Quiet Room - Lori Schiller [53]
That was all right with us. We would head over about dinnertime and wait for a table in her section. I would order a burger or spare ribs and Nancy would get a salad from the salad bar. To my eyes, Lori was doing pretty well for someone who had just been locked up for almost a year in a psychiatric hospital. I would sit waiting for my food and watch her moving briskly through the crowds. She was lively and efficient, and she knew she was in the service business. I would watch her laughing and chatting with the customers, keeping up a cheerful repartee as she took orders and made change.
Sometime the previous fall she joined a video dating service. That seemed like another good sign. Even though Lori was living at home, Nancy and I thought she ought to be making a bigger effort to make friends with people her own age. She paid $500 for a subscription to the dating service, and I told her I thought it was a good investment.
Very seriously, she explained to me how the service worked. 1
“There was a lady off camera asking me all kinds of questions! about what kinds of guys I like, what kinds of things I like to do,| how I feel about different things.”
It seemed that she was given the chance to see similar videotapes! done of men, and select the ones she felt she'd like to date
“So if I pick Andrew and Scott, then the service calls them in and tells them someone's interested. They come in, see my video, and decide if they're interested in meeting me too.”
Lori was, like me, old-fashioned. She liked the idea that if the attraction was mutual, the woman's phone number was given to the man to call. The attraction must have been mutual a good bit that fall, for men were always showing up at the door. One man showed up with a big bouquet of roses. On another evening she returned home laughing: She had just had dinner with a magician who had performed his tricks over the meal.
All through the winter I loved to hear the phone ring. It meant to me that our Lori was back.
I was so grateful she was back, so grateful she was out of that hospital.
Now that she was out, I felt my job was to encourage her, to shepherd her along, to make sure that she didn't get stuck in the hospital system. I embarked on a program to encourage her. Marshal your forces, Lori, I told her. “You are in charge of the way you present yourself to others.” She was a fighter, a winner. She could pull it together and hasten her own recovery.
Although she was up off the bottom, I knew she wasn't altogether well. I had only to look at her to know that. I could see it in her eyes. From the time Lori was a baby, I used to say that Lori had devilish eyes. There was mischief in them, and intelligence and sparkle and fun. These eyes were dead, their stare vacant. Her walk was different too. Her arms hung lifelessly from their sockets. She looked like a zombie, moving as if walking in her sleep.
It wasn't the Lori we knew. But it was better than the Lori we had seen over the last several months. I figured that she was in the early stage of recovery. When she picked Dr. Rockland as her psychiatrist, we all agreed that what she needed was to be eased back into her own life. With work and friends, meaning and \ purpose, she would merge herself back into the life she had left behind.
Lori herself seemed to feel that way too. In May of the year before, just after Lori left the hospital, Nancy threw a wonderful party for my fiftieth birthday. It was at a restaurant in SoHo in Manhattan, and about two dozen of our family friends were there. Mark and Steven were with us, so it was the first time the whole family had been together in one spot in a very long time. The boys were getting punchy, acting silly, calling for a toast and then passing chunks