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What Stephanie could remember of her teenage years was chaotic. Her first
experiences with alcohol and marijuana occurred sometime in her thirteenth year.
Her first sexual experiences followed soon after. By the time she was sixteen,
she had lost count of the boys and men she’d slept with. By some miracle, she’d
managed until then not to get pregnant, but just after her seventeenth birthday
her luck ran out.
Stephanie was nearly three months pregnant when the accident happened. She and
her boyfriend were riding late at night on his motorcycle. They had both had a lot
to drink. He had sped up to get through the light before it turned red and was
crossing Commonwealth Avenue when the minivan hit them. The fender crushed her
boyfriend’s leg upon impact and they both flew several dozen feet and struck the
pavement hard. He was dead by the time the paramedics arrived. She had broken her
collarbone, pelvis, and a few ribs. And the blood trickling between her legs signaled
the end of the pregnancy.
Stephanie spent two weeks in the hospital and another six weeks in a rehabilitation
facility. It was the longest she had been sober in over three years. Soon after she
got out, the whole incident submerged into the amorphous quagmire that had become the
record of her young life. She had not given the pregnancy, the accident, or her dead
boyfriend another thought until her therapy with Dr. Kenneth Miller was well under way.
Stephanie bore many scars, both emotional and physical. She could not recall how
most of her physical scars had come to be. The most curious of these was a series of
concentric circles from the size of a dime to around the size of a silver dollar cut
into her left forearm just below the elbow. Kenneth had seen a variety of self-inflicted
wounds, but few with the geometric precision of these. What he did not find out until
much later was that there was an identical set of scars cut into her lower belly, partly
concealed by her pubic hair.
Stephanie could not remember when she started bingeing and purging, but by the time
she landed in the hospital, it had become a familiar part of the landscape of her daily
life, a landmark looming over the wasteland that surrounded it. It was the one thing she
could depend on to remind her she was the same person from one day to the next.
Stephanie sometimes purged to keep from gaining weight, but often it had little to do
with how she saw her body. Her vision of how she looked was constantly changing. Sometimes
when she looked in the mirror, she saw a grotesquely obese woman with a protruding belly
and thick, dimpled thighs. At other times, she saw a wispy, almost transparent figure that
threatened to dissolve altogether as she watched. In fact, Stephanie was neither overweight
nor particularly emaciated. Her bulimia had very little impact upon the shape of her body,
even while it was playing havoc with its chemistry and endangering her life.
The changes in Stephanie’s image of herself were scarcely less drastic than the
frequent changes in her appearance. Her wardrobe varied from low-cut halter-tops and
leather miniskirts to demure combinations of ankle length skirts and ruffled white blouses
that would befit a grammar school librarian. She changed her hair color and style two or
three times within a week. One day her hair would cascade in auburn splendor over her bare
shoulders while the next it would be bound in a tight brown bun, hovering over the collar
of a navy blazer and starched white shirt.
Stephanie could paint herself over a roomful of people with such brilliance that no
one else seemed visible and she could just as well make herself disappear in a crowd.
She was a master of disguise, a chameleon who could be whoever or whatever the situation
or the passions of the moment demanded.
Within months after they met, Kenneth witnessed the breathtaking range of roles of
which Stephanie was capable while he sought the elusive core of her existence. She
showed up to her first office appointment in a T-shirt and blue jeans with straight,
jet-black hair and round, black wire-rimmed glasses. As she sat on his couch with her
legs curled up under her, she barely resembled the pale waif he’d met in the hospital
only days earlier.
Stephanie kept him at bay session after session, sometimes with stony silence and
other times with empty chatter about movies, television, or her favorite rock groups,
while Kenneth listened between the lines for hints about her life, her feelings, and
the relationship that was slowly developing between them. The only emotion she showed
for months was anger.
“What a waste of time this is. Why haven’t you fixed me yet?” she would demand. She
was still bingeing and purging and had little intention of stopping. But she kept coming
back.
Stephanie came to her eighth session dressed in tight shorts and a man’s ribbed
undershirt, braless. She watched Kenneth defiantly as he struggled not to look at the
peaks that her nipples made in the soft cotton. She enjoyed wielding power over even
this man, who was never supposed to feel anything sexual toward her. He finally got
up and briefly left the room, returning with the gray gabardine jacket he’d worn to
work that morning. He draped it loosely around her and sat back down. She glanced at
him, covered her face, and began to sob.
When she looked up again, he met her gaze with the same kind eyes that she remembered
from their first encounter. She sighed gratefully, then turned away briefly while she
slipped the jacket on and zipped it up. When she turned back to face him, she appeared
at ease.
“O.K.” she said quietly, “Where do we start?”
To purchase your copy of Carousel Music just click on the link below
A.J.'s Review of Carousel Music will be up here soon, please check back.
Last up-dated December 30, 2004
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