The Quiet Room (3 page)

Along the way I have lost many things: the career I might have pursued, the husband I might have married, the children I might have had. During the years when my friends were marrying, having their babies and moving into the houses I once dreamed of living in, I have been behind locked doors, battling the Voices who took over my life without even asking my permission.

Sometimes these Voices have been dormant. Sometimes they have been overwhelming. At times over the years they have nearly destroyed me. Many times over the years I was ready to give up, believing they had won.

Today this illness, these Voices, are still part of my life. But it is I who have won, not they. A wonderful new drug, caring therapists, the support and love of my family and my own fierce battle—that I know now will never end—have all combined in a nearly miraculous way to enable me to master the illness that once mastered me.

Today, nearly eighteen years after that terrifying summer, I have a job, a car, an apartment of my own. I am making friends and dating. I am teaching classes at the very hospital at which I was once a patient.

Still, I have been to a place where all too many people are forced to live. Like all too few, I have been permitted to return. I want to tell others about my journey so that those who have never experienced it will know what life inside of my schizophrenic brain has been like, and so that those who are still left behind will have hope that they too will find a path out.

2

Lori Scarsdale, New York, August 1970” Augyst 1977

As I look back on my childhood, one memory plagues me. It is the memory of the afternoon of the dog.

I remember that when I was young my family had a medium-sized black mongrel. He was kept chained to a door, unable to move very far in one direction or another. One day as I was in the kitchen with him I suddenly grew very angry.

In a burst of rage, I grabbed a nearby golf club and began beating the dog furiously. At first he barked hysterically. But because of the chain, he could not escape. He began to foam at the mouth. As I beat him, one by one his legs collapsed. He kept struggling to rise, but I wouldn't let him. I kept hitting him, and hitting him, and hitting him. He fell to the ground. Then he stopped barking. His body writhed in horrible spasms, blood dribbling from his ears and mouth. After a while he stopped moving. Dead.

To this day I do not know why I did it. I try to imagine the evil impulses and anger that must have led to such a crime. In my thoughts over the years, I have punished myself over and over again for having committed such a terrible sin against an innocent creature.

But there is one big problem with this memory: It isn't true. It never happened.

My mom and dad say we never had such a dog. They say that the incident I remember so clearly never took place. My younger brothers, Mark and Steven, agree. We had only one family dog when I was growing up—not medium-sized and black, but a tiny gray miniature schnauzer. She died, not a brutal death, but a poignantly normal one when Steven took her to the vet to be put to sleep in her old age after a long, comfortable life. The vivid memory of the dog I murdered, my family tells me, is something my troubled mind conjured up years later, long after I became ill.

My increasingly healthy mind tells me they are right. The further I progress toward sanity, the more such dark images are fading, letting my real memories of my real childhood peep through.

Instead of such horrors, when I look back today on my childhood I find few signs of the illness that was secretly growing within me. I don't find a past filled with fear and violence and conflict. I don't find a troubled childhood of abuse and rage.

What I find instead is an exceptionally happy childhood, filled with love and comfort, fun and friendship. And the most compelling images of my past are not those of rage and hurt, but are instead of a girlhood of the most ordinary and tranquil sort.

“Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall, ninety-nine bottles of beer … you take one down and pass it around, ninety-eight bottles of beer on the wall. Ninety-eight bottles …”

It was the summer of 1970, we were driving across the country, and I thought we would drive my father crazy. Between our endless singing and our endless demands for bathroom stops, we kids were being wickedly, deliberately, irritating.

“Daddy, I have to go to the bathroom again.”

“I'm hungry.”

“I'm Yugoslavia.”

“That's stupid.”

“You're stupid.”

“Mommy, Mark called me stupid.”

“Daddy, I have to go to the bathroom.”

My father threatened, my mother suggested car-spotting games. But still we persisted. “I have to go to the bathroom, Daddy. I have to go to the bathroom.” Finally, after a couple of hours of this, Daddy snapped.

