My condition is called dissociative identity disorder. A far
more serious form was made famous by Sybil back when it was known as multiple personality disorder. Either predicament, according to my shrink, Milton, is a result of severe and repeated trauma; he’s been trying to get me to talk about it for the past five years. The problem is, I don’t remember any trauma, severe or repeated, before I was eighteen and Betty Jane appeared. Since that time, living with her is what any sane person would call severe and repeated trauma.
Milton has never labeled me or my condition. Instead, he subscribes to a progressive notion of psychoanalysis that disregards diagnostic classifications in favor of facts and aims at treatment specific to the patient’s needs. The only label in our work is the one Milton has for the voices—he calls them the Committee to make it easier when we talk about them as a group. But don’t be fooled into thinking that “Committee” means each voice has equal representation.The truth is more like an autocracy, with Betty Jane as the despot and me and the others as the servants doing her bidding.
The Committee and I can switch back and forth with an ease as natural as blinking. Okay, with Betty Jane the switch is really a coup de main that requires coercion or a show of force, usually by Sarge, to regain control. Regardless, the best way to describe the switch is to compare it to driving. As the driver, I have my hands on the proverbial wheel and the open road is right in front of me. Having one of the Committee members take over is the same as allowing them to take the wheel while I move to the passenger side or backseat. Either way, I am no longer in charge.When this happens, I experience everything taking place externally from a different perspective. Basically, I experience everything taking place outside from the inside of my head.
It goes without saying that my Committee is a lot more than the voices most people have in their heads—the ones that recount
the events of the day or the last conversation with a friend. Not that I have friends. How could I? You try walking around with five fully formed, visible people in your head and see if you have the space or even the need for friends. I don’t have either. Besides, no friendship, or relationship for that matter, can flourish under these circumstances. I stopped trying to have an honest relationship with anyone other than my older sister, Sarah, and Milton, who both unearthed my secret despite my best efforts. But analysts are paid to stay, and family is permanent. Friends, on the other hand, are easy to lose.
The Boy, the Silent One, Sarge, Ruffles, and Betty Jane serve as family and friends. They talk to me. They talk to one another. They have their own lives, hobbies, and interests. They even have a fully furnished house with front and back doors, a well-manicured lawn, and a rosebush complete with thorns. And I see all of it inside my head from the moment I awake until the moment I go to sleep. We share a terrible intimacy where no words are required. But, like family, they judge me, sometimes a lot; and they keep secrets from me. So does my sister. Like I said, we all have secrets. I’ve kept the Committee’s secrets, at least the ones I know, and in return, they’ve kept mine—the ones I know, and the ones I don’t know.
{ 1 }
I
sat in my darkened room, lit a cigarette, and watched the orange tip glow as it burned.
Six hours to go. Then it would be over. Six more hours and I, Holly Miller, could mark off another milestone—twelve Christmases spent alone.Well, technically not alone if you counted the Committee.At least, that was what I told Sarah last April when she started asking how and where I planned to spend Christmas. She’d asked me the same question for the last eleven years, each year asking it earlier than the last. Each year I evaded the question until the day came and went with me still sitting in my NewYork City apartment counting the hours until the birth of Jesus passed and “normal” loomed once more on the horizon.
The first time I said I wouldn’t make it home for the holidays nobody protested. My mother said, “Things are too complicated at the moment to add you to the mix.” Sarah had just gotten married, so she was caught up in making memories and didn’t ask probing questions about what I’d do for the holiday.
I remember sitting in my freshman dorm room on Christmas
day thinking this was how cracked glass must feel—not broken enough to be shattered and replaced but disfigured enough that it marred the view of the world. The following year my mother sent my Christmas gifts in October. She lives in Palo Alto, California, where I grew up. Okay, mail deliveries are notoriously slow around the holidays, but you don’t need two and a half months to deliver a package to the East Coast.
