Quiet Room - Lori Schiller [28]
It was fear.
Was whatever it was that had happened to Lori going to happen to me? Was there going to be a day down the road when my parents would lock me away? If it had happened to Lori, why couldn't it happen to me? They said this was a genetic problem, and I had the same genes she did.
My fear was all the more acute because for as long as I could remember Lori was what I was going to be when I grew up. When I was little, one of the first things I remember thinking was that I wanted to be older like Lori. When I was in grade school, she was already in high school, which seemed like the place to be. When I went to camp, she was already a counselor, and that meant power and authority. When I was eleven, all I wanted to be was seventeen, because Lori was seventeen and she had it all. Lori's life looked so glamorous that I often, enjoyed fantasizing about the day when I would be able to do the things she was doing.
That was especially true when I got into high school and she was in college. I was having a miserable adolescent time of it. But Lori gave me a break. She invited me up for a weekend at college with her friends. She and her roommates Tara and Lori Winters took me to do all the fun things that college kids do in Boston. We walked around the Common and looked at the sights of the city. We went to the original Steve's and made our own sundaes from homemade ice cream. Lori filled her pockets with M&Ms when the guy behind the counter wasn't looking. We even went to the top of the Hyatt and watched the city from the rotating bar. We picked the raisins from the trail mix on the tables near where we were sitting. We made jokes when the waiter threw us out because I was underage. To me, a miserable gawky high school sophomore, it all seemed unbelievably exciting. I left Boston thinking: In a few years this will be me. What's happening to Lori now will happen to me soon.
So now, a year later, I worried that in illness too, Lori's fate would be mine.
My dad's behavior was troubling. After Lori became ill, Dad suddenly changed the way he behaved toward me. For years he had pushed us all to achieve, to do the hardest things possible. But this summer, as I was preparing to enter my senior year in high school, he began to urge me to take the easiest classes possible, even perhaps remedial classes. I thought Lori's illness was a result of the way my parents treated her. I began to feel that he thought the same thing I did—that he had caused Lori's illness, and that he was afraid of causing it in me.
Finally I summoned up enough courage to talk to my dad.
“Dad I'm having problems, and I think I need to see a psychiatrist,” I said Then I held my breath and waited.
He looked at me for a very long time. Finally, he spoke very seriously.
“ If you think you need to see a psychiatrist, of course you can go see one,” he said very slowly. “But, Steven—I don’ think you need one.” He paused. “Why do you think you do?”
I didn't really have an answer. And I never did see a psychiatrist. I guess I just wanted to see how he'd react. To see if he'd laugh, or look scared, or agree that I needed help.
My fears had one other powerful side effect: I refused to visit Lori in the hospital. Party I was just being selfish. I didn't know what I'd say. I didn't know how to act. But partly, I was thinking about myself. When I had visited Lori at Tufts it had been like I was looking into a mirror at my own future. I couldn't go visit her at Payne Whitney and look into that mirror.
8
Nancy Schiller Payne Whitney Clinic, New York, August 1982–September 1982
Click. Click. Click. Click.
Every night the tap of my high heels on the steaming pavement sounded a drumbeat as I walked from the subway to the hospital. One. Two. Three. Four. Shoulders back. Chin up. Head high. “If you can keep up a good front for your co-workers and clients, you can do it for Lori,” I told myself. I had to keep control. I couldn't let her see me cry. I had to be cheerful, and upbeat and smiling and supportive. I had to play the role.
All the way on