“I don't want anyone to mention bathroom to me for the rest of the trip,” he announced in exasperation. Well, that held us—for about two minutes. Then in somber tones one of us shouted over the front seat: “I have to go to the bathroom—Bob,” and collapsed in fits of giggles. And for the rest of the trip we made our bathroom requests, not to our dad, but to our new imaginary friend. “I have to go to the bathroom, Bob,” we shouted, knowing from the look on our parents’ faces as they tried to stifle laughter that we had won. “I have to go to the bathroom, Bob.”

I was eleven years old, Mark was eight, Steven was five, and the whole Schiller family was on the move again. I had been born in Michigan where my father, a graduate student from the Bronx finishing up his Ph.D. in psychology at Michigan State had met and married my mother, the daughter of a prosperous department store owner. When my dad graduated and got his first job, the three of us moved to Chicago where Mark was born. When I was six, my father was promoted, and we all moved to Los Angeles, where .Steven was born.

Now, five years later, Daddy was being promoted again and we were all moving east. For us kids, this trip was great fun. For two weeks, we were trekking past the Petrified Forest, to the Grand Canyon, through Indian reservations in New Mexico and the seemingly endless drive across Texas. We saw men in cowboy hats, had our pictures taken with oxen in reconstructed villages, played the license plate game, and—despite my father's warnings—continued to beg Bob for bathroom stops, especially when they could be combined with forays for hamburgers and fries at McDonald's.

But underneath, we were all a little uneasy. We had loved California. Our house had been modern and bright and airy, and we had a big yard and swimming pool.

New York seemed so foreign, and far away. Even my normally confident mother and father seemed a little unsure. They had decided Dad should accept the new job, had flown to New York, bought a house and returned in just a few days. So it was only partly a game when they began pointing out the most outlandish, tumbledown houses, teasing us and each other.

“Is that it, honey?” my father asked my mother, pointing at one old farmhouse with a sagging front porch. “Is that what our new house is like?”

And then a few miles later, my mother caught sight of a broken-down trailer. “Marvin! Marvin! That's it! That's it!” she cried excitedly to my father. And then, twisting around to address us kids in the back seat: “That's what our new house is like.” Later, they lapsed into stand-up comedy-type routines.

“Did we buy the house with the bathroom?” my mother asked my father.

“Yes, I think there's a bathroom,” he answered, deadpan.

All the way across the country, they bantered on like this until, as we neared New York, none of us was quite sure what to expect. We all knew they were joking, of course. But all the same, we almost collapsed with relief when we pulled into the driveway of the beautiful old white Colonial with black trim and a big backyard.

I ran through the house, eagerly inspecting the stairs up to the second floor, the family rooms downstairs and the bright bedroom that was going to be mine. “This is a cool house,” I told Mom and Dad.

As it turned out, we were very happy in Scarsdale, the New York suburb where we settled. Mom and Dad made friends. I settled in at school, sometimes walking there, sometimes biking. Little Steven took to kindergarten as if he had been going there all his life. And even Mark, who at first felt awkward and shy in his new neighborhood, eventually began to feel comfortable. The house really began to feel like home to us, with its big yard for snowmen and leaf piles, and even a kid's playhouse out back.

My mom and I made excursions to museums in the city, both dressed alike in red and white checked blouses and wire-rimmed sunglasses. We ate foot-long hot dogs and chocolate milk shakes, and laughed at people's outfits on the train on the way home. Dad played paddle tennis or shot hoops with Mark and Steven. On Sundays he played golf, and he often let me come along to drive the golf cart or walk the course with him and keep score.

Of course, I think our family could have been happy just about anywhere. Maybe it was because we moved so often that we never really got to know our other relatives. For us, the word “family” meant the five of us. We were all very close. One day when Daddy was taking pictures around the fireplace, he got irritated and raised his voice at me. I started to cry. And then, because I was crying, Steven started crying. Then Mark began sobbing, and pretty soon the whole family was in tears. No one of us could even feel anything without everyone else feeling it too.

We had a whole private language, that only we could understand. When someone was sick, we'd call the sick person Ill-ke Sommer. A Telly was a short haircut, as in Telly Savalas. If someone yelled “GPY,” it meant “God is Punishing You.” That was what happened when someone, say, Mark, stole the biggest French fry off my tray, and then burned the roof of his mouth.

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.