Sybil (27 page)

Neither the Stickneys, nor Mrs. Vale, nor Harrison Ford, nor Willard Dorsett, nor the town itself seemed to notice. When Sybil had pleaded, "Mother, someone will see you," Hattie had invariably retorted, "Rubbish." And for whatever reason--perhaps the Dorsetts' prestige in the town--"rubbish" it seems to have been, since the town of Willow Corners apparently never made any attempt to bring Mrs. Willard Dorsett into line.

The town seems also to have been unaware of Hattie Dorsett's incredible performances on Sundays when she babysat with a flock of little girls whose parents were at church.

On the surface, nothing could be more virtuous, more harmless, more publicly maternal than to care for one's neighbors' children, and in fact the games Hattie played with these little girls did begin innocently enough.

"We're going to play horsey," she would tell them as she got down on all fours and encouraged them to do likewise.

"Now lean over and run like a horse." As the children squealed with delight at the prospect, Hattie would motion them to begin. Then, while the little girls, simulating the gait of horses, leaned over as they had been instructed, Hattie, from her perch on the floor, revealed the real purpose of the "game." Into their vaginas went her fingers as she intoned, "Giddyap, giddyap." Watching, Sybil and the other selves responded with the same intense shame they had experienced during the pilgrimages of defecation.

The perversity that was more than "oddness" was also evident one afternoon when Peggy Lou, looking into Hattie and Willard's bedroom, saw Sybil's mother nude on the bed with a baby boy between her legs. Sybil's mother was lifting the baby up and down with her hips and rubbing him between her thighs. The eighteen-month-old boy was a neighbor's child for whom Hattie was babysitting. Peggy Lou furrowed her brow and thought, as she told Dr. Wilbur in analysis, "What Sybil's mother was doing wasn't nice." Then Peggy Lou, glad that Hattie was not her mother, slipped silently away from the room.

Shame there was, too, when Sybil walked through the woods to the river with her mother and her mother's three teenage friends. All three--Hilda, Ethel, and Bernice--came from "the lower crust," and Hattie let it be known that her fraternizing with them was a form of social service.

Sybil never saw her mother and father kiss or hold hands by day. But as Sybil walked to the river, she saw her mother do such things with these special friends. At the river her mother would say, "You wait here while we go behind the bushes to get into our suits." Sybil, who was already wearing her bathing suit, waited. The first few times that her mother went behind the bushes Sybil didn't pay any attention to how long it took before her mother and her friends returned.

Then one day Sybil began to feel uneasy as, wading along the edge of the river on the sloping shore, she realized that her mother and the girls had stayed behind the bushes longer than was required to get into their bathing suits.

Sybil didn't dare call to her mother, but she decided to walk around the bushes in the hope that she would be noticed. The woods were silent, but, as she reached the bushes, she heard soft voices--the voices of her mother and her friends. What were they saying? What were they doing? Why were they taking so long? Overwhelmed by curiosity, Sybil pushed aside some leaves to see.

Her mother and the girls were not getting into their suits, which were lying in a heap. Her mother and the girls were not standing. Their dresses, pulled up, were tucked above their waists. Naked from the waist down, mother and the girls were lying on the ground, their hands intermingling, their buttocks visible. Fingers moving. Palms stroking. Bodies gyrating. Ecstatic expressions. Everybody seemed to be holding somebody. Her mother was holding Hilda. Her mother's hands were at Hilda's crotch.

The horsey games, Sybil thought as she turned away and walked slowly back to the edge of the river. At the age of three Sybil could think of no other description for the mutual masturbation, the lesbian encounter, that she had witnessed.

Silent witness she was, on that shore, for three successive summers. Each time she would wade in the river, play with the rocks, and either glimpse the scene behind the concealing bushes or wait without looking for its cessation. How she wished her mother and the girls would hurry!

