Reviving Ophelia (19 page)

Pete said, “I don’t have any choice. I don’t think Katie will start taking orders now.”

Katie wouldn’t take orders, but I sensed that she was healthy enough to respond to conversation and encouragement. I knew that at some level she was aware that she was hiding from peers. On the other hand, I admired the closeness of Pete and Katie and was determined not to pathologize a loving relationship. I said, “There are many ways to compromise. Katie could perhaps study abroad one year or attend an out-of-state school for a summer session. We can talk about this when she comes to my office.”

“I think Katie will do what she wants.” He smiled at her. “She’s my cross to bear.”

Holly’s mother had fallen in love with a neighbor and slipped away one day while Holly was at kindergarten and Dale was at work. They never saw her again. Dale worked as a supervisor at the Goodyear plant. His wife and daughter had been his life, and he was devastated by the abandonment and the responsibilities of single parenting. He arranged for Holly’s physical care and supervision, but he had neither the energy nor the understanding to deliver much emotional support and companionship.

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 on Holly. She said that while they liked Holly, she and her husband felt that things were moving way too fast and that Lyle needed to slow down. After all, these were eighth-graders. They talked to Lyle about their concerns and he agreed to cool it. Before she hung up, she told Dale that Holly and Lyle had been sexually active.

Dale was stunned by the news. He suggested a pregnancy test but Holly refused. In fact, she refused to discuss Lyle with him at all. When he came home at night she fled to her room and slammed the door. For a few days Holly cried nonstop, refusing to eat or go to school. Her eyes were red and her face puffy from grief. She called Lyle daily but the talks didn’t go well. Her pleading made him even more determined to break up. Then one day Holly swallowed all the pills in the house.

Fortunately, Dale came home at lunch to check on Holly. He found her asleep in a pool of vomit and called 911.

I met Holly at the hospital after this suicide attempt. Alone in a white room, she was dressed in the regulation hospital gown, but with her hair properly spiked and a
Rolling Stone
magazine by her side. When I introduced myself, she was polite but distant. I asked her about the suicide attempt. Holly stared out the window at the harsh November day and said, “My life is over.” The rest of our time she answered questions in noncommittal monosyllables.

Things were not much better at the office. Dale came the first time and filled me in on his life with Holly. He knew almost nothing about her thoughts and feelings. Clearly he cared about his daughter, but he had no ideas about how to express his caring in helpful ways. He and Holly had talked so rarely that now that Holly was in a crisis, they had no foundation for working things through. I was struck by the little pleasure his own life had. His parents were dead. He didn’t believe in socializing with his coworkers. His only interest was television.

I called the school counselor, who said, “Holly doesn’t really have a life. She’s living in a fantasy world that she’s constructed around Prince. She tried to substitute Lyle for Prince, but real people are too complicated for her.”

Slowly I began to build a relationship with Holly. Once a week she showed up in a different purple outfit and we talked about Prince. I encouraged her to bring a tape and we listened together. To test me, she played “sexy” Prince songs. Afterward I commented on whatever I could praise.

“I like the line about staying until the morning light.”

She shrugged and said, “That’s his old stuff. Listen to this.”

I asked, “What does this song mean to you?”

Holly said, “It’s two against the world. Undying love.”

“You haven’t had that—undying love, I mean,” I said. “Are you bringing up my mother?”

Holly often answered my questions by quoting Prince’s songs. I listened and pulled themes from the lyrics for further consideration. I waited for Holly to use her own words. Finally I suggested that she write a Prince-style song about her feelings.

The next week Holly handed me a song. It was Prince-like with themes of loneliness and abandonment. She grinned when I praised it. After that Holly and I communicated mostly via her songs. She brought a fresh one each week—a song about her mother’s leaving, another about her anger over the divorce, a song wondering where her mother was and why she didn’t call and a song about how cruel kids could be. I listened, discussed the writing, asked what meaning the songs had in her life.

Otherwise, I gently encouraged her to make a friend. Because of her mother’s abandonment and because of teasing by girls, Holly didn’t trust females. She shook her head no to my suggestions about talking to girls. I suggested music lessons and maybe a band.

After many months I felt we had a strong enough relationship that I could bring up sex. I suggested a doctor’s appointment for an examination. I told her basic facts about sexuality that “all girls wonder about and are afraid to ask.”

