by Truddi Chase
The woman sat to his right on the screen. Initially, she was the perfectly controlled business woman as she described having been in her mid-twenties and wondering where babies exited the human body, insisting that as a child she had no idea what a penis looked like, and had no memory of ever receiving candy or money for sex. That done, she got into what she called “flicks against my mind,” protesting that they had grown in the last few weeks, not only in number, but in duration and content.
“I’m scared to think of the hedgerow nearest the house, of the chicken house or the fields. There was never a day of peace, nothing was safe. I was fifteen when I dared complain to my mother the first time, to tell her I couldn’t spend one more day in that house, that I was leaving. About the only thing I recall when my mother and I confronted my stepfather with those years of hell was that he broke a broom over my back in his rage. He hurled a bowl of fresh made apple sauce at someone. That day, his killing instincts went full-throttle. I knew that if he got his hands on any one of us, he’d choke us until we had no more breath. My mother held him off with the rifle; she explained in deadly quiet tones that he had to leave.
“At some point afterward my half brother, who was twelve, found a small hole carved in the door of the closet separating my bedroom from that of my mother and stepfather. There was a pile of old sawdust on the floor under the hole. I felt shock, and then I felt dirty and immobile.”
The woman paused for breath, searched for control and found it. “I was so ashamed. I just shook, realising that while I hid in my room all those years in what I believed was privacy, my stepfather had stood there on the other side of the wall, peering through the knothole. In short, the bastard had made himself privy to my every movement.”
She shrugged and shuddered at the same time. “Right now, what bothers me most is the pink thing in the flicks. It’s there with all that wiry brush around it and it seems to pertain to me, and yet it doesn’t. The flicks won’t stand still long enough.”
“What pink thing?” Stanley asked innocently, and she tried to describe her stepfather’s male organ with a look of utter helplessness. Her hands balled into fists and she pounded them on yoga-positioned kneecaps.
“It’s like the animals, we lived on a farm, we had animals. I know we did! But I can’t remember a single god-damned one, and I know they were there. I hate animals, always have, always will, something about animals and my stepfather and me, but every time I think of them or him lately, I run, I go crazy. You want me to say that word, well, I will, I’ll show you I can do it!”
She couldn’t.
Captain Albert Johnson, along with the students, wanted to get up and yell, “Penis,” but he, like they, sat watching her adult face, still puzzled over the reference to the animals, and then realisation hit the class like a shock wave.
Albert marveled at the woman’s ability to tell Stanley about nap-time on a quilt as a three-year-old, and in the face of her inability to spit out the word “penis,” a few minutes ago, now to describe so explicitly her mother’s anger at her infantile, but driven, masturbation practices.
“My mother put me down daily for naps. She sat up in a chair, reading her magazines. I guess I was three, I don’t know. What I was doing seemed normal, but looking back, I realise that for me it was a frantic sort of thing, all-consuming. And it made her furious. She said I’d get pregnant. She screamed and she hit me; for some reason that one activity frightened her badly but I couldn’t stop.”
The woman put her head down but raised it almost immediately. “Some complete asshole,” she told Stanley angrily, “wrote a story and in it, he said small children don’t feel sexually aroused. Was he wrong, or was I abnormal?”
“He was wrong.” Stanley was writing furiously on his clipboard. “Children are capable of sexual arousal from birth, and if someone else is instructing and encouraging as your stepfather was, the need to masturbate can become an obsession.”
Albert thought he’d seen her face change drastically twice so far. Now it was almost purple, a masque of rage. She swung to face Stanley. The bangs flew back for an instant, revealing a pair of eyes so deadly that Albert recoiled.
“I’m trying,” she hissed, “to tell you the obscene first; I figure that way the rest will be easy. Like the vegetables we hate. Eat the shit first, right?”
“Right,” said Stanley, and uneasy smiles rippled across the faces of his students. Her voice, raspy and hate-filled, tore into the outhouse and her stepfather’s face at the opening under the bench and how after that she couldn’t force herself to use the bathrooms in school, preferring, one day, to sit in a pool of menstrual blood in a coed gym glass.
When she described her stepfather’s face, positioned between an open pail of body refuse and her bare bottom, a silence fell throughout the classroom.
“I never told anyone that, can you imagine?” She snarled and cried simultaneously, her face glistening with tears. “I’ve been married, for christ’s sake, and I never was able to tell that to a single soul, including my husband.”
She began a stream of cursing. As she got to “tit-toothed, prick-faced, pious, piss-ant bastard,” the black woman seated to Albert’s left let out a deep sound of appreciation.
“Right on, girl.”
Albert had to agree. At the precinct house the woman had stupefied his officers and detectives, but her presentation had been mild in comparison to this one.
“As a teenager, I got strep throat, flu, some really rotten colds. It bothered me being out of school so often, with a temperature, on the living room sofa, not up in my room. After each illness, I’d wonder what he’d done to me when my mother went out into the fields or to town, shopping. My memory is blank.”
“He was so goddamned big,” the woman was saying more calmly, but with controlled rage holding her features together, “no matter how strong I became or how tall I grew, he was a mountain and mean as a snake.”
