by Truddi Chase
“We’d sit there together, content. The adult remarks from inside the house carried to us on the breeze; gossip, bits and pieces of who in the family was a scoundrel, a tramp, a boozer; how my uncle Tom was headed for Sing Sing sure as we sat there; and how could uncle Bill have married that silly twit who dyed her hair blond? Anybody could see she was a black-haired Italian. And if my aunt Katherine didn’t shape up, she would go down in family history with a scarlet letter on her bosom. Who had she taken up with now? Knowing looks were eventually exchanged between grandfather and me. We’d get up, go out past the railroad tracks for a walk, an ice cream cone. It was the last time I ever felt truly safe with anyone. Grandfather didn’t know how bad I was; and I feared nothing from him. Grandfather hated the stepfather; he seldom visited us on the farm.”
Who had been talking? Stanley didn’t think it was the woman. He said how nice it was that the Troops have known an appropriate male role model.
“Appropriate?” The voice was a growl. “I don’t want to hear that word; it sucks, man. Appropriate. It grates on my nerves; it’s an insult to my intelligence. Exactly who is the high chief of ‘appropriateness’? If everybody in the damn world ran around considering how ‘appropriate’ everything was before they took action, we’d be back in the Dark Ages.”
Even without a name, he recognised Ten-Four. “Are you a man?” he asked.
“Hell, no, I don’t go for either sex, got that? Sex is a waste of time. First you got to figure out who you want, then you got to figure out if they want you and if the whole thing is ‘appropriate.’ You wind up, in any relationship, spending all your time wondering what you’re doing wrong and when you’ll get caught at it and spit on. Screw that. Give me a boardroom of men, let me see the whites of their eyes while I’m dealing the deck. The only way you can ever beat a man is in business, where they’re flat-out dumb.”
Stanley wiped the smile off his face and consulted his clipboard. Names or no names, Ten-Four hadn’t been the only one speaking this time. He’d also spotted Nails and a hint of Sewer Mouth, and knew that somehow, even the one referred to in the manuscript pages as “the Outrider,” had been verbalising. What had set them off? The incident with the natural father, obviously. He was unsure of the Outrider’s origin but something told him that for Ten-Four, Nails, and Sewer Mouth, the trauma of that incident might have “given birth” to selves of their nature; a trio who eschewed sexual relationships, either male or female, and henceforth channeled all energies into work and business. Stanley ignored the cold look he was getting and the conversation continued. The voice, full of barely restrained anger, belonged to Nails.
“When grandfather went away, I began drawing a wall of silence around myself, tighter than before. People say my powers of concentration are terrific. They aren’t. I just honed to a fine art the ability to shut out unpleasantness. Go ahead, scream at me. I’ll never let you know, provided the game is begun correctly, that your words hit home inside. But if I begin the game incorrectly, then it’s all over. Adrenaline surges through my body, enough, it seems, to let me lift the Empire State Building in a single heave. In that moment, I’m like Mean Joe; we both know the strength of which we are capable, the leashed rage within. And so we’re smart enough to treat it gingerly. With respect.”
The pain in her face had faded. First misery over the loss of her grandfather, and then rage, had replaced it. Whoever this was, she wouldn’t, perhaps couldn’t, weep. The word “game” had been spit out, as if it tasted vile.
“During childhood the power to shut things out got me into deeper trouble. A simple request from the mother to go down to the cellar for a bucket of coal would find me standing in the cellar twenty minutes later in absolute fright and frustration, while I tried to remember, was it coal or eggs she wanted? No matter which I decided on, I was wrong.
“Or the morning my stepfather turned extra rotten, and wouldn’t give me privacy as I got ready for school. I didn’t want to look at him. So I shut him out of my mind along with my mother’s voice. As I went into the kitchen, sleepy and not yet alert, she’d told me, ‘Please use the bucket on your left, to wash your face.’ The bucket on the left was full of well water, the one on the right, fresh creme from that morning’s milking. My stepfather stood in the kitchen doorway, watching me with a smile. He scared me. A few seconds later shaking my head, blindly trying to rid myself of creme in my nose and eyes, I couldn’t see which one of them hit me. Don’t tell me I was good, Stanley. I did wrong, bad things all the time. Creme cost money. My mother worked hard; my mistakes cost her plenty.”
