Sybil

by Flora Rheta Schreiber

  And, just as Dr. Wilbur refrained from smoking or swearing in the presence of this modest, puritanical man, she had also inhibited the questions that would have challenged his puritanism.

  "I tried to be a good father," Willard Dorsett repeated as he shook hands with the doctor at the end of a session that had run two hours. His words, however, had lost the old cadences of assurance, and his invincible armor had crumbled. The door closed on a man who had been visibly shaken.

  Still self-protective, eager to get hold of himself and to obliterate the past that had caught up with him, he returned to Butler Hall and telephoned Frieda, with whom he could make connection with the present. In that conversation, of course, he did not mention the harrowing encounter, though the confrontation was to produce immediate results. Never again, as long as he lived, did the first of the month roll around without Sybil's receiving a check from her father.

  Shortly after Willard concluded his conversation with Frieda, the house phone rang and he was told, "Your daughter and her friend are waiting for you."

  "Yes, yes, I'm expecting them," he replied. "Tell them I'll be right down."

  In the lobby, Sybil, wearing a blue gabardine suit and a red blouse, was waiting with Teddy Reeves. Suddenly she thrust out her chest, began whistling a tune, and strutted jauntily away from Teddy. Approaching Willard who had been walking toward her, Sybil said in a firm, clear voice, "Why didn't you ever take me to a football game?"

  It was an uncanny moment, and Willard was taken back to a night when there had been a pounding of nails in his carpentry shop in Willow Corners. Wondering who could be there at that hour, he decided to investigate. In the carpenter's shop was a lean figure clad in blue denim coveralls with a belt in the center; the figure's arms were covered by a red woolen sweater. Willard did not see the face, for the figure's back was turned toward him. However, when he called out, the figure turned. Sybil in the Butler Hall lobby looked now as she had looked then. "Dad," she repeated as they flagged a taxi to take them to Carnegie Hall, "why didn't you ever take me to a football game?"

  Teddy Reeves knew that Sybil had changed into somebody else, but she didn't know into whom. And the harassed father didn't know that, by not taking his daughter to a football game, he had frustrated a son.

  19

  The Boys

  At the very moment that Willard Dorsett was walking into Dr. Wilbur's office that May 4, 1957, Sybil Dorsett was placing her key into the lock of her Morningside apartment. As the door swung open, she gazed in astonishment at the thirty-by eighteen-foot room that was the apartment's main thoroughfare. Between 8:00 A.m. and the present moment, a space of eight hours, the room had been transformed by what seemed like a great wall.

  The smell of fresh paint that assailed Sybil's nostrils affirmed not only the recency but also the reality of the wall. The red paint that adhered to her fingers when she reached out to touch this inexplicable wall was further testament to its reality. But it was not quite what it at first seemed. Upon closer scrutiny, Sybil realized that the wall--really a partition--was only eight feet high.

  The apartment, which originally had been the dining room of an old mansion, provided an ersatz elegance and the redundancy of two kitchens but no privacy. Teddy Reeves slept in the smaller of the two kitchens; Sybil slept in the part of the long room that had an old woodburning fireplace. In the Dorsett-Reeves household the area was known as the living room. To get to her room, Teddy always had to pass Sybil's bed. It had been an odd, unsatisfactory arrangement, for which neither Sybil nor Teddy had ever quite gotten around to finding a solution.

  The partition, which divided the room in half and masked the area in which Sybil slept, rendered Sybil's bed inviolable against intrusion. Teddy could walk directly to her own room. But although Sybil was greatly pleased at finding the solution presented as a fait accompli, she was anxious about the mysterious existence of this protector of her privacy.

  The anxiety was the greater because her discovery had occurred at the end of a fragmented day with long stretches of lost time. Even as she took her key out of the lock, closed the door, and walked toward the end of the partition, she could feel strong internal movement--"the interference of the others," as she had learned to call it. There was a clamoring without sound.

