"You'll have to stand," said Gabriele.
"What do I do?"
"Hold onto the railing," she scoffed.
Lily grabbed it and began to dangle there like a leaf on a tree. "I guess you forgot me," she said timidly.
"No, you said that you would come in the morning. I thought maybe you had decided against coming." Her expressions were hard. It wasn't her idea to get this Rita/Lily person to come with her but she didn't own the services so she couldn't tell her to not come. "Really, you know, it isn't for everyone, Lily"
"Rita," she said.
Gabriele could never empirically detect the existence of a second personality that the girl purportedly had, and as such she could not believe that one personality came out in manic stages and the other during depression. When the Rita/Lily person called herself Rita and when she called herself Lily she was both timid and fragile, and tended to lie or imitate language like a parrot within her stages of depression. When she called herself Rita and when she called herself Lily she was even a little timid and fragile within contumacious manic fun. A month earlier she had contradicted herself by saying that she had not been sexually abused when she was young and that the patriarchal abuse she was "always talking about" was infrequent sexual abuse experienced as a teenager. The abuser was also amorphous: at one time a stepfather and another time a biological father. Gabriele again thought, "Once didn't she claim that her mother and father would soon be experiencing their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary? And yet there is a stepfather? What an interesting little liar." These contradictions were performed consistently by both of the "personalities." Furthermore, she talked of enjoyable times that she experienced with her parents. These times seemed to be ongoing. At any rate she spoke of them happily instead of looking onto happy but deceased memories sadly. It didn't appear that emotional trauma or abuse was bedizened as sexual abuse in a display to get others to empathize with her tattered past. It didn't seem that she was fabricating a happy family life scenario like someone extirpating weeds to plant flowers. That would be trauma- induced schizophrenia that would not be attributed to a manic-depressive who was being prescribed lithium. She claimed to have had a hysterectomy although neither childhood molestation nor cancer was claimed as the culprit. Gabriele thought that having advised Rita to go to a gynecologist once a year for a checkup might have brought on this comment. Maybe the Rita/Lily person fabricated information to keep a conversation ongoing. Maybe she needed continual conversation because it blocked out the moods that were a catalyst for divergent and erroneous perspectives and ideas. Gabriele's conjecture was that the split personality was nothing but the Rita/Lily person's own way of justifying why she had shifts in moods.
If she were sexually traumatized, it didn't come across with any more poignancy than her reactions toward not knowing what to do when she could not find anywhere to sit on the bus. She only became taciturn if she felt that too many questions and too much scrutiny were being paid toward her statements. None of the pieces added up. Gabriele thought that she did not know this person at all. She thought that she did not know any person at anytime in her life really. A person was never quite known. All one had were one's concoctions of plausible scenarios about the person's history and how he or she might behave from empirical personal experiences or what was witnessed when with others. It wasn't the person. The fact that one never knew anything didn't bother her. It was more of a mystery to walk around the planet in a loose blindfold.
"It isn't for everyone," Gabriele repeated.
"I want to go," said Rita. Will they tie me up until I make a vow of secrecy by signing my allegiance in blood? Something like that was on TV."