And more important than your bedroom your body. You have to eat properly, darling, that’s not optional.”
“I eat all the time. Literally every day. Three times every day we sit down at a table and we eat.”
“Darling, I found your little hiding place, ok, so no more lies.”
“You shouldn’t sneak, Channah.”
The words did not sound like Elsie’s. Even the way she held herself was somehow off.
After hearing about the discarded food, Eric grounded his daughter. She was already on a tight leash; her whereabouts had to be accounted for at all times. Hannah met her after school, and each day they rode the tube home together. And now, for a week, she would not make plans with friends with or without the supervision of other parents. She would come home straight from school, she would do her homework on the kitchen table, under his eyes if necessary, they would have dinner together—and for God’s sake, she would eat—then she’d go up to her room.
“I eat fine. You wanna know what hunger is, try living on one portion of bread a day, sometimes two if you can steal.”
Eric felt the breath leave his body. “What kind of sick joke is that?”
“Who’s joking, Eric?”
Until that moment, Elsie had always called him Dad, sometimes Daddy. Tovyah, following Gideon, had lately abandoned the habit, but not Elsie. He had prayed to God on this very subject. Indulge a father. Whatever the boys do, let her call me Dad as long as I live. Baruch Hashem.
“That’s two weeks! Two weeks you see no one, you do nothing.”
“Whatever. But if you’re in the business of grounding people, maybe you should talk to Mr Pink Triangle.”
She was referring to an incident that had everyone worked up. The week before, Alan Carmichael, father of Elsie’s friend Meredith, called wanting to speak to Eric. He said Gideon had been at theirs on the pretext of working on his English coursework with Phil, Meredith’s older brother.
“Judy came up the stairs with a tray full of snacks, and when she went in, nobody was studying.”
Eric knew his oldest son better than to be shocked by this. “I presume they were playing violent computer games. Yes? We don’t have them at home, so when he’s over at his friend’s… They call them beat-em-ups, I believe. Or was it the shoot-em-ups?”
Alan paused. “I think you should have a word with Gideon when he gets back. I’m sure he’s a little embarrassed, and he might like to hear that his parents will love him regardless.”
Eric had sufficient imagination to fill in the blanks. Still, he asked, “What should I talk to my son about?”
There was a soft groan as Alan fumbled for the right words. “I mean his sexuality. You knew, right? With Phil, we clocked it years ago. Probably before he did.”
“I don’t think I’ve met Philip,” Eric said. “My work keeps me away a lot.”
There was a pause.
“Don’t tell me you didn’t know?”
Eric had no idea what he was going to say to his son. The possibility that Gideon—or any of his children—might be gay had never occurred to him. They weren’t that type of family. When Gideon arrived home, Eric led him to the garden for a glass of Talisker.
“You’ll never believe what Alan Carmichael told me on the phone just now.”
“It’s not true,” Gideon said at once.
A tree swayed in the wind. Somewhere a cat yowled.
“But I didn’t tell you what he said yet.”
“I know what you’re talking about. No one needs this. Don’t be weird, Eric.”
And that was it, conversation closed. Gideon remained ungrounded, and neither of them ever mentioned it again. “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” became unofficial policy within the Rosenthal household, just as the US military was having second thoughts. That is, until Elsie provocatively suggested that Gideon should be grounded, for the crime of making out with a member of his own sex.
I was now in the habit of inspecting her living quarters daily. I got to know how the sun moved through the room: wide-angled in the morning, narrowly intense by late afternoon. One day I opened the door and the bed was made; the clothes sat folded in neat bundles inside the wardrobe. Progress! The sense of dread that had fluttered behind curtains was dispelled. Then, emptying out her drawers, I found chickpeas rolling around at the back. My heart thumped. I held one to the light, pinched between thumb and forefinger. This tiny ball of protein and carbohydrate was an index of what was taking place in my daughter’s soul. But what was it telling me?
Again she brought it up with Elsie, who insisted that it wasn’t what it looked like. From somewhere came the intuition that her daughter wasn’t lying. You don’t get through sixteen years of motherhood, you don’t get to the bottom of a thousand petty scraps between warring siblings, without developing an internal polygraph.
“This isn’t about your weight?”
“No.”
“Then what’s going on?”
She wouldn’t say. It was the same with her disappearance. You only had to ask the question and the shutters slammed down; she told no one why or where she had gone. Other than to repeat, with a coquettish half-smile, she’d been looking for God.
“But sweetheart, Hashem is everywhere,” her father had said, in the days when he still had patience. “You know that.”
“Oh yes, I know that now.”
The fortnight of being grounded was extended by another week. Eric took to watching his daughter at mealtimes. One night she ate half her dinner and said she was full.
“Uh-uh,” Eric said. “You’ll be excused when you finish.”
