The Quiet Room (17 page)

Nancy began noticing that a lot of the calls were coming from one man. I had met this guy before when he occasionally came to call for her at the house. His name was Raymond and he was black. That in itself didn't bother me. What bothered me was that his background seemed odd. Something about him made me uncomfortable too, a furtiveness and unease he seemed to exhibit around us.

“Marvin, I think that guy is selling drugs to Lori,” Nancy said one day.

Parents were always being admonished in those days to be alert for signs of drug abuse. Be on the lookout for unusual behavior, the public service announcements said. Watch for unexpected mood swings, running nose, tremors, bloodshot eyes. We watched, but what could we tell? We couldn't separate out her illness from anything else that might be affecting her. Lori's moods were so unstable that she had initially been diagnosed as manic-depressive. She slept so little that her eyes were often bloodshot. And she was taking so much prescription medicine that there was hardly a time when her hands didn't tremble.

At first if there were any signs we took them as positive. She had been so fat coming out of the hospital, and she had begun to lose some weight. Her moods seemed to get brighter.

For a long time my concerns about Raymond were of a different sort. I thought she was having a sexual relationship with him. That bothered me. I thought she could do better than that. I told her so.

“Are you having a relationship with this guy?”

“No, Daddy. He's just a friend. I need friends. You know you are always on my case to meet people. Well I met someone.”

The other boyfriends came and went. Lori let her membership in the dating service lapse. But still the phone calls continued. Nancy was getting more uneasy. She told me how worried she was, so the next weekend I confronted Lori again. I was in the family room watching TV when she came in. I turned to face her.

“Lori, why is this guy Raymond calling you all the time?

” She shifted around uneasily. “Dad, I told you. He's a friend.”

“Lori, do you think I'm stupid?” I kept my voice low, but she could tell I was serious. “There's something more going on, and I know it. Your mother is worried. I'm worried. Is that guy selling you drugs?”

“No, Daddy,” she said. Her denial was vehement, but I felt she was lying. “He doesn't have anything to do with drugs. He's just a friend I met from the restaurant. We just hang out together.”

“I don't want you meeting that kind of people. I don't want him around here, and I don't want him around you. I think he's a drug dealer.”

“No, Daddy. He's just a friend. He's got nothing to do with drugs.”

There was a long pause. I looked her straight in the eye. “He'd better not,” I said.

But soon it became apparent that she was indeed lying. Even to us it became clear that something was affecting her, something more than her illness. Her mood swings were becoming much more pronounced, and much more rapid. (“Maybe she isn't taking her medicine,” I thought.) The tremor in her hands had increased so that she had trouble performing ordinary tasks like pouring herself a soda. (“Maybe she is taking too much medicine.” ) And she was increasingly agitated. (“Is she taking enough medicine?”) In fact, it seemed like she hardly slept. (“Does she need sleeping pills?”) I was away during the day, so perhaps she slept then when I didn't notice. But at night, I could hear her coming in at one or two o'clock in the morning, and then pacing about until dawn. Finally, Nancy and I decided it was time for a showdown. Lori was involved in something dangerous, and we couldn't stand by any longer. This time I was going to find out what was really going on. Once again I confronted her. When she finally confessed, I blew up.

She wasn't going to do one thing more until she got herself off the drug, I told her. If she couldn't do it herself, then she was going to have to get help. So with a recommendation from Dr. Rockland, Nancy and I arranged to have Lori visit a drug treatment program in Stamford, Connecticut. Three times a week, she drove up there for counseling, group therapy and surprise urine tests.

I knew she could do it, and she did. By August, she was clean.

14

Lori Scarsdale, New York, September 1984–March 1985

By early fall, I was ready to try again with another job, this time one in the mental health field. I knew a lot about it, obviously. Maybe I could help somebody. Dr. Rockland and I talked about it, and he gave me a list of the hospitals in the area. I prepared a résumé—which didn't include my stays at Payne Whitney and New York Hospital—and sent it off.

I didn't actually believe it would work, but it did. I had a number of interviews, and several job offers. I chose to work at Rye Psychiatric Hospital Center because it reminded me least of New York Hospital.

