After we moved to New York, Dad came home from work every night at 6:30. We were always so hungry that by 6:31 we were already seated on the wicker chairs around the butcher block table in the kitchen. We each had our own places, but because it was a kitchen set for four, the kids rotated the extra spot on the step stool.
No matter how busy Daddy had been during the day, at night at dinner he was completely ours. We talked about politics. We talked about current events. Then Daddy went around the table asking us each one by one what we had done during the day. On Thanksgiving, Dad had another ritual: He went around the table again, only this time he asked us each to tell the family about the things we were thankful for. We kids always hooted and hollered, and cut up in embarrassment, but at bottom, we liked it. We all knew just how lucky we were.
Growing up, I had always felt special. I was the oldest. I was the only girl. And I always liked having the center stage.
I loved attention. To get it, I usually chose achievement. I was the kid in the Spanish class with the best accent. I was always vying for the lead in the school play. When I was only picked literary editor—and not editor-in-chief—of the school publication, I was really upset. Whatever I did had to be done all the way.
Sometimes, though, I got my attention through pranks. I was always a show-off, and once I got myself kicked out of math class for stuffing a dissected frog into the light socket of the overhead projector where my teacher could find it when she went to see why it didn't work.
From when I was a little girl, I loved performing. I remember my favorite toy wasn't a Barbie or a bicycle. It was a Jerry Mahoney dummy that I got for Christmas one year. I learned to throw my voice, and I loved entertaining my parents with my little skits. I decided that when I grew up I would be a ventriloquist.
Scarsdale was filled with successful people—lawyers, doctors, stockbrokers—all of whom wanted their kids to be successful too. So demanding parents and competitive kids were nothing unusual. There was no question about whether you were going to college. Everyone went. The question was how good a school you could get into. Everyone was very aware of where they ranked in class, what activities they participated in, and what their SAT scores were.
Even in Scarsdale, though, other kids could occasionally goof off and come home with Bs and Cs. Not the Schiller kids. My parents were upset with anything less than an A. Other kids could hang out, listen to music and just fool around. My parents demanded that we play sports, get involved in school activities,
I suppose it was because they were both so successful themselves at whatever they did. My mom was beautiful, tall and slender with dark curly hair. Everything she did, she did well, from decorating the house to cooking dinner for fifty people, to being a room mother for the PTA.
And my dad—well, we were all so proud of my dad. He had come from a poor family in the Bronx, and had been the first person in his family to graduate from college. Now he had a Ph.D. My parents expected big things from themselves, and they expected big things from us too.
Mom and Dad drilled us endlessly in proper behavior. Keep your napkin in your lap. No elbows on the table. Spoon your soup away from yourself and don't snarf your food down faster than you can swallow.
They encouraged us in all our accomplishments, and loved to show us off. Whenever they had parties, they paid me and Mark and Steven to serve hors d'oeuvres for them. And when supper was over, Mom and Dad used to ask me to sing.
Actually, I had a voice like a crow, and I could barely carry a tune. If I sang alone in my room, I could almost always count on some smart aleck shouting up the stairs: “Lori, are you all right?” my father would call. “Is there a wounded animal in your room?” my mother would chime in. I was no great shakes on the guitar either. I had taught myself to play from a book, but I had such a bad sense of pitch that I had to keep going back to the music store where, laughing, they would retune the strings for me.
But still, I did what my folks wanted. With the guitar as my support, I played John Denver and James Taylor songs, because they were the easiest, and somehow managed to stay in tune. Even though it was hard, it was something I prided myself on. If I had to do something—even something difficult—somehow I found a way to do it. I so much wanted my mommy and daddy to be proud of me.
But after I came home early from camp that summer, I suddenly had a new task: keeping my terrible secret. It took all of my determination, and all of my drive. I was putting on a super performance nearly every day. I was pretending that nothing had changed, even though nothing at all was the same.
When the camp staffer dropped me off at my house, my parents weren't home. With all of us away at camp, my parents had driven back to Michigan to visit relatives. Some friends of my parents were staying at our house. By the time I arrived home, I had pulled myself together enough that I only looked a little drained. That was easy enough to explain.
“I have a bad flu,” I told them. “I just want to go to bed.”
They called my parents, and reassured them that I was fine, with nothing wrong that a few days’ bed rest wouldn't fix right up. So nobody seemed surprised when, armed with this excuse, I went into my room and stayed there, sleeping most of the day … and the next.
By the time my parents returned, the worst seemed over. I must have seemed more myself, because they didn't seem unduly concerned. The only person who was concerned was my best friend, Gail. And she was only worried that I was mad at her. Quite by accident she had dropped by and found me home from camp three weeks before she had expected me.
“You didn't even call me!” I could hear the hurt in her voice. She had stayed up late before I had left, sewing my name tags into my clothes, just laughing and being with me before we were to be separated for the summer.
It was the first time I ever kept anything from Gail. We had been as close as sisters. We did everything together. We got our hair cut together, we slept over at each other's houses, we studied together, we got kicked out of the library together for talking. When she had troubles in high school, it was me she confided in. When her parents got a divorce, she cried on my shoulder. When I hit my teens, and began feeling gawky and awkward, it was she who reassured me. I told her everything.
