Reviving Ophelia - Mary Bray Pipher [63]
After his wife left, Dale’s days were all the same. He came home, fixed dinner, did the dishes and parked himself in his recliner in front of the television. Many nights he fell asleep before the ten o’clock news. He rarely made it to Holly’s school programs and had no outside interests of his own. Once a coworker tried to set him up for a date, but Dale refused. He wasn’t taking that kind of chance again.
Holly quickly learned to care for herself. She kept her bedroom neat and washed and ironed her own clothes. She was only vaguely aware that other girls had more friends and activities and parents who read to them and took them on outings. She never studied, but she was well behaved and her report card was a dull list of “satisfactories.”
In elementary school, she watched television with Dale, but by junior high she dropped TV in favor of music. Holly became obsessed with the music of Prince. She papered her walls with his posters and record covers. She joined his fan club, and once a week she wrote long letters to her idol. She played his music until she had all the lyrics memorized, and because Prince wore purple, Holly dressed exclusively in purple. She dyed her hair red and spiked it because Prince claimed he liked red hair.
Dale hardly noticed this until the school counselor called to say that students were teasing Holly about her purple clothes and outrageous hair. She also was worried that Holly had few friends and no interests except Prince. She encouraged Dale to sign Holly up for a club, sports or drama classes.
Dale asked Holly if she would join a club and she said no. He offered her lessons in whatever she wanted and she declined. Dale bought her new brightly colored T-shirts and Holly put them in a drawer unopened. Dale sensed Holly’s problem might be related to her home life, but he was unsure what else to do. He gave up and returned to his television.
Then Holly met Lyle, a skinny eighth-grader who had a studded black leather jacket and a tattoo that read “Live fast, die young.” Lyle, like Holly, had chosen music as his way of dealing with his aloneness. He listened to music virtually every waking minute that he was not in class. He was in trouble at school for blasting music during lunch break. They met in the back row of English class. Holly noticed that Lyle had slipped a Sony Walkman into the school and shyly asked him if he liked Prince. Lyle, unlike most of the boys, didn’t think that Holly’s teased hair and purple outfits were a liability. He said yes, he liked Prince.
He asked Holly to come to his house after school and listen to music. By the weekend they were going steady. Holly transferred much of the devotion she’d lavished on Prince to Lyle. She called him first thing in the morning to wake him and met him at the corner south of school for a cigarette. She wrote notes to him during classes, ate lunch with him in the school cafeteria and then, after school, went to his house. In the evenings she spent hours on the phone to Lyle.
Dale was relieved that Holly had a friend. He told me, “Lyle was a strange agent, but he had good manners.” Dale sensed that so much closeness so fast might not be healthy, but he was unsure what to do about it. He brought up sex to Holly and she angrily told him that she could handle it. He doubted that, but was uncertain what to say or do next.
For three months Holly lived for Lyle. Then Lyle broke off the relationship abruptly. He told Holly that he wasn’t ready for a serious relationship and wanted more time to practice his guitar and hang out with musicians. Lyle’s mother called Dale to warn him about the effect this news would have