Sybil

  As she turned into East 74th Street, she suddenly remembered that, before these thoughts had occurred to her, she had been on her way to keep an appointment with Dr. Wilbur. Peggy Lou decided to keep the appointment. She wanted to see the doctor for one last time.

  Coming closer to the doctor's office, Peggy Lou marshaled her arguments, rehearsed what she would say. The essential thrust would be: I'm the one who lets Sybil live, and she doesn't do anything for me. The thought of having to take leave of the doctor, however, made Peggy Lou suddenly sad.

  Her thoughts, as she approached the building where for five years she had been allowed to speak freely and to assert herself, reverted to a snowy day the previous winter, when, to get away from the frightening snow, she had gone to Grand Central Station to buy a ticket for some place warm. She hadn't been at the station very long when, standing beside her, was Dr. Wilbur.

  Peggy, who didn't know that Sybil, "coming to" briefly in the station, had called Teddy and that Teddy had called Dr. Wilbur, couldn't understand how Dr. Wilbur had gotten there.

  "Oh, Dr. Wilbur," Peggy Lou asked on first seeing the doctor, "where did you come from?"

  Avoiding a direct answer, Dr. Wilbur said only, "We have to get you home to a warm bed."

  And Peggy Lou, instead of being angry because the doctor had interfered with her plans, nestled up against the doctor, saying, "Oh, Dr. Wilbur, I'm so glad to see you." Together they had walked out of the station to the taxi stalls while Peggy Lou shivered with the cold. As the doctor wrapped her mink coat around her runaway patient, Peggy Lou had continued to shiver, but not from the cold. It was an exquisite pleasure to be enveloped in mink. And Dr. Wilbur had promised that someday Peggy Lou could have a sleeve of that mink coat as a souvenir.

  Peggy Lou entered the doctor's office with mixed emotions. Then, suddenly helpless before the flood of powerful feelings that overwhelmed her, Peggy Lou told the doctor every last detail of the Grand Design for emancipation.

  "What have I done to make you want to leave me?" the doctor asked softly. In reply Peggy Lou nestled closer and said, "Oh, Dr. Wilbur." The gesture and the tone were identical to what had transpired on the snowy day.

  Now, too, in the cradle endlessly rocking was Peggy Lou, her resolution to break with the past to start a life of her own lullabied into inactivity. Having expended her fervor in the declaration, Peggy Lou did not have to perform the deed.

  Vanessa stood in front of the mirror, in which Sybil never looked. The body Vanessa lived in was too slender for her taste. A little more flesh, a few rounded curves, breasts that were more voluptuous: these she would have liked to have had. Her hair--that beautiful dark chestnut red hair, flaming with her passions--was nearer to her heart's desire. She wished for new clothes, chic and alluring, in which she could face the world. How tired she was of the veil that hung between her and the world. It was as if she, along with the others, were facing life from behind a scrim.

  Poor Sybil, Vanessa thought. She would enjoy life more if she didn't always have to be skimping to make ends meet. She hasn't held a job since she came to New York. Father's check just covers basic expenses.

  Dr. Wilbur isn't being paid. Sybil doesn't have money for clothes, art supplies, travel. We don't make it any easier for her, always nagging for the things we want and often spending money on our own. The conscience that makes her feel guilty about indulging herself even in small pleasures when she's in debt doesn't help either. The rigidities, Vanessa reflected bitterly, are the bequest of the hypocrites of Willow Corners.

  While carefully lining her lips with lipstick, which Sybil still didn't use, Vanessa suddenly had a brainstorm. Sybil wasn't earning anything. Peggy Lou and Marcia were spending, heedless of Sybil's caution. Vanessa at that moment took a decisive stand: she would become the breadwinner!

  Remembering the Help Wanted sign in an Amsterdam Avenue laundromat, she decided that to work there would be ideal. Involving neither stress nor brainwork, the job would reawaken no old traumas.

