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.”
“So you’re telling me that you think the reason you have problems and are here is because Mrs. Baker did sexual things with you?”
Solemnly, Cassandra nodded.
I hesitated.
She quickly read my uncertainty. “It’s true!” she said with sudden vehemence. “It is the truth and no one will believe me. It’s just like she said. Everyone will believe her and not me. And I got to pay for it.”
“I think the reason people have a hard time believing you, Cassandra, is because in the past you have sometimes had trouble telling the truth. This makes it hard for people to know if what you are saying has really happened or not.”
“It has. And it’s your fault. No one believes me. No one takes my side. Nobody understands anything.” And with this Cassandra broke into inconsolable sobs.
State law required all allegations of child abuse be reported, so I had no choice but to go immediately to Dave Menotti with Cassandra’s accusations regarding Mrs. Baker. I was quite certain she was not telling the truth. Not only did her allegations sound outlandish in terms of their content, the logistics just didn’t fit. Mrs. Baker not only had a husband, but he usually stopped by the school at the end of the day to give her a ride home, as they had only one car. A friendly bear of a man, he was in the room, helping his wife rearrange classroom furniture the day I had visited. So the odds did not seem high that she also had a secret lesbian lover who joined her after school in molesting the children. Nonetheless, these were serious allegations. Without evidence that they were untrue, it would be negligent – and unforgivable – to simply ignore them.
In the early afternoon Dave and I sat together watching the videotape of the session. What came through in a way that hadn’t been so obvious to me during the sessions was what a strange girl Cassandra was. There was no other way to put it. You watched her and you just got this eerie, uncomfortable sense of how odd she was.
The other thing I noticed was the lack of any discernible pattern to her behavior. Other than a desire to control the session, which had been present in all our meetings, Cassandra’s behavior was diffuse and erratic. Watching the session, I was struck by how much of my floundering was simply because I still had no idea what
