The Flock

by Joan Frances Casey

  At least her bad habit of daydreaming had taught her to be observant and cagey at catching up on lost time. She had learned how to ask leading questions that would yield clues.

  Jo stood at the window and marveled at how the seasons had changed in her absence. She was glad that she hadn’t daydreamed her way through fall.

  Nancy appeared behind her. “Oh, Joan Frances, what are you doing in jeans? You’ve been dressing so nicely since you started high school.”

  Jo ignored the remark. She didn’t care how she looked. She had more important things to figure out. First, her parents. “Do you think Dad’s going to come by for a visit soon?” she asked in a forcedly casual tone.

  Her mother jumped at the suggestion. “Do you need to talk to your father? Why don’t you call him at work and ask him to come see you?”

  “N-no,” Jo said nervously. Obviously her mother was still pursuing her father. “It’s nothing important,” Jo said. “I just wondered.”

  Nancy grabbed the phone. “You seem upset,” she said as she dialed. “If you are upset, we better call your father.”

  Jo waited. She was glad for the chance to talk to her father but wished that she could call him sometime when her mother wasn’t around.

  “Your kid needs to talk to you,” Nancy said, and handed Jo the phone.

  “Hello, Dad?” Jo said.

  “Yes, pixie, what is it?” Her father sounded concerned. She could hear factory machinery in the background.

  “It’s nothing….I…Well, how are you?”

  “Come on, hurry up, I’m at work,” Ray said.

  Jo wished she could sink through the floor. He was mad and wouldn’t want to see her now. She lost her grip on consciousness.

  At once, Rusty, the adolescent male personality, took over. “Hey, Dad,” he said in a cheerful tone, “when am I gonna see you? Can we go to Norfolk this weekend?”

  “Now, that’s more like it,” Ray said, pleased at the change in his daughter’s demeanor.

  “Tell him you’re having trouble at school,” Nancy coached, and Rusty, who hated having this woman breathing down his back, slipped inside.

  Joan Frances looked up with a conspiratorial smile. She didn’t understand what her mother saw in that jerk, but it was clear that Nancy wanted Ray talked into coming over to the apartment.

  “Maybe you could come over tonight and help me with my math,” Joan Frances said into the phone. “I’m having lots of trouble, and Mom says that she’ll cook dinner.”

  Nancy nodded approvingly. The kid had it in her after all. Nancy was ready for a reconciliation with Ray. Two years ago, she had had a lover and a new group of friends. But her affair was long over. Nancy was lonely and tired of shouldering all the responsibility for their younger daughter.

  —

  IN THE MONTHS THAT followed Jo’s sudden awakening in high school, various personalities were active, often splitting up single days among them. Joan Frances concocted schemes with her mother to help win Ray back; Rusty enjoyed the time he was allowed to spend with Ray and was hurt when his father said, “You can’t live with me because you belong with your mother.” Rusty refused to acknowledge that he had a mother, and he hated living with Nancy. Isis’s crush on Miss Maloney continued and Jo found a rare and trusted friend in Mr. Dunlap.

  Soon Jo was keeping the consciousness enough each school day so that she had had continuous memory of five of her high-school classes. Mrs. Adams, Jo’s journalism teacher, encouraged her to write for the high-school newspaper. She even made a friend: Brian O’Neil, a year ahead of her in school, was very bright, and liked that the other students thought he was strange. Jo teamed up with him and found herself part of the school’s “hippie” crowd.

  She had trouble with geometry, but she sat in the back of the room, next to Sam, a friend of Brian’s. Miss Hernandez, the geometry teacher, was nice to Jo even though she didn’t make very good grades.

  Jo hated Spanish. There was no way that she could handle Spanish II after forgetting Spanish I. Mr. Walker made no secret of his dislike for Jo, and ridiculed her. The other students seemed to enjoy having a scapegoat.

  Jo had no memory of what happened in gym, and for that she was grateful. She was sure that she made a worse fool of herself in gym than she did in Spanish class.

