by Truddi Chase
The woman looked at him, confused. Stanley knew what he’d read that morning: the long-ago kitchen conversation wherein her mother had told her stepfather that if he weren’t after her all the time, the child wouldn’t know anything about masturbation. How could the woman have forgotten it? But she must have done just that. Her blank eyes and face were too genuine, and the burgeoning terror they masked was something no one could manufacture.
Had he pushed her too far? So much had come out of this session. She’d held up this far and so many avenues had opened.
“Stanley? I remember something.”
Her face had not changed so much as it had softened; the voice was very young, the pronunciation very precise. It was older than the voice he’d heard in the entry foyer during the first interview.
“Tell me,” he said.
“When the old barn burned down, the garage was converted. We took the car out and put the cow in there with a lot of hay. One day I was walking past the open door. The half sister lay there in the hay, all that black hair of hers spilling out. The stepfather had his back to me, he knelt between her bare legs, his pants were down around his ankles.”
“How old were you at the time?”
“Nine. I couldn’t believe what I’d seen. When I asked her about it later, and told her I thought he was a bastard, she said she loved him, he was her father and she loved him. She was seven years old.”
Stanley had what he thought of as a brilliant idea. The soft face and the very young voice told him it was brilliant. “And how old are you, right now?” he asked.
“Twelve. I’m twelve years old.”
The voice had faded to almost nothing and Stanley had to lean over to catch the words.
“That’s when I knew I had to be crazy. His own daughter loved him, people said it was wrong not to love your parents. Yet I hated him with a passion.”
“You aren’t crazy,” he said, “and you’ve remembered one of the farm animals.”
“What farm animals? We didn’t have any.” The woman was staring at him.
Tony motioned from the booth and Stanley reached out and touched her arm. “Time for the break.”
He didn’t know what else to say.
The woman headed down to the bathroom at the far end of the hall avoiding her reflection in the glass walls of the control booth. She could not, however, avoid her eyes in the lavatory mirror. At first glance, as she rubbed away the smudged mascara, her eyes were pale green and slanted. The colour changed then, almost to grey, and the slant became more oval. The eyes wouldn’t shut; they remained open and stared right back at her.
FOUR
OK, so you’ve got a tremendous need for coffee, which means caffeine, you’ve got ‘we,’ headaches with no pain, a sporadic memory, and somebody who tells you that she’s twelve years old. Anything else?”
Marshall Fielding’s voice crackled at the other end of the long-distance line. Marshall was a researcher with his finger on the pulse of every happening in the mental health field. More than that, he was a very old friend whose judgement Stanley trusted.
“You’re not laughing, you bastard.” Stanley had one eye on his wristwatch, because the session was about to start again. “There’s plenty else. I saw the contents she dumped out of her purse one day. She lives by lists—she’s got a list for every waking moment. Some of them are duplicates and triplicates of the same project but with variations as to completion. She’s got an incredible memory before the age of two. After that, it’s zip. Except that every now and then, details come out and I can’t be sure what she remembers. She has no sense of time, no sense of direction. . . .”
There came a long silence at the other end of the line. “Is she very creative?” Marshall asked.
“Somebody thought enough of her work to give her a one-woman show. She once designed an entire art department according to a strict budget. That’s another thing. Her work requires that she do cash-flow statements on various income-producing buildings. Yet she has trouble with figures.”
“I take it then that this is a very productive woman we’re talking about.”
“Exceedingly,” Stanley said. “Which leads me to believe that this can’t possibly be multiple personality. She’s never been debilitated, nothing seems to stop her. And I definitely don’t see a neat parade of alternate selves who come out and say, ‘Hi, I’m so-and-so.’”
“Go back to work,” Marshall said. “I’ll see you in a couple of weeks.”
“And in the meantime?”
“She isn’t going anywhere,” Marshall said. “You’re the first person she’s ever had for that little trip into the deep forest. Now she’s got an inkling that it’s going to get deeper.”
“Sometimes I don’t think she has an inkling of anything.”
“If it’s multiple personality, somebody does.”
Stanley hung up and ran back to the studio.
He lowered himself across from the woman and felt his ankles rebel against the position. One of these days he’d get the hang of it.
She began to tell him that as a child she had hidden under tables, behind the doors or the kitchen stove.
“I hated being with anyone,” the woman said, “but I knew that I must never be alone and in full view. Whenever my mother did force me out of hiding, I stayed at her feet or at her side. I drew a lot with my school crayons. Then I’d lose track of time and panic. Where had my mother gone? And I’d run like the wind if it wasn’t too late.”
“Too late?” The woman’s words had created a picture that Stanley didn’t think she had ever examined fully.
“Yes,” she said. “Too late. I knew there was danger, but I can’t remember what. I want to go into the field of tall grass. Let’s go. I’m ready.”
He’d been trying in the first two weeks of therapy to teach her a method whereby with her relaxed breathing and his softened, singsong voice, she could hypnotise or “lower” herself into childhood recall. So far it hadn’t worked. A tiny flashback of the field at the first farmhouse had been stirred up during the brief treatment with the psychoanalyst eight years ago. The flashback had triggered at that time an absolute terror for the woman that still persisted.
