The Quiet Room

by Lori Schiller

  When I heard the Voices yelling such terrible things, I grew afraid to make eye contact with the people I was with. I was afraid they had heard the Voices and now knew the terrible secrets about me that they were revealing. What tortured me more than anything was when the Voices laughed at me. It was a kind of hysterical laughter, as if I was the target of everyone's jokes. I didn't know why they were making fun of me so viciously but I hated myself for being the sitting duck for ridicule. I became extremely self-conscious in front of everyone for fear they too would nail me to a taunting cross.

  I began to feel that my friends hated me. That's what the Voices said. I felt they regarded me as scum. That's what the Voices said too. I kept on seeing my friends, kept on partying with them, kept on laughing and joking, driving around and dancing with them. But in little ways, I began to act on my strange feelings.

  One weekend, Tara threw a big birthday party for Lori Winters, and invited a lot of her own friends from home. As they began arriving, I began feeling pressured. These people didn't like me. They were talking about me. They were going to start making fun of me. I didn't want to be around, so I jumped into my car and drove four hours home to New York. Then, I turned right around and drove back to Boston.

  I took a class in abnormal psychology, and pored over big fat books with teeny tiny print. Every atypical symptom in the lectures and the textbooks seemed to apply to me. I felt overwhelmed by the material, but at the same time a little comforted. At last I didn't feel so alone. There were people out there who felt the same way I did. In fact, I decided, it was really possible that everyone experienced Voices as a young adult, but, like me, chose not to discuss them.

  I spent my junior year abroad. While I was in Spain my first semester, the Voices were softer, but I was so revved up, my motor seemed to be working overtime. When the Voices did speak to me, sometimes they did so in Spanish: “Puta! Puta!” they yelled. “Vaya con el diablo.” Go to hell, whore.

  In London during the second semester, I grew increasingly depressed. The Voices were back in force. There almost never seemed to be a time when the Voices left me alone. Still I kept forging on. I had to keep going. I couldn't let go.

  Gail Kobre was in London with me, on her own junior year program from Skidmore College. We wrote reports together on Disraeli and Gladstone. We studied British history, painting and sculpture. We stopped in Trafalgar Square to have our pictures taken with the lions. We went to pubs and drank beer, ate tea and crumpets and tried to make the Queen's Guards laugh. At one time during the semester we cut our fingers and smooshed our blood together. We'll be friends forever, we said. Blood sisters. Nothing will come between us.

  Of course it wasn't true. The Voices were already between us.

  Keeping my secret grew harder and harder. When I got back to Tufts, Lori and Tara and I had moved in together along with another girl. We lived in a big house off campus. We shopped for food, piling up cookies, cakes, candy and donuts. Sometimes in the supermarket we tore into boxes of chocolate chip cookies and polished them off before we hit the checkout counter. We were always dieting, though. We switched to eating Twinkles, reasoning that since they weren't chocolate, they weren't fattening, like Ring Dings. We starved ourselves all day, and stuffed ourselves like pigs at dinner, finally pushing ourselves away from the table, moaning our secret code: ISF—I'm So Fat.

  I kept up with them. I had to. I kept laughing with them, joking with them, rising at 5:00 A.M. with them for our part-time job waitressing at Mug ’N Muffin, a coffee shop in Harvard Square. But my hands had begun to tremble. I had begun smoking in Europe, a chic thing to do, I thought. Now I had trouble lighting up without a steady hand.

  My highs were higher, my lows lower. In my high moods, I spent money wildly, recklessly. Sweaters, books, candy, tapes, records—I bought more than I could ever need, more than I could ever use, more than a college student could ever afford. My thoughts would race, speeding faster than I could talk so no one understood me. I loved everything in life, from the gripping winter weather to the power of a slamming door, to laughing back at the Voices.

  The Voices were with me nearly constantly these days. Where once I could retreat in sleep, now not even that refuge was left. They followed me into the night, and followed into my dreams. I went for days without sleeping.

