Quiet Room - Lori Schiller [12]
The previous fall Daddy drove me up to Boston for interviews. While 1 was at Tufts, I stuck a wad of chewing gum on the back wall of the bookstore. If I'm accepted here, I told him, next year I'll come back and see if the gum is still there. All winter I waited, and all spring I ran to the mailbox. I was accepted at Bucknell and Tufts, wait-listed at Harvard and rejected at Northwestern. That fall, I enrolled at Tufts. As my parents were helping me move into my dorm, I walked over to the bookstore. The gum was still there. It was fate.
At first college life was wonderful. In fact, everything I did had a kind of sheen to it, an exciting biting edge. And academically it seemed I could do anything, even though I decided right from the outset that I had no intention of chaining myself to a seat in the library.
In the middle of my first year, I moved in with Tara Sonenshine from Long Island. Tara and I were really tight buddies. Later we met another Lori, Lori Winters from St. Louis, and the three of us became inseparable.
Back home, I was a big shot, a college girl. My brother Mark seemed to feel depressed a lot, and when I came home on weekends or for vacations I tried to cheer him up, and give him advice on how to handle the problems he felt he had. Sometimes I would squire him around in my car, because he didn't have his license yet. Life seemed exhilarating.
Although the Voices still hovered around from time to time, fading in and out, disturbing my peace, they were much softer than they had been at camp, and in high school. They were more like chatterboxes in the back of my brain, talking to each other about me, narrating my every move. Most of the time I could retreat into sleep, and they wouldn't follow. If I couldn't sleep, I would close my eyes and take a series of deep breaths. “You're not crazy,” I would chant to myself. “You're not possessed by the devil.” Then I would silently address the Voices: “Please,” I would beg, “please leave me alone.”
Back at school that spring I decided on a whim to go skydiving. Some friends and I drove out to Turners Falls for a course on how to jump out of an airplane. It all happened so quickly. In the morning, they taught us how to drop the streamer to test the wind, to jump backward from the plane, to pull the emergency cord if the chute didn't open, and to drop gently, with bent legs. In the afternoon, we went up.
Standing on the little step just outside the plane, clutching on to the wing supports, I looked down at the little streamer drifting to earth as we circled the jump site, and I froze with fear. We circled once, circled twice. I wouldn't let go. Finally the instructor peeled my hands off, and pulled me back in the plane.
I knew I had to do it. The next time around I forgot everything they had told me, and just jumped, praying to God the chute would open. For the first few seconds, all I saw was black. I felt sick to my stomach. Then a pop, a tug, and there I was soaring through the air.
“I can fly! I can fly!” I shrieked to the big quiet sky.
The next fall, Tara and I moved into Wren Hall, the dorm right on the Quad where everything happened. We could lean right out of our windows and shout down to our friends passing below. We had upper-class friends who helped us get parking passes, and we were set.
I had lots of friends, both men and women. I was always the one who found things to do off campus. Disco was big then and I found fun places to go dance. I would find the neatest guys in bars, and arrange parties for everyone.
I dated a lot. There was a big, good-looking medical student