Quiet Room - Lori Schiller [56]
“Do you remember that we told you that Lori was working in Boston?” we said to our friends. “Well, she wasn't. She was actually in New York Hospital. She's attempted suicide a number of times, and she's really very ill.” We explained as best as we could what we understood was wrong with her, and we tried to explain that we had concealed it for Lori's sake, hoping to shield her from stigma.
People were polite and seemed concerned. “When did this happen?” they would ask. “What is happening with her now?” “I didn't realize.” Their expressions were sympathetic, but we could see they were shocked. Some seemed confused about what to think about her illness, about how to react to us, or to her.
We were surprised too. People didn't behave the way we had expected them to. Some of our closest friends had the hardest time dealing with the news. One couple in particular had been very close to us and to our children. But they seemed to be particularly uncomfortable. They never asked about Lori and never visited her in the hospital. In fact, very few people asked about her, and fewer still actually visited her. They didn't know what to do.
As time went on, I began to wish that our friends could understand better, or be more empathetic with our situation. But in a way, how could I blame them? We had such a hard time understanding and accepting the situation ourselves. How could we expect more from them? And after all, what did they know about mental illness? A few bizarre stories about serial killers or cannibals, or young men who went up in towers and shot at passers-by. Deep down, our friends were probably afraid of Lori, afraid of what she might do. In the end, Nancy and I realized that this was our struggle, not theirs, and that we couldn't look to anyone else to ease the pain or make things better.
As Lori settled into her job, we began to let ourselves believe that things were getting better. But then, in the spring of 1984, Nancy and I started detecting a strange pattern to Lori's life. Phone calls came at odd hours, and seemed to be from odd people. Sometimes when Lori answered the phone, she spoke in hushed tones. Sometimes, Nancy said, Lori would leave the house suddenly after one of the calls.
Nancy began noticing that a lot of the calls were coming from one man. I had met this guy before when he occasionally came to call for her at the house. His name was Raymond and he was black. That in itself didn't bother me. What bothered me was that his background seemed odd. Something about him made me uncomfortable too, a furtiveness and unease he seemed to exhibit around us.
“Marvin, I think that guy is selling drugs to Lori,” Nancy said one day.
Parents were always being admonished in those days to be alert for signs of drug abuse. Be on the lookout for unusual behavior, the public service announcements said. Watch for unexpected mood swings, running nose, tremors, bloodshot eyes. We watched, but what could we tell? We couldn't separate out her illness from anything else that might be affecting her. Lori's moods were so unstable that she had initially been diagnosed as manic-depressive. She slept so little that her eyes were often bloodshot. And she was taking so much prescription medicine that there was hardly a time when her hands didn't tremble.
At first if there were any signs we took them as positive. She had been so fat coming out of the hospital, and she had begun to lose some weight. Her moods seemed to get brighter.
For a long time my concerns about Raymond were of a different sort. I thought she was having a sexual relationship with him. That bothered me. I thought she could do better than that. I told her so.
“Are you having a relationship with this guy?”
“No, Daddy. He's just a friend. I need friends. You know you are always on my case to meet people. Well I met someone.”
The other boyfriends came and went. Lori let her membership in the dating service lapse. But still the phone calls continued. Nancy was getting more uneasy. She told