“What did they cost you?” Stanley asked her.
“No. I can’t go along with you. It all seemed normal to me, the way we lived. They were right and I was wrong. They said so. Except when I went with my father each summer. My mother told me not to get any high-flown ideas; but that’s when my life began to look odd. For those two weeks, things were totally different. By the end of the two weeks each summer I exploded with guts, courage, determination, and with candy, new clothes, books, art supplies—and too many new debts. Believe me, whatever you get in this world, you pay for.”
Stanley was being bombarded with new information faster than he could sort it out. Once more he’d discovered that the person speaking bore no resemblance to his client as he thought he knew her, yet she spoke in the first person singular.
“Bad debts,” she said, grimly. “There was guilt because the half brother and half sisters hadn’t gotten away to enjoy what we had. Once we got back home it was hard to sit around enjoying the spoils, knowing we’d made out like bandits. Except that anything we showed up with enraged the stepfather. He broke what he could and threw the rest away.”
The woman seemed to emerge then. Stanley knew she hadn’t heard a word of the conversation. She talked about her father and having loved him enough to eat everything on her plate, pretending to be blasé with cauliflower which she wouldn’t touch at home. “He said once that I’d look good in a feed sack, that it didn’t matter what I wore. I was shocked and couldn’t believe him. I learned from those visits that unless I behaved like the perfect child my grandmother and father would hate me, and if I seemed sad or told them one word of what went on at home I would never be allowed to go there again.”
“How did you figure all that out?” Stanley asked.
“My mother told me.”
“I see.” Stanley saw too well.
They both agreed on one thing; some of the tape recordings she made at home were scratchy, barely intelligible, and his own from the session were sometimes not much better. Tony still had problems with the video sound and picture. The woman looked bemused, then skeptical; her eyes changed colour as a smile crept over her face, but it was directed at the floor. Stanley waited for someone to say something, anything. They didn’t.
* * *
Back home, the woman trotted into her kitchen. The top of her skull began to thump and she closed her eyes against an ache of impossible proportions. If she had ever felt anything vaguely resembling pain, it had been that ache through the years, at long distance, as a sort of “threat.” She gazed out the window into a backyard draped in whispering emerald ivy over a sea of white gravel. Easy things to care for. One did not need to leave the confines of the house in order to tend them. No reason for sweating with hoe and bug sprays, exposed to strange eyes.
She made two slices of toast and slathered them with sweet butter and wild blackberry preserves. Standing at the window holding a cup of steaming tea, a hanging fern from a rafter high above brushed the back of her neck. Shadows darted on the walls and danced closer to her taut body. Hot tea spilled onto her hand from a cup that rattled in the saucer. She felt nothing.
In the Tunnel, the Gatekeeper gave the signal.
The signal had been a strong one; the Troop member whom it had summoned was bearing down with the whole of his being. The woman fought back, lifting the teacup to her lips and trying
to smile. It never materialised.
Ivy blew in the garden outside, the leathery leaves brushed and rubbed against each other. The sound, muted as it was through the window, did not penetrate the detachment she acknowledged but did not feel.
In the garden, a squirrel shot under a pile of dead leaves that trembled atop his quivering body. Inside the house the woman stood stock still, gazing out at nothing. Inside her mind there was nothing. No memory, nothing. She had no experience with which to compare that lack; no emotion of her own with which to feel terrified, or even annoyed. For a very small second in time, she looked out of the prison of her own space and knew that except for when the others gave her something, she did not exist.