While he would have preferred to try for other recall, it was important that she develop faith in her own decision making.
“Very well, we’ll go back,” Stanley said. “You can stop at any time if you’re not comfortable.”
She started to count backward, from ten to zero. Gradually, her muscles relaxed. The drifting came slowly as always; it crept, taking her body but skirting her mind. Then it began as never before—the seeping into her mind of something she was unused to, a relaxation so strong that it was like a sedative. She knew she was going, and it was almost a relief. The final number, zero, escaped her mouth with a soft hiss.
The woman was no longer in the video studio, but in a field of tall grass. She smiled.
“The sun. It’s bright. But it goes in and out of the clouds, it . . . does something funny to the grass. The grass is moving.” Her voice was thicker, as if she were under anesthesia, and sounded very young. “Dress. I’m wearing a dress. The ground is—it’s damp today. The grass is so tall.”
“Who is there with you?”
“He’s there. He’s above me, on me.” There was a shudder and her eyelids pressed hard together. “He . . . I can’t see it.”
“How old are you?”
“Two. I’m two.”
Silence again for several minutes, a look of fear on her face and then, “My dress. It won’t stay down. It keeps moving up above my waist and I keep pulling it down. I don’t want my dress to go up.” There was a whine in the voice, like that of a very little girl. “He is so big. I don’t like this.”
“We can stop if you want to.”
“No.” Still the childlike whine, but the words were more adult. “I’ll get it, it just keeps fl
oating back and forth, and the clouds move . . . he is so big . . . is it possible to feel disgust?”
“Oh, yes. Entirely possible.”
“It’s sweeping over me from somewhere. The dress won’t stay down, he keeps pulling it up and I can’t stop it!”
A low, howling sob began, mingled with a soft, childish weeping, as if she were crying two sets of tears. Unknown to Stanley, two sets of tears were being wept, and neither one of them by the woman.
Even under hypnosis, the woman neither saw nor experienced anything except the sunlight on the grass and the pressure of the stepfather’s body on her own. Rabbit was a very young and unevolved child who held the pain for almost the entire Troop Formation. Rabbit now re-experienced the act of penetration and was responsible for the howling sobs. Another very young child, undergoing the same act of penetration but on a “removed” level, wept more softly. One day as therapy progressed, Stanley would understand the phenomenon of two or more persons being present at exactly the same time. He would also understand how the woman, when she was present, and unbeknownst to herself, was only a conduit for other Troop members.
No words came in accompaniment to the terrified weeping, no verbal explanation of what was happening in the field of tall grass, to cause the fear and pain the woman evidenced. Stanley thought he knew, with or without words. Only one offender among the men he treated had ever admitted to raping so young a child as the woman had been in this recall. It had taken the man three years to face his guilt. His victim, his child, had been committed to a mental hospital.
The woman’s throat muscles strained with the howling sobs. Stanley hoped they had not aimed too quickly at the field. This one area held what he felt might be the original, the deepest, root of trauma. After it, almost an entire lifetime of sexual memory had been shelved.
“Well,” Stanley said, “that’s very good. This isn’t easy but don’t be scared, it’s alright. We’ll stop for now, we’ll count from zero to ten, and when you reach ten, you’ll be here in this room and you’ll feel refreshed. Are you ready?”
Haltingly, she went through the numbers. On the count of ten, relief flooded her face. Tears streamed.
“Why,” she blurted as her eyes flew open, “is it so easy to get there now?”
“Because you are ready now.” Stanley smiled.
The woman felt herself gripped by a sudden incomprehension. Certain words had formed in her mind but refused to be spoken. She wanted desperately, with no awareness of how limited her own view of the sexual abuse had just been, to thank Stanley for the breakthrough. Eight years ago, the psychoanalyst had let her see a brief glimpse of the field. She had run from the recall—for no reason she could fathom—and been terrified of that field ever since. Moments ago, however, the view had been larger and the threat of danger very understandable. The stepfather had been there.
But instead of thanking Stanley, she heard herself wailing the word “coward.”
“You aren’t a coward.” He tried to catch her eye, but the blond hair blocked his vision. “Reliving actual happenings would scare anybody. You’re doing well, you’re determined, and that’s half the battle.”
“Those little flicks against my mind,” the woman said, oblivious to his impression that she’d been aware throughout the entire recall, “they’re coming faster now, they hurt, they’re so ugly!”
“They’re memories, they’ll probably increase somewhat in the next few weeks.”
“Is that what it is?” The woman laughed and sobbed, simultaneously. Her nostrils were heavy and swollen with crying. They felt strange; she felt strange—yet she did not feel anything at all, except a weird kinship to some trapped animal ready for slaughter. With no other warning, conflicting emotions began to war with one another. It popped into her mind that the emotions were actually the flicks of memory and that the pain they produced was only intellectual. It was not physical. Why, then, did her heart suddenly ache with a keening, biting, wrenching sensation and why wouldn’t the damned tears stop?
“By the way,” Stanley said, “I’ll use this tape in class. It shows enormous progress.” He stopped talking then, because as he looked over at her, he knew she wasn’t hearing him.
