Reviving Ophelia - Mary Bray Pipher [145]
JUNE
The morning we met, June had worked a double shift at the Kawasaki plant, gone out for breakfast and driven across town to my office. June was big-boned with a round, pockmarked face. She wore her hair short and was dressed in a gray sweat suit. She lumbered into my office and sank onto the couch. She was so physically imposing that I was surprised by her delicate sensibilities.
Her language was personal, precise and earthy. She talked about herself softly and carefully as if psychotherapy, like dentistry, might hurt. She did not, thank goodness, talk like someone who had read too many self-help books.
June said, “I’m here because I am dating someone for the first time in my life. I’m twenty-seven and I’ve never been kissed. I thought I might need some coaching.”
She’d been at Kawasaki for ten years. Her closest friend worked next to her on the assembly line. Dixie was a single parent and June helped her with her kids. She pulled out their school pictures to show me and said they called her Aunt June. “They’re real good kids,” she said, “once you get to know them.”
June had met her boyfriend, Marty, at work too. He was the union representative for her group of workers. The last three Saturday nights he had dropped by with a pizza and a video. Last Saturday night he put his arm around June. That’s when she decided to call me.
I asked her about her family and June sighed. “I was afraid you would bring them up.”
“We can wait,” I say gently.
“I might as well get it out,” she said. “After you hear about my teenage years, you’ll understand why I haven’t dated much.”
June’s father was a farm laborer who “never had much to do with me.” Her mother was a cook at a rest home. “She was hard-working and fun. She’d bring me treats from the rest home—cookies and crafts that the residents made for me. She showed them my pictures and kept them posted on my activities. Everyone at the home loved her.”
June paused and looked at me. “Mom died at the start of my freshman year in high school. It was an awful time to lose her. I had just started my periods. I was clumsy and had bad acne. I had been slightly chubby and then I got fat. I was totally alone.”
June blew her nose before continuing. “The year Mom died, I watched the Miss America pageant all by myself. I stared at those thin, poised girls and knew I would never be like that. I had no looks and no talents. Only my mom had loved me as I was. I thought about giving up.”
She rubbed her forehead as if to erase some memories too painful to consider. “I don’t know how I made it through that year. Dad was never home. I had hardly any clothes. I did what housework and cooking got done and that was precious little. Dad almost never gave me money for groceries. I was fat and hungry at the same time.”
I asked her about the kids at school. “They were terrible. Not so much mean, as totally indifferent. I didn’t exist for them. I was too ugly and too sad to even be part of the class. I ate by myself and walked to and from school alone. No one would be my lab partner.”
She rubbed her big face and continued. “One time a boy approached me in the cafeteria, in front of all the other kids, and asked me to go to a football game. I was such a goof that I thought he meant it. I thought maybe he could see past my appearance and like the real me. So I said sure, if I could get Dad’s permission. Then he started laughing. His buddies all whooped it up too. They’d dared him to do it for a joke. He collected ten bucks for just asking me out.”
June sighed. “After that I steered clear of boys.”
Her father married Mercene a year after June’s mother died. They took a honeymoon trip to Sun City and brought June salt and pepper shakers for her hope chest. “By then I had no hope,” she said flatly.