by Truddi Chase
Tony, the video engineer, had been with the university for fifteen years. He was tall and thin with a soft voice, and had eyes that never looked at anyone with the interest that he showed in his equipment. While Tony talked to Stanley in the glass-walled control booth, the woman peered into her small compact. Vanity might be a sin but ugliness was unforgivable. It popped into her head, the long-ago conviction that she’d been born a mongoloid idiot. As a child she’d found it the only possible reason for having slanted eyes and an awful face. She’d felt that it might also explain her stupidity. Over the years, the idea had died away, but she still camouflaged each flaw. A good plastic surgeon could change things, but that would require a verbal admission of vanity and somehow, punishment.
As the word punishment entered her mind, there came a wave of dizziness. She was seeing the studio for the first time, and with utter panic. The knowledge stayed with her only a moment: she wasn’t looking at the studio; someone else was, and the panic belonged to that person. She tried to retain the reality of that; it flitted away. A second later, only a stern edict, something the mother had said time and again, nagged her: take responsibility for your actions.
Unable to recall what had just happened to herself, the woman stared at the video camera across the room. She knew that along with the decision to make training tapes had come the idea of punishment. If allowed to escalate, the fear would win. She could not envision going through the rest of her life afraid, and reassured herself again; her mother didn’t know where she was and neither did her stepfather. She was a grown woman. What could they do to her?
Plenty, someone said.
Tony took the plastic chairs away. She and Stanley settled themselves on the orange floor cushions. Tony positioned the camera and signaled from the booth. Stanley led the woman into territory she had avoided in the first two tapings—her mother. Incest families were complicated. The abuser, whether male or female, was seldom alone in his or her efforts. Usually the “silent partner” played a secondary but important role.
“There isn’t much to say about my mother.” The woman looked uneasy. “Nothing daunted her; she could do practically anything. She was brilliant and beautiful—and told me that I was neither. She liked me to pay attention to her, but I seemed to drift. She told me I was a rotten child but I didn’t grasp the scope of it until I grew up. She was good. She tried to make me good, too. I suppose I didn’t want any part of it.”
“Why not?” In the manuscript pages he’d read less than an hour ago, there had been an admission that her mother was no paragon of virtue.
“I don’t know. I was bad.”
“How did your mother react to that badness, as you call it?”
“She thought that if I screamed in pain, it meant I was paying attention. If I didn’t scream, she’d lose count and hit me until I did.”
What had, for a few moments, been a tougher expression now veered right back to a more vulnerable one.
“The mother hit me with her hands at first. Then she started beating me with the strap, whatever was available. I used to yell ‘I’ll be good, don’t hit me.’ It didn’t stop her.”
The woman kept her head down, staring at her hands. They had never, those hands, seemed familiar. The mother? The sudden strangeness of the expression yanked her to another level of awareness. Why had she said “the” mother? And why did the feeling sweep over her, that it was so appropriate?
Deep inside the Tunnel, that first questioning penetrated the walls of the Troop Formation. The threat posed by talking to Stanley—the first person with whom they’d ever shared so much and contemplated sharing more—the mechanism keeping so many unaware of each other since birth was a strong one, but the tremour had been felt. For a handful of Troops, the tremour was so strong that they recognised each other as being separate. For others, more insulated, only a question with no hint of the separateness behind it raced through their minds: Who is the woman?
Their voices echoed from one wall to the other and no answer came.
Of all the Troop members, only the Gatekeeper dared raise her eyes and stare down the length and breadth of the Tunnel Walls—to the deepest recess. The Gatekeeper heard his voice before she saw him and in fact she did not see him at all, but he entered her mind and soul like water seeping into a sponge. His reality came like a flood and his being was acid. A kind acid, to be sure; it at once coated and stripped her; cooled and warmed and abrased her. Knowledge.
The Gatekeeper wept, tears much like the confetti flicks with which the person before her ruled the Tunnel.
Old, the Gatekeeper said to him. You are old. I feel you, a thousand years multiplied, by every leaf on every tree.
Aye, he said.
She had never seen such a smile. She did not want to use the word “seen.” It was ineffectual, demeaning to the experience.
I know you, the Gatekeeper said. I know your name. Ean. She hesitated, grasping immediately that voicing his name was against the rules. Who is the woman?
Not who, he said, and the brogue in his voice was rich and full, but what. Concern y’rsel’ wi’ that.
He was gone as if he had never existed, leaving the Gatekeeper to gaze on the other Troop members and the danger that had materialised.
Three persons sitting in prime command had been wrenched from the surface depths of their Troop positions. It had quickly become apparent to two of the three that they were not alone—as they both had always supposed.
As quickly as she felt it, the Buffer denied the woman’s presence on the orange cushions; denied, too, the other selves who were suddenly an overwhelming reality. Instead of abating through the denial, the horror grew stronger and the awareness finally took hold. She, the Buffer, was not alone, but sharing space with the woman on the orange cushions. Worse, there were others here. No matter which of the Troop members had ever, during the woman’s presence, spoken at any time in the past, the Buffer had until now absorbed the resultant blows, thinking she was the only one and that she absorbed on her own behalf. Caught in the new awareness, the Buffer reeled. But not as in the past, from a massed series of blows. The emotional reactions of the other Troop members were now single and separate and piercing, as if a thousand tiny razor blades hacked away at her.
