by Truddi Chase
The woman looked at him as if she’d misunderstood his words.
“You told me,” he said, “that you were related to no one.”
“Isn’t that funny? I don’t recall saying such a thing to you but I’ve felt that way. Well, most children believe at one time or another that they’re adopted or something. Except that I’m an adult now, so why hasn’t the notion just been put away?”
Why, indeed. According to Jeannie Lawson, the selves had a certain speech pattern that, up until now, he’d considered only briefly. Relatively sure that the woman was present and verbalising, Stanley decided to explore, by a backdoor method, the suspicion that suddenly grabbed him.
“Was your mother affectionate with you?” he asked.
“The mother said that if she showed me affection, the stepfather would say she played favourites, that she was cheating his children. I don’t think I ever knew that hugs were part of a mother-daughter relationship until one day, when she hugged me for the first time, in front of a total stranger. I remember being shocked. I guess I was thirteen.”
Who the hell was sitting here? Stanley had assumed for the last few minutes that this was the woman and, by the natural order of things, also the first-born child. But she had just said “the mother.”
He asked her about it.
“Did I say ‘the mother’? I know that’s wrong. I should say ‘my mother.’ One should do what’s right.”
If it’s right, Stanley thought to himself. “Don’t I hear you saying ‘my mother’ sometimes?”
“I guess so. I do it because I’m supposed to, but sometimes I slip.”
Stanley stared into the blank face in front of him. Marshall, he thought, would arrive none too soon. This conversation was turning into Abbott and Costello and their “Who’s on First?” routine.
He tried another route.
“Did you draw for me in the sketchbook just before we took our break?”
“Did I bring the sketchbook?” The woman held her skirt aside and looked down at the floor. “Do you want me to draw something?”
“Do you remember telling me about the second well in the back field?”
“What second well? We only had one, by the kitchen door.”
“My mistake,” Stanley said. If he went further, they’d be into the well business and neither of them was ready for it. Something had gone on in that back field. The woman in front of him right now did not remember it, and probably for good reason. What concerned Stanley more at the moment was that, just like an alternate self, she did not consider the mother as her own.
The woman wished the dizziness would go away. Her skin had broken out in a cold sweat. There seemed to be nothing inside her.
From deep in the Tunnel, someone heard the silence in the woman’s mind. The Gatekeeper gave the signal. The Buffer sat up front now, allowing the thoughts of another Troop member to flow again through the emptiness of the woman’s mind.
“Did I do something wrong?” the woman heard herself asking Stanley. “You look at me so funny, what did I do wrong?”
“Not a thing,” Stanley said.
“This is a lot like being back home. I was always scared I’d done something wrong. I spent a lot of time being scared that the mother would see the special badness the stepfather hinted we were capable of. Was it so horrible that he couldn’t say it out loud? Why didn’t I remember it? Why was he at me, everywhere I looked, trying to do things to me, touch me, force his fingers . . . but things he did are coming back now.”
The voice had been a peculiar mixture of adult woman and small child. Stanley gave up tracking the differences between “my mother” and “the mother.” The expressions were too intermingled as the woman rocked back and forth on the floor cushions, gaining control one minute and losing it the next. She was recounting the crawl along the kitchen floor with the stepfather atop her protesting six-year-old body. Her mother, at such times, continued her cooking at the big black stove and seemed oblivious.
“‘Somebody,’ the mother would say to no one in particular, ‘is going to get hurt if you continue to play that roughly.’
“The game at that point was at my mother’s feet, me trying to get away from my stepfather’s body on top of me, he with his hands over my mouth to shut off the screams. My mother said that over and over. ‘Somebody is going to get hurt.’”
The outraged and tormented expression remained but the face became rounder. The voice and demeanor were unmistakably those of a very small child.
“Didn’t the mother know it had already happened?” she asked Stanley.
Neither the woman nor the Troop member speaking were aware of it, but the amount of rage being suppressed might have fired a missile. The stepfather’s inhumanity, his dehumanisation of the small child, had never been forgotten or forgiven. It had merely grown to astronomical proportions and was now, as in the past on too many occasions, evidencing itself as energy. Tony stood inside the control booth, his frenzy indicating more trouble.
The woman surfaced and rubbed her arms. She was freezing. The coldness seemed to accompany a childlike feeling inside herself. The woman was leaning forward from her yoga position and laying her forehead on her knees with the suppleness of a fourteen-year-old gymnast. When she sat straight up, both hands were buried to the wrists in ash-blond hair, her face red with emotional strain. There were no pauses between the words, they tumbled out of her mouth. She spewed hatred for everything and everybody, including herself; denied the worth of whatever she had accomplished, or might accomplish, in her lifetime. Her eyes remained, for the most part, veiled behind the bangs.
“I tried to run away,” she said. “There were transient workers on the next farm. They laughed a lot, I could hear them when the wind was right.”
Stanley heard the child’s voice but so faintly.
“The transient workers,” he said casually, “how close to your farm did they live?”
“Ooh.” Soft eyes, wider and more lively, sparkled at him under ash-gold fringes of hair. “I don’t know. This far.” Her hands came together, moved apart. “Music,” said the same childlike but suddenly lispy voice, “it was pretty the way they sang, and do you know what?”
