The Quiet Room

by Lori Schiller

  “We have to go get your sister in the hospital,” he said. “She's tried to kill herself.”

  It was out of the blue. I didn't understand it, and no one took me aside to explain what had happened. Now Lori was suddenly a major problem—bigger than anyone knew how to deal with. Since there were no answers, nobody talked about the questions. I felt isolated in the silence and confusion.

  When my parents put Lori in the hospital, it reopened an old wound for me. It was loneliness. I was still resentful that my mom had gone back to work many years earlier. I was still feeling abandoned.

  So when Lori went in the hospital at the end of my junior year in high school, I just felt it was more of the same. Mom started coming home later and later. Both Mom and Dad were more and more preoccupied. They both had even less time for me than they had before.

  That summer, they left me more on my own to do things than they ever had with the other kids. My summer job that year was working at Cherry Lawn Farm, helping bag produce and wait on customers. In the evenings I sometimes started dinner. My mom had always done all the cooking, and somehow the fact that she wasn't doing it all the time anymore seemed to signal the end of a happy era to me. We used to start dinner together. Now I was doing it alone. I would start the burgers, or chicken or steak, and cut up vegetables for a salad.

  Then once they got home in the evening there we were, just the three of us around the dinner table. Mark was away at college. Lori was put away someplace. My parents were silent and tense. We were hardly even a family anymore.

  So when Mom started coming home crying, I wasn't exactly sympathetic. She never talked about Lori. I thought she was upset about work. She always talked about work. She was upset, she said, because someone had said something mean to her. Or because someone had taken credit for something she had done. Or because of some bit of office politics. It never really registered that she was coming home late and always crying because she had gone to visit Lori.

  Had I been older, I might have thought that all the stress in my mother's life was making it hard for her to deal with things that otherwise she might have taken in stride. But I didn't think that at all. I thought she wasn't cut out for business. I thought she was finally finding out that she had no business leaving home—and me. Lori had nothing to do with it.

  And when my mother started smoking again after seven years without a cigarette, I wouldn't buy her explanation. Is smoking the solution? You and Dad are just using Lori as an excuse for everything bad that is going on in our family. I was harsh. I knew I was being harsh, but I didn't care. I didn't know what was going on, and I was very confused.

  Underneath my complaints and my criticisms, though, there lurked something much deeper.

  It was fear.

  Was whatever it was that had happened to Lori going to happen to me? Was there going to be a day down the road when my parents would lock me away? If it had happened to Lori, why couldn't it happen to me? They said this was a genetic problem, and I had the same genes she did.

  My fear was all the more acute because for as long as I could remember Lori was what I was going to be when I grew up. When I was little, one of the first things I remember thinking was that I wanted to be older like Lori. When I was in grade school, she was already in high school, which seemed like the place to be. When I went to camp, she was already a counselor, and that meant power and authority. When I was eleven, all I wanted to be was seventeen, because Lori was seventeen and she had it all. Lori's life looked so glamorous that I often, enjoyed fantasizing about the day when I would be able to do the things she was doing.

  That was especially true when I got into high school and she was in college. I was having a miserable adolescent time of it. But Lori gave me a break. She invited me up for a weekend at college with her friends. She and her roommates Tara and Lori Winters took me to do all the fun things that college kids do in Boston. We walked around the Common and looked at the sights of the city. We went to the original Steve's and made our own sundaes from homemade ice cream. Lori filled her pockets with M&Ms when the guy behind the counter wasn't looking. We even went to the top of the Hyatt and watched the city from the rotating bar. We picked the raisins from the trail mix on the tables near where we were sitting. We made jokes when the waiter threw us out because I was underage. To me, a miserable gawky high school sophomore, it all seemed unbelievably exciting. I left Boston thinking: In a few years this will be me. What's happening to Lori now will happen to me soon.

  So now, a year later, I worried that in illness too, Lori's fate would be mine.

