Sybil (44 page)

"Awoke as me,"

"stayed myself." These were the triumphs of Sybil's fragmented existence as, almost four years after the inception of the analysis, she continued to fall prey to the same archetypical event, reproduced in the same ritualistic form. Sybil, it might be said, lived in parentheses. Outside the brackets was approximately one third of her waking life.

When she woke as someone else or turned into one of the others later, Teddy Reeves, noting the transfiguration and accepting it as a routine aspect of life in the Dorsett-Reeves household, reported the event to Sybil.

Within a single week, in which the analysis had uncovered the first dissociation, Teddy had informed Sybil:

--"Mike was here for fifteen minutes at breakfast. I asked him what he liked to draw. He said cars, trains, buses."

--"Vanessa was here at 3:00 A.m.

"I'm going to dress and go outside," Vanessa said. "I have a class. It says so on the schedule I wrote this morning." I made her go back to bed." (sybil had observed: "Maybe Vanessa is closest to me of any of them. She usually continues the concern that I have begun. I'm the one who wrote the schedule of classes.")

--"Mary came at 2:00 A.m. and tried to talk me into going with her to some other city. When I said, "Not now," she cried as if her heart would break." (sybil had remarked, "Mary cries with the tears I can't shed.")

What Teddy reported with words, Capri, Sybil's cat, revealed through action. Upon "coming to" Sybil became expert in inferring from the cat's behavior which of the other selves had been present. With Mary, Capri was quiet, lovable, wanting to be held and petted. With Marcia, Capri would rub against her face as a gesture of comfort.

But it was with Peggy Lou, in whose presence the cat became frisky, that Capri underwent the most complete transformation. Knowing instinctively that it was Peggy Lou, the cat would race around the apartment and make its frenetic way to Peggy Lou's lap or shoulder. "Nice old cat," Peggy Lou would say, holding the animal a bit too tightly. But Capri didn't mind. The cat, who had no hesitancy about scratching any of the others, wouldn't scratch Peggy Lou.

"Maybe," Sybil quipped, "Capri is multiple too."

The quip, although an accommodation to the facts of Sybil's grim existence, could not mask the fact that waking life, which since Philadelphia had once again become a series of fragmented vignettes, had become increasingly terrifying.

In dreams Sybil, who in waking life was remote from her feelings, came closer to the truth about herself, for sleeping Sybil was the total unconscious. In dreams Sybil was more nearly one than at any other time. "Sleep and forget" did not apply. To be awake was to forget; to be asleep was to remember. Her dreams reverted to the original events that had caused her to become multiple and that in waking life were reproduced in her other selves.

During the week in which Sybil had learned that she had been a multiple personality since the age of three and a half, for example, she dreamed that she was on an intercity train on her way to the end of the line. The train came to a sudden halt. Dragging herself from her seat, she walked to the back window of the train to ascertain the reason for the hiatus.

Through the window she could see, in process of construction, a huge platform with prominently displayed buttresses. Obviously the train would not be able to resume its journey until the platform, which her father was building, had been completed.

Inexplicably she then found herself outside the train and in a warehouse. Looking out of the warehouse window, she noticed a small yellow and white mass trying to drag itself around a doorsill into the open space. It was a kitten.

Sybil watched as the pathetic little kitten rubbed its nose along the bottom of the doorway in what seemed like a search for food. Its movements were circumscribed, halting. Is it paralyzed? she wondered. Then she realized it was dying of starvation.

A few feet away from the kitchen there was a hideous sight--the decapitated body of the mother cat. The head lay a few inches away from the torso.

Not far from what had been their mother three kittens huddled together. Sybil hadn't noticed them at first, but these three seemed even closer to starvation than the first kitten.

I'll take them home, Sybil thought, and she raced out of the warehouse and into the street. Maybe Capri will grow to like them, and we'll be a happy family.