  Still, the partition was sturdy, and, although hastily assembled, it had been skillfully wrought-- worthy, she thought, of two generations of Dorsett carpenters--her father and her grandfather. She would have to show it to her father before he returned to Detroit.

  She could hear Teddy's key in the lock. "I smell paint," Teddy called. She stopped short, staring at the wall. "The partition's marvelous. Why didn't you tell me you were going to build it?" she asked.

  "I didn't," Sybil said. But even as she spoke, she knew that she couldn't be sure of the "I." Not inconceivably the nails, which her nervously wandering fingers had discovered in the pockets of the blue slacks that she had been wearing all day, belonged to the partition's carpenter. Dorsett carpenters?

  The next morning Dr. Wilbur's office, a virtual tribunal the day before, became a confessional. A personality strutted jauntily toward the couch, sat down, and confessed, "I did it."

  "Did what?" the doctor asked.

  "Built the partition, of course. I let Mike drive in the nails, but I did all the heavy work myself. Vicky and Peggy Lou did most of the planning and measuring and some of the painting. You have to give girls credit where credit is due."

  For the nonce Dr. Wilbur did not make too much of the name "Mike" or of the patronizing compliment to girls. What most greatly impressed the doctor was that alternating selves had translated Sybil's wish and need for privacy into a constructive solution, which the waking self hadn't found. While the conscious mind had vacillated, the unconscious had acted.

  The doctor's attention quickly was brought back to the immediate situation, however, as she became aware that the patient--a self whom the doctor hadn't met before--was looking at her very intently. "I'm Mike," the voice announced. "I want to ask you something." This voice was different from the one that had talked about the partition.

  "What would you like to know?" the doctor asked. "How come?"

  "How come what?"

  "We're different?"

  "Different?" the doctor repeated. "Well," Mike explained, "the others are girls. But I'm a boy, and so is Sid."

  "You live in a woman's body," the doctor reminded Mike.

  "Not really," Mike countered with certainty. "It just looks like it," Sid added with equal assurance.

  The moment passed. The boys, having asserted confidence in their maleness, rattled on about who and what they were. By their own description, Sid had light skin, dark hair, and blue eyes; Mike, olive skin, dark hair, and brown eyes. Sid had derived his name from Sybil's initials--So-ybil I-sabel Do-orsett. Mike attributed his name to two sources--father and grandfather. The name of Mike, which had originated in Willard's having called his daughter, "Mike" whenever she was dressed in coveralls, had been reinforced by a favorite expression of grandfather Dorsett: "For the love of Mike."

  Mike and Sid talked of the concert they had attended last night with Dad, of helping Sybil with her woodcarving and sculpture. They talked of their stamp collection and of life in the Dorsett-Reeves apartment.

  Sid, who was the partition's carpenter, was also Sybil's repairman. "I fix what's broken, mend what needs mending," Sid told Dr. Wilbur. "Sybil never knows who did it." A broad smile illuminated his face.

  "You know what," he said, "I'm going to get six apple crates and build Sybil a bookcase."

  New York, the boys complained, offered them almost no opportunity for the sports they had enjoyed in Willow Corners, where, dressed in their blue denim coveralls and a red sweater, they had spent long hours roller skating or hitting a ball against the side of the Dorsett home. In Willow Corners they had watched, they said, the miracle of construction performed by their father's crew. What Mike and Sid enjoyed most of all was to climb into
the long rope swing and to get that swing up high enough so that they could touch their own home when swinging forward and the neighbor's house when swinging backward. "Boy, it was fun," said Mike.

  "You should have seen us," said Sid. Life in Willow Corners was, of course, not without frustration. Symbolic of that frustration was the megaphone other kids at school used for the amplification of sound at sports events. "Sid and I never used the megaphone," Mike told the doctor, "because we never went to a ballgame. Our Dad wouldn't take us."

  Even in the first session with Dr. Wilbur there had been clues that illuminated Mike's initial "How come?"

  "I look like my Dad," Sid had volunteered. "He's a builder. I'm a builder. As good as he is anytime."

