Sybil (28 page)

Unable to endure, Sybil would almost invariably allow one of her other selves to emerge.

Sybil's face and eyes were bound with dish towels, and the "blindfold" game served as punishment for the child's having dared to ask some question to which the mother's answer was, "Anyone could see that who isn't blind. And I'll show you what it's like to be blind." The result was that Sybil feared blindness, and later, when she suffered vagaries in her vision, she was terrified.

There were times when Hattie showed Sybil what it's like to be dead, when she put the child in the trunk in the attic and closed the lid or stuffed a damp wash rag down Sybil's throat and put cotton in Sybil's nose until the child lost consciousness. When Hattie threatened to put Sybil's hands in the meat grinder and chop the fingers off, Sybil couldn't be sure whether or not the threat was real. Her mother threatened to do lots of things; later she did them.

There were times, however, when it was not Sybil but the china, the linens, the piano, or books that were the butt of Hattie's obsessive frenzy. At these times Hattie Dorsett, who, before Sybil went to school, spent virtually twenty-four hours a day in her daughter's presence, didn't know that the child was there. Completely self-absorbed and apparently fixated in fantasies of her late father, Hattie would sit, stroking and smelling by the hour the quilted smoking jacket that had belonged to him. When she wasn't holding it, she kept it sealed in a box.

Or she would wash and polish the Haviland china that, seldom used, needed neither washing nor polishing. She would arrange and rearrange, unfold and refold the linens. She would sit at the ornately ornamented Smith and Barnes upright piano to the left of the window in a rather dark corner of the living room, playing Chopin and Beethoven. She would put records on the phonograph, insistent that they had always to be played from the beginning and in sequence. It was heresy and a violation of her code to play the fourth movement of a symphony, for instance, without having preceded it by movements one through three.

Hattie would also pace the floors, reciting passages from "Evangeline,"

"The Village Blacksmith," Ivanhoe, and other poems and novels. A line or a passage would amuse Hattie, and she would laugh and laugh. Sybil would ask what was funny, but Hattie would continue the recitation, intended for nobody except herself. "Mother, what kind of buttons should I put on my doll's dress?" Sybil would ask.

"My Haviland dishes are just like mama's," Hattie would reply. "Someday I'll have mama's because they match mine. I just love the pattern of those dishes."

The walls of this prison house began to close in during Sybil's infancy.

Eleven-month-old Sybil, strapped in a high chair in the kitchen, played with a rubber kitty and a rubber chicken. While Hattie entertained herself at the piano in the living room, Sybil bounced first the kitty and then the chicken. When both fell to the floor, Sybil struggled to free herself and to go after them. Unable to make any headway, she could only cry. But Hattie went on playing and singing, refusing to untie the infant's "chains."

"The more Insistent the cries, the louder the jailer played to drown out the intrusion.

When the prisoner in the high chair was old enough to crawl, she managed to achieve an early retribution over her mother. Playing on the speckled linoleum floor in the sunroom, Sybil watched one morning as Hattie left the house to go to the store. Then Sybil made her way into the living room and to the piano, where she scattered Hattie's sheet music over the room. Returning to find Sybil placidly sitting in the sunroom, Hattie never connected Sybil with the sheet music's dispersal.

The child had other means of fighting back. When her mother tripped Sybil, who was learning to walk, Sybil refused to learn; she sat on the floor and slid. Having precociously spoken her first sentence, "Daddy, shut the barn door," at ten months, Sybil began belatedly to walk, at two and a half.

Retaliation against her mother was easier in these earliest years of life because even in prison there were friends. It was not her mother but grandmother who took care of Sybil during the infant's first six weeks of life, during which Hattie, who suffered postpartum depression after the birth, was unable to care for the child. Grandmother Dorsett returned to help Willard care for Sybil later when the infant developed a disease of the middle ear. Hattie, unable to stand the crying, again abdicated the mother's role. The ear "broke" while the infant was resting on Willard's shoulder with her infected ear toward the hot stove. Her grandmother again went away, her mother came back, and the infant connected surcease from pain with her father.

