The daughter's normal questions about the facts of life were left unanswered. When Hattie was pregnant, Sybil was excluded from the "filthy" truth. When the pregnancy resulted in a miscarriage and Willard Dorsett buried the fetus--a boy--alongside the back steps, Sybil did not know what he was doing or why. Babies, born or unborn, somehow happened, but nice people did not admit how.
There were no hows or whys, only the conversational assumption of an incorporeal saintliness that, denying the flesh, consigned it to the devil. "All men," Hattie counseled her daughter, "will hurt you. They're mean, worthless." On other occasions, however, she did say, "Daddy is not like other men." But so saying, she led Sybil, who had seen the penises of little boys, to believe that her father didn't have a penis. With father "castrated" and because of the negative attitudes toward sex inculcated within her by day, Sybil was shocked and bewildered by what she saw and heard at night.
Riveted to the nighttime lie that represented the hypocrisy of her formative years, Sybil was forced to watch a drama from which she could escape only by closing her eyes and covering her ears.
The shades were usually halfway down in the twelve-by-fourteen bedroom. The crib was placed so that a street light shone in the bedroom window, silhouetting the penis that Sybil denied her father had. Three or four nights a week, year in and year out, from the time Sybil was born until she was nine years old, parental intercourse took place within her hearing and vision. And not infrequently the erect penis was easily visible in the half-light.
Observing this primal scene, directly and in silhouette from the time of their individual arrivals, the various selves had different reactions to it.
Peggy Lou was wakeful, uneasy, but she did not try to cover her eyes or to keep from listening.
"What are you talking about?" she would sometimes demand to know.
Hattie would reply, "Go to sleep."
But instead of going to sleep, Peggy Lou would strain her ears in the hope of unscrambling what was being said. She didn't like to have her father and Sybil's mother whispering about her. They often whispered about her at the table, and she thought they were doing the same in the bedroom. Enraged by the feelings of exclusion engendered by the whispering, Peggy Lou was also made furious by the rustling of the sheets. Every time she heard that rustling she wanted to stop it.
It had been a relief to have been moved into the upstairs room shortly after Grandma Dorsett's funeral and not to have had to hear that rustling any more.
Vicky had seen the erect penis in silhouette on many occasions. Unafraid, she would turn from the shadow on the window to the substance in the bed. What happened in bed was not always visible and, when visible, not always the same. A humped figure, Willard would sometimes move towards Hattie and mount her. At other times he would approach her as they lay side by side.
In the beginning Vicky thought that perhaps Willard was going to crush Hattie and kill her, but instead of dying, Hattie rolled over with Willard. They embraced. And it went on. Vicky had decided that if Mrs. Dorsett hadn't wanted him to do what he was doing, she would have stopped him. At any rate, Vicky knew that it certainly wasn't up to her to help Mrs. Dorsett.
Usually the faces of Mr. and Mrs.
Dorsett were hidden in the darkness. There were times, however, when the room was light enough for Vicky to see the faces--tense, strained, transformed, unrecognizable. Looking back from the vantage point of later years, Vicky could never decide whether these were the faces of ecstasy or of some malign affliction.
Vicky often felt that perhaps it wasn't right for her to look. She dismissed the scruple, however, with the realization of whether or not she looked, she would have heard anyhow. And she was curious. There was also something else: Vicky had the distinct impression that Hattie Dorsett actually wanted her daughter to look. That "something else" was that Hattie customarily threw the sheets back as if to reveal what was happening.
Marcia feared for mother's safety.
Mary resented the denial of privacy. Vanessa was revolted by the hypocrisy of parents who paraded in their daughter's presence the sexuality they pretended to deny.
Watching and listening in that parental chamber of sexual display was a self called Ruthie, who emerged in analysis during the reliving of the primal scene. She was only a baby, perhaps of three and a half, and she could not give the date of her arrival in Sybil's life. But of all the silent witnesses to the parental intercourse it was Ruthie who was most actively indignant. Acting in concert with Sybil, who was then of the same age, Ruthie retaliated against her parents with undisguised rage.
When the parents came into the room, Ruthie would lie very still, pretending to sleep. The pretense would continue while the parents undressed--Hattie in the bedroom, Willard in the adjoining doorless bathroom. But when the parents got into bed and her father moved to her mother's side, Ruthie would make her presence known. "Go to sleep, mama," she would call. "Go to sleep, daddy."
Ruthie was angry because she didn't want her father on her mother's side of the bed. Ruthie didn't want her father to whisper to her mother, or embrace her or breathe heavily with her or rustle the sheets with her. When he was near her mother that way, Ruthie felt that he liked her mother better than he liked her.
One night, seeing and hearing these things, Ruthie climbed out of the crib and walked very quietly toward her parents' bed. In the car Ruthie always sat in the middle. If she could do that in the car, she could do it in the bedroom. Climbing onto the bed, she attempted to get between her parents and to reclaim her rightful place in the middle.
Infuriated, Willard jumped naked out of bed, dragging his daughter with him. He sat down on a chair, placed the child over his knees, and spanked her hard. Then he put her back into her crib and returned to his wife to discover that for Hattie as for himself interrupted intercourse was to be followed by interrupted sleep; for, even after the morning sun had replaced the street light, the agonized sobs that had emanated from the crib from the moment the child had been returned to it had not ceased.
