The Story of a Bad Girl
Keeny, Susan
The Story of a Bad Girl by Susan Keeny On a residential street in Arlington, Virginia, sits an unpretentious Cape Cod house, cut from the same cookie mold as the others on the block. The head...
...When we returned she and Charley had rented an apartment, and at the end of the month Judy moved out...
...It is now three months since I last saw her or heard from her...
...I think Judy wanted me to turn the clock back six months and welcome her unreservedly back into our home as before...
...She married before her senior year and had a baby 11 months later...
...Did my efforts have a positive effect on Judy...
...Rather than formally label Judy delinquent, the counselor disposed of the case by directing it to the VIP progrq...
...She is very overweight, and the fact that a large part of that weight is above her waist does not console her...
...It was filledfortunately, as it turned out, since about two months later the house closed abruptly when the resident counselor’s husband was found having sexual relations with one of the girls...
...Because Mrs...
...She looked into the county’s halfway house for girls...
...It’s worth our best effort to try to do something about them...
...But a situation can never be totally recreated-either physically or emotionally...
...As Judy continued to receive only abuse, she got more resistant to changing herself, which in turn inflamed her mother further...
...Eventually about $43,000 fil-tered down to Arlington for the VIP program, and $360 landed in my pocket...
...The Senate and...
...But Charley paid the medical bills because Judy didn’t have medical insurance...
...She left owing us money (part of the last month’s rent), .?;& she had never made any gesture toward paying us...
...Right now she seems to be even farther from the secretarial work she once wanted so very much...
...Fed up with Judy’s wild living, Mrs...
...Lisa had had an abortion before she was 14...
...She looked desultorily for another job...
...Seeing Double In July I took Judy to an eye doctor...
...In June she spent all her savings ($100) for a down payment on a car without considering the cost of the insurance, license, county registration, or even gas...
...Few human or social problems yield immediate gratification when we try to do something about them...
...He lost that job in a few months, however, and switched to installing radios in buses...
...Her smile is tight and bright, and her manner is that of a sassy teenager...
...to start painting, and I went out and bought the paint...
...My parenting of Judy certainly produced no immediately visible results...
...Lisa was 15 and had a mother who was 32 and who talked about her sex life with Lisa, explaining why her current husband sometimes left the apartment...
...without her help I would never have attempted to wallpaper the kitchen, which we did together successfully...
...For several months I had observed that when I asked her to turn right, she turned left, and when she tried to sight-read music her fingers went down the scale as the notes went up...
...The other girls in the house went home, but Judy’s counselor and I feared all of Prelude’s good effects would be undone if Judy followed suit...
...Charley learned to lay barpet, enjoyed it, and earned good money...
...Judy didn’t have a drug problem and her counselor and I worried that the program might have a bad side effect on her...
...She had been pregnant and at first was going to have the baby, but when Charley made it clear he didn’t want the child she had an abortion...
...After just a week with Judy I was nearly ready to forget having any responsibility for her...
...Her mother moved out of the family home and in with a boyfriend, begging Phillippa and her sisters to come with her...
...They are living somewhere in the Washington area rent-free in return for helping a contractor fix up a house for sale...
...Judy has many positive qualities and abilities: she’s a pleasant person, she has good organization abilities (she rearranged my kitchen so well that my husband said he’d never seen it look SO neat, a statement with which I had to agree...
...But 12 years of respected parochial and public school teachers had never picked up her problem...
...They had sold the car for $30 (and she had purchased it for $420...
...Charley had lost his job and was going to Florida...
...Two weeks later she stopped by to chat, wondering why my husband and I didn’t fight and complaining that Charley didn’t take out the garbage...
...In the eight months we knew them Karen and Tom quarreled and split three times, the last time for good...
...And like half the juveniles on their first visit to the court she did not see a judge, but was diverted away from the justice system...
...Nevertheless, I got out a paint chart and solicited her opinion on colors...
...Always an impulsive person, Judy quickly realized she’d made another poor decision...
...Cordial but bluff, Lou leaves the job of raising his five children to his wife (his second...
...We parted quite amicably, kissing each 36 other goodby, and Judy was back the next day...
...The doctor said she had one of the worst cases of visual dysfunction he’d seen in over 20 years of specializing in the field...
...They owed money to friends for the rent, money to the phone company, money to the abortion clinic...
...Through an employment agency Judy found a job as a clerk-typist...
...Charley, a crush of Judy’s, is as slender as Judy is overweight...
...She was always welcome, I said, as I had on other occasions, to live in the basement...
...Despite my weekly three-hour injections of encouragement, reinforcement of her few positive qualities, and attentive listening, Judy’s behavior worsened...
...Do I regret the effort...
...About half the volunteers were being paid, because the first directors of Arlington’s VIP program wanted to find out whether paid volunteers were better motivated than unpaid workers...
