by Truddi Chase
It was very nice while it lasted, Twelve said.
Perhaps. It was Catherine’s voice. Tell me. Is there anywhere a man who talks and strokes, in tandem?
You won’t let them talk, the Outrider said. Everyone isn’t an Einstein and you can’t stand stupidity.
At least he didn’t wave his working parts at us. Twelve sounded hopeful, as if by giving Morgan points, the outcome might change. But of course there wasn’t any hope, just a cold draft in the room, created not by the rising winds outside, but by Morgan’s absence.
No, he didn’t wave his working parts at us, Sixteen said, he wasn’t what anyone would call threatening. Morgan was a passive lover.
The Outrider, knowing that for someone in the Troop Formation, Morgan had been anything but a passive lover, let out a scream of hilarity and turned up the radio. “Slow Hand,” the Pointer Sisters’ hit record, played loudly and long. “I want a lover with an easy touch, I want a lover with a slow hand . . .”
The infinitesimal kernel of emotion discovered only hours earlier as being sadness, pulsated, nudged out yet another kernel. The woman with her head under the pillows wanted to scream. She got up. She poured a glass of white wine, hoping that if she read for a while it would make her sleepy. It did not. The gallery bookshelves teemed with volumes ranging from mystery stories to classical literature to poetry and the occult. They’d all been in her hands at one time or another and some were duplicates or triplicates. She could not have quoted the story lines in any of them, but her other selves could and frequently did. The books were arranged in no particular order. The Troops did not like categorisation.
With another glass of wine, the woman made out a list of duties for the following week: cleaning the house, getting her clothes in order, and maintaining a “decent” personal appearance. How strange that she bought so many cleaning items and used so few, and that her dresser boiled over at times with makeup items that she never used. Her ears were vibrating again.
If you cry, Nails said, I’ll break both your arms.
Around 4:00 A.M., tired of staring at the ceiling, she got out of bed, consulted the list, and stumbled downstairs in the dark. The house around her beckoned with moonlit fingers. It smelled faintly of mice and cookies she couldn’t remember baking.
She loved this house. How much longer would it be hers?
First things first, the Outrider said, and the surge of energy lifted the woman almost bodily and carried her to the typewriter. Another hour or two, and dawn would break. Inside the gallery, shadows hung, impenetrable even by the 150-watt, gooseneck lamp.
Shivers took hold; her fingers paused on the keyboard, another mind forcing the action she could not instigate. She turned the stereo on, not because she wanted to, and by the time dawn had crept up to the gallery windows, she’d outlined a land contract for a business meeting that afternoon.
She didn’t notice the crumbs from a toasted cheese sandwich scattered among the typewriter keys, or the notes written by a forceful new hand in the red journal. She was too busy dealing with a chocolate craving. She beat it into the kitchen, for Morgan’s supply of sweets. They’d been there last night, now they were gone. A green garbage bag, neatly tied, sat at the back door.
In the bathroom for the first time that morning, she got a glimpse of her swollen face in the mirror and nearly fainted.
Seated in the dentist’s chair a scant hour later, she burst into tears before he had a chance to lay a hand on her.
“Don’t yell at me,” she sobbed, “we know you will.”
The man’s tender, fatherly concern surprised her.
“Oh, god,” the woman said, laughter rising over the tears, “what’s wrong with me?”
“A little hysteria, a lot of infection. I told you last time. Bone disintegration is caused by pressure, strain, tension. This has been going on for at least fifteen years. It drains your body of vitamins, depletes you; don’t you ever get tired?” The dentist consulted his chart. “You’ve had this since you got married. Have you been brushing with the baking soda and peroxide? You look like a squirrel. Doesn’t it hurt?”
She tried to tell him, with her mouth full of steel probe, that she never got tired and nothing hurt. The same compulsion she’d felt with Morgan last night had pushed to the forefront. The words weren’t any clearer this time.
When she’d finished, the dentist stared down at her. “Your therapist calls that ‘fragmentation’?”
