Sybil

by Flora Rheta Schreiber

  Retaliation against her mother was easier in these earliest years of life because even in prison there were friends. It was not her mother but grandmother who took care of Sybil during the infant's first six weeks of life, during which Hattie, who suffered postpartum depression after the birth, was unable to care for the child. Grandmother Dorsett returned to help Willard care for Sybil later when the infant developed a disease of the middle ear. Hattie, unable to stand the crying, again abdicated the mother's role. The ear "broke" while the infant was resting on Willard's shoulder with her infected ear toward the hot stove. Her grandmother again went away, her mother came back, and the infant connected surcease from pain with her father.

  When Sybil was two and a half, love returned in the person of Priscilla, a maid who later cared for the child while Hattie devoted her time to grandmother Dorsett, who had had a stroke. Sybil loved Priscilla second only to her grandmother. One day Sybil said, "I love you" to Priscilla. Hattie, overhearing the remark, said, "Well, you love mama, too, don't you?"

  Sybil turned around to where Hattie was standing, polishing some Haviland china. Sybil put her arms around Hattie's neck and said yes. Pushing Sybil away, Hattie said, "Oh, you're too big to act like that."

  Observing that Mrs. Dorsett was being "cross" with the child, Priscilla spread her arms toward Sybil in a gesture of inclusion. Sybil ran over and took hold of Priscilla's hand. Priscilla said that Sybil could help her, that Sybil could do the dusting, and that they'd prepare the noonday meal together. Sybil had Priscilla and felt she didn't need her mother.

  As Sybil grew older, however, the interludes of her grandmother and of Priscilla ended, and her mother steadily took over the helm. The stage for repression was set as Sybil, commanded not to tell, not to cry, lest she be punished, kept everything to herself. Sybil learned not to fight back because by fighting she evoked further punishments.

  What did survive, however, was the fascination of new experiences, of creativity, of making things. Often the creativity, as in the case of drawing the chickens with red feet and green tails, also led to head-on collisions between mother and child.

  One afternoon when Sybil was four, she pasted a face she had clipped from McCall's magazine on some tin foil and put some red Christmas cord on it. Delighted with what she had made, she ran into the kitchen to show her new creation to her mother. "I thought I told you not to run in the house," Hattie said as she placed a pan in the oven.

  "I'm sorry," said Sybil.

  "Well, you better be," said Hattie. "Look, mother," Sybil said as she proudly held up her handiwork.

  "I don't have time to look at it now," said Hattie. "I'm busy.

  Can't you see I'm busy?"

  "Look what I made. It's for our Christmas tree."

  "Well that's just a magazine and some tin foil," Hattie sniffed.

  "I think it's pretty," Sybil said, "and I'm going to hang it on the tree."

  "Well, I'm busy," said Hattie.

  Then Sybil hung the ornament she had made on the tree that stood near the piano in the living room. She looked at what her mother had belittled, and she herself was, nevertheless, proud of having made it. "Mother, come look," she called, as she went back into the kitchen.

  "I don't have time."

  "Come on."

  Then all of a sudden Hattie stopped what she was doing and looked at Sybil. Hattie asked: "You didn't go hang that on the tree after I said that?"

  Sybil wanted desperately to get the ornament off the tree before her mother saw it. But standing at the tree, her mother was already calling, "You come here this minute and get that thing off that tree."

  Sybil stood still.

  "Do you hear me?" Hattie was standing next to the tree.

  "I'll take it off in a minute," Sybil promised.

  "Don't you say "in a minute" to me," Hattie's voice rasped.

  Sybil was trapped. If she obeyed, she had to go to the tree, where Hattie stood ready to hit her. If Sybil didn't go, she would be hit for disobeying. Deciding on the former, Sybil pulled the ornament down quickly and, eluding her mother, ran toward the door. Hattie started after her daughter. Sybil ran faster. Her mother's menacing, "Don't you run in this house," echoed everywhere. Sybil wondered whether she should keep running or stop. If Sybil stopped, her mother would hit her because of the Christmas ornament. If Sybil ran, her mother would hit her for running. Entrapment was complete.

  Stopping, Sybil received a swift, sharp blow on the right cheek.

