When Rabbit Howls

by Truddi Chase

  * * *

  Each person who emerged from cover of the Troop Formation brought into the woman’s awareness (or at least whatever awareness the Weaver allowed, for however long he allowed it) an oddity, a peculiarity, all their own. In the case of Olivia, the Well of Creativity, her creativity, long stored and newly awakened, became a heated, wondrous thing. Night after night and at odd moments during the day, the woman would see a pattern in almost anything and Olivia would promptly slide a completed painting into her mind; unique, individual—and sometimes upsetting. She brought more than individuality. She also brought memory, not in bits and shreds, but in “trays.” The Well of Creativity slept these days, but no longer only in the dank well which she had occupied since her death at the age of six. In some strange fashion, she now also occupied another sleeping place—close in the tuck of Mean Joe’s shoulder from where, perhaps, her essence was near enough and safe enough to make current contributions to the recall.

  Tray by tray, Olivia slid each night into the woman’s dead-tired mind an image of cylindrical stone walls and the odour of water long held captive at the bottom of them. It was a dank smell and hung during the daytime in the woman’s nostrils. She could not get rid of it.

  Olivia slid other things into the woman’s mind. One of them was the notion that there had been an old well up in the back field of the second farmhouse. The woman did not believe it when in one of the sessions, Stanley took out the sketchbook and showed her the drawing made several months ago. The well had been sketched in very carefully just at the corner of the hedgerow.

  The woman screamed that it was all a lie, that there had been no well other than the one by the kitchen door. But the sketchbook remained embedded in her mind along with a growing fear and for some reason, a much-heightened repugnance of anything vaguely resembling a snake. She could not drink anything unless she avoided looking into the glass or cup; the reflections were terrifying.

  Olivia, the Well of Creativity, slept on. But the “essence” of her was very busy nonetheless.

  Full of fear and renewed hope, the woman marched about admiring summer. Meanwhile, various Troop members took full pride in saying aloud “incest victim” and “multiple personality” to friends and relative strangers alike. They knew, as the woman knew only when the Weaver allowed it, that both were tags that applied to themselves like the clothes in their closets, the driver’s licenses and social security numbers. But Twelve, feeling marvelously adult, picked her audience carefully, trying the term MPD on Norman first.

  For a moment he didn’t say anything. Then he swore, a rapid string of obscenities, the same kind that made him furious when Sewer Mouth started up. Twelve paid him rapt attention, disappointed when he stopped for breath.

  “I don’t believe it,” he said. “Yes, I do believe it. It makes more sense to me than anything else I’ve heard. As a label and, yes, I know you hate them, it gives me a viewpoint. I never had a clear viewpoint where you were concerned. Our lives were simply chaotic. Now I damn well know why.”

  Twelve had always been kind. And mannerly and at times too pliant. She hung her head, thinking that would mollify him, and then she looked straight up, right into his eyes. “Listen, Norman. I’m through apologising. I was having a rough time, so I left. That’s all I can tell you.”

  Twelve heard the words coming out of her mouth. They weren’t hers, but she silently thanked whoever gave them to her, because they increased her feeling of adulthood. Norman, on the other hand, wondered why her voice tonight was so young, her attitude so innocent. She could do that, it seemed, swing from adult to child and back again. It made him nervous. Then he remembered; she’d just told him how she could do that. In the middle of wondering if she were doing it now, he began to sweat.

  “Everyone has bad times,” he said, wiping both palms on his handkerchief. “They work them out. You wouldn’t work anything out, you hated me.”

  The woman had surfaced in the middle of Norman’s words. “I don’t remember that,” she said. “Page wants to come over this weekend. Is that in line with your schedule?”

  “You asked me once tonight and I’ll ask you again; are you dangerous?”

  The woman gave the only answer she had. “I don’t know.”