She admitted that, yes, that was what Stanley called it.
Outside the dentist’s office, the sun burned bright on her face. Mean Joe ambled along, his wary eyes moving from side to side, Miss Wonderful did not need to “see” Mean Joe. He had always been there for her—sentinel keeper, warrior in a silent cloak. She knew only that in his shadow she was safe. Her smile grew wide in the June sunlight.
Nobody knew that incest created basket cases, because nobody talked about it. She’d already told Sharon; now she’d told Morgan and the dentist, two outsiders. Miss Wonderful would tell anything, rather than keep it inside. With her mood of celebration at full steam, she spied a street vendor with a cart of flowers. But whereas Miss Wonderful perceived the vendor as being safe because he was a lot like Mean Joe, and the flowers as simply golden and beautiful—the woman regarded him as the enemy, a stranger, and the flowers called up a field of tall grass and lurking danger.
Miss Wonderful’s thoughts seeped through to the woman and gradually the idea of beauty overtook danger; she felt secure, then miraculously happy. The street vendor, a tall black youth wearing a red beanie, smiled at her. In a voice that sounded like an ocean of raw silk, he quoted a price and extended an armful of flowers. His presence, the beauty of his wares, were strong messages. Three very small Troop members responded and their thoughts seeped through to the woman. She did not even wonder why she was so at ease with him or why she felt so faintly childish, counting money into his big, roughened palm. The daffodils nodded yellow heads. Their pungent, earthy odour tugged at something way, far back in her mind as she buried her face in them and got into her car.
* * *
Two days later, with the swelling all but unnoticeable, the woman made her way on unsteady legs beneath a sheer skirt of bottle green that clung damply to hot, wet skin. At the open foyer doors, laughing guests chatted, waving paper napkins at each other and swatting flying insects.
“Makes twice in one month that I’ve seen you,” Sharon cried, “is the world coming to an end?”
“Sharon, which charity are we attending?”
“Cancer, heart, whatever.” Beads of perspiration clung to Sharon’s upper lip, her red hair hung limp on her shoulders. “I wanted to get you out of the house. Your friends are calling me, saying that you never go out, you keep the answering machine on and they can’t reach you.”
“I’m busy.”
“You’re scared. We’re all scared of something; you can’t let it immobilise you.” As if to press the point, she handed the woman a glass of champagne. “What are Stanley’s plans for you, do you know?”
“Eventually a face-to-face confrontation with my stepfather, letting the chips fall where they may.”
“Why not? He deserves it. Take a gun with you. Want crab or lobster?” Sharon was cruising the buffet line like a pro.
“Because.” A giant Waterford punch bowl directly in the woman’s line of vision had caught the sunlight in its thousand crystal cuts, and the reflections were dazzling . . . there was that same dead face, the idea of water in her mind. She looked over her shoulder and spoke too loudly in Sharon’s direction. “My stepfather is twelve feet tall.”
Sharon’s full plate tilted in her hands. Why was the woman’s face so smooth, so rounded, so . . . babyish, and how could she point her toes in that way? “Ssssh,” she hissed.
“No! He scares me.”
“Norman called me,” Sharon said, trying to change the subject and una
ble to find the way. “He’s convinced, finally, that this therapy is good for you. ‘Under the circumstances,’ whatever that means. But he’s got some fantasy that your problem is a sort of sexual coup d’état that has yet to be remembered—a single event.”
“Would that it were. I keep getting this image of a day-to-day horror back there on those two farms. Stanley says hang in there. I swear it’s killing me.” The woman smiled, brittle and bright.
Sharon found them a table near the band where conversation could be drowned out, and they sat. Sharon spoke into her wineglass. “It isn’t like you to get down. Think happy thoughts and you’ll feel better. I promise.”
* * *
“Yes, I’m calling you. Wonder of wonders, right?”
“Astounding,” Stanley laughed. “Bad night?”
“The pits, man. I don’t think anyone we know knows how to talk about this, the nitty-gritty of it. We tried yesterday afternoon, with Sharon.”