We talked about how vulnerable she’d been to the first person who said “I love you.” Lyle was a decent guy, lonely and naive like Holly, but the next person might be different. I pointed out that “I love you” are the first words that psychopaths say to girls.

Holly was vulnerable to a common adolescent girl’s mistake—using her sexuality to get love. She needed affection, not sex, and most of all she needed affection from her father. We discussed how she and her father were strangers to each other, and I invited Dale in for a visit. That first joint session he was even more awkward than Holly. He sat stiffly with his arms folded across his chest and said “yes, ma’am” to my questions.

“We don’t talk,” Holly said accusingly.

Dale said, “Your mother was better at that. I never had much experience talking to kids.”

I asked if they wanted to be closer. Holly twirled her hair around her little finger and nodded shyly. Dale choked up but finally said, “That’s all I want. What else am I alive for?”

I recommended that they go slowly. Neither had many skills and both would be overwhelmed by failure. They could cook a meal together or drive around and look at Christmas lights. When I suggested they attend a holiday concert, both looked alarmed. I backed down and suggested they talk ten minutes each evening about how their day had gone.

The next session they reported that the talks were difficult at first but easier with practice. Dale asked about Holly’s school. She told him about lunchtime in the loud cafeteria. Holly asked what her dad did at work, and after all these years he explained it to her.

In therapy we gingerly approached their long-buried feelings about Holly’s mother leaving. Dale said, “I tried to put it behind me. I couldn’t change it, so what was the point crying about it?”

Holly said, “I was afraid to bring it up because Dad always looked so sad. After the first month I didn’t mention Mom anymore. For a long time I cried myself to sleep.”

I asked both Holly and Dale to write letters to the absent mother in which they expressed their true feelings about her leaving. These letters were not for sending (indeed, we didn’t even know where to send them) but for Holly and Dale’s reworking of the painful events.

The next week Holly and Dale read their letters aloud. At first Dale’s letter was formal and emotionally constricted, but later more passionate. Years of pent-up anger came tumbling out, and after the anger, sadness, and after the sadness, bad feelings about himself. He was a failure as a husband, he wasn’t able to communicate clearly or to show affection. He blamed himself for his wife’s leaving.

Holly listened closely to her Dad’s letter and handed him Kleenex for the tears. She patted his arm and said, “It wasn’t your fault, it was mine.”

She read her letter, which, like Dale’s, began in a formal, polite way and built up steam over time. Her first and strongest emotion was loss—her mother had chosen to leave and never see her again. She suspected that something must be wrong with her, some secret flaw she couldn’t identify. She had grieved since it happened, unsure how to express or even acknowledge such painful feelings.

Ever since her mother left, she hated to be touched or praised by women. If a teacher patted her, she cringed. Instead of moving toward women for support, she tried to toughen herself so she wouldn’t need it. She didn’t like to visit girls at their homes. She got too jealous watching them with their mothers.

She blamed herself for her mother’s abandonment. She was “a mouthy little kid.” After her mother left, Holly stopped being mouthy, she almost stopped talking. She no longer trusted that words could help her.

Since her mother’s abandonment, Lyle was the first person she let in emotionally. He gave her hope that she was lovable. He listened to her, held her and told her she was beautiful. When he left, the pain was horrible. It reminded her of her mother’s leaving and convinced her that she was unworthy of the love of another human being.

At the end of that session, both Holly and Dale were crying. I realized that Holly and Dale desperately needed each other. They could sink or swim together. Neither of them felt lovable, and the only person who was close enough to change that basic feeling about themselves was the other. By making their relationship a loving one, they could prove to themselves that they were capable and worthy of love. In what I hoped would be a self-fulfilling prophecy, I said, “You two can teach each other how to show love.”

That’s what we worked on. Dale had been distant because of his own unprocessed pain and because of a lack of relationship skills. Indeed, this same lack of skills had probably cost him his marriage. Holly had been distant because she was abandoned. Her dad made it easy to stay distant. Prince was the perfect love object since he was a thousand miles away and totally inaccessible. She could love him without taking any risks.

Gradually Holly and Dale formed a caring relationship. They talked more about personal topics. For example, Holly asked about Dale’s friends at work and he said he avoided them. He told her they read
Playboy
and talked about women in a way that made him uncomfortable. Holly told him about the way boys teased her at school and about her discomfort when boys touched her in the halls. That led them into a philosophical discussion of the relations between the sexes. They both had things to learn and teach.