  * * *

  On hearing the news, for someone in the Troop Formation was determined that they should, friends did not quite turn their backs; they inched away. To them, multiple personality meant insanity and they could not accept or connect that to this astute, articulate businesswoman. They spoke to her of vitamins, taking a vacation, and, most of all, putting the incest behind her. They told her not to dwell on it, that she must get on with her life. They did not understand that they were talking to many people, not one; nor would they believe it.

  With the woman’s letter in one hand and a double gin in the other, Morgan called from sunny Spain, to ask if she didn’t think he could make her happy. He did not ask what the experience she was going through was like, or if she were scared and miserable, or how it affected her sex life. He did demand to know if she hadn’t been ecstatic with him, if she couldn’t be ecstatic again. She hung up on him. It wasn’t worth an argument. Three days later she was trying to memorise a brand new, unlisted telephone number for herself, and figure out when she’d had the time to change it. Sharon accepted the new number with disgust and said the woman would be sorry later, that bachelors like Morgan were hard to find. “Impossible,” was the word Sharon used.

  “What are you doing? If you don’t want him and you don’t want anyone else, what do you want? You don’t look well. Life is too short to be lived this way. Maybe some time off from your job and away from this house would change your perspective. Honestly, I want to help you but I don’t know how.”

  The anguish showed in Sharon’s pinched face.

  “Everything will be alright, Sharon. Stanley says it just takes time. He doesn’t say how much.”

  * * *

  The woman awoke that night, entangled in a nightmare that included a face frozen inside a hoar-frost block of ice; a face so smooth and unlined that it might have been a one-dimensional painting. It wasn’t. The name “Olivia” echoed in the woman’s mind, over and over again, and with it, another Troop member sent her a message. She listened and began to understand, finally, that her pain was too evident to her friends, now that she’d learned to say ouch. Her friends, like most people, shriveled when pain entered the picture. She resolved to cool it with them and concentrate on the immediate. On winning.

  * * *

  Stanley called an extra session in the middle of the week. She’d lost weight, was increasingly tired looking and on edge. He took her, almost literally by the nape of her neck, pried her eyes open, and tried to make her look fully at her own hatred and the emerging reasons behind it. For, in spite of the evil things recalled, she still insisted that she couldn’t believe it.

  “There’s only one time in my mind when I did fully believe it,” she said. “And even then, all I remember was knowing that I had to get away from that farm; that if I stayed, the bad things would go on and on.”

  “What bad things?”

  “I don’t know,” the woman had begun to wring her hands and her voice came out in a low-pitched scream that ended on a note of embarrassment and desperation. “The only thought in my head was, Get away, you’ve got to get away from this place. Well, the chance came and I remember being determined to take it. I think I was thirteen. My father had been away in the war and then he’d stayed on longer, training pilots. The day he returned my mother gave me permission to walk up the road to the bus stop alone to meet him. The difference between him and my stepfather was so apparent that morning. While both men were big, my father was taller, more broad-shouldered, with curly dark brown hair and warm brown eyes. He came swinging down the road, happy looking and handsome in his Army uniform. When he hugged and kissed me, I couldn’t stop crying. He asked me, “What’s wron
g, tell me. If anything is wrong, I’ll change it. I’ll take you away.”

  “So you told him?”

  “Are you crazy? I couldn’t. He looked too clean. I was too dirty. I knew that if I told him, he’d hate me, it was too shameful, all of it. For another thing, when I was four and he came to visit, my mother used to hide me under the bed and tell him that I wasn’t home. I used to cringe with my nose in the dustballs, knowing that she was lying to him. Lies are bad. It was as if I’d lied to him myself. How could I ask him a favour in the face of such deceit? And do you think he would have believed me? I hardly believed it myself. If he had believed it and taken me away from there, another bad thing would have happened.”

  There was silence, except for the sound of tears. Stanley had taken note of the childlike words and voice, interspersed with the more adult tones. Someone very small clung to the idea that she was to blame for everything, including the lies told by a mother determined not to let go of her child.