  Despite her fear of Spanish and gym class, she found a sense of stability in school. Mr. Dunlap’s office turned out to be a quiet and comfortable place for her. She went there as soon as she arrived at school each day.

  Occasionally there were other students in the office, and often Mr. Dunlap didn’t have time to talk, but that didn’t bother Jo. She would study, or read, or work on a homework assignment. Just being near Mr. Dunlap made her feel a little less lonely.

  Jo remained upset that her father wouldn’t give her his home phone number—“I know that your mother will get it out of you,” he said, “and I don’t want her bothering me”—but she had Mr. Dunlap’s number for consolation.

  Even if Jo couldn’t reach her father when she wanted, she could call Mr. Dunlap in the evenings or on the weekends. He trusted her to keep his phone number a secret. Mr. Dunlap offered advice and made her feel better just by listening. Although Jo didn’t talk openly with him about how she lost time, his long explanations and careful reiteration of events at school made her think that he somehow knew when she was lacking important memories.

  Isis got private gymnastics coaching from Miss Maloney a few afternoons each week and stopped by her apartment when she could find an excuse. Often she knocked on Miss Maloney’s door to offer her a sample of the goodies that Nancy baked when Ray came for a visit.

  One day in December, Miss Maloney told Isis to start taking the bus and to stop coming to her apartment. She had a roommate now, who didn’t like having Isis around. Isis knew she was jealous but felt that she could handle Miss Maloney’s relationship if given the chance. She sometimes watched from her apartment window and saw the two of them link arms in the parking lot or touch intimately with a subtle sleight of hand.

  Isis kept a frustrated and lonely silence and waited to find the words that would reassure the teacher. Then she wouldn’t be excluded. But for now she’d give Miss Maloney some room and stay stoned to escape from her feelings of rejection. Brian, Sam, drugs, and music provided good distractions.

  One night late in January, Isis sat on the rug in a candlelit room at Sam’s house, smoking hash. She passed the pipe to Brian, who was sitting next to her, and ignored the other people in the room. The company hardly mattered: the music was too loud for any conversation.

  The hard rock beat enveloped her and folded her into her favorite fantasy of Miss Maloney touching and kissing her. She lay back on the rug, feeling aroused. Suddenly she realized that this wasn’t pure fantasy. Brian was lying on top of her, kissing her and holding her down.

  “No!” she yelled, pushing Brian aside and lurching out of the room. “Bad trip,” someone said as she passed.

  She jerked out into the night, wanting to run from this body, this dirty body. She swore no man would do that to her again. She had to be free of it.

  Isis got home and used a razor blade to etch a symbol of death into her left breast. She lit candles and incense. She chanted softly, willing total and final separation from this body. Hoping that her magic would work quickly, Isis drifted off to sleep.

  The next morning, before classes, Isis worked out in the gym. She was furious to find that she hadn’t died during the night. “This is Miss Maloney’s fault,” she decided. She’d show her.

  Isis worked feverishly on the bars with the bare wooden floor beneath her. She knew that it was against the rules to use the equipment without mats, but she didn’t care. When Miss Maloney appeared around the corner, Isis swung in preparation for her dismount, more frenzied than before. The teacher had to pay attention to her now.

  Miss Maloney turned and walked into her office. Her rejection was too much. Isis threw herself in a swan dive from the t
op bar to the floor.

  Josie found herself, as she had at other moments in her life, being hurled through the air. She accepted the panic as her own and enjoyed the anticipation of the black relief of impact.

  Jo sat up, dizzily aware that her gym teacher was calling her name. “I’m OK,” she said automatically.

  Jo looked around her at the gym and then down at the leotard and tights she wore. What was she doing? Jo staggered slightly as she wandered into the locker room to find her clothes.

  “Yes, I’m sure I’m OK,” she said to Miss Maloney, who had followed her. Jo sat silently on the bench until the teacher finally left.