For the Interpreter, the woman’s presence and that of the Buffer were computed quickly as being separate and apart from her own self. She recognised the need for them, hidden as it had always been. The Interpreter’s job, without knowing where all the words originated, had been clarifying, in order to convey often convoluted meanings. It was in this instant and not before that the Interpreter knew that there were many sources for the words and that she, herself, was but one of them. She adjusted herself to the situation, and computed another flash of knowledge: it wasn’t the woman on the orange cushions to whom Stanley was listening. Somehow, the Buffer sat in front of the woman, absorbing the blows, and speaking the words. The Buffer was catching whatever pain the knowledge behind the words might have caused the woman and deflecting it to herself.
With great difficulty because it was one of the most complicated aspects, the Interpreter saw that throughout the woman’s life, there were time spans when neither the Buffer nor the woman were present. At those times another Troop member could move in and take over completely.
It made sense to the Interpreter. What she did not understand was the woman, herself. There was something very odd about her construction—her being. The Interpreter searched for words to fit the mechanics of what she observed, and found them: the woman did not “lack” particular mechanisms; she had purposely been constructed to function without them.
And who was the other self, here on the perimeter of her awareness?
From a great distance, but closer to the woman than either the Buffer or the Interpreter, the Front Runner absorbed the individuality of her Troop charges. She identified them for the first time. Aware of their existence but not their ident
ities all along, the Front Runner did not feel threatened by their presence. But she understood only today the true purpose of the woman on the orange cushions.
She wouldn’t tell Stanley. Not by spoken word, and not in the journal notes being churned out each day at a rapid rate. Not wanting to interfere with the conversational flow, the Front Runner avoided eye contact with him and quieted her thought processes. She would not, as one of her duties entailed, throw out conversational bones today, to stimulate thoughts and guide proper conclusions.
Thus did four of the Troop Formation’s upper echelon become aware of the existence of themselves and the woman—all as separate entities. In the deepest recesses of the Tunnel, the Irishman’s counsel was his own.
The woman’s words in the session would go on and the Front Runner would allow it because the Gatekeeper’s signal far back in the woman’s mind was clear: Continue.
The woman, oblivious to the Tunnel and whatever went on there, was crying.
She described the second farmhouse where she, her two-year-old half sister, her mother, and her stepfather had moved. It had been the summer of her sixth year. In the fall she would enter the second grade. Besides running their new, twenty-four-acre farm, her stepfather had worked in the city, thirty miles away. She said vaguely that he had been employed as some kind of factory worker, perhaps a machinist.
“He was crafty,” she said. “I loved my new upstairs bedroom but sometimes you’d think he was gone and he’d be behind the staircase door, waiting. If my mother were near, I dared to squeeze past him on the stairs, hugging the wall. He’d sneer then and look innocently at my mother, asking why I was such a ’fraidy cat. If my mother wasn’t inside the house I’d slam the door in his face and run back to the kitchen.”
“What happened when you were alone in the house with him?”
“I don’t know. It’s a blank. All I remember is when my mother was there. He was very big and quick on his feet. When he caught up with me, he sort of pushed his face right into mine and his expression—it was as if he knew something awful about me, some dirty secret that the two of us shared together. But I never talked to him if I could avoid it, hated even being in the same room with him, so there couldn’t have been any secret, it had to have been my imagination.”
She talked, one memory leading to the next, all of them expressed for the next few minutes by a rush of words.
“We had a big, black, wood-burning stove in the kitchen. The fire in it never went out, even in summer. If my stepfather caught up with me in front of my mother, he’d grab me up in his arms and hurl me above his head over the stove. His hands were so big, touching me in places I didn’t want to be touched. I used to wish those places did not exist.”
“You were six and your half sister was two,” Stanley said.
“Yes. I think so. I’ve never been able to keep track of time, it doesn’t mean anything to me.”
He asked if she meant that an inability to capture the sequence of many incidents in her life had left her with a distorted concept of time. She tried, but could not convey with words exactly what she meant, nor could she agree to any of his attempts to describe her feelings about time. She was vehement about it. He found himself fascinated at the erratic way her hands beat the air—rejecting the concept of time as it might apply to herself.
The cheekbones rose higher in her face. “Where was I?”
“In the second farmhouse. The stove.”
“Yes, the damned stove. It never got cold. It cooked all our food, heated the water for tea and baths and the dishes. At the back of the stove, instead of another griddle, there was a reservoir that was always full of more hot water. I remember the steam rising from it. When my stepfather hurled me above his head, I went up into the air. He’d catch me. Before he did, I’d look down at the reservoir of boiling water and pray to land anywhere except in those hands of his.