* * *
All during the latter part of June, the reflection in anything liquid drew panic around her neck like a terrorist’s rope. An approaching animal, no matter how small or innocuous, even the sight of one in a magazine, brought on a frenzy of repulsion, of sexual aversion. She had no hint that these episodes were connected to the child abuse. Her own instincts were useless in deciphering the meaning behind them: first because she had no instincts of her own, and second, because the incidents behind the terror had not happened to her, but to the other selves. Selves who were only now getting ready to paint a fuller picture of life in the two farmhouses. Olivia II, the Well of Creativity, would paint the first one and thereby reveal, among other things, the depths of Catherine’s long-held secret.
The Troops wrote through her and around her. They wrote whether she was “present” or not. They were determined to see their efforts in print, to dissolve the mystery and myth surrounding both incest and multiple personality. The pages grew, based on notes made and scenes written, during the night, on lunch breaks, and while waiting for builders and settlement attorneys. They mushroomed at the hairdresser’s, while Catherine called for a pale ash-blond colour and Ten-Four confused things by demanding brassy, harvest gold.
The woman did not resent the long hours as much as her inability to stay awake and participate. But even as she laboured among them, anxious to keep pace, the words rang in her head, night after night. For you, there isn’t any more.
One day the woman would realise that she did not even go to the bathroom. Her people ate; they went to the bathroom. Such knowledge at this point in therapy would have cut her adrift. Those who knew the truth were wisely waiting to tell her.
For now, the woman listened to television commercials extol the virtues of Preparation-H and Ex-Lax and wondered why she didn’t need either. The closest she’d ever come to dealing with body functions had been the time during a very long car ride when she’d noticed an odd discomfort and found a Tampax inside herself, still in its cardboard tube.
Once more, a vague premonition of disaster seemed to be following the woman. She took her fright to Stanley one day and listened to him carefully. Afterward she couldn’t remember what he’d said but in the following days there were brief moments when the terror did recede and she half-believed that it would all get better.
What little the woman did comprehend of the stacked manuscript pages in the gallery escaped her vaguely puzzled mind, like wood-smoke in an open field.
The minute but significant cooperative force building up between herself and those Troops who had now evidenced was double-edged. The daily bombardment of their individual natures on each other occasionally flooded the woman, along with each one’s desire not to attract attention. Each one believed that his or her behavior was perfect—and that the others needed to tone it down, shut up, or go away entirely.
The amount of energy spent in sessions and everyday life dealing with the other selves was enormous. But a stronger, more compelling energy kept building up. If not singing to rock music on the car radio, the woman found herself dancing to the living room stereo, wanton and with a carried-away feeling so pronounced that it frightened her into a more concentrated hiding than ever before. Terrified that one of them might escape in public, she denied even the possibility of it, and someone laughed. The sound was unpleasant.
The Outrider evaluated what the Buffer and the Front Runner were reporting on a daily basis and knew that the woman, because of her construction, still operated at a safe distance from the truth. That distance was a straight line, leading directly to Troop members whom no one wanted disturbed.
When the phone went dead one morning, it popped into the woman’s mind how frequently she must lose complete track of time. How long had bills been paid in three- or four-month increments because she couldn’t open and read the mail? She looked in the checkbook; its contents were too scrambled. The calendar in the kitchen stared back, indecipherable.
At midnight she paid the phone company a call, stuffing the envelope into the night depository. The “under cover of darkness” operation pleased Nails. The woman scuttled home. Unable to sleep, she sat at the typewriter, watching manuscript pages pile up, until three in the morning. Finally, she crawled into bed. She’d been cold since noontime, shivering over steaming cups of coffee in an effort to find warmth. The temperature in the loft bedroom was 72 degrees, yet she huddled under the big downy comforter and three blankets, with skin icy to the touch. The premonition was alive again.
Under the tent of bedclothes, by the tiny beam of a tensor lamp, she began organising a stack of what appeared to be sloppily written manuscript notes. The handwriting had shifted more than a dozen times. It went from neat up-and-down strokes to letters that dangled above and below the lines, to a chicken scratch that danced into a flurry of curlicues. The woman stared at the handwriting, appalled by the messiness.