...She got an A in government, thanks to some intensive tutoring by my husband...
...I joined the Volunteers in Probation (VIP) program of Arlington County, Virginia out of an interest in troubled children...
...the children’s mother died some years back...
...Some are likely to prove even more intractable than Judy...
...It was either quit or be fired-in three months’ ‘employment she had worked only one full week, casually taking off afternoons, mornings, or entire days...
...Tortelli could find no redeeming feature in Judy, she gave her no praise...
...As a teenager Charley had been arrested for stealmg to support his drug habit...
...She couldn’t even add bowling scores without counting on her fingers...
...He tends to their thirsts and feeds their egos as bartender at one of the city’s more expensive restaurants...
...he often paid the rent share’ of his roommate, a partially disabled Vietnam veteran...
...Our usual meeting place was a nearby Hot Shoppes where Judy had a hot fudge sundae or a similar rich, gooey dessert for about 85 cents...
...It is impossible, of course, to predict with any certainty where Judy is heading...
...Karen never finished high school...
...It was clear I wasn’t going to know Judy’s feelings as long as her mother was around...
...She hoped Judy would be put in the detention home for a few days, scaring her into better behavior, but that isn’t how things worked out...
...At my first meeting, Judy’s mother continually interrupted her daughter to tell her own side of the story...
...Tom changed jobs three times...
...She spent most of her time hanging around a bowling alley with friends her mother disapproved of...
...Judy’s been playing hooky, and her grades show it-mostly Ds...
...She failed English at school and had to take a make-up course in summer school...
...His father was an alcoholic, and Charley couldn’t hold beer himself very well...
...From a friend I learned she persuaded Charley not to go to Florida...
...She was pencil-thin like Twiggy and wore eye makeup so thick my husband first thought Winston was beating her...
...at best, I may have made an imprint on her behavior that won’t show up clearly for years...
...and Karen’s mother died of emphysema...
...Preferably Judy would become strictly a boarder, doing her own grocery shopping and not helping with any of the household chores...
...This was financially possible only if she found a part-time job, but that, on top of her 35-hour work week, would hardly have strained her...
...I could not get her to understand the relationship between seeing well and the ability of the entire body to coordinate...
...The only other choice was Prelude House, the county’s residential drug treatment center...
...I had never pressed her for the money but thought she needed to get her priorities straight...
...As a clerk-typist she was slow...
...Like many of the juveniles who go before the courts, Judy was a status offender-she was guilty of an act that was a crime only because of her age: truancy, running away, incorrigibility...
...She never read a book, magazine , ne wspaper-anythingunless absolutely forced to...
...After an hour of trying to achieve some sort of harmony out of the discord, my head reeled...
...And emotionally I no longer could tolerate a loafer in our home-there was no excuse for a healthy 19-yearold not to work responsibly at a full-time job...
...She argued with the manager of the nursing home where she served the evening meal and was fired...
...As Judy continued to misbehave her mother coped in her fashionignoring Judy unless extremely angered and then laying down rules she later wouldn’t enforce...
...the idea is to turn the offender away from crime by giving him onetoone attention...
...Charley played the guitar and liked to think of himself as a country western singer...
...I see 20-20...
...Judy interrupted, puzzled, “Inertia...
...I think the problems are rooted in her eyes...
...Understandably, she had never been keen on that invitation...
...The one goal I wanted her to reachto achieve the self-confidence and ability to support herself-she has not reached, In mid-March Judy came to see us with a tale of woe-tribulations that would destroy another person but that Judy only shrugged off because she expects so little of herself...
...Lou Tortelli came to America from Italy as a child...
...Tom, her husband, had spent his childhood in and out of foster homes...
...We wanted her to learn to turn a poor decision into a positive accomplishment, so we encouraged her to keep the car...
...These people live somewhere off to the edges of society...
...I learned that she had had an operation as a child to correct crossed eyes and the muscles had never strengthened to hold the eyes properly...
...The obvious answer is that the effect-if there was one at all-was marginal...
...When she cooked supper she could fix the meat, salad, and vegetablesbut not at the same time...
...But we shouldn’t just ignore them...
...As a volunteer I received a bnef description of Judy and her problems-‘.‘has poor self- imhge, needs attention, needs authority figure checking on her”-and was left to take it from there...
...He’s been on probation for a number of years and even spent some time at a residential treatment center for boys...
...Until she corrects her visual coordination I doubt she will have many successes in the jobs she tackles...
...Phillippa, daughter of a strict Greek father, also had had an abortion...
...I learned, though, that if you pushed Judy up against -the wall to do something demanding extra &fort, her spine sagged rather than stiffened, and she looked for the easiest way out of her difficulties...
