by Truddi Chase
The woman appeared oblivious to the meaning behind her words as she described the stepfather’s fawning behavior toward his mother. When Stanley pressed for further details, she could only recall that the stepfather and his family had been holy rollers. She told Stanley about one “prayer meeting” when they’d knelt, pressing their faces into the seats of chairs.
“It made me sick, it was so hypocritical an act, my stepfather praying,” she said. “He was a pig.”
So, Stanley thought, in the minds of the woman and the Troops perhaps anyone who prayed henceforth was a pig, a hypocrite, capable of the stepfather’s same actions. Thus associations are born. The woman actually looked ill, as if she would vomit. Her skin had a greenish tinge. She plowed on, telling Stanley about family gatherings, at Christmas, Easter, and Thanksgiving holidays.
“Smiles,” the woman said, still with a listening tilt to her head, “the relatives hated each other but they all showed up for the holidays and my mother’s cooking and they never stopped smiling once.”
Her father, she said, brought his mother. The stepfather’s family had shown up, along with the maternal Irish grandmother and sometimes an aunt if she wasn’t too busy with a new affair. A maternal uncle came to visit whenever he was not in Attica prison. The relatives whispered among themselves, behind each other’s backs, and kept on smiling.
“The Irish relatives talked knives to your face. They are volatile in the curses they laid on each other, and every other word was ‘jesus, mary, and joseph.’ Alma and Velma complimented my mother on the dinner, but they whined to my stepfather later that the food had disagreed with them. Alma tended to feel faint a great deal, and the stepfather would run to her all day, adjusting things to her liking . . . as if he loved her. I can’t imagine him loving anyone. Like when the bed springs creaked in his and my mother’s bedroom. I wondered how my mother could even stay in the same bedroom with him. The idea of it made me sick.”
Stanley knew that she expected his disapproval at having described her family in such a way. But Stanley cheered silently, glad to see a measure of justified anger. He spent ten minutes supporting both her anger and her hostility.
It seemed to pay off. The woman elaborated on Alma’s attitude toward her grown son; what a perfect child he’d been, sleeping with his mother in thunderstorms, when “daddy,” as Alma called her husband, was away working with road crews. Alma praised him as being a perfect child, always spotless, with long sausage curls. Just like a little girl, Alma had noted proudly, squeezing his cheeks and kissing his hands.
The woman remembered how the Irish grandmother had then uttered something about lunatics.
A child’s voice began describing Easter baskets and chocolate rabbits, and the colouring of eggs. The tone was plaintive; Stanley asked if someone were sad. By now he knew Lamchop by her voice alone but still she wouldn’t give him her name.
“Holidays,” she said, “are special. We don’t celebrate ’em anymore. They’re for families.”
The face turned, at the mention of families, from child to angered adult, and Sewer Mouth spit over her right shoulder.
“One day,” she said, “we’ll have collected somewhere, a whole room of spit. We’ll take it to hell with us.”
Sewer Mouth ranted, enmeshed in her hatred for families and for holidays, especially Christmas. Stanley tried to steer the session toward a clearer picture of the woman’s mother. Eventually the woman surfaced again, but only listened to the words she seemed to be speaking.
“It’s so difficult to remember more than bits and pieces. I still don’t understand why, but I remember loving her deeply when I was very small and then hating her when I grew into my teens. At some point, I shut her out entirely. All that’s left now is ambivalence. She was beautiful with auburn hair and hooded green eyes and the most marvelous bone structure. Her cheekbones were high, her nose thin and well shaped.
“I could never figure it out. When I was two, she was only twenty-one and brilliant, yet she hid herself away with the stepfather. From reading her poetry and other writing, I knew she didn’t belong in that house with him. One of the worst times, when my stepfather really showed himself, was a Christmas where I can’t remember opening any packages at all. The preparations made for that holiday were stupendous. Company was coming—an outsider, a playwright my mother corresponded with. He’d seen some of her work in a magazine. I wonder to this day if he had any idea, sitting in our living room in front of that beautiful Christmas tree, what really went on there? I wonder if with all his literary flair, he could have described the screams or the madness or the perversion?”
Stanley knew she’d forgotten he existed. Here she was, describing madness and perversion. Yet he had to wonder if it really sank in for her.
“It was the first time I’d had a chance to observe my stepfather’s behavior around a man other than my father, with whom he was simply brooding and silent. How my mother got the nerve to invite a stranger into our house, I don’t know. Maybe she was just desperate, finally, for company. It was obvious that the man’s presence antagonised my stepfather. As my mother brought out her writing, he started to prowl the room. But then the playwright had found her poetry, tracked her down, and made his way to our farm; he’d walked the mile from the corner bus stop in heavy snowdrifts, just to speak with her.
“That part was exciting. I watched it from a corner of the living room, trying to be still, to listen. But writers are observant, and he noticed after a while how my stepfather circled them. He was beefy and sullen looking anyway, and that night the brutal look in his eye kept growing. The playwright tried to include my stepfather in the conversation; all he got was a sneer.