In early 1957 the analysis unfolded a drama of cruelty, secret rituals, punishments, and atrocities inflicted by Hattie on Sybil. Dr. Wilbur became convinced that the taproot of Sybil's dissociation into multiple selves was a large, complicated capture-control-imprisonment-torture theme that pervaded the drama. One escape door after another from cruelty had been closed, and for Sybil, who was a battered child four decades before the battered child syndrome was medically identified, there had been no way out.

Normal at birth, the doctor speculated, Sybil had fought back until she was about two and a half, by which time the fight had been literally beaten out of her. She had sought rescue from without until, finally recognizing that this rescue would be denied, she resorted to finding rescue from within. First there was the rescue of creating a pretend world, inhabited by a loving mother of fantasy, but, the doctor hypothesized, being a multiple personality was the ultimate rescue.

By dividing into different selves, defenses against not only an intolerable but also a dangerous reality, Sybil had found a modus operandi for survival. Grave as her illness was, it had originated as a protective device.

At the farm the mother against whom Sybil had to defend herself had been immobilized by what seemed to Dr. Wilbur to be the catatonic phase of schizophrenia. But the return to Willow Corners had brought with it the mother who, no longer immobilized, was again threatening. Reality again became dangerous, and once again Sybil sought her customary means of coping.

At the moment Hattie Dorsett had taunted, "You'd be the first to eat the rhubarb pie," Sybil, in anger, had blacked out into Peggy Lou.

Returning home with Sybil's mother, Peggy Lou went into the sunroom to play, shut the door, and began to act as if Hattie Dorsett did not exist. Peggy got out her crayons, sat on the linoleum, drawing and singing a song that her father had taught her: "A train's acomin' 'round the bend, all loaded down with Harrison's men, goodbye, my lover, goodbye."

When Hattie shouted, "Stop that infernal noise," Peggy Lou went right on singing. "You have to find something you like besides music and all these colors," Hattie pontificated as she swung wide the sunroom door. "It's not like that when you grow up. It's not all sunshine and singing and pretty colors. There's always thorns in the roses." And at that moment Hattie punctuated what she was saying by stamping her foot on her daughter's box of crayons.

Peggy Lou went on singing and, unable to use the broken crayons, turned to her dolls. Peggy Lou, who could get angry, could also defy Sybil's mother.

Sybil returned shortly before supper and, when her father suggested, "Why don't you go color a while?" replied, "My crayons got broken."

"These new ones, already?" Willard asked. "Sybil, you have to learn to take care of things."

Sybil said nothing because she knew nothing of how the crayons had gotten broken.

The Willow Corners mother laughed when there was no reason for laughter and didn't allow her daughter to cry when there was cause for tears.

Ever since Sybil could remember, the laughter --cacophonous, wild--had accompanied a special brand of matinal maternal ministration. Beginning when Sybil was only six months old, this special ministration continued throughout early childhood. In the early morning after Willard Dorsett had gone to work and she was alone with her child for the day, the Willow Corners mother began to laugh.

"We don't want anyone looking in, spying on us!" Hattie would say as she locked the kitchen door and pulled down both door and window shades.

"I have to do it. I have to do it," Hattie muttered, as with the same ritualistic deliberateness with which she indulged her aberrations in the community, she placed her daughter on the kitchen table. "Don't you move," the mother enjoined the child.

What followed was not always the same. A favorite ritual, however, was to separate Sybil's legs with a long wooden spoon, tie her feet to the spoon with dish towels, and then string her to the end of a light bulb cord, suspended from the ceiling. The child was left to swing in space while the mother proceeded to the water faucet to wait for the water to get cold. After muttering, "Well, it's not going to get any colder," she would fill the adult-sized enema bag to capacity and return with it to her daughter. As the child swung in space, the mother would insert the enema tip into the child's urethra and fill the bladder with cold water. "I did it," Hattie would scream triumphantly when her mission was accomplished. "I did it." The scream was followed by laughter, which went on and on.

