Sybil (21 page)

Vicky recalled having told Peggy Lou at Mary Dorsett's grave to answer to the name of Sybil Dorsett because it wasn't polite to point out people's mistakes. Then, on the second day of her residency in the world, Vicky took her own advice. In the sixth-grade classroom, she immediately recited when the name of Sybil Dorsett was called by Mr. Strong, the teacher.

Vicky liked Mr. Strong and remembered that Sybil had liked him too. One afternoon, while Sybil was raking leaves in the backyard, Mr. Strong, who happened to be passing, called to Sybil. Roused from daydreaming about the Victoria Antoinette of her fantasy, Sybil had been thrilled that the teacher had spoken to her first.

Isn't it pathetic, Vicky thought, that Sybil doesn't know about me, but keeps thinking about that imaginary girl whose name I now bear? It is sad that Sybil doesn't know about any of the people who live within her.

Having acquitted herself beautifully on the first day of school, in all subjects, including arithmetic, which Vicky had absorbed through silent observation, Vicky went home, sanguine about her new existence.

Approaching the Dorsetts' home, Vicky observed that Mrs. Dorsett was peering out of the window. Mrs. Dorsett, Vicky thought, always seems to be spying. "Come on. Let's go visit somebody," Hattie said. "There's a new baby at the Greens' house. Let's go down there and see what's going on."

Here it is, Vicky thought, the almost daily ritual with its everlastingly boring adult-woman talk to which Sybil had been subjected. Well, Vicky decided, I'll go. Peggy Lou fought back, but I'll be diplomatic.

Mon Dieu, Vicky thought as in subsequent weeks she took a good look at Willow Corners, the people in this town had no style, no éclat. Narrow, provincial, and dull were the adjectives for them. Even at the age of thirteen she had outgrown them. She was certain that they and she were worlds apart. As for Sybil's parents ... well, the father was nice, but he didn't care enough. In fact, he didn't come up from behind his newspaper or his blueprints long enough to see enough of what was happening to be able to care. The mother was a different story. She was always saying, "You should do it this way or that." And Vicky decided that it was this that had hampered Sybil in doing things. How, Vicky speculated, can you do anything when there are so many shoulds and shouldn'ts, and nothing is any fun? Still, Mrs. Dorsett was hard to fathom. She was either too much there or not there at all. But Vicky had the consolation of knowing that she was here to help, that after a while her own loving parents and her many brothers and sisters would come for her and she would go back to Paris with them. How she looked forward to the time when they would all be together. Contrasting her parents with the Dorsetts, she felt almost guilty at her own good fortune. She promised herself that before she left this family she would arrange to let Sybil have as many good days as possible--as many in fact, as the outside world and the other people within her would allow. Poor Sybil, Vicky thought.

There were times when Vicky retreated to the more congenial inner stratum and allowed one of the other selves in the Sybil Dorsett entourage, or even Sybil herself, to take a seat in the sixth-grade classroom.

One day Mary Lucinda Saunders Dorsett, who had emerged during the first year of Peggy Lou's two-year tenure, when Sybil was ten, took that sixth-grade seat. Before the day was over Mary suddenly didn't feel well.

It wasn't a pain she felt; it was more like a stretching.

When Mary got home, she headed for the bathroom. Grandpa Dorsett was in it, so Hattie called, "Why can't you use the other bathroom?" What other bathroom? Mary didn't remember there was any and only learned later that her father had built it during the second year, during which Peggy had been there and Mary had paid no attention.

In the new bathroom Mary blanched at the sight of what she later described as "this brownish red stuff" in her underwear. She had seen her grandmother, who had had cancer of the cervix, bleed, and she was afraid that she too was going to die.

"Why are you in there so long?" Hattie called.

"I'll be right out, Mom," Mary replied. Mary, who didn't feel that Sybil's mother was hers, always called Hattie "Mom," which seemed like a general word for any older woman who took care of one. Washing her underwear to make sure that Hattie wouldn't know what had happened, Mary lingered long in the bathroom, worrying about the strange condition in which she found herself.