"Never again," Willard told Hattie.
"I'll never spank that child again. Anyone who sobs all night takes things too hard."
Willard Dorsett, who had never spanked his daughter before and who kept his promise not to spank her again, did not know that it had been Ruthie and Sybil who had interrupted the intercourse but Peggy Lou who had sobbed all night. The incident had been so traumatic that Sybil, who had shared the experience with Ruthie, blacked out and became Peggy Lou.
Willard and Hattie Dorsett, of course, were not so disturbed by a lost night's sleep that they did not continue to have intercourse in the presence of their daughter. And Sybil continued, time after time, to be exposed to this primal scene until she was nine years old.
Awakened at times or wakeful and restless, Sybil tried to shut out the insistent rustling of the starched sheets of the parental bed, the whisperings, the murmurs, and the silhouettes. The penis of shadow and substance, which was visible to the other selves, was an object of denial for Sybil. She claimed not to have seen her father's penis until the morning when her father had leaned over the crib to tell her that Grandma Dorsett had died. At that moment Sybil had become uncomfortably aware of the mass of hair on her father's chest. She had wondered why she was so shocked, and she realized that it was not because of the hair on the chest. As a very young child, hadn't she often made a game of cutting off her father's chest hair? She was shocked instead because of how far down she could see. Visible was something from which she turned with aversion. It was partly concealed, and the closest she could come to describing it was to say that it was hidden in feathers. It wasn't very big, but it was bigger than any boy's she had ever seen. It was a little bigger around than her father's thumb, but it wasn't long. It sort of hung down when her father leaned over. In back of it, on either side, a pair of little lumps was hanging down. Sybil felt so scared and so awful that at first she didn't quite grasp what he had said about her grandmother.
> If Sybil was terrified by her father's maleness, Willard Dorsett was equally terrified by his growing awareness of his daughter's femaleness. She was only two and a half when he suddenly began insisting that she was "too big" to sit on his lap, "too big" to wander in and out of the bathroom while he was shaving. By the time she was four, she had become "too big" to cut the hair on his chest or to put salve on his feet, both of which activities she had by then been performing for about a year. Like a metronome, the phrase too big ticked off the incestuous stirrings in Willard Dorsett.
But to be deliberately exposed to the sights and sounds of her parents' most private sexual intimacies, Willard and Hattie Dorsett's daughter--even at the age of nine --was not too big.
13
The Terror of Laughter
When Sybil was six, however, there had been an interlude away from the white house with black shutters. For, when the Great Depression struck, Willard Dorsett suffered serious reverses, even losing his home. The house became the property of his sister in payment of an old debt, and Willard, virtually penniless, took his wife and daughter to live on farm land belonging to his parents five miles outside of Willow Corners.
The only house on those forty acres of land was a one-room chicken house, which the Dorsetts made their temporary home. High on a hill in undulating country, the new home delighted Sybil, who found in it surcease from the strange occurrences in the white house with black shutters where she had always lived.
At the farm, which Willard dubbed The Forty, autumn had yielded to winter and winter to spring. It had been snowing for three days, but now it had stopped. Willard Dorsett was putting wood in the range--it was only March and still cold--and was talking to Sybil in his usual soft voice: "We will go outside and leave Mama alone."
That meant that they were going back to the big oak tree at the bottom of the hill, which they had been sawing before the snow began. She enjoyed all the things she could do in the house-- coloring with her crayons, playing with her dolls, making dresses for them, playing with Top, the big Airedale her cousin Joey had given her, and reading in the primer her father had bought for her. But it was good to be going out again.
"Are we going right away?" she asked.
"As soon as I look after Mama," her father said.
"Mama." He always called her that, but Sybil herself never said anything except "Mother." Sybil had stopped saying "Mama" long ago, when she was a very little girl. Now Sybil was six and two months, but her father hadn't noticed that her mother wasn't "Mama" to her anymore.
That's the way her father was. So handsome, so bright, so successful until just before coming here--to this one room on top of the hill. But his nose was in his work--designing and building all those wonderful houses, churches, and barns for people. Some folks called him "master builder." He just didn't have time to notice.
At the far end of this room, which served as living room, bedroom, and playroom, there was a figure that didn't move. Her mother. The kerosene lamp with which the room was lighted on dark days was glowing beside her.
Sybil could see her mother's gray-white hair, the bun in the back held together by three bone hairpins and the wisps and loops in front. Although it was the middle of the afternoon, she was wearing a dark blue flannel bathrobe and her feet were encased in gray-felt carpet slippers. Her hands were straight down and flat at her sides, and she hung her head so low that you could hardly see her face.
The pelican on the piano in the big house in Willow Corners: her mother was like that, or like the statue in the museum in Rochester. Her mother used not to be this way. She used to think well of herself, ran things, held her head high. "Hattie Dorsett holds her head so high," Sybil once overheard a neighbor say, "that I'm sure that she wouldn't see a crack in the ground."
