by Truddi Chase
“I haven’t had one of them from you in three months. As I recall, that’s when you talked me into being a clearinghouse for county abuse reports. Wound up tight as a tic tonight, aren’t you? You on speed or something?”
“Something,” Stanley agreed and hung up. Albert was right. Yesterday the energy had begun to fade. Today, during the session with the woman, it had returned. He’d even begun to document it, just to give Marshall something to laugh at. Where was Jeannie?
He caught up with her, halfway down the long hall. Jeannie was tall and slender with a wealth of pale brown hair that drifted across narrow shoulders. While walking, she kept her arms wrapped around herself.
Stanley had his suspicions about her. But it wasn’t the kind of thing you asked about and Jeannie, unlike three of his other students, had never volunteered anything.
“Doctor Phillips, my counselor is a woman. Sometimes it’s easier for me to talk to women. She’s going to call you. For now, you said there were videos for this class. May I see one?”
“You mean of an incest victim? Sure. I’ve scheduled a video for next week, but if you can wait after class tonight—” Stanley knew his first-year student was itching to get away from him. In class she stayed pretty much to herself, spoke to almost no one, and avoided eye contact as if she were very angry or scared to death.
“I’ve heard she’s local. I can’t believe she’s talking.”
“Why should that be so incredible?”
“Victims don’t talk,” Jeannie said, “except for a handful, and when they do, they don’t really say much. Nobody says much.”
“This victim wants to change that.”
“Lots of luck to her,” Jeannie said. “I’ll see you after class.”
The students settled down, a few smokers lit up, and Stanley took his place at the front of the room. Jeannie, crouched deep in a navy jacket far too heavy for the month of May, was so silent that she might not have been in the class at all.
Stanley instructed in an even tone as usual, no theatrics because the subject didn’t need them. Across the country, a number of educational facilities, enough to fit through the eye of a needle, were handling the subject of child sexual abuse and maybe, if it caught on, enough clinicians would be trained to treat its ramifications by the year 2000.
The students took copious notes, asked direct questions, and displayed, when the hour was up, expressions ranging from shock to studied casualness. From the back of the room a sophomore raised her hand.
“Doctor Phillips, next year my sister will follow me into this class. Will you be teaching it?”
“Next year,” Stanley said, “this course may not exist. The funding for practically everything is being cut. Tape-record, take notes, and pass them on. Next week I’ll be showing you videotapes of an incest victim which were filmed last week and this morning. The woman you will see on those films made a request of me when we first began her treatment. She asks that after you have seen them, talk. Wherever you go and to whomever you meet. She does not care if her name or that of the company she owns is mentioned in your conversations. I have a request of my own. You’re going to run into her in the halls here. Don’t say hello, leave her alone for another couple of weeks.”
As the students filed out, he sat Jeannie down in front of a small viewer and adjusted the headphones. Technicolor flashed in front of her face and there was no mistaking the woman’s words.
Incest.
It had been one thing to have been trapped in her own mind with similar memories but to see and hear the woman displaying her own anger and fear was another. Jeannie pulled the navy coat tighter around herself.
“Those two farmhouses are there, somewhere,” Stanley was saying to the woman. “You spent sixteen years in them. Suppose you just tell me whatever you do remember.”
“Even if it’s dumb?”
“Especially if it’s dumb.” Stanley smiled. “Sometimes that’s the best place to start.”
The woman gave him the little she remembered from the age of two. She insisted that nothing else existed in her mind until she’d been six and in the second grade in a little one-room schoolhouse. Her family had just moved, she said, to the second farmhouse.
“I was so scared.”
“Of what?” Stanley asked her.
“The other kids and the teachers scared us. I liked the coloured paper, though. We used to make chains out of it and play wedding. The chains were the veils for our gowns. We used so much paper that the teacher locked it up.” She paused and looked up from the floor, her face very soft and rounded, the eyes more slanted. Then cheekbones which had not been so noticeable for the last several minutes, seemed to appear again out of nowhere. “There are times, Stanley, when I don’t feel as if this is my skin; it wasn’t back then, either. Like the car accident in front of that one-room schoolhouse. I must have been in the third grade. We lived a mile from school, I was on my way back from lunch at home. A car hit me, knocked me down in the road.”
“Were you badly hurt?”
“I didn’t feel anything. I don’t remember being hit, just some man bending over me, saying how sorry he was, and his car on the side of the road with the door open. He shook a lot. I felt very calm. That’s all I remember. There wasn’t any pain.”
Jeannie could see Stanley on the videotape and now here in this room, considering that.
“All of a sudden, I’m in the sixth grade,” the woman said, cutting three years out of her life.
Stanley pressed on. “You had half sisters and a half brother?”
“I don’t remember them, except for bits and pieces. Everything is so vague—when it’s there at all. Except the nightmares. I don’t remember them, just the terror they produced.”
“Scared of the dark?” he asked. “Too much dessert for dinner?”
“I’m not scared of the dark and I don’t get sick anymore.”
“Once you mentioned something about a cellar under that one-room schoolhouse and we never got into it, there wasn’t time.”
