"Peggy Lou also said something about little gray boxes in rows and that she had to watch and be careful, that she had to get away," Teddy went on. "I've been hearing about these letters, words, and boxes for several years now."
Sybil replied thoughtfully, "I haven't the faintest idea." But as she spoke, she looked up at the blank red wall just ahead and, although aware of herself as Sybil, at the same time she felt like a little girl. It was not a matter of being childlike but of being a child. Then Sybil found herself saying, "When I was a youngster, I was not allowed to listen to fairy tales or any stories that were not "the truth." Nor was I allowed to make up stories. But I liked to write, especially animal stories and poetry. When Mother and Dad made me promise I would stop, I devised a way to "write" without writing. I would cut words and single letters in headings out of newspapers and put the letters in little gray boxes, which I took to school. Then I'd paste the words on sheets of heavy paper so that the letters made words, the words made paragraphs, and I could write without writing. You see?"
Bewildered, Teddy reminded her roommate, "But you just said that you didn't have the faintest recollection."
"I didn't," Sybil replied calmly, "but then I did. You see I devised that technique when I was in the third and fourth grades, after my grandmother died."
The third and fourth grades, after her grandmother died? The calm vanished as Sybil realized what she had said.
Out of the mist hanging heavily over Sybil's two lost years (between the ages of nine and eleven) Peggy Lou's memories were becoming Sybil's. By responding to Peggy Lou's memory as if it were her own, the waking self that was called Sybil had been able to recall an incident from the childhood of the alternating self. And all at once Sybil realized that at that moment she felt not merely like Peggy Lou; she was one with her. Pentothal had ripped open the unused line of communication between Sybil and one of her other selves to restore a fragment of the lost years. Sybil, who had never been ten or eleven years old, had in a swift flashback become those ages. What had started as a casual breakfast conversation had become a milestone along the pathways of restoration of the original Sybil.
With the new feeling of being one with Peggy Lou there also came a wholly new attitude toward both Peggy Lou and the other selves. Sybil was now becoming able to distinguish what she did, as she put it, as "someone else" from what she did "as myself." The Sybil who in Vicky's description stood aside had now moved in closer.
Aware now of the others through the eyes of Dr. Wilbur and of Teddy and through her own experience, Sybil wondered, with humor, why with all these "gals and guys" around, the veil of aloneness that hung over her had not been lifted. "Let's give a party for ourselves," Mary whispered in the recesses of being. Sybil was amused.
VOLUME IV
Part IV:
Reentry
25
Beginning to Remember (continued)
By Christmas, 1958, Sybil had accepted her other selves with sufficient humor to include them in her Christmas greetings to Dr. Wilbur. A series of cards, attached to each other like the folds of an accordion, all designed and executed only by Sybil, read:
To Our Dr. Wilbur:
Multiple greetings--Sybil Love--Vicky Happy Holidays--Vanessa Gail Merry Christmas from Mary Glad Noel--Marcia and Mike Best wishes--Sybil Ann Happy New Year--Peggy Dr. Wilbur was not unaware that the Christmas ball beside Peggy's "Happy New Year" was of broken glass; nor that Sybil had failed to send greetings from Clara, Nancy, Marjorie, Ruthie, Helen, Sid, and that Peggy Lou and Peggy Ann were represented by a single Peggy. That Sybil could move out of her longtime negation of the others to share the spirit of the season was in the nature of an analytical turning point.
Unfortunately, to Sybil pentothal became "magic" and Dr. Wilbur, the "magician" who could confer bliss. The dependency upon the doctor that Sybil developed during the pentothal treatments made Sybil feel both loved and important. Becoming demanding about pentothal, Sybil also acted as if she could control the doctor and, by controlling the doctor, Hattie Dorsett. Safely ensconced in this double dependency, Sybil relived the relaxation she had known at her mother's breast before being weaned and being confronted with the manufactured nipple that had supplanted the warm human one. Euphoric on all these counts, Sybil came to regard pentothal as ecstasy and salvation.
