The Quiet Room (12 page)

“Are you feeling a little hostile, Mrs. Schiller?” Jody Shachnow would say in her schoolteacher voice.

“Hostile?” I was sarcastic. “You might say that.”

Inside, I was even more belligerent. Why shouldn't I be hostile? I thought. You don't know Lori. You don't know what a beautiful, intelligent, charming girl she was. And now she is locked up in your hospital. I don't know what's wrong with her. You don't know what's wrong with her. And now you are treating me like a five-year-old. Wouldn't you be hostile?

Privately, Marvin and I mocked their professionally saccharine voices.

“And how are
you
tonight?” we would mimic in the car, and then collapse in peals of laughter. It was cruel. They were professionals, they meant well, and they were only doing their job. It was the only laughing we did those days. But at least it was better than crying.

For nowadays, there was no escaping it: Lori was getting worse.

Anyone could see she was hallucinating. Once the doctors at Payne Whitney had told us about it, I began to see it clearly. The staff at New York Hospital was doing what we wanted done. They were trying to take her off as much medicine as possible, to see what her symptoms were like underneath.

Off all medication, her symptoms raged. She was frightened, almost panicked, by what she was hearing inside her head. Sometimes when I would visit, she was able to carry on a conversation. She talked with me about her day, asked me to bring her cigarettes, or batteries for her Walkman. She would be very coherent, and aware of what was going on. Then all of a sudden—boom!—sometimes in the middle of a sentence even, she was gone. Suddenly the disease would take over. She was there, but not there. Her body was still with me, but her mind was far away and lost. She was looking at me, but not seeing or hearing me. She was listening to something else.

Sometimes when we were talking and she would begin to follow the voices in her head, I would grab her by the shoulders.

“Lori!” I would scream at her. “Lori! Pay attention to me. Stay here. Stay with me. Lori! Look me in the eye.”

But when she looked at me, it was always with a secret in her eyes. “I know something you don't know,” her eyes were telling me. It was a knowing, superior look, a look that had in it great distance, and great pity, and at the same time, an enormous amount of suffering. “I can hear something you can't hear,” her eyes were saying.

And then one day, I recognized that look.

When the realization came, it was so sudden and so clear, I wondered why it had taken me so long to realize: I had seen the look in those eyes before. Not on Lori. No, my memories of those vacant eyes were much older than that. I had seen eyes like that—distant, remote, pitying, all-knowing, superior, preoccupied eyes—all the time when I was growing up. I had seen eyes like that on my mother.

My mother!

Suddenly it all made sense. My poor, scattered, bewildered, on-the-edge mother. Looking at my daughter, I saw my mother and suddenly I understood everything that had made no sense when I was a child. Suddenly I understood my mother's strange helplessness. I understood her odd behavior, the behavior no one ever spoke of at home. She was always talking to herself and eating her dinner in strange places. I remember seeing her take her plate into the bathroom to eat before the mirror, studying herself carefully as she took each bite. I saw in a new light the strange spells of false anger that seemed to come from nowhere and be caused by nothing. And her fainting spells that her brothers and sisters said she used to have even as a child— “to get attention” they said—suddenly even those made sense.

Everything fell into place. There were her regular disappearances. Every so often my mother would suddenly leave to visit her “cousin” in Florida—“to rest,” people said. Only I knew what was never spoken about: There was no cousin in Florida. It was a Christian Science healer she was visiting.

Poor people are crazy, they say, and rich people are eccentric. My mother was rich, and so she was allowed to be eccentric. But now, looking at Lori, I realized that my mother hadn't been eccentric. She had been sick. And now I saw that sickness repeated in her granddaughter. For if Lori was schizophrenic, then so was my mother.

With a shock, I remembered the shame I had felt as a child. I remembered my mother meeting my friends, with an odd smile on her face.

“It's so lovely to meet you,” she said in a girlish falsetto, prancing and swirling around like a marionette. Then the sudden fade-outs while she was talking, and the all-knowing, superior grin as she retreated into a world of her own. I watched my friends cover up their snickers, and I wanted to die from embarrassment.