...We provided her with a cushion between the comforting cocoon of the house and the real world...
...Abruptly Prelude House closed...
...One weekend she stayed out all night, and as an excuse she told her mother she had been raped...
...Most of Judy’s friends had also been at Prelude House, but Karen, who was as plump as Judy, was a neighborhood friend...
...Judy grew silent...
...In Arlington the program was operating with the help of funds from the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration...
...I’m glad I tried to help...
...Now, at 16, she worked steadily as a waitress, saving all her money to make the payments on a car that cost more than $7,000...
...At one supper conversation I commented on a friend who’d had inertia ever since she’d come home from the hospital with a new baby...
...About all that remains of his Italian background is an ability to speak the language...
...But I thought everyone saw that way,” she said...
...I was tired of dirty pans in the sink...
...her probation counselor thinks it is her mother’s attitude...
...As a result, one eye saw off to the side...
...The stratum of society we saw, however, rather than being the doctors, lawyers, and businessmen of the soaps, was the waitresses, unskilled garage helpers, swimming pool cleaners, painters’ assistants-the men and women who never stay long enough in a job to earn a raise or acquire a skill...
...Now almost 18, Al is on his own, working sporadically, and causing trouble-mostly for himself...
...What are the two arms of the legislature...
...To have continued to live in a place like Prelude House probably would have been better for Judy, but it became unavailable and I was there...
...Judy also learned then she had gonorrhea-and not from Charley...
...She had attended a wallpapering session with me and remembered the instructions better than I did...
...At the postexamination conference I was stunned to find out that Judy saw double at a reading distance...
...She giggles when her mother tells a visitor how awful she is...
...At bank teller school she could not balance her accounts and was dropped from the school before the final exam...
...She seemed more at ease with herself and others, and she had friends...
...He worshipped his mother a little too obsessively, calling her “the sweetest woman I’ve ever known...
...Her savings and her reputation disappeared as she indiscriminately gave away her money and her body to win friends...
...Definitely not...
...The doctor recommended eye training but would accept Judy as a patient only if she wanted the training and would work at the exercises for the next eight to 12 months...
...In this case, it was “falling in love” with Charley, which made it easy to accept his money and not bother with the part-time work...
...Our basement is strictly utilitarian, and despite Judy’s flair for decorating it could never be a cozy private apartment...
...Probably everyone, to some extent...
...That’s a strange name for a baby...
...We could do things for her but we could not inculcate in her values that she didn’t already have...
...Large enough to house 30, the house had only 12 resident youths in January 1976...
...Today, Judge Leenhouts estimates, there are VIP programs in about 2,500 court jurisdictions throughout the nation...
...She lost weight, her tough-kid posture faded, her bleached hair was growing out...
...About this time I realized Judy .was pocketing about $5 a week from the money we gave her to buy our groceries...
...Tortelli marched Judy down to Arlington’s Juvenile Court...
...Charley’s best friend was Winston, who off and on left his wife and in the off periods dated Lisa, who was crazy about him...
...For the most part they are not criminalsthey don’t break the rules of society -but neither do they make them nor conform to them...
...The head of the household isn’t one of the powerful, but like most people around Washington he caters to the powerful...
...She had forgotten to take her coats from the closet in the entranceway and her clothes from the chest of drawers...
...Before the summer was half over she failed the course because of too many late arrivals...
...Her reading, math, and English language skills were deplorable...
...Instead, Phillippa moved in with the family of her current boyfriend...
...I was disturbed by her ready acceptance of herself in that light...
...Judy is a 16-yearold high-school sophomore...
...The visual training became a lost cause when Judy quit her job in mid-August...
...That’s how I got to know the Tortellis three years ago...
...In mid-March Judy graduated from high school, which says more about the quality of public education than Judy’s academic achievement...
...Tired of Judy By the beginning of September I was feeling totally sympathetic with Mrs...
...I knew Judy and Charley were looking for a place to live together because I had taken calls from apartment rental offices...
...All my efforts to be consistent, to enforce rules pleasantly but firmly, did not seem to be bringing about any change in Judy, and she was becoming a strain...
...The program matches the child with an adult who will“ be a friend, counselor, and role *model...
...The guidelines for VIPs are few...
...She would look for a job but she has had increasing medical problems and is collecting welfare payments...
...She agreed, though reluctantly, to come the next day at 9:30 a.m...
...I was tired of reminding her on Tuesdays to take out the trash...
...Instead of talking to me at this point about another used car she wanted to buy, I told her, she needed to find a job, pay off her debts, and save for a car...
...She has blond hair that’s the brassy shade of a bad peroxide job...
...In any case, I’m glad I tried...
...Of the $480 million that LEAA granted in fiscal 1973 to the states and territories, Virginia received nearly $11 million to improve the state’s criminal justice system...
