Sybil (9 page)

"Come in, Peggy," the doctor said. And Peggy, obviously pleased that the doctor had been able to tell her apart from Sybil, entered with quick, confident steps.

Relaxed and cooperative, Peggy was more than willing to talk about herself. "I told you a little the other day," she said. "I was angry then.

I had a right to be." Her tone became confidential as she looked directly at the doctor and said, "You know Stan sent us a "Dear John" letter. Only it was "Dear Sybil." Do you want to know what he said? He said, "I think we should discontinue our friendship-- for the time being, anyway." That's what he said. I was so mad I tore up his letter and threw it in a trash can on Lexington Avenue at 65th Street on the way here. And I threw that letter away. Only it wasn't the whole letter. I thought it was. But you saw the other half here. Well, I was insulted. Who wouldn't be?"

Peggy paused, rose from the couch, paced a bit, and, with an impish glint, remarked rather than asked: "Want to know who wouldn't be insulted? Well, I'll tell you. The answer is Sybil. She can't stand up for herself. I have to stand up for her. She can't get angry because her mother won't let her. I know it's a sin to get angry, but people do get angry. It's all right to be mad if I want to be."

Coming back to the couch and sitting close to the doctor, Peggy asked, "Wanna know somethin' else about Sybil? She's scared. She's jist scared all the time. I get tired of it. She gives up, but I don't."

"Peggy," the doctor asked, "do you and Sybil look alike?"

"Not at all," Peggy replied indignantly as she pulled away from the cushion, rose to her feet, and began to prance around the room. "We're completely different. You see how my hair is. And the shape of my face."

Dr. Wilbur didn't see the difference. While Peggy did seem younger and did talk and behave differently from Sybil, the hair, the face, and the body were the same. Peggy was in complete command of the body, but the doctor knew from her experience of the previous week that at any moment Peggy could change into Sybil. In fact, Peggy stayed the whole hour.

As the doctor probed, Peggy remarked with a touch of edginess, "Boy, you ask a lot of questions!" And when the doctor tried to search for the thread that connected Peggy to Sybil, Peggy replied cryptically, "Oh, leave me alone.

There are things I can't tell you. I jist can't. It's like the guards around the palace. They can't smile. They're on duty." Then, smiling herself, Peggy added, "I suppose they'd smile if you tickled them with a feather. Not me, though. I don't smile or talk if I don't want to. And nobody can make me."

When it was time to go, Peggy said pleasantly as she rose from the couch: "You know, we met before."

"Last week," the doctor replied. "Here."

"No," Peggy insisted. "We met in Omaha. At the window. The way we met here. I talked to you my own self in Omaha, but you didn't recognize me. I told you I was Peggy, but you thought it was Sybil's nickname."

When Peggy was gone, she remained very much in the doctor's questing thoughts. Peggy was angry because Stan had sent Sybil a "Dear John" letter. Could this mean, the doctor wondered, that even though Sybil didn't know about Peggy, they were closely allied and that Peggy carried the emotional impact of Sybil's experiences?

Peggy had said that Sybil couldn't get angry but that she could. Was Peggy Sybil's defense against anger? Was the rage in that fist, when Peggy broke the windowpane, the embodiment of what Sybil repressed? The doctor knew that she would have to learn a great deal more before she could confirm this hypothesis. Perhaps she simply was being bombarded with insights. In any case, the questions poured into her mind urgently and insistently.

Suddenly thinking about Peggy out on the streets alone, Dr. Wilbur was concerned. Peggy, an assertive personality, should be able to take care of herself. Yet when she said, "Sybil's mother won't let her," as if the mother were still alive, she had clearly shown, as had also been the case on the previous visit, that she didn't know present from past. And she was young. How could she negotiate the streets of New York, the doctor wondered. Dr. Wilbur hoped that she would get home safely. Home? Home was Sybil's home.

