Reviving Ophelia (34 page)

Angela described the experience to me. “I thought Noah was cute, but I wasn’t ready for sex. I hadn’t really thought about it, but Noah came on strong and it happened. I didn’t enjoy it much. I thought, What’s the big deal?”

After Noah, she had a new boyfriend every few weeks. She’d be attracted to someone, go out with him, not on a date really, but cruising or to his apartment. Sometimes she had sex with guys who didn’t even know her last name and vice versa. Angela always hoped this guy would become her boyfriend. Usually though, early into the relationship, they broke up. Angela would be heartbroken for a few days and then meet another “cool guy.” She had crushes just the way junior-high girls always do. The difference between her and girls twenty years ago is that she had sex with all her crushes.

Todd was a regular at the video arcade. He was tall and blond with a James Dean style. Girls fell for him. Angela noticed him her first week, but he often brought his little daughter with him and Angela assumed he had a regular girlfriend.

Five months ago, after she broke up with yet one more crush, Todd approached her in the concession area and offered to buy her a Coke. Angela said, “He was so sweet. I told him I’d been dumped and he was sympathetic. He wasn’t hustling me or anything, he just wanted to talk.”

The next night Angela wore her best outfit to the arcade. Todd came over to talk to her again. After an hour he suggested they go to his place where they could have more privacy. Angela agreed and that night they had sex. Two weeks later she missed her period.

We ended that appointment with Angela promising to see a doctor for a checkup. I said I’d be happy to meet Todd if he could come with Angela.

Angela came to her next appointment in black tights with a white sweatshirt, her first maternity outfit. She carried a copy of
All About Babies
and told me immediately that she was depressed. Todd wouldn’t come. He didn’t “believe in shrinks.”

She sighed and ran her hands through her hair. “I went to Birthright this week to try to get money. They made me watch their sucko film about fetuses. I’ve been to welfare about ADC and it’s so complicated. There’s piles of forms to fill out and you have to prove everything. The lady who interviewed me was a bitch. Plus, I’m trying to quit smoking.”

“Have you been to a doctor yet?”

“We can’t find a doctor who takes Medicaid. This week has sucked.” Angela. sighed. “Todd’s being such a jerk. I’ve hardly seen him. He says he’s busy at work, but he’s been at Holly’s house. She’s the mother of his little girl.”

Angela told me that Marie’s kids had chicken pox. Her dad was bitching about money. Todd’s car needed a hundred dollars in repairs and that made him crabby. She’d been throwing up in the morning.

I asked how she felt about having a baby, and for the first time that morning she smiled. “I’m happy about that. I’m glad I’ll have someone to love.”

We spent the hour talking about her pregnancy. Angela had a project that she was interested in—being a mother. She loved looking at baby clothes at Goodwill and talking about pregnancy with her friends. She no longer felt so inferior to girls who stayed in school. She had something they didn’t have. I’m glad we had a happy session because the next time Angela came in Todd had broken up with her.

Angela’s eyes and nose were red from crying when she told me the news. But by then she was mostly mad. “How could he be such a jerk? He promised me that he’d stay with me.

“He called me last night and said that he was moving in with Holly.” She wobbled her head sarcastically. “They need him.”

She continued. “I hate men. All the guys I’ve dated have turned out to be assholes.”

At the end of our session she reported some good news. “I found a doctor and I haven’t had a smoke in six days.”

We talked about relationships in later sessions. Angela realized that after her folks’ divorce she’d been looking for love. She fell for any guy who told her she was pretty. Because she gave herself so impulsively and easily, she was hurt frequently. She grew to expect rejection and a part of her wasn’t surprised when Todd left her.

“If you take a little time, maybe you could find someone who would stick around and make you happy,” I said. “Could we at least set some criteria for what needs to happen before you have sex with a guy?”

“Like what?”

“You need to decide for yourself.”

Angela looked skeptical.