  In my low moods, I kept to my room, refusing to go to class. Partly, it was the blackness of the depression that was making it impossible for me to move. Partly it was dread: The Voices were beginning to command me to hurt people, and I was starting to fear I might obey. If I stayed in my room, I was safe.

  Lori Winters began to see that I was upset.

  “Come into my room, if you can't sleep,” she said. So night after night, long into the night, I sat in her room, smoking cigarettes and shaking, while she tried to coax from me my secret. But I could tell no one. I thought increasingly about hurting myself. I sat in the library, up all those flights of stairs, and considered jumping.

  The problem was here, it was here at Tufts. I had known it all along. I should never have come. I would leave here, I would leave the problems behind. So I drove across the river to Boston University, wrote them a check, and told them I was transferring. The next day I transferred back. Something was about to snap.

  Finally I called my parents. I told them as little as possible.

  “I'm having some problems,” I told them. “I think I need to talk to someone.” They were already perplexed by my decision to leave Tufts in my senior year. I was just about to graduate, they said. Tufts was so much better a school, they said. What was I thinking? They could see I was upset, so they readily agreed to my consulting a therapist.

  I met first with a counselor at Tufts, and then with a psychiatrist in private practice. Week after week I met with him, yet I couldn't speak. I couldn't talk about the Voices. It was too dangerous. The Voices were twisting themselves around me. It was hard to tell where they left off and I began. They threatened me, and I believed them. If I squealed on the Voices, they might kill me. If I ratted on them, the person I told would have to die.

  My thoughts grew increasingly confused and poisonous. Session after session I sat in the psychiatrist's office wondering: Who the hell is this guy? What is he going to do to me? Send the white coats for me? Send me to Rikers Island? Was he going to take a scalpel and dissect the wrinkles of my brain? Do a lobotomy? What could he do about the stuff rotting there in my head? He gave me Valium for my anxiety. I took it, and grew steadily more anxious.

  Things began to spin out of control. Trying to flee the Voices, I took to my car, racing up the old Hutchinson River Parkway, and the narrow Merritt Parkway. I wanted to see how fast I could go without being killed. Yet I half wanted to get myself killed. Driving up the Mass Pike on the way back to school, I was pulled over by a cop for speeding. I rolled down my window. He asked for my license and registration.

  “You are going to kill yourself driving like that,” he said. I began to laugh hysterically. Right before my very eyes, the state trooper with his hat and sunglasses and uniform had changed into a fantastic creature with bugged-out eyes and hair standing up wildly on end.

  On Saturday, April 25, in honor of my twenty-second birthday the following day Tara and Lori woke me up at 5:00 A.M. and handed me a scroll. “Congratulations,” it read. “You have won an all-expense-paid vacation in the company of two people who love you very much.” They hustled me into my clothes, handed me my overnight bag all packed, and carried me off to Provincetown. We stayed at an inn, ate lobster and curled up at night under striped sheets eating Oreos.

  Six weeks later we all graduated and headed to New York City, Tara to Columbia University's School of International Affairs, Lori and I to live together and work. My last memory of college is of graduation day, caps flying in the air, mellow music playing, a frantic round of goodbye parties, and the Quad filled with parents, relatives and friends, all gathered around to wish us well in our new lives.

  Par
t II

  I Can Fly

  4

  Lori Winters New York City, July 1981–March 1982

  Lori Schiller and I loved being roommates when we were together at Tufts. So we should have been perfect roommates in New York the year after our graduation. We were both just starting out in the big city. We both had interesting jobs: I had been accepted into a training program at Manufacturers Hanover Trust; Lori had a job as a Spanish translator at the Miss Universe Pageant. We were the same age, came from the same sort of background, and we enjoyed each other's company. We even shared the same first name.