  Jo felt odd that day—a little disoriented and uncoordinated. Walking, standing, even moving her arms seemed like an effort that required great concentration. She had a horrible headache.

  DIARY    July 1, 1982

  I have begun to arrive at a more complete picture of Jo Casey’s adolescence. It is clear that she was struggling with a number of handicaps, not the least of which was her well-established multiplicity. It is obvious that the malady was, by then, a two-edged sword, both preserving capabilities and providing a survival mechanism. But it created additional problems as well. The pathological home situation became worse as each parent demanded that the child serve as confidante.

  Nancy would tell her daughter, “Your father just comes around when he wants to get laid,” and Joan Frances wondered why her mother would bother with such a man.

  Ray told his daughter, “Every time I look at your mother, I think of her screwing that pig last year,” and Jo couldn’t understand why, then, he spent the night.

  Finally, the group looked elsewhere for attention and love. They turned to the gym and psychology teachers, or stopped their aching need with drugs.

  So far, Renee is enjoying the detective work without thinking of implications for herself. Since she has no sense of having rights of her own, Renee doesn’t yet conceive of her own birth as evidence of abuse. I have a hunch that she is in for some difficult times when she does begin to value herself. At present, the approaching vacation helps her postpone the inevitable.

  This is actually a good time for a break. The work has been taxing for me, and I don’t want Renee to get in much deeper just yet. The weeks apart will help us both to gather some strength. Since Renee will spend part of this vacation in Richmond, she is hoping to find evidence from the school and hospital to corroborate what reportedly happened during the time we are piecing together.

  17.

  DIARY    August 10, 1982

  Jo, the other personalities, and I have resumed our sessions after a vacation that stretched into five weeks. After an initial “re-entry syndrome,” the personalities are as comfortable with me as they were before the break. They seem calm. Aside from a few minutes spent cuddling Missy every session, everyone seems willing to let Renee and me continue piecing together the period of adolescence. Renee and I are looking closely at the months that preceded her evolution into a separate personality.

  Renee did find time during her trip to Richmond to do some research. It was predictably difficult for her to pry records loose from the school, hospitals, and doctors, but she is smug that her tenacity paid off. She produced evidence that corroborated an emergency-room visit for head injuries that fit with Missy’s story that, as a preschooler, “That girl Josie got hit against the wall,” and has retrieved records concerning a hospitalization in adolescence.

  Renee triumphantly displayed her “proof” of the early-childhood incident. I think that Renee needed this evidence far more than I, but since I literally chortled over the records from her adolescent experience, I empathize with her feeling of validation.

  I’ve generally ignored clinicians who deny the existence of MPD or who suggest that the manifestations appear to meet some pathological need on the part of the clinician. But, like Renee with the early hospital records, I feel that I now have proof that I can show anybody who would dare to doubt. Renee brought separate reports from a neurologist and a psychologist that confirm to me that Jo would have been readily diagnosable as a multiple when she was in high school if only her physicians had had an understanding of MPD and thus asked the right questions.

  I would be tempted at this point to overcongratulate myself for my perspicacity if I were not so well aware that I came to my information by a different route. Jo trusted me as she had no other clinician. When I met her, she was free of her parents, and she was ready for diagnosis and treatment. I have also become painfully aware that MPD is pretty much dismissed by many in the medical community.

  —

  “LET’S PICK UP AFTER ISIS threw herself from the bars,” Lynn said.

  About a week after Jo’s fall, Nancy noticed that there was something peculiar about her daughter. She couldn’t quite put her finger on the problem, but there appeared to be a new tension in the teenager’s movement. When Jo walked, she worked to keep herself from staggering. Nancy, watching her daughter butter a piece of bread, noticed that the girl held the knife as if it were heavy and hard to control.

  “Joan Frances, what’s wrong with you?” Nancy asked. Certain that her mother would be angry if she was sick, Joan Frances answered, “Nothing. I’m fine.”

  “Well, then,” Nancy pursued, “why are you having so much trouble with that knife?”