“And?”
“Couldn’t get through to her. She likes us to smile. We can’t always do that. When we stop smiling and try to unload, it makes her uncomfortable. And to me, the unloading sounds like complaining; I stop before I get started.”
“Work into it gently,” Stanley said. “Try telling whoever, how bad your headaches are, see if they accept that, and then work up slowly to something else, like your toothache. Everyone understands those two things, pain-wise. From there, you can get into what’s really bothering you. People are so used to your strength, it probably shocks them to see you in this situation. But if they can’t accept this situation, that’s their problem, not ours.”
“My teeth don’t hurt and neither does my head.”
“Pretend,” Stanley told her.
The reflections, having begun, continued. The woman’s fright, each time she saw them, grew. And deep in the blackness of the Tunnel, the Troop member whose emergence the reflections heralded huddled soaking wet and icy cold. Her essence, so wrapped in pain for too many years, sensed the mind that probed for hers with a message she’d thought never to hear: It’s safe. We’ve made it safe. No one will get close again. Even Morgan is gone. Remember the flowers? See the paper? See the crayons? It’s safe. You’re free, now.
Olivia, the one the other Troop members would shortly refer to as “The Well of Creativity,” was coming alive; not as the dictionary defined “alive,” but rather as it was defined within the mechanism of the Troop Formation. And to a man, within the dark Tunnel, there was a scurrying, a making of comfort, a paving of the way. For Olivia would bring with her untold artistic abilities and a horrifying reality.
THIRTEEN
MARSHALL Fielding had called last night. He’d be here “sometime today,” but not in time for the woman’s session. So what Stanley carried in a brown paper bag to the university that morning had been purchased for two reasons; one, to occupy and therefore calm himself and two, as a lure for the children whose names he wanted to learn.
His client showed up for the session with an angular haircut that swung from forehead to nape of neck in a severe swath. Not many women had the face for it. As she settled herself on the orange cushions, Stanley wasn’t sure that she did, either, except for moments when he wondered why she ever wore it any other way.
Stanley handed over the brown paper bag. “This is for you,” he said.
“Me?” She sat there, an adult in emerald green blouse and trousers, with hammered silver earrings and two bracelets that clinked smartly. All her sophistication fell away as she opened the bag, stuck her nose in, and shrieked. “Oh, god, how did you know, aren’t they beautiful!”
She snatched out the dark-green and yellow box and flipped open the lid. Embarrassment overtook enthusiasm as the crayons spilled into her lap. Her nose went into the air, she looked very haughty; then her shoulders hunched protectively. The changes were rapid; another followed as she asked, puzzled, if she was crazy or was it normal for victims to have memory blanks.
“Normal?” Stanley asked. “Just because something happens or doesn’t happen to others has nothing to do with being crazy. Don’t you love your daughter’s uniqueness, her very special individuality?”
The green eyes were frosty. “Love is a fallacy,” one of the Big Three said.
“There is right now,” Stanley told her, “a ten-year-old victim who has no memory of incestuous experiences with her father. Yet we know they happened. After three years of private therapy, Protective Services took over her case, and they are at their wits’ end. A twenty-four-year-old woman in one of my classes has just now emerged from successful therapy. It took her four years to remember. One day, if you’re willing, I’ll arrange a meeting between the two of you.”
Stanley didn’t elaborate on how similar she and Jeannie actually were. The woman started to cry and asked if the other woman were well now, and happy.
“Whatever that means,” Stanley said. “She’s putting her life back together. She gave me a message for you. Said to tell you that it gets better.
“Jeannie,” Stanley said, trying to make things more real for her by using his student’s first name, “watched several of your tapes.”
He saw it sink in. She might be listening, but he suspected that the crayons occupied the attention of someone else. The hand began to move over the sketchbook, clutching a fat purple crayon. He’d seen the woman’s absent-minded drawing before, but the flowers erupting today were loose and flowing, their shapes more imaginative than the stilted daisies with which she usually decorated either the red journal or the sketchbook.