  Later that morning the laundromat job became Vanessa's. Discovering that they had a job, the others were pleased. Peggy Lou thought it was great fun, and the boys admitted to getting a "kick" out of operating the machines. Vicky thought that having a job was not only economically wise but also good therapy. Sybil herself agreed that this was the sort of job that made sense. But it was to Vanessa, who alternated with the others in performing the simple tasks the job required, to whom the job meant most.

  When Sybil I. Dorsett received her first paycheck, Vanessa Dorsett visited a small dress shop on Broadway and bought two stunning but inexpensive costumes. Vanessa, through Dr. Wilbur, was even able to persuade Sybil to go to the theater.

  In any case, from the middle of August, 1959, to the middle of October, Sybil had a job that Vanessa had secured. When, however, the job interfered with the demands of classes, by then in full swing, Sybil, with Dr. Wilbur's approval, resigned. Of the selves, Vanessa alone could not accept resignation from a job that had provided new clothes and the means to wash away the guilt and hypocrisy of the past. For Vanessa the two months in the laundromat had meant purification.

  In the meantime, Marcia had a better solution than the laundromat. She wanted to turn her talents to cash. I could do so many things, she thought as she walked to the mailbox, if only everybody didn't get in the way.

  She placed her key in the lock anxiously. Asking acceptance from the world at this moment were two of her most recent creative efforts. One was a pop tune, "On a Holidate for Two," for which she had written both words and music. Finding a copy of the song in a drawer, Sybil had wilted with embarrassment. What, Marcia had heard Sybil ask, would people think if I were to die and they were to find this childish tune among my belongings? Sybil, of course, had been against sending the song to a publisher. That was Sybil. Defeated before she starts. Marcia had sent the song in spite of Sybil.

  Would there be a reply today? If they bought it, Marcia could then buy all the paints she liked, and she wouldn't have to use Sybil's money.

  The essay sent to Parents magazine had been out for three weeks. There might be a reply by now. The essay was entitled "Can a Loving Mother Be Dangerous?" Key phrases lingered in memory: "This mother was ambivalent. This kind of consistently inconsistent love is dangerous to the trusting child. Can a loving mother cause her child to be a potential neurotic? Psychologists and psychiatrists tell us, "Yes, it is possible.""

  There was no news about the song or the essay. But there was a letter from Marcia's book club. "When you enroll a friend," the letter read, "you get four free books." Marcia decided to enroll her friend: Sybil I. Dorsett.

  Her friend had objected to having Marcia's name in the mailbox, but Marcia had held her own, telling Sybil through Dr. Wilbur that these days she got more mail than Sybil did. Marcia had won. There in the mailbox alongside "Dorsett" and "Reeves" was "Marcia Baldwin." Well, Marcia thought, I have to have some victories.

  As she walked up the stairs to the apartment, Marcia brooded moodily about her status. She was the one who came to the fore when Sybil simultaneously felt hidden anger and feelings of rejection, the one who took over these feelings that Sybil could not endure. "Marcia," Vicky had said, "feels what Sybil feels, only more so." No wonder, Marcia reflected, since I'm so close to Sybil that when she's asleep, I can't even open my eyes. But I want to be somebody, a recognized identity. If I sell my song and my article, I'll insist on using my own name. The fame and money will be mine.

  It's the same way with my painting. My style is so individual that my work cannot be confused with the paintings of the others. And I'm cleverer than most of them--except perhaps Vicky and Vanessa.

  My very existence, Marcia thought as she opened her apartment door, is tenuous. When Sybil is happy, she doesn't need me or any of us.

  Inside the apartment Marcia could sense that Teddy was uncomfortable with her. Teddy, Marcia realized, was afraid of her depressions and her suicidal impulses.

  Marc
ia headed for her easel and began, as was characteristic, to paint in a great variety of colors. She left the easel abruptly, thinking, I have everything and nothing, so much talent and so fragile an existence.

