When Rabbit Howls

by Truddi Chase

  The woman’s hands shook at the mention of the flatbed car, and her eyes darted from side to side. Her face took on a curious, listening attitude, as if she heard things outside the studio. She gave Stanley a list of leftovers filched from the kitchen cupboards.

  “Cupboards, cupboards, hide,” the words left the woman’s mouth in a chanting lisp. She winced and went right on. “Once I ate jelly doughnuts from the two-week-old baked goods we bought for the pigs. The doughnuts smelled like the burlap sacks my stepfather brought them home in. When my stepfather caught me stealing them, he called me a sow, a fat, greedy pig.”

  The face Stanley saw from the corner of his eye had almost “melted” as if there were no bones under the skin.

  She started to repeat “cupboard” over and over holding her head in her hands and uttering a low, moaning sound. “Oh, damn, oh, hell,” she was weeping and cursing, “where is that coming from? There were cupboards in the pantry at the second farmhouse and cupboards in the kitchen. I smell mice right now. I see a tin can, we used to nail the lids over the mouse holes; it’s dark in the cupboards.”

  “Did anyone put you in the cupboards?” Stanley was casual.

  “No,” the lispy, small voice told him, “I hid there, behind the pots and pans.”

  He didn’t recognise that voice or the quickly changing features that had accompanied it. “Were you playing in the cupboards?”

  The answer came in a rough, adult voice. “Hell no, man. We were scared.”

  “Night and day . . .” Elvira, whose name he didn’t know but whose voice he recognised, along with her abandoned body language, sang the words in an alto, to a Southern baptist beat.

  * * *

  During the break Stanley made a phone call to Marshall’s hotel. The message read to him was, “Be cool, see you for drink 3:00 P.M. today.” Stanley clenched his hands all the way back to the studio. Ever mindful of his instructor’s “river theory,” he pushed the woman harder, reminding whoever glared at him that they didn’t have enough recall at this point, that if someone, anyone, would only elucidate on what was termed the “flicks against my mind,” they’d get further. Things grew more confusing. At one point he heard what seemed to be the woman, explaining her mother’s interrogation tactics; how she’d held her daughter by the hair of her head, alternately yanking and screaming questions. The woman sounded bewildered as she tried to name what she’d done to cause her mother’s rage.

  Brat, who was eight years old, simmered just behind the woman. Brat seldom appeared in public, she was too volatile, unable to stand still long enough, to understand much except the rage inside herself. Her rage expressed itself in tantrums, instant and full-blown at any cross word. For Brat, the world and the people in it meant torture, misery, degradation. She remembered the agony of being accused and punished by the mother, while being guilty of nothing. Neither she nor the woman had committed the overblown “crimes” the mother had ranted about. They had simply not been present at those times.

  Unknown to Stanley, this young Troop member’s confusion, her feeling of dehumanisation and long-suppressed anger had now welled up. Identical emotions swept throughout the Troop Formation, and he spent the next fifteen minutes like a spectator at a hockey game, viewing a composite picture of how not to raise a child.

  Stanley decided to bring up the subject of Mean Joe.

  “Once his size and power is clear, Mean Joe can be scary to people who don’t understand him. We’ve written about Mean Joe in the manuscript pages.”

  “I’m sorry,” Stanley said, wishing he had a name to go with a voice. “I don’t think I read it. Tell me.”

  “You don’t read very fast, do you?”

  “Not as fast as you write,” Stanley told her, thinking of the growing backlog of manuscript in his office.

  “You’ll have to shape up.” For once, Elvira wasn’t laughing. She told Stanley that Mean Joe had blown the mother’s mind.

  It occurred to Stanley that if Mean Joe, a male, had presented the mother with a boy’s more aggressive attitude and behavior, then she’d have been startled, to say the least.