  So there were bad days, but there also were good days--such as the one when the Floods visited. As the Floods--Pearl, Ruth, Alvin, and their mother--were leaving in their sleigh, Sybil waved goodbye from the porch steps. The sleigh faded from sight, and Sybil turned to go back into the house. She had been happy that afternoon as she played on the sunroom floor with Ruth and Pearl, who were older than she. She was only three and a half, but they played with her and taught her many things. Pearl had made Sybil's doll, Betty Lou, walk.

  Still holding Betty Lou in her arms, Sybil went into the sunroom. Hattie came after her and said, "Get that doll out of your hands. I want to get your sweater off."

  But Sybil didn't want to put the doll down. It had been a wonderful afternoon, and she had discovered many things. She had learned how to make Betty Lou walk.

  "I want to show you how Betty Lou walks," Sybil told her mother.

  "I don't have time," Hattie bristled. "I have to get supper ready for daddy. Now put your doll down this minute. I want to get your sweater off."

  As her mother was taking off the sweater, Sybil bubbled, "I like Pearl. She's fun."

  "I don't have time," her mother replied as she hung the sweater on a hook in the kitchen.

  Sybil had followed her mother out of the sunroom and into the kitchen, still trying to talk about the afternoon's events. Her mother began preparing supper. As she took some pots and pans out of the cupboard, the blue sweater, placed hastily on the hook, fell to the floor. "When I turn my back to you," her mother said, "see what happens. Why did you pull that sweater down? Why can't you behave yourself? Why must you always be bad, you bad, bad girl?"

  Her mother picked up the sweater, turned it over in her hand, scrutinizing it. "It's dirty," she finally announced in the tone of a doctor making an important diagnosis. "Mother always keeps you clean. You're a dirty girl."

  Sybil felt her mother's knuckles hitting her hard on the side of her head over and over again. Then her mother shoved her onto a little red chair. It was the chair on which she had been sitting the time her grandmother had come downstairs, wanting to talk to her and her mother, and her mother had said, "Grandma, please don't go near Sybil. She's being punished." And her grandmother had not come near.

  The little red chair was in front of a mantel clock. Sybil was not big enough to tell time, but she could see where the big hand was and where the little hand was. At this moment the big hand was on 12 and the little hand on 5.

  "It's just five o'clock," her mother said. It was such a wonderful afternoon, Sybil thought as she sat in the little red chair, not daring to move, and she had to go and spoil it. I had so much fun that I was sorry Alvin couldn't play on the floor with the girls and me because we were playing with dolls and he is a boy. He was left out. It is awful to be left out.

  Her mother had been so kind to the Floods. She gave them all kinds of things: food for Mrs. Flood, mittens for Pearl, leggings for Alvin. Her mother also gave them two games that Sybil had never really used, never really had a chance to play with. That was all right because she liked the Floods.

  Sybil looked at the mantel clock. The little hand was now on 6. She called to tell her mother.

  "I didn't ask you," her mother answered sharply. "For that you sit there five minutes more, you dirty girl. You made the sweater dirty, and you have a dirty mouth."

  "What did I do?" Sybil asked.

  "You know perfectly well what you did," her mother replied. "I have to punish you to make you good."

 
Sybil didn't want to think of herself, sitting on that little red chair, watching the clock. But she often thought about it. Whenever she did, she managed to turn right away from it.

  "Why must you always be bad, you bad, bad girl?" her mother asked.

  The "y" confused Sybil. The "bad" made her wonder. She didn't think anything she did that day was bad.

  Sybil told no one about the day of the blue sweater, but thoughts of that day, lodging in her throat, always made her throat hurt.

  Nor did Sybil tell about the glass beads of many colors that hung like a rainbow on a cotton string. The beads, which were made in Holland and were very old, were given to Hattie by her mother. Hattie had given them to Sybil, who enjoyed pulling on them, sticking them in her mouth, and licking them. One afternoon while she was doing this, the string snapped, and the beads were sprinkled over the living room rug. Sybil, who was then three, tried to pick them up as fast as possible before her mother could see. But before Sybil could get them all up, Hattie had grabbed her and had shoved one of the beads up her nose. Sybil thought that she was going to smother. Hattie tried to remove the bead, but it wouldn't budge.

