Sybil (29 page)

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.

Hattie liked to dress her daughter up and show her off to company. In an effort to display the child's precocity, the mother would get the child to read and recite for guests. If Sybil made a mistake, Hattie would regard the error as a personal affront. Sybil would think: it's like mother doing it instead of me.

"My dear Sybil," her mother wrote in the daughter's elementary school graduation autograph book, "Live for those who love you, for those who know you true. For the heaven that smiles above you and the good that you can do. Your loving Mother."

The loving mother of Sybil's life, however, was not the one who played constructive eating games with the cereal bowl or who wondered about the daughter's getting drowned or showed the daughter off to company. Sybil's loving mother was the one who inhabited a "pretend" world of Sybil's own creation and in which Sybil found the rescue she was denied in the real world.

The loving mother of the pretend world lived in Montana. In this state, which Sybil never had visited but which she fancied was her own, she imagined that she had many brothers and sisters with whom she played.

The Montana mother didn't hide Sybil's dolls in the cupboard when Sybil wanted to play with them or stuff Sybil with food and then force it out of her with enemas and laxatives. The Montana mother didn't tie Sybil to a piano leg or beat her or burn her. The Montana mother didn't say that Sybil was funny and that only blonde children were pretty. The Montana mother didn't punish Sybil for crying or tell her not to trust people, not to learn too much, never to get married and have a lot of kids around your neck. This good mother of the fantasy allowed Sybil to cry when there was cause for tears and didn't laugh when there was no reason for laughter.

When the Montana mother was there, Sybil could play anything she wanted to on the piano. The Montana mother wasn't sensitive to noise, and Sybil didn't have to blow her nose or clear out the dripping in the back of her throat without making a sound. When the Montana mother was there, Sybil was allowed to sneeze.

The Montana mother didn't say, "You won't grow up to be a good girl if you aren't good when you're little," didn't cause Sybil to have headaches because what she did was unfair. The Montana mother never said, "Nobody loves you except mother," only to prove that love by inflicting pain.

Where the Montana mother lived was not just a house; it was a home, where Sybil could touch things and didn't have to scrub the sink every time she washed her hands. Here Sybil didn't have to be searching all the time for some way to reach her mother, to change her, to earn if not her love, at least her liking. The Montana mother was warm and loving, always kissed Sybil, hugged her. She made Sybil feel wanted.

In the Montana mother's home Sybil wasn't told, "You are above your friends," at the same time that she was also told, "You can't do anything; you'll never amount to anything; you'll never be like my father. My father was a Civil War hero, the mayor of the town, a gifted musician. He was everything. No child of mine, no grandchild of his, should be like you. Lands, how did I get you?"

Picture: Marcia's drawing of the town of Willow Corners. Marcia is in the lower left corner, separated from the people of the town. The sketch depicts the bushes and the neighbor's garden, the scene of Hattie Dorsett's embarrassing activities during Sybil's early childhood.

Sybil was nine years old when Marcia did this sketch.

Picture: Peggy Lou's pencil drawing of Hattie Dorsett. The pose refers to the "winter on the farm" episode of Sybil's childhood.

Picture: Peggy Lou's pencil drawing of Hattie's cut-glass goblet and tumbler. Even as an adult Sybil was frightened by the sound of breaking glass.

Picture: Peggy Ann's pre-suicidal city sketch. Her notations describe her feelings of fear, pain, and loneliness.

Picture: Sid's self-portrait, drawn when Sybil was ten years old.

Picture: A pre-suicidal tempera painting by Marcia. Again she stresses her loneliness and separation from others. The original is done in dull browns and blue-grays.

Picture: Mary's crayon drawing with her handwriting, drawn just before she bought a house without Sybil's knowledge. Picture: Peggy Ann's torn sketch of the numbers she hoarded for so many years. It was only after integration that Sybil knew the multiplication tables that Peggy Ann had learned in the third grade.