“What?”
“He was my friend, that black boy. He made the mother smile a real smile, bringing me home up on his shoulders that day I got lost back there behind the apple orchard. She smiled and said what a nice person he was to do it, can you believe that?”
“Yes, I can.”
“I can’t believe that. She didn’t like anybody.” Her mouth turned down at the corners. She stared at Stanley and bit her lip.
“Was that your mother who smiled?”
“I used to call her that but she wasn’t, you know.”
“If she wasn’t your mother, whose mother was she?”
“The big one’s mother, I guess. But it was a secret.”
“What,” Stanley pressed, “was the secret?”
“Us,” said the small voice, and she pointed at herself. “We were the secret.”
“I see. Are there many of you?”
“I don’t know. There are a lot of voices. You won’t like some of them. Some of them don’t like me. I can’t tell you why. If I do and she hears me, there’ll be trouble.”
“And who is she?”
“The big one.” She skipped neatly off the dime, diverting her attention to the songs the transients had sung at night behind her farm, and gave him a short stanza in halting, childish singsong, of a nursery rhyme half-remembered. “‘Lazy Mary, won’t you come home . . .,’ only we didn’t sing it that way. We sang it, ‘Crazy Mary.’ That’s what they said she was, the big one.”
Stanley recalled again the names on the list the woman handed him in the car this morning. Five of them, added to the voice of a very young child in the woman’s foyer that first day, and this new one who must be around three or four years old. There must be o
thers, too, because on his clipboard he’d been tracking changes that could not be confined to these seven.
“Tell me,” he said, “about, uh—Mean Joe.”
Her face lit up and she clasped her hands as if they were fat-fingered. “He protects me. Mean Joe is nice. I hear his words and then I can . . .” she hunted for a word, couldn’t find it, and looked as if she wanted to cry in frustration.
“What happens when you hear Mean Joe’s voice?”
“I can see him even if he isn’t there. That’s not what I mean, but I don’t know how to say it.”
“You mean his voice helps you visualise him? I know that’s a big word.” Stanley tried again. “It helps you see him?”
“Yes.” She giggled.
“How long have you known Mean Joe? How many years?”
“I never knew Mean Joe.” The small voice sounded petulant. “I never knew he was there, but I knew he was there.”
Stanley looked at what he’d written on the clipboard and then at her. “Who are you?”
“Me,” she said, and when he looked puzzled, she pointed a finger at her chest.
He leaned over to peer into the eyes that had glazed over so quickly he wasn’t sure he’d seen it. The cheekbones were popping back up beneath the skin. It wasn’t a child’s face anymore.
“That’s a pretty dress,” he ventured, watching carefully for the reaction.
“This?” She looked down at the full-sleeved, sheer blouse, the pale mauve skirt and vest. “I love the jeans, they’re more comfortable when we film. But today, I don’t understand why, I felt determined to be feminine.” There was a bemused set to her face.
“That must be a nice feeling.”
“No. It scares me. See these earrings?” She flipped back her hair to expose two golden hoops. “My mother said hoop earrings, makeup, and shorts denoted looseness. I don’t know why I’m wearing them today or the clothes, either. They make me feel uncomfortable. As if wearing them makes me bad.”
“That is the dumbest thing I ever heard you say.”
“Really?”
“Dumb,” Stanley said.
“Oh. Well,” the bemused look intensified. Stanley, by calling the mother’s opinion about the hoop earrings “dumb,” had given Twelve the courage to push all the way past the woman. Twelve’s face was innocent of adult emotion. “I always felt it was dumb, but that’s what the mother said. See this lipstick we’re wearing? Pale, isn’t it? Bright lipstick scares some of us. Once, back at the farm, we bought a lipstick. We sneaked it. Purple. Put on a lot of it.”
“I imagine that was pretty, too. Purple is a great colour.”
“No. It was ugly. And that other one came out and smiled into the mirror like she’d done a bad thing and didn’t care. When you do bad things you’ve got to care.”
“Otherwise?”
“You’re going to hell, that’s what. The mother said so.”
There came only the merest whisper of change and Stanley knew the woman was back.
“Stanley,” she said, and her words bore no relationship to lipstick colours or hoop earrings. She was obviously worried about something else entirely. “I was so sure I had everything under control the other day but I went on appointments, grocery shopped, all with a silly, sixteen-year-old smile on my face. When I caught sight of myself in the mirror, I looked different, gleeful. I was warm with people all day, caring, ridiculous. Around five o’clock that same afternoon, somebody else took over and again I felt different. That’s the way it happens, they just take over. They take me. I’m them. Am I crazy? What do I do now?”
“My sense is,” Stanley said, laying down the pen, “that they will be getting stronger, coming out by themselves. You may not have as much control over them anymore.”
He tested her again with bits of memory revealed in the session. She looked at him with blank eyes and the beginning of a worried frown, unable to connect herself to what he was saying and too polite to dispute him except on one point.
“I control these people?” she repeated. “How can I control them when I didn’t even know they were there? I feel like a lunatic. How can I go out in public this way?”
