Sybil (42 page)

"When I awoke, the fog of the night before was gone from the air, and the sun was shining. I was awful glad to see the sun, and I stood by the windows a long time looking at the reflections on the buildings and on the bridge. Near the bridge was a large church with a very tall, slender steeple. It stood out darkly against the hazy buildings across the river behind it. I liked this scene and returned to look at it several times while I was dressing. I called room service and ordered a big breakfast because Sybil never gives us enough to eat. The waiter was very nice, and we got friendly. While I was eating, I sat in the big chair near the window and put crumbs on the windowsill. Pigeons and other birds came and ate the crumbs. I shared my cocoa and toast with the birds. I decided that I would do that every day as long as I was in this room.

"Then I went out and walked along the streets. I hadn't gone very far when I saw an old, dark-red brick building. I walked up the steps and into the Academy of Fine Arts. I saw some lithograph prints on exhibit. They were black and white like my drawings, so I looked at them. Then I went up the stairs to see what was in the galleries above. I spent so much time at this museum that I got acquainted with one of the guards. We talked about art, and I got along very well with him.

"I also spent half a day at the Betsy Ross House. I went to the medical school museum, where I saw a brain of a forty-eight-year-old man with a bullet wound in his head and a brain of a thirty-eight-year-old woman who had had a stroke. And there were a lot of little babies in glass jars. Those jars were awful interesting. I had lots of fun in Philadelphia.

"In the street and in the hotel room I spent a lot of time sketching. I loved sketching on the hotel stationery. The paper was free, so I didn't have to buy any. My strokes were also free as I drew the woman standing alone on a cliff. I did her in black. I was happy.

"I was happy in Philadelphia. I went where I pleased, sketched, slept ten hours a day, spent three or four hours a day eating. It was the same kind of feeling that I had several times before and I was sure no one would tell me what to do ever again. And then there was the day when I was caught in a snowstorm. The wind was on my back, and snow was all around me. I had no overshoes or gloves, and my ears ached with the cold. The coat I was wearing wasn't warm enough. When I turned around to come back, I had the wind all the way. The woman who came into the hotel room and asked me how I was had warned me not to go out, and I should have listened. But I didn't. But when the wind whipped me, I wasn't so sure. I felt like smashing one of the windows in the ugly building I was passing. I stopped and put my hand on the glass. It was smooth and cold. When I touched it, I thought I heard someone say very quietly, "But you don't want to break the glass. You said you wouldn't anymore." I whirled around and expected to see you, Doctor. You weren't there.

But I didn't want to break the glass whether you were there or not because I wasn't angry anymore. I was cold, very cold. I thought: I'll let Sybil have the body. I was too tired to think about it then, but I suppose that was another way of getting even."

A click signaled the end of the tape. And in the room there was silence. "Red and green lights on the bridge," Sybil mused more to herself than to the doctor. "Large church with a very tall, slender steeple. I didn't notice them. The zipper folder, the mittens, red scarf, the pajamas. The waiter, the woman at the desk. I guessed right even though I had not met Peggy Lou."

Then, turning directly to the doctor, Sybil said, with composure: "Peggy Lou feeding the birds is like St. Francis of Assisi."

"You see," the doctor said. "Peggy Lou is no monster."

"Yes, she seems to have quite a lot of aesthetic feeling," Sybil concurred. "The drawing of the woman on the cliff is quite good. You told me that she always paints in black and white."

"She sees the world in black and white. No grays for Peggy Lou," said the doctor.

"Let Sybil have the body?" Sybil asked. "What an odd thing to say. As if the body were hers!"

"You see, Sybil," the doctor explained, "this account of the Philadelphia trip, revealing at what point an alternating personality in command of the body relinquishes it, gives us real insight into the dynamics of multiple personality. It is evident, you see, that, exhausted by the storm, Peggy Lou turned the body over to you because she preferred not to be."

"She has the choice?" Sybil asked somewhat willy.

