Reviving Ophelia - Mary Bray Pipher [96]
I noticed Violet right away because she was an unusual age for a shelter visitor. She looked about eighteen, maybe even younger. She was chubby and dressed in jeans, a T-shirt and plastic thongs. Like most of the people at the center, she had bad teeth. When I first saw her she was playing cards at a table of regulars. She laughed easily and was popular and accepted by the group. They joked with her, offered her smokes and advice on survival in our town.
Later, when the men hit the streets, I visited with Violet. She had just run from what she said would be her last foster-care placement. She’d had six and that was plenty. She’d also lived on the reservation with her mother, who was sick and alcoholic, and she’d lived in an institution for difficult kids with no place else to go. She was ready to be on her own and said, “I’d rather live on the streets than have anyone tell me what to do.”
I worried aloud that she might get raped being on her own, and she looked at me strangely. “Do you think that hasn’t happened to me before?”
Before she left that day she pulled out a picture of her mother’s home on the reservation. It was a trailer surrounded by squalor—old tires and car engines, even a toilet. But Violet looked longingly at it. “I miss my own place, but Mom’s just too hard to live with.”
Violet came in for several months. Like many of our local homeless, she sold her blood and “volunteered” for drug studies at a pharmaceutical company. She wove leather armbands that she sold on the streets. Violet made enough money to buy herself and her friends food. She bought presents for children whenever they turned up at the center. Soon I was busy answering the question “Where’s Violet?”
In fact, Violet had lots of friends. She wasn’t a complainer and had a way of laughing about troubles that made them seem less serious. She was big on hugging others when they were down and had nicknames for everyone.
One morning she showed me all the scars on her arms and leg—from a knife fight with her mother’s ex-boyfriend, from her mother when she was drunk, from a foster father who believed in physical discipline. Another day she said, “You’re a shrink. I wonder what I should do about this tendency I have to eat everything that isn’t nailed down.”
She told me how she always associated food with comfort. Her fondest memories were of her childhood visits to her grandmother’s. There she’d had a calm, clean place to play and rest. She said her grandmother was a good cook and always had oatmeal cookies and angel food cake for her to enjoy. “Mom never had food around, only booze. Grandma’s place had good food.”
She lit a cigarette. “I had lots of bad homes. Food was the one thing I could count on. No matter how wrecked I was, eating helped me feel better. But there was never enough food. That’s what worries me now. I can’t get enough. I eat until my stomach hurts, and then I’ll keep on eating.”
I said, “It sounds like you’ve got things pretty well figured out.”
She smiled. “I know what’s wrong, but how do I fix it?”
Eating filled a deep need that Violet didn’t know how to fill in other ways. I knew she could learn healthy ways to take care of herself. Because she was such a good worker, I was sure she could work her way into a decent job and a more stable life. I started to tell her this, but Violet waved her hands. “Whoa. Don’t get too deep on me.”
I apologized. “We shrinks have a tendency to do that.” Then someone asked me to make some more coffee.
I bought Violet a copy of Orbach’s book Fat Is a Feminist Issue and told her about a free support group near the center. She didn’t like to hang out with people with money (it made her self-conscious), but she did read the book.
One day she told me that she thought her eating was related to her fears about sex. She said, “I figure that if I’m fat enough maybe guys will leave me alone. It’s a kind of armor, soft armor, but it works pretty well.”
Another day