Sybil (24 page)

Sybil said good night and walked thoughtfully toward the downstairs bedroom. To her amazement, the crib was not there. The only bed in the room was the familiar large white iron bed in which her parents slept.

"Peggy Louisiana!" her mother's voice echoed sharply from the living room. "Aren't you going upstairs?"

Upstairs? Sybil didn't know what her mother was talking about.

"It's after eight!" her mother's voice had become sharper. "You won't be able to get up in the morning. You'll have to answer to Miss Henderson --not me."

Upstairs? Some years earlier Hattie had designated an upstairs bedroom as Sybil's room. Somehow, however, Hattie had never gotten around to moving either the crib or Sybil there. With nothing to lose, Sybil decided to find out whether that room could be what her mother meant.

The crib was not in this other bedroom, either. Instead there was a full-sized bed. The fresh sheets and pillowcases invited occupancy. Was the room for company? There was no company. Could the grown-up bed be hers? Her mother had sent her there. It had to be. But when had they given this bed to her?

Sybil undressed and--for the first time--slept in an adult-sized bed in a room of her own. It was the first time that she could remember not having to face the bedroom drama that was always there.

No doubt the moment she had first become aware that merely going to bed at night was profoundly disturbing could not be fixed by clock or calendar. The cause of disturbance was always there. Only now, at last, she discovered, she could go to sleep without squeezing her eyes shut or turning to the wall.

The drama from which Sybil rebelliously removed herself was what, in psychoanalytic terms, is known as the "primal scene"--a child's auditory and visual perception of the parents' sexual intercourse. The scene is called primal because it is first in time in the sense that it is the child's first encounter with adult sexuality and because, as a foundation on which a youngster will build future feelings, attitudes, and behavior, it is of first importance of the child's development.

For some children there is no primal scene; for many others there is a moment in which the door opens slightly, and a child glimpses sexual intercourse between his parents. Usually the moment is accidental, inadvertent, and the way a child is affected depends on the general atmosphere of the home. When sexual intercourse is made to seem something private but not forbidden, the effects of this brief encounter are often free from psychological damage.

In Sybil's case the primal scene was no momentary glimpse, no single accidental moment. It was always there. For nine years Sybil had witnessed her parents' sexual intercourse as a fixed, unchangeable part of life and in marked contrast to the excessive propriety and coolness of their daytime behavior.

By day they never kissed, touched, or addressed each other by any endearment, either affectionate or perfunctory. By day there was no display. The observation of the parental copulation, moreover, took place in a household in which sex was regarded as wicked, a form of degradation. Theirs was a household in which alcohol and tobacco, dancing and the movies, even novels (which, because they were "made up," were regarded as lies) were strictly forbidden.

The daughter's normal questions about the facts of life were left unanswered. When Hattie was pregnant, Sybil was excluded from the "filthy" truth. When the pregnancy resulted in a miscarriage and Willard Dorsett buried the fetus--a boy--alongside the back steps, Sybil did not know what he was doing or why. Babies, born or unborn, somehow happened, but nice people did not admit how.

There were no hows or whys, only the conversational assumption of an incorporeal saintliness that, denying the flesh, consigned it to the devil. "All men," Hattie counseled her daughter, "will hurt you. They're mean, worthless." On other occasions, however, she did say, "Daddy is not like other men." But so saying, she led Sybil, who had seen the penises of little boys, to believe that her father didn't have a penis. With father "castrated" and because of the negative attitudes toward sex inculcated within her by day, Sybil was shocked and bewildered by what she saw and heard at night.

Riveted to the nighttime lie that represented the hypocrisy of her formative years, Sybil was forced to watch a drama from which she could escape only by closing her eyes and covering her ears.

The shades were usually halfway down in the twelve-by-fourteen bedroom. The crib was placed so that a street light shone in the bedroom window, silhouetting the penis that Sybil denied her father had. Three or four nights a week, year in and year out, from the time Sybil was born until she was nine years old, parental intercourse took place within her hearing and vision. And not infrequently the erect penis was easily visible in the half-light.

Observing this primal scene, directly and in silhouette from the time of their individual arrivals, the various selves had different reactions to it.

Peggy Lou was wakeful, uneasy, but she did not try to cover her eyes or to keep from listening.

"What are you talking about?" she would sometimes demand to know.

Hattie would reply, "Go to sleep."

But instead of going to sleep, Peggy Lou would strain her ears in the hope of unscrambling what was being said. She didn't like to have her father and Sybil's mother whispering about her. They often whispered about her at the table, and she thought they were doing the same in the bedroom. Enraged by the feelings of exclusion engendered by the whispering, Peggy Lou was also made furious by the rustling of the sheets. Every time she heard that rustling she wanted to stop it.

It had been a relief to have been moved into the upstairs room shortly after Grandma Dorsett's funeral and not to have had to hear that rustling any more.

Vicky had seen the erect penis in silhouette on many occasions. Unafraid, she would turn from the shadow on the window to the substance in the bed. What happened in bed was not always visible and, when visible, not always the same. A humped figure, Willard would sometimes move towards Hattie and mount her. At other times he would approach her as they lay side by side.

In the beginning Vicky thought that perhaps Willard was going to crush Hattie and kill her, but instead of dying, Hattie rolled over with Willard. They embraced. And it went on. Vicky had decided that if Mrs. Dorsett hadn't wanted him to do what he was doing, she would have stopped him. At any rate, Vicky knew that it certainly wasn't up to her to help Mrs. Dorsett.

Usually the faces of Mr. and Mrs.

Dorsett were hidden in the darkness. There were times, however, when the room was light enough for Vicky to see the faces--tense, strained, transformed, unrecognizable. Looking back from the vantage point of later years, Vicky could never decide whether these were the faces of ecstasy or of some malign affliction.

