Sybil

by Flora Rheta Schreiber

  When it was time to go, Peggy said pleasantly as she rose from the couch: "You know, we met before."

  "Last week," the doctor replied. "Here."

  "No," Peggy insisted. "We met in Omaha. At the window. The way we met here. I talked to you my own self in Omaha, but you didn't recognize me. I told you I was Peggy, but you thought it was Sybil's nickname."

  When Peggy was gone, she remained very much in the doctor's questing thoughts. Peggy was angry because Stan had sent Sybil a "Dear John" letter. Could this mean, the doctor wondered, that even though Sybil didn't know about Peggy, they were closely allied and that Peggy carried the emotional impact of Sybil's experiences?

  Peggy had said that Sybil couldn't get angry but that she could. Was Peggy Sybil's defense against anger? Was the rage in that fist, when Peggy broke the windowpane, the embodiment of what Sybil repressed? The doctor knew that she would have to learn a great deal more before she could confirm this hypothesis. Perhaps she simply was being bombarded with insights. In any case, the questions poured into her mind urgently and insistently.

  Suddenly thinking about Peggy out on the streets alone, Dr. Wilbur was concerned. Peggy, an assertive personality, should be able to take care of herself. Yet when she said, "Sybil's mother won't let her," as if the mother were still alive, she had clearly shown, as had also been the case on the previous visit, that she didn't know present from past. And she was young. How could she negotiate the streets of New York, the doctor wondered. Dr. Wilbur hoped that she would get home safely. Home? Home was Sybil's home.

  Peggy Baldwin, sometimes Dorsett, had no intention of going back to the dormitory when she left the doctor's office. "I want to go someplace," she murmured half aloud as she strode through the front door of the building onto Park Avenue. "I want to do what I want to do."

  The broad street, with its islands of Christmas trees sparkling with leftover snow, its shining limousines with men at the doorways, their bright buttons glistening in the sun, fascinated her. It was all so different from Willow Corners. Quickly she corrected herself: she had to admit that she lived in this wonderful, new city with Sybil. But her home was Willow Corners.

  How would it feel, Peggy wondered, to live in one of these houses? She wanted someday to be somebody. When she was, maybe she could live in a house with a doorman with shiny buttons. She wanted to be like all those important people, to do lots of things and go lots of places.

  She decided to walk for a while, look, see, experience. There were so many things she wanted to know about. That's why she was always listening, trying to hear everything, her ears straining to capture all she could. She often went to different places just to find out what was going on.

  Crossing over to Madison Avenue, she looked at the shops that she passed-- shops with slender stoles of sable, lovely knitted suits, pink peppermint nightgowns, black jersey tops above red and white cotton skirts banded with black velvet rickrack. She loved pretty things, but she didn't dare buy anything from good places like these. She just looked.

  The bar she passed back on West 44th Street was another place to which she didn't dare go. But she could look in at all those people in there this day after Christmas doing what nobody she knew in Willow Corners did.

  Two men came out. One brushed against her and asked, "How about it?" How about what? she wondered as she looked at him sternly. The man laughed. Laughter scared her. When people laughed, she was sure that they were laughing at her. She began to walk quickly but not fast enough to avoid hearing the man who had brushed against her remark to the other man: "Pretty independent, no?"

  Pretty independent, yes, Peggy simmered as she raced ahead of her anger. Blamed independent. She wasn't going to take anything from anybody. She could fight back.

  Forgetting about the incident, she walked on, finally finding herself in a big store. Passing over a ramp upstairs, she went into a station: "Pennsylvania Railroad," the sign said. Oh, boy, she thought, I can go somewhere. In the station she found a place to eat. She liked to eat.

  After lunch she found herself at a bookstand, looking at a doctor's story. She wasn't too crazy about doctor stories, but Sybil liked them.

  Sybil. How had the nice lady with the red hair mixed her up with Sybil? Couldn't she see that Peggy and Sybil were not the same? All of a sudden Peggy laughed out loud. People turned to stare.

  The people. She could cry when she thought of all the people. Sometimes when she thought of people, she felt lost and alone. There were too many cross people, and cross people made her angry. She knew it wasn't right to be angry, but many things made her angry. Her anger was purple and violet.