But this time, I told her nothing. I was evasive. I mumbled something noncommittal, and she left, the hurt still clearly showing on her face. But what could I do? How could I tell her, or even my parents, about the Voices, about what was happening to me?
As time went on, sometimes I thought I was mentally ill, but I only vaguely knew about mental illness. What I did know I had only learned from whispered conversations. There was one girl in school who—the rumor had it—had gone crazy and torn her room apart. She vanished from school for two weeks. I was very disturbed by her experience. When she came back to school, I wanted to help her. I wanted to know what had happened to her. But I didn't want to tell her what was happening to me. I was afraid of how she would react. I was afraid of how others would react. I watched them shying away from her, treating her almost as if she were now a time bomb ready to go off at any moment.
Her experience made me doubly sure I wanted to keep my own secret. I didn't want to be a crazy person. People shunned crazy people. They feared them. Worse, they called the men in the white coats to come put them in straitjackets and take them away to an insane asylum. I couldn't let that happen to me.
Sometimes I thought I was possessed. The Stephen King horror movie Carrie came out that year. The psychedelic feeling, the crazy sense of being in touch with the occult, the images of blood, and of speaking to God and to the devil—that was what I was like, I decided. I saw Helter Skelter that year too, the movie about Charles Manson and the murder of Sharon Tate. It stirred up old recollections: We had been in Los Angeles the year of the murder: I remember going to the driveway every day and picking up the newspaper emblazoned with headlines about the gruesome murder. Demonic cults, possession, insanity—it all rang bells with me. I didn't need a doctor, I need
ed an exorcist.
In school one day, I found myself especially disturbed by one literature assignment. I confided to my journal what I could confide to no one else:
We're reading The Bell Jar in English. I absolutely hate it! I have never been so emotionally upset about a book before. The symptoms of the crack-upped Sylvia Plath-Esther Greenwood are me. Of course not everything, but enough. Maybe I'm descending into madness myself. Especially with the wounds of this past wonderful summer being remembered. I'm so upset. I didn't sleep for 23 nights. Esther G. only didn't for 21. I always put myself down, note the bad and not the good, am paranoid, am the A student who would seem least likely to … am afraid to commit myself to relationships, have an alias for all sorts of weird things (at least I don't have to worry about not eating or washing my hair) and don't know who or what I really am. I'm scared and afraid. I want so badly for [my teacher] to understand my fears and set me at ease, but she can't and doesn't. We will be finishing discussing the book next week …
I had always wanted my parents to be so proud of me. It was so important to me that I reflect well on them. So how could I destroy my parents by letting them know their daughter was possessed? At all cost, I had to keep it from them.
So for my last year of high school, as the Voices came and went without warning, I played a game of cat-and-mouse. I kept on going to school, I kept on studying. I went to the prom, applied to college, went skiing with my friends, listened to music or talked about guys with Gail. But always I had to be on my guard. When the Voices began to shriek, I had to stay composed.
I had to conceal the fact that objects around me were beginning to feel hostile. Once I was in my bedroom alone when the phone rang. I picked it up and no one was there. A strange feeling settled over me. It rang again. Again no one. And then again, and again, and again. Always that same vacant feeling at the other end of the line. A part of my mind knew that there was a classmate at the other end of the line, playing tricks on me. And finally, I picked up the phone and screamed into it: “I know it's you! I know it's you!” But to the other part of my mind, the empty line took on the same eerie quality as my Voices. Why was this happening? What did the phone want of me?
From then on, I became terrified of using the telephone. But I couldn't tell anyone why. So sometimes I hid behind a cloak of shyness. Sometimes I pretended I just didn't want to speak to the person at the other end of the line. Sometimes I just couldn't avoid it, and at those times I gingerly took the receiver, never knowing what horrors were going to slide down the telephone line to my brain.
In the evenings, the television became fearsome. Steven and Mark and I could watch Gilligan's Island or The Brady Bunch or The Flintstones . Those were okay, and I even enjoyed them. But in the evening, my parents would put on the evening news. When Walter Cronkite appeared on the screen, he began talking directly to me. As he spoke, he gave me great responsibility. He told me of the problems of the world, and what I must do to fix them. I couldn't handle it. I would immediately leave the family room, and head for my bedroom.
Mom and Dad never let me go without a fight. They wanted to have all of us together in the evening, and didn't like to feel that any of their kids were cut off from the family. So often, reluctantly I came back. I lay on the couch with my face to the wall, and pulled a blanket over my head. I had to block out Walter Cronkite's face and voice. He was telling me that it was my job to save the world, and that if I didn't, I would be killed.
I couldn't listen to him. I just couldn't. He was giving me responsibilities that belonged to God and to no one else. How was I, a seventeen-year-old girl, able to complete a task as overwhelming as saving the world?
