Reviving Ophelia - Mary Bray Pipher [11]
She scrunched between her parents wearing a T-shirt that said “If you don’t like loud music, you’re too fucking old.” Her body posture signaled “My parents can force me to be here but nobody can make me talk.” When I offered her a soda, she rolled her eyes and said, “Color me excited.”
Her mother said, “Cayenne acts like she’s allergic to us. Everything we do is wrong.”
Her dad talked about her grades, her friends, her herpes and depression, but most of all he mourned their lost relationship. Cayenne had been so close to them and so much fun. She was no longer “Old Faithful”—her bad days outnumbered her good. He thought that even Marla had been easier. At least she hadn’t contracted a sexually transmitted disease. After he shared his concerns, he asked, “Does Cayenne need to be hospitalized, or is she just acting like a fifteen-year-old?”
Good question, I thought to myself. Later I met with Cayenne alone. Her blue eyes were icy under her frizzy red hair. She glared at me, almost daring me to make her talk. I sensed that while her surface behavior was angry and withdrawn, underneath she was hurting. I searched for a way to begin.
Finally Cayenne asked, “Do shrinks analyze dreams?”
“Do you have one?”
Cayenne told me of a recurring dream in which she was asleep in her upstairs bedroom. She heard footsteps on the stairs and knew who was coming. She listened, terrified, as the steps grew louder. An old man leading a goat walked into her room. He had a long, sharp knife. Cayenne lay in her bed unable to move while he began slicing at her toes. He sliced off pieces of her and fed her to the goat. She usually awoke when he reached her knees. She’d be covered with sweat and her heart would be racing wildly. Afterward she was afraid to go back to sleep for fear the man would return.
When she finished I asked her what she thought the dream meant. She said, “It means I’m afraid of being cut up and eaten alive.”
Over the next few months Cayenne talked in fragments, almost in code. Sometimes she talked so softly that I couldn’t hear her. She wasn’t happy in junior high and missed her old school. She missed her sister, Marla, who was away at college. Although she was sure it was they, not she, who had changed, Cayenne missed the closeness she had had with her parents.
Cayenne’s demeanor was cautious and her speech elliptical, but she kept coming. She hated her looks. She thought her hair was too bright, her hips and thighs too flabby. She tried to lose weight but couldn’t. She dyed her hair, but it turned a weird purple color and dried out. She felt almost every girl was prettier. She said, “Let’s face it, I’m a dog.”
She didn’t feel comfortable around her old friends. We talked about the girls in her class who teased her about her clothes and about the boys who gave her a hard time. Cayenne had problems with most of her friends. Everything was unpredictable. One week she felt reasonably comfortable and accepted, the next she felt like a pariah. She told her friends secrets only to have them spread all over the school. She was included one day in a clique and left out the next. Some days guys called her a slut, other days these same boys would flirt with her.
She felt pressure to use drugs and alcohol. She said, “I was the perfect angel in grade school. I never planned to smoke or drink, but all of a sudden, alcohol was everywhere. Even the president of the Just Say No Club got loaded all the time.”
School, which had once been fun, was now a torment. She felt stupid in her math and science classes and bored in everything else. She said to me, “School’s just the way the government baby-sits kids my age.”
We talked about her parents’ rules, which had grown much stricter after the herpes. Her protests were surprisingly weak. She felt ambivalent about her parents—part of her felt guilty about all the fights with them,