When I’d interviewed at New York University, they’d asked me if the distance from home would be a problem. My answer was “New York is as far away as I can get from my mother without leaving the continental United States.” Unlike with my father, whose random appearances in between business trips made it easy to ignore him regardless of proximity, I could avoid my mother’s duplicitous deeds only with physical distance between us. I didn’t realize my mother shared my need for distance until my Christmas gifts arrived early. After that, the tacit agreement between us went like this: as long as I remained in New York City, my family would continue to supply financial aid. In my absence, Mom could spin any tale she wanted to her bridge club. Having me show up on her doorstep would be the equivalent of perfect fiction colliding with imperfect reality. Trust me when I say that comparison would provoke from my mother far more than an end to money flowing from a bank account in Northern California.
I lit another cigarette and listened to people shouting at one another outside on the streets. In the Lower East Side, holidays are not exempt from altercations when you have a bottle of Colt 45 and an attitude to match. I didn’t have either, so I sat there muting my own regret-tinged anger by chain-smoking.
I inhaled and wondered what the people hurling insults were so angry about. What was I angry about? To root out the cause meant I’d have to dig into my past.
Avoid the past
was
another one of my mother’s lessons. Trust me, I’ve mastered the ability to avoid all introspective journeys down memory lane.
When I pulled back the curtains, I didn’t see anything. Never did. I’d rented my place sight unseen because I couldn’t believe “a four-room apartment with a view” was offered for such a low rent with no up-front fee.The day I moved in, I understood. My new abode consisted of a hallway (so small you had to step into the bathroom to enter and exit), bathroom, main room, and a closet.That’s four rooms in Manhattan.After eight years, I had yet to find the view. All I saw outside my two windows was a brick wall. But if I angled my body just right, I caught a sliver of sky. Regardless, the small space with only enough room for my bed, armchair, dresser, and tiny table with two chairs suited me just fine; and the brick vista had grown on me.
My childhood was spent in a large house where we each had our own bedroom. We also had guest bedrooms, a great room, a living room, a family room, library, dining room, kitchen, hallways, pantries, sunporches, and way too many bathrooms. Sometimes hours—and, when I got older, days—passed without my seeing another family member.
Since leaving the Miller mansion, I’ve preferred snug spaces. After all there’s just me and the two cats I’ve never bothered to name. I refer to as them Cat One and Cat Two. For the Committee, whose house inside my head mirrors mine, the cramped quarters create a strain.The deal is that the Committee lives at my level of means. I live in a studio apartment.They live in a studio apartment inside my head.When we moved to New York, I gave up my car, so Sarge had to leave his ’57 Chevy behind.You get the picture. All to say, the Committee’s snug space has to accommodate Ruffles on her pillow and Betty Jane’s California King. This doesn’t leave much room for the other three. Sarge installed a triple bunk bed with the Boy on top, him in the middle, and
the Silent One on the bottom so he doesn’t have to climb over anyone to get into bed after nighttime prayers.At least they don’t have pets. Not yet anyway.
I let the curtain drop and took another drag on my cigarette. I shouldn’t be smoking, but I liked to smoke. Cat One ran into the room and let out his siren sound, a warning that the vomiting was about to begin. I looked at the cigarette
. Do I keep smoking and wait for him to barf up his Christmas surprise, or do I get up and chase him around with the newspapers?
I’d always thought Cat One was bulimic. Cat Two? He’s just fat. Me? I have five people living inside my head.What do you think?
Being my mother’s daughter, I do manage to appear passably normal even though I don’t do cute outfits with matching shoes. I wash my pale Irish skin, brush my dark brown hair, and iron my black and blue clothing. The dark colors down to my footwear help me blend in. Even my workout clothes follow this color scheme.The only variation is the white beacon of Nike hope on my feet for the forty-five minutes a day I run, although my hope remains fixed on a smaller ass, not a brighter wardrobe. As for the rest of it, lipstick equals trauma in my world, because I have had to look at Betty Jane’s ruby red lips issuing one searing indictment after another for the last twelve years. So I don’t use it and rarely wear makeup of any kind. I walk through life looking like a permanent bruise on a bleached background, half the time so focused on what is going on in my head I don’t hear people talking to me. I’d probably go completely unnoticed if Ruffles hadn’t parked her pillow in the upper left corner of my skull. At over three hundred pounds, her bulk always causes my head to lean to the left. The first time I meet someone, they feel the need to mimic my left lean, as if to let me know my head isn’t on straight.
