I started tap-dancing. “Well, talking about anger, I’m here because I’m angry with myself for not being able to control my eating. I binge on ice cream and pizza, Little Debbie snack cakes, potato chips, any kind of junk food I can get my hands on.” I paused and looked around the circle. “Then I throw it all up.”
“First of all,” Joy explained, “you need to understand and accept that it’s not your fault. There’s something in your past that’s making you treat yourself this way.” She aimed a long, manicured finger at my chest. “There’s an unhappy child in there. Think about your history. Search your memory.”
My homework was to buy a notebook. “The prettiest notebook you can find,” advised Mindy. I was supposed to go to a quiet place where I wouldn’t be interrupted and write a letter to the little girl inside of me.
“Even if you don’t yet believe she exists, say that. Or you can say, ‘I hate you! You got me into this mess!’ ” Joy instructed. “You can’t begin to have a relationship with your child until you make contact with her. Writing to her is the first step.” I gathered I would be first up at next week’s meeting, so if I intended to come back, I’d actually have to give this writing nonsense a whirl.
The meeting ended with everyone standing in a circle, holding hands in silent prayer. Lord, get me out of here, I prayed.
In two minutes, He did.
On the way to my car, while wrapping my scarf around my neck against a chill mid-January wind, Mindy and Gwen caught up with me. Gwen had blond pigtails, wide blue eyes, and freckles. She looked like Pippi Longstocking. “Mindy and I usually go to Starbucks for coffee afterward. Would you like to join us?”
“Sure. I could use a tall cappuccino right now.” The heck with the decaf, I decided. I’d have high-test.
“Do you know where it is?” Mindy wanted to know.
“Off Falls Road, over by Fresh Fields?”
“Right! We’ll meet you there.”
From the church, I turned right onto Roland, left on Lake, and proceeded cautiously down the hill to Falls Road. As I passed Coldbrook, I shivered. For all I knew, Dr. Sturges’s ghost was still hovering about, unavenged, in the woods surrounding her house down at the end of that dark, silent street. I turned right on Falls and left almost immediately into the Fresh Fields parking lot, winding clockwise around the store until I came to Starbucks.
When I entered, Mindy and Gwen were already saving me a place in line. We picked up our coffees, and I watched Mindy doctor hers with two packets of brown sugar and a generous sprinkling each of cinnamon, cocoa, and vanilla. In spite of the season, Gwen had ordered a Frappuccino.
Feeling uncomfortably new-kid-on-the-block, I joined the two women at a small, round table.
“Where do you live?” asked Gwen.
“In Annapolis,” I said without thinking.
“Annapolis. That’s a long way to drive. Don’t they have support groups in Annapolis?”
Mindy rapped the back of Gwen’s hand with a black plastic spoon. “Don’t be so rude, Gwennie. You’re supposed to be welcoming!”
“No, no,” I said, thinking fast. “It’s a fair question.” I set down my cup. “To tell you the truth, I just didn’t know anybody in Annapolis to ask. And Georgina was so keen on your group that I decided to give it a try.”
“Where is she, by the way?” Gwen pushed the ice around in her Frappuccino with a straw.
“I’m not sure,” I said truthfully. “I stopped by her house, but she wasn’t home.”
Mindy studied me seriously over the rim of her cup. “Your bulimia?”
“Yes?”
“You force yourself to throw up all the time?”
“Uh-huh.”
A looked passed between Mindy and Gwen. “You know what Diane would have said about that?”
“What?”
“Diane would have told you that’s usually a symptom of childhood sexual abuse.”
I nearly choked on my coffee. “No way!”
“Way!” said Gwen. “ ‘Don’t vomit,’ she would have advised you. ‘Get that penis out of your mouth another way.’ ”
I stared at Gwen, hardly daring to breathe.
“Believe me, I know,” offered Mindy. “I used to be anorexic.” She ran her hands down her sides and over her hips. “You’d never know it to look at me now.”
“I’ll say.” Mindy was the perfect size six most women were fruitlessly starving themselves for. “So Diane Sturges cured your anorexia?”
Mindy nodded. “We did it together.”
“How?”
“I’ll have to go back to the beginning to explain. I started starving myself in college. I felt obese if I weighed more than one hundred pounds. I’d eat a cracker and a can of tuna. That’d be it for the day. I dated for a while, but I was terrified of sex. But you have to be a woman to have sex, don’t you? So if you don’t eat, you don’t mature. No hips, no breasts, no period-no problem!” She turned her coffee cup around and around in its saucer. “I was raped by my uncle every summer from the time I was nine until I turned sixteen.”
“She finally got the courage to confront him.” Gwen looked at Mindy and smiled, obviously proud of her friend’s accomplishments. “We couldn’t have done it without Diane.”
I turned to Gwen. “Were you anorexic too?”
“No. I came to Diane for help with my drinking problem. She made me see that my addiction was a way of coping with sexual abuse. I drank to keep the memories at bay, and when they did come, I drank to numb the feelings, to escape the pain. When I sobered up, those memories started flashing back at me like a slide show gone berserk. Diane saved my life and my sanity.” Gwen covered her eyes with her hands for a few seconds, then turned her unflinching gaze on me. “I was raped by my father when I was three. He hurt me so badly I had to have stitches.”
“My God!”
“We lived on a farm in Wisconsin. Isn’t that a hoot? The land of purest milk and cheese. One time my father forced me into the barn and made me stick a nail into my doll, right between her legs where her vagina would have been. I had forgotten all this, but Diane helped me remember.”
“Why would you want to remember? That sounds like a nightmare, Gwen. Are you sure that it really happened?”
Gwen twisted her straw into a spiral and wove it around her fingers. “Would anyone invent something that bad? Would anyone willingly go through all this torture?” She threw what was left of her straw onto the table. “I don’t think so.”
We sat in silence for a while, drinking our coffee while the staff behind the counter made noisy preparations for closing.
Suddenly Gwen turned to me and changed the subject. “How’s Georgina? Have you talked to her recently?”
I shook my head.
Mindy and Gwen exchanged glances. “We haven’t seen her since before Diane was killed.”
“She’s taking that pretty hard,” I told them.
“She was abused by her father, too, you know,” Mindy added.
I froze. “She mentioned something about that.”
Gwen rested her elbows on the table, leaned forward, and whispered. “Her father gave her a knife and ordered her to dismember her favorite Cabbage Patch doll.”
I started to feel light-headed. I wished the kid behind the counter had a good tot of rum I could slosh in my coffee. I stared at a poster on the wall and silently counted to ten. “Pardon me for saying this. Perhaps it just shows how naive I am, but don’t you think it’s a little strange that both you and Georgina have such similar memories about mutilating your dolls?”
“The faces of abuse are often very similar. Sometimes what you hear from other people in the group… it’s like holding up a mirror to your own life.” Gwen spoke slowly and distinctly, as if she thought I might have trouble understanding her.
“I’m sure I’ve never been abused.”
Mindy raised an eyebrow and shot Gwen a knowing glance. She reached into her purse and extracted a silver case with the initials A.G. engraved on the lid, flipped it open, and took out a business card. “Here.” She laid the card flat on the table and shoved it across to me with two slim fingers. “Call me. Anytime. I’ll be there for you.”