Quiet Room - Lori Schiller [78]
Deanna, my assigned social worker at Futura House, seemed like a goddess to me. She was older than I—maybe in her late thirties, with long blonde poodle-like hair. She had a lively, free-and-easy attitude toward life. She took courses, vacationed in interesting places. She had a neat husband, a man who owned an art gallery. She swam all the time, and was fit and relaxed. I wanted her to like me. I wanted to be like her.
Somehow we clicked in a way that Dr. Rockland and I never did. Every Monday at 4:00 P.M. Deanna and I had our weekly session. We met at the Futura House office and talked for as long as I could last.
I felt safe with her. She wasn't going to judge me, or reprimand me, or laugh at me. She wasn't going to send me to the state hospital if I said the wrong thing.
And I didn't feel bad if I didn't come up with heavy stuff to talk about. I didn't have to bring into sessions stuff about my childhood, or sexual experiences, or what I felt about my parents. We talked about day hospital, about my friends, about my lack of friends. I was still so restless from my inner turmoil that I needed to talk about it. Deanna opened doors of emotions for me to explore.
I guess I understood that I could have done this with Dr. Rock-land, but somehow sitting in his office with him smoking his phallic, Freudian cigar, I felt that if I didn't talk about sex, or my father, then I was being a bad patient. With Deanna I could just talk about whatever was on my mind at the moment.
She was supportive, always encouraging me to keep fighting. And I believed somewhere in my heart that she really did like me. That notion kept me going.
Robin, on the other hand, was clearly a bad influence on me. A resident like me, she was tall and blonde with hair down to the middle of her back, and an acne-scarred complexion. The only thing we really had in common was our diagnoses, both schizo-affective disorder. Still, we were pretty much inseparable. We spent a lot of time together smoking cigarettes and shooting the breeze.
Our pasts were completely different. Her parents hated each other; she couldn't believe mine were so close. She barely spoke to her mother; even when I was angriest at mine, we were still friends. I talked to Robin about my relationships with men. She talked to me about hers with women, for Robin was gay. I found speaking with Robin easy and comfortable. I hadn't had a buddy like her in a long time. Like Deanna, she was easy to talk to.
Unlike Deanna, she liked to egg me on into getting in trouble. Robin was into shoplifting in a big way. It scared me, but it was kind of exciting too. She always went for the challenge. We went into a college bookstore and she spirited off the biggest, fattest textbook she could find. Once we were in a Hallmark store and she spotted a coffee-table book on unicorns that she wanted. I didn't want us to end up in jail, so I dug into my own pockets for the money to pay for it. But before I could say anything, she had lifted it right out of the store. She was fast!
She urged me to try it. I didn't really want to. I was scared. But she was daring me, so I made an attempt. My heart was pounding and I was moving fast. But when Robin and I reconnoi-tered, she was completely unmoved by my efforts.
“Is that all?” she said when I pulled from my pocket a little green fluorescent marker, the first and last thing I was ever able to bring myself to swipe.
Robin and I worked out another little scheme we found mutually beneficial. I was prescribed a tranquilizer called Xanax, a kind of high-tech Valium, to take four times a day. I got into the habit of skipping a dose here and there to build up a reserve fund for emergencies. Then I got the bright idea that they could be a kind of currency.
From then on, I paid Robin in Xanax to do my household chores. We worked out an elaborate system. Different doses of Xanax were different colors. One color would be worth cleaning