  “I’d have been hurting my mother, breaking my promise to her if I left, not that there was anyplace to go. She said my father was bad, shiftless, lazy, a womaniser; that if he took me away to live with him, I’d see his real side. She told me there’d be his mother to contend with, too; her rules and regulations and no freedom at all. And of course if I ever left, my mother would die. In that one moment with my head on my father’s shoulder, something else went through my mind, too. She and my stepfather had told me so often that I was stupid, that to make up my own mind seemed dangerous. I couldn’t trust myself to tell my father anything. I guess incest victims have to get past that, before they open up to anyone. Feeling dumb, I mean. I had to get past it with you, Stanley, and I’m not sure I really have.”

  Her nose dripped. He handed her Kleenex. Mucus ran into the tears and the tears ran into her mouth and down her chin.

  “You’re doing very well,” Stanley said, “and you’re not dumb.”

  “That sounds nice, but someday they’ll cart you away because obviously your perceptions are twisted.”

  He heard what sounded like real laughter and then she started to cry again.

  “It’s a good thing,” she said, “that I don’t miss my father and don’t care if I see him again. I did a bad thing in high school and he’ll never forgive me. I didn’t invite him to graduation. It would have made my mother angry; she let me know that she’d supported me and that my graduation was her honor, not his. You don’t do bad things to people, Stanley, and expect to get away with it. No. My father wouldn’t waste spit on me, today, let alone extend a welcome.”

  She refused to buy Stanley’s conclusion that her father bore no grudge, that there was nothing for him to forgive, and that her mother had been cruelly manipulative. She was up off the cushions and at the door, carry-all purse in hand.

  “Break time,” she said.

  SEVENTEEN

  TONY gave the signal from the control booth. The woman wore a look of embarrassment.

  “Before we get into this,” she said, “I need to ask you something. These dates, these calculations, they just come into my head. How can I be sure they’re right?”

  “Doesn’t matter. Most of us are eighty-percenters, meaning that utter perfection is not our boss. You, or someone in the Troop Formation, strives for one hundred percent, and you drive yourself nuts doing it.”

  “Stanley, it’s the only way I know. The mother—”

  “Screw the mother,” Stanley said.

  The woman gasped, with shock and then with grudging admiration. She laughed. “You’ll go to hell for that.”

  She began to speak, grimly but with a detached air, using first person singular, because that, along with various calculations, was what someone far back in her mind gave her.

  “I have no idea how my father arranged for my mother’s permission, but when I was between six and thirteen, I tasted the freedom of two weeks each summer, during vacations with him and his mother, my paternal grandmother. They lived together in a two-bedroom apartment up over a Jewish delicatessen.

  “My mother warned me each time beforehand to behave myself, that grandmother was a stickler for manners and neatness, that she wouldn’t put up with my nonsense; one false move would send me right back home. On my first visit, the neatness was obvious. Grandmother’s kitchen got scrubbed daily with strong bleach; the floors, the windows, all the appliances glowed, not with wax but with her scrubbing and polishing. On Saturdays she got up before the sun to begin the wash; pre-soaking, pre-sudsing, then the bit with the wringer, squeezing my father’s shirts and each white towel or sheet twice, hanging it all on the clothesline that ran on pulleys from the apartment to the next building. But she let me sleep late and I’d wake up to the smell of fresh coffee and frying bacon.”

  The woman did not look at Stanley, she talked to the floor. “I slept with my father for those two weeks each summer. It was nice. He had a double bed, and I lay curled up against his back under the covers, counting the glories of the day, looking forward to the next one. No matter what my mother said about him, I loved my father; he was mine. A wonderful man with a hearty laugh and big hands that took my small ones in his. I liked that. My father made me feel as though I was a good child.

  “This is so clear to me, as if it were yesterday; so is the shame I felt for years afterward. There lay my father, warm and protective beside me. He and my grandmother and I had just come back from a marvelous dinner in a restaurant. We’d discussed what we’d do tomorrow; the downtown zoo and the sea lions and shopping in the art supply store.

