by Truddi Chase
With little real assurance that she was not a murderess, that a policeman would not come pounding on her door some night, the woman wondered if this was the reason she avoided answering doors or telephones or opening the mail. She had to find out. She added it to the weekly list: call the stepfather. Make sure he’s still alive. And all the while, of course, the hope swept over her that he was dead as a doornail and rotting in hell.
* * *
The long-handled wooden kitchen spoon with which his parents had beaten him might have terrorised the two-year-old boy in Virginia had he lived long enough to become an adult. There were supposedly innocuous things that petrified the Troop members and the woman, collectively and individually: the open hood of a car (Stanley suspected that a great deal of sexual abuse might have gone on behind the hoods of the many vehicles the stepfather repaired as a hobby); wicker baskets (in which one Troop member hinted that the stepfather had collected the snakes); muddy paths (reminders of the hedgerow); animals (Stanley expected further details on that); the thought of high places; having to sit in chairs; having the bedclothes anywhere near their faces; anyone who hugged them too tightly or even put out a hand too quickly in greeting; and, of course, the sound of anyone “slobbering,” as one Troop member put it, over food. From other victims and even adult offenders who had been subjected to oral sex as children, Stanley had picked up that masticating sounds held the power to disturb their subconscious minds greatly enough to cause overt eruptions of anger.
When not terrified by outside forces, the Troop members aggravated each other and terrorised the woman. The journey, as the Seventh Horseman had called it, had begun in earnest.
“I can’t stand it,” the woman yelled one day. “I want to know if what’s happening to me is normal. Am I normal?”
“Yes,” he said. “Within your own frame of reference.”
Stanley suspected, as the woman did not, that a vital part of the journey to which the Seventh Horseman had alluded would include a more potent “evidencing” by Troop members who had previously been quiet or at least more restrained.
He was right.
That night in the loft bedroom, the woman found her black dress slung over a wing chair. Fear snaked inside her mind. Why wasn’t the dress in the closet where it belonged? She’d worn it only once, to a funeral. The jewelry thrown casually on top of it didn’t look funereal; it looked gaudy.
The off-balance sensation tightened inside her. Yanking herself upright against the doorjamb, she tried to crush the pulse that had started to throb, and then beat, between her legs.
Click. Click, click. In the woman’s mind, the sound of beads shattered the silence, as if the skylight had burst above her head.
Hell, the voice said, you’re going to hell. Click.
Poor Sister Mary, another voice said, and Sister Mary answered: Click. Click.
The woman sensed that nobody was talking to her. She didn’t touch the dress and in the morning it was gone.
Equanimity fled each time she faced another flick or click. As the hot and humid August days passed, her desperation grew and control slipped away. The tiny person whom she and the Seventh Horseman had seen under hypnosis seemed to press closer. Little else remained of that session, except for the memory of the silent, golden-haired child, to whom the woman referred, without understanding why, as a “doll.”
She took the crayons Stanley and Jeannie Lawson had given her and hid them up in a kitchen cupboard. For a nonmultiple, it might have been an irrational act.
Sorting out the voices was more difficult. They were all in her head as individual thoughts, distinctly different and belonging to individual people; but, more often than not, her confusion welded them together instead of separating them according to their owners. She decided to ask Sharon for help with the sorting process. Therapy was fine, but somebody other than Stanley had to listen, tell her it was alright. Late one afternoon, over the phone, the woman started explaining multiple personality to Sharon. Sharon took a deep breath, said she’d already explained it, and that it still sounded ridiculous. “You talk,” Sharon said, “as if these people are real, as if you see and hear them!” The woman replied that they were, indeed, “real,” that she could in fact “see and hear them,” but that she had no memory of having told Sharon anything about MPD. The easy laughter of their thirteen-year-old friendship vanished. For the first time since the woman had known her, Sharon could not find time for coffee.
It wasn’t until the next morning on her way to a business meeting that the rejection hit her. She stopped the car in a parking lot while something awful welled up and the one who brought it cried. The gap between what she perceived as herself and the outside world was unbridgeable. Since she’d never experienced loneliness, she did not understand what engulfed her at that moment.
She went into the business meeting, attempting to juggle the voices in her head, but her mind was fastened on guilt and Stanley’s insistence that she was guilty of nothing. His lessons came back to her: “Children are naturally sexual creatures. Boys frequently have erections at birth and, like girls, can be sexually aroused by the touch of an adult or another child stroking any portion of their skin. No adult has the right to take advantage of that early sexuality or lead a child into areas where it is not prepared or equipped to deal.”
It sounded too easy, laying the blame on the stepfather instead of herself. She viewed herself from the mother’s perspective; the guilt descended. Stanley’s words warred with the mother’s. Suddenly the weight lifted from the woman’s shoulders. The settlement check lay forgotten in her hand.
Had the mother really, as Stanley said, starved her daughter for affection and made her a prime target for the stepfather? She stood for a moment staring at nothing, searching for the child she used to be. No memory surfaced.
Feeling badly treated as a child, scared witless and angry because of it—that memory came but only from an enormous distance. As if the small bits clogging her mind right now had never touched her.