Elsie dipped her spoon into her bowl, filled it, tipped half the broth away, then slowly brought the spoon to her mouth. After she swallowed, she bared her teeth. “That’s it,” Eric said. “Thank you.” She carried on, moving with maximum possible slowness. Between each mouthful, she cast resentful looks, first at her father, then her mother. Both boys pretended not to watch. When she was done, she pushed the empty bowl to the centre of the table and let out a low growl, a sound like a hurt dog. She stood. In a moment, she fell forwards, as though kicked in the back, her palms smacked against the dinner table, her head went down, and she was overtaken by violent, full-throated heaves, disgorging all that she’d been forced to swallow, splattering across the table.
Afterwards she looked up. “Happy?”
She scurried off upstairs, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand.
Once the boys had also been sent upstairs, Hannah told her husband that she never wanted him to do that again. “Long as she’s eating something, she won’t starve.”
“This isn’t normal,” Eric said. “I don’t know who she is anymore.”
It was hot in the living room and, leaning from the sofa, Hannah twisted shut the valve on the radiator, until the faint hiss died.
“There are cases,” Eric went on. “People have accidents and afterwards they’re not the same people. Maybe there’s no physical damage to the brain, nothing that comes up on a scan, but something slips out of place and no one knows how to put it back. A lifelong vegetarian takes up hunting, the shyest boy in class becomes the bully.”
Hannah glared. “But there wasn’t any accident.”
There was an obvious caveat that went unspoken: no accident they knew of. Four whole days of Elsie’s life were unaccounted for. Hannah’s mind filled with possibilities, all the dreadful things that might have happened to her daughter. There were sick people in this world. You only had to turn on the news and there they were.
“Come here, my love,” Eric said, opening his arms to her.
Shrugging off her husband’s embrace, Hannah went out for a walk. When Eric spoke to God, he liked to be in his study, crowded by holy books. But then, Eric had excellent Hebrew and could read the debates of ancient rabbis as easily as the morning paper. When Hannah spoke to God, she went outside. She had to be away from everyone, far from the domestic clutter, and pacing beneath an open sky.
Not for the first time, she asked Him what was going on with Elsie. What was she supposed to do?
Then she waited, listening to silence. That was how God spoke. His voice was a colossal, unarguable silence. And in His silence, God told Hannah strange truths about her daughter. Truths that from any other mouth, she wouldn’t have believed.
* * *
When she searched Elsie’s room the following morning, she found nothing, just as expected. She then went upstairs to Zeide’s old dwelling. By tacit agreement, no one had used the attic for anything since Yosef’s death. But as soon as she opened the door, she knew Elsie had been here. It had that lived-in smell. She found half an apple on the bookcase, something mushed into the carpet that might have once been tuna-mayo. Under the bed was an empty vodka bottle and, on the chair in the corner, a stack of Hebrew texts. They were not texts Hannah immediately recognised.
When they next spoke, Hannah asked Elsie to show her arms. “Come on, roll up your sleeves.”
“Channah, no.”
“Can you please roll up your sleeves? Two seconds. I just want to see something.”
“There are people out there who think they decide who is human and who is not human. My arms are my arms.”
Elsie’s voice was changed utterly. It was suddenly deeper, more rasping, and strangely accented.
For a moment, they just looked at each other. Then Hannah made a sudden grab for her daughter’s arm. She held her at the elbow. Elsie, scratching at her mother’s face with her free hand, tried to liberate herself.
“Get off, you bitch!”
Hannah clung on. She pushed up her daughter’s sleeve. It was exactly as God had told her. There, all along the back of Elsie’s arm, were raised horizontal lines. The lines at the top were older, already half buried in the skin, but towards the wrist, the gashes were still pink.
And if she had understood Him correctly about this…
“You don’t understand anything,” Elsie said. “It helps focus my mind.”
“On what? What the hell do you need to focus on so much that you’d mutilate yourself?”
“On God.”
There was no tone of mockery in her daughter’s voice.
“Is that what the not eating is about too?” Hannah said. “A fast?”
“I already told you, the food is not for me.”
“Then who? I’m sick of these riddles.”
Elsie shook her head.
“Darling, please. Let me help you.”
“Help? You think you can help?”
“Give me a chance. Open up.”
“Do you never feel trapped in your own body? That your rib cage is a set of iron bars, tighter than any prison? That your soul is not supposed to be closed up in this tiny cage of flesh and bone? That your brain, your mind, is banging itself bloody against your skull—”
“All right, enough.”
Elsie’s shoulders were hunched over; she had the posture of an old man. Hannah remembered being taught, as a child, that you could look at someone, or you could look through them, but looking through them was considered rude. In the same way, she knew now that she could either speak to Elsie, or she could try speaking through her.
She aimed her voice at whatever was inside her daughter. “What do you want?” she said.
Elsie closed her eyes. “I want out.”
“Out?”
“You uncovered me, Channah. Now set me free.”
“And how do I do that?”
Elsie’s misty eyes opened and fixed on her mother. “You know how.”