She turned her attention to the day when she played alone in the spring mud by the tractor parked on a knoll in the truck garden, and the tractor slipped and slid over on its side, on top of her.
“They were all in the house, my mother saw it from the kitchen window. My stepfather came out and stood over me. I couldn’t open my mouth to ask for help. I knew . . .”
“What,” Stanley prodded gently, and the wild green eyes flared.
“Favour for a favour,” she whispered. “Like I could read his mind. If I were able to paint his face, they’d give me a scholarship to the Sorbonne. He was a maniac, I saw it in his eyes. He grinned and he stood there, and he didn’t lift a finger. How did I know what he was thinking so clearly, and why can’t I remember it?”
“Do you remember anything after you saw his face that day?”
“No.” She seemed ashamed of her answer. “It’s like trying to remember the rest of my life. Nothing is there.”
Jeannie Lawson put her head down on her desk and when she lifted it seconds later her face was drained and expressionless.
A sense of fear emanated from the disheveled woman on the videotape as she battled to control herself, placing a hand over her mouth for a second, pausing to stare wild-eyed at the floor. When she looked up a smile had replaced the twisted, pale slash of her mouth. She mentioned the headaches, how much worse they’d become the moment she’d sat down to write the journal notes, the amount of Extra-Strength Tylenol she took daily to absolutely no avail.
“They’re strange headaches,” she said. “They hurt but they don’t hurt.”
Albert didn’t know what to make of that but he estimated that Tylenol in such big doses could lay a horse low. Didn’t she read directions or warning labels? He remembered her face that day at the precinct, and how he couldn’t describe it afterward. It made him want to cry suddenly, to reach out and lift her bodily from the torment of the video screen. She wasn’t mature, wasn’t a businesswoman but something else entirely. His police
man’s mind wanted to know what. He listened to her talk, in that strangely childlike voice, about the black boy bringing her home from the orchards. Albert wanted to find him and wring his neck. But where else could he have brought her? Where else did abused kids go but right back to face more of the same?
An hour had passed; the video player was shut off. Pamela raised her voice to carry over the commotion.
“This woman,” she said, “speaks so concisely at the start of each session. She obviously has a logical mind. Admittedly, this is hard for her. But somehow I expect by her initial appearance, at least until she falls apart after ten minutes, a more orderly presentation of facts. I suppose I need orderly recall to grasp what went on in those two farmhouses. Isn’t there some therapy method that you could use to bring the memories out in chronological order?”
“Like the steps in a cake recipe, Doctor Phillips.”
It was the first time Jeannie Lawson had ever spoken in class. Stanley acknowledged her sarcasm by the briefest flicker of a smile.
“What I mean is,” Pamela was not oblivious to Stanley’s quick smile or the surprised eyes of the other students, “the therapist has enough problems without trying to sort out the order in which these atrocities occurred. Why does she skip around so much?”
“Because,” Stanley said, “for this client—to put it mildly—there are sore spots she’s never talked about before. Nor have these tapes been edited for any kind of logical progression. They’re one of a kind, unique in student training, just as the manuscript she’s writing will be unique when it is published. Do any of you realise how unconducive therapy is to orderly thinking on the part of a client under fire? The intensity stimulates a kind of free association. So a lot comes out, much more than if I tried to structure thinking to any great degree. There’s nothing ‘neat’ about psychotherapy. You might say that it holds up a mirror to a life being probed. As therapists, you may find eventually that no one’s life is orderly.”
“Deliver me from the profession,” Pamela snorted. “I’m signing up right now for a course in library science.”
General laughter broke across the classroom.
“Doctor Phillips?” A young woman with her hair in a frizz of pale gold tapped Stanley’s arm impatiently. “When your client was pointing out in her sketchbook the different locations of outbuildings at the second farm, her hand paused sometimes. Her voice would catch, and then she’d go right on with it as if nothing bothered her at all. I’d be interested to know if the stepfather did something to her in each of those particular places. They really seemed to upset her. One of them was the well, not the one by the back door of the second farmhouse, but the one way up in the back field. What could a well have to do with child sexual abuse?”
“I don’t know,” Stanley said. “She doesn’t know at this point. If any of you read the recent article in the paper about the two-year-old boy in Virginia who was beaten by his parents and died, you’d know that for him, the instrument of his destruction was a long-handled wooden spoon, in and of itself an innocent kitchen implement. The well seems innocent too. But something tells me that there was nothing innocent about anything on those two farms.”
“I hear,” a well-muscled young man, who wrestled for the university, spoke up behind Stanley, “that those parents will get off with maybe a one-thousand-dollar fine and no jail sentence. How can that be? In fact, whenever you read an article about kids dying from child abuse, more times than not the person responsible gets off scot-free.”
“Our laws have not caught up with what we as clinicians know to be the true state of affairs. The general feeling among the public is that children are possessions. If you want to mistreat them sexually and/or physically, then feel free. But your question brings up an interesting point. The two-year-old boy died. This woman probably endured a lot more; her abuse went on until she was sixteen. But she didn’t die and she didn’t become psychotic. Can anyone here tell me how she survived?”
