Sybil (48 page)

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.

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.

Both Mary and Sybil had a special fondness for children. Mary, indicating oneness rather than autonomy, remarked about a woman they all knew, "None of us liked her."

Excited by conversations about music, Peggy Lou often shut her ears in the course of other conversations. Bored by female conversation in general, Mike and Sid sometimes succeeded in making Sybil break an engagement or nagged throughout the visit.

"I'd like to get going on building the new bookcase," Mike confided in Sid during one visit in which they were held captive.

"I have some typing to do and want to get home," Sid replied.

Summarizing what it was like to be a prisoner in a social situation, Marjorie told Dr.

Wilbur, "I go with Sybil when she visits her friends, but they talk about things they like and I don't care about--houses, furniture, babies. But when Laura Hotchkins comes, they talk about concerts, and I like that."

Of them all Nancy Lou Ann had the greatest interest in politics, an interest that was closely linked with the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy. As had already become apparent, these other people within Sybil had different religious attitudes and different tastes in books. They also had different vocabularies, handwriting, speech patterns, and different body images. Their reactions to sex were not the same. The fear of getting close to people, the result of Hattie Dorsett's abuses, permeated the sexual attitude of all of them. In Peggy Lou and Marcia, however, the fear became terror. In Vanessa it was somehow sublimated by a joie de vivre, and in Sybil Ann it was dissipated by a yielding lassitude.

Incipient, insidious jealousies often flared among the selves. Peggy Lou was furious that Vicky had an extensive knowledge of early American furniture. To get back at Vicky, Peggy Lou burned the midnight oil for countless hours, poring over books on this subject, memorizing page after page, until she could proudly prattle as an expert on the subject. Vicky looked on with an amused, tolerant smile.

Talents and ambitions among the selves were both the same and different. According to Vicky, Sybil was the best of the painters. Vicky had often taught with and sometimes for Sybil. Both Sybil and Vicky wanted to become doctors. When asked whether Sybil should study medicine, Peggy Lou replied, "It's hard for her to concentrate. But I could do it if I tried."

The selves alternated with each other, but they also coexisted. They obstructed some of Sybil's activities, but they cooperated in others. Sid had built the partition. As on the Omaha scaffold, there was harmonious joint painting. Peggy Lou, who didn't like to paint in oils, helped with an oil painting. Marcia talked enthusiastically of an abstract painting that "we all did together."

Marcia often went to chemistry classes and lab sessions when Sybil could not attend, taking notes for Sybil to study later and signing Sybil's name on the attendance sheet. Like a secretary signing her boss's signature in the boss's absence, Marcia often put her own initials under the signature of Sybil I. Dorsett.

None of the selves was essentially more intelligent than any other, although there were marked differences in what had been studied, learned, and absorbed. Although their ages fluctuated, each self had a prevailing age. Differences in the prevailing ages, in the quality of emotions, in the degree of activity and passivity, and, of course, in the traumas each of the selves defended accounted for vast differences in behavior. So clearly marked were these differences that when the various selves telephoned Dr. Wilbur she knew not only from the voice but also from the behavior described who was on the line.

"Dr. Wilbur, I'm in this bar with colored lights. Everyone is having fun," the voice said. "Why can't I have a beer?"

"Sure you can, Peggy Lou," the doctor replied.

"Wouldn't that be naughty?" Peggy Lou had reversed her position.

"No," the doctor said reassuringly, "lots of people drink beer."

"Well, no," Peggy Lou decided. "I'm going home."

Captor and captive, Sybil counted on Teddy Reeves to mediate among the selves, to report on their comings and goings, to bridge the void that existed between blacking out and coming to. A Greek chorus commenting on Sybil's fragmented action, Teddy also shared Sybil's interest in multiple personality.

In 1957, for instance, when the movie Three Faces of Eve was released, Sybil and Teddy saw it together because they had heard it was about a multiple personality.

In the movie Eve White changed into Eve Black, who, talking to the doctor, dropped her eyes coquettishly. Teddy grabbed hold of Sybil and whispered, "That's exactly what you do." Misunderstanding, Sybil thought that Teddy had meant that she was flirtatious.

"Is that the way I act with people?" Sybil asked in dismay.

"No," Teddy replied. "That's the way you look when you change from one to another. You have a sort of blank look just for a moment."

"The movie was exactly like Sybil," Teddy later told Dr. Wilbur.

"No," the doctor explained. "Sybil and Eve don't have the same kind of personality. The reasons for being multiple personalities are not the same. But I do agree that Sybil and Eve have the same blank look when they change."

Despite the closeness between Sybil and Teddy in extraordinary circumstances, their relationship began to quaver. Disquieting to Teddy had been Peggy Lou's assertiveness and Marcia's depressions. Sybil, disturbed by Teddy's disquietude, became increasingly lonely.

The tension did not come to a head, however, until one night in the late summer of 1959 when Teddy made some scathing remarks about the doctor. "She's exploiting you to satisfy her own personal needs," Teddy charged.

"I don't want to hear any more of this," Sybil replied angrily as she rose from the dinner table.

"Well, you never want to hear the truth," Teddy snapped.

Propelled by mounting anger, Peggy Lou stepped right into the context of the action. "I'm leaving," she announced.

"No, you're not," Teddy replied authoritatively. "You're not going to run away again. I'm going to keep you here whether you like it or not."

"You get out of my way," Peggy Lou warned, "or I might hit you."

"You wouldn't dare," Teddy challenged. "You get out of my way, or you'll see," Peggy Lou threatened, heading for the door.

With Teddy trying to block the way, Peggy Lou rushed to a large bay window. Teddy grabbed hold of her wrist, clutching it tightly. Breaking away, Peggy Lou crawled on all fours and, her back to Teddy, wedged herself under a large dresser. Despite repeated attempts, Teddy failed to get Peggy Lou out. She finally appealed by phone to Dr. Wilbur.

Arriving on the scene within an hour, the doctor got down on the floor, calling, "Peggy Lou." No answer. "Peggy, it's Dr. Wilbur," the doctor repeated several times.