Quiet Room - Lori Schiller [81]
By late high school, I had worked myself into a pretty gloomy state. I hung around in my room writing poems about death. I thought about suicide a lot and got my parents all riled up. They tried to say all the right things.
“This is all part of growing up,” they said. “We went through it when we were your age.” But I didn't believe them. I thought I was a real loser, a real failure.
When I chose Tulane as my college it was my first assertive step away from my family and toward independence. Tulane, in New Orleans, wasn't exactly the kind of place kids from Scarsdale went to college. In Scarsdale, if you didn't get into Harvard or Princeton or Yale, then you went to Brandeis or Colgate or Tufts. Very few people ventured even to Chicago to go to Northwestern, or to the University of Chicago. And it was almost unheard of to go south as I did.
That was fine with me. I wanted something completely different. I liked the warm weather. I liked that fact that Tulane was a big school. I liked the fact that it was a major party school, and that accomplishment seemed a secondary consideration. I liked the fact that I could be at the top of the class here, and would be one of the smartest people. I wanted to start over. I wanted to have fun.
It worked.
I enjoyed Tulane. Out of the pressure cooker of Scarsdale High School, I achieved as never before. I got lots of As. I was elected to an honor society. I was a member of a fraternity. I was popular. People liked me. I liked being somewhere where I was only known as myself, and not just as Marvin's son—or Lori's brother.
After college Chicago became another place for me to start over, just as New Orleans had been. I did well at my work. I was clearly going to be promoted. And then in a small neighborhood bar in November of 1985, I met Sally, a girl I had known vaguely at Tulane. I had been in Chicago since August. I had had a few dates since I had arrived, but Sally was different.
She was attractive, she was funny, and she was smart and easy to talk to. Since we had gone to the same college we had something to talk about on our first dates. We went to blues clubs and to bars. We went dancing. She fixed her friends up with my friends and we all double-dated. We went out on our first date in early December. By January we were seeing each other four or five times a week.
Early on in our relationship I told her about Lori. I was worried. I didn't know how she was going to react. But Sally was great. She was sympathetic, but not too sympathetic. Interested, but not too curious. Willing to listen, but not too eager to pry. I was relieved.
Nonetheless, as Thanksgiving and the trip home rolled around, I got more and more nervous. Sally had only met my mother once, and she had never met Steven. I was worried that my family was going to come on too strong. I was worried that Lori was going to do something strange. I was worried that Sally would think Lori was weird, or be frightened of her or hate her. I was just plain worried.
As it turned out, I needn't have worried for Sally's sake. The Thanksgiving table was loaded with wonderful things to eat— turkey and stuffing, my mom's homemade ambrosia and homemade pies. There were fresh rolls filling the house with the smell of baking and pitchers of cider. Little turkey and Pilgrim and Indian figurines were scattered about the beautifully set table. What's more, there were guests there, and that relieved a lot of the tension. Our friends the Mossbergs had come with their two daughters, who were close to the ages of me and Lori and Sally. Having other young people around helped a lot.
Lori herself was more quiet than anything else. She seemed to be on a lot of medication. She slipped off fairly often to take quick