...For the next eight months Judy lived with us, broadening our lives, testing our tolerance, and opening our eyes to a slice of society we knew little about: teenage misfits, the kids who experiment with drugs, liquor, and sex and do as little at school as possible...
...For many years he directed his yelling at his oldest, Al, the bad boy of the family...
...When she asks for fatherly discipline, he mostly yells or gives a cuff on the neck or bruising smacks on the arm...
...As I half expected, she did not appear...
...Ever since Al was a Susan Keeny is a Washington writer...
...So I opened a savings account in which I deposited the program’s monthly checks until the day Judy’s behavior deserved a reward...
...Judy didn’t want to (“Why...
...If that worked, we were to try it again...
...On his day off Lou acts like a typical American...
...Judy is a year younger than Al and close emotionally to her brother...
...Now he worked as an automobile mechanic-though everyone, including himself, said he knew little about cars...
...The Values She Didn’t Have In thinking back over our experience in parenting 1 feel that we did the most that could have been done at that time in Judy’s life...
...One weekend Judy went off to a motel with a girlfriend and two Marines...
...There is enough evidence that probation works for adolescents like Judy-not violent criminals but status offenders and youngsters caught stealing for the first time-that it’s clearly worth trying...
...We gave her support at a time when she needed it to finish school, get her driver’s license, and find a job...
...uh . . . . the Congress...
...Her Prelude counselor thinks her problems stem from her mother’s death when she was eight years old and her father’s subsequent remarriage...
...My gasoline expenses in driving across the county to see Judy could never have been more than 50 cents a week...
...For the next 16 months I saw Judy rarely but when I did it was obvious the intensive counseling and peer pressure within the house was helping...
...I’ve learned there’s a lot of reality to the soaps...
...Judy said she wanted to live with us but I thought it wouldn’t be wise since my husband and I both worked late and no one would be at home waiting for her when school was out...
...Abaut 20 years ago Judge Keith J. Leenhouts of Royal Oak, Michigan, started the VIP program as a way of giving misdemeanant offenders counseling that the professional probation workers did not have time for...
...Her mother thinks Judy’s problem is her older brother’s influence...
...Tortelli...
...Her skill at math was less than the average fourth grader’s...
...I was in a group whose members received $45 a month...
...After that I would pick up Judy and head for the Hot Shoppes...
...Karen and her baby now live with her father, who has remarried...
...By closing the house the county could save $140,000 a year...
...She was working nights at a boring job-but it was ending in a week anyway...
...Things weren’t the same...
...Who’s right...
...Like New York City, the county faced a-fiscal crunch...
...Off to the Edges Sound like a soap opera...
...Prelude House may have smoothed her rough edges and helped her to mature, but at 1 8-and-a-half she was still rebellious, stubborn, and lazy, and I was severely strained trying to cope witli it all calmly, pleasantly, and without anger...
...By the end of summer, it was obvious to Judy’s probation counselor that the situation at home was impossible...
...What better way to save money than by closing an underutilized youth program...
...My husband and I were going away for a week’s vacation in mid-September and I resolved that if Judy did not have plans to move out when we returned, we would have to draw up new house rules...
...On one occasion I yelled at her, which seemed to impress her but also accomplished nothing and exhausted me...
...He sits in his reclining rocker, drinks beer, and falls asleep in front of the TV...
...and I was tired of Judy...
...Instead Judy wound up .on probation with a volunteer counselor...
...Her mother is worried that Judy is going to turn out like Al...
...The ironing board was back in place in “her” room, our books were back on “her” knicknack shelf, visitors for several weekends were expected in “her” room...
...child, he was in and out of trouble at school and in the neighborhood...
...Eventually I stopped trying to change her less-than-responsible habits all at once, and we settled into a routine of living...
...But the house was taking an increasing number of youths with problems other than drugs, so Judy went to Prelude...
...Judy was more a mixed-up adolescent than a potential criminal...
...Then I suggested, as I had before, that she help me in painting and fixing up the basement to work off her debt to us...
...I pointed out to her that if I was less than wildly enthusiastic about welcoming her back, there was another reason...
...Because children’s problems are usually rooted in their family relationships, we were advised to see the child with his parents at the first meeting...
...A 15-minute meal took an hour to prepare...
...She’s not into drugs, but alcohol and general misbehavior are a big part of her life...
...By no stretch of financial wrangling was my involvement in the program costing me $45...
...As a switchboard operator she found it difficult to be responsible both for answering the phones and for remembering to deliver messages...
...At 24 Charley was surprisingly naive, easily taken advantage of by his friends...
...She also had allowed her brother Al to sleep on our sofa when we were away one weekend-an accommodation I had expressly forbidden before we left...
Vol. 9 • July 1977 • No. 5