At bedtime that night Mom came in and said, "Let's see your underwear." Mary hesitated. "Show it to me this minute," Hattie demanded. When Mary did as she was directed, Hattie remarked, "Just what I thought. It's your age working on you. It's simply awful. The curse of women. It hurts you here, doesn't it? It hurts you there, doesn't it?" And pushing at various target points of Mary's anatomy, Hattie jabbed hard, accentuating the pain.

"It's sick time," Hattie said as she prepared a cloth for Mary to wear. "Only women have it. Don't mention it to Daddy." Then Hattie stalked out of the bedroom, muttering, "The curse of women. The curse. I wish men had it. It would serve them right. Men!"

Mary was frightened because Mom had said "sick time." Sick meant staying home from school; school meant getting away from Hattie. And Mary wanted to get away. Next day Mom explained that with this sickness girls did go to school. So Mary went to school.

What Mary didn't know was that what had happened to her for the first time had already happened to Sybil for two successive months without Hattie's knowing and without pain. In the future, Mary, who carried the burden of menstruation, inflicted the pain on Sybil or whatever other self was in the ascendancy during the menstrual period.

Mary continued to appear occasionally during the sixth grade, but it was Vicky who was there most of the time. Toward the end of the school term Sybil arrived one day on the way to school, feeling that the Victoria of her fantasy was taking her there. This return, however, was not so alarming as had been the return in the fifth grade. Although Sybil still thought that time was "funny," she found herself somehow more at ease about this spell.

At the time of Sybil's return Mary talked to Vicky about Danny Martin. "Sybil doesn't know," Mary said, "that while Peggy Lou was there, Danny was jealous of Billy Denton. Peggy Lou didn't pay any attention to Danny, but she certainly did latch onto Billy."

"Yes," Vicky agreed, "she certainly did. And Billy could never understand--after Sybil came back--why the Dorsett girl acted as if she didn't know him."

Mary, who was interested in poetry, became grandiloquent, telling Vicky that for Sybil the mighty heart of the world often lies still and that at such times there are for Sybil no fresh woods, no pastures new, just pastures fallow with forgetfulness. "Sybil calls it nothingness. And that's not very flattering to us!"

In the months that followed Sybil found herself floating in and out of blankness. Disguising the fact, she became ingenious in improvisation, peerless in pretense, as she feigned knowledge of what she did not know. Unfortunately, from herself she couldn't conceal the sensation that somehow she had lost something. Nor could she hide the feeling that increasingly she felt as if she belonged to no one and to no place. Somehow it seemed that the older she got, the worse things became. She began repudiating herself with unspoken self-derogating comments: "I'm thin for a good reason: I'm not fit to occupy space."

Spring was bad because of her grandmother. Now summer was approaching, and summer would be bad because of Danny. Sitting on the front steps or high in the swing, Sybil would remember the summer leading to Danny's departure.

"Break, break, break, ar On thy cold grey stones, O Sea! ar ... But O for the touch of a vanished hand, ar And the sound of a voice that is still! ... But the tender grace of a day that is dead ar Will never come back to me," Mary recited as she took over the swing from Sybil.

During the late spring of 1935, Sybil faced a new terror, brought on by the vulnerability of puberty. The terror centered around hysterical conversion symptoms that were part of her then undiagnosed illness. For hysteria-- grande or otherwise--is an illness resulting from emotional conflict and is generally characterized by immaturity, dependency, and the use of the defense mechanisms not only of dissociation but also of conversion. Hysteria is classically manifested by dramatic physical symptoms involving the voluntary muscles or the organs of special senses. During the process of conversion, unconscious impulses are transmuted into bodily symptoms. Instead of being experienced consciously, the emotional conflict is thus expressed physically.

Suddenly, half of Sybil's face and the side of her arms would become numb.

She would grow weak on one side, not always the same side. Almost constantly her throat was sore, and she had trouble swallowing. She began to suffer from tunnel vision; sight would often leave one eye. She--and some of the other selves as well, notably Mary--developed a nervous tic, which, like that of the telephone operator, caused consternation in the town.

