Twilight Children (7 page)

“I’m going to change her clothes,” I said. “Right now she is wearing pajamas, but I think it’s time for some day clothes, don’t you?”

Cassandra looked over at my doll. It was a slow, almost turgid movement, as if she were having to turn through a thick fluid. She said nothing.

“What about this long dress? If we look through the box, we’ll find a sunbonnet that matches it. Would you look for it for me?”

Cassandra regarded me. She didn’t answer.

“The lady who made this outfit wanted it to seem old-fashioned. Like perhaps one of the dolls was traveling west on a wagon train in the old days. So she made this long dress with lace on it like they wore in those days and a sunbonnet, because often the women and girls would walk alongside the wagon as they traveled and they didn’t want to get a sunburn.”

Cassandra stared at the doll in my hands.

“Cassandra?”

Again, the slow, solemn turning of her head.

“When we work together in here, I’ll always keep you safe.”

She glanced only briefly at my face and then away, staring into the space beside my chair.

“Sometimes we’re going to work on hard things together, but you will decide how fast we go. We’re not going to do anything that is too scary or too difficult. And I’m strong. If your feelings get too big, I’ll help you with them. They won’t be too big for me to handle. And I won’t be scared by them.”

She continued to stare, unfocused.

“Cassandra?”

She didn’t respond.

I reached out and turned her face toward me. “How does that sound to you?”

She didn’t meet my eyes. Even though I had reoriented her head, she kept her eyes averted.

A pause.

I lowered my hand. Leaning forward, I sorted through the apple box until I found the sunbonnet.

“Look. Here it is. See, it matches the dress.”

She regarded the sunbonnet.

“Would you like to try it on her?” I held the dark-haired doll out to her.

She took it. Laying the doll on the table, she carefully pulled on the sunbonnet and tied it under the doll’s chin. Then she held the doll up.

I smiled. “What do you think?”

She didn’t say. Indeed, she didn’t speak again for the remainder of the session.

T
he next morning when Cassandra arrived for her session, she was once more her usual outgoing self. I had the box of dolls sitting on the table again, but this time she went right past them and over to the shelves behind me.

“I want to draw today,” she said. “I can do what I want in here, can’t I? Isn’t that the way it’s supposed to work?”

“You’d like to draw today?”

“That’s the way it worked at the psychologist’s I went to before. ’Cause I’ve been places like this before. If you thought you were special, you’re not. My other psychologist’s name was Dr. Brown. Adele Brown. But she wasn’t brown. She was pink. Whitey-pink. Ugly whitey-pink. She was ugly. You’re ugly. I think you’re ugly, too.”

“I see.”

“And at ugly whitey-pink Adele Brown’s, I could do whatever I wanted. That’s what she said. That I could do whatever I wanted. So that’s what I can do in here, too.”

“You’re telling me you want to do whatever you please,” I said.

“Yup. And I’m going to. And you can’t stop me.”

“You can do as you please in here as long as it doesn’t involve destroying things or hurting yourself or me. I would stop you then. That isn’t allowed here.”

Cassandra looked at me, a rather evil glint in her eye. “You can’t stop me doing anything, if I really want.”

“If it’s necessary, I can,” I said quietly, “because those are the rules here and they’re here to protect us. So I won’t allow you to break them. But I am quite certain that isn’t how we want to spend our time.”

“You couldn’t stop my daddy. He’s bigger and stronger than you.”

“You feel your daddy is very powerful and he can do what he wants. But if he were here, he’d have to follow the rules, too. In here I don’t allow anyone to destroy things or hurt people.”

“My daddy’s the Hulk! Boom!” she cried and threw her hands out expansively. “Nobody can stop him when he turns into the Hulk. He’d beat you up in a minute! Boom! When he gets angry, he goes from being ordinary to being huge. A huge green monster. All his clothes rip apart.” She leaped from the chair and demonstrated by pretending to tear off her clothes. “Even his underpants rip apart. Then you see his big green weenie. His weenie would hit you on the head and you’d fall down dead.”

“That’s what you picture happening,” I said.

“Yeah!” she cried enthusiastically, leaping around. “That’s what I want to happen. I want to see you dead.” I smiled slightly and didn’t speak.

“That’s what
would
happen!” she said, as if I’d rebuffed her. “My daddy would kill you with his dick.”

“You seem excited by that idea.”

“Yeah! You’d be dead! My daddy’s so much stronger than you! Then I’d stomp up and down on your guts!”

“Cassandra, sit down, please.”

She didn’t. She continued jumping up and down.

“Cassandra, sit down, please.”

She continued to jump. However, the quality of the jumping changed almost immediately from frenzied to defiant.

I watched her. Part of the reason I’d asked her to sit down was to help her keep from being swamped by what I sensed were very strong, scary emotions, but partly it was also to see how in control of her behavior she actually was, how much of it she was directing.

Quite a lot, it seemed. She jumped boldly a few more times, staring me right in the eye, challenging me to stop her. When I simply sat but insisted again she also sit down, she gave two or three more jumps to save face, then stopped and sat down.

Silence followed. Cassandra looked at me. Again I noticed what extraordinary eye contact she had. When caught in her gaze, I had almost a sense of violation. I found it hard not to want to escape it.

A dominance technique? Had she discovered this was a good way to gain power over others? Or was it more self-protective than that? Was she watching me so carefully because she felt the need to anticipate what I was going to do next? I didn’t know.

More silence. Cassandra kept watching me.

“Know what? I don’t like you,” she said finally.

“Yes, so you’ve said. Why is that?” I asked.

“I don’t like the way you look. I think you’re ugly. I’m not going to work for you. I’m not going to do anything but sit here.”