  The ramp, which was long, made her feel small. She went through a turnstile, walked down a long corridor, and came to a place where they were selling tickets. She went up to the window. The woman behind the window looked cross. Peggy said evenly: "I don't have to buy a ticket from you!" It wasn't right to get mad, and now she had done it.

  "Ticket, please," she said as she walked up to another window.

  "Elizabeth?" the new lady asked.

  Peggy nodded her head yes. Why not? She could see that lots of people were waiting until a sign was put up. She wanted to be the first through the gate, but even though she hurried, she was the fifth in line.

  The next thing she knew she was in a restaurant near a railroad station, and she was ordering a hot chocolate. When she asked the waiter whether she was in Elizabeth, he looked at her in a peculiar way and said, "Well, sure." Funny, she didn't know how she had gotten there. Her last memory was of moving through the gate at Penn Station. Well, she supposed Sybil or one of those other people had taken the train ride. Who cares, Peggy thought, I bought the ticket for Elizabeth and I'm here.

  She walked apprehensively along the street outside the restaurant. This place wasn't very interesting, but she had to do something. She was surrounded by unfamiliar sights. Spotting a parking lot, she walked briskly across it. She hadn't gotten very far when she felt the sudden joy of recognition at seeing her father's car.

  It was! She had found her father's car, something familiar.

  She walked to the car and began trying its doors. All the doors of the car were locked. She tried the doors again, but no matter how hard she tried, they just wouldn't open. She felt trapped, not by being locked in but by being locked out. It could happen both ways, she knew.

  Anger, purple and violet, welled within her. Its quick, sharp, heavy pulsations throbbed through her body. Almost without knowing what she was doing, she took her handbag and banged the metal frame against a slightly open window. After a few blows she heard the tinkle of broken glass. She loved the sound of breaking glass.

  A man in a tan suit was standing beside her. "What did you do? Lock yourself out?" he asked.

  "It's my daddy's car," she replied. Before the man in tan could reply, a man in a gray suit, who had joined them, snarled, "No, it isn't. It's my car."

  Peggy didn't like this man in gray one bit. And he had no right to talk to her like that. "It's my daddy's car," she insisted, "no matter what you say."

  "Who's that?" asked the man in tan. "Willard Dorsett," she replied proudly.

  The man in gray reached into his pocket, took out his wallet, and displayed the car's registration card. "You see, sister, the numbers match the license plate," he sneered.

  Her head high, her eyes flashing fire, she started off to tell her father what had happened. She would find him, and he would make everything all right. But the man who claimed to own the car was hollering at her in a loud and ugly way: "Hey, come back here. You ain't going nowhere."

  Peggy didn't like being left alone with these men.

  They were mean and ugly, and she was afraid of them. She feared that they would stop her if she tried to get away. She tried to escape anyway, but the owner of the car grabbed her by the arm.

  "You take your hands off me," she warned. "I might jist hurt you."

  Peggy tried to pull away, but the owner of the car placed
a restraining hand on her shoulder and said, "Cool it, sister, cool it." She felt like an outcast, enmeshed by strangers from whom she could expect only mistrust, rejection, insult.

  "Well, sister," the owner of the car insisted, "you broke the window. It will cost me $20 to replace that window. Are you going to pay for it?"

  "Why should I? It's my father's car," Peggy replied.

  "Who are you anyway?" the car owner asked. "Let me see your identification."

  "I won't," Peggy asserted. "I won't. And not you or anybody else can make me."

  The car owner, infuriated by her refusal, pulled her purse away from her. "Give it back to me," she screamed. "Give it back to me right this minute."

  He removed a plastic identification folder from the purse and returned the purse. "Sybil I. Dorsett," he read aloud. "That your name?"

  "No," Peggy said.

  "What are you doing with it, huh?" he snapped. Peggy didn't answer. She certainly wasn't going to tell him about the other girl.

  "Give me the $20," he ordered. "Damn it. Give me the money, sign this paper, and we'll let you go."

  Peggy was raging mad. The next time the car owner asked for twenty dollars, pointing his finger at her, she bit his finger--hard. "Damn it," he sputtered, "you, Sybil Dorsett, give me the money and we'll let you go. Well?"

