Brave Girl Eating Read Online Free PDF Page A

bloomers are the norm in both our families. Then, too, the kind of intense gymnastics training Kitty was involved in could delay development. But that could be a good thing, couldn’t it? I’d written an article years earlier for Health magazine on research showing that teenage girl athletes who delay menstruation have a lower than normal lifetime risk of breast cancer, which runs in our family.
    In the end, Jamie and I decided, we weren’t that worried. Kitty was smart, savvy in ways I certainly hadn’t been at her age. She was growing up, that was all. We agreed we’d keep an eye on her, though we had no idea what we were looking for.
    And yet. Most parents of an anorexic child can look back on a day when they should have done something but didn’t. A day when they first realized something was very wrong but still had no words for it, just a feeling—a prickle at the base of the neck, the hairs on their arms standing up, something in them recognizing danger. For me it was the next day, the Monday after Mother’s Day, when Kitty called me at work to ask what we were having for dinner on Friday night, five days later. She’d never done anything like that before, and I was, frankly, flabbergasted.
    â€œI don’t even know what we’re having tonight,” I said, laughing. Maybe she was joking.
    â€œI have to know,” she said. “Why can’t you just tell me?”
    I wish, now, that I’d paid attention to the frantic tone in her voice, to the anxiety driving this odd and insistent questioning. What if I’d made an appointment that day to see “someone”? Would that “someone” have seen what we couldn’t, yet?
    I’ll never know, because instead of making a call, I got annoyed. I’ve never been good at meal planning; I’m the kind of parent who rummages in the fridge and throws something together on the spot. When Kitty wouldn’t stop pressing me, when she didn’t back down, I said in exasperation, “Spaghetti, OK? We’ll have spaghetti on Friday night.” And when that calmed her down enough to get off the phone, I forgot about it.
    Only I didn’t. A few days later I stopped at the library on my way home from work and checked out a video called Dying to Be Thin . I didn’t go looking for it, and I couldn’t have told you why I checked it out. I brought it home and put it on my desk in the living room, where it was quickly covered by a pile of papers. It sat there for weeks, long past its due date, but I never watched it.
    Much later, Emma told me that when she saw that video on my desk, she knew Kitty had anorexia. “Why else would you have taken it out of the library?” she asked, with incontrovertible ten-year-old logic.
    If only I’d paid attention to my own signals.
    As May wore on, Kitty’s mood continued to deteriorate. She cried more; she was testy one moment, clingy the next. She kept up with her homework, as usual; she’d always been disciplined about school. Too disciplined; anything less than an A on the smallest assignment could send her into a spiral of anxiety about college and law school. In her chipper moments she couldn’t stop talking about her new passion for cooking. “I want to make a dinner party foryour birthday, Mom!” she announced one day. My birthday is in October, but that didn’t stop her from making elaborate plans—dinner for thirty, place cards, fancy dress. She spent hours reading cookbooks, marking pages with yellow Post-its, making lists of ingredients—lobster, Cornish game hens, heavy cream, tarragon, butter. She called me at the office where I was editor in chief of a magazine to read me menus for the kind of four-course meals you could cook only with a kitchen full of Williams-Sonoma equipment. She flopped down on my bed at night to debate the relative merits of scallops versus shrimp, sweet butter versus French butter.