Quiet Room - Lori Schiller [16]
None of us at college could put our fingers on what was wrong. At first, it simply seemed as if she was depressed because she was so fun-loving and we were all such grinds. Often it seemed she would get into scrapes just to get our goats. That business about jumping out of the airplane, for example. Here we were—a bunch of girls who were scared to go up in glass elevators and she pulled a stunt like that. We just thought she was trying to get our attention.
By senior year, though, a secret side of Lori began to emerge. Some of us suspected she might be doing drugs. She just seemed so up sometimes, and so down other times, and we never could predict which it would be. When she refused to come out of her room, and refused to go to class some days, Tara and I got a little concerned. “What should we do about Lori?” Tara and I asked each other.
Still, we were just college kids and college kids were melodramatic. It was even a bit fashionable for people to talk about being neurotic, and about having nervous breakdowns from stress. Surely there were other people—people in authority, grownups—who must be more aware than we. We knew she was seeing a psychiatrist, so obviously the problems were being handled.
The best thing we could do, we thought, was to try to make her cheerful. So we bought her chocolate chip cookies, went out late at night to Dunkin’ Donuts, took her to Provincetown on her birthday, and generally tried to jolly her out of her funks.
Some of our friends weren't sympathetic at all. In fact, a lot of the guys thought she was just bullshitting us. There was a group of eight men and eight women who all went out dancing or to dinner together. One night Lori refused to leave her room to come with us and one of the guys exploded.
“What is the matter with that girl, anyway?” he complained to me. “It's not like she's got some big problem.”
“Yeah,” chimed in his friend. “She's cute, she's smart, her parents have all this money, people like her—what's she got to be depressed about?”
All around me I could feel people nodding silently. Lori should just snap out of it, they felt. I tried to be supportive. When I heard her up pacing at night I invited her into my room. There she would sit in the middle of the night, smoking and shaking and looking glum. But by the time we graduated, I was getting impatient too. I was getting tired of her funks. I didn't want to be her caretaker, and I didn't want to spend my first months out of college making excuses for her.
Still, I didn't feel like I had much choice. I had promised to live with her in New York back at a time when I thought what I was really going to do was go back home to St. Louis to work for IBM. When those plans changed, I felt I had to honor my commitment to Lori.
I tried to look on the positive side. When Lori was up she was great. And as for her problems, I knew that her parents had found her another therapist in New York, so there were responsible people who were aware of her condition. Too, I honestly thought a lot of the problem might have been Tufts. Now that we were away from that grind, and out in the real world, things would improve with Lori I was sure. What's more, we weren't very far from her home and her parents. There was a lot of support around. Nothing really bad would happen, I reasoned. Everything would be just fine.
And for a long time, it was fine. In the early part of the summer, we lived with her parents while we waited for our apartment to be ready. I knew Dr. and Mrs. Schiller well, and I had always liked them. Because I was from St. Louis and didn't always want to go home for short vacations, I often went to Lori's house. It was fun being there. Her mother was always warm and outgoing. She and Lori's father were always teasing each other and their children, and Lori always seemed to have such a nice, close relationship with her parents