But first, Sybil knew, she had to dispose of the mother cat. Picking up the head and then the body, she flung both parts into the river that ran alongside the warehouse. But the parts fell close to the shore, where the water was shallow, and Sybil blamed herself for not having thrown the dismembered parts of the dead mother cat with greater force, for it seemed entirely possible that they would float back to the shore.

Dismissing her fear, Sybil turned her attention to the group of three kittens. Bending over to pick them up, she was filled with sudden wonder at finding that underneath them were three kittens she had not seen before.

Out of nowhere she managed to happen on a pink and white plaid blanket, identical to one on her own bed. After placing the blanket in the bottom of a box, murmuring, "Poor little pussies," she placed the kittens on the blanket. As she was setting out for home in search of the person who would know how to make everything all right, she woke up.

Shaken by the dream, which showed an unconscious awareness that had not yet filtered unconscious life, Sybil was appalled, guilt-ridden.

To Sybil the meaning of the dream was threatening. Sybil saw the train as life, moving toward a destination but stopped by new work (analysis), which meant reversing its route (retracing childhood events) to become one. The various degrees of starvation among the kittens symbolized the years during which Sybil had tried to live and work normally only to discover that she had come to the end of the line (the train again) in maintaining the ruse of normality.

The kittens also symbolized Sybil. That they were plural rather than singular was a recognition that she was many. The first kitten, attempting to drag herself into the open spaces, was Sybil herself. The other kittens, discovered in separate groups, were the other selves. The first group symbolized the early appearance in the analysis (and in life) of Vicky and the Peggys, and the second group, the later appearance of the other selves, who were more deeply buried.

Some of the kittens were weaker than others, as were some of the selves. "Some, such as Vicky, Peggy, Marcia, Vanessa, Mary, Mike, and Sid," Dr. Wilbur had said, "are active; others like Sybil Ann are passive. All of them are strong or weak depending upon what emotion at the time there is to defend." Dr. Wilbur, of course, was the unnamed figure in the dream who would know how to make everything all right.

The act of saving the kittens seemed to Sybil not an act of personal solicitude on her part but, like the train, the analogue of the analysis that was attempting to save both her and all of the "kittens" in her still mysterious "family."

Sybil rose from the bed, started to dress, and tried to extricate herself from the realization that having to get rid of their (her) dead mother before she could take the kittens safely home meant only one thing--that only by ridding herself of her mother could she become well, strong, really a "family." Family was the euphemism Sybil used for becoming one.

As Sybil walked into the kitchen for breakfast, she pushed the dream aside, unaware that her explication had overlooked the fact that the "new work" that blocked the train's passage--the free flow of life--which she had interpreted as "analysis," had in the dream been built by her father. The starving kittens could be interpreted as representing sexual starvation. The same events that had driven Sybil from a normal childhood had driven her, too, from a normal womanhood.

Most importantly, what Sybil didn't notice about the dream were her own emotions in disposing of the mother cat. With businesslike precision but without repugnance she had flung her mother into the river and had become disturbed only when there was danger that her mother would float back to shore.

Later that morning, during the hour with Dr. Wilbur, Sybil talked of the selves the kittens in the dream symbolized.

"I went to all the trouble of coming to New York," Sybil remarked resentfully, "and they have taken over the analysis. They've made friends with you, go on trips, make friends with people I'd like to know. And I'm left out."

Overriding Dr. Wilbur's explanations, Sybil refused to let the doctor come to the defense of the personalities, particularly of Vicky. When the doctor pointed out that by resenting her other selves, Sybil was avoiding the issue and that such avoidance in psychoanalytical terms was known as resistance, Sybil began to make a joke of it. "I know I'm indulging in that nasty word," Sybil kept saying. "Don't say it. But that Vicky you're so fond of is a blabbermouth. I can't have any secrets. She rushes to tell you everything. If she doesn't, one of those other midwesterners does. They give me no peace, no privacy, no freedom."