She started to bite her thumbnail and the face grew soft again, the cheekbones seeming to submerge. “It wasn’t anything like the big school later, just three seniors, a couple of freshmen, some elementary kids, and me. I was in the third grade, so I must have been seven. Summertimes the teacher had flowers on her desk, lilacs from the big bush outside the window. In the winter there was the smell of our wet leggins and mittens on the floor register, and always, the odour of lunch-pail food and waxed paper.
“One of the freshman girls had a fuzzy pink sweater and fuzzy brown hair. I used to stare at the sweater because she had a chest. That impressed me. Everyone liked her; I thought it must have something to do with the sweater or the chest. During recess the smallest of us huddled in the snow outside the cellar door. Sometimes we put our mittens up to it, thinking we could get our hands warm. The furnace inside the cellar sent out blasts of hot air. One day we all stood outside, waiting for the girl in the pink sweater to come out with one of the senior boys. Everyone else stood around giggling, not wanting the teacher to hear. They thought it was funny, but I knew, Stanley, that those two were doing something wrong in there, something dirty and vile and evil.”
The voice expressing in simple sentences a knowledge far beyond a child’s third-grade years, had struck Jeannie as odd. And familiar. She watched Stanley on the video screen, taking notes. Jeannie was taking her own notes and for her a warning bell had gone off.
“Did you ever have friends in school?”
“One. Later on in the big school. Her name was Helen, and she was big and tall and I hid behind her. But one day, she told a joke, and as she did it, she put out her hand to me. It scared me, her hand coming at me like that. Good-bye, friend.” The eyes regarded Stanley under a fall of ash-blond bangs, and a smile slid to one side of the pale mouth. “The teachers tried to steer us toward making friends, then they insisted.”
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“And did you?” Stanley was asking on the videotape.
“Hell, no. By that time, we knew better than to do anything we were told to do. The stepfather told us to do lots of things.”
Jeannie Lawson sat straight up in her chair. “We.” The woman had said it repeatedly. The references, Jeannie felt, might not have been to the woman’s classmates as a child, or to members of her immediate family . . . but to members of an even more “immediate” family. Jeannie ticked off the changes that anyone else might regard as simply part of an animated manner: hands that gestured broadly, that lay calm in the lap and then moved almost sensually through the tumbled blond hair; the voice that was never one but many; expressions that ranged from businesslike to street smart and childlike and all the gradations in between. The eyes. No one person had that many pairs of eyes.
This was a businesswoman Stanley was dealing with—someone who should be brisk and efficient; who gave orders and negotiated land contracts, someone who always had the upper hand. But Jeannie watched the woman going from that kind of person to another: one who displayed almost hysterical mannerisms and voice changes, there on the floor under Stanley’s watchful gaze. Jeannie listened to expressions of what seemed to be of paramount importance in the woman’s mind—staying hidden and isolated from human contact because she felt ugly and incompetent. And because each time people reached out to her, their motives were suspect.
Jeannie Lawson knew the woman’s feelings and mannerism changes too well. They might have been her own a year ago.
Watching the woman go into the relaxed breathing, watching her face and body contort with the recall in the field of tall grass, was agony. By the time what had to be a small child began to scream for the crayons, Jeannie was screaming with her, in a part of her mind so scarred already that numbness fought with the pain. What Jeannie saw and heard reminded her of the few typewritten words of the psychosocial history Stanley was waiting for and which she had been unable to complete.
She had come to watch a victim who was willing to be filmed, using her own name, with no shadows and no voice distortion. Instead, she’d found not only another victim, but a mirror-image of herself—and her own case was termed “rare” by every printed word she’d ever encountered on the subject.
She turned away from the video screen with her mouth open and her eyes wide.
“You’re working with a multiple for these videos? How in god’s name did you find her?”
Stanley had been sitting there, staring at the screen, tapping his teeth with a fingernail. All of a sudden, Jeannie knew what he was going through; the same sporadic, suspicion/confirmation/doubt that had caused her own therapist to flounder.
“Tell me,” he said, “how you know that.”
* * *
At home that night, his mind whirling, Stanley tried to catch up with his client’s writing. Again the pages were typewritten.
Stanley, with the psychoanalyst, it became impossible to go back, even under hypnosis. I wound up biding time by telling him about my mother reading to me, The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew, Anne of Green Gables, and Little Women, by the light of a kerosene lantern, while the wind howled outside and the snow blew against that first farmhouse, in great, swirling drifts.
There was so little of me anywhere, during that time with him. He increased the number of weekly sessions but it didn’t help. I demanded to know one day, where all this had come from, my panic, the hysteria and guilt, over what? The unknown, terrible action that I could not remember, and the guilt, had to originate somewhere in childhood. I wanted to know, was ready to face, whatever had this much power over me.
He told me to count back, think of someplace I’d truly like to be, out of all the places in the entire world. I couldn’t produce a single one. His voice got soft, slow, I tried and couldn’t. And he kept at me.
It was a nice idea. Someplace you’d truly like to be. His voice went on, lulling, and suddenly in my mind, I let go for a split second and I was there, saying aloud, “Oh, a field of tall grass,” and in front of my eyes, the very gentle breeze was causing the tall grass to move, to quiver—but there were yellow flowers in that field—I couldn’t go there!
