Quiet Room - Lori Schiller [43]
Of course I did have my family. But even that had changed.
There we were again, 6:30 P.M. sharp around the dinner table, just as I remembered it from my childhood. But it was a pretty pale imitation of the old days. Like my friends, both my brothers were growing up and moving on with their lives. Mark wasn't there. He was in New Orleans, finishing up his senior year at Tulane, about to return to New York City to business school. Steven still lived at home. But he was at the end of his senior year in high school, had already been admitted to Johns Hopkins, and was hanging out with his own friends, doing his own thing.
So that left just me and Mom and Dad around the dinner table. And in place of the lively conversation I remembered from my childhood, there was now strained silence. What was I supposed to say to Mom and Dad? I felt a huge gulf between us. They had changed. They weren't proud of me. They hated me. I knew they loved me, of course, but they hated me too. They hated me, and they were afraid of me. The Voices told me so.
When my release from the hospital was first discussed, people in the hospital brought up the idea of a private-duty nurse. Shouldn't I have someone to stay with me while they were out of the house? Mom and Dad asked. I got angry with them. I would never consider such a thing. Never. Never. Never. I didn't need any more bodyguards. I had had enough of that in the hospital. I was out of the hospital, remember?
So at first, they took turns spending a lot of time with me. My dad took some time off from work, then my mom did. There was always someone around at first. What is Lori going to do? I was being watched like a prisoner, like a crazy person. When they began to leave me alone it was in frightened little jackrabbit bursts. Mom dashed to the country club across the street to drop off her golf shoes, and was back in eight minutes. I was okay. The next day a kamikaze run to the supermarket. Back in twenty minutes flat. Still okay. Was Lori going to bug out and try to kill herself again? No, Mom and Dad. That's over. I won't do that anymore. I promise. I'm better now. Really. Prettysoon, I got them to believe me. So Dad went back to work in the city, and Mom followed soon after.
They tried so hard to please me. They knew that food was one of the few pleasures left in my life, so they took me to eat anything I liked. General Tsao's chicken and moo shu pork with pancakes and hoisin sauce; pizza with the works and spaghetti; soft-shell crabs, and burgers and fries—I'd wolf down anything.
They also did everything they could to help me put together the pieces of my life. My mom took me shopping for clothes, and tried to encourage me. “Go out and meet young people,” my Dad said. “You won't have any kind of social life sitting around your room.” He even encouraged me to hang out where young people hung out. “Go to a bar,” he said. “You don't have to drink. Order a Diet Coke. Talk to people.” He was always giving me some pep talk. And at the end, he always said the same thing: “It's better than being in the hospital.”
But was it? I knew I hated the hospital. But the fact was, my memories of the past year were so foggy that I wasn't even completely clear what had happened in the hospital.
My last clear memory was of a morning in my apartment in the McAlpin. Lori Winters and I were leaning out the window, watching the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade roll by just beneath us. We were so close that the three-story-tall balloons were bobbing just about at eye level. Then the next clear memory I have is of lying strapped down in an ambulance, a pregnant nurse at my side, being transferred from the Payne Whitney Clinic in Manhattan to New York Hospital in Westchester. People told me that in between those two memories I had tried to commit suicide twice, and that I had already been in the hospital for several months. I didn't know whether to believe them or not.
These gaps in my memory were enormously frustrating. It was like everyone on