Memories, long buried, came flooding back. Troubling, frightening memories that I had long ago tried to push aside. Memories that horrified me when they came bubbling to the surface. For my mother had not been the only one in our family who was sick, I now realized. Far from it.

I began to think back. Cousin Sylvia. How long had it been since I had thought of Sylvia? Sylvia had been a constant source of fear and embarrassment to me. Sylvia was “crazy as a loon” everyone said when I was growing up. She was fat and slovenly and always wore shoes with holes cut out around her bunions and calluses. She had flyaway gray hair and a triple chin. When she smiled you could see the spaces where teeth were missing.

As a child, I was frightened of this woman. She came every day and sat in the shoe department of my father's store, screaming and screaming.

“They're going to come and take your feet away,” she screamed one day when I came in and put my feet in the X-ray machine to look at my feet in my shoes. I turned to my father, terrified.

“Don't pay any attention to her,” he said. “She's a fat, old crazy cow.”

My mind raced back to Lori. When I had seen Lori on the streets of New York, disheveled and out of control, what had I been thinking? Oh, please, I was thinking when I looked at Lori in the late spring heat wearing her long winter coat and snow boots, and carrying shopping bags, please don't let anyone see her like this. Please don't let them be repelled, point, fear. Don't let them laugh at my daughter. Don't let them laugh at me.

Looking back on that moment, I was aghast. With all my might I had been trying to keep from seeing what was right in front of my face. I had looked at Lori and seen my worst fears. I had seen a childhood full of embarrassment and humiliation. When I looked at Lori, I had seen Cousin Sylvia. I had seen my mother, and my friends laughing at her all over again. I had seen my past. It was something I couldn't bear to see again.

And then came an even more frightening thought. Suppose I was seeing not just my past, but my sons’ futures? Schizophrenia, I had read, ran in families. Clearly it ran in mine. Suppose Lori was not the only child of mine to be afflicted?

As much as I could, I tried to act normally. With Mark, it was easy. He was away at Tulane, and, it seemed, really happy for the first time in his life. He had shaken off the adolescent depression that had so troubled him and begun to blossom as a man. He was doing well in his studies. He had plenty of friends. He was dating a lot. It was apparent he was having a ball, and I was so happy to see that.

Steven was at home and in his senior year in high school. I knew he was devastated by Lori's illness. We all were. Nonetheless, Steven seemed happy to me. He was really funny, and could always make me laugh.

Things couldn't help but change. Up until I had gone to work, and Lori had gotten sick, Steven had been the child to whom I had been closest. The other two had left the house, and Steven and I had spent an inordinate amount of time together. He was my baby, and my life had revolved around him as a mother. Now with nearly every waking minute focused on Lori, there just wasn't as much time to spend with him as before.

Still, as best I could, I tried to keep up the things we had always enjoyed doing together. We went to museums together, played golf together, and talked about school and life.

I never mentioned my suspicions to my sons. I didn't want them to worry about themselves. They knew that my mother was strange. But I never told them my newly awakened suspicions about her. As for our other relatives, we had never had much contact with them, so the boys were barely aware they existed. In silence, I worried. Mark was twenty-one, and, I thought, more likely to be out of danger from an illness that seemed to strike in the late teens. But Steven had just turned seventeen. Was he going to be next?

We saw what we wanted to see, and believed what we wanted to believe. With enough time, and enough medication, Lori began to grow calmer, and we took it as a sign she was getting better. And we began to push for her release.

Actually, it was Marvin who pushed. My feelings were mixed. Her behavior was certainly improving. Her rages were beginning to diminish under the medicine, and her pacing was abating. She began to appear more relaxed and started to attend some of the hospital activities. By Christmas and New Year's she had calmed down enough to receive passes to walk with us on the grounds of the hospital. In February for the first time since she entered the hospital she dressed in street clothes, instead of the sweat suits she had been habitually wearing. After a time, she appeared well enough to go out to dinner with us, and to spend a weekend or two at home.

What she needed now, Marvin argued, was activity, a job, friends, a social life. She needed things to anchor her to reality, he argued, not to spend her days in a mental hospital surrounded by sick people. Being at home in a familiar setting with both of us there to help her would be the best thing for her, he argued.