3
Lori Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts, September 1977–June 1981
For a long time relief came more often than torment. The Voices and sounds left me alone enough to let me finish high school and apply to college. My choices were reasonable ones: Harvard, because it was the best, and I always wanted to be the best; Northwestern, because it had a good journalism program, and I was interested in writing; Tufts for its prestige; and Bucknell because it was a middle-of-the-road safety school. I thought I had a pretty good chance of getting into any of my choices since my high school grade point average despite my troubles was 3.9.
The previous fall Daddy drove me up to Boston for interviews. While 1 was at Tufts, I stuck a wad of chewing gum on the back wall of the bookstore. If I'm accepted here, I told him, next year I'll come back and see if the gum is still there. All winter I waited, and all spring I ran to the mailbox. I was accepted at Bucknell and Tufts, wait-listed at Harvard and rejected at Northwestern. That fall, I enrolled at Tufts. As my parents were helping me move into my dorm, I walked over to the bookstore. The gum was still there. It was fate.
At first college life was wonderful. In fact, everything I did had a kind of sheen to it, an exciting biting edge. And academically it seemed I could do anything, even though I decided right from the outset that I had no intention of chaining myself to a seat in the library.
In the middle of my first year, I moved in with Tara Sonenshine from Long Island. Tara and I were really tight buddies. Later we met another Lori, Lori Winters from St. Louis, and the three of us became inseparable.
Back home, I was a big shot, a college girl. My brother Mark seemed to feel depressed a lot, and when I came home on weekends or for vacations I tried to cheer him up, and give him advice on how to handle the problems he felt he had. Sometimes I would squire him around in my car, because he didn't have his license yet. Life seemed exhilarating.
Although the Voices still hovered around from time to time, fading in and out, disturbing my peace, they were much softer than they had been at camp, and in high school. They were more like chatterboxes in the back of my brain, talking to each other about me, narrating my every move. Most of the time I could retreat into sleep, and they wouldn't follow. If I couldn't sleep, I would close my eyes and take a series of deep breaths. “You're not crazy,” I would chant to myself. “You're not possessed by the devil.” Then I would silently address the Voices: “Please,” I would beg, “please leave me alone.”
Back at school that spring I decided on a whim to go skydiving. Some friends and I drove out to Turners Falls for a course on how to jump out of an airplane. It all happened so quickly. In the morning, they taught us how to drop the streamer to test the wind, to jump backward from the plane, to pull the emergency cord if the chute didn't open, and to drop gently, with bent legs. In the afternoon, we went up.
Standing on the little step just outside the plane, clutching on to the wing supports, I looked down at the little streamer drifting to earth as we circled the jump site, and I froze with fear. We circled once, circled twice. I wouldn't let go. Finally the instructor peeled my hands off, and pulled me back in the plane.
I knew I had to do it. The next time around I forgot everything they had told me, and just jumped, praying to God the chute would open. For the first few seconds, all I saw was black. I felt sick to my stomach. Then a pop, a tug, and there I was soaring through the air.
“I can fly! I can fly!” I shrieked to the big quiet sky.
The next fall, Tara and I moved into Wren Hall, the dorm right on the Quad where everything happened. We could lean right out of our windows and shout down to our friends passing below. We had upper-class friends who helped us get parking passes, and we were set.
I had lots of friends, both men and women. I was always the one who found things to do off campus. Disco was big then and I found fun places to go dance. I would find the neatest guys in bars, and arrange parties for everyone.
I dated a lot. There was a big, good-looking medical student football player from Harvard. There was a teaching assistant in a computer class I took at Tufts. One sweet guy from Boston University was serious enough to want to marry me.
On the surface, things seemed great. Underneath, though, they were beginning to come apart. The Voices were coming louder-
and faster, startling me with their surprise visits to my brain. Only I didn't know they were in my brain. I heard them coming at me from the outside, as real as the sound of the telephone ringing.
They popped up when I least expected them. Occasionally they were friendly, but mostly they reviled me, shouting in their hoarse, harsh tones: “You must die, you bitch,” they shrieked. “Die! Die! Die!” They filled me with anxiety. I'd turn around thinking somebody was in back of me, and no one would be there. On several occasions I tried beating through the bushes to flush out whatever or whoever it was that was taunting me. Of course I was a bloody-fisted loser every time.
I grew increasingly tense and nervous. I was always afraid I really was going to die, because that's what the Voices said would be my fate.
Once again hiding the Voices began to take up much of my time and energy. When the Voices began to screech and cackle, I looked to the floor. Sometimes I held my breath, hoping, somehow, to outlast them. Sometimes they got so bad that I had to make up some excuse—having to go to the bathroom, or suddenly feeling sick to my stomach—and leave the room.
The most important thing was to keep from looking around to see where they were coming from. If I did get caught whirling my head around, I would try to cover up.
“Oh, I just thought I heard a noise,” I would say, acting nonchalant. I often found myself laughing out of nervousness, but for the most part, people didn't seem to catch on.
Still, the pressure was building.
My fear of the Voices was beginning to spill over into the rest of my life. I was always terribly anxious, because I never knew if those around me could hear them too. I watched my friends’ faces expecting to see their expressions turn to horror when they heard these Voices calling me “whore.” When the Voices called me a “fucking bitch” I watched my professors to see if they would throw me out of class.
The Quiet Room Page 3