"Vicky is trying to help you," the doctor protested.

Sybil summoned enough nerve to reply, "I'd be better off without her help." Then Sybil added what she had said many times before: "I can't afford that Peggy Lou."

Then, taking stock of her current financial situation, Sybil explained, "I came to New York with five thousand dollars in savings. Three thousand have been spent on paying for the analysis and buying a few extras I hadn't been able to manage on what Dad sent me. But two thousand of the five thousand have been blown on Peggy Lou's broken glass."

The resentment Sybil bore toward Peggy Lou for the broken glass was deepened by other evidences of Peggy Lou's destructiveness. "The other night," Sybil went on, "I found that my charcoal sketches had been destroyed. Teddy said that Peggy Lou had done it. What's the matter with Peggy Lou? You said she worked in black and white. Doesn't she like black and white anymore? Or is it me she doesn't like? If so, the feeling is mutual."

After she left the office, Sybil went to school. As she was leaving the chemistry lab, Henry, who sat next to her and whom she also knew from other classes, followed her to the elevator.

There was an affinity between them. Both were from the Midwest; both loved music and books; both were premed students (now that she had her Master's degree in art, Sybil had decided on a future that included both art and child psychiatry). Although Henry was eight years younger than Sybil, she was so youthful in appearance that she actually looked younger than he.

Henry walked Sybil home. When they reached the old brownstone, they stood talking. Reluctant to leave her, he offered to let her read his notes covering the classes she had missed while she was in Philadelphia. "I'll go over the stuff with you," he volunteered. She invited him in.

They worked, student to student, with no surface insinuations of sex. He would have liked to have had a beer, but he settled for iced tea, which she presented to him with the cookies Teddy had said that Mary had baked. Sybil enjoyed a pleasant two hours of wholeness.

As Henry was leaving and they were standing at the half-open door, the mood changed. No longer only a colleague, Henry put his hand gently on Sybil's shoulder and looked at her tenderly. "I want you to give me a date for the dance Wednesday night," he said softly.

Sybil panicked. Replying no, she shrank from Henry's touch.

"Don't you like me just a little bit?" he asked. "Of course, I like you," she replied slowly.

"Well?" he asked.

"But I don't want to date anybody," she replied firmly.

"You're too nice for that," he protested. "Lots of people like you, and you shouldn't be like that. You're good company. It would be fun to go with you."

Sybil shook her head decisively. "No," she repeated. "No."

"Then how about dinner?" he asked. "No," she replied. "Henry, please don't press me. We'll see each other in the lab. I value your friendship, but don't press."

"But why? I don't get it," he persevered. There was an awkward pause. Then he asked: "What is it?"

In the silence that followed Sybil could feel internal pressures, the interference of the others, as she had come to call it. The pressure was there, although the meaning was obscure. Sybil did not know that Vicky was thinking, "He's nice. I can't see why she doesn't date him," or that Peggy Lou was fuming, "Just like her. She never does anything I enjoy doing."

"Sybil," Henry said as he tried to take her in his arms, "I like you. I've liked you for a long time. Why can't we see each other?"

Extricating herself from the embrace, Sybil reached for the door knob, hinting that she wanted Henry to go. "Are you sure?" he said.

"Very sure," she replied.

There were footsteps in the hall. Henry turned to see who it was, and as he did so, Sybil shut the door behind him and bolted the lock. The feeling she experienced as she did so was reminiscent of the moment in her dream in which, after placing the kittens on the blanket, she had closed the box. In the dream she had created an improvised perforation to leave room for air, but now the "box" that she had remorselessly shut tight was airless.

Here she was, on the other side of the door that she herself had closed, thirty-five years old and an old maid--excluded by the phalanx of the married, a third plate at their dinner tables. Isolated, with only Teddy near, she felt removed from the world. And Teddy's awareness of the strange circumstances of their joint domesticity was deeply disquieting.