  My dad's behavior was troubling. After Lori became ill, Dad suddenly changed the way he behaved toward me. For years he had pushed us all to achieve, to do the hardest things possible. But this summer, as I was preparing to enter my senior year in high school, he began to urge me to take the easiest classes possible, even perhaps remedial classes. I thought Lori's illness was a result of the way my parents treated her. I began to feel that he thought the same thing I did—that he had caused Lori's illness, and that he was afraid of causing it in me.

  Finally I summoned up enough courage to talk to my dad.

  “Dad I'm having problems, and I think I need to see a psychiatrist,” I said Then I held my breath and waited.

  He looked at me for a very long time. Finally, he spoke very seriously.

  “ If you think you need to see a psychiatrist, of course you can go see one,” he said very slowly. “But, Steven—I don’ think you need one.” He paused. “Why do you think you do?”

  I didn't really have an answer. And I never did see a psychiatrist. I guess I just wanted to see how he'd react. To see if he'd laugh, or look scared, or agree that I needed help.

  My fears had one other powerful side effect: I refused to visit Lori in the hospital. Party I was just being selfish. I didn't know what I'd say. I didn't know how to act. But partly, I was thinking about myself. When I had visited Lori at Tufts it had been like I was looking into a mirror at my own future. I couldn't go visit her at Payne Whitney and look into that mirror.

  8

  Nancy Schiller Payne Whitney Clinic, New York, August 1982–September 1982

  Click. Click. Click. Click.

  Every night the tap of my high heels on the steaming pavement sounded a drumbeat as I walked from the subway to the hospital. One. Two. Three. Four. Shoulders back. Chin up. Head high. “If you can keep up a good front for your co-workers and clients, you can do it for Lori,” I told myself. I had to keep control. I couldn't let her see me cry. I had to be cheerful, and upbeat and smiling and supportive. I had to play the role.

  All the way on that long hot walk I rehearsed as if for a sales pitch—the hardest one of my life. I had to convince my sick little girl that everything was going to be all right. I had to convince her that life was worth living. But first I had to convince myself.

  Every step of the way was a battle. First I stopped at Peppermint Park at the corner of 66th Street and First Avenue to buy ice cream. Lori loved ice cream. How many times when she was a teen had we looked at our thighs and laughed. “Who better deserves?” we would say. “Let's have a hot fudge sundae.”

  So what was I hoping for? Did I think I could bring her back with a pint of rocky road? I felt like a jerk. How could I hope ice cream would cheer Lori up when even buying it made me dizzy with disbelief. The pink and green store awnings, ice cream parlor chairs and fake Tiffany windows infuriated me.

  “Don't you know my daughter is on a locked ward at Payne Whitney, and she thinks she can fly?” I wanted to scream at the silly laughing clerks. “How dare you laugh? How can you be happy when there is so much misery in the world?” And at the back of my head, the ugly thought lurked: “How dare you be well when my Lori is so sick?”

  From the ice cream store, I walked over to York Avenue. There I stopped at a flower cart between 66th Street and the hospital entrance on 69th. Buying Lori flowers was extravagant and stupid. She had retreated into her own world, and w
as barely noticing the room around her. What did she care about flowers? But every day I bought some just the same. I had to do something. Anything.

  As I headed up to the locked ward on the third floor, I checked my reflection in the mirrored elevator doors, and gave myself one last pep talk: “Okay, Miss Sparkle Plenty, get your act together,” I ordered myself. “All right, Stella Stunning—it's show time!”

  Lori was more than just my daughter. She was everything I had ever wanted. When she was a baby, she was my doll; when she got older, we were playmates. She was my friend, my confidante, my soul mate. She was the childhood I never had.

  When I was a little girl, I would sit in the lilac tree in our backyard and dream of my future. I would be slim and beautiful. I would have a doctor for a husband. I would have a little daughter to hold in my arms. I would sing to her, laugh with her, dress her, cuddle her, play with her and shower her with all the love that I craved so much.

