Quiet Room - Lori Schiller [9]
Growing up, I had always felt special. I was the oldest. I was the only girl. And I always liked having the center stage.
I loved attention. To get it, I usually chose achievement. I was the kid in the Spanish class with the best accent. I was always vying for the lead in the school play. When I was only picked literary editor—and not editor-in-chief—of the school publication, I was really upset. Whatever I did had to be done all the way.
Sometimes, though, I got my attention through pranks. I was always a show-off, and once I got myself kicked out of math class for stuffing a dissected frog into the light socket of the overhead projector where my teacher could find it when she went to see why it didn't work.
From when I was a little girl, I loved performing. I remember my favorite toy wasn't a Barbie or a bicycle. It was a Jerry Mahoney dummy that I got for Christmas one year. I learned to throw my voice, and I loved entertaining my parents with my little skits. I decided that when I grew up I would be a ventriloquist.
Scarsdale was filled with successful people—lawyers, doctors, stockbrokers—all of whom wanted their kids to be successful too. So demanding parents and competitive kids were nothing unusual. There was no question about whether you were going to college. Everyone went. The question was how good a school you could get into. Everyone was very aware of where they ranked in class, what activities they participated in, and what their SAT scores were.
Even in Scarsdale, though, other kids could occasionally goof off and come home with Bs and Cs. Not the Schiller kids. My parents were upset with anything less than an A. Other kids could hang out, listen to music and just fool around. My parents demanded that we play sports, get involved in school activities,
I suppose it was because they were both so successful themselves at whatever they did. My mom was beautiful, tall and slender with dark curly hair. Everything she did, she did well, from decorating the house to cooking dinner for fifty people, to being a room mother for the PTA.
And my dad—well, we were all so proud of my dad. He had come from a poor family in the Bronx, and had been the first person in his family to graduate from college. Now he had a Ph.D. My parents expected big things from themselves, and they expected big things from us too.
Mom and Dad drilled us endlessly in proper behavior. Keep your napkin in your lap. No elbows on the table. Spoon your soup away from yourself and don't snarf your food down faster than you can swallow.
They encouraged us in all our accomplishments, and loved to show us off. Whenever they had parties, they paid me and Mark and Steven to serve hors d'oeuvres for them. And when supper was over, Mom and Dad used to ask me to sing.
Actually, I had a voice like a crow, and I could barely carry a tune. If I sang alone in my room, I could almost always count on some smart aleck shouting up the stairs: “Lori, are you all right?” my father would call. “Is there a wounded animal in your room?” my mother would chime in. I was no great shakes on the guitar either. I had taught myself to play from a book, but I had such a bad sense of pitch that I had to keep going back to the music store where, laughing, they would retune the strings for me.
But still, I did what my folks wanted. With the guitar as my support, I played John Denver and James Taylor songs, because they were the easiest, and somehow managed to stay in tune. Even though it was hard, it was something I prided myself on. If I had to do something