Where New York Hospital was big, with over three hundred beds, Rye Psychiatric was small, a thirty-bed hospital. The road in was short, but it was lined with greenery. It had well-kept lawns and a soothing atmosphere about it. There was a main building and a small side building called “The Cottage” that really did remind me a bit of a country cottage.

But the most important thing was that, unlike New York Hospital, Rye Psychiatric Hospital was not a closed-door facility. As long as they stayed on the hospital grounds, patients were free to come and go as they liked. There were no bars or safety screens on the windows. There were no passkeys or security people in jeeps riding the grounds.

Suddenly, from being a psychiatric patient, I was in charge of other psychiatric patients. After a brief orientation, I began handling the same kinds of jobs that all the other mental health workers did. I helped patients in an assertiveness training group. During recreation, there was arts and crafts, where I helped the patients make wallets and moccasins. During art therapy time, they drew pictures and I helped analyze them.

When I worked on the evening shift, which went from 3:00
P.M
. to 11:30
P.M
. the workload was lighter and I could be spontaneous. I went out in the garden with the patients or played horseshoes or croquet or took people out for walks.

The day shift was the busy one though. That's when all the patients had to be woken up, helped with getting washed and dressed, and assisted through breakfast and lunch. Daytime was when we got most of the admissions too. During my orientation, I had been trained to take admissions reports, and do all the other required paperwork.

I wound up doing a lot of paperwork because, unlike the other staffers, I enjoyed it. I liked to write, and I liked to interview the incoming patients and their families. I asked them questions about their problems and complaints and wrote them down in great detail. And I helped with the record keeping about the daily events of the hospital. I also learned how to do EKGs, which were required for all admissions, hooking people up to the electrodes and taking the totally painless reading of their brain waves.

I never mentioned my past to anyone, and at first no one asked. But a few weeks after I began working at Rye Psychiatric, Eddie Mae Barnes called me into her office. She was director of nursing, and a stout, no-nonsense person. She had noticed a tremor in my hands, she said, and wondered if I had “seen anyone about it.”

“Yes,” I said, holding my breath.

“Do you take any medication?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Have you ever been under a doctor's care for it?”

“Yes.”

“Are you under a doctor's care now?”

“Yes.” By now I was really shaking.

“A psychiatrist?”

Yes.”

I C3.

“And have you ever been in a psychiatric hospital yourself?”

“Yes,” I said. And waited.

But miraculously, she didn't fire me. She didn't even cut back on my duties. After that, I did notice that she was watching me more closely. But aside from that, nothing else happened. I was amazed, and grateful. It wasn't common in those days to use former mental patients as mental health workers. She was being creative—and taking a chance.

Within a very short time, I began working marathon shifts at Rye Psych. I was usually scheduled for day shifts, beginning at 7:00 in the morning and ending at 3:30. But often when another worker didn't show up or was sick, I found myself taking the next shift too, which ended at 11:30
P.M
. Or sometimes I would do the evening shift, and then stay overnight to cover until morning. Sometimes I would do the morning shift, go home at 3:00 in the afternoon, catch some sleep and come back at 11:00 at night. Sometimes I'd be home asleep when Eddie Mae called at 5:00
A.M
. to ask if I could be there by 7:00. I almost always accepted.

Once, during a raging blizzard, I worked all three shifts in a row, staying there, and awake, for twenty-four hours straight. It was snowing too hard for anyone else to report to work, or for me to get home.

I liked doing all the overtime. Partly, I liked the money. Very soon, I was making more from my extra shifts than I was from my regular salary. But partly, I discovered I was good at the work. I was a hard worker, a good writer, and conscientious. When the state came to recertify the hospital once, the examiners pulled reports I had written to explain to the others that this was how a report should be written.

I was trying so hard to be normal.

My mom and I went on errands together. We bought groceries, stopped at the pharmacy, the dry cleaners. We went to buy flowers for the house. Doing errands was safe. We didn't have to talk. When my Voices yelled at me to jump out of the car, I could focus on the radio and keep myself under control. Down to the Golden Horseshoe shopping center we went. My mother gave me assignments, I carried them out. But when I went into the pharmacy to fill a prescription, the owner and his assistant, who had been there for years, didn't recognize me.