When Sybil was two and a half, love returned in the person of Priscilla, a maid who later cared for the child while Hattie devoted her time to grandmother Dorsett, who had had a stroke. Sybil loved Priscilla second only to her grandmother. One day Sybil said, "I love you" to Priscilla. Hattie, overhearing the remark, said, "Well, you love mama, too, don't you?"

Sybil turned around to where Hattie was standing, polishing some Haviland china. Sybil put her arms around Hattie's neck and said yes. Pushing Sybil away, Hattie said, "Oh, you're too big to act like that."

Observing that Mrs. Dorsett was being "cross" with the child, Priscilla spread her arms toward Sybil in a gesture of inclusion. Sybil ran over and took hold of Priscilla's hand. Priscilla said that Sybil could help her, that Sybil could do the dusting, and that they'd prepare the noonday meal together. Sybil had Priscilla and felt she didn't need her mother.

As Sybil grew older, however, the interludes of her grandmother and of Priscilla ended, and her mother steadily took over the helm. The stage for repression was set as Sybil, commanded not to tell, not to cry, lest she be punished, kept everything to herself. Sybil learned not to fight back because by fighting she evoked further punishments.

What did survive, however, was the fascination of new experiences, of creativity, of making things. Often the creativity, as in the case of drawing the chickens with red feet and green tails, also led to head-on collisions between mother and child.

One afternoon when Sybil was four, she pasted a face she had clipped from McCall's magazine on some tin foil and put some red Christmas cord on it. Delighted with what she had made, she ran into the kitchen to show her new creation to her mother. "I thought I told you not to run in the house," Hattie said as she placed a pan in the oven.

"I'm sorry," said Sybil.

"Well, you better be," said Hattie. "Look, mother," Sybil said as she proudly held up her handiwork.

"I don't have time to look at it now," said Hattie. "I'm busy.

Can't you see I'm busy?"

"Look what I made. It's for our Christmas tree."

"Well that's just a magazine and some tin foil," Hattie sniffed.

"I think it's pretty," Sybil said, "and I'm going to hang it on the tree."

"Well, I'm busy," said Hattie.

Then Sybil hung the ornament she had made on the tree that stood near the piano in the living room. She looked at what her mother had belittled, and she herself was, nevertheless, proud of having made it. "Mother, come look," she called, as she went back into the kitchen.

"I don't have time."

"Come on."

Then all of a sudden Hattie stopped what she was doing and looked at Sybil. Hattie asked: "You didn't go hang that on the tree after I said that?"

Sybil wanted desperately to get the ornament off the tree before her mother saw it. But standing at the tree, her mother was already calling, "You come here this minute and get that thing off that tree."

Sybil stood still.

"Do you hear me?" Hattie was standing next to the tree.

"I'll take it off in a minute," Sybil promised.

"Don't you say "in a minute" to me," Hattie's voice rasped.

Sybil was trapped. If she obeyed, she had to go to the tree, where Hattie stood ready to hit her. If Sybil didn't go, she would be hit for disobeying. Deciding on the former, Sybil pulled the ornament down quickly and, eluding her mother, ran toward the door. Hattie started after her daughter. Sybil ran faster. Her mother's menacing, "Don't you run in this house," echoed everywhere. Sybil wondered whether she should keep running or stop. If Sybil stopped, her mother would hit her because of the Christmas ornament. If Sybil ran, her mother would hit her for running. Entrapment was complete.

Stopping, Sybil received a swift, sharp blow on the right cheek.

So there were bad days, but there also were good days--such as the one when the Floods visited. As the Floods--Pearl, Ruth, Alvin, and their mother--were leaving in their sleigh, Sybil waved goodbye from the porch steps. The sleigh faded from sight, and Sybil turned to go back into the house. She had been happy that afternoon as she played on the sunroom floor with Ruth and Pearl, who were older than she. She was only three and a half, but they played with her and taught her many things. Pearl had made Sybil's doll, Betty Lou, walk.