He’d taken a risk by sliding the hint of multiple personality into his previous answer. He didn’t think it disturbed her or that she’d even caught on.
“How long have you been going out in public up until now?”
“Oh, jesus,” Sewer Mouth said. “You mean I’ve looked like an ass all these years?”
She agreed to call him if things got too hectic.
Stanley went back to his office to get ready for his next class, feeling that his energy was boundless. He worried that it was a mistake to wait for a reinforcing diagnosis, not to trust himself. He hoped that when the time came she would understand that he’d been doing it for her own good. “Her own good.” Her mother had said that to her constantly, and he knew the revulsion it summoned up. When the time did come, he’d better have other words ready.
ELEVEN
THE hallway outside Stanley’s classroom door resembled a bus terminal. Students clutched tote bags and brown-sacked lunches, they leaned against the walls and sprawled on the floor of the narrow corridor. A dark-eyed woman with raindrops caught in her black hair sat rearranging the contents of her purse into bright plastic envelopes, all neatly labelled.
The retired Air Force captain watched her thin fingers whipping among grocery receipts and cancelled checks and odd makeup items. He knew her name was Pamela; she appeared to be in her twenties but little mean lines were already forming from nose to mouth, and a frown wanted to settle into her forehead.
“Wouldn’t you think,” he muttered out of habit because all of Stanley’s students muttered, most of the time to themselves, “that if a course simply required a man to go downtown, visit a few porno shops, watch god knows how many skin flicks, outline the working parts of, say, three hundred self-pleasuring instruments . . .” He paused, seeing the tight look on Pamela’s face, the way her thin neck was grasped by the high-collared white blouse. Inundated by his own words, he knuckled a pair of tired eyes. His classroom attire, tan chinos and a sweatshirt, was soggy from the spring rains lashing the campus.
“That he should be able to pass?” Beside him on the bench, Pamela laughed with no humour. “Of course not. Phillips isn’t content with the mechanics of sex. He wants to delve into one’s shyness about discussing those bloody field trips; he wants one’s whole life history on paper; he wants to know how one feels about prostitutes and pimps, as if I feel anything about them. How could I? They’re not part of my lifestyle. The more I hear in this course, the more I think that sex should be banished from the face of the earth. I think this course is giving me migraines.”
“But you can’t say it isn’t interesting.” He was startled by her vehemence and tried to hide it by watching her fasten a bright green envelope shut.
“Interesting? I’ll tell you this,” she spoke the words as if they were red hot and her tongue was sizzling. “I wanted, actually wanted, to be a therapist when I signed up for this course. I must have been mad. The human animal in my estimation is beyond redemption and to spend forty hours a week treating that irredeemability is perfectly ridiculous.”
“The red-light district got to you, did it?” The captain smiled. “That isn’t the whole world.”
“I wonder.” She glared and gathered her purse and her books, and she marched ahead of him into the classroom, where Stanley waited beside a large video player.
The room had begun to fill with students and the odours of wet fabric, lebanon bologna, and peeled eggs. Pamela placed her thin body on a bright blue plastic chair. Her notebook with its carefully tabbed pages mocked his collection of jottings, all scribbled on various scraps of paper and held together by a rubber band.
“He’s got tapes today,” the captain whispered.
Jeannie Lawson, bundled in a t
an raincoat, tried to creep past the two of them with her head down. The Air Force captain said hello. She gave him a hesitant smile. In plain clothes and as an invited guest, Captain Albert Johnson strode in and took his seat near the back of the room.
“The tapes I’m going to show you this morning,” Stanley said, “concern another aspect of sexual relationships. The woman you will see in these tapes is a client of mine. She is not unusual, although I felt she might be when I first began working with her. Since then I’ve learned a lot about incest aside from what I already knew as a therapist treating male abusers, and so has she. You may feel that her situation is bizarre, that it is unreal. I assure you it is not. She has lost the greater share of her memory, she suffers from what might be called migraine headaches, although she feels no pain whatsoever. She claims to have no emotions or feelings, yet she expresses a wide range of both.
“Yes,” he said, seeing the puzzled faces before him. “The woman is a dichotomy. She may also be something more.”
Jeannie Lawson, still in her coat, shot him a questioning look and he nodded at her. She sat down quietly and removed the coat but kept it draped around her shoulders. She was seldom without a coat in public.
“Current figures on sexual child abuse,” Stanley went on, “are now at a definite twenty percent of our population, or fifty million. This year at least four thousand children will die from sexual child abuse and another three million new victims will be added to the rolls. Remember that these are reported cases only and that both men and women sexually abuse children, although women are not usually reported. Usually—mistakenly—it is felt that sexual experience for a young boy, with his sister, even with his mother, is macho or a joke—certainly not traumatic. Most offenders I treat, however, might not have sexually abused their own children had they not been abused by their parents, siblings, or some close adult authority figure. Some victims experience more trauma than the particular victim you are about to see, some less—dependent, it is believed, on the severity and the duration of the incest. In any case,” Stanley looked over the class as he turned on the video player, “this is what it’s all about.”
