November 1 - Casting a spell

When Mike thought on his daughter, Lily, he thought of a little three-year-old girl with wire-and-gauze fairy wings strapped to her back, running into the kitchen and yelling, “I’m casting a spell on your Mommy! Casting a spell on you!” while waving a plastic wand and hugging her mother’s legs about the knees, her head not even reaching to Margaret’s thighs. Margaret had looked down with a benevolent smile from where she was cooking a spaghetti sauce for dinner, and Mike looked over from where he was working on storyboards at the kitchen counter – this was years before he had home office space – and he had smiled too. Not just at the scene of paternal bliss, but at Lily’s imagination. Already at that age, she was constantly creating, producing.

“She’ll follow in your footsteps as a filmmaker,” all his filmmaker friends said with little knowing laughs, and Lily waltzed into the room – oh, she really waltzed: “One two three, one two three,” she counted in a high-pitched whisper under her breath, the pink ballet slippers on her feet scuffing in rhythm to the maestro in her head. The actors in the room shared wry looks. “This one’s an actress if ever there was one.” In the true sense of the word, Mike thought proudly. His daughter acted out life; she wasn’t content to let life act around her.

“Daddy,” commanded a five-year-old Lily, “You are going to be the pirate, and when I come into the kitchen, your job is to say, ‘Aargh! What have we here?’ Do you understand?” She was always giving orders like this, shaping the world to her imaginings, transforming it into the way she wanted to see it. Mike laughed as he played along.

The flip-side to the incessant movement of Lily’s brain was that she was an overachiever, a perfectionist. It didn’t occur to Mike that this fact should worry him – he recalled being the same way as a child, exacting of himself and ignoring praise from others because with each goal achieved he was already pushing himself onto the next. He admired this trait in himself – it had helped him work two jobs as he made his way through film school, allowed his creativity to flourish, so it didn’t worry him to see the same dogmatic characteristics in his daughter. Didn’t worry him until Lily’s second grade teacher gently pulled him and Margaret aside after Parents’ Day at school, the day where the parents sat uncomfortably in their children’s child-sized chairs, stifled by the space into which there large, adult knees were squished, and nodded along to the teacher’s lessons at the chalkboard while the kids beamed from the corner. Lily was full of: “Let me show you this! And here is where I play house! And see all my gold stars for the cursive writing assignments.” Her smile was angelic.

“You’re Lily’s parents?” asked the teacher, a woman past sixty with thin spectacles and thinner gray hair. “I tell you, that girl has more talent in her little finger than most kids have in their whole bodies.”

The proud parents beamed.

“My only worry for Lily is this: that when she comes up against failure for the first time, she won’t know how to handle it.”

The beams turned upside down, twin expressions of a worried frown.

Mike didn’t understand what happened when Lily reached seventh grade. He didn’t understand why her stare when she took in the backyard – where she used to envision mountains and knights and castles – suddenly was glassy eyed. Her eyes would roam back and forth across the green enclosure and she would turn a faint shade of green, looking panicked.

“Does the yard seem smaller to you, Daddy?” she whispered one night as he tucked her in bed, and he laughed until he realized she was really afraid. “No, angel,” he told her seriously, and she nodded gratefully.

“Good,” she murmured, “For a moment there I felt suffocated.”

He continued to praise the work she brought home; that was what he always assumed to be a parent’s job. So why did this girl with the body of a pixie, a nymph, the girl who used to dance about in leotards and laugh with her head thrown back and her mouth open in unabashed glee, why did she start to wear oversized shirts that looked like a tent draped over her body, why did she walk carefully into every room, entering with one toe first like she was testing the temperature of water?

He walked past her room and caught sight of her, looking like a beached whale, pumping her arms up and down at her sides while her body formed a V-shape, her legs out in front of her, her abs straining against her t-shirt.

“What are you doing?” he asked in alarm.

“Pilates,” she said cautiously. “Counting repetitions.” She stopped counting and propped herself on one elbow and looked at him. “Daddy, does it seem easier to you sometimes to count numbers than to create?”

Mike wasn’t sure what she meant, so he said, “Sure, angel,” and walked back into his office.

The clothes were three-sizes too big to begin with, so he and Margaret didn’t notice what was happening under that tent. Still, he felt like he was to blame when the school nurse called up.

“You know your daughter has lost twenty pounds in the past six months? What kind of parents are you? Aren’t you watching at home?”

He put a cupcake on the table in front of her on her fourteenth birthday. “Happy birthday, angel,” he said with a nervous catch to his voice. Her eyes tripled in size, the lids drawing back until the whites showed like a spooked horse in Manhattan traffic. She began to blubber. Mike couldn’t remember ever seeing his daughter cry. Laugh, yes. Crying was a foreign sound coming from her throat.

“Daddy, I can’t! Please understand. I can’t!”

He thrust his face into hers roughly, angered. “Why not? You love cupcakes. What is it you can’t do?”

Her voice grew smaller, less sure than he’d ever heard it. “Daddy, I’m scared of it.”

Mike gaped. His daughter, who went hiking through the forest alone at night when she was seven, who had gone to overnight camp and insisted he and Margaret not call or write the whole time so she could have an “authentic experience” at eight, who was the ringleader in every game she and her friends had ever played, who took up stage acting at age eleven because she had a minor bout of stage fright and decided that making herself act before an audience was the best way to “nip it in the bud” (her words, at eleven), this daughter was scared of a cupcake?

Mike cried that night. He couldn’t remember the last time he had felt tears trickling down his cheeks, landing with an unpleasant saltiness in his beard. He guessed he hadn’t had a beard the last time he cried.

Mike didn’t know what was in her head. He didn’t know until the psychiatrists told him that she was slicing at the flesh she imagined clung around her hips and her thighs, cutting off chunks of it until the flesh underneath bled, thinking that might make the adipose layer disappear.

“What fat?” Mike asked the psychiatrists, dumbfounded. Lily was as thin as a slat on a fence.

“She sees it, sir,” they said with hands spread in wonder. “She imagines that it’s there, even if it’s not.”

A week before the end of her eighth grade year, he received the call while he was on set; Margaret was already at the hospital when he arrived half an hour later, and they stared through the cold, glass window that separated them from the shell that had become their daughter, watching her pale lips part as she breathed in and out, the cold plastic tube that pumped vitamins into a throbbing vein.

“Can we go in, doctor,” Margaret asked, clinging on to Mike’s arm so tight he could feel welts rising under her nails, but he didn’t pry her away.

Lily’s eyes opened when they entered.

“What are you doing to yourself, angel?” Mike asked without thinking, before Margaret could nudge him with caution in the ribs. They weren’t supposed to level blame, the doctor had said.

Lily’s eyes welled with tears. “Please Mommy, please,” she whispered. “Please find some spell you can cast so my brain doesn’t think my body is an enemy anymore.”