A voice sounded in her mind. The premonition of doom, stronger than before, had raised goose bumps on her arms. Everything the mother had warned against became a litany. She was sloppy, fat, stupid, incompetent, prideful, greedy, selfish, and cowardly. The litany lengthened to include the chaos her life was in, and proved both the validity of the mother’s warnings and her own chaotic condition. Stanley’s ego building, all the armour he’d tried to build around her, fell away. The mother won, the stepfather won, she lost. Worthless and doomed to hell, the tears were cold on her face.
The Outrider took a look at her. The irony was that this person who had so little—whose construction didn’t even allow for the actual consumption of her own food—should be so necessary to what happened, or did not happen, to the cores. The Outrider felt as if she were walking a high wire every time she tried to give the woman something while making sure the cores still slept.
The Outrider moved. Selecting a handful of confetti, she knitted the shreds together, piece by piece, and prepared to let them fall in a single veil. Under the blankets the woman’s breath was frigid. Her fingers, lifeless cold stubs on the black pen, moved over the pages with a will of their own. The Outrider let go of the veil. In the name of the one who had experienced what the knitted confetti shreds represented, the Outrider made a silent apology to both child and woman.
Into the woman’s half-awake mind fell an image of cylindrical rough stone walls and a quavering reflection in the water below. A sense of movement gripped her; she became dizzy. Long, thin, living shapes rushed at a downward angle past the periphery of her half-sleeping mind.
She shivered, and inside the Tunnel walls there was only silence and the black water beneath her dangling feet. Over her shoulder, the stepfather’s face appeared in the reflection, along with a third face that looked like her own and was not.
Then another image and it was so clear. The woman sat straight up, the bed covers flew off with her momentum. She was screaming in a loud, shrill voice, shaking like a leaf in a high wind. The screams went on and in front of her eyes the snake lay on the bed, large as life with a scaled body, tan with black markings. Except that there wasn’t one snake, there were many and they weren’t on the bed now. They rained down on the tiny creature hanging in the well, the child who swayed back and forth in some kind of contraption, made by man,
that only the devil himself could have contrived.
EIGHTEEN
DAWN came into the loft bedroom. The woman untangled herself from the sodden and rumpled sheets. Wet stone walls and a swaying motion . . . she hung onto the bathroom door for support. She brushed her teeth with two kinds of toothpaste and gargled with Listerine, but the taste of well water remained.
Dazed, she dressed in whatever lay at the foot of the bed, but the bright blue blouse and the white slit skirt were not what had been laid out the night before. Exhausted but still in the grip of last night’s raging fear and the coldness that had settled into her bones, she drove to the university.
She walked into the session that morning and spent a half-hour telling Stanley that the second well did not exist. Stanley watched her; he couldn’t envision anything to do with a well that might have torn her apart this way. He kept pressing because if she didn’t unload and face it, the fear would grow, and possibly explode outside a session. She was unshakable, her face frozen and blank. During her fourth or fifth disavowal, the adult voice grew tiny and tears rolled down over what were no longer high cheekbones but the smooth and rounded face of a child.
In the dead essence of Olivia II’s six-year-old mind as she surfaced and began to speak, things were as they had been on the day of her “death.” As she sat playing in the field at the second farmhouse, there came the call of a far-off bird, his song heavy with summer’s inertia. The sun beat down on the hedgerow that surrounded her on four sides like tall green fortress walls. The leaves were silent in the windless heat, and perspiration matted the pale curls framing her face. A giant daddy longlegs crept up a blade of grass near her bare toes. She watched his spindle legs, bent in the slow-motion, stop-and-go walk that took him precisely wherever he wanted. The actions mesmerised her, claimed the attention she had been giving to the shards of coloured glass in her lap. They had been lovingly collected. One was a deep, navy blue that had once been a whole drinking glass, the other was ruby-red, a fragment from a heavy service bowl. She had more, pried up from the soil in the area where the stepfather burned the trash from the house.