“Dammit,” the woman heard the snarl. “Dammit, why couldn’t I see all of that stupid field? Why am I such an ass? I thought when I left the farmhouse that I was free of everything. But it’s never stopped, I’m still running!”
“What do you think you’re running from?” Stanley kept his voice noncommittal.
“Only one thing equals this guilt. I must have killed someone.”
This was not the reaction Stanley had expected. Why didn’t she express a direct verbal horror of the rape? Those howling, pain-ridden sobs—having just relived the rape, how could the guilt still rest squarely on her shoulders? Why hadn’t she begun to transfer that guilt to the stepfather where it belonged?
His eyes raced back to his notes. There it was—immediately after coming out of hypnosis, she’d again referred to “flicks,” not to a whole memory. How much of the field had she retained? Perhaps she was simply not ready to accept the rape; he doubted that he had been ready.
“Just offhand,” he said, “who do you think you might have killed?”
There was no hesitation in the same young, precise voice he’d heard just before the break.
“The stepfather. I thought about it, a lot. But to kill somebody, you have to touch them. I didn’t want to touch him. If you used a rifle, you might miss and make him angry. Then he’d get you.”
“Jesus,” the woman heard herself screaming in an adult voice, “why can’t I remember when I saw that bastard for the last time? There’s nothing in my head!”
Even as the adult voice spoke, bombarding flicks of recall and opposing emotions hit all at once. The woman held her head as if afraid that it would explode, and a shriek tore out of her mouth. In that one second, she saw a jigsaw puzzle with all the pieces flung into the air, helter-skelter. The pieces were a past that might have belonged to a stranger. No one piece fit side by side with another, nothing related to anything she knew.
Yet all of it, in fragmented form, seemed frighteningly familiar. So did the voice in her head. She heard it quite suddenly and was reminded of the mother. Somewhere in the very recent past, she’d heard that voice, but it had seemed like just another of those random, far-off—were they thoughts or voices? Whatever they were, they had begun, just before her visit to A Woman’s Place, to spring up with no warning.
Stanley might not have been in the studio, seated across from her. The voice would not go away. Demanding, cruel—the woman listened, staring down at the orange cushions, feeling distanced, removed from Stanley’s presence. Awful things were being said to her, mean, hurtful things, designed to wound, to impart the knowledge that one was imperfect, imbecilic, and worthless.
“It was bad back there on the farm,” Stanley was saying. “It was bad, all of it, and you have a right to feel scared.”
But the woman heard through his words another voice, like that of a child, crying:
“No! It wasn’t all bad, my crayons were good, they were the best part of growing up, I want my crayons, now!”
Stanley observed her over the clipboard. He tabulated what he’d seen and heard since the first interview, weeks ago. Little of it matched anything he’d witnessed before in his professional career. The woman knelt in front of him, her forehead on her knees, holding herself as she cried. When she finally raised her head, he noted the slanted eyes and thought that even without the makeup which had now washed away, they were oddly pretty. That thought was promptly replaced with another: this client might be beyond the scope of his expertise. Unless Marshall could give him some direction, Stanley had no idea to whom he might refer her.
FIVE
CIGARETTE smoke drifted down the university hallway in the wake of students headed for Stanley’s night class. He searched
his pockets for Albert’s number and juggled the telephone against a stack of papers that needed grading. Impatiently, he listened to the ringing as Jeannie Lawson, a first-year student, waved to him from his office door. He waved back. He’d get to her later. Jeannie had yet to turn in her psychosocial history and he knew she’d come to beg more time. There wasn’t any more time. The paper was due.
Finally, Albert answered the phone.
“Albert,” Stanley said with no preamble, “what’s the statute of limitations on murder?”
“You gotta be kidding.” Captain Albert Johnson let out a howl on the telephone wire. “You’re not talking cash or groceries, Stanley, you’re talking homicide.”
Stanley sighed. Anyone was capable of murder. All it required was to be pushed too far, and without a doubt, the woman had been pushed. More than likely, however, she was only expressing guilt. Her lack of self-esteem went far deeper than he’d suspected. Almost all victims had a fear that the “silent partner” to sexual abuse (in this case the woman’s mother), would find out and despise them, as they despised themselves. Perhaps with the memory of the abuse so deeply buried in the woman’s subconscious, the guilt had festered there, too. Until that which her mind could not accept had found an outlet: she was so bad that she must have killed someone—her stepfather.
“You wanna get off the line, Stanley? I got four phones going at once, thanks to you. My precinct isn’t orderly anymore, it’s a goddamned madhouse. Protective Services has been up my nose. What they want on initial and follow-up reports is that one of their staff should accompany what they call an officer trained in the field. Know what that means? I haven’t got trained officers. I hand one of my people an incest call and they look at me like I’m asking for a moon shot.”
“Albert, I’ve got some training videos for you.”
“My officers fall asleep on that stuff. One of your offenders told me those films are cotton candy compared to what he put his kid through.”
“I just made these videos myself, Albert, and they’re not cotton candy. You set it up with your people, I’ll be there. I’ll even buy you a beer afterward.”