Other things also were different from her mother here and her mother in Willow Corners. That mother did things to you; this mother didn't do anything.
Her father had walked over to her mother and motioned to Sybil. Sybil knew what that meant. She didn't like doing it, but her father had crippled hands and couldn't lift her mother by himself. Now that her mother was like this, she had to help him.
Her mother didn't pay any attention even though her father and Sybil were standing over her. She didn't notice when they lifted her from her chair onto the white enamel slop jar they kept just for her. A shadow passed over her father's face while they waited for her to finish. Then they lifted her back to her chair, and her father took the jar outside.
Sybil was alone with her mother. In Willow Corners, in the house with black shutters, Sybil was always afraid to be left alone with her mother. Here she was not afraid. This mother didn't do anything to her. She was a forty-seven-year-old woman who had to be treated like a baby.
They had to do everything for her mother now. She couldn't walk to the toilet, which was outside. They had to dress her and feed her. She swallowed so slowly that even the liquid meals lasted for hours.
In the big house her mother had cooked, and Jessie had cleaned. Here there was no Jessie, and her father cooked, got water from the spring, and washed clothes in the river. He had to do everything--with his hands, crippled with the neuritis he had back in Willow Corners.
Sybil turned from her mother to Norma, her doll. "Norma," she said as she put an extra blanket on her, "I'm going out. You'll be asleep, so you won't feel lonely."
"Mama," her father, who had come back, was telling her mother, "I'm taking Sybil out with me. Will you be all right?"
Why did he talk to her? She didn't hear him. She didn't hear anything. Her eyes were open, but when something passed in front of them, they didn't even blink. Her mother wasn't asleep, but she didn't hear or see. And she never answered when they talked to her.
"Sit down, daddy," Sybil said as she lifted his fleece-lined jacket from the padded box he had made for their clothes. The jacket was so woolly and furry. It looked so nice over his long trousers. He never wore overalls, but the men who worked for him in Willow Corners did.
When her father sat down, she buttoned the collar of his shirt and then helped him into his jacket. She also helped him with his buckled overshoes. "Foot up," she said.
It was so nice to be doing this for her father. It was only after his hands had been crippled that he had allowed her to do things for him again. When she was little, he had come home tired after a long day and she had put sweet-smelling salve on his feet. Then, all of a sudden he had decided to put the salve on by himself.
"Why can't I do it?" she had asked him. "Didn't I do it right?"
"Yes, yes, you did it fine," he had replied, "but you are too big."
This too big. She couldn't understand it. Was she too big for her father?
"All right, daddy," she said, "you can get up now."
She put on her red wool coat with the beaver collar, her brown knit leggings, her overshoes with three buckles, and her red wool stocking cap. She never looked in a mirror. She didn't like to look at herself. Her mother used to say that she had a funny nose.
"Daddy, I'm ready," she said.
"Coming," he replied. Then he walked to her mother's chair. To protect her against the afternoon chill in case the range did not provide enough heat, he placed her black coat around her shoulders as if it were a cape. Then he went out with Sybil.
Outside everything was white and beautiful. It had been autumn when they had arrived. Now it was the beginning of spring. Soon the trees would grow leaves. Sybil looked forward to that.
"A beautiful spot," her father had said. Her sled was outside the door, and her father said, "When we come back, you can go sleighing." How she loved sledding down this rounded, snow-clad hill on which their house stood. She never hit the furrow. She was careful.
They passed the woodpile. She loved helping her father carry wood from that pile. At first he couldn't pick up the wood or load it in his arms. She picked up a stick of wood, placed it across his arms. Her father was weak, and the work was hard for him. But he did i
t.
Sybil thought of that autumn day when she had come here with her father and mother. She would never forget that drive. Nobody spoke. Of the three, she herself, it was clear from the way the others behaved, cared least about losing their old home. Now and then she would try to place bits of talk into the long silences, but she knew that her parents weren't listening so she, too, finally said nothing. Her mother did say, though, "A chicken house is only fit for chickens."
Her father had replied: "It's clean, and there have never been any chickens in it." Then her mother's neck got red all over, and she had sneered: "No, we're the first. When I married you, I didn't think you'd turn me into a chicken. Your sister Clara did this to us. You were silly to let her." Her father turned away, concentrated on the driving, and said nothing.
Her mother didn't sneer anymore. At Christmas the change had come. Her mother told her parents and her brothers and sisters in Elderville, Illinois, that this year they would not exchange gifts. But the relatives sent things anyway, and her mother, who didn't have the money to buy anything for them, had become very depressed. Then she stopped talking, stopped doing anything.
Sybil remembered the time they had come just for a visit. Someday, her father had said, they would build a summer house here, and when she was big enough, she would have her own pony. Then all of a sudden they had just come. They hadn't built a house, but they had come anyway. Daddy and Mother hadn't liked it, but she had. It was much better here than in the big house.
It was fun to walk down the hill with her father and with Top, who had come along with them. He stopped when they reached the corn crib and the barn on the side of the hill. The barn had stalls, where they kept a cow and horses. Sometimes Sybil came here with her father to hitch horses. She was too little to lift the harness in place, but when she stood on the milking stool, she was big enough to help her father lift it.
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