  When I was growing up my parents rarely hugged me, or held me on their laps, or told me they loved me. Instead, they fought and argued constantly. My father was a shrewd businessman, cold and calculating. My sister thought he worshipped my mother. I thought he was an opportunist. I think he married my mother—who was very beautiful, very wealthy and very scattered—for her money.

  In any case, they were terribly mismatched. My father was orderly, disciplined and focused. My mother was an artist, flighty, disorganized and indecisive. She always seemed overwhelmed by life, unable to cope, to discipline me and my sister, or to handle running a household.

  Late at night, when I would hear them screaming and quarreling, I would run crying to my German nanny's bedroom for the only comfort I could get. In the morning, my mother would scream at me: “You are the cause of all my unhappiness.” She never wanted children, and didn't know how to handle them. “You're too loud” was all I ever heard. “You're too fat.” “Stand up straight!”

  And as for my father, I adored him, and did everything I could to have him love me—including trying to be the son he wished he had had. I washed his cars, climbed trees, asked about his business. Of course, I was a complete failure, for in reality I was a terribly feminine child, caught up in my dolls and my dreams. When my father asked me to dance at the synagogue, I felt like a princess as we whirled and twirled. But he was a sadistic man, and to him it was a joke. He purposely tripped me and laughed as I lay, humiliated, on the floor in front of everyone.

  Was it any wonder, then, that I married the first man who was good to me? I knew I was going to marry Marvin from the moment I spotted him across the room at a fraternity dance. He was dark, sophisticated and older—a graduate student, and an adviser to the fraternity. When I saw him head across the room to me, I almost fainted. By the time the dance was finished, I was madly in love. We were married on December 14, 1957, just a month short of my nineteenth birthday.

  With his Ph.D. in psychology, he would be the doctor of my childhood lilac tree dreams. And with his help, I would become the slim beautiful wife I wanted to be. I was terribly lucky. Such an impulsive match could have turned out so differently. But it didn't. We loved each other and together we became a team. From the beginning, we taught each other things. I was a small-town girl; he was from the big city. He introduced me to a more cerebral, sophisticated world. His family had been poor. Mine had lacked for nothing. I had dancing lessons, piano lessons, singing lessons. I taught him which fork to use, how to make small talk, how to write thank-you notes. I taught him how to be less aloof and more diplomatic.

  And when, nine months later I became pregnant, all I could think of was fulfilling the rest of my old dream from the lilac tree. Let it be a girl, I thought. Let me have a daughter.

  Lori Jo didn't disappoint me. She was born when I was twenty, and I loved her more than anything on the face of the earth. My every waking moment was spent with her. I would dress her up in crinolines and little dresses. She was a very precocious child. She walked early, she talked early. We showed her off at every chance we got. She wasn't a cuddly snugly child, which did frustrate me. Instead, she was a little tomboy, off and running and doing. She was terribly stubborn too, a little girl who knew her own mind, and got her own way however she could.

  But how could I help loving her so much? She was the perfect child. She was bright, funny, alive, beautiful, giving and warm and loving. A friend once said that Lori just climbed into your bones.

  When she got older, my friends would call and complain that they and their teenagers had all these problems. They were fighting. There were secrets, and suspicions, and testing. Not between Lori and me. We went to movies together. We went shopping, tried on hats and got hysterical together. We lay in the backyard and sunned ourselves together. We never argued. There was none of the head-butting and distrust that my friends and their teenage daughters went through. We were as close as a mother and daughter could be.

  Where had she gone?

  When the hospital elevator let me out on the third floor, I had to ring the bell. A nurse peeked through the window and let me in, closing the door carefully behind lest someone escape. It was a dreary, bleak place with scuffed paint and institutional furniture. Sometimes Lori and I visited in her room. Sometimes she would take me to a visiting room at the end of the hall. It never made much difference to me. There I was with this shell of my daughter. Half the time she sat as if in a fog, as if a veil had been drawn between us. Half the time she was incoherent and rambling, full of a peculiar energy.