There was no way for him to know that in the woman’s mind, the creativity he saw on the sketchbook pages was being unleashed through another Troop member. Someone had begun to chant, Make it pretty, paint it green, yellow, red, purple. Let it be a flower. Let there be a lot of flowers. The woman didn’t hear the chant and Stanley could see no expression in her face.
“Very well,” Stanley said, “let’s relax here.”
“Thank you for the crayons.”
Lamb Chop’s voice was tiny. Stanley grinned. She took sly whiffs of the waxy crayon odour. Suddenly the soft voice gave way. Without warning, it whipped back and forth among other voices, a three-, a six-, and a ten-year-old, to a hard-nosed twenty-five, and back again to the first childlike tones. Except that a lisp had now materialised in another child’s voice, fleeting but definite. The woman’s face changed so rapidly during the voice fluctuations that Stanley gave up tracking its cheekbone angle, the slashes of pale mouth, the nostrils that alternately flared, compressed, widened, and pinched themselves together.
The voice and facial changes belonged to various individual Troop members, each one motivated by the air of safety which Stanley had manufactured with a three-dollar box of crayons. One by one, they looked out from behind the swing of blond hair and, just as quickly, leaped back into hiding. Although he asked repeatedly, no one would give him a name. As things calmed down, he heard a single voice, good-humoured and unflappable. The female speaking did not introduce herself.
“I never associated the words ‘daddy’ or ‘father’ with the stepfather. I totally refused to do that. He had rewards for himself and one of them was cruelty. Toward us, animals, people, it didn’t matter.”
“We call that evil,” Stanley said.
His air of agreement had reached past Elvira, to Twelve. Stanley would learn to recognise her intense warmth of manner, the lilting voice, and a pair of eyes that sparkled like sunlight on water.
“Nobody ever said that to us before. You agree with that definition of the stepfather? You’ll have to, or you won’t believe a single thing we tell you today or any other day.”
“I believe you.”
Twelve told him that the stepfather stomped new-born wild baby rabbits to death during the spring plowing each year. One day, the half brother managed to save one. He’d carried it home, wiggling and scared to death, and put it in
a cage in the washroom along with the family pet, a big white bunny. At dinner that night, the stepfather sat there laughing. Then he got up, watching everyone’s face, and opened the washroom door. Both rabbits lay dead in the cage.
“There was too much screaming and fear during any meal; you were never sure what would happen next. We all screamed, but that day with the rabbits, I remember the half brother’s most of all. The stepfather beat him unmercifully. He kept yelling at him, ‘Be a man.’ Did he want his son to be cruel and sadistic, the way he was? The half brother wasn’t effeminate. He just didn’t know how to be like his father.”
Catherine now spoke her own, the woman’s words, and those of another Troop member. The woman heard the words and realised that letting them out today had a relatively calming effect on someone. For her, what had lain shrouded in her mind over the years sounded familiar and brought back the old terrors.
“The stepfather looked on mealtime as a battleground. He’d give even his own children such scornful, loathing looks. He’d chew his food in a slow, sloppy way, because he knew it made me sick. He’d sit there laughing while my mother insisted, ‘Eat, damn you, I grew this food in the garden! I canned it, I cooked it. It’s hot over that stove but you wouldn’t know that, I do everything for you!’ Just thinking about that now, I want to get up and run out of this room, I want to scream and hit something. But fury or tears created a kind of joy in him. He’d stare at me and smile. If my mother left the table even for a second, he said things to remind me that I was stupid, odd, crazy, useless. He jeered and calculated what it cost to feed me. Even today, as an invited guest in someone’s home, I can’t ask for a second helping of anything.”
She told Stanley about stealing food to eat outside the house. Until turning thirteen it had been possible to hide her appetite, but that summer the cellar walls needed rebuilding. Both her muscle structure and appetite had grown as she and her stepfather lifted boulders down from a flatbed car.