Quiet Room - Lori Schiller [39]
Sometimes when we were talking and she would begin to follow the voices in her head, I would grab her by the shoulders.
“Lori!” I would scream at her. “Lori! Pay attention to me. Stay here. Stay with me. Lori! Look me in the eye.”
But when she looked at me, it was always with a secret in her eyes. “I know something you don't know,” her eyes were telling me. It was a knowing, superior look, a look that had in it great distance, and great pity, and at the same time, an enormous amount of suffering. “I can hear something you can't hear,” her eyes were saying.
And then one day, I recognized that look.
When the realization came, it was so sudden and so clear, I wondered why it had taken me so long to realize: I had seen the look in those eyes before. Not on Lori. No, my memories of those vacant eyes were much older than that. I had seen eyes like that—distant, remote, pitying, all-knowing, superior, preoccupied eyes—all the time when I was growing up. I had seen eyes like that on my mother.
My mother!
Suddenly it all made sense. My poor, scattered, bewildered, on-the-edge mother. Looking at my daughter, I saw my mother and suddenly I understood everything that had made no sense when I was a child. Suddenly I understood my mother's strange helplessness. I understood her odd behavior, the behavior no one ever spoke of at home. She was always talking to herself and eating her dinner in strange places. I remember seeing her take her plate into the bathroom to eat before the mirror, studying herself carefully as she took each bite. I saw in a new light the strange spells of false anger that seemed to come from nowhere and be caused by nothing. And her fainting spells that her brothers and sisters said she used to have even as a child— “to get attention” they said—suddenly even those made sense.
Everything fell into place. There were her regular disappearances. Every so often my mother would suddenly leave to visit her “cousin” in Florida—“to rest,” people said. Only I knew what was never spoken about: There was no cousin in Florida. It was a Christian Science healer she was visiting.
Poor people are crazy, they say, and rich people are eccentric. My mother was rich, and so she was allowed to be eccentric. But now, looking at Lori, I realized that my mother hadn't been eccentric. She had been sick. And now I saw that sickness repeated in her granddaughter. For if Lori was schizophrenic, then so was my mother.
With a shock, I remembered the shame I had felt as a child. I remembered my mother meeting my friends, with an odd smile on her face.
“It's so lovely to meet you,” she said in a girlish falsetto, prancing and swirling around like a marionette. Then the sudden fade-outs while she was talking, and the all-knowing, superior grin as she retreated into a world of her own. I watched my friends cover up their snickers, and I wanted to die from embarrassment.
Memories, long buried, came flooding back. Troubling, frightening memories that I had long ago tried to push aside. Memories that horrified me when they came bubbling to the surface. For my mother had not been the only one in our family who was sick, I now realized. Far from it.
I began to think back. Cousin Sylvia. How long had it been since I had thought of Sylvia? Sylvia had been a constant source of fear and embarrassment to me. Sylvia was “crazy as a loon” everyone said when I was growing up. She was fat and slovenly and always wore shoes with holes cut out around her bunions and calluses. She had flyaway gray hair and a triple chin. When she smiled you could see the spaces where teeth were missing.
As a child, I was frightened of this woman. She came every day and sat in the shoe department of my father's store, screaming and screaming.
“They're going to come and take your feet away,” she screamed one day when