Vicky often felt that perhaps it wasn't right for her to look. She dismissed the scruple, however, with the realization of whether or not she looked, she would have heard anyhow. And she was curious. There was also something else: Vicky had the distinct impression that Hattie Dorsett actually wanted her daughter to look. That "something else" was that Hattie customarily threw the sheets back as if to reveal what was happening.

Marcia feared for mother's safety.

Mary resented the denial of privacy. Vanessa was revolted by the hypocrisy of parents who paraded in their daughter's presence the sexuality they pretended to deny.

Watching and listening in that parental chamber of sexual display was a self called Ruthie, who emerged in analysis during the reliving of the primal scene. She was only a baby, perhaps of three and a half, and she could not give the date of her arrival in Sybil's life. But of all the silent witnesses to the parental intercourse it was Ruthie who was most actively indignant. Acting in concert with Sybil, who was then of the same age, Ruthie retaliated against her parents with undisguised rage.

When the parents came into the room, Ruthie would lie very still, pretending to sleep. The pretense would continue while the parents undressed--Hattie in the bedroom, Willard in the adjoining doorless bathroom. But when the parents got into bed and her father moved to her mother's side, Ruthie would make her presence known. "Go to sleep, mama," she would call. "Go to sleep, daddy."

Ruthie was angry because she didn't want her father on her mother's side of the bed. Ruthie didn't want her father to whisper to her mother, or embrace her or breathe heavily with her or rustle the sheets with her. When he was near her mother that way, Ruthie felt that he liked her mother better than he liked her.

One night, seeing and hearing these things, Ruthie climbed out of the crib and walked very quietly toward her parents' bed. In the car Ruthie always sat in the middle. If she could do that in the car, she could do it in the bedroom. Climbing onto the bed, she attempted to get between her parents and to reclaim her rightful place in the middle.

Infuriated, Willard jumped naked out of bed, dragging his daughter with him. He sat down on a chair, placed the child over his knees, and spanked her hard. Then he put her back into her crib and returned to his wife to discover that for Hattie as for himself interrupted intercourse was to be followed by interrupted sleep; for, even after the morning sun had replaced the street light, the agonized sobs that had emanated from the crib from the moment the child had been returned to it had not ceased.

"Never again," Willard told Hattie.

"I'll never spank that child again. Anyone who sobs all night takes things too hard."

Willard Dorsett, who had never spanked his daughter before and who kept his promise not to spank her again, did not know that it had been Ruthie and Sybil who had interrupted the intercourse but Peggy Lou who had sobbed all night. The incident had been so traumatic that Sybil, who had shared the experience with Ruthie, blacked out and became Peggy Lou.

Willard and Hattie Dorsett, of course, were not so disturbed by a lost night's sleep that they did not continue to have intercourse in the presence of their daughter. And Sybil continued, time after time, to be exposed to this primal scene until she was nine years old.

Awakened at times or wakeful and restless, Sybil tried to shut out the insistent rustling of the starched sheets of the parental bed, the whisperings, the murmurs, and the silhouettes. The penis of shadow and substance, which was visible to the other selves, was an object of denial for Sybil. She claimed not to have seen her father's penis until the morning when her father had leaned over the crib to tell her that Grandma Dorsett had died. At that moment Sybil had become uncomfortably aware of the mass of hair on her father's chest. She had wondered why she was so shocked, and she realized that it was not because of the hair on the chest. As a very young child, hadn't she often made a game of cutting off her father's chest hair? She was shocked instead because of how far down she could see. Visible was something from which she turned with aversion. It was partly concealed, and the closest she could come to describing it was to say that it was hidden in feathers. It wasn't very big, but it was bigger than any boy's she had ever seen. It was a little bigger around than her father's thumb, but it wasn't long. It sort of hung down when her father leaned over. In back of it, on either side, a pair of little lumps was hanging down. Sybil felt so scared and so awful that at first she didn't quite grasp what he had said about her grandmother.

If Sybil was terrified by her father's maleness, Willard Dorsett was equally terrified by his growing awareness of his daughter's femaleness. She was only two and a half when he suddenly began insisting that she was "too big" to sit on his lap, "too big" to wander in and out of the bathroom while he was shaving. By the time she was four, she had become "too big" to cut the hair on his chest or to put salve on his feet, both of which activities she had by then been performing for about a year. Like a metronome, the phrase too big ticked off the incestuous stirrings in Willard Dorsett.

But to be deliberately exposed to the sights and sounds of her parents' most private sexual intimacies, Willard and Hattie Dorsett's daughter--even at the age of nine --was not too big.

When Sybil was six, however, there had been an interlude away from the white house with black shutters. For, when the Great Depression struck, Willard Dorsett suffered serious reverses, even losing his home. The house became the property of his sister in payment of an old debt, and Willard, virtually penniless, took his wife and daughter to live on farm land belonging to his parents five miles outside of Willow Corners.

The only house on those forty acres of land was a one-room chicken house, which the Dorsetts made their temporary home. High on a hill in undulating country, the new home delighted Sybil, who found in it surcease from the strange occurrences in the white house with black shutters where she had always lived.

At the farm, which Willard dubbed The Forty, autumn had yielded to winter and winter to spring. It had been snowing for three days, but now it had stopped. Willard Dorsett was putting wood in the range--it was only March and still cold--and was talking to Sybil in his usual soft voice: "We will go outside and leave Mama alone."

That meant that they were going back to the big oak tree at the bottom of the hill, which they had been sawing before the snow began. She enjoyed all the things she could do in the house-- coloring with her crayons, playing with her dolls, making dresses for them, playing with Top, the big Airedale her cousin Joey had given her, and reading in the primer her father had bought for her. But it was good to be going out again.