“My stepfather was literate but his reading material had nothing in common with my mother’s writing. He used to hide magazines around the house: True Crime, True Detective, that sort of thing. They were full of gruesome, bloody, debasing things the newspaper didn’t print, like women lying in ditches with their skirts up over their heads, blood gushing from their wounds, children chopped up and flung into the bushes, people hacked and bludgeoned.
“He had a lot of pocket books, too. I’ve always been a reader but after the first one, my curiosity died. They weren’t about vampires, which I adore; they even went beyond mass murders. The sex scenes described a world where men and women were treated like animals.
“That night with the playwright, the hair on the back of my neck began to stand up. The house felt so quiet. When the playwright stood up to go and said good-bye to my mother, he told her that she was gifted, that he’d enjoyed the evening. It was both a relief and an awful realization; our house was empty of almost the first stranger who’d ever stepped into it.
“When he was gone my stepfather raged, he said vile things to my mother. She got the beating of her life. He tore and pounded and broke things. That night long after the screams got fainter, we could hear something heavy thudding into the walls.
“My mother didn’t come out of her room for days afterward; when she did, she’d stopped speaking to anyone. She sat day after day, silent, not eating, not moving. I don’t think she could. She didn’t wash, cook, or clean, or sew or issue commands. My stepfather commanded, we obeyed.
“I don’t really remember much else, everything was and is sort of disconnected. But my mother’s face looked strange. I remember her sitting there in her bathrobe, with no change of expression. Finally, after several weeks, my stepfather started in on my half brother and my half sister and me. He was scared. It was our fault, he said. We were to blame that my mother was sick. Look what we’d done to her, we must now be extra good, did we hear him? I wanted to kill him.
“My stepfather cooked. We ate, went to school, came home. My mother sat there in her bathrobe, my invincible mother, who’d never been sick a day in her life. She began to lose weight: the robe hung on her. I hated her for something I saw growing in her eyes; she seemed to believe what he said
about its being our fault. He fed her with a spoon, and you’d have thought he’d never hit her at all. He cared for her like a baby, like he cared for his mother, and she let him. I wanted to throw up.”
Stanley cheered silently once more. It was painful, he knew, but it would help the woman to discharge her hidden anger. The cheering subsided when, from behind the woman’s bangs, a pair of soft young eyes peeped out.
“Do you think,” asked the tiny, childlike voice, “that we were bad and made the mother sick?”
“You didn’t make anyone do anything. When the woman was speaking just now, she referred to the parents as ‘hers.’ Were they her parents?”
“No,” the small voice said. “The person sending her the words thinks we should say it that way, even if they weren’t our parents.”
“Who was the person speaking?”
“I don’t know,” the child said. “We haven’t sorted all of our selves out yet. But I know a secret that not everybody here knows. The woman can talk, but she can’t think. Everything her structure makes her believe she’s thinking is coming from one of us. She doesn’t tell you each time that idea comes into her head, because it would be silly.”
“Nobody’s feelings are silly,” Stanley said. “You think that you made the mother sick. That’s a feeling and it isn’t silly, because it bothers you. But you didn’t cause anything. I suspect that your stepfather was treating your mother the way he wanted to treat his own. He was venting his hatred of women. All women.”
During the break, Stanley shuddered to himself. After the break, he gave the Troops something positive to think about.
“Those college courses,” he said. “You could take a college equivalency test and amaze yourself.”
“That can’t be true.” The woman looked pleased but shocked. “Anyway, the book comes first.”
“No reason you can’t do both,” Stanley told her.
She replied that it was necessary to earn a living, and again stressed her stupidity, saying that she had to work twice as hard as anyone else, to compensate for it. He told her she should slow down, that workaholic executives had heart attacks under much less pressure and strain. Ten-Four didn’t buy that.
“Bull,” she said. “People use ten percent of their brains. And most of them are so sedentary that they only use three percent of their physical energy. We once worked more than twelve hours a day for seven years without a vacation or a day of sick leave. The only time we took off was when we were bored silly.”
“No one ever gets sick?” Stanley asked.
“I don’t think so,” Ten-Four told him. “Somebody, we don’t know who, has allergies but when it gets bad, somebody without allergies comes out. When we went to the doctor, he’d diagnose something or other, but on the follow-up visit he couldn’t believe that it wasn’t there anymore. We quit going. It was a waste of money.”
Stanley told whoever might be listening, that in the case of multiple personality one person might test as having some ailment while the other selves wouldn’t show any symptoms at all.
“Like a cold or the hives?” Ten-Four asked.
“Sometimes even more than a cold or the hives. The headaches I hear being mentioned are quite similar to migraines, but they don’t respond to medication. Multiples don’t respond well to medication overall. It seems to have very little effect, almost as if multiples have other ways of dealing with those symptoms.”
“The last shrink gave us tranquilizers,” Ten-Four said. “I threw them away.”
“I don’t want to frighten you,” he said, “I know that you’ve been trying for recall on your own and that’s wonderful. But I think it might be better if you waited and let it come out in the sessions where I can help you with it. Have you got a friend you can call during the week if things get too heavy?”
“There’s Sharon,” the woman said, “but I hate to bother her. What’s happening to me, the way things are happening to me, frightens her. It sounds too crazy. I’m not worried. I seem to be staying afloat in the business world for the time being and even in my personal life, what there is of it. Even if the others do rage inside me at times, I’ve got control. Don’t I?”