“Well, I’m sorry to hear that because it will certainly be very boring sitting here every day, doing nothing,” I replied.

“I’m going to do it because it’ll make you mad,” Cassandra said. “Whatever you want me to do, I’m not going to do it. So you might as well know that now.”

“You sound very concerned about who’s in control here.”

“I’m not going to listen to you either.”

“Once I had a boy in here whose name was Liam. One of the first things he told me was that I couldn’t make him do anything he didn’t want. He wasn’t going to do any work for me. He wasn’t going to listen to a single thing I said.”

Which was a story. I’d never had a Liam. But I’d found one of the best techniques for approaching problem areas was to ascribe the difficult behaviors or incidents to someone else.

“Liam thought that if he was—” I continued.

“I’m not listening to you,” Cassandra said. She put her hands over her ears.

“Liam thought that if he knew everything that was going to happen, then—”

“I’m not listening,” she said, hands still clamped over her ears. “La-la-la-la-la!” she started to sing in an effort to drown out my words.

“Yes, you’re right. If you don’t want to listen, I can’t make you listen. Just like I can’t make you talk, if you decide you don’t want to talk. You decide things like that. And as I said yesterday, we will not do anything that feels too scary or too difficult. If it feels too scary to listen, then we’ll start with not listening.”

Cassandra exploded up gleefully, throwing her hands in the air. “So I can do anything I want in here! You just said so yourself! I can do anything and you can’t stop me.”

I sat back and smiled with what I hoped was a very patient smile.

“I’m going to draw,” Cassandra announced. “That’s what I want to do.” She flounced around the table to where the paper was kept on the shelves behind me and took a handful of sheets. She returned to the table, opened my box of tricks, and took out the smaller box containing the crayons and marking pens.

Then a pause.

She pushed the first sheet of paper over in front of me. “I want you to draw first. Draw a squiggle.”

“How do you mean?”

“Draw a squiggle, so that I can draw. That’s what my other psychologist did. She always drew a squiggle and then I would make a picture from it.”

“I see,” I said. “So you want me to do the same?”

“That’s what Dr. Brown did.”

“You like things to go exactly the same, don’t you? You don’t want any surprises.”

“Just do it,” Cassandra said. “I’m telling you, and you got to do anything I say.”

“You want these sessions to be just like Dr. Brown’s sessions. You want to tell me what to do.”

“Would you quit repeating what I say? Draw.” She shoved the pen right under my nose.

This demand to draw felt to me less like an effort to connect and communicate and more like a plain old-fashioned power struggle of the sort I’d had much experience with while teaching. Consequently, I said, “No, thank you.”

“Yes. I say.”

“No. In here each person is responsible for her own behavior. You have the right to decide what you are going to do, but you don’t have the right to decide for me.”

“Dr. Brown let me. It’s what you let kids do at the psychologist’s. You’re so stupid. You don’t know anything. I’m supposed to be able to do what I want in here, and I want you to draw a squiggle.”

“You know what I hear you saying?” I said. “I hear you saying you want to control everything in here. You want to be able to say what you will do and you want to be able to say what I will do, too.”

“That’s how it’s supposed to be. How long have you been a psychologist? You sure don’t know anything about it.”

“I see.”

“You don’t see or you’d do it. You don’t see anything. You’re stupid. You don’t know anything about doing your job.”

A moment’s silent standoff. She glared at me, fixing me very firmly with her gaze.

“I don’t like you,” she said sulkily. “You’re a big pain. I don’t like being in here. I’m not going to come anymore.” Frustrated, she sat down in the chair opposite me at the table.

Yet more silence.

She sighed heavily and flopped forward on the table. “You want Cooperative Girl,” she muttered.

A pause.

“You said I could come in here.” Her voice was low and still petulant. “But you don’t want me. You want Cooperative Girl.”

“I hear you saying you can’t be yourself because you aren’t able to tell me what to do.”

“Shut up.”

“I’m thinking that you feel worried about coming here unless you can control everything that might happen.”

She clamped her hands over her ears and lowered her forehead down until it was against the tabletop.

Several moments passed.

Then gradually she lifted her head and lowered her hands. She remained hunched well forward over the tabletop and she sat very still, staring down at the wood pattern of the Formica. There was almost a meditative quality to it, a quieting, and it lasted two or three minutes, which is a sizable amount of time, if one is simply sitting without speaking. I watched her carefully.

“I can tell you something,” she said very softly, her head still down.

“All right.”

“It’s a secret, so you’ve got to not tell anyone. But I can explain why I got so many problems and got to be in here.”

Cassandra tilted her head to the side slightly, enough to look at me sidelong. For a moment or two she held my gaze. “You know my teacher?”

“Mrs. Baker? Yes.”

“Well, one day … this was last term. Before Christmas. I was at my desk doing my workbook and she leaned over me … and she put her hand between my legs and felt me.”

I watched her.

“She said if I could come in after school, she’d show me something. I didn’t want to and I was sort of shaking my head. Like this. Real slow, like, because I didn’t want the other kids to see. I didn’t want them to know what she was doing to me. I didn’t want to come in after school, but she said if I didn’t, she’d tell my parents that I had stole some money, even though I hadn’t done it. But she said she’d say that to them and they’d believe her.”

“I see,” I said.

“So I went in after school. She was there with her girlfriend. She’s a lesbian and they were making love with each other. She asked if I wanted to do it, too. I didn’t want to. I know that’s wrong and I wanted to run away, but she said she’d tell my mom and get me in big trouble if I didn’t do what she wanted. She said nobody was going to believe me over a teacher. So I had to let her and her girlfriend tongue me.”