  “Usually,” Elvira said, “we got beaten and worse, when we crossed the mother. But then one day Mean Joe was there, I mean he was just there. Things turned around after that. Of course, Mean Joe couldn’t be there all the time but when he was, watch out. The mother didn’t dare smack him. People look at Mean Joe today. His voice, his size, it scares them. But Mean Joe wouldn’t hurt anyone unless they tried to stomp on one of us. Besides, the Peacemaker is always with him when he’s out, more to calm whoever he’s talking to than to protect them from his wrath. Mean Joe isn’t a wrathful person.”

  The Peacemaker, Stanley thought, someone who made peace in Mean Joe’s wake, another of what seemed to be checks and balances in a complicated, internal process? He chose to ignore the reference and question something else.

  “Somehow I get the impression that you enjoyed the mother’s discomfort. You’re smiling. Did you enjoy it?”

  Elvira disguised her scrutiny of him by listening in her own mind to the Talking Heads do a drawn-out version of “Take Me to the River.” That way if Stanley broke bad, if he chastised her for enjoying the mother’s misery, she could just fade into the music. She couldn’t be hurt if she didn’t hear him. Nor would she ever tell him anything else. The music in her mind ended. She took a shot.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I enjoyed it. No excuses, man, I hung on every yelp out of her mouth. Like a really great piece of music, you know? Something that sinks right into the old bones!” The pleasure on her face was plain; she punctuated it with a sound that might have made Little Richard envious.

  Stanley laughed and by so doing, became less the enemy, more the-possible-confidant-being-tested. She still wouldn’t give her name but she would, throughout the balance of the session, give the names of several other Troop members, their activities and fears. Let him guess, she thought, that’s all he’s doing, guessing. He can’t kill what he can’t specifically identify.

  “Reading was safe,” she said in her street-smart way, with the music in her mind going full blast. She recited snatches of poetry having to do with moonlight. One of them was “The Highwayman,” and she did not stumble over the words. The imagery of a renegade highwayman travelling on a moonlit landscape yanked Stanley back to his high school Prose and Poetry books. Her voice, aside from an ever-present bravado, was almost wistful and quite reflective. Stanley was sure, however, that more than wistfulness and reflection lay behind it.

  “The mother hated that romantic streak in us. One night, Sixteen, when she was thirteen—Does that confuse you, Stanley?—leaned out the bedroom window. The moon was full, so pale a blue, a colour no one can mix, no matter how hard we try. It washed over the countryside that night; quiet, no movement anywhere. We smiled to ourselves. And the next morning the mother hissed: ‘Did you sleep without your nightgown on last night? You know that’s not nice, the rule is you sleep in your nightgown, you keep your clothes on at all times.’ And the mother didn’t look at us but kept her eyes down and got very quiet and then nervous, telling us that we had no control, that we’d never had any.”

  “Us?” Stanley couldn’t resist it. He knew the person in front of him wasn’t referring to the half brother or the half sisters, but to herself and the others with her. It was like asking the rain why it was wet. She looked at him as if he were dense and said that it was only an “expression.” But wariness haunted the eyes; he sensed a withdrawal in the body movements, caution behind the good humour. Immediately there was another change.

  The laughter came in giant, unrestrained waves, washing over the woman’s body long before it reached her throat.

  “Why am I laughing? What did I do wrong those times? I wish I knew.” She held onto her face with both hands, trying to ask over the hilarity why her mother had hated her so much. But her jaw dropped and the voice became sluggish,
the words thick and forced.

  “Do you want to stop now?” He kept the concern from his tones.

  “No! But there’s something wrong. My arms are full of needles, the room is swaying and my head roars, Stanley, I feel as if my hands are moving in molasses!”

  The only thing he could conclude was that some sort of chemical imbalance had taken place within her body—too many persons coming and going all at once and, in the process, somehow tripping the delicate balance. He watched her fighting to regain a footing, struggling to tell him, over the continuing laughter, that her mother had never failed to drive her back into the “hole” and make her cringe after an outburst.

  “She treated me at times,” the woman said with the same thick voice as before, “as if I were a wild thing in a cage.”

  “Maybe it seemed that way to her.” Elvira smiled. “Mean Joe could scare the mother just by looking at her. She thought Mean Joe was wild but he was just different. The drummer he listened to did a mean beat and took no crap from nobody.”

