Reviving Ophelia - Mary Bray Pipher [130]
Once scorned, a person was out for years. One classmate who broke into a building in the eighth grade was ostracized for years by all the “good” families. We were forbidden to associate with him. He was killed in a car wreck the week after graduation. Only then did I realize how awful his high school years must have been.
The town newspaper was full of stories about who attended whose birthday party or fiftieth wedding anniversary. Crime was garbage cans and privies being overturned on Halloween. No one locked their doors. Our town sheriff mostly looked for lost pets and speeders. I could go anywhere before or after dark without my parents’ worrying. My most traumatic experience was reading The Diary of Anne Frank and realizing that somewhere people could be incredibly evil.
As I recall my childhood, I’m cautioned by Mark Twain’s line, “The older I get, the more clearly I remember things that never happened.” Remembering is more like taking a Rorschach test than calling up a computer file. It’s highly selective and revealing of one’s deep character. Of course, others had different experiences, but I recall small-town life as slower, safer and less sexualized. Everyone did know everyone. Sometimes that made the world seem safe and secure and sometimes that made the world seem small and oppressive.
Cassie attends a high school with 2,300 students. She doesn’t know her teachers’ children or her neighbors’ cousins. When she meets people she doesn’t try to establish their place in a complicated kinship network. When she shops for jeans, she doesn’t expect the clerk to ask after her family.
Cassie sees her extended family infrequently, particularly since her parents’ divorce. They are scattered all over the map. Most of the adults in her neighborhood work. In the evening people no longer sit on their front porches. Instead they prefer the privacy of backyard patios, which keep their doings invisible. Air-conditioning contributes to each family’s isolation. On hot summer days and nights people go inside to stay cool. Cassie knows the Cosby family and the people from “Northern Exposure” better than she knows anyone on her block.
Cassie fights with her parents in a more aggressive way than the teens of my youth. She yells, swears, accuses and threatens to run away. Her parents tolerate this open anger much more readily than earlier generations would have. I’m confused about whether I was more repressed as a child or just happier. Sometimes I think all this expression of emotion is good, and sometimes, particularly when I see beleaguered mothers, I wonder if we have made progress.
Cassie is much more politically aware of the world than I was. By the time she was ten she’d been in a protest march in Washington, D.C. She’s demonstrated against the death penalty and the Rodney King trial. She writes letters to her congressmen and to the newspapers. She writes letters for Amnesty International to stop torture all over the world. She is part of a larger world than I was and takes her role as an active participant seriously.
Cassie and her friends all tried smoking cigarettes in junior high. Like most teenagers today, Cassie was offered drugs in junior high. She can name more kinds of illegal drugs than the average junkie from the fifties. She knows about local drug-related killings and crack rings. Marijuana, which my father saw once in his lifetime, wafts through the air at her rock concerts and midnight movies.
Alcohol is omnipresent—in bowling alleys, gas stations, grocery stores, skating rinks and Laundromats. Alcohol advertising is rampant, and drinking is associated with wealth, travel, romance and fun. At sixteen, Cassie has friends who have been through treatment for drugs or alcohol. The schools attempt alcohol and drug education, but they are no match for the peer