  Mike had remarked, "Grandpa was strong, and I'm strong. He could pound nails, and I can pound nails just as hard as he can. He was big, and I can be just as big. I'm not crippled."

  Saying that, Mike had thrust out his chest with a flourish of masculine pride. With this bit of pantomime Dr. Wilbur realized that even though at the beginning of the hour Sid had spoken first, it had been Mike who had entered the room. The doctor knew, too, that the clues that had been dropped, like pebbles in a stream, were producing ripples in answer to Mike's initial question. She hypothesized that Sid was an identification with father; Mike, with grandfather Dorsett.

  Boys in the 1920's and 1930's in Willow Corners, Mike and Sid were still boys in the 1950's in New York.

  Theirs was the eternal youth of an alternating self, a youth with the constant although unfulfilled promise of growing up.

  As they walked to the door, the doctor was struck by the fact that they were wearing blue slacks, the New York counterpart of the Willow Corners blue denim coveralls.

  Growing up for Mike and Sid, who had remained boys for more than twenty years, had a special meaning: becoming a man. Over a period of weeks they revealed the intensity of their yearning to Dr. Wilbur.

  "It was so dark in the garage," Mike told Dr. Wilbur. "You could smell the shavings and the lumber, and it smelled good. It's clean, that smell. There was a long bench in there, with a box under it, with books that kids aren't supposed to look at. Know what else was in that box? Woman's switches." (the switches were auburn tresses, the remnants of Hattie's youth.)

  "It's sin in that box," Mike declared. "Sin."

  There was a mischievous glimmer in his eyes as he turned them up at the doctor.

  "Wanna know something?" he asked. "I put those switches on for fun. I looked like a girl. I didn't like that." His eyes flickered elusively. "Would you believe it? When I wore those switches, I looked like a girl!"

  Mike waited for the doctor to share his consternation, but, noting that she made no answer, he confided: "I didn't like looking like a girl. I don't want to be a sissy and do dirty things like our mother. I took those switches right off."

  "Your mother was not a nice girl," the doctor replied. "She was a dirty girl, that's true. But, Mike, very few girls are like your mother. You can be a girl without being what you call a dirty girl."

  "I'm glad," he replied with conviction. "I'm not a girl at all."

  "What do you have against girls?"

  "Nobody likes girls. Not anybody."

  "I like girls."

  "Oh, some girls are all right." Mike grinned broadly.

  "I like Vicky and Peggy Lou okay. But I'm glad I'm a boy."

  "You say you're a boy, but you're not built like your father, are you?"

  There was silence--a silence that was finally broken not by Mike but by Sid.

  "Almost," Sid replied.

  "How almost?" the doctor asked.

  "Arms and legs and everything," Sid explained. "Yes, arms and legs, Sid, but what is different from your father?"

  "I don't know," Sid replied.

  "Is there anything different from your father?"

  "I don't know."

  "Is there?"

  "I said I didn't know," Sid repeated angrily.

  "What do you think? Do you think there is something different from your father?"

  "Well," Sid admitted after an awkward pause, "I never got it, but I will. When I'm bigger, it'll grow."

  "Sid, you didn't have it at birth like other little boys. There will always be something different."

  Sid became thoughtful. "Well," he finally said, "I sometimes used to pretend I was a girl. When I did that, a woman with gray hair laughed. Nobody laughs when I'm a boy, and that's what I really am."

  "What you pretended was real, Sid," the doctor said slowly. "You look like your father and can be like him in thought and feeling, in the way you approach things. The differences in the sexes are fewer than people, even experts, used to think. But you are never going to be like your father sexually. Your father has a penis, and you don't. He doesn't have a vagina, and you do. Now how do you suppose that you came to think you're built like him when you're not?"

  "But I am."

  "Your father was a boy who became a man."

  "That's what Mike and I will be when we're older. We will have everything our Dad has. Dad has to shave. We'll have to shave. Dad. ..."