Peggy Baldwin, sometimes Dorsett, had no intention of going back to the dormitory when she left the doctor's office. "I want to go someplace," she murmured half aloud as she strode through the front door of the building onto Park Avenue. "I want to do what I want to do."

The broad street, with its islands of Christmas trees sparkling with leftover snow, its shining limousines with men at the doorways, their bright buttons glistening in the sun, fascinated her. It was all so different from Willow Corners. Quickly she corrected herself: she had to admit that she lived in this wonderful, new city with Sybil. But her home was Willow Corners.

How would it feel, Peggy wondered, to live in one of these houses? She wanted someday to be somebody. When she was, maybe she could live in a house with a doorman with shiny buttons. She wanted to be like all those important people, to do lots of things and go lots of places.

She decided to walk for a while, look, see, experience. There were so many things she wanted to know about. That's why she was always listening, trying to hear everything, her ears straining to capture all she could. She often went to different places just to find out what was going on.

Crossing over to Madison Avenue, she looked at the shops that she passed-- shops with slender stoles of sable, lovely knitted suits, pink peppermint nightgowns, black jersey tops above red and white cotton skirts banded with black velvet rickrack. She loved pretty things, but she didn't dare buy anything from good places like these. She just looked.

The bar she passed back on West 44th Street was another place to which she didn't dare go. But she could look in at all those people in there this day after Christmas doing what nobody she knew in Willow Corners did.

Two men came out. One brushed against her and asked, "How about it?" How about what? she wondered as she looked at him sternly. The man laughed. Laughter scared her. When people laughed, she was sure that they were laughing at her. She began to walk quickly but not fast enough to avoid hearing the man who had brushed against her remark to the other man: "Pretty independent, no?"

Pretty independent, yes, Peggy simmered as she raced ahead of her anger. Blamed independent. She wasn't going to take anything from anybody. She could fight back.

Forgetting about the incident, she walked on, finally finding herself in a big store. Passing over a ramp upstairs, she went into a station: "Pennsylvania Railroad," the sign said. Oh, boy, she thought, I can go somewhere. In the station she found a place to eat. She liked to eat.

After lunch she found herself at a bookstand, looking at a doctor's story. She wasn't too crazy about doctor stories, but Sybil liked them.

Sybil. How had the nice lady with the red hair mixed her up with Sybil? Couldn't she see that Peggy and Sybil were not the same? All of a sudden Peggy laughed out loud. People turned to stare.

The people. She could cry when she thought of all the people. Sometimes when she thought of people, she felt lost and alone. There were too many cross people, and cross people made her angry. She knew it wasn't right to be angry, but many things made her angry. Her anger was purple and violet.

The ramp, which was long, made her feel small. She went through a turnstile, walked down a long corridor, and came to a place where they were selling tickets. She went up to the window. The woman behind the window looked cross. Peggy said evenly: "I don't have to buy a ticket from you!" It wasn't right to get mad, and now she had done it.

"Ticket, please," she said as she walked up to another window.

"Elizabeth?" the new lady asked.

Peggy nodded her head yes. Why not? She could see that lots of people were waiting until a sign was put up. She wanted to be the first through the gate, but even though she hurried, she was the fifth in line.

The next thing she knew she was in a restaurant near a railroad station, and she was ordering a hot chocolate. When she asked the waiter whether she was in Elizabeth, he looked at her in a peculiar way and said, "Well, sure." Funny, she didn't know how she had gotten there. Her last memory was of moving through the gate at Penn Station. Well, she supposed Sybil or one of those other people had taken the train ride. Who cares, Peggy thought, I bought the ticket for Elizabeth and I'm here.

She walked apprehensively along the street outside the restaurant. This place wasn't very interesting, but she had to do something. She was surrounded by unfamiliar sights. Spotting a parking lot, she walked briskly across it. She hadn't gotten very far when she felt the sudden joy of recognition at seeing her father's car.

It was! She had found her father's car, something familiar.