Stanley insisted that the self-control, the iron will, had to go. No matter how proud she was of it. He told her she was blocking emotions that were valid, to which she had every right.
“Control is all I’ve got. Letting go means that people who see me switching from one person to the other will hate me. If I hang on tight, that won’t happen. Besides, I know that somebody in here is mean as hell. I could never let her out.”
“Or him.” The woman had never expressed any feelings about having Mean Joe, a male, inhabiting her female body. For some multiples, Stanley knew this aspect was frightening.
“Another male?” The woman looked at him quietly. “You mean there could be another male like Mean Joe Green?”
“We’re all made up of male and female. . . .”
“I know that. Androgyny, the combination of male and female characteristics. I don’t see us putting Boy George out of business. But Mean Joe is so big, he’s the only one who could, if he decided to, break somebody in half. Suppose I do relax and he is the mean one here? What if he does something horrible to someone who doesn’t deserve it?”
“Give your people more credit,” Stanley said gently. “They protected you all these years, and anger can be a good thing.”
“You’ve lost me, Stanley,” the woman said. “Norman hates my rage, everybody hates it. My mother hit me when I got angry.”
The woman left the session, and Stanley watched her progress down the hallway. Even if she were not the first-born child, what must it be like, he wondered, to operate in the world, knowing that she might be doing things of which she was unaware?
* * *
It was a terrifying idea, no longer being able to blame herself for everything. Funny how clear things were becoming lately, and how that made it all the more confusing, as if everything had been turned inside out. Who was the mean one here? What really shocked her was that more often than not, Stanley looked at her idea of bad and mean and laughed.
That night, the woman sat down at the typewriter, preparing to incorporate the day’s notes into manuscript pages. Ever since the white light in the session that day, it had been a recurring thought in her mind. She didn’t know what it meant or if it meant anything at all, and had not discussed it with anyone, including Stanley. The woman only knew that the idea of it was comforting. After all, she could go back there anytime if she got desperate enough. It made her smile as her fingertips struck the typewriter keys.
The Front Runner frowned. She sent the message to Mean Joe, who had been waiting. He answered promptly that the sleeping cores were safe. The Front Runner sent other messages and the Outrider paused for a moment, listening carefully to each reply.
Now, the Front Runner said, and there was a cadence in the word, a sadness and something else. It came from the darkness of the Tunnel, a silent battle cry, uttered by thought alone, from one who was proud and confident of the Troops around him.
Elvira listened to his battle cry and grinned. Better pack a lunch, she hollered.
At the keyboard the woman’s fingers stopped moving. Definitely, undeniably not alone in the gallery, she felt invaded, threatened, as if war had been declared on her. Her head began to pound and tears hit the white bond paper.
Flick. The smell of straw and manure—the milk cow standing in the old barn—its rolling, brown, saucer-eyes with the whites showing. The stepfather had his trousers off, he stood on a wooden crate at the back of the cow. His face alternately scrunched and smiled, in rhythm with the forward and back motions of his body. Why? Through a child’s eyes, the woman watched and did not understand what he was doing. She understood his expression as he saw her in the barn doorway. She turned and ran but her feet wouldn’t take her fast enough. Suddenly her face slammed into t
he dirt pathway leading to the farmhouse. The stepfather’s rage as he landed on her, and something else about him that scared her even more, were twined together in words she heard like an evil cry from hell. The stepfather was not only angry, he was excited. Pain shot through her arms as he dragged her back inside the barn. He yanked her white cotton pants off and no amount of screaming could have stopped him. The cow swung to look at the two of them—its tongue, like a huge pink caterpillar, unfurling. The stepfather had her in his arms, he was holding her up to that pink caterpillar tongue, his fingers baring her flesh to it.
The woman was screaming and trying to reach the phone to call Stanley, and the voices in her head wouldn’t stop. One voice, above all the others, cried out to her and sanity seemed like a very fragile thing.
TWENTY-THREE
THE headache was vicious last night,” she screamed. “There were voices, all talking at once, vague and far away. They showed me a wooden crate and the stepfather standing on it, at the back of the cow.”
Even before the words left her mouth, Stanley knew what she was going to say. He’d suspected it for some time but it still shocked him. The woman told him the rest of it, her face red and her fingers twisting each other so hard that he could hear the knuckles cracking.
“Is it true? Could the stepfather really have done that?”
“Yes,” Stanley said. “It’s called bestiality.” Unfortunately, he thought to himself, your stepfather was capable of so much, which is why you’ve got amnesia.
“Then there was only one voice, one lone, single voice, that I don’t think I’ll ever forget as long as I live!” The woman could not control the shaking that overtook her. “Do you know that it’s sinking in, but I’m not sure how long I’ll be able to grasp it before it’s taken away again? Look at me! I hear people who give memory and then take it away. One minute it’s as if I’m the one who had all the experiences they tell me about and the next minute I know I’ve always been so empty that I never experienced anything, then or now, and if you don’t tell me that makes me crazy, I’ll never believe another word you say!”
