Quiet Room - Lori Schiller [29]
Every step of the way was a battle. First I stopped at Peppermint Park at the corner of 66th Street and First Avenue to buy ice cream. Lori loved ice cream. How many times when she was a teen had we looked at our thighs and laughed. “Who better deserves?” we would say. “Let's have a hot fudge sundae.”
So what was I hoping for? Did I think I could bring her back with a pint of rocky road? I felt like a jerk. How could I hope ice cream would cheer Lori up when even buying it made me dizzy with disbelief. The pink and green store awnings, ice cream parlor chairs and fake Tiffany windows infuriated me.
“Don't you know my daughter is on a locked ward at Payne Whitney, and she thinks she can fly?” I wanted to scream at the silly laughing clerks. “How dare you laugh? How can you be happy when there is so much misery in the world?” And at the back of my head, the ugly thought lurked: “How dare you be well when my Lori is so sick?”
From the ice cream store, I walked over to York Avenue. There I stopped at a flower cart between 66th Street and the hospital entrance on 69th. Buying Lori flowers was extravagant and stupid. She had retreated into her own world, and was barely noticing the room around her. What did she care about flowers? But every day I bought some just the same. I had to do something. Anything.
As I headed up to the locked ward on the third floor, I checked my reflection in the mirrored elevator doors, and gave myself one last pep talk: “Okay, Miss Sparkle Plenty, get your act together,” I ordered myself. “All right, Stella Stunning—it's show time!”
Lori was more than just my daughter. She was everything I had ever wanted. When she was a baby, she was my doll; when she got older, we were playmates. She was my friend, my confidante, my soul mate. She was the childhood I never had.
When I was a little girl, I would sit in the lilac tree in our backyard and dream of my future. I would be slim and beautiful. I would have a doctor for a husband. I would have a little daughter to hold in my arms. I would sing to her, laugh with her, dress her, cuddle her, play with her and shower her with all the love that I craved so much.
When I was growing up my parents rarely hugged me, or held me on their laps, or told me they loved me. Instead, they fought and argued constantly. My father was a shrewd businessman, cold and calculating. My sister thought he worshipped my mother. I thought he was an opportunist. I think he married my mother—who was very beautiful, very wealthy and very scattered—for her money.
In any case, they were terribly mismatched. My father was orderly, disciplined and focused. My mother was an artist, flighty, disorganized and indecisive. She always seemed overwhelmed by life, unable to cope, to discipline me and my sister, or to handle running a household.
Late at night, when I would hear them screaming and quarreling, I would run crying to my German nanny's bedroom for the only comfort I could get. In the morning, my mother would scream at me: “You are the cause of all my unhappiness.” She never wanted children, and didn't know how to handle them. “You're too loud” was all I ever heard. “You're too fat.” “Stand up straight!”
And as for my father, I adored him, and did everything I could to have him love me—including trying to be the son he wished he had had. I washed his cars, climbed trees, asked about his business. Of course, I was a complete failure, for in reality I was a terribly feminine child, caught up in my dolls and my dreams. When my father asked me to dance at the synagogue, I felt like a princess as we whirled and twirled. But he was a sadistic man, and to him it was a joke. He purposely tripped me and laughed as I lay, humiliated, on the floor in front of everyone.
Was it any wonder, then, that I married the first man who was good to me?