I fought so hard to get back, to be in that psychoanalyst’s office again, out of that office, I remember screaming to someone, anyone, “Let me go!”
Norman, my ex-husband, says the doctor called him to come take me home that day, saying that he could handle anybody, but he couldn’t handle me. I have no memory of that at all. I must have acted very badly, though. Norman says I kept screaming in the car, “No, no, I can’t go there anymore, leave me alone.” And Stanley? It just now hit me. There’s more than one field of tall grass.
Stanley put down the manuscript pages. They’d probably been written a week ago. Yet even after today’s revealing session, his client seemed almost as much in the dark as she had during the initial interview. Flowers represented both her mother and the guilt. Stanley recognised that, and he’d also known something else: anyone who conducted sexually roughhousing games over a hot stove, with a screaming, protesting, child, who could rape that same child, wouldn’t stop at one field.
It was generally felt in the world of mental health treatment that brutal abusers like her stepfather were rare. But abusers, brutal or not, were seldom reported. Many of the men whom Protective Services turned over to Stanley for treatment had reported themselves. They’d had sexual relations with their children. That was horror enough. While all child sexual abuse was a physical act, a brutality—these men had not added the element of physical torture.
Jeannie Lawson had been a multiple as the result of sexual abuse and brutal, physical torture by her stepfather’s teenage boys. Jeannie, and the woman whose condition he’d almost decided on, were supposed to be rare, too. Were they? What about the brutal offenders? Men and women who would never turn themselves in? Could there be more brutal offenders—and perhaps multiples, too—in greater numbers than anyone imagined?
* * *
The morning session had produced a fright that stayed all day. At bedtime it was still there. The sporadic awareness that had been stirred up lately, had struck her on a new front. She wanted to call her friend Sharon Barnes, but stood in front of the kitchen clock, scared because she could not tell what hour it was. It was either twenty after ten in the evening or twenty after eleven (in which case it would be too late to call).
What she really wanted was to simply drive the two miles to Sharon’s house, have coffee and unload a measure of the built-up fear. But Sharon had a cat now, a sleek black cat full of curiosity and sensuous, prowling movements.
Hatred and fear of animals lay there for a second, naked in her awareness . . . real this time, like a plastic monster come to life. She didn’t know why the fear should be there.
The Gatekeeper waited. The woman’s fear mounted. Only the whisper of the woman’s breathing broke the silence. Fear began to take a stronger hold as her suspicions became less vague and therefore more real. The Gatekeeper gave the signal. And in the shadows of the Tunnel Walls, the Weaver bent to his task with nimble fingers. He gathered the threads of the veil that shrouded all and wove each one back into place. The woman’s suspicion floated away. No longer able to feel the fear, she believed that it did not exist, had never existed.
She had always denied what her other selves gave through thought transference. Everything seemed like messages from her own mind. What made it so perplexing was that she didn’t have the background for, or involvement in, much of anything, and often felt a wonder at the strangeness of what she received.
Now, while she stared at the wall clock, 10:20 just flew into her head. She dialed Sharon’s number. They had, after all, been friends for thirteen years. Sharon did not make judgements; her sense of humour would certainly wipe out the sense of impending doom. The woman’s hands shook and the words sounded far away but she came directly to the point
when Sharon answered.
“Voices?” Over the phone, Sharon’s sharp intake of breath didn’t masque the anger and disbelief.
“They were real, Sharon. In the session this morning.”
She hadn’t expected Sharon to reject the idea completely. It took a minute to calm down because she heard the angry thoughts in her head, the anger rising at Sharon’s denial. The woman tried again.
“Sharon, in this morning’s session, I know it was just Stanley sitting on the floor with me, but there were other voices. In a peculiar way, they were in my head but they were outside of it, too.”
“You listen to me! You aren’t making sense. Holding it back all these years has been a terrible strain, that’s all.”
The Buffer had become upset. Nails, a Troop member who dealt with rejection, charged up front. Nails was now “sitting forward” in the mind of the woman who could still hear and operate, and therefore believed that the actions and words were her own. Even if she did feel “removed” from everything.
“Three of my agents quit,” Nails said to Sharon and lit a cigarette.
The woman stared from a long way off, at the cigarette between her fingers and the one still smoking in the ashtray. People said she smoked too much.
“They quit just like that?” Sharon’s voice reflected a panic the woman hadn’t felt at all when three days ago, the agents had marched out of her office on Hampton Road.
The woman didn’t hear Sharon’s panic. She heard only that which Nails permitted.
“The agents couldn’t deal with me,” Nails said, “I couldn’t deal with them. But in land and commercial real estate where everybody’s the Lone Ranger, it doesn’t matter.”
“What about human companionship? You shouldn’t be alone so much right now.”
Companionship? The woman struggled to focus over a feeling of unreality, of having drifted off somewhere. In spite of her need to talk to someone tonight, companionship was not, had never been, part of her vocabulary. Her head had begun to pound. Rain lashed at the kitchen window as she hauled out instant coffee and found a cup, not sure when she’d turned the gas on. But the water had already come to a boil.