I continued, “It takes some time to know if someone is honest and caring. Jerks can fake things for a while. How long do you think you would need to be with someone before you knew the true person?”

Angela thought awhile before she said, “Probably at least a month.”

“That’s one criterion. Do you have any others?”

“That he have a job and a car. That he be fun.”

“Let’s write these down,” I said.

I saw Angela through most of her pregnancy. We talked some about her long-term goals. We discussed the perils of looking outside oneself for salvation. I suggested that being a mother wasn’t a sufficient goal. She needed to find a way to support herself and the baby, and she needed to establish relationships with people of both sexes that lasted.

Angela called me from the hospital to tell me that Alex had been born. He weighed just under six pounds and had naturally blond hair like Todd’s. Marie had been her birth coach. She sounded proud and happy. She said, “If you come up to visit, bring me some chocolate. I’m starving in here.”

I last saw Angela a few months ago. I was shopping at a discount grocery and she strolled by with baby Alex. She looked her old self—a happy smile, apple-red hair and black eyeliner. She handed me Alex, who was a chubby baby with spiked hair. He was dressed in a black Leatherette jacket. I held him and he cooed. I cooed. I could tell by his good health and smiles that he was well cared for. As he wiggled in my arms, Angela told me about her current situation. She had a new boyfriend now, Carey, who actually met her criteria for a relationship. He worked as a TV repairman, owned a Jeep and liked babies.

Angela was working on her GED. Her mother had never seen Alex and rarely called Angela, but Angela talked to Marie about her problems. She, Carey and Alex ate Sunday dinner with her father and Marie.

She laughed as Alex held his hands out to her and she took him back quickly. “Isn’t he great?” she said as she chucked him under the chin.

I pushed my cart down the aisle, happy that I had seen her and that things were going better than I would have predicted.

On Sunday mornings I wake early. Everyone in my family sleeps in and I like the time alone to read our local paper. One Sunday these were the headline stories: THE NIGHTMARE BEGAN WITH GOOD-BYE was about Candi Harms, a first-year university student. Candi lived in an apartment with her parents a mile from her boyfriend’s place. Between 11:40, when her boyfriend walked her to her car, and midnight, when she was due home, something happened. Her abandoned car, with her keys and purse still in it, was found in a remote area north of town.

There was an article on Kenyatta Bush, an A student and a homecoming-queen candidate. Kenyatta disappeared from her high school one morning. Her backpack and books were found beside her car. Her body was found in a ditch the day of the school’s homecoming.

Another headline announced that domestic violence was at an all-time high. One out of two women will be battered at some time in her life. In 1991, more than one million women reported being the victims of violent crimes at the hands of husbands or lovers; four thousand women were killed. Police estimated that more than six million assaults actually took place. In America, a woman is a victim of domestic violence every eighteen seconds.

On an inside page of the Sunday paper, a new fashion line was on display. The photo showed skimpily clad models wearing high heels at a New York show. On their tight, short outfits, over their breasts and buttocks, were painted bull’s-eyes. The caption of the fashion photo read: “Walking targets.”

These stories about women and girls were being told in every paper in America. They have a chilling effect on all young women. Many report their fears of being home alone, driving and going to swimming pools or theaters. Their confidence in their ability to navigate their world is eroded. They speak to the heart of the question, What is our environment like for girls?

I recently saw a bumper sticker on a young man’s car that read: “If I don’t get laid soon somebody’s gonna get hurt.” He is not alone in his philosophy. On any given day in America, 480 women and children will be forcibly raped, 5,760 women will be assaulted by a male intimate partner and four women and three children will be murdered by a family member.

The newer the study, the worse the figures. Rape is the “tragedy of youth” because 32 percent of all rapes occur when the victim is between the ages of eleven and seventeen. More than 15 percent of all college women have been raped since they turned eighteen. There is ominous evidence that the incidence of rape is increasing over time—the younger the age category of respondents, the higher the incidence of reported rape.

