Her parents loved her willingness to take on the universe. One day she dressed up like a belly dancer, the next like an astronaut. She liked adults and babies, boys and girls, dogs and sparrows. An absolute democrat, Cayenne treated everyone with respect, and she expected the same.
When outraged, she took on the world. She got a black eye from fighting with a boy who said that girls couldn’t play soccer. Once she dunked a much older boy who was throwing rocks at a little turtle. She threatened to hit kids who were racist. Because she was good at standing up for herself and concerned with justice, her teachers predicted she’d go to law school.
In elementary school Cayenne didn’t fret much about her appearance. She weighed in once a year at the doctor’s office and was pleased with gains in her height and weight chart. She wore jeans and T-shirts unless forced to dress up. Her mother had to beg her to go shopping and remind her to brush her hair.
She walked to school every day with her best friend, Chelsea. She and Chelsea biked together, watched television, played on the same ball teams and helped each other with chores. They talked about everything—parents, school, sports and interests. They shared their dreams. Chelsea wanted to be a pilot, and Cayenne wanted to be a doctor. They made up elaborate fantasies in which Chelsea would fly Cayenne into a remote Alaskan village to deliver a baby or amputate the leg of a fisherman.
Cayenne liked school. Her grades were good and she loved projects, especially science projects. Twice she was on the Olympics of the Mind team. She’d known most of the kids in her class since kindergarten. She played ball with them and went to their houses for birthday parties.
Cayenne got along well with her parents. Marla, her older sister, had been the moodier and more disobedient child. As an adolescent, Marla sneaked out of the house to drink with her friends. Cayenne felt sorry for her parents when Marla yelled or made them worry, and she promised she would never act that way.
Of course, Cayenne wasn’t perfect. She’d never liked to clean her room and was fidgety in church. She preferred junk food to fruits and vegetables. About twice a year Cayenne would be cranky and sullen for a day, but mostly she was easy-going. Bad days were so rare that they were events, like Groundhog Day. Her parents came to depend on Cayenne as their emotional centerboard, and they jokingly called her “Old Faithful.”
At twelve, Cayenne had her first period. As her body grew rapidly, it became awkward and unpredictable. She gained weight, especially in her hips, and she got acne. Cayenne moved from her neighborhood school to a junior high with 2,000 students. She was nervous the first day because she’d heard rumors that seventh-graders’ heads were stuffed in the toilets and that boys pulled down the girls’ blouses. Fortunately these things didn’t happen, but she came home upset that some boys teased her and that the girls wore makeup and expensive clothes. She was criticized for her JCPenney jeans, and even Chelsea begged her to give up soccer practice and spend Saturday at the mall.
Cayenne grew quieter and less energetic. For the first time she needed to be coaxed into doing things with the family. She stopped wanting hugs from her parents and brushed them away when they approached her. She didn’t laugh or talk to them.
Her parents expected some of this. When Cayenne became self conscious about her appearance, it saddened them, but they knew this was “normal.” They were more upset when she quit playing soccer and when her grades dropped, even in science, which Cayenne now considered hard and boring.
Meanwhile Chelsea’s parents divorced and Chelsea fell in with a wild crowd. She invited Cayenne to join and called her a “Muffy” when she hesitated. Eventually Cayenne became part of the group. Her parents suspected that this crowd might be using alcohol or drugs. They encouraged Cayenne to do more with other girls, but she complained about cliques. They tried to steer her toward sports and school activities, but she felt these things were for nerds.
I met Cayenne the winter of her ninth-grade year. Her family physician had referred her to me after she was diagnosed with herpes. He believed that the family and Cayenne needed help dealing with this infectious disease.
She scrunched between her parents wearing a T-shirt that said “If you don’t like loud music, you’re too fucking old.” Her body posture signaled “My parents can force me to be here but nobody can make me talk.” When I offered her a soda, she rolled her eyes and said, “Color me excited.”
Her mother said, “Cayenne acts like she’s allergic to us. Everything we do is wrong.”