Still holding Betty Lou in her arms, Sybil went into the sunroom. Hattie came after her and said, "Get that doll out of your hands. I want to get your sweater off."

But Sybil didn't want to put the doll down. It had been a wonderful afternoon, and she had discovered many things. She had learned how to make Betty Lou walk.

"I want to show you how Betty Lou walks," Sybil told her mother.

"I don't have time," Hattie bristled. "I have to get supper ready for daddy. Now put your doll down this minute. I want to get your sweater off."

As her mother was taking off the sweater, Sybil bubbled, "I like Pearl. She's fun."

"I don't have time," her mother replied as she hung the sweater on a hook in the kitchen.

Sybil had followed her mother out of the sunroom and into the kitchen, still trying to talk about the afternoon's events. Her mother began preparing supper. As she took some pots and pans out of the cupboard, the blue sweater, placed hastily on the hook, fell to the floor. "When I turn my back to you," her mother said, "see what happens. Why did you pull that sweater down? Why can't you behave yourself? Why must you always be bad, you bad, bad girl?"

Her mother picked up the sweater, turned it over in her hand, scrutinizing it. "It's dirty," she finally announced in the tone of a doctor making an important diagnosis. "Mother always keeps you clean. You're a dirty girl."

Sybil felt her mother's knuckles hitting her hard on the side of her head over and over again. Then her mother shoved her onto a little red chair. It was the chair on which she had been sitting the time her grandmother had come downstairs, wanting to talk to her and her mother, and her mother had said, "Grandma, please don't go near Sybil. She's being punished." And her grandmother had not come near.

The little red chair was in front of a mantel clock. Sybil was not big enough to tell time, but she could see where the big hand was and where the little hand was. At this moment the big hand was on 12 and the little hand on 5.

"It's just five o'clock," her mother said. It was such a wonderful afternoon, Sybil thought as she sat in the little red chair, not daring to move, and she had to go and spoil it. I had so much fun that I was sorry Alvin couldn't play on the floor with the girls and me because we were playing with dolls and he is a boy. He was left out. It is awful to be left out.

Her mother had been so kind to the Floods. She gave them all kinds of things: food for Mrs. Flood, mittens for Pearl, leggings for Alvin. Her mother also gave them two games that Sybil had never really used, never really had a chance to play with. That was all right because she liked the Floods.

Sybil looked at the mantel clock. The little hand was now on 6. She called to tell her mother.

"I didn't ask you," her mother answered sharply. "For that you sit there five minutes more, you dirty girl. You made the sweater dirty, and you have a dirty mouth."

"What did I do?" Sybil asked.

"You know perfectly well what you did," her mother replied. "I have to punish you to make you good."

Sybil didn't want to think of herself, sitting on that little red chair, watching the clock. But she often thought about it. Whenever she did, she managed to turn right away from it.

"Why must you always be bad, you bad, bad girl?" her mother asked.

The "y" confused Sybil. The "bad" made her wonder. She didn't think anything she did that day was bad.

Sybil told no one about the day of the blue sweater, but thoughts of that day, lodging in her throat, always made her throat hurt.

Nor did Sybil tell about the glass beads of many colors that hung like a rainbow on a cotton string. The beads, which were made in Holland and were very old, were given to Hattie by her mother. Hattie had given them to Sybil, who enjoyed pulling on them, sticking them in her mouth, and licking them. One afternoon while she was doing this, the string snapped, and the beads were sprinkled over the living room rug. Sybil, who was then three, tried to pick them up as fast as possible before her mother could see. But before Sybil could get them all up, Hattie had grabbed her and had shoved one of the beads up her nose. Sybil thought that she was going to smother. Hattie tried to remove the bead, but it wouldn't budge.

Hattie was frightened. "Come on," she said, "we'll go to Dr. Quinoness."