  Hattie was frightened. "Come on," she said, "we'll go to Dr. Quinoness."

  Dr. Quinoness got the bead out. But as the mother and child were about to leave, the doctor asked, "Mrs. Dorsett, how did the bead get there?"

  "Oh," Hattie Dorsett replied, "you know how children are. They're always sticking things up their noses and in their ears."

  That night Hattie told Willard how careless Sybil had been about the bead. "We ought to teach her to be more careful," the mother told the father. "Teach her ... impeach her ... beseech her ... reach her ... what a creature ... it's time ... let's rhyme."

  Willard agreed that Sybil should learn to be more careful. Sybil, who had said nothing to Dr. Quinoness, said nothing to her father.

  Another incident Sybil kept to herself was the one that took place in the wheat crib one rainy afternoon when she was four and a half. Hattie had taken Sybil there for an afternoon's play.

  After Sybil and her mother had climbed up the retractable stairs from Willard's carpentry shop to the wheat crib above it, Hattie said, "I love you, Peggy." Then the mother placed the child in the wheat and left, pulling the stairs up into the ceiling.

  Encircled by wheat, Sybil felt herself smothering and thought that she was going to die. Then for a time she knew nothing.

  "Are you in there, Sybil?" She recognized her father's voice. Then Willard was standing beside her in the wheat crib. He bent over, lifted her gently, and took her downstairs to where her mother was waiting in the shop.

  "How did Sybil get up in that wheat crib?" Willard asked his wife. "She could have smothered in that wheat."

  "Floyd must have done it," her mother improvised. "He's such a mean child. This town would be better off without him. The church would be better off. We ought to get rid of that bully."

  Willard went right down the street to speak with Floyd while Sybil and Hattie went back to the house. When Willard came home, he told his wife and daughter that Floyd had said, "No, I didn't do it. What do you think I am?"

  "Floyd's a liar," her mother declared haughtily.

  Willard, not knowing whom to believe, asked Sybil how she had gotten into the wheat crib. Sybil's eye caught her mother's eye, and she remained silent.

  "I don't want you in that wheat crib again," Willard lectured his daughter. "It's a good thing I came home early because of the rain. It's a good thing I went into the shop. The stairs didn't look right to me, so I went up to look."

  Just as Sybil had said nothing about the buttonhook and the beads, she said nothing about the wheat.

  Nothing was also what Sybil said one night when she was only two and her father asked, "How did you get that swollen black eye?" Sybil refused to tell. She didn't let the father know that her mother had kicked the blocks with which the child had been playing, had hit the child in the eye, and, with hard knuckles, had smacked the child on the mouth, where a new tooth grew.

  These were the things, not separate but indivisible, forming an unending sequence of captivity on which the torture chamber of Sybil's childhood was built. Their memory returned to torture Sybil on the day that had begun felicitously with her drugstore dreams.

  Torture reawakened, however, could also sometimes be put aside. In the first grade now, Sybil enjoyed school, made friends, and a few days after the return of the Willow Corners mother visited the home of her classmate and friend, Laurie Thompson, after school.

  Laurie's mother, who was a warm, outgoing, rotund woman, greeted Laurie and Sybil as they came up the porch steps. After giving Laurie a big hug and smiling a greeting to Sybil, Mrs. Thompson ushered the two children into the house. Milk and a fresh apple pie were waiting.

  Everything was so peaceful in the Thompson home, but Sybil--then seven--was certain that as soon as she left, Mrs. Thompson would do terrible things to Laurie, the way all mothers did.

  The supposition that hers was the normal way of life didn't really make it better, nor did it lessen the unexpressed, impotent rage buried in Sybil from infancy. Rage there had been when the hated hard rubber nipple had replaced the breast and when the cries of the eleven-month-old prisoner in the high-chair had been ignored by the jailer. But the most terrible rage of all-- cumulative but repressed--came with the growing sense that there was no exit, no way out of the torture chamber. The more intense the rage became, the more repressed it also became. The more repressed it became, the greater were her feelings of impotence; the greater the feelings of impotence, the greater the rage. It was an endless cycle of anger without an outlet.