Her dad talked about her grades, her friends, her herpes and depression, but most of all he mourned their lost relationship. Cayenne had been so close to them and so much fun. She was no longer “Old Faithful”—her bad days outnumbered her good. He thought that even Marla had been easier. At least she hadn’t contracted a sexually transmitted disease. After he shared his concerns, he asked, “Does Cayenne need to be hospitalized, or is she just acting like a fifteen-year-old?”
Good question, I thought to myself. Later I met with Cayenne alone. Her blue eyes were icy under her frizzy red hair. She glared at me, almost daring me to make her talk. I sensed that while her surface behavior was angry and withdrawn, underneath she was hurting. I searched for a way to begin.
Finally Cayenne asked, “Do shrinks analyze dreams?”
“Do you have one?”
Cayenne told me of a recurring dream in which she was asleep in her upstairs bedroom. She heard footsteps on the stairs and knew who was coming. She listened, terrified, as the steps grew louder. An old man leading a goat walked into her room. He had a long, sharp knife. Cayenne lay in her bed unable to move while he began slicing at her toes. He sliced off pieces of her and fed her to the goat. She usually awoke when he reached her knees. She’d be covered with sweat and her heart would be racing wildly. Afterward she was afraid to go back to sleep for fear the man would return.
When she finished I asked her what she thought the dream meant. She said, “It means I’m afraid of being cut up and eaten alive.”
Over the next few months Cayenne talked in fragments, almost in code. Sometimes she talked so softly that I couldn’t hear her. She wasn’t happy in junior high and missed her old school. She missed her sister, Marla, who was away at college. Although she was sure it was they, not she, who had changed, Cayenne missed the closeness she had had with her parents.
Cayenne’s demeanor was cautious and her speech elliptical, but she kept coming. She hated her looks. She thought her hair was too bright, her hips and thighs too flabby. She tried to lose weight but couldn’t. She dyed her hair, but it turned a weird purple color and dried out. She felt almost every girl was prettier. She said, “Let’s face it, I’m a dog.”
She didn’t feel comfortable around her old friends. We talked about the girls in her class who teased her about her clothes and about the boys who gave her a hard time. Cayenne had problems with most of her friends. Everything was unpredictable. One week she felt reasonably comfortable and accepted, the next she felt like a pariah. She told her friends secrets only to have them spread all over the school. She was included one day in a clique and left out the next. Some days guys called her a slut, other days these same boys would flirt with her.
She felt pressure to use drugs and alcohol. She said, “I was the perfect angel in grade school. I never planned to smoke or drink, but all of a sudden, alcohol was everywhere. Even the president of the Just Say No Club got loaded all the time.”
School, which had once been fun, was now a torment. She felt stupid in her math and science classes and bored in everything else. She said to me, “School’s just the way the government baby-sits kids my age.”
We talked about her parents’ rules, which had grown much stricter after the herpes. Her protests were surprisingly weak. She felt ambivalent about her parents—part of her felt guilty about all the fights with them, while another part blamed them for not understanding the pressure she was under and keeping her safe.
I recommended she write down three things every day that she felt proud of. I asked her to write me a letter telling me her good qualities. She wrote that she was proud of mowing the lawn, doing dishes and going to church with her grandmother. As for good qualities, she liked her navel and her feet. When I pressed her for personality characteristics, she liked her courage and directness. At least, she could remember being that way.
One session, dressed in sweats and red-nosed from a bad cold, Cayenne told me that Chelsea was afraid she was pregnant. She had missed a period and showed positive on a home testing kit. We had a general discussion of girls getting pregnant, teenage mothers, abortion and birth control pills. Cayenne was happy to discuss her friend’s sexual behavior, but volunteered nothing about her own.
The next session she said that Chelsea was not pregnant and had renounced sex until she was sixteen. She and Chelsea had gone to the movies to celebrate. We talked about
Mermaids,
the movie they had seen, in which a teenage girl has graphic sex with a guy she barely knows. I asked Cayenne what she thought of that. She said, “It tells it like it is.”