These early morning rituals also included unneeded enemas, which Hattie gave her daughter with frightening frequency. Almost invariably it was an enema of cold water administered from an adult-sized bag, containing about twice as much water as would normally be given to a child or infant. After the enema Hattie insisted that the child walk around the room holding in the water. This resulted in severe cramps. But if Sybil cried, Hattie would beat her and say, "I'll really give you something to cry about."

The ritual was not complete until Hattie had warned, "Now don't you dare tell anybody anything about this. If you do, I won't have to punish you. God's wrath will do it for me!"

With frightening frequency, too, during infancy and childhood, Hattie would force her daughter to drink a glass full of milk of magnesia.

Sybil would get cramps. Hattie would pick up the child, allowing the legs to hang straight. The cramps would become more severe. When Sybil pleaded to go to the bathroom, Hattie made her go to the bedroom instead. Hattie made Sybil soil herself and then punished the child for doing what Hattie had made her do. Sybil began to cry. Then Hattie tied a towel around Sybil's mouth so that grandmother Dorsett, who lived upstairs, would not hear the cry. Fearing the towels, Sybil also was afraid to cry. By the time she was three and a half she no longer did cry.

There was still another morning ritual with which Hattie Dorsett took great pains. After placing Sybil on the kitchen table, Hattie would force into the child's vagina an array of objects that caught the mother's fancy--a flashlight, a small empty bottle, a little silver box, the handle of a regular dinner knife, a little silver knife, a buttonhook. Sometimes the object was her finger, performing as it did when she bathed the child and scrubbed so zealously that at two and a half the child locked the door and tried to bathe herself.

"You might as well get used to it," her mother, inserting one of these foreign bodies, explained to her daughter at six months or at six years. "That's what men will do to you when you grow up. They put things in you, and they hurt you, and they push you around, and they hurt you, and you can't stop them, and when they get tired of one woman, they get another. So I might as well prepare you."

Hattie prepared her daughter so well that Sybil's hymen was severed in infancy, and her vagina was permanently scarred. The preparation was so effective, moreover, that a gynecologist who examined Sybil when she was in her twenties stated that, because of the internal injuries, she would probably never bear a child.

Sybil fought back at first even though her mother's "I have to do it" led her to think that this was indeed something that had to be done. Too, although the fight was literally beaten out of Sybil by the time she was two and a half, she blamed not the perpetrator of the torture but its instrument: the flashlight, the towels, the silver box, the shoe buttonhook.

"Sybil," Willard Dorsett said one Sabbath morning as the family was getting ready for church. "I don't see why you scream so every time we put those shoes on you."

To Hattie, Willard remarked, "Mama, we'd better get her new shoes."

Willard Dorsett didn't know that it hadn't been the white kid shoes that made Sybil scream. He didn't know that in the Dorsett household the buttonhook had uses unrelated to the buttoning of shoes. Hidden from Willard, concealed from the world beyond the drawn shades, these sadistic tortures remained nameless.

These tortures, of course, had nothing to do with what Sybil had done. When Hattie Dorsett actually wanted to punish her daughter, there were other means. Then Hattie would slap her daughter and knock the child to the ground. Or Hattie would fling Sybil across the room, once sufficiently violently to dislocate one of the child's shoulders. Or Hattie would give Sybil a blow on the neck with the side of her hand, on one occasion severely enough to fracture Sybil's larynx.

A hot flat iron was pressed down on the child's hand, causing a serious burn. A rolling pin descended on Sybil's fingers. A drawer closed on Sybil's hand. A purple scarf was tied around Sybil's neck until she gasped for breath. The same scarf was tied around her wrist until the hand became blue and numb. "There's something wrong with your blood," Hattie pontificated. "It will get better."

Sybil was tied with dish towels to the scrolled piano leg while her mother played Bach, Beethoven, Chopin. The binding sometimes took place without the preamble of other tortures, but on other occasions Hattie would first fill the child's rectum or bladder with cold water. With the pedals of the piano pushed down, Hattie would pound the instrument as hard as she could. Vibrations in the head and reverberations in the full bladder or rectum created physical agony and emotional horror.