“When I was older, it got worse. He’d smirk and grab me, slam me into the wall. ‘I’m going to get you,’ he’d say, holding onto me or some piece of my clothing. ‘It won’t be long now, you like this, don’t you?’ Something pushed at my mind those times. There wasn’t anything to like. But his expression kept reminding me of something. Just like the ice cream did last night. I put a scoop of chocolate ice cream into a bowl and something so clear—as if I’d never seen it before—leapt into my mind. For you, Stanley, eating ice cream is an innocent thing—but have you ever noticed how those ridges from the scoop look like the skin on a man, in one particular place?”
It took him a minute to follow her reasoning. A man’s scrotum.
“Shit,” she said, abruptly. “I have to ask you, Stanley, where are these shreds coming from? I need to know, is this real? Screw Miss Wonderful, I’m scared.”
The woman heard herself saying the words. She knew they were tumbling out too quickly, but they didn’t seem to belong to her.
Stanley didn’t like the way her face and voice altered with every other sentence or how oblivious she seemed to the alterations.
“Miss Wonderful,” Stanley said, “who is she?”
The woman heard him from a distance and struggled to surface completely. She didn’t want to tell him that Miss Wonderful was only a voice in her head. So she muttered, as was true, only that her friend Sharon often called her Miss Wonderful because she acted at times like a professional hostess. “Stanley,” she said, “if I don’t get a grip soon, I might as well be back on the farm. What happens to those victims who aren’t strong? Where do they put the weak ones?”
“Being strong is great, but you’ve got to learn to ask for help. Asking for help is a sign of health.”
“It’s a sign of weakness!”
She began to cry and refused to take it further, rocking back and forth on the pillows, her eyes wild and glassy. Repeatedly, in lulling undertones, Stanley told her that she had every right to be scared. His low murmur through the sessions had grown familiar and she talked right over his words, knowing that whatever he said didn’t need a reply; but that in the days following each session his monotone messages would reach her subconscious, save her in moments of stress. They were armour if she recalled anything while alone.
“Why don’t I remember more right this minute?” she screamed suddenly. “When I told my mother I was leaving that house because of the stepfather, what did I tell her? The incidents were so vague, I could never be certain they’d really happened. But until I turned fifteen, ‘tell her’ rang in my head. I don’t know what finally precipitated my telling her—or even our conversation. She didn’t look shocked at all, just determined that I mustn’t leave her. There I was, looking forward to a new life when she’d spent hers in as much filth as I had, paying him for the roof over my head, for the food that kept me healthy. She’d paid him with herself.”
No, he thought. Your mother paid her bills with you. First with your body and very nearly with your mind. In spite of the anger he felt, Stanley kept his face expressionless, concentrating on his notes.
“My mother didn’t rant or rave that day, she just said that I was to stay. Things would get better, she’d make him stop. It’s impossible for me to believe that she knew what was going on.”
As the woman talked, Stanley saw the conflict: a mother’s harsh qualities weighed against the good—an inclination to accentuate the good and blame one’s own self for the harsh.
Her mother, she said, pinched pennies all year because of a tight-fisted man who wouldn’t give to his own children or wife, let alone his stepdaughter. The pennies at Christmas bought a wealth of gifts for the children; creatively, beautifully wrapped, even stacked artistically under the perfect tree.
Stanley began to get a picture of a woman, big bones and red hair and Irish-beautiful; a world-beater cook, seamstress, and laundress, who slaved over the cleaning, until the farmhouse glowed. A woman who haunted auctions to furnish that farmhouse well, on a budget tighter than Scrooge’s. So
meone who had the capacity, or was driven enough, to work night and day, not only in the farmhouse but in the fields as well, planting and picking crops. He caught a glimmer as in past sessions, of a deeply tormented woman who had perhaps been mishandled by her own mother and passed it down to her daughter.
There was more. It amounted to an inability on his client’s part to see her own side or to speak in her own defense. Her mother had been perfect, she had not.
Stanley had listened. Now he laid down the clipboard. “You were not responsible for your mother’s happiness or unhappiness. Your mother was an adult and her emotions were hers to deal with. You talk about how she scrimped and saved and denied her own needs to feed you, to give you nice holidays. But with your earnings from various jobs, you supported your mother, half brother, and half sisters, a long time before your stepfather eventually left.”
“I couldn’t really earn a lot after school and lots of times I hurt her. I wasn’t an easy child. I screamed and smashed things. I was a malcontent, whom nothing satisfied, one of those people who is happy with nothing and no one.”
“Or so your mother told you. You worked,” he reminded her, “as a waitress every afternoon until midnight and every single weekend, during your junior and senior years. And your mother hurt you, didn’t she? She beat the hell out of you. And she gave you to your stepfather; she handed you over to him.”
Stanley had purposely slapped it down in front of her, made it blatant and undeniable.
“My mother didn’t know.” The woman was crying.
“You told me she did.”
“Did I?”
“It’s in your journal notes,” Stanley told her firmly. “She knew what he was doing.”