  And at first glance, Lori and I both thought the renovated McAlpin Hotel was an ideal place for two recently graduated college girls like us to make our first home. It was right in the heart of midtown Manhattan. It had a doorman. It was near the subway, and right across from Macy's huge department store. By day, the streets teemed with people, busy commuters and shoppers going about their business. The price was right too—about $500 for a one-bedroom, which in New York was downright cheap.

  Still, there was a lot of fretting when we moved in together that summer. Lori's parents hated the idea of our moving into an apartment building located in a commercial, rather than a residential, neighborhood.

  And to tell the truth, I wasn't too crazy about living there with Lori either—but it wasn't the building I was worried about. It was Lori. I kept quiet about my concerns, but they were growing every day. Lori had been such fun. She was bubbly and creative and lively and energetic. I loved her like a sister. But during the last year at school, she had just become too weird. I really didn't want to live with her anymore.

  None of us at college could put our fingers on what was wrong. At first, it simply seemed as if she was depressed because she was so fun-loving and we were all such grinds. Often it seemed she would get into scrapes just to get our goats. That business about jumping out of the airplane, for example. Here we were—a bunch of girls who were scared to go up in glass elevators and she pulled a stunt like that. We just thought she was trying to get our attention.

  By senior year, though, a secret side of Lori began to emerge. Some of us suspected she might be doing drugs. She just seemed so up sometimes, and so down other times, and we never could predict which it would be. When she refused to come out of her room, and refused to go to class some days, Tara and I got a little concerned. “What should we do about Lori?” Tara and I asked each other.

  Still, we were just college kids and college kids were melodramatic. It was even a bit fashionable for people to talk about being neurotic, and about having nervous breakdowns from stress. Surely there were other people—people in authority, grownups—who must be more aware than we. We knew she was seeing a psychiatrist, so obviously the problems were being handled.

  The best thing we could do, we thought, was to try to make her cheerful. So we bought her chocolate chip cookies, went out late at night to Dunkin’ Donuts, took her to Provincetown on her birthday, and generally tried to jolly her out of her funks.

  Some of our friends weren't sympathetic at all. In fact, a lot of the guys thought she was just bullshitting us. There was a group of eight men and eight women who all went out dancing or to dinner together. One night Lori refused to leave her room to come with us and one of the guys exploded.

  “What is the matter with that girl, anyway?” he complained to me. “It's not like she's got some big problem.”

  “Yeah,” chimed in his friend. “She's cute, she's smart, her parents have all this money, people like her—what's she got to be depressed about?”

  All around me I could feel people nodding silently. Lori should just snap out of it, they felt. I tried to be supportive. When I heard her up pacing at night I invited her into my room. There she would sit in the middle of the night, smoking and shaking and looking glum. But by the time we graduated, I was getting impatient too. I was getting tired of her funks. I didn't want to be her caretaker, and I didn't want to spend my first months out of college making excuses for her.

  Still, I didn't feel like I had much choice. I had promised to live with her in New York back at a time when I thought what I was really going to do was go back home to St. Louis to work for IBM. When those plans changed, I felt I had to honor my commitment to Lori.

  I tried to look on the positive side. When Lori was up she was great. And as for her problems, I knew that her parents had found her another therapist in New York, so there were responsible people who were aware of her condition. Too, I honestly thought a lot of the problem might have been Tufts. Now that we were away from that grind, and out in the real world, things would improve with Lori I was sure. What's more, we weren't very far from her home and her parents. There was a lot of support around. Nothing really bad would happen, I reasoned. Everything would be just fine.

  And for a long time, it was fine. In the early part of the summer, we lived with her parents while we waited for our apartment to be ready. I knew Dr. and Mrs. Schiller well, and I had always liked them. Because I was from St. Louis and didn't always want to go home for short vacations, I often went to Lori's house. It was fun being there. Her mother was always warm and outgoing. She and Lori's father were always teasing each other and their children, and Lori always seemed to have such a nice, close relationship with her parents and brothers.