"Oh, yes," the doctor replied. "Once the alternating self has acted out the emotions that at any given time have triggered her, there is no longer any reason for her to function. Philadelphia was Peggy Lou's way of acting out in the present what you and she had repressed in the past. By doing exactly as she pleased for five days, she exhausted the angry, hostile feelings that had been awakened in the chemistry lab. When you are unable to handle such feelings, Peggy Lou does it for you."

And so in Willow Corners and Elderville Peggy Lou had been the runaway who didn't run. Only in Philadelphia, some three decades later, had flight taken place. Her mother, whom Peggy Lou refused to acknowledge as hers but from whom she was forever in flight, was the key from the past on which the present action turned.

When the glass had crashed in the chemistry class, the sound had evoked two episodes from the past. In the old drugstore in Willow Corners Sybil had rested her elbow on the counter. A bottle of patent medicine crashed to the floor, and there had come Hattie's accusing voice: "You broke it." In the Anderson kitchen in Elderville, cousin Lulu had accused Sybil of breaking the pickle dish that Lulu had shattered. Again there had been Sybil's mother's accusation: "You broke it."

In the chemistry class, as in the old drugstore in Willow Corners and in the Anderson kitchen in Elderville, Sybil's head had throbbed and the room seemed to swirl. In all three incidents the physical reactions and the emotions were the same.

The next day Sybil listened to the tape of Peggy Ann. It was interesting that Peggy Ann was free of Peggy Lou's verbal mannerisms and grammatical errors. "I was walking toward Seventeenth and Dodge Streets," Peggy Ann's voice was saying, "so I could find out where Dr. Wilbur had gone. I walked several blocks, and none of the signs had numbers on them, so I turned and started another way to find streets with numbers. I thought if I could just find Sixteenth Street, Omaha's main street, I could then find Seventeenth. I walked and walked until I was very tired and very cold, but I could not find the streets with numbers on them. I began to get cross and agitated and felt like smashing a window. "But you don't want to break the glass," I heard. "You said you wouldn't anymore." I whirled around to see who had spoken to me. I wanted to talk to her, so I started down the street after her, but I could not find her. I felt sad again and very lonely. I wanted to find the only person I liked. Then I remembered I liked Dr. Wilbur best of all, and I was looking for her. I wanted to tell her about the hands and the music and the boxes. I didn't know just what about these, but they are what I thought I wanted to talk about. And I wanted to ask her why I wasn't getting better when she said I would. I was afraid."

"Dr. Wilbur is right here," the doctor's voice declared on the tape.

"Dr. Wilbur went away," Peggy Ann was insisting.

"Can't you see that I am Dr. Wilbur?"

"Dr. Wilbur went away and left us helpless."

"Where were you when Dr. Wilbur left you?"

"Omaha."

"Where are you now?"

"Omaha."

The tape had come to an end. It seemed curious to the doctor that Peggy Ann had assumed the burden of the broken glass, which really belonged to Peggy Lou. But then the two selves were so closely allied that they often shared the same experiences and even adopted as their own the emotions of the other. Anger and fear, as exemplified by the Peggys, were not disconnected.

The doctor then turned to Sybil, who had been silent during Peggy Ann's recital. "She has robbed me of my past," Sybil finally said. "They both have. Peggy Lou as well as Peggy Ann."

"The past," the doctor replied with conviction, "as we move toward integration, will no longer trouble you. Your mother's hands won't frighten you. We'll resolve the conflicts, and the thieves will return to you what they have stolen."

The doctor then explained that Peggy Ann was the terrified, frightened part of Sybil and that she had brought that fear home with her from Philadelphia.

"But Peggy Ann didn't even know she had been in Philadelphia," Sybil replied thoughtfully. "What a mix up in the emotions to have produced anything like this."

"Well," the doctor replied, "I also have tapes of the other selves. Shall we start listening tomorrow?"