  "I'm not Sybil Dorsett," Peggy replied coolly.

  The man studied the picture in the plastic folder.

  "That's you, all right," he said with conviction. "And that's your name under the picture. You're Sybil I. Dorsett."

  "I'm not," Peggy protested.

  "Well, what's your name?"

  "I'm Peggy Lou Baldwin."

  "Alias," said the man in tan.

  "She said her father was Willard Dorsett," remarked the man in gray. "There's something rotten here."

  "There sure is," the man in tan agreed. Peggy tried to pull away, but she couldn't move. And she knew that she was being stopped as much from within as from without. In fact, it was because of what was happening within that she didn't move.

  She thought of not having been in command during the train ride to this horrid town, and she knew that she wasn't at the helm now, either. She knew that it was Sybil who had control. She could feel Sybil reaching into their handbag as the car's owner repeated, "It will cost me $20 to replace that window. You're going to pay or I'll call the police." Peggy could feel Sybil handing two crisp $10 bills to the hateful man.

  The man wrote something in a loose leaf notebook. "Okay," he said, "sign this."

  Peggy could hear Sybil saying no, in a firm voice.

  This time Peggy was proud of Sybil.

  It isn't like her to stand up for us, Peggy thought, but this time she is.

  "If you don't sign this paper," the man muttered, "we won't let you go!"

  Peggy watched Sybil reading the paper but couldn't see what the paper said. Only one phrase seeped through. It was: "The owner of the vehicle."

  The owner of the vehicle? These words scared Peggy. They meant that this wasn't really her father's car. Not her father's car? Realizing this for the first time, Peggy again started to run away. But the owner of the car grabbed her, placed a ballpoint pen in her hand, and commanded, "Sign the paper." He then held the paper right up to her face, saying, "You broke the window in my car. You paid me for it. But not for the inconvenience--not for the time I'll waste having it repaired. You really ought to pay extra ..."

  "You put my name on that little card. You said I could go. And I'm going," Peggy announced firmly. "But I don't know why you want me to sign my name."

  "I thought you said it wasn't your name," the man replied. "You're too much! Go!"

  Peggy walked back to the depot. As she rode the train home, she thought of how silly it had been for them to make all that fuss about a little broken glass.

  It was nearly dark when Peggy returned to the small room she shared with Sybil. Twilight peering into the room, so like the one they had occupied as undergraduates in college, cast a pale sheen here and there on the ceiling and on the upper surface of the dresser and chairs.

  Peggy kicked off her shoes and stretched out on the bed. Then she got up and moved swiftly to the portable phonograph. Should she play "Mockin'bird Hill," or "Galway Bay"? Deciding on "Mockin'bird Hill," she sang along with it.

  Still singing, she went to the window and looked out. The trees in the dormitory courtyard glistened with the snow that had just begun to fall. She stopped singing. She was afraid of snow, afraid of the cold.

  Suddenly she had an idea. This was the night of the pre-Christmas social in the rec room, and, tired of all the dreary things that had happened during the day, she decided to go to the party and forget. She would wear the apple green dress that she had bought in a Chinese store on upper Broadway. She had gone there to buy only a tiny tencent paper parasol, but the moment she had seen that dress, she knew she had to have it.

  As the record still played, Peggy took the dress off its hanger in what she humorously called "our closet." This dress is "jist" as pretty, she thought, as those she had seen in the windows of the fancy Madison Avenue shops. And her dress, which was all the rage this season, cost only $12. It would have been worth the price even if she had paid $30, $40, $50, $80, $200, maybe even $300 for it. But Sybil had to go and spoil everything. Peggy liked Sybil best when Sybil minded her own business.

  As she slipped gracefully into the dress, which opened down the front, the pleasant feeling she had felt toward Sybil earlier in the day vanished. Sybil, she felt, stood between her and her desires, her needs, and the expression of her individuality. The dress had brought back all her dormant complaints against Sybil, keeper of their body and head of their household.