Dr. Wilbur, however, was becoming increasingly concerned about administering pentothal to Sybil. The doctor didn't like having to use the needle, didn't like Sybil's growing dependency and the fact that Sybil was using pentothal to circumvent problems. It was clear to the doctor, although certainly not to Sybil, that no mere medicine could change the underlying psychic problems or conflicts. Although pentothal, because of its abreactive effects, had proved valuable in uncovering buried memories and lost time, in bringing Sybil closer to her other selves and so mitigating against her depletion, it had made no dent in the basic traumas, the core distortions created chiefly by Hattie Dorsett and perpetuated through Sybil's own defensive maneuvers. Yet it was precisely upon the resolution of these traumas that ultimate recovery, the final healing and integration, depended.
What was most disquieting to the doctor was that while it conferred upon Sybil the freedom of feeling well, pentothal had also threatened to impose upon her the bondage of addiction. Feeling that the gains did not outweigh the risks, Dr. Wilbur decided to terminate this treatment.
Accordingly, the first weekend in early March, 1959, was bad not only for Sybil but for "everybody else," as she called her other selves. It was the weekend of the weaning from pentothal.
"What have I done that made Dr. Wilbur punish me by taking me off pentothal?" Sybil murmured to Teddy Reeves. "What have I done that made the doctor shut me out?"
"The doctor is going to come," the Peggys kept saying. "We just know that she is."
Marcia, shaking her head gravely, said, "No, the doctor isn't coming and will never come again."
Nancy said, "Who knows? She just might."
"No," Vicky observed. "Dr. Wilbur isn't coming. She isn't going to give in about the pentothal. The decision to stop it was for our own good. She said we were becoming powerfully addicted to it, psychologically speaking. I believe in her."
Hearing someone walking up the stairs or in the hallway, Marcia and Vanessa, Mike and Sid, Nancy, Sybil Ann, Mary, and the Peggys, feeling a tremor of excitement, would pretend it was Dr. Wilbur. The receding footsteps would electrocute hope.
All weekend the Peggys nagged; Mary cried; Nancy, Vanessa, and Marcia stormed. Sybil, feeling her own despair compounded by that of the others, told Teddy, "I've sewed the last of the hem in the wall hanging.
I'm never going to do another thing around this place. Dr. Wilbur isn't coming anymore. What's the use?"
And Vicky told Teddy: "You can't really blame them. The end of pentothal is the greatest loss they've sustained since the death of their grandmother."
In the doctor's office on Monday Sybil demanded, "Just give me pentothal on the Wednesday night before the chemistry final on Thursday. Then I'll be in the best possible shape for writing the exam."
"No, Sybil. No," said the doctor. "Pentothal was something I could count on," Sybil pleaded.
"You're of sterner stuff. We'll find other safer, stronger means."
"I can't stand it."
"What you're saying to me, Sybil, is that there are some things you feel that you can't deal with as Sybil. As of this moment, that's true. But it doesn't have to stay true, you see?"
"I don't see. You want me to dissociate," Sybil replied bitterly. "If I didn't, you'd miss seeing Vicky and all those other people you're so fond of."
"Sybil," the doctor answered, "you know this makes me think it's a good thing you're not a drinking girl. If you were, you'd be an alcoholic. The connection between bottles and breasts is very real. Pentothal brought you the relaxation of your mother's breast, just as alcohol does for the alcoholic. And it is perfectly clear that you have a powerful psychological addiction
to pentothal. Improvement has not been great enough to justify the risk."
Rejected again, newly deprived of the sweet dependency pentothal had conferred, Sybil felt hopeless. The resistance she had built against facing her underlying problems had been ripped away, and she was terrified by knowing that now she would probably come closer to the real roots of her illness.
With this realization there came the stifling rage that Sybil used to feel when Hattie Dorsett punished her without cause. The doctor, Sybil felt, was as omnipotent as Hattie--and just as unfair. Now, as in the past, Sybil believed, had come punishment, irrational, cruel, and utterly groundless.
Leaving the doctor's office, Sybil walked along a crazy, swaying sidewalk. When she got home, she took a Seconal and went to sleep. When she woke up, she buried her face in the pillow, unable to face the new day.
Why should she face it? she wondered. For what was she struggling so hard and alone? There was no way out. Of that Sybil was certain.