Statistics gloss over thousands of sad stories. This year one of my students missed class many times because she was being beaten by her boyfriend. Another group of students presented a panel discussion that included the results of a questionnaire about abuse in our classroom. None of the men but more than half the women students reported having been abused in a relationship. The last three times I’ve spoken at a high school class, a girl has approached me afterward to tell me she’s been raped.

Classes on self-defense are filled with women and girls who recently have been victimized. I ask in my college classes what men do to protect themselves, and they say that they do nothing. I ask about women and we fill a blackboard with the ways women are careful. Fear changes behavior in a thousand ways—where and when young women can go places, who they talk to and where they walk, study and live.

I have seen so many victims of sexual assaults, some recent, still bruised and in shock, others struggling to come to terms with assaults that occurred years before when they were children. The youngest girls I worked with were two sisters, three and five, who had been brutally assaulted by a stepfather. My oldest client was a woman in her seventies who told about a rape that occurred when she was a teenager. Fifty years later, she still had nightmares. Some days I leave work thinking that every woman in America has been or will be sexually assaulted.

Long after the physical trauma of assault, victims must contend with emotional wounds. A number of factors influence the severity of the trauma that comes from sexual violence. Generally the trauma is more severe if the victim is young, if the assaults occur with frequency and over a long period of time, if the assailant is related to the victim and if the assault is violent. The most damaging assaults are violent ones by a family member.

Other factors that are important include the reactions of the victims. The sooner girls tell someone what happened and seek help, the better. The more support they have from family and others, the better. Finally, girls vary in their own resiliency and ability to handle stress. Some are capable of a quicker, more complete recovery than others. All victims of sexual assault are helped by posttraumatic stress work, either with family, friends or therapists.

The first appointment with Ellie and her parents was painful for everyone. Ellie sank into my big chair and curled up like a small child. Her dark eyes were filled with tears. Her dad, Dick, was so overwhelmed he could barely talk. Ronette, who was small and dark-haired like her daughter, did most of the talking. She began our session by saying, “I’m so shattered by this that I can barely speak.”

Dick was a welder and Ronette ran a hair salon in their home. They were hard workers who put their daughters first. Dick had an American flag flying in their yard and flag decals on all the vehicles. He’d been wounded in Vietnam and was president of his local VFW.

Ronette liked the country music at the VFW and was proud that she and Dick were good dancers. They’d taken dance lessons at the local community college. She was a good-hearted, hard-working woman who had run into few problems she couldn’t solve. Both cared deeply about Ellie, who was the oldest of their three daughters.

Ronette took deep breaths and gave me an outline of events. “Ellie acted up some in eighth grade. She argued about everything—her chores, the telephone and her studies—but we weren’t really worried about her. We knew kids acted that way. Her grades were pretty good, mostly Bs. She was on the swim team. We liked her friends.”

Ronette sighed. “What worried us most was her disobedience. She skipped school several times and she slipped out at night with her friends. We were afraid she’d get hurt.”

Ellie began sobbing as her mother talked, and Dick curled and uncurled his fists like a boxer ready for a fight. Ronette’s face was tear-stained and tense, but she continued. “This last month she’s driven us crazy. She’s been insulting to us and mouthy at school. Yesterday she was called into the counselor’s office because she pushed a kid in the hall. That’s just not Ellie. Her grades dropped and she quit going out with her friends. We knew something had to have happened but we couldn’t figure what.”

Dick said, “We asked her what was wrong and she wouldn’t tell us.” “Thank God Ellie told her counselor,” Ronette said. “Things were going downhill fast.”

I asked, “I know this is difficult, but what exactly happened?”

We all looked at Ellie, who buried her face in the chair.

Dick said, “We don’t know many details. It’s too hard to talk about.”

Ronette said in a dull voice, “Ellie sneaked out to a bowling alley. She thought her friends would be there but they weren’t. When she walked across the parking lot to come home, four boys pulled her into their car and raped her.”