I’d just seen
Medicine Man,
the story of a male scientist who is in the rain forest searching for a cure for cancer. Sean Connery is visited by a female scientist forty years younger than he, wearing short shorts and a tight, low-cut top. He’s shocked to find that a scientist is female and refuses to work with her. She’s snooty and terrified of snakes. Then she has an accident, Sean saves her, and she falls weeping into his arms. Reduced to a helpless blob of jelly, the female scientist becomes more feminine and likable. She follows Sean around and he rewards her with smiles and caresses. In the end she gives up her career to help him find the cure for cancer.
I thought it was sexist and told her why. “This movie says it’s okay for women to be scientists if they are beautiful, young and seductive. But they must allow themselves to be rescued by a man and give up their careers to serve his needs.”
As I wondered aloud if a movie like this could influence a girl’s grades in science, I told Cayenne about the MTV I had watched in a hotel room in Chicago. I was shocked by the sexual lyrics and scenes. In the first video, openmouthed and moaning women writhed around the male singer. In the second video, four women with vacant eyes gyrated in low-cut dresses and high black boots. Their breasts and bottoms were photographed more frequently than their faces. When I expressed dismay, she said, “That’s nothing; you should see the Guns ’N’ Roses videos.”
We talked about
Silence of the Lambs.
Much to my dismay, she insisted on describing to me the pictures of skinned women and oozing body parts. I realized as she talked how different we were. Violence and casual sex that upset me didn’t bother her. In fact, Cayenne was proud of being able to watch scary and graphic scenes—it proved she wasn’t a wimp. Despite our different reactions to media, the talk raised important issues—lookism, sexism, cultural stereotypes of men and women, and the importance of sex and violence in movies.
Finally Cayenne was ready to talk about her own sexual experiences, at first in a tentative way, and later in a more relaxed manner. She made fun of the school films with their embryos and cartoon sperm that looked like tadpoles. She said her parents told her to wait for sex until she was out of high school and involved with someone whom she loved.
I asked, “How does your experience fit with what your parents told you?”
Cayenne looked at me wide-eyed. “My parents don’t know anything about sex.”
She pushed back her frizzy bangs. “In seventh grade everyone was sex-crazy. Kids kept asking me if I did it, if I wanted to get laid, stuff like that. Guys would grab at me in the halls. I was shocked, but I didn’t show it. Later I got used to it.”
By the middle of her eighth-grade year, Cayenne wanted to have sex. Her friends said it was fun and they teased her about being a virgin. But she was scared—she wondered if it would hurt, if she would get AIDS or become pregnant or if the boy would lose respect for her. She knew that “boys who have sex are studs, but girls who do it are sluts.”
The summer before ninth grade she and Chelsea went to an unsupervised party. A guy she knew from the Olympics of the Mind team was there. Tim had been innocent and clean-cut in sixth grade. Now he was a sophomore with long hair pulled back in a headband and a sarcastic sense of humor.
Tim’s friend had invited ten girls and nine guys. He opened his parents’ liquor cabinet and poured creme de menthe for the girls and scotch for the guys. Cayenne hated the cough-syrupy taste of liqueur, but because she was nervous, she drank it. Tim came over and sat by Cayenne. He complimented her shirt and joked about all the geeks at the party. He poured refills. Tim’s friend put on a Madonna tape and turned off all the lights.
Cayenne was nervous and excited. Tim put his arm around her and kissed her on the forehead. They whispered for a while, then began to make out. All the other kids were doing the same thing or more. Some moved off into other rooms.
Cayenne told me, “I knew this would be the night. I was scared, but ready. I was surprised by how fast things happened. We had sex in the first hour of the party.”
After that night she and Tim called each other for the next month. They talked about school, music and movies—never sex. They lived in different parts of town and couldn’t figure out how to meet each other. Twice they made elaborate plans that fell through. After a while both became interested in kids at their own schools and they drifted apart.
I asked her how she felt about Tim now. Cayenne rubbed her forehead. “I wish it had been more romantic.”
Cayenne was a typical therapy client. She had had a reasonably happy childhood. With puberty, the changes and challenges in her life overwhelmed her, at least temporarily. Her grades fell, she dropped out of sports and relinquished her dream of being a doctor. As she moved from the relatively protected space of an elementary school into the more complex world of junior high, all her relationships grew turbulent. She had decisions to make about adult issues such as alcohol and sex. While she was figuring things out, she contracted herpes.