"You've said there are fourteen besides me," Sybil replied. "That will take forever." Changing the subject, Sybil repeated what had been the source of her terror in the previous session: "Peggy Lou has my mother's voice."

"That's interesting," the doctor remarked. "You know, Peggy Lou insists that your mother was not hers."

"Peggy Lou," Sybil replied willy, "had all the advantages. She can deny what I have to face." Then in a sudden burst of curiosity long repressed Sybil asked, "Where did she come from? How was she created? Questions, questions, questions. But no answers."

"There are many answers," the doctor averred, "that I, too, don't have yet."

Then Sybil, suddenly less conciliatory, affirmed, "Well, I'm not going to listen to the others for a long time. They'll only make me miserable. Why should I?"

The doctor reminded Sybil: "Knowing is better than not knowing. It is important, as I've told you before, for you to remember and to accept as your own the things that happen to the fourteen other selves. As your own, Sybil, because they are part of you. Recognizing this is one of the first steps toward getting well."

When Sybil awoke the next morning, her thoughts had not fully been extricated from the dream that had propelled her into awakening.

In that dream her parents and she had had to leave town unexpectedly because to stay would have meant doom. On sudden inspiration she had decided to take her parents to another town to inspect a house, in which they could have lived and been safe. She had been very proud to have been able to introduce her father to the owners of this house and prove to him that she really had known these people. It had been, in fact, the same feeling of satisfaction that she had experienced when her father had confirmed what she had told Dr. Wilbur.

Then she had been standing in the large living room of the house in the other town, face to face with the children of these people she had known--seven sets of twins and one singleton lined up in a row. Four sets of twins had had dark brown hair; the other three sets, blonde hair. The one singleton standing apart from the others had had hair identical to Sybil's.

"How about introducing your brothers and sisters to me?" Sybil had asked one of the older children.

Suddenly, however, the parents and their fifteen children had started to move out, and Sybil and her parents had begun to move in. As Sybil realized that the introduction to these children, who, all but one, were standing in a row in twosomes, had not taken place, she had awakened.

But that was a dream. In waking life Sybil continued resolutely to resist meeting the children-- Marcia and Vanessa, Mike and Sid, Ruthie and Marjorie, Peggy Lou and Peggy Ann--who were twosomes. So resolute was the resistance that Dr. Wilbur decided to take the matter up with her co-analysand.

"Vicky," the doctor confided the week that Sybil had heard the Peggys on tape, "I told Sybil about you and the others. It doesn't seem to make any difference. I can't get Sybil to accept your existence. I can't get her to remember the things that happen to you."

"I'm afraid," Vicky replied, "I can offer no solution. But maybe it will help if I tell you a little about what living with the others is like."

The doctor nodded.

"I'm in the center," Vicky explained, "Sybil is at my right. Sybil has her back turned to all of us."

"I see," the doctor replied. "But tell me, Vicky, is there any connection between Sybil and the rest of you?"

Vicky paused thoughtfully, then said, "Yes, way underneath, so far underneath that Sybil doesn't remember about it. She doesn't want to remember because it hurts."

"And," observed the doctor, "she has split off what hurts, removed herself from it, relegated it to the others?"

"I suppose you could say that," Vicky replied pensively. "You see, I'm a whole person, Sybil is not. Don't ever tell her. It's bothering her. It's part of her complex."

What was Vicky trying to say? Dr. Wilbur wondered. The manifest content was obvious: Sybil was a depleted personality; Vicky, a fuller one. But there was something more than that.

"You know, Vicky," the doctor replied slowly, "you've just made a very important statement. What you're saying is that Sybil is not a whole person because parts of her have been siphoned off to the other selves. Am I correct?"

"Correct," Vicky answered.

"There must have been a multitude of dissociations occurring over the years that produced these others in the first place."

"Correct," said Vicky.

"The dissociations must have been caused by traumas --the result of intolerable realities against which each of the selves had to defend Sybil."