26
Independent Futures
During May, 1959, several of the selves made individual thrusts toward independent futures. At the same time Sybil, reacting to these thrusts, wondered whether she was moving forward or backward or, indeed, was moving at all.
That May morning the sun was streaming into the apartment as Mary awoke, stretched toward the once-confining partition, and realized with a mistlike recollection that she had done something recently that would render the partition unnecessary.
Suddenly, like moving pictures on a screen, the relevant scenes flashed before her. Dan Stewart, a real-estate agent, was asking her, as she stood with him on the front porch of a ranch house in Crompond, New York, "How large is your family?"
"I'm alone," had been her reply. "More than enough space," he had laughed openly.
"And plenty of room for company. You can throw great weekend parties."
Paying what he had called "earnest money," she had written a check for five hundred dollars as a down payment on this house, which was priced at twenty-two thousand dollars.
She had been about to sign Mary Lucinda Saunders Dorsett, but then she had remembered that it was not she but Sybil who had the checking account.
"Sybil I. Dorsett?" the agent had remarked, examining the check. "Are you related to the Dorsetts of Glens Falls?"
"No," she had replied, "I'm from the Midwest."
"The closing," he had then told her, "will be in a couple of weeks. I'll call you."
By now fully dressed, Mary headed for the kitchen. "I'm going to pack and leave," she told Teddy at breakfast, "so as not to be in the way."
"I don't want you to go away," Teddy replied as she walked to Mary's end of the table to put a reassuring hand on Mary's shoulder. "I want you to stay right where you are. It's where you belong."
"As a little girl," Mary replied willy, "I always wanted a room of my own." She paused briefly, adding, "I didn't get it until I was nine. I've always wanted privacy but never had it. I sometimes used to think that I would be driven out of my home."
Teddy left for work but not without a reassuring reminder that the Morningside apartment was where Mary Lucinda Saunders Dorsett belonged.
Alone, Mary made a fire in the fireplace. Then, huddled in a heap near the fireplace with Capri beside her, she began sewing brownish violet draperies for the bedroom in the ranch house that would soon be her own.
Two days later Sybil, standing at her mailbox, placed in her purse an unopened letter from her father, noted with wry amusement a letter from the Book-of-the-Month Club addressed to Marcia Dorsett, and then opened a manila envelope from the bank. She was overdrawn. The check for forty-seven dollars she sent to Hartley's Pharmacy last night would bounce.
Sybil thumbed through the canceled checks. A check for five hundred dollars? She hadn't written a check for that amount. Evans Real Estate? She had never heard of them. In a less sophisticated stage of her multiplicity she would have regarded a check she hadn't signed as a mystery, but now she realized that one of the others had signed the check. Who? It really didn't matter. In dollars and cents terms they were all spelled Sybil I. Dorsett.
After Sybil received a telephone call from a Dan Stewart, informing her that the closing of "her" house was to take place, she panicked. At first Dr. Wilbur, who kept on saying, "When you are well, these things won't happen to you," wasn't helpful. The doctor did finally get a lawyer, however, who, by pleading "mental incompetence," rescued Sybil from the commitment made by Mary. Dr. Wilbur, who saw Mary's house largely as a flight from the primal scene, thought of it as having been spun of the same fabric that had made the boys build the partition and that propelled Peggy Lou in repeated flights in search of new places.
Curious about the role of the others, who, unlike Sybil, had been aware of the purchase, Dr. Wilbur talked over Mary's house with two worthy representatives: Vicky and Peggy Lou. Vicky said: "Mary wanted that house so badly that I decided to let her go through with the initial stages. I knew she wouldn't be able to have it in the end. But what was wrong with letting her have her dream fulfilled briefly? What she did was certainly no worse than taking a dress from a shop, wearing it, and then returning it. Lots of women do that. That's dishonest. What Mary did was not."
And Peggy Lou explained: "I was in on letting Mary buy that house; I helped her express her feelings because so many people have been cruel to Mary. It didn't hurt that Mr. Stewart to let Mary go through with buying that house."
To Dr. Wilbur's practical question: "But who is going to pay for it?" Peggy Lou replied assertively, "Sybil. It's up to her to work and take care of us."