  In August, we moved into the McAlpin. True to Dr. and Mrs. Schiller's predictions, the location turned out to be a nightmare. It was noisy and dangerous and not very convenient. There was no grocery store or dry cleaners within walking distance. And at night, once the stores closed and the commuters had gone home, the streets were deserted, the cheerfulness vanished, and the area began to seem creepy.

  In the beginning, we didn't care. Moving in together was an adventure. We bought unfinished furniture and painted it ourselves. We bought a wall unit with mirrors, where Lori put her stereo and tapes, and a big glass and chrome coffee table. My grandfather bought us a king-sized sleeper bed.

  Most of the furniture wasn't delivered for six weeks or so, so in the meantime we slept in sleeping bags on the floor. Sleeping on the floor gave Lori an idea: We would all have a slumber party. So one weekend, we invited all the girls we knew over and a dozen or so of us rolled out our sleeping bags on the floor like teenagers.

  We also began meeting a lot of nice guys. A couple of guys would always just happen by to see if Lori was there. Her job was fun too, helping the Spanish-speaking Miss Universe contestants find their way around the city. One day she came home with Miss Colombia's banner, which had been given her as a thank-you. All my fears melted away.

  But the good times didn't last.

  Before too long, Lori's moods began to swing again. At times, she would take to her bed, refusing to leave, refusing to go to work. Bringing people home became a problem.

  The guys she was dating began drifting away, without saying much to me. When Lori did leave her room, she became hostile and aggressive. I had been set up to date my sister-in-law's cousin. The guy was nothing great to look at, but I liked him all right, and had him over a couple of times. One day when I brought him home, Lori was there.

  “What is that thing on your face?” she said to him, with a not-quite-joking air. He had a mustache. “That is the ugliest thing I've ever seen, and you're pretty creepy too.” I was taken aback. I tried to pass it off as a gag, and we left quickly.

  Soon, however, it became hard to have people over at all, Lori was so belligerent. You are ugly. You are fat. Why did you come over here anyway? We don't want you around.

  Tara was living in her own apartment up by Columbia, and I found myself calling her all the time, wondering what I should do. I tried to talk to Lori's parents too, but it was hard to explain what was happening. Lori's parents had never seen her get really bad. She always wanted them to be so proud of her that she would never admit she had problems. Often she said she didn't want to bother them. What's more, just being with them seemed to make her happy. When they were around she a
lways seemed more normal and the vivacious, funny, lovable Lori would just seem to take over for a while. So they never knew about the days she wouldn't get out of bed. But sometimes I got so concerned myself that I called them. Lori's mother would listen to my stories, and in a very friendly motherly way, brush them aside.

  “Oh, don't worry about that,” Mrs. Schiller would say. “Lori is just in one of her moods. It will pass.”

  I always felt better after talking with her mother. Her parents knew her a lot better than I did and they didn't think her problems were such a big deal. I was just getting all upset over nothing.

  Wintertime in New York is wonderful. And wintertime in New York around Herald Square where we lived is especially magical. Every street corner has its Salvation Army Santa with his bell and brass bucket for change. People with kids and strollers crowd around Macy's to see windows filled with moving figures, ice skaters, ballet dancers and reindeer. Just as the song says, there really are hot chestnut vendors, filling the air with the smell of roasting.

  And on every street corner, there are the three-card monte games. One eye out for the police, their games perched precariously on cardboard boxes, these con men prey on passersby. Nearly every New Yorker knows, or quickly learns, that no matter how easy it seems to turn over the right card, no matter how many times the dealer lets you win when the bets are small, no matter how fervently you believe that you are the one who can beat the system, you will never, ever win. The games are completely crooked, and anyone who falls for them is a dope.

  One evening in December around early twilight Lori came in. Her eyes were bright and there was a wildness about her, a kind of new energy.

  “I lost my bracelet,” she said, distressed.

  “Your new bracelet? The one your parents gave you?” Her parents had recently given her a beautiful, and very expensive, diamond bracelet.