Quiet Room - Lori Schiller [47]
My brothers didn't offer any help. Basically they kept their distance.
They had their own lives to live. Sometimes I would catch sight of Steven in the family room where his friends were drinking Coke and watching TV. He was all wrapped up in his job selling produce at Cherry Lawn Farm, and making his plans to go to college. I didn't resent him going on with his own life. I had been to college. I had had that experience. This time it was his turn.
I did resent Mark though. It was Mark who was living the life I wanted to live. He was graduating from college, going to graduate school, moving to an apartment in the city, living the young, single life-style that was supposed to be mine. I wanted to live Mark's life. I even wanted to be him. It certainly would be better than being myself.
I had nothing to do and nowhere to go. I spent the rest of the summer lounging by the pool at my parents’ country club. I was extremely self-conscious. I had gained so much weight since I had gone into the hospital. I felt like everyone was looking at me. I didn't fit in anymore.
It wasn't just in my head. People didn't know how to act around me. I could hear the chatter of my parents’ friends as I strolled to the pool.
“Is she hearing voices now?”
“Does she remember who we are?”
“Can she still talk and carry on a conversation?”
“Is she going to change into another personality?”
“I think even though they let her out, she still may be crazy.”
“Can you believe she's actually had shock treatment?”
“Poor Nancy and Marvin. What a tragedy …”
It almost made me long for the hospital. At least in the hospital I was just another patient, and not a freak.
12
Lori Scarsdale, New York, September 1983–May 1984
I was never without music. I'd wake up in the morning to music that had been playing all night. I drove my car flipping stations until I found one that I liked. When I came home, I made a beeline to my bedroom and immediately, like a reflex, turned on the stereo.
Sometimes I'd listen to music just to cover up the sound of the Voices. I'd turn up the music and focus on it instead of on the sounds in my head. Sometimes the Voices tried to shout over the music, and sometimes they succeeded. But often I could drown them out with tunes. Sometimes the music from the stereo was enough. But often, when the Voices were energetic, I'd have to do more. I'd plug a Walkman in my ears, turn the volume up to full strength and blast the suckers.
Music was a great mood bank. It was a kind of drug for me. It enhanced and tempered my moods. Just listening to the introduction of a favorite song was enough to make me feel some kind of exclamation-point emotion. Give me a dose of Al Jarreau and it picked up my spirits. Add a double dose of Neil Young to temper my feistiness. To get revved up, I popped a Pat Benatar cassette. Then I'd need a song to counter the wild state, so I'd play “Bridge over Troubled Water.” And then I'd chill out in the early morning with the song “Easy” by the Commodores:
Everybody wants me to be
What they want me to be
I'm not happy
When I try to fake it.
Stevie Wonder's music was upbeat and exciting. I found myself playing “Golden Lady,” swirling around and dancing with exhilaration and excitement alone in my room, feeling high as the Milky Way. Elton John, on the other hand, was in a category by himself. He was always the master of emotions, at both passionate ends of the musical spectrum. There were songs with powerful titles like “Funeral for a Friend.” There were wild songs like “Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting.” Elton John was my lithium. Elton Lithium John. We'll bottle him and keep him in the medicine cabinet, take as needed. Music is the doctor, as they say.
But if music was strong, my moods were stronger. More often than not I found that it wasn't the music that controlled my moods. It was my moods controlling the music. My moods would whirl around me, and seep