Lori herself was begging to come home. Every time we visited she pleaded to be released. She often threatened to sign herself out against the doctors’ orders, and once or twice she had actually tried to do so. She wasn't hallucinating anymore, she insisted. She wanted to get out of the hospital, and get on with her life. Marvin had promised her she could leave the hospital by her birthday in April. He felt she needed a goal to reach for. She grabbed on to that idea and wouldn't let go. She wanted to be home by her birthday. She would be home by her birthday.

My rational mind was screaming “No! No!” There was still something very wrong with this glazed, dazed stranger I saw before me. Thinking realistically, I could see that Lori was not better. She was drugged.

Still, who was I to argue? Marvin was the expert. If he said she would get better at home, I believed him. And while it was clear that Lori's doctors didn't approve, they were doing nothing to stop us. They did urge that she should be released, not to us at home, but to a halfway house. But when we rejected that option, they didn't press. What's more, it was hard to refuse Lori. She was so unhappy in the hospital, and so desperate to get out. She said she felt better, and who knew better than she?

Besides, all along the doctors had been telling us to face facts. Maybe the fact I had to face was that this remote sleepwalking stranger was my daughter. That this was what she would be like from now on. Maybe my expectations were too high. Maybe the doctors were right. Maybe I had to adjust, and learn to live with this strange new person who used to be my daughter.

So on April 22, 1983, Lori was discharged from New York Hospital, just four days before her twenty-fourth birthday.

Part III

There’ Nothing Wrong with Me

11

Lori Scarsdale, New York, May 1983’August 1983

I was glad to be home.

Daddy had promised me I would be home in time for my birthday. And true to his words, he had brought me back to my old bedroom just in time for cake and ice cream. It wasn't that I cared so much about my birthday. I just couldn't stand the hospital.

Everything about the hospital infuriated me. I didn't know why I was there. I didn't know how I had gotten there. All I knew was that I was trapped. I felt like a prisoner doing my time. I looked out the window every single day and waited for my freedom. Outside was so inviting. I begged for a walk on the hospital grounds. Even with one hospital attendant—or two—at my side, I was so grateful to breathe outside air. I hated being locked up.

Most of all, though, I hated the hospital because everyone there thought I was sick. Well, naturally they thought I was sick! If you are in a mental hospital you must be sick. That was why I wanted to get out. I wanted to get out to be normal again.

There was nothing wrong with me. So why did they keep telling me there was? All these doctors and all these nurses kept saying all these things about me. The words swirled around my head. “There's some bipolar disorder. We should use some antide-pressants.” “I think she's definitely schizophrenic. A paranoid schizophrenic. She needs neuroleptics.” “She seems to be very manic at times. Give her some sedatives to calm her down.” “I believe there are borderline tendencies. She needs more work in psychotherapy.” When they finally settled on a diagnosis of schizo-affective disorder—some schizophrenia, some manic-depression—it felt like one of those everything-on-it bagels they sell in the deli. Poppy seed, sesame seed, onion, garlic, salt, pepper … crazy, loony, insane, cracked, cuckoo. Daffy, demented, lunatic, mad, maniac, nuts, screwy, wacky—use your imagination.

All the time I was in the hospital they told me I was sick. They told me I was psychotic with hallucinations. I hated these two words. I knew they were not true. Psychotic meant like the movie
Psycho
and Norman Bates, and the Bates Motel. That was scary and sick. That wasn't me. I wasn't a
Psycho
-tic woman with a butcher knife.

And hallucinations? Another word that enraged me. Hallucinations meant that you were seeing something or hearing something that didn't really exist. But when I heard the Voices screaming at me, they were real. When the doctors and nurses challenged me, told me that I was out of reality, and hallucinating, I hated them. What made me the psychotic one? What about all those judgmental people? What made them the experts?

In fact, I knew they were trying to trick me, trying to torment me into madness. I knew they could read my mind and hear all that the Voices were saying about them. The doctors and nursing staff told me repeatedly that the Voices weren't real. But if they weren't real, then how did the staff know they were there? The staff told me over and over again that they couldn't read my mind either. But if they couldn't, then how did they know all about what the Voices were saying?