by Truddi Chase
The woman looked a little dazed. She held the map absent-mindedly. He was noticing at the far end of the living room, a gallery lined with pictures. Reluctantly, the woman walked him to the doorway. She did not seem thrilled at his interest.
“They’re bad.” She looked embarrassed. “They should be burnt but I’ve never had the time. Among other things, I’m a very slack housekeeper.”
Not according to the cleanliness surrounding him, he thought. He moved from one painting to the other, admiring the style which ranged from a heavy to light palette, and from sledgehammer to finely feminine lines.
“They just seem to leap onto the canvas with no help from me. What I mean is, if they’re bad and I know they are, I take responsibility for that, but their creation doesn’t seem to involve a conscious effort.”
“Therapy has been known to loosen the creative flow. It can be the tapping of one’s inner self.”
“Really? That would be nice. But I might waste a lot of time and money.”
He could not help staring. Her voice shocked him. It was that of a small child.
TWO
AN odd increase in energy stayed with him for days after the interview. On a dozen occasions he found himself running when normally he would have walked. His speeding mind seemed incapable of sleep. He blamed the excess energy on the challenge the woman presented. Not only was she articulate and perceptive, she showed the tenacity to hang on and keep going.
Occasionally, he played the tape back. He told himself that perhaps pressure and tension had been responsible for the woman’s memory block when it came to anything of a sexual nature.
While the woman had shown what he could only term a certain “richness” of manner and expression, no amount of rationalisation explained the child’s voice. The tape recorder had been put away by the time he’d heard it. Afterward, only his own memory nagged him.
On Thursday, they had videotaped at the university. The woman had brought the yellow legal sheets. After a while, she’d seemed to forget about them. As in the first interview, she’d continued to refer to “people,” and always on a note of apprehension or fear. He was careful not to let her see how that astounded him. She operated a real estate office with seven agents and negotiated contracts with a hard-nosed attitude, but he saw little belief in her ability to do anything without questioning her motives or painting the outcome black. Almost everything frightened her. Yet as a teenager, she’d left her mother with no idea where her next meal was coming from—and years later, with as little preparation, she’d walked out of an unhappy marriage.
During that first videotaping, he’d again heard the voice change from adult to childlike. He’d mentioned it to her. The woman had replied that she hadn’t noticed any change. Nor did she seem to be conscious of referring to herself at times as “we.” When he pointed it out, she’d said that very recently a buyer had asked the same thing. She’d told the buyer it was only a reference to herself and her seven real estate agents—what else could it be?
After the second videotaping, he looked more closely at the words “Distanced” and “Removed” on his clipboard. The woman seemed to be giving them a whole new meaning. There were times when she cried, but appeared puzzled by the tears on her face. “Distancing” from one’s feelings did not mean forgetting what had been said just minutes ago. Yet very often, she did seem to forget. He had to keep reminding himself that she’d been tested for every ailment under the sun and that hers was not a medical problem.
Now, weeks later, he sat waiting for her in his university office. They were about to videotape for the third time. It had been impossible to take the usual psychosocial history. They’d only begun to delve, but he had never encountered a client with so few basic foundations from which to start.
From the age of two, she had lived on a farm, yet could not recall a single farm animal. Beyond vague generalities, she could not remember subjects taken in school, the clothes she’d worn, or the faces of her mother, her stepfather, or her half brother and two half sisters. When pressured to describe a single meal under her mother’s roof or the sound of her mother’s voice, the woman bent forward from her yoga position and cried in frustration.
She had an incredible amount of energy. In spite of her lack of memory after the age of two and her eighteen-hour work days, she had managed to hand him over sixty pages of typed journal notes, saying she guessed she’d write a book as they went along. He had applauded the effort. Finding the time to read would be another matter. With one eye on the clock, he bent to the pages she’d given him. She wrote:
Doctor Phillips, a decision has been made. Sitting down to compose anything of a personal nature has always made me physically ill. I don’t think we can refer to you in these pages as “Doctor Phillips,” or by your first name either. Somehow it brings you and the authority you represent too close, and the sick feeling rises up. If you don’t mind, another name has been chosen—“Stanley.” I know it sounds like the name of an innocuous, lifeless entity. It is meant to. It will take a year or more to write this book through the journal notes, and we need a feeling of privacy for it. “Stanley” will keep you at a proper distance.
My stepfather said I was a liar ever since I can remember. So did my mother. Consequently, I suppose, I feel as if every word on these pages must be a lie, too, because the pages reflect my life with them. Having been told so often that one is a liar leaves one with the tendency to check every word twice, not only for veracity, but perspective. And I do question my perspective and certainly my right to say uncomplimentary things about my mother. Probably because along with calling me a liar, she described herself as a paragon of virtue. I believed for a long time that she was.
