Lost & Found - Jacqueline Sheehan [27]
Melissa was the kind of kid that Rocky had not wanted to work with at the counseling center. Not at first, but after awhile she had begged her director, “Don’t give me one more starving girl!”
Rocky’s mantra as a therapist had been, “I don’t specialize in eating disorders,” and because another therapist at the clinic did, she had sent all the determined starving young women to her. Ellen was the perfect therapist for girls with disordered eating. She was round, unembarrassed by her own girth, and no threat to girls who were in competition for deprivation. The unhappy army of girls, defined by skin, bones, and grit, found solace with Ellen. Rocky had watched them arrive for their weekly meetings, hardly allowing their sit bones to touch the chair and pulling their osteoporotic spines straight. From her office, she could spot their skin, desperate with goose flesh and extra hair, trying to warm the bodies that insisted on living without fat.
None of her training had truly prepared her for the tenacity of anorexia or the pure malevolence of the voice of an eating disorder that wrapped around the girls like a smirking python. With Ellen as resident specialist, she was off the hook. Ellen went to all the eating-disorder conferences, talked about eating disorders during lunch (which Rocky found particularly distressing), and became absorbed by the world of restricting. All of this meant that Rocky passed on the big-eyed skinny girls with their hair pulled back tight and their baggy pants and big sweatshirts worn to hide the clatter of their bones.
And then Ellen left. She married a dentist and moved to Albany last winter. The director of the clinic said to Rocky, “We have to talk about our clients with eating disorders now that Ellen is gone.” She knew what this meant, and a solid sense of dread had lodged in the back of her throat. She tried everything to escape them.
“It’s not ethical to offer services that are beyond our scope of expertise. We can refer out. Let’s put this in the job description, ‘must have experience in eating disorders,’” said Rocky.
She said anything except the truth, which was that the tiny young women who refused to eat, but who thought of nothing else all day except food, terrified her, outwitted her, showed that all of her training was for naught. She finally settled on seeing the clients with bulimia. She understood gulping down life in vast quantities, and even had a therapeutic understanding of a sudden change in heart and throwing up. And most importantly, she never wanted to reach out and grab them by the ears and shake them into eating the way she did with the army of anorexic girls.
On the island, no one expected cures from Rocky. They expected that she would catch, remove, and relocate animals. Her job was confined to the battered yellow truck, finding abandoned animals, picking up roadkill if the town truck missed it.
At her neighbor Elaine’s house, she watched the girl rearrange the lettuce without salad dressing and the yolkless, hardboiled egg. She wondered if Elaine knew. As the mother, she will be blamed no matter what she does, the way mothers of autistic children used to be blamed because they were thought to be too cold; this was offered as the sole cause for what turned out to be a neurological disorder. If Elaine doesn’t know, she’ll be blamed for being in denial. If she does know, she will still be the culprit for colluding with her daughter who refused the egg yolk.
Rocky shifted her attention to the girl and a suddenly liberated mean streak ran through her. “Hey, can I have a slice of that egg white? It looks delicious.” She reached across the table with her fork as if to stab the egg white. The mother and daughter drew in tight. Rocky had broken through the perimeter of their rules. She put her fork back on her plate and scooped up more pasta. Rocky