  As Dr. Wilbur had observed, Marcia was a seeming contradiction: on the one hand, highly productive; on the other, as destructive. Underlying the buoyancy and creativity was a dark quality connected with her tremendous need for a loving mother and a desire, equally great, to kill retrospectively the mother she did have. Marcia's basic existence derived from the death wish for her mother, expressed long ago when Marcia had wished for the little box to grow big. But the death wish alternated within Marcia with a death wish for herself. When Sybil had stood at the banks of the Hudson River, ready to jump, Marcia had been the propelling inner force.

  I want to live without the hurting, choking, the crying, Marcia thought as she walked back to the easel. I want to belong. I want to make a name for myself in the world. I want to get up in the morning and feel good, and I want to get in bed at night and go to sleep and be able on awakening, whether or not Sybil is asleep, to open my eyes.

  Seated at her desk on August 17, 1959, Sybil wrote Dr. Wilbur:

  I am not going to tell you there isn't anything wrong. We both know there is. But it is not what I have led you to believe. I do not have any multiple personalities. I don't even have a "double" to help me out. I am all of them. I have been essentially lying in my pretense of them. The dissociations are not the problem because they do not actually exist, but there is something wrong or I would not resort to pretending to be like that. And you might ask me about my mother. The extreme things I told you about her were not true. My mother was more than a little nervous. At times she was flighty, clever, overanxious, but she did love me. She was overprotective and watched me all the time. I was not the interesting, charming person she was. My parents were better than a lot of parents are. We had a nice home, plenty to eat, and nice clothes. I had lots of toys and books. My parents interfered with my music and my drawing, but it was due to a lack of understanding, not a lack of caring. I had no reason to complain. Why I grew to be odd I do not know.

  After writing the letter Sybil lost almost two days. "Coming to," she stumbled across what she had written just before she had dissociated and wrote to Dr. Wilbur as follows:

  It's just so hard to have to feel, believe, and admit that I do not have conscious control over my selves. It is so much more threatening to have something out of hand than to believe that at any moment I can stop (i started to say "This foolishness") any time I need to. When I wrote the previous letter, I had made up my mind I would show you how I could be very composed and cool and not need to ask you to listen to me nor to explain anything to me nor need any help. By telling you that all this about the multiple personalities was not really true but just put on, I could show, or so I thought, that I did not need you. Well, it would be easier if it were put on. But the only ruse of which I'm guilty is to have pretended for so long before coming to you that nothing was wrong. Pretending that the personalities did not exist has now caused me to lose about two days.

  Three weeks later Sybil reaffirmed her belief in the existence of her other selves in a letter to Miss Updyke, the school nurse of undergraduate days.

  When I had been in analysis for a few months, I wrote you that Dr. Wilbur had explained to me about multiple personalities and that the "blank spells," as I had always called them, were not blank in anything but my memory. I had been active, and another "person" had taken over and said or done the things that I had not been able to do for some reason--whether fear of consequences, lack of confidence, lack of money, or for the reason of getting away from problems and pressures too great for me to face as "myself."

  The point I'm trying to make is really twofold: The "blank spells" I have had since I was just under four were spells in which I, as another of the fifteen personalities that have emerged from time to time, did things to act out the problems or troubles of the past or the present. Many of these started with my mother, who was catatonic at times, at other times laughing hysterically and joking very cleverly, dancing on the street or talking much too loudly in church or acting "silly" at a party, sometimes cruel and sometimes entirely unreachable. We are trying to undo what has been done and what you, in your aversion to my mother, seemed to sense.

  As Miss Updyke read this letter, she recalled the homeward journey during which, chameleon-like, Sybil had revealed a swift succession of what had then been dismissed as moods. At one point Miss Updyke recalled that Sybil had put her head in her companion's lap, but Sybil had later insisted, "I'd never do a thing like that."

  The others, who had been denied in the past because of lack of knowledge and denied in the present because of shame, had been readmitted to awareness.

  27

  Prisoners in Their Body

  Watching Mary take the first steps toward buying a house, Peggy Lou plan to usurp the selfhood, Vanessa purge herself at the laundromat, and Marcia storm the citadel of authorship, Sybil came to consider herself more and more the hostage of the selves she hadn't been able to deny. As far as Sybil was concerned, these acts were part of the interference she had tried to banish from her life through denial. Vicky, on the other hand, decided that, although these were actions of the parts and not of the whole, they were thrusts toward health. As she told Dr. Wilbur: "I try to keep Sybil safe from dangers and give her as many good days as the others will allow."