  Behind the words there was an unyielding sense of humour, the ability to hang on, unperturbed. The mind producing the slang expressions was quick; it would give only so much at a time and no more. Stanley knew he was being tested with the few sentences about Mean Joe and did not press it, fearing to destroy the progress already made. Spurred by his reticence, she leaned forward to ask if he liked chocolate chip cookies dunked in scotch, Francis Bacon’s paintings, and rock music. Sensing the opportunity to create a bond, Stanley took a deep breath and said yes.

  Elvira smiled to herself under the angular swath of hair that partially concealed her eyes; Stanley really wasn’t a bad sort. Trusting him or anybody, though, could be a mistake. Well, what the hell. She snapped her fingers to a silent beat, moving her body from the waist in a short burst of amazing abandon, telling him about “that woman’s,” meaning the mother’s, criticism of Elvis Presley’s “lurid gyrations.” The mother, she said, had been horrified and threatened to “shut his mouth for good” by turning off the television set.

  “Are you talking about your mother?” Stanley asked.

  “You can’t play that game with me, honey,” Elvira said. “That was never my mother.”

  Her next words reminded Stanley of the white collage hanging in the woman’s foyer. First her voice and then a number of others told him of a national art exhibit in which their high school had participated. Apparently they’d turned in over a hundred and fifty entries and won awards for all. But one particular watercolour of a tree, their first attempt at the medium, earned them a coveted gold key. He felt a shudder at hearing the description of the tree—eerie, cold, and twisted into itself, standing in yellow moonlight on an empty moor. The roots, he was told, could not be discerned from the branches, because they intermeshed, clinging together. Somehow he felt the symbolism was linked, client to tree. Had whoever painted it understood what they were painting, had they done it intentionally? “Does anyone paint anymore?” he asked.

  “Thirty-eight paintings in two months’ time last year, for a one-woman show. In acrylics. Did ’em all, right in the middle of full-time real estate.”

  Silence. The woman’s blank face made him uncomfortable. He asked who painted.

  “We don’t know,” Twelve said. “When one of us begins, sometimes one of us is creating. But at other times it’s as if someone here, someone we don’t know at all, takes over. Whatever goes on the canvas then, comes from that person. Catherine paints all by herself and she writes, always in a wry style, very sophisticated and cryptic. She wouldn’t let anyone guide her, except . . .”

  “Who guides Catherine?”

  “I can’t tell you. When the time is right, Catherine will tell you herself.”

  Silence, and again the withdrawal.

  “I hear the mother had what might be called an enlightening tongue,” Stanley prodded. “Is that true?”

  Elvira proceeded to mimic remembered phrases.

  “‘I didn’t have to give birth to you; I chose to and it’s a debt never to be forgotten or escaped, do you hear me? I want you to act like a lady, walk without sashaying, lower your voice, speak up, act adult! What are you smiling at, why are you frowning, what are you doing up there in your room all day long, why can’t you be good, why are your grades so bad? You think life is hard now, wait until you get out in the world and you’ll know what hard is! It’s a cold world out there. What are you crying for, keep that up and I’ll give you something to cry about!”’

  Elvira described the first date, a prom. The dress for it was long and white and the motherly chat beforehand turned into a diatribe on what good girls didn’t let bad boys do. To the mother, all boys were bad; so were the girls who went out with them. The lecture didn’t dim Sixteen’s joy and astonishment that a boy had actually asked for a date. But the stepfather found out about the date, and grabbed her in the kitchen one night. Enraged, he said that if she went to that prom, he’d tell the boy she was a whore.

  The woman surfaced just before Elvira’s last words, looking the way she felt: off-balance. “For weeks before the dance,” she said, “I wanted to die because stepfather’s actions just didn’t make sense to me.”

  “You had no idea what he meant by ‘whore,’ in relationship to yourself, you didn’t understand why he didn’t want you to date, to be with a boy?”

