If and Only If: A Journal of Body Image and Eating Disorders Winter 2015 | Page 109

everything else. Bridgeway clients, having been through the requisite detoxing and 21-day treatment, are in the slippery emotional terrain between “treatment” and “recovery” whereby they haven’t yet learned the coping skills that will protect their sobriety. Therein lies our job: to give newly recovered clients something to hold onto as they make their way back into society without alcohol or drugs or fantasies of disappearing. Individual and group therapy, Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous meetings and education groups are all a part of the effort we mount to bolster the newly sober addict’s ability to resist the pull of relapse. This is Bridgeway’s sole raison d'être. This is why Mr. Jenkins’s interview question--what did I know about relapse and was that knowledge spoken from experience--hung uncomfortably in the air until I answered satisfactorily. Because I looked, for all intents and purposes, like the greedy arms of addiction were still wrapped around my bony shoulders, like it was only a matter of time before I would be again be yanked (or go willingly) into that inglorious pit of self-destruction. Which would be (as the director of the eating disorders unit knew) very bad role modeling indeed.

“Good morning young lady,” Mr. Jenkins says when I walk in. He scans my outfit and I see his mouth working over words that he doesn’t say. He is seated at the desk where I had my interview just two weeks ago with a large mug of coffee and the newspaper. He points to the chair I sat in for my interview. “Take a load off.”

Although he has his own office, Mr. Jenkins will spend most of his time at this desk because it is a hub of activity and he likes being in the center of things. Staff offices—including my new office--are off this main room, the front door of the house is visible from it, and clients must pass by it on their way to the group room, the dining room, and the upstairs sleeping quarters. Behind us, in the irregular collection of chairs that encircle the room, sit Henriette, staff RN, and Margery, staff secretary. Henriette has been at Bridgeway for fifteen years, and if the grim, hard face and slightly stooped, mannish body are any indication, it’s been fifteen hard ones. She’s 52, I would learn later, but looks 60. It’s hard to recall whether I disliked her right off or whether it was gradual, an outgrowth of the contempt she seemed to have for me—from the start. Margery is 60 and has been at Bridgeway twenty years. She is soft-spoken and painfully prim with a blouse buttoned up to her chin but when I go into the ladies restroom after her I will be enveloped in a cloud of stinking, illicit cigarette smoke. This will be the extent of her secretiveness, but I will somehow understand that it is unmentionable.

I sit down in the chair facing the center of the room and Margery and Henriette. Margery is telling Henriette about taking her grandchildren to Disneyland in July and how everybody is “real excited” including her. Even in animation Margery is rigid, her smile masklike and brittle.