People gave me startled looks when I slipped and began talking even vaguely about life in those two farmhouses where I grew up. Actually, I only talked perhaps three times in my life and very briefly. Once I told a classmate that my stepfather was a bastard, that he shouldn’t be permitted to walk the face of the earth. The classmate looked at me and she looked away and neither one of us knew what to say. I remember wanting desperately to continue, to tell her—and here I’ve got to tell you, Stanley, that my mind just stops at this point. The second time was to a man I’d been dating long after I left the second farmhouse. He was a very warm person with very good manners and extremely intelligent. We spent a lot of time together, in which he talked and I listened and learned to read things like War and Peace and Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Anyway, I started to explain to him one day exactly what the stepfather was like. I don’t remember how successful I was. I do remember that he held my hand and afterward we went for a walk in the rain and then we went to a bar and drank until they closed. I felt very strange that day. I don’t know why.
The next conversation was with my husband eight years ago. He as much as said, “Shut up.” He feared that my talking about what little the psychoanalyst had dredged up might hurt his business and upset our daughter, Page, who was only six years old.
Besides having so little to say, I simply felt numb. In fact, nothing really bothers me. I told you, I don’t believe I have what most people would call emotions or feelings—just an awful fear, a guilt I can’t define, and a sense of impending doom.
What I’m going to do, Stanley, is simply write it all down without regard for your opinion. You can make up your own mind whether I’m crazy or not. They said that, too, my mother and the stepfather, that I was crazy.
That second floor apartment where I lived with my mother and my real father—it seems like yesterday that I saw it all. Fish markets, shoe repair shops, ice cream and tailoring factories; all and more, were crammed in amongst the apartment buildings on a busy main street. I loved looking out the window into our back alley, smelling overripe melon and listening to the peddlers and rag men and vendors. Their voices carried up from the street every morning, mingled with the clop, clop, of horse-drawn carts. Car horns sounded rarely.
Cars were for people with money and on our street there wasn’t much.
Regardless of our lack of money, my mother insisted on good food. A neighbor lady gagged at the creme I drank from the tops of milk bottles. My mother said it made me healthy and she was right. Because there used to be a picture of me about a year old, sitting on my paternal grandmother’s lap; plump and dimpled, with a mass of tiny gold ringlets and slanty, scrunched-up eyes.
Writing this, Stanley, is like peering into a child’s mind and knowing how a brain operates only two years after birth. At two, all you’re doing is watching. You don’t know the meaning of the words “mother” or “father,” or how those words relate to you. So I guess I didn’t miss my father when we left him.
All I know is that we went to live on a farm, my mother and me, with the man who had put me on his lap that day. The farmhouse had dark brown shingles and white trim. It sat back from the road with a row of rocks on either side of the driveway. A huge old apple tree with a swing made of rope and a flat, splintered board sat to the right of the house. As soon as we moved in, my mother planted flowers alongside the drive and the house, bunches and bunches of them. I remember the faces of the pansies, velvet bits of soft colour. They were pretty and I’m glad I remember them now. Because shortly after we moved into that first farmhouse, my memory seemed to grow more and more vague.
I do remember my mother telling me how my stepfather was kind and loving, did not smoke or drink, and faithfully brought home a paycheck. How, unlike my own father, he spent all his spare time with us, not off fishing and hunting and carrying on with other women.
Somehow, I don’t especially admire those attributes in anyone now, and I certainly didn’t as a child. In fact, all I wanted to do when my mother described his good qualities was break, smash, destroy, anything in front of me. She told me when I was older that my stepfather had been so good with me as a baby, that we wrestled and played and laughed for hours. I don’t remember it. When I was four, she wanted to know why I couldn’t be good instead of screaming and crying whenever he came near me. I don’t remember my tantrums, as she called them. I do remember a boiling hatred inside myself.
A truant officer drove by the farm and insisted that a child my size should be in school. Kindergarten was strange and not entirely pleasant. I stole things. Scissors in particular. My mother made me take them back and ’fess up. That made me hate her as well as my stepfather. Now we have a pair of scissors for every room in the house and a really sharp pair for the bottom of whatever purse we carry. I can’t remember where they come from, I simply know I don’t buy them.
Sometimes I just didn’t want to go to school. Once, when the sun had warmed up the floorboards in the living room, and my dolls were waiting to be played with (the stepfather was in the city that day, so playtime would be uninterrupted), I threw myself on the floor as the school bus drew up outside. Crying and kicking, I screamed a refusal to budge. My mother said I would go, by god, and she walked and then she stomped in retaliatory rage, over my prone body. I remember the shock of that moment. She said all the time that she loved me. I didn’t feel loved. I felt her heels on my spinal column.
Late one night around that same time, I heard my mother’s and stepfather’s voices and saw a light on in the kitchen. My bed was in the darkened living room. I listened for a while. My mother commented that I might still be awake and my stepfather laughed.
“She’s probably in there playing with herself,” he said.
My mother told him, “Well, if you weren’t after her all the time, she wouldn’t know anything about that, would she?”
Stanley, something is wrong. All these years—and in spite of my vague sense of the abuse—I’ve felt that I had to keep my mother from knowing what my stepfather was doing. And yet I see that kitchen conversation on these pages. I must have known all along that my mother had always been aware of everything. But, Stanley, I didn’t know. Either my memory is sporadic or I am one of those slow persons, just a little “off,” perhaps, who can’t quite get it together. I’ve only got one memory of that damned cornfield, and perhaps one or two incomplete pictures of my stepfather with me. So, exactly what did I tell my mother years later, on the day I left for good? I remember being in the kitchen with her, telling her something, but I can’t remember what. Nothing is clear.