  How could I talk to this stranger? What could I say that would make a difference? But still I put on the show. “Don't worry, Lulubelle,” I said, using my childhood pet name for her. “You'll get better. You'll be well soon. Everything will turn out all right.” Half the time I didn't know what I was saying, murmuring reassuring nonsense. But I did it anyway. I had to. For her sake.

  Leaving her every evening was torture for me. As the door swung locked behind me when I left, her parting pleas were like razors.

  “Don't go, Mommy,” she cried. “Don't leave me in here. I don't belong in here, Mommy. Please take me home. I'll be good, 1 promise.”

  For the longest time, I told no one where Lori was. The boys knew, of course, but no one else in the family did. I didn't tell my sister. I didn't tell my mother. I didn't tell a soul. Marvin wouldn't let me.

  When we left the hospital for the first time, his face was grim.

  “I forbid you to tell anyone about this.”

  I was taken aback. Forbid? We had been married for twenty-five years. Never once had I heard him utter a word like that. Forbid?

  “If we let people know about this, no one will ever let her forget it,” he said. “It will put a terrible stigma on her. When she gets out, she will have to put this behind her. It will be impossible if people know where she has been.”

  “But, Marvin, they said …” The people in the hospital had been hinting that Lori was sicker even than we knew.

  “I don't care what they said.”

  “How are we going to keep a secret like that? She may be in here for a while.” In truth, neither of us knew how long she'd be there.

  “I thought of that. From now on, the story is that Lori has gone back to Boston to study. It's a logical thing to have happen.”

  It didn't make any sense to me. “We still have her apartment. Her roommate knows …”

  He wouldn't budge.

  “I can't keep this inside. You know I'm no good at keeping secrets. I have to talk about it with someone. I need to talk.”

  “We'll talk about it together,” he said.

  And that was that.

  The deception made everything ten times worse for me. I needed to talk, to vent, to get sympathy and support from my friends. Instead, I could confide in no one. What was worse, I was lying to them. I hated lying to my friends. I hated pretending everything was all right when it wasn't.

  I began to see how marriages could break up. The strain was more than we had ever experienc
ed. We were still friends. We still enjoyed each other's company. But our traditional roles were jarred. I had always been the wife and mother. He was the breadwinner. He was precise and methodical, the kind of man a family could lean on.

  But this was different.

  One evening leaving the hospital, we held hands and looked at each other.

  “Is everything going to be all right?” I asked.

  “I don't know,” he said.

  It was a terrible moment. I had never heard him say “I don't know” before. He had always been so positive and take-charge. He always thought everything was going to come out all right. I had never heard him express any doubt. How could he say he didn't know? I needed him to know.

  For all those years I had depended on Marvin. Now, suddenly he was helpless. Helpless in the face of something dreadful happening to the little girl he adored. Helpless in the face of something he couldn't manipulate. He couldn't buy it. He couldn't pull strings and make it go away. He couldn't make it all better.

  Lori's illness was something over which he had no power. He felt impotent. And so he did everything he could to deny what was happening. He made up ridiculous stories. He threw himself even more into his work.

  I never thought he was making up excuses to travel away from home. Traveling was part of every management consultant's job. And as one of the senior people, he was forever having to spend days and nights at the firm's head office in Chicago. Still, I was brutally angry with him for going away and leaving me alone. “You're never here when I need you,” I thought. It was unfair of me, I realized, but I thought it all the same. I couldn't help myself. When I returned to an empty house at night after visiting Lori, it was the loneliest I had ever been. Marvin called every night, and we talked. Even though he was tired, and had worked a long day, we talked as long as I needed to. He was very loving and caring, but he was seven hundred fifty miles away, and I was alone.