All right. All right. I know. I'm a big fat tub of lard. I couldn't stand my weight. I hated the way I looked in the mirror. I especially hated buying bras and bathing suits. I'd ask people what I looked like, but nobody dared tell me for fear of hurting my feelings. All they'd say was that I was a “little overweight.” “Don't worry. You'll lose it,” they said. “It's probably from the medicine.” And then the worst of all: “You have such a pretty face.” I knew what that meant. It meant I was blubber. Only Dr. Rockland and my parents dared to tell me the truth.

Dr. Rockland encouraged me to exercise. That would be a way to lose the pounds, he said. He also said it was a proven medical fact that vigorous exercise was a good antidepressant.

So I tried to do what he said. I walked four miles on the golf course with my parents on Sunday. I found that too boring. I walked with my mother to Gail's mother's house, two miles each way. That was too hard. I tried long bicycle rides. Sometimes I'd ride my bike the seven miles from my parents’ house to New York Hospital. The hill up Gedney Way was a killer, but I stood up from the seat and pumped up. I made the five-mile trip from home to the village of Mamaroneck. Once when I was making that run Dr. Rockland, who lived nearby, happened to be driving by, and he beeped with pleasure at catching me in the act of actually listening to his coaching. I felt I should be wearing a bumper sticker: Honk if your mental patient is exerting herself.

Dad said go off, be with young people, make friends, enjoy life. So I went on a group vacation, a Club Med-like thing, to Jamaica. I liked swimming at Negril Beach. I liked parasailing, because it reminded me of skydiving. I liked pigging out on the all-day buffets. We played bingo and cards, watched crab races and went snorkeling. But most people were there to drink and sleep around. Because of the medication I was taking, I would get sick when I drank alcohol, so I felt queasy all day. And I had no intention of getting involved with any of those big-time losers on this trip.

I even tried to go to nursing school. I thought that would be cool. It would prove I was okay. Along with a B. A., I'd have an R.N. after my name. I couldn't be sick if I was a nurse.

I needed to take preliminary courses, so I signed up at Westchester Community College to take nutrition and chemistry. We analyzed the nutritional content of food. The teacher brought in the milk carton, and we studied the information on the side. I wanted to impress the teacher with my knowledge so I sat in the front row munching Snickers bars: The TV commercials said that Snickers were nutritious and gave people energy. When we saw a movie about the famous nutritionist Jean Mayer, I got all excited. I went up after class and told the teacher I knew Dr. Mayer personally. I didn't. He had been the president of Tufts while I was there, but I had never met him.

In chemistry class, I found myself leaving the room two or three times in each ninety-minute lecture out of sheer antsiness. Sometimes when there was a break, I just left and went home. I missed tests and pop quizzes but it didn't matter. On the first day of class I had seen the periodic table of the elements. My eyes had zoomed in on the “Li“—lithium. I knew all about this element in a very intimate way. I even ingested it. From then on, what I did in class never really mattered. The very fact that I knew what lithium was made me feel superior to everyone else.

I couldn't concentrate. I couldn't sit still. Too many things were distorted in my brain. I wanted to be a nurse, but I didn't want to study. After a while, I just stopped going to class.

Even so, I was trying so hard that I almost never did anything inappropriate at Rye Psychiatric. Once, though, I passed my hand, palm side out, before the eyes of a catatonic patient, trying gently to bring him out of his inner world. Eddie Mae saw me and called me into her office.

“Don't ever do that again,” she scolded. “He could come to and be frightened, and get out of control.”

Sometimes patients sensed my wildly fluctuating moods. One patient went to Eddie Mae, confused and flustered.

“What did I do wrong?” she asked. “Lori seems so depressed I think she must be mad at me.”

Again Eddie Mae called me in. Had I done anything off-limits, like confiding my personal history of mental illness to this patient? I told her I hadn't. And I lied about my moods.