Sybil or one of the others would twitch, jerk, and carry on with unrestrained body movements. Sybil or the others would aim for the doorway and run into the door, aim for the door and run into the doorjamb. The symptoms were intensified by headaches so bad that following such an attack, Sybil had to go to sleep for several hours. Sleep after one of these headaches for Sybil, who was generally a light sleeper, was so sound that it seemed she had been drugged.

Most disturbing of all, life seemed to be floating by in an unreal kind of way, filled with strange presentiments. Sybil would remember that she had been somewhere or had done something as if she had dreamed it. She seemed to be walking beside herself, watching. And sometimes she couldn't tell the difference between her dreams and this dreamlike unreality.

One night Sybil mentioned this feeling of unreality to her parents, who then decided to take her to Dr. Quinoness, the town's doctor.

Dr. Quinoness diagnosed Sybil's case as Sydenham's chorea, a form of St. Vitus dance. Explaining that there was a psychological component, he advised that Sybil should see a psychiatrist and made an appointment for her with a doctor in Minneapolis. Willard and Hattie refused to keep the appointment. If it were only psychological, Willard claimed, he could handle it himself. Upon this assumption he bought Sybil a guitar and engaged a guitar teacher for her. Father and daughter practiced together and later gave recitals. Since Vicky, Mary, Peggy Lou, and some of the other selves also learned to play and did so with different degrees of enthusiasm, the performances Willard Dorsett's daughter gave were strikingly uneven.

Despite her father's easy optimism, Sybil admitted to herself that she was having "mental trouble," which in the Dorsett household and in the town of Willow Corners was considered a disgrace. Indeed, new fears began to revolve around the state hospital, where her uncle Roger worked as a purchasing agent and her aunt Hattie, as a nurse. Sybil had often visited her uncle and aunt at the hospital.

Trying to take her mind off her trouble, Sybil threw herself into her school work. At school, however, she was disturbed by not knowing the European history that had been taught while she was not present. Vicky carried history, just as Peggy Lou was the keeper of multiplication. With science, however, Sybil caught up quickly. Fascinated as Mr. Strong elucidated the mysteries of the human anatomy, she didn't even notice that he carefully bypassed the sexual parts. When students were required to draw a large sketch of a heart, Hattie bought Sybil a pencil that was red at one end and blue at the other, which made Sybil feel like a teacher, grading papers. Sybil's daydreams were filled with ideas about heart circulation and doctors, and she would pretend that she herself was a physician explaining heart function to patients.

One day Sybil dashed into the house after school to tell her mother about heart function. Refusing to listen, Hattie said, "I don't want to hear about that." Sybil, however, was so excited about the subject that she went right on explaining what she had learned. "How many times do I have to tell you that I'm not interested?" Hattie screamed, lashing out at her daughter. Sybil, who had been standing on the polished linoleum in the sunroom, took the blow full on the hip, slipped, fell sideways over the rocking chair, and landed on the floor. Her ribs were badly bruised.

From that time forward Sybil was afraid of the science class, and even though science continued to fascinate her, she had a hard time getting through high school and college biology. She also became afraid of rooms without rugs.

That night Hattie took Sybil on an outing to Main Street. It was a Wednesday night, and the stores were open. There were popcorn stands on the corner and popsicles in the drugstore. Children always asked their parents for a nickel or a dime, but Sybil made no demands. Hattie asked, "What do we want tonight? Do we want popcorn or a popsicle?"

Sybil replied, "Well, anything is all right."

The remark, although characteristic, didn't indicate that Sybil had no preference. Just as she didn't dare tell anybody her secret about time, she didn't dare ask anybody for anything.

As mother and daughter were enjoying the popsicles Hattie bought, Sybil caught sight of some hair bows displayed on a counter. Thinking how pretty they were, Sybil hoped that her mother would ask whether she wanted one. But Hattie passed the counter, looked at the hair bows, and went down the aisle. Sybil gave up hope that her mother would ask her.

Then Vicky decided to do the asking and pointed to a light blue hair bow. "I'd like to have it," Vicky informed Hattie. "It matches our blue organdy dress."