I’m talking now about the picture of a whole lifetime. Forced to look, I realise what you were talking about the other day, about how my memories must be somewhere.
You ask me for a psychosocial history and I try to answer you, but there is nothing to say. What do people have in their histories, Stanley, what do people have in their lives? I’m not stupid. I know what should be here, all the things that others have and discuss on a daily basis, concerning them and their interrelationships with friends and family and total strangers. That’s what they have. So where is mine?
These journal notes are growing by leaps and bounds. Why are there so many pages and why am I at the typewriter every time I turn around when there is nothing here?
He laid the pages down, cursing under his breath. Her written words, “there is nothing here,” were a repeat of what she’d tried to tell him in the very first interview. He’d heard panic in her voice then; he read it now, in the pages. Should he go on making allowances for pressure and tension, or take her statements at face value? She was exceedingly articulate. Assuming no communication problem, she literally had a few memories and what she called flicks, shreds—of a whole lifetime. The details, limited though they were, would then have to be coming from someone other than the woman. Might the woman be a multiple personality?
It was ridiculous to entertain such a notion on the basis of so little client contact. Besides, she’d been tested by experts. Someone would have noticed. Her family would have noticed.
And then he remembered what she’d told him last week: “I don’t have what you’d call constant contact with anyone. Never have. Don’t want to. People bore me. Small talk, chitchat, pleasantries; it’s a pain. Nobody talks about ideas, concepts, the far-out, the impossible that wouldn’t be impossible if they’d throw it around for a while, you know? So I run, I limit each encounter to a couple of hours. With Norman it was easy. He was always in the workshop grinding something to splinters. In business time is money; people don’t waste too much of it on getting to know you.”
The variety of her mannerisms and expression melded too smoothly. Apart from what he saw as a woman at war with herself—one side frightened to death and the other frightened enough to run—no sharp delineation had ever materialised. Except for the voice of that small child.
He put the pages away in his briefcase and prepared to leave for the video session. Had the pages been in their original handwritten state and not fresh off the typewriter, his suspicions might have been confirmed. He would have seen the numerous different handwriting styles. The journal notes were being delivered up to him, not by the woman as one single entity, but through her people—the others of whom she was merely a “part.”
Sybil and Eve had handed the world a bible on multiplicity. The Troop Formation was about to hand Robert A. Phillips, Jr., Ph.D., Psychotherapist, alias “Stanley,” a much different bible.
THREE
DOCTOR Phillips had noted the continued use of “we” in the woman’s writing. While “we” was still a puzzle, he understood how necessary his new name was: Stanley. He resolved to go along with it. In a recent seminar, another psychotherapist had reported that in over three years of treatment, a male client severely abused by his entire family had never addressed him by name. The man had felt threatened by the authority it represented. Doctor Phillips supposed that “Stanley” was better than no name at all.
The university’s air conditioning had not been turned on. It was still too early in the spring. Prompt as usual, the woman looked up from the bench outside his office door. She seemed annoyed, not at the heat, but the way it had r
umpled her blue denim skirt and precisely ironed white blouse. She put the lid on a large plastic coffee cup, set it and her red daily journal into a large carry-all purse. The purse and two orange floor cushions bound with heavy-duty string bumped against her thigh as she walked with him, down the hall to the video studio.
“I brought the cushions again.” Her tone carried an apology. “You said you didn’t mind them the last time. I really hate chairs. For some reason, they give me an awful feeling of imprisonment. You read the journal pages, how do you like your new name? I hope we haven’t offended you.”
“Absolutely not,” he said, and looked at the heavy carry-all purse and the bobbing cushions. “Let me help you with that.”
The woman juggled her things protectively. “No. I can do it. I wish this headache would go away. They’re bad, the headaches. Nothing stops them. I take Tylenol, more for security than relief. Like whistling in the dark, I suppose.”
“It sounds like migraines,” he said. “They’re very painful.”
“No. The doctors ruled out migraines. And there’s no pain.”
No pain, he thought. Then how could she know she had a headache?
“I sort of sense the pounding,” she told him, “but it’s from forty miles away and that makes me nervous. Because I know it’s coming.”
“What’s coming?”
“The pain.”
“But you never feel it?”
“No. I told you. I never feel anything.” She grinned. “But I stay so busy that maybe I outrun it. Think so?”
He wondered if the quantities of coffee she drank had anything to do with the headaches. She stared at him over the bundle in her arms.
“Nope,” she said, still grinning. “I know what you’re thinking. I drink about thirty-two cups a day. Maybe more. I stopped once. It didn’t help.”
The studio’s front room was crammed with equipment. Several training students looked up at their entrance but went right back to headphones and clipboards. Beyond the front room was the control booth and beyond that, the video studio, sharply lit and barren except for a coffee table, two green plastic chairs, and a makeshift backdrop.