Sybil herself thought longingly of the house that Mary had bought and she herself had rejected. Mary's wish was her wish; Mary's action, the uninhibited voice of an unconscious Sybil.
The others had a strength in forging reality out of dreams that Sybil lacked. The lost house had many mansions, many barricades against remembrance of things past and to come. How sweet, Sybil thought, to be in a house, held and caressed in a house that was hers, in which the earth mother could gather her children to herself and call them one!
Peggy Lou was watching closely as Sybil, seated at her desk in the Morningside Drive apartment, wrote: "July 20, 1959. Dear Carol, I had hoped to be able to accept your invitation to spend a few weeks at your home in Denver. I should so love to be with you and Carl, reviving old times. Then, too, New York summers are sultry, and I do feel the need to get away. I even went so far as to check plane schedules. But, Carol, I've finally decided that I can't really make it this summer. There are too many reasons for having to remain New York-bound. Forgive me. We'll look hopefully to another time."
Later in the morning the letter was uppermost in Peggy Lou's thoughts as she thrashed her way through the streets, trying to wear down her emotions against the pavement.
Peggy Lou had counted on going to Denver and, when Sybil had called the airlines, had told Dr. Wilbur, "All of us are smiling inside." But now Sybil had spoiled everything. It isn't fair. It isn't fair, Peggy Lou iterated and reiterated as she quickened her steps to keep pace with her mounting fury.
There was also a feeling of betrayal. Waiting for a traffic light, Peggy Lou suddenly realized that she had come to the end of the line and could not, at least would not, continue to ride with Sybil. They had different destinations, different lifestyles. Sybil doesn't have the same ideas I have, Peggy Lou protested. She thinks my ideas are wrong. And she's the one who runs things. I have to give her credit because there are some times that she does what I want her to do.
But that's over now. Sybil can never again be trusted.
Her betrayal, moreover, as Peggy Lou saw it, was both a failure on Sybil's part to do what Peggy Lou desired and a violation of an agreement--a contract among the selves, negotiated by Dr.
Wilbur. The doctor had gotten Peggy Lou to agree not to go off on trips of her own if Sybil would promise to take Peggy Lou places.
Well, Peggy Lou thought, as once again she
quickened her steps, Sybil hasn't kept her part of the bargain, but I have. I haven't gone anywhere out of town since Philadelphia. Peggy Lou made the momentous decision to change her status-- to break free from being an alternating self confined to a body headed by an alien person.
The Grand Design, long dimly brooded upon but now fully hatched, was to break completely with Sybil and the other selves. Peggy Lou decided that she would assume command of the body and take it to a distant place, never to return.
In the past Peggy Lou had had to be angry in order to be. When the anger was extinguished, Sybil had returned. Peggy Lou had never before been reluctant to return the body to Sybil. The future would be different. Never again would the body belong to anybody but Peggy Lou.
She knew exactly what this would entail. Her existence had made Sybil's survival possible. Many were the times when Sybil, overwhelmed by rage, had decided that for her there never would be anything but suffering, no chance to accomplish anything without interference from her selves. At such times, asking, "What's the use?" Sybil had been close to suicide.
By taking over the rage Peggy Lou had literally let Sybil live.
But now that she was going to be the only occupant of the body, now that she would no longer be an alternating self but the one self, whose existence would not depend only upon rage, it would be different. Sybil would not live.
Buoyed by the expectation of supremacy and the sweet feeling of revenge against Sybil, Peggy Lou realized that there were practical matters that had to be considered before she could make this new life for herself. Everything had to be planned carefully so as to avoid being apprehended by the police or others who would search for a missing person.
She would take the two hundred dollars Sybil kept in a box in the apartment and leave New York at once. Those who pursued her would be looking for the legal entity called Sybil Dorsett, a conservatively dressed schoolteacher. Peggy Lou would therefore seek an occupation remote from teaching and would bedeck herself in the most flamboyant clothes that money could buy. The pursuers would look for Sybil Dorsett in the North or perhaps the Midwest. Peggy Lou therefore planned to go south.
Sybil Page 34