  Sybil was a fact of Peggy's life, but sometimes Sybil could be an awful nuisance. When Sybil had found this beautiful dress in the closet, she had acted as if she had seen a ghost or something. How did it get into my closet? What is the sales slip doing in my purse?

  Perhaps what had hurt most was that she had found the dress at all. Peggy had hidden it on the top shelf of a closet that Sybil used as a catch-all for everything except dresses. Who would ever have expected Sybil to look there?

  Had Sybil been upset, Peggy wondered, about the money? Certainly $12 wasn't too much for the dress. Sybil had the money. But, Peggy supposed, Sybil had her own ideas and would go and use her money for furniture, art supplies, and all those medicines--all the things Sybil called necessities.

  Sybil's always messing around with the things I buy, Peggy fretted. It was the same way with my blue suit and blue shoes.

  I got them out twice one day, but both times Sybil put them away again. Yes, she certainly can be a nuisance.

  Peggy looked at herself in the mirror. The effect was beautiful, simply beautiful. Anybody would like such a dress. Maybe Sybil wasn't really upset because of the dress but because of Peggy. No, that's nonsense. The truth was--and Peggy had to face it--that Sybil didn't know of her existence. It wasn't very flattering, but that's the way it was.

  A little jewelry would add to the effect, Peggy thought as she continued to examine herself in the mirror. It would be such fun to wear it, but she knew that she couldn't. It was wrong for her to wear jewels. Hadn't they said so in church? Hadn't she been told that ever since she could remember? Still, she did like pretty things. She hesitated. There was a string of pearls belonging to Sybil's mother. No, she wouldn't wear them. She didn't like Sybil's mother, and that made it doubly wrong to wear those pearls.

  Peggy could not pull herself away from the mirror. Her square body gave her a chunky appearance that she wasn't too crazy about, but she liked her Dutch haircut, her straight black hair, her bangs, her round face, her pug nose, her bright blue eyes and--yes, she had to admit it--her mischievous smile. Ofta mia, she hadn't thought of it before, but she did look like a pixie. Sybil, with her thin, lean body, her light brown hair worn loosely, her heart-shaped face, her gray eyes, and her serious expression, was alto
gether different. Couldn't the nice doctor see that? Couldn't the men in Elizabeth who looked at Sybil's picture and at Peggy see that? Why were people always mistaking her for Sybil?

  Suddenly Peggy moved swiftly from the mirror. The sight of her lips made her turn away. Full and big. The sort of lips Negroes have. She was afraid of her lips. She had begun to think of herself as a Negro. She was afraid of Negroes, afraid of the way people treated them, afraid of the way people treated her. She reached for her purse and left the room.

  In the dormitory courtyard, with snow falling on her hatless head and trickling down her nose, Peggy raced ahead of her fear. As if to banish it, she found herself again humming "Mockin'bird Hill."

  The recreation room was already crowded when she arrived. Students were gathered in groups, talking about everything under the sun. There were card tables and a ping pong table. Sybil didn't play cards or ping pong, but Peggy did. Peggy was well coordinated and quick.

  Peggy looked at the men students. There wasn't one among them, she thought, who wasn't nicer than Stan. But was Sybil interested in them? She was not. Stan hadn't broken Sybil's heart; she simply didn't care that much. And Peggy's heart wasn't broken, either, not at all. Peggy wished that Sybil would find somebody else they could like.

  The long refreshment table, covered with a lovely white lace tablecloth and displaying two large copper samovars, one for coffee and the other for tea, reminded Peggy that she had had no food since her snack in Elizabeth. She knew she couldn't have the coffee or tea because her religion wouldn't let her, but the little sandwiches and dainty cookies looked good. She had just begun to nibble on a sandwich when she heard a cultivated midwestern voice asking, "Have a good day, Sybil?"

  "Great," Peggy replied without hesitation as she looked up at Teddy Eleanor Reeves, a good-looking woman even though she was indifferent about how she dressed, wore no makeup, and had a diamond shaped body. Teddy, who occupied the room next to her own, always called her "Sybil." Long ago Peggy had agreed to answer to the name of Sybil when necessary. It hadn't been necessary with those sinister people in Elizabeth, but with Teddy, who had become a good friend of Sybil, it was different.