  Her mother tortured and frightened Sybil, and Sybil could do nothing about it. What was perhaps even worse, Sybil did not dare to get anybody else to do anything.

  Sybil loved her grandmother, but she hadn't intervened when her mother said, "Now, Grandma, don't go near Sybil. She's being punished." Her grandmother hadn't intervened when her mother tripped Sybil as she was going down the stairs. Her grandmother had asked what had happened, and her mother had replied, "You know how clumsy children are. She fell downstairs." The rage Sybil felt at her grandmother was repressed.

  Her father hadn't intervened, either. Couldn't he see what the buttonhook, the dislocated shoulder, the fractured larynx, the burned hand, the bead in the nose, the wheat crib, the black eyes, the swollen lips meant? But her father had refused to see.

  When Sybil cried or the shade was up, her mother always said, "What if somebody comes?" There was repressed rage, too, at the neighbors who never came, at Grandfather Dorsett, who was upstairs and didn't seem to know what was happening below, at Dr. Quinoness, who again and again saw that the Dorsett child had been hurt but didn't try to discover why. And later Sybil repressed rage at her teachers, who from time to time asked her what was wrong but never actually bothered to find out. Sybil especially loved Martha Brecht, her seventh-grade teacher, because she could talk to her. But Sybil was disappointed in this teacher too because, even though she seemed to recognize that Sybil's mother was strange--perhaps even crazy--she, too, did not intervene. That saga had a sequel in college, where even Miss Updyke, who seemed to understand, was a party to sending Sybil home to torture.

  Distressed by those who didn't come to her rescue, Sybil nevertheless invested the perpetrator of the tortures with immunity from blame. The buttonhook was at fault, or the enema tip, or the other instruments of torture.

  The perpetrator, however, by virtue of being her mother, whom one had not only to obey but also to love and honor, was not to blame. Almost two decades later, when Hattie, then on her deathbed in Kansas City, remarked, "I really shouldn't have been so cross with you when you were a child," it seemed sinful to Sybil even to recollect that euphemistic crossness.

  Sybil's feelings toward her mother had always been complicated by the fact that Hattie's behavior was paradoxical. The same mother who embarrassed, shamed, and tortured her daughter would
cut bright-colored pictures from magazines and paste them on the lower part of the cupboard door so that they would be at Sybil's eye level. At breakfast this same mother would often manage to have a "surprise" in the bottom of the daughter's cereal bowl: prunes, figs, dates, all of which the child especially liked. To encourage Sybil, whose appetite was slight, to eat, her mother would make a game of having Sybil guess what was at the bottom of the bowl. Her mother would insist that the child eat down to the bottom to discover whether the guess was correct. Hattie provided children's dishes decorated with pictures, children's silverware engraved SID, Sybil's initials, and a chair that was a little higher than the regular kitchen chairs. There were playthings all over the house and lots of good food, which, Hattie said, the starving children in China would give anything to have.

  The one time that Sybil, then four, was audacious enough to reply, "They can have it if you want to send it over to them," Hattie reminded her daughter: "You have so much to be thankful for--a nice home, two parents"--Hattie's frequent reiteration of the two invariably irritated Sybil--"and more attention than any other child in town."

  Again and again, both in her childhood and during her adolescence, Sybil heard a multitude of varieties of "You have so much to be thankful for," followed by "And after all I do for you, you still don't appreciate it; you can't come to the table with a smile on a bet." Then Sybil would say, "You're the best mother in the whole world and I'll try to do better."

  The "best mother in the world" would say, "I worry so when you are late from school for fear you got killed." The "best mother" didn't allow Sybil to swim, to ride a bicycle, to ice skate. "If you ride a bicycle, I can see you lying out in the street with blood all over. If you ice skate, you might fall through the ice and drown."

  Hattie Dorsett enunciated solemn strictures about exemplary child care. Never hit a child, Hattie Dorsett preached, when it is possible to avoid it, and under no circumstances hit a child on the face or head. Hattie, who had a neat trick of denying reality by twisting it to conform to her fantasies, meant what she said. It was a mental sleight of hand that made it possible for her to dissociate what she actually did with what she thought she did, to separate action from ideation.