  "But this is a woman's body. ..."

  "Doctor, I want to tell you something." It was Mike, speaking in a firm clear voice in which he seemed to be pushing Sid aside to assume control of the situation. "If I pushed hard, I could push it out."

  "But you have tried," the doctor pointed out, enunciating each word with care, "and you haven't pushed it out."

  "I could, though." The certainty of Mike's tone was matched by the confident look in his eyes.

  "If you could, you would have," the doctor insisted. "You're just saying that," Mike replied with a broad, infectious grin.

  "No, I'm not just saying that. This is the truth for both you and Sid," the doctor reminded her patients. "Boys in a girl's body don't grow up to be men."

  Unconvinced, Mike asked, "If I give a girl a baby, will it be mine?"

  "Mike," the doctor replied firmly, "I cannot say yes to the impossible. In this body in which you reside there is a uterus, ovaries, a vagina. Each of these is just as special, just as precious as a penis in a man's body. Without the woman's organs as well as the man's, the perpetuation of the human race would be impossible. It takes a woman's organs as well as a man's to produce a baby. Now, in this body-- your body, Mike--there is a pair of ovaries, where the eggs are. ..."

  "I don't want those sissy girl organs," Mike interrupted, "and I don't have them. Not me--I'm a boy."

  "Mike, you only have half of what it takes to create a baby, and it is not the half you think you have. All of these parts of the body--the woman's organs and the man's--are important for both the woman and the man. But no one of them is more important than the other. None of them is dirty. You understand that?"

  "I'm built like my Dad, like Grandpa was," Mike protested. "I can give a girl a baby if I want to. How many times do I have to tell you that if I pushed hard enough, I could push it out?"

  "Why don't you try?"

  "I will when I'm older."

  "Mike, you do not have a penis or the two little sacks, the testicles, that hang down below the penis and contain the male cells. Without these you cannot give a girl a baby."

  "Not ever?" Mike asked. "Not ever?" His tone, for the first time since he had presented himself to the doctor, was somber, subdued.

  "No, not ever."

  He replied with urgency: "But I want to I want to. I have to!"

  Mike Dorsett could not accept the special facts of his life.

  Of the two, Mike proved in analysis to be the more aggressive; Sid was the more thoughtful. This was quite appropriate in terms of their identification-- Mike with his grandfather, Sid with his father.

  Sybil had made identification not with her mother, of whom she was terrified and ashamed, but with the males in her family. Her father had let Sybil down but, except for the one instance when he and Hattie had been having intercourse, had not hit her or hurt her physically.
Because she had to have someone, she had made her father the figure on whom she depended. The identification was the more natural because she looked like her father.

  Her father was a builder and carpenter. She became a builder and carpenter by dissociating into a male personality. And that was the genesis of Sid, who had built the partition.

  Grandpa Dorsett was aggressive and fanatical. He aroused Sybil's fear, anger, and hatred. Sybil had found the means of dealing with this grandfather and these emotions by dissociating into a male personality whose name was Mike. In Mike Sybil found an aggressor to deal with her grandfather's aggression. Sybil was terrified and ashamed of her grandfather. Mike reflected Sybil's feelings but at the same time made identification with the aggressor-- in fact, became the aggressor.

  "How could Sybil get along with her grandfather?" Mike had asked the doctor in late May, 1957. "He was always there and always right. The only way to get along with him was either to lick him or join him. I joined him."

  Sid and Mike emerged strong and nonneurotic. As far as the doctor had been able to determine, neither was subject to fear, anxiety, depression, or even undue sadness. Sid, however, more contemplative than Mike, was often subject to the intermingling of love, fear, and hate in his feelings toward his father and his father's father. Mike maintained a strong silence about his mother. Even though he talked freely of grandfather and father, of the "girls," as he called Vicky, the Peggys, Marcia, Vanessa, Mary, Ruthie, and the others who had not yet emerged in analysis, he was always reluctant to talk of Sybil herself.