Appearances aside, most days the Committee’s chaos kept me discombobulated, but it rarely made me lonely. Holidays were an
exception and required extra everything to keep the pressure from closing in. Fortunately, without my asking, the Committee found something to do that didn’t involve conversation or sound of any kind.
Christmas evening, when I lit up, I was hoping I could sit, smoke, and enjoy the quiet while I waited for everything to turn normal again. The shouts on the street helped. Watching the cat puke was an unexpected bonus.
I stubbed out my cigarette and started to light another one when the phone rang.
“Hello,” I said.
“Hey, it’s me,” said Sarah.
“Please tell me you’re not calling to find out what I am doing next Christmas.”
“No, I want to know what you’re doing for your birthday. I thought I’d fly out.”
I was born on New Year’s Eve.You might think it’s great that the whole world has a party every year on my birthday, but I’ve never been big on celebrations. I usually spend the anniversary of my birth avoiding the ghosts of the past. This year I was turning thirty. Entering a new decade would bring a multitude of ghosts and their friends. Having Sarah cross the country to see me safely over that threshold quashed any worries I had about yesteryear clamoring for attention.
Sarah was the only family member who’d ever visited me during the twelve years I’d lived on the East Coast. My parents would have come for my graduation, but getting them there together was complicated, and getting me on the stage was more complicated. I told them I’d decided to skip it.Then I made sure to charge my cap and gown on the emergency credit card my mother gave me when I started at NYU. I did so with the faint
hope that someone might see the bill and show up. At least take me out to dinner.
Turned out my mother didn’t bother to look at the credit card statement until a couple of months after I graduated. Sarah wouldn’t fill me in on the particulars of the conversation they had. She didn’t need to. The expletives Sarah uttered after I told her I had marched in the graduation ceremony said it all. After that, Sarah started reviewing my statements on her weekly visits to our mother’s house. She noticed everything.
After she had her first child, Sarah no longer liked to travel. Then she had the second one and she started saying, “I have my male alphabet—Doug, Elliot, and Francis—and the Bay Area offers everything you could ever need. Why would I want to be anywhere else?” One of Sarah’s goals in life was to be a better partner and parent than her role models growing up. Just thinking about doing a better job put her far ahead of my parents. But that wasn’t enough for Sarah.What she accomplished as wife and mother would put most spouses and parents to shame.
The thing was, Sarah hadn’t turned up on my twentieth birthday, and she only had her first letter of the alphabet—D—then. So why my thirtieth? I immediately ignored that thought, because if I asked her, Sarah would tell the truth, and I didn’t want any honesty to trump the happiness I felt at that moment.
When Sarah finished giving me her flight details, I said,“I’m glad you’re coming. See you next week at six p.m. Hanging up now.” I never said good-bye and I hated it when people said it to me, because I always felt like good-bye meant I would never see them again.
“Hang on, Holly,” Sarah interrupted.“For the short time that I am there, I’d like to set some limits around that Committee of yours.” What was about to follow bit into my anticipation of her
visit. “I’d like to request that Betty Jane not be present for the birthday festivities.”
Before I could react, I felt what can only be described as an invisible hook around my waist and caught a glimpse of Betty Jane’s red lips pursed in a resentful line as she executed what Milton and I referred to as a hostile takeover.
“Who do you think you are to banish me?” shot out of my mouth in a sugary Southern tone edged with sour.
“Betty Jane”—Sarah’s voice sounded severe—“how dare you? I will not tell you again that you are not to speak to me.You return my sister immediately or I will take steps you will not like.”
Inside my head, the Committee and I exchanged worried glances while we waited for Betty Jane to respond. None of us had any idea what Sarah meant, but her voice made clear that whatever it was, she could make good on it.