  Actually the days free of interference were few: Sybil's closets, despite limited funds, continued to sport the clothes she hadn't bought; her paintings were completed in her "absence"; and medicine--because the others took individual doses--persisted in running out long before it was time to renew a prescription.

  On one occasion she had "come to" in the apartment to discover that she had a bandage over one eye and looked like a Cyclops. On another occasion she had found herself wearing ice skates and stumbling over the living room floor.

  Captive, she was often late for appointments because her captors had deliberately hidden her purse or her underwear. Or the captors would manage to take her somewhere just long enough to keep her from getting to her destination on time. She often failed exams because those who held her hostage had deliberately given incorrect answers or because a particular jailer--Peggy Lou--had withheld the essential mathematical and chemical formulas.

  With fourteen alternating selves making spontaneous appearances in the world, the slender frame of Sybil Dorsett, roaming the streets of New York, often confounded comprehensibility.

  Peggy Lou walked in the rain, went into a store on Broadway, picked up a glass dish, wanting to break it. Vicky said no.

  "Do you want the dish?" the clerk asked. "No," Peggy Lou replied, "I want to break it."

  "Put the dish back," Vicky ordered. Peggy Lou did. Together Peggy Lou and Vicky left the store, leaving the clerk to think that the customer had been talking to herself.

  Both Peggy Lou and Mary suddenly became sick at the corner of Seventy-First and Lexington Avenue. Peggy Lou leaned against an apartment building.

  "What's wrong?" a policeman asked. "She's sick," Vicky replied.

  "Who is?" the officer wanted to know. "I am," replied Peggy Lou.

  Peggy Lou and Vicky, halfway across Madison Avenue, with traffic coming toward them from both directions, came to a sudden halt.

  "I'm going over to the gift shop over there," Peggy Lou said, moving forward.

  "I don't want to," Vicky replied, turning and walking toward the side of the street from which they had come.

  Remarked the traffic policeman, "For heaven's sake, lady, make up your mind."

  For several months Sybil made repeated attempts to get to an art gallery to retrieve a painting that had been part of an art exhibit. Each time she tried, Marcia took her elsewhere. In the end not Sybil but Dr. Wilbur reclaimed the painting.

  Marcia and Peggy Lou took Sybil to a coffee shop in lower Manhattan. Sybil "came to" to find
herself penniless and too far from home to walk. Seizing a dime on a counter, intended as a tip, she telephoned Dr. Wilbur. Again the doctor resolved the problem. The next day Sybil returned to the coffee shop to pay her debt.

  Ironically, the captors thought of Sybil not as their hostage but as their keeper, the hostess of their body. All complained that she didn't give them enough to eat, that she didn't provide their favorite foods--a difficult task since they had individual tastes.

  When one was ill, the others, who were not ill, felt the ravages of the illness. After Sybil's bout with colitis, Vicky complained, "See how much skinnier I've gotten." When Sybil Ann or Nancy Lou Ann, because of depression, would take to their bed, the others would also be immobilized. Mary and Sybil Ann had seizures, which were profoundly disturbing to the others. In cold weather, when Peggy Lou impetuously went out with insufficient clothes, Vicky would protest that "that made me cold, too." Vicky would say, "My head aches when Mary cries."

  Captive the captors were, too, because Sybil's social life did not always coincide with their individual needs. Although they liked some people in common, they also had individual predilections for both outsiders and each other. Marcia and Vanessa did things together, as did Mike and Sid, Marjorie and Ruthie, and the Peggys. Although not a team, Mary and Vanessa were special friends.

  Among outsiders Vanessa claimed to like everybody who wasn't a hypocrite. Peggy Lou vented her spleen against what she called "showoffs like Sybil's mother." Vicky favored intelligent and sophisticated persons.