Walking back to her car in a light summer drizzle, she watched with grave concentration people thronging the street on their way to lunch, seemingly at ease and self-confident. A man looked straight at her. Remembering her mother’s “You’ll never be pretty, you’d better be neat,” she averted her eyes, pretending concern with the carry-all purse. Did any of these people keep their houses neat to the point of sterility? Did they take two and three baths a day or devote hours of painstaking preparation for a date or an appointment or even just to sit at a typewriter? Did they fear a knock on the door, someone catching them disheveled and ugly?
Flick, snip, images of the stepfather and the odour of his warm body sweat plunged straight to the woman’s brain. Furious, she ran the rest of the way to her car and slammed the door shut, wishing his head were caught in it.
* * *
Stanley explained to his class the fear some incest victims experienced.
“This woman,” he said, “just prior to therapy, allowed someone she’d thought of as a friend to blackmail her for over sixty thousand dollars. She accepted blackmail rather than allow one insignificant love affair to surface in public.”
“Lesbian?” a student inquired.
“Plain old heterosexual,” Stanley said. “But to somebody in the Troop Formation, the sex act is filthy and should be hidden.”
“But she permits these tapes to be shown around here at the university . . .,” the student began.
“In that respect, at least, she’s come out of hiding. Eventually we both hope the videos will be used in training other therapists. Of course when we began, she and I, we had no idea we were dealing with multiple personality.”
“Doctor Phillips,” a Protective Services worker raised her hand. “Is there a test for this sort of thing? I’m working with an incest victim right now who sounds so much like this woman. I’m wondering if the reason we aren’t getting anywhere with her is t
hat we’re just not seeing the right problem.”
“It’s possible,” Stanley told her. “There’s a short question-and-answer form that you could begin with: Does the client have blackouts, severe headaches, dizzy spells? Does the client make numerous lists? Do people recognise the client on the street many times, but the client doesn’t recognise them in return? Etc. I’ll give you a copy after class.”
It sounded so easy.
* * *
If multiple personality was uncharted territory for Stanley and for the researchers working on it, it was the same to the woman experiencing it. For almost each new occurrence so far, she’d demanded to know if another multiple had encountered the same. Stanley could not confirm or deny much of anything. One day at home, she stared at her hands, the ones that didn’t look familiar. She went to the bathroom mirror and stared. The eyes changed immediately, both in colour and expression. The mouth took on a fuller, more languid line and the cheekbones rose into place. These things had always happened. How did they happen?
Someone smiled at her in the mirror.
It will make sense only if you give up the fright and look at it properly. We’re trying to tell you one single fact: you can’t do anything unless we do it through you. Got that?
The woman got it. She’d gotten it before but this time they let her hang onto it a little longer.
Someone began to sing “Secondhand Rose,” reinforcing that if she existed at all, it was secondhand, through her other selves. She stared into the mirror and while the voice sang there wasn’t one thought in her own mind. The singing stopped.
The woman’s mind went completely blank, devoid of what had been passed to it just a few seconds ago.
We give and we take away, the voice said.
The woman started to cry, knowing with someone else’s thought that something had been snatched from her grasp before she could pin it down as her own. What they were doing to her today was worse than waking up on the highway at fifty miles an hour, wondering at unfamiliar landmarks, or sitting at the dinner table with Page, trying to hear a conversation she was not part of.
“I hate you,” she cried. “I hate you for treating me like a child! There’s a secret here that someone isn’t telling me!” As Brat acted through her, the woman felt a child’s anger. She stamped her feet on the tiled floor of the bathroom and beat her hands on the countertop; the heavy aroma of spilled perfume filled her nostrils.
There is a secret. It just isn’t shared with you.
“Why am I left out?”
You are the secret.
* * *
“Goddamn them and their riddles, they can’t frighten me, Stanley!” The words were vehement but the woman appeared disoriented. “Why,” she asked him, “do I feel as if what I just said wasn’t of my own volition? As if someone put the words in my mouth and spoke them for me?”
Stanley laid down the clipboard. “Who did that?” he asked. “Which one of you?”
“Which ones of us?” The voice was taunting and he knew by the woman’s glazed expression that even though the words came out of her mouth she wasn’t conscious of them or of the tears on her face either.
“You’re not giving her a chance to speak,” Stanley said.
“She can’t.”
“What do you mean, she can’t? She’s human, with a mind of her own, isn’t she?” Stanley kept his voice noncommittal.
So they explained it to him.
“In order to understand our ‘process,’ as you call it, you might want to liken ‘her’ to an empty paper bag in a high wind. Remember that the bag itself is nothing; it is merely a thin shell with no stability of its own. It has no real experience and therefore no conscious self-thought. In order for the paper bag to withstand the high winds of life, if you will, we, one or more of us at a time, must continually leap in and ‘fill’ the bag. Do you understand now?”
The Troops were telling him again that the person he saw as his client didn’t think. They did her thinking for her. Stanley shook his head as if to reject the idea and caught himself, but not in time.