“She’s obviously strong as hell. Or nuts.” The student wrestler’s hands dwarfed the notebooks in his lap. “Wouldn’t you have to be nuts to survive?”
“Not necessarily.” Stanley had been watching Jeannie Lawson and now, like a mother hen seeking to protect her young by distracting the enemy, Stanley moved further away from her. “The human mind is a strange and wonderful place. But there are those who possess minds that I can only call ‘wondrous’ and those minds do survive atrocities without falling prey to insanity. Can anyone tell me how?”
“You tell us,” the Air Force captain said.
“One thing I hope this course will give all of you, no matter what profession you go into, is the notion of questioning. Of being open to all avenues, no matter how far-fetched they may seem. Does anyone here, after seeing the tapes today, have another conclusion besides insanity?”
Jeannie Lawson raised her head from her chest and looked Stanley directly in the eye. “You questioned her at the end of those sessions,” she said. “It was almost as if she hadn’t been there most of the time, because she really didn’t connect with your questions. I got the feeling that very often she was almost humouring you, trying to be ‘good’ by pretending to know what you were talking about. Her voice changes, movements, and attitudes during the filming were all so different. If she has no memory, as you’ve said, then where is all this recall coming from? Multiple personality, if we’re searching for a label here, comes pretty close to her situation.”
“Does it?” Stanley looked innocent. The class was over. He watched his students gathering up their belongings.
“Multiple personality,” said a student at the classroom door, “is rare. Your client is a businesswoman. Her competence doesn’t tie in with the disablement that multiple personality caused people like Eve and Sybil.”
“Ah,” said Stanley. “Boxes, compartments, niches, neatness, chronological order.”
The student made a face at him and laughed. But she hesitated a moment as she turned to leave. Some of his students were destined one day to be excellent therapists. Their minds were open, questioning, perceptive. Others were there only for what they saw as a relatively easy credit. After viewing the tapes, what they had in common today was a single desire, rippling quietly in the minds of some, spoken aloud by others, firmly felt but just as firmly repressed by still others: “Kill the bastard.” The thought had been precipitated by the woman’s videotaped agony, exacerbated by Stanley’s reminder of the little boy who’d died in Virginia, nurtured by other reports they’d heard on television, and in some cases brought to the surface by personally remembered abuses suffered as children.
It would not occur to any of them for a long time that they’d been unable until now to voice true rage even for the major trespasses against themselves. Or to wonder why they’d needed to see what had been done to someone else in order to feel their own pain.
“Killing,” snapped a twenty-seven-year-old woman whose features were normally pleasant and placid, “is too damn good for him.”
Stanley filed her comment, and all others, away in his mind for that time when his client would be close enough to her own feelings, and have enough memory, to express her own justified anger. What, he wondered, would she say and do when the time came?
One person in the classroom grinned and was not shy about it as she listened to the opinions being spewed out around her. She seemed to have grown taller, more upright, inside her raincoat. Never during her lifetime had she thought that anyone cared enough to feel angry—as outraged as her classmates were—over things similar to those that had happened to her. She’d believed, before therapy, that she’d deserved it all and more, and had no right to complain, cry, or fight back. After therapy she’d felt alone, and numbness had set in. She looked around the classroom today, felt a wave of unaccustomed emotion and decided it was genuine within herself: affection for other human beings and a lot less fear of them. For a moment she just stood there wit
h students brushing or bumping against her in an effort to get out the door and on to the next class. Body contact no longer seemed a threat; in fact she almost welcomed it.
Stanley noted her emotion and laid a hand on her arm. He smiled and Jeannie Lawson did not move from under his grip. A wraith in white knee socks and hanging, damp brown hair, she shot him a conspiratorial glance and then was gone.
At lunch with Stanley afterward, Albert’s mind was as full as his plate. “That silent, easy, yoga position, what does it indicate to you, Stanley?”
“That I’m younger than she is, and I need help getting off the floor. I’ve seen her sit like that for two solid hours. Sometimes she can splay those legs out, one to each side, and sometimes it isn’t exactly a yoga position. When things get rough, she kneels with her forehead on the floor. We cut out the chairs, one week into filming.”
“When I saw her today, it reminded me of something. She sits easy on the floor, but not with the attitude of someone born to it, just someone who’s been forced to it for a long time, so long that it becomes second nature. Maybe you don’t get downtown a lot, Stanley. Watch the shoulders of the street people. The Vietnam vets hold themselves the same way, at least the ones who went through the high crap. Like they need their whole body compressed underneath them, controlled.”
“Control is what I have to break her of. That and a lot of other things. I’d like to get her to the point where the self-esteem can operate better. She’s going to become a full-fledged recluse before this is over.”
“What does she mean,” Albert asked, “about the headaches that don’t hurt?”
“Defense mechanism, it looks like, highly developed. To her mind, nothing happened if there was no pain.”
Stanley could not know how overly simplistic his answer to Albert was, nor how convoluted the real answer and what wide ramifications it held for society as a whole. Albert accepted Stanley’s reasoning without understanding it fully, and charged ahead, asking the questions uppermost in his mind.