  She doesn’t know. Stanley wrote it down on the clipboard, digging the pen into the paper. If his assumptions were correct, here was the heart of Multiple Personality Disorder. Her eyes at this moment, no matter what knowledge various other voices had imparted to him this day or any other, were empty of that knowledge. They reflected only the shock he’d seen growing in the last hour, the surge of disbelief at what her vague suspicions had to mean.

  It seemed that one minute he heard “her” stating point blank the stepfather’s intentions, as if “she” had some recall of the incest and the events surrounding it. The next minute “she” would break into her own conversation, exhibiting no knowledge at all about the stepfather or anyone else in the family. At those times, what he ran up against was a blank face, a doubting look, an unawareness of things discussed in past sessions or even moments before.

  Catching which person was the woman and which was another self; delineating when the woman vanished while speaking a whole series of thoughts or merely, in some instances, a single sentence, was a chore he didn’t think he’d mastered. How was he to determine exactly how much she knew, when he could not always determine which one she was? The face in front of him bore the look of confusion, unfamiliarity with her surroundings. For a moment he doubted that she knew her own name, or would understand if he asked her. He was silent, unwilling to disturb the vulnerability, the fear he was sensing.

  “Stanley,” she didn’t seem conscious of the tears on her face, “this is the first time my stepfather’s face, his expression in the kitchen that day, has ever been clear to me. Why did he act like that?”

  “Whore.” The word was said by a small voice and repeated. But then the voice changed and wet green eyes looked up at him. The voice carried a note of desperation and self-doubt, asking if he’d ever treated a victim who didn’t cry.

  “No, not one,” he said, and told her that her childhood was bizarre, that her stepfather, and possibly even her mother, had been “sick.” He hoped the woman heard him; it had become difficult to pick her out in the crowd.

  * * *

  Shaking with exhaustion, with eyes gritty from mascara after more than a solid hour of crying, the woman drove home from the session, hating the traffic and driving between tractor trailers and buses with her eyes shut. Each time no crash occurred, she gasped a sigh of relief. She’d been driving for many years and didn’t understand how her record could be perfect when she was such an imperfect, frightened driver. She’d told Stanley about her driving. He hadn’t known what to say.

  Today’s session, like all th
e rest, had been almost completely enervating, a result of unconscious straining to remain “surfaced” and in control. The woman struggled daily for that same control, unaware of what she struggled against. The sessions totalled three hours a week, and the recuperation time afterward ate into a calendar that never contained enough days in any one month. Eventually she would wonder why her days were so crammed with scheduled events and duties that seemed only vaguely to transpire; then she would laugh at the obvious answer. She wasn’t laughing now. Her entire body ached, her head roared, and always there was that awful sense of imbalance, the feeling of imminent danger, the fear of unnamed things. All of it was mixed with the certainty that any second she would topple over.

  Summer was in full swing; a hot, humid blanket covered the countryside, baked her front lawn, and threatened to burn the grass trying to grow there. On her front porch she fumbled with the house key, wanting to get inside where things were more familiar, where she could throw off the effects of the session. But from the corner of one sore, gritty eye, she saw it, movement at her feet. The key lay forgotten in her hand.

  Lamb Chop bent down, slid to hands and knees, fascinated by the earthworm making its way across the front porch. Gently, she guided the worm onto the palm of her hand. She had always loved them. Twelve had a whole bunch in the big aquarium in the living room. Lamb Chop would have brought the worm inside and added it to Twelve’s collection but the edict had gone out: no strange worms; you’ll destroy the chemical balance.

  A half-hour disappeared somewhere; time seemed to do that, drift away like vanishing smoke. For a second the idea of smoke hung in the woman’s mind . . . then came the smell of it, burning leaves. She saw the stepfather, the flatbed car, saw the hiding place under it, understood for the first time that the flatbed car was an open trailer on which the buzz saw had been hauled around the orchards so that tree branches could be pruned. Why was the stepfather waiting as she got off the school bus, why was she getting off here at the orchard instead of the house where the mother would have an afternoon snack ready?