“Gotcha,” Elvira said. “We don’t care if you voice your opinion or show emotion. That don’t bother us at all. Do you remember Descartes’ rule of thumb, ‘I think, therefore I am’? The woman ain’t, Stanley. She runs around all day, wondering,” and Elvira began to sing off key, “Oh, god, how come you do me like you do, do, do?”
“I doubt if she says that,” Stanley said, misunderstanding Elvira’s humour.
“Hey. Lighten up. Y’all want us to weep and moan?”
* * *
“Days of freedom, days of grace, amen,” Elvira chanted irreverently in the woman’s mind. Stanley had gone off for the weekend, to a seminar on multiple personality. A whole Saturday morning with no session, no business to conduct. Fear moved aside long enough to fry bacon and two eggs. She dipped hot buttered toast into golden yolks, munching happily as someone else swallowed, although she didn’t know that. She’d always believed the humming sensation along her veins to be normal for everyone. She hadn’t noticed how it had increased these last minutes.
Upstairs in the loft, while she ran water for a leisurely soak, the humming sensation travelled more rapidly through her muscles. Time passed. From a great distance as she lay quietly in the water, the woman watched a tiny child taking up the bar of soap. Almost dreamily, the child lathered it between fat-fingered hands, blowing bubbles, round and rainbow-like, that plopped with small hisses against the tiles and faucets. There was no other sound in the bathroom. Again time passed. The woman felt detached and lazy.
Once out of the tub, she avoided her reflection in the mirror, suddenly aware of not having looked at herself in months. The humming inside her veins was now like a thousand tiny electrical shocks.
The Troops were moving in.
The old white cotton robe would not stay belted around her middle, no matter how tightly she tied it. As it slithered unaided to the tiled floor, the woman stood in front of the mirror, naked and frozen. There seemed to be a pair of hands moving over her body, inspecting the flesh. She could feel them, separate and apart from her own.
“No,” she whispered. “It’s my day.” It didn’t help to know that one of her other selves was about to emerge. Knowing and believing were two different things.
“Catherine,” the presence said with wry amusement, as if introducing herself. She held something in her hand, which the woman could not see. “Red,” Catherine murmured, “I’m terribly, terribly fond of it; you’ll get used to it.”
The woman looked into the mirror. Her lips were flooded with the blood-red colour of an ordinary accounting pencil she’d never seen before.
“There have got to be some changes here.” Catherine’s hands slid over the woman’s flesh again; they plucked at her hair twisting it this way and that. “Look at yourself,” Catherine prodded, “a pale blob. You need colour, lots of it.”
It shocked and revolted the woman to see how pretty the red actually was on her mouth. She snatched up her clothing, hurriedly pulling nylons on, right over damp flesh. Along with the humming sensation, cold water seemed to be shooting through every vein in her body. Out of nowhere or perhaps with someone else’s help (because the woman felt more than one other presence now), a strange pair of white ankle socks slid on over the nylons.
Behind the terror it was funny. At least one voice told her so. She was being told a lot of other things in an awful Southern accent. Clothing in hand, the woman stood listening to the radio belt out “Proud Mary” while two separate persons, one of them Catherine, the other still mercifully unidentified, pressed down on her, forcing her by a means she couldn’t define to accept them, accept their attitudes and their very states of being.
Confused, unable to delineate their voices, the woman heard them separate and merge again. Both urged cooperation on her part, a willingness to “see our side of it.” All
the woman could see was a blood-red, wanton mouth in the mirror and her own body, leaping to the rhythm of “Suzie Q,” the wildest version she’d ever heard.
Battle lines were drawn between herself and them, as another voice, huffy and displeased, started demanding decorum in tones that might have belonged to a duchess.
The woman ran into the bedroom. She threw on her clothes, remembering Stanley’s repeated instructions to “let them out.” The red would not come off her mouth, no matter how hard she scrubbed, not even when she put Ajax on her toothbrush and scoured her lips.
She faced how people would see her through these three alone: wanton, silly, raucous, pretentious. If, as Stanley said, they’d always been there, then people had already seen her this way, and probably laughed behind her back.
She stumbled toward the bed, to escape into sleep. It was the safest place left. There was something strange about the bed, some reason not to go near it; she turned as if to flee the room. A voice, softly, plaintively called her name. The woman whirled around and faced the bed. A small presence in a brown dress sat there waiting all alone, with tiny, fat-fingered hands lying quietly in her lap.
Solemn-eyed, the child followed on tiny, padding feet as the woman headed away from her, down to the gallery. The woman turned on the tape recorder. She felt it in each of her movements, a haughty, easily offended attitude, exactly like one of the voices just moments ago. She pictured outsiders observing that attitude, and could barely operate the recorder buttons. She remembered the session with the Seventh Horseman and the child in the brown dress—the same child who now sat at her elbow, here in the gallery.
Doll.
Child.
The stampede in her mind grew thunderous. Whoever had emerged today would be followed by others—selves who belonged to all the quarrelling voices.
Someone screamed, “You are the secret,” and it was as if someone had taken fistfuls of either side of her brain and tugged brutally in opposite directions. She had just experienced what Frank Putnam’s research termed “jamming,” the act of one self fighting to take away the too-dangerous thoughts of those selves closest to the sleeping cores.