Quiet Room - Lori Schiller [11]
We're reading The Bell Jar in English. I absolutely hate it! I have never been so emotionally upset about a book before. The symptoms of the crack-upped Sylvia Plath-Esther Greenwood are me. Of course not everything, but enough. Maybe I'm descending into madness myself. Especially with the wounds of this past wonderful summer being remembered. I'm so upset. I didn't sleep for 23 nights. Esther G. only didn't for 21. I always put myself down, note the bad and not the good, am paranoid, am the A student who would seem least likely to … am afraid to commit myself to relationships, have an alias for all sorts of weird things (at least I don't have to worry about not eating or washing my hair) and don't know who or what I really am. I'm scared and afraid. I want so badly for [my teacher] to understand my fears and set me at ease, but she can't and doesn't. We will be finishing discussing the book next week …
I had always wanted my parents to be so proud of me. It was so important to me that I reflect well on them. So how could I destroy my parents by letting them know their daughter was possessed? At all cost, I had to keep it from them.
So for my last year of high school, as the Voices came and went without warning, I played a game of cat-and-mouse. I kept on going to school, I kept on studying. I went to the prom, applied to college, went skiing with my friends, listened to music or talked about guys with Gail. But always I had to be on my guard. When the Voices began to shriek, I had to stay composed.
I had to conceal the fact that objects around me were beginning to feel hostile. Once I was in my bedroom alone when the phone rang. I picked it up and no one was there. A strange feeling settled over me. It rang again. Again no one. And then again, and again, and again. Always that same vacant feeling at the other end of the line. A part of my mind knew that there was a classmate at the other end of the line, playing tricks on me. And finally, I picked up the phone and screamed into it: “I know it's you! I know it's you!” But to the other part of my mind, the empty line took on the same eerie quality as my Voices. Why was this happening? What did the phone want of me?
From then on, I became terrified of using the telephone. But I couldn't tell anyone why. So sometimes I hid behind a cloak of shyness. Sometimes I pretended I just didn't want to speak to the person at the other end of the line. Sometimes I just couldn't avoid it, and at those times I gingerly took the receiver, never knowing what horrors were going to slide down the telephone line to my brain.
In the evenings, the television became fearsome. Steven and Mark and I could watch Gilligan's Island or The Brady Bunch or The Flintstones . Those were okay, and I even enjoyed them. But in the evening, my parents would put on the evening news. When Walter Cronkite appeared on the screen, he began talking directly to me. As he spoke, he gave me great responsibility. He told me of the problems of the world, and what I must do to fix them. I couldn't handle it. I would immediately leave the family room, and head for my bedroom.
Mom and Dad never let me go without a fight. They wanted to have all of us together in the evening, and didn't like to feel that any of their kids were cut off from the family. So often, reluctantly I came back. I lay on the couch with my face to the wall, and pulled a blanket over my head. I had to block out Walter Cronkite's face and voice. He was telling me that it was my job to save the world, and that if I didn't, I would be killed.
I couldn't listen to him. I just couldn't. He was giving me responsibilities that belonged to God and to no one else. How was I, a seventeen-year-old girl, able to complete a task as overwhelming as saving the world?
3
Lori Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts, September 1977–June 1981
For a long time relief came more often than torment. The Voices and sounds left