  “I recall exactly, because it is burned into my brain, the sentences floating in my mind just before sleep: ‘My father is such a wonderful man. He loves me and I love him so much.’ My hand stirred under the blankets, found my father’s back. I hugged him. Funny, but at that age there was no conflict of emotion; just one-line reasoning, clearly defined. As I lay there, I knew I adored him, wanted to give him something to express my pleasure over all the goodness he’d given me that day. I knew what it must be. My stepfather demanded and enjoyed the same thing.

  “I told myself, I wouldn’t do this for my stepfather, just reach out and offer this, because he’s vile and nasty and I hate him. My hand found my father. Right there. And I squeezed. My father didn’t respond positively. He took my hand away, moved away, lay on his tummy, and went to sleep. I don’t know if I drifted off then, because I was almost asleep anyhow. I don’t know how I felt the next day or how he treated me.

  “My grandmother took me into her bed for the rest of that visit. I never slept with my father again. I lay with her the next night, reading and eating Oreo cookies with her; there were crumbs in my grandmother’s bed, with the sheets so tight, the linens smelling of talcum and lilacs. I never forgot her kindness but the memory of what I had done burned so bright. I was bad, Stanley, you can’t say I wasn’t. How had I gotten to be so bad when I wanted to be so good?”

  “Baloney,” Stanley said, wishing that his casualness would take the pain out of her face. “Most men are taught to express love only with the penis. Same thing you were taught.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Never more,” Stanley said. “And with that attitude, men have a tough time convincing women they’re worth more than a one-night stand. But we don’t wipe out childhood training if we don’t understand it first. You’re beginning to understand what most people never do.”

  “Why don’t you ever laugh at me, or just tell me I’m crazy? Everything I say to you can’t make sense.”

  “You aren’t crazy and I’m afraid it all makes sense.”

  “Nobody else ever told me that. You mean I might be right, sometimes? Can that be true?!” She sat hugging herself and grinning but quickly, almost with guilt, turned to the business at hand. “My grandfather said I was right, a lot. I loved him, did I ever tell you?”

  So far, Stanley had a long list of things and people the Troops ha
ted. He dug out the infinitesimal mental list of things that were loved and added her maternal grandfather to it.

  “My mother and her mother, his other daughter and his two sons—talked about him in whispers that never reached his ears. He wasn’t to their liking, not the average, grey-haired gentleman who held grandchildren on his lap and nodded tenderly over sticky fingers. He was tall, with flaming red hair and cornflower-blue eyes and ruddy complexion that said outdoors, and pubs and brawls. He could do anything, including steal all the very expensive wood he loved to work with. On his good days, he built my grandmother’s house and made the furniture, hand-rubbing it and the pillars he’d carved for the staircase. Otherwise he was gone, taking his Irish fighting spirit off to some downtown bar, and that sat ill with the family. Once he got so drunk for so long, he spent every nickel of the two thousand dollars that would have paid off my grandmother’s mortgage. Somehow I loved him all the more for that bit of bravery in the face of my grandmother.

  “Grandfather saw my feisty side as it marched to the cadence in my own head; the one that looked him directly in the eye and said no or yes as only I pleased. That’s when I was a baby; and after I was maybe ten, I never saw him again. I don’t know where he went. Just away.

  “The story was that on my mother’s side, the women had been servants—maids in some old Irish castle before they came to this country during the potato famine. Grandfather had been a carpenter. Listening to those stories from the top of their staircase, their voices thick with brogue, drifting up to me in the shadows—it was fun but not as much fun as being with my grandfather. In fact, the stories were vague and so was the brogue, but I’ll never forget him.

  “We used to sit on the front porch, everything dark and quiet with a soft breeze—I liked to watch him. When he noticed that the rattling of his newspaper infuriated me, he did it again, laughing. His eyes were kind and full of spirit behind the laughter, and I knew that. So after I’d punched him with a small fist to let him know I had spirit too, he’d give me a sip of his beer. But only when no one was looking.