Quiet Room - Lori Schiller [7]
To this day I do not know why I did it. I try to imagine the evil impulses and anger that must have led to such a crime. In my thoughts over the years, I have punished myself over and over again for having committed such a terrible sin against an innocent creature.
But there is one big problem with this memory: It isn't true. It never happened.
My mom and dad say we never had such a dog. They say that the incident I remember so clearly never took place. My younger brothers, Mark and Steven, agree. We had only one family dog when I was growing up—not medium-sized and black, but a tiny gray miniature schnauzer. She died, not a brutal death, but a poignantly normal one when Steven took her to the vet to be put to sleep in her old age after a long, comfortable life. The vivid memory of the dog I murdered, my family tells me, is something my troubled mind conjured up years later, long after I became ill.
My increasingly healthy mind tells me they are right. The further I progress toward sanity, the more such dark images are fading, letting my real memories of my real childhood peep through.
Instead of such horrors, when I look back today on my childhood I find few signs of the illness that was secretly growing within me. I don't find a past filled with fear and violence and conflict. I don't find a troubled childhood of abuse and rage.
What I find instead is an exceptionally happy childhood, filled with love and comfort, fun and friendship. And the most compelling images of my past are not those of rage and hurt, but are instead of a girlhood of the most ordinary and tranquil sort.
“Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall, ninety-nine bottles of beer … you take one down and pass it around, ninety-eight bottles of beer on the wall. Ninety-eight bottles …”
It was the summer of 1970, we were driving across the country, and I thought we would drive my father crazy. Between our endless singing and our endless demands for bathroom stops, we kids were being wickedly, deliberately, irritating.
“Daddy, I have to go to the bathroom again.”
“I'm hungry.”
“I'm Yugoslavia.”
“That's stupid.”
“You're stupid.”
“Mommy, Mark called me stupid.”
“Daddy, I have to go to the bathroom.”
My father threatened, my mother suggested car-spotting games. But still we persisted. “I have to go to the bathroom, Daddy. I have to go to the bathroom.” Finally, after a couple of hours of this, Daddy snapped.
“I don't want anyone to mention bathroom to me for the rest of the trip,” he announced in exasperation. Well, that held us—for about two minutes. Then in somber tones one of us shouted over the front seat: “I have to go to the bathroom—Bob,” and collapsed in fits of giggles. And for the rest of the trip we made our bathroom requests, not to our dad, but to our new imaginary friend. “I have to go to the bathroom, Bob,” we shouted, knowing from the look on our parents’ faces as they tried to stifle laughter that we had won. “I have to go to the bathroom, Bob.”
I was eleven years old, Mark was eight, Steven was five, and the whole Schiller family was on the move again. I had been born in Michigan where my father, a graduate student from the Bronx finishing up his Ph.D. in psychology at Michigan State had met and married my mother, the daughter of a prosperous department store owner. When my dad graduated and got his first job, the three of us moved to Chicago where Mark was born. When I was six, my father was promoted, and we all moved to Los Angeles, where .Steven was born.
Now, five years later, Daddy was being promoted again and we were all moving east. For us kids, this trip was great fun. For two weeks, we were trekking past the Petrified Forest, to the Grand Canyon, through Indian reservations in New Mexico and the seemingly endless drive across Texas. We saw men in cowboy