She walked to the car and began trying its doors. All the doors of the car were locked. She tried the doors again, but no matter how hard she tried, they just wouldn't open. She felt trapped, not by being locked in but by being locked out. It could happen both ways, she knew.

Anger, purple and violet, welled within her. Its quick, sharp, heavy pulsations throbbed through her body. Almost without knowing what she was doing, she took her handbag and banged the metal frame against a slightly open window. After a few blows she heard the tinkle of broken glass. She loved the sound of breaking glass.

A man in a tan suit was standing beside her. "What did you do? Lock yourself out?" he asked.

"It's my daddy's car," she replied. Before the man in tan could reply, a man in a gray suit, who had joined them, snarled, "No, it isn't. It's my car."

Peggy didn't like this man in gray one bit. And he had no right to talk to her like that. "It's my daddy's car," she insisted, "no matter what you say."

"Who's that?" asked the man in tan. "Willard Dorsett," she replied proudly.

The man in gray reached into his pocket, took out his wallet, and displayed the car's registration card. "You see, sister, the numbers match the license plate," he sneered.

Her head high, her eyes flashing fire, she started off to tell her father what had happened. She would find him, and he would make everything all right. But the man who claimed to own the car was hollering at her in a loud and ugly way: "Hey, come back here. You ain't going nowhere."

Peggy didn't like being left alone with these men.

They were mean and ugly, and she was afraid of them. She feared that they would stop her if she tried to get away. She tried to escape anyway, but the owner of the car grabbed her by the arm.

"You take your hands off me," she warned. "I might jist hurt you."

Peggy tried to pull away, but the owner of the car placed a restraining hand on her shoulder and said, "Cool it, sister, cool it." She felt like an outcast, enmeshed by strangers from whom she could expect only mistrust, rejection, insult.

"Well, sister," the owner of the car insisted, "you broke the window. It will cost me $20 to replace that window. Are you going to pay for it?"

"Why should I? It's my father's car," Peggy replied.

"Who are you anyway?" the car owner asked. "Let me see your identification."

"I won't," Peggy asserted. "I won't. And not you or anybody else can make me."

The car owner, infuriated by her refusal, pulled her purse away from her. "Give it back to me," she screamed. "Give it back to me right this minute."

He removed a plastic identification folder from the purse and returned the purse. "Sybil I. Dorsett," he read aloud. "That your name?"

"No," Peggy said.

"What are you doing with it, huh?" he snapped. Peggy didn't answer. She certainly wasn't going to tell him about the other girl.

"Give me the $20," he ordered. "Damn it. Give me the money, sign this paper, and we'll let you go."

Peggy was raging mad. The next time the car owner asked for twenty dollars, pointing his finger at her, she bit his finger--hard. "Damn it," he sputtered, "you, Sybil Dorsett, give me the money and we'll let you go. Well?"

"I'm not Sybil Dorsett," Peggy replied coolly.

The man studied the picture in the plastic folder.

"That's you, all right," he said with conviction. "And that's your name under the picture. You're Sybil I. Dorsett."

"I'm not," Peggy protested.

"Well, what's your name?"

"I'm Peggy Lou Baldwin."

"Alias," said the man in tan.

"She said her father was Willard Dorsett," remarked the man in gray. "There's something rotten here."

"There sure is," the man in tan agreed. Peggy tried to pull away, but she couldn't move. And she knew that she was being stopped as much from within as from without. In fact, it was because of what was happening within that she didn't move.

She thought of not having been in command during the train ride to this horrid town, and she knew that she wasn't at the helm now, either. She knew that it was Sybil who had control. She could feel Sybil reaching into their handbag as the car's owner repeated, "It will cost me $20 to replace that window. You're going to pay or I'll call the police." Peggy could feel Sybil handing two crisp $10 bills to the hateful man.

The man wrote something in a loose leaf notebook. "Okay," he said, "sign this."