Becoming Marilyn

Chapter 6

-3-

"Ophelia became my name for the rest of the year," Marilyn said to Dr. Tripp. "Mr. Telfer tried his best, but it was like I was more real as Ophelia than I was as Robert. All the kids in my class called me Ophelia, soon the whole school did. Everyone but the teachers and Mack. I don't know why he called me Robert when even Tom and Joe called me Ophelia."

"You never asked?"

"God, no. I was a twelve year old boy, or I was trying hard to be. I cut my hair the day after the play, but it didn't matter. Every time I saw a mirror, I saw Marilyn looking back. I hated her, so I took up sports. I became like Brent and played everything. Mack wasn't into sports. We drifted apart as I became a jock while he played guitar and wrote songs. We never had a fight, just one day we weren't friends anymore." Marilyn fished in her purse for a tissue. "s**t, my makeup's going to run."

"It's OK." Dr. Tripp handed her a box. "You can fix it before you go."

Marilyn blew her nose and sighed.

"I never thought about it before. I was trying so hard to be Robert, I never saw Mack leaving. One time, I can't remember why, we were sitting in the stands. Something made me ask him about Ophelia. I didn't get past You remember when I played Ophelia? He jumped up and ran away. I think he moved soon after, 'cause he wasn't in my class the next year. Tom and Joe were, but they started chasing the girls and I didn't see myself doing that. I wanted as little as possible to do with anything like a girl."

"What about Brent?" Dr. Tripp asked, "Did he call you Robert?"

"He never came home," Marilyn said, "He went to school in Nevada, then joined up in the Marines. Last I heard he'd done a tour in Iraq and had a family down in Texas. We never talked after the play. He vanished. I don't think Mom and Dad knew what to do, and I became enough trouble to keep them from worrying about how to put our family back together."

"So, tell me about the trouble."

"I don't think I was a bully," Marilyn looked at a painting on the wall. "I never hit a kid who didn't want to fight, but I never turned down a fight when one showed up. I found my brother's weights in the garage, so I started lifting weights and doing all the exercises. Even the kids a year ahead of me couldn't stand up to me. Ophelia got shortened to Offie, but there weren't THAT many kids who bothered to talk to me any more. The guys hated me because I could beat them all up if I chose to. The girls hated me because I never cared if they noticed me."

"How did you survive?" Dr. Tripp asked. "It sounds like a very lonely existence."

"I drank, did drugs, played every sport as long as it required me to be tough. That got me through middle school. In High School, I started hearing the rumors."

"Rumors?"

"That I was gay," Marilyn said. "It kind of made sense. I didn't like girls, I started dreaming about the guys I saw in the locker room. That lead to some embarrassing things so I would change off by myself. The only thing keeping me from having the s**t kicked out of me was being tougher and meaner than any of them. It meant we won games and they were willing to put up with a lot to win those games."

"So you became the ultimate guy." Dr. Tripp made a note.

"Stupid isn't it?" Marilyn said, "I drove Marilyn down as deep as I could. The strange thing was the dress. It stayed in my closet all those years. Mack brought it over when I was in the hospital. Dad hung it up in the closet because he didn't know what to do with it. Brent occupied all his time. So when I got home, the dress was hanging in my closet. I pushed it aside, but I never got rid of it."

"The tough guy with a dress in his closet. What did your parents do?"

"They never talked about it. We talked about my behavior, not about who I was. If I didn't tell them different, I was just Robert who'd gone off the rails."

"So what happened then?"

"We're almost done for time," Marilyn said, "and I have to fix my makeup. Can we talk about this next week?"

Dr. Tripp looked at her and tapped his pen on the pad.

"Next week then," he said and a tiny bit of the clenched fist in Marilyn's gut relaxed. She went to the washroom and fixed her makeup. When she stood this close to the mirror, she almost looked like the person she should be.

Marilyn waved to the receptionist and went out to catch her bus.

***

Their social work class talked about the difference between clinical social work and community development.

"Both streams are dedicated to increasing human capacity to live well," Professor Dingman explained, "but the methodologies are very different.

"In clinical social work you interact directly with clients helping them to understand themselves and how they are in the world. It may be through counseling, or in institutional settings. The emphasis is on the change the client needs to experience to move forward. The danger in clinical work is you can get frustrated that client after client needs the same thing. You're on a treadmill and you aren't getting anywhere. The temptation is to short circuit the process and tell the client what they need to do. Giving into that temptation creates greater dependency and lessens rather than increases capacity.