Brave Girl Eating Read Free Page B

the child with the adult palate and sent out a bowl of chocolate ice cream in appreciation. Which Kitty finished.
    I still don’t understand, but I’m beginning to know. To recognize the sick feeling in my stomach each time we sit down at the table and Kitty does not eat. I’m beginning to be able to predict how each meal will go: Jamie and I will take turns cajoling, pleading, ordering our daughter to eat, and she will turn aside everything we say with the skill of a fencer parrying a lunge. She will eat a few bites of lettuce, a handful of dry ramen noodles. She will count out six grapes and consume them with infinite slowness, peeling each one into strips and sucking it dry. She will pour her milk down the sink when she thinks we’re not looking, allow herself only five sips of water.
    And at the end of the meal, she will climb the stairs to her room and do a hundred extra sit-ups, penance for the sin of feeding herself even these scraps. Which would not keep a dog alive.
    Which will not keep her alive, either.
    Kitty sits next to me in the front seat, her lank blond hair scraped back in a ponytail, looking small and lost in the oversized sweatshirt that fit her six months ago. “I’m dizzy, Mommy,” she murmurs. I keep one hand on the wheel, the other on her, as if I can keep her from floating away. My brain seems to divide as I drive, so that while part of me is watching the road, hitting the gas and brake, another part is thinking Don’t die. Please don’t die.
    The triage nurse is waiting when we hustle into the emergency room. She has my daughter on a gurney, sweatshirt off, hooked up to the EKG machine, within minutes. Kitty trembles in the hospital air-conditioning, goose bumps rising along arms so thin they look like Popsicle sticks. She clutches my hand, the sharp bones of her fingers leaving bruises, as the nurse applies goo and deftly arranges the sensors across her chest.
    â€œDon’t leave me,” she says, and I promise. They’ll have to handcuff me to get me out of the room this time.
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    I’d left the room a few months earlier, at Kitty’s fourteen-year-old checkup, trying to be a good mother, a wise mother, a nonhelicoptering mother. The truth is, I was worried about Kitty’s weight. She’d always been on the small side, built lean. When she turned eleven, she’d gained a little weight as her body got ready to grow. It wasn’t much, maybe five or six pounds, but Kitty was unhappy about it. That was the first time she talked about not liking how she looked, at least to us. Of course Jamie and I reassured her, reminding her that this was her body’s way of getting ready to develop, that she’d be healthy and strong no matter what shape or size she was meant to be.
    She was in sixth grade at the time, the first year of middle school, and the emphasis in health class, then as now, was on obesity. The sixth graders were weighed, their BMIs calculated, their fat measured with calipers. They learned about calories and nutrition, all from the cautionary perspective of too much rather than not enough . So it didn’t surprise us when Kitty came home one day and announced that she was cutting out desserts because they weren’t “healthy.”
    I thought it might be a good idea. I applauded her discipline and willpower. Like most women in America, I’ve had a conflicted relationship with food and eating. Like most women in my family, I’m short and plump and have a sweet tooth. And like most mothers of my generation, I was determined that my kids would be healthier than me. My children would breathe in no secondhand smoke; they would always wear seat belts and bike helmets and eat organic food as much as possible. I baked Kitty’s first birthday cake myself, a homemade concoction of carrots and raisins, using applesauce instead of oil and a quarter of the sugar the recipe called for because I didn’t want my