  Joan Frances glanced down at her hands. They looked strange to her, like hands that belonged to a puppet on a string; she felt as though she were controlling them from a great distance. “I don’t know,” Joan Frances finally said.

  “I want you to stand up,” Nancy said, “and put your feet together.”

  Joan Frances rose and struggled to get her balance. She found that she had to hold on to the wall or the counter for support.

  “Are you feeling OK?” Nancy asked. This time, Joan Frances considered the question. “I do have a headache.” The constant pounding behind her right temple had become so much a part of her that she hadn’t thought to mention it before. “I think you should stay home from school today,” Nancy said. “I want you to come to the office this afternoon and see Dr. Roger.”

  Joan Frances agreed, as usual, to do as her mother asked, but it was Jo who was pleased to have the day off. She was happy alone in the apartment. She could read, or simply sit and think, without Nancy’s demanding that she do something. At the end of the day, Jo walked unsteadily to the clinic where her mother worked.

  Roger Schuler, Jo’s doctor and Nancy’s boss, asked Jo to do a number of simple things that Jo found surprisingly difficult.

  “Follow this light with your eyes,” the internist said. Jo discovered that the pain in her head prevented her eyes from moving from side to side.

  “Walk a straight line.”

  Jo stood up and fell against the wall. “I’m not drunk,” she joked, but she was upset that she couldn’t keep her balance.

  Back in the examining room, Dr. Roger tested Jo’s reflexes. Her right leg jumped at his little hammer; the left leg barely moved. “Wait here,” he said. “I’m going to talk with your mother.”

  Jo sat on the table and leaned back against the wall. Her head now pounded in rhythm with her heart. Jo’s concern about her lack of coordination and equilibrium was nothing compared with her certainty that her mother would be furious with her. Jo figured that Dr. Schuler was at this very moment telling her mother that she was pretending to be sick. There would be hell to pay when she got home. “I’ll tell her I’m sorry and promise never to do it again,” Jo decided.

  The doctor stated the facts but tried to hide from Nancy his own anxiety over how serious Jo’s problem might be. “I want to admit her,” he said. “Something’s going on here, but I’m not sure what. I think she needs a complete neurological checkup.”

  —

  JO HAD HER FIRST of three week-long hospitalizations. After neurologists, neurosurgeons, ear, nose, and throat specialists, and her internist puzzled over the symptoms and the test results and rea
ched no conclusion, she was sent home with instructions to her parents to “watch and wait.”

  Jo’s gait quickly became more unsteady. Soon she could barely walk without support. She fell too often to return to school, but the Board of Education provided her with a tutor who came to the hospital or the apartment. This tutor gave Jo enough background in math so that she became able for the first time to appreciate the beauty and logic of geometry and algebra.

  Jo eventually grew less troubled by her loss of equilibrium. The hospitalizations protected her from having to deal with the aspects of her parents’ separation that she least liked. When home, Jo would sometimes lie awake for hours thinking of her mother in the next bedroom. She wasn’t comfortable knowing that Nancy lay there bitter and alone, but she also wasn’t comfortable when her father spent the night. If Ray wouldn’t forgive Nancy for having an affair, what was he doing sleeping with her? When Jo was in the hospital, she didn’t have to know whether her mother was alone, or sharing her bed with Ray or with someone else. Jo relished being far away from it all.

  The doctors remained puzzled by Jo’s illness. The first neurologist consulted on the case wrote that he was suspicious of her symptoms. Her skull X-rays, EEG, and spinal tap were all negative. The sudden changes in personality and periods of blankness that Nancy described, combined with Jo’s indifference to her physical problems, led him to write that there might be a factor of hysteria in the illness.

  The psychologist who examined Jo on the neurologist’s referral found her to be a “hysterical, depressed, repressed child” who felt the burden of her parents’ problems. Although the psychologist reported that he could not definitely rule out a neurological problem, he recommended that Jo enter psychotherapy to provide support for her and to help her resolve her feelings about her parents. This suggestion was ignored.