The Quiet Room Read Online Free PDF

composed.
    I had to conceal the fact that objects around me were beginning to feel hostile. Once I was in my bedroom alone when the phone rang. I picked it up and no one was there. A strange feeling settled over me. It rang again. Again no one. And then again, and again, and again. Always that same vacant feeling at the other end of the line. A part of my mind knew that there was a classmate at the other end of the line, playing tricks on me. And finally, I picked up the phone and screamed into it: “I know it's you! I know it's you!” But to the other part of my mind, the empty line took on the same eerie quality as my Voices. Why was this happening? What did the phone want of me?
    From then on, I became terrified of using the telephone. But I couldn't tell anyone why. So sometimes I hid behind a cloak of shyness. Sometimes I pretended I just didn't want to speak to the person at the other end of the line. Sometimes I just couldn't avoid it, and at those times I gingerly took the receiver, never knowing what horrors were going to slide down the telephone line to my brain.
    In the evenings, the television became fearsome. Steven and Mark and I could watch
Gilligan's Island
or
The Brady Bunch
or
The Flintstones
. Those were okay, and I even enjoyed them. But in the evening, my parents would put on the evening news. When Walter Cronkite appeared on the screen, he began talking directly to me. As he spoke, he gave me great responsibility. He told me of the problems of the world, and what I must do to fix them. I couldn't handle it. I would immediately leave the family room, and head for my bedroom.
    Mom and Dad never let me go without a fight. They wanted to have all of us together in the evening, and didn't like to feel that any of their kids were cut off from the family. So often, reluctantly I came back. I lay on the couch with my face to the wall, and pulled a blanket over my head. I had to block out Walter Cronkite's face and voice. He was telling me that it was my job to save the world, and that if I didn't, I would be killed.
    I couldn't listen to him. I just couldn't. He was giving me responsibilities that belonged to God and to no one else. How was I, a seventeen-year-old girl, able to complete a task as overwhelming as saving the world?

3
    Lori Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts, September 1977–June 1981
    For a long time relief came more often than torment. The Voices and sounds left me alone enough to let me finish high school and apply to college. My choices were reasonable ones: Harvard, because it was the best, and I always wanted to be the best; Northwestern, because it had a good journalism program, and I was interested in writing; Tufts for its prestige; and Bucknell because it was a middle-of-the-road safety school. I thought I had a pretty good chance of getting into any of my choices since my high school grade point average despite my troubles was 3.9.
    The previous fall Daddy drove me up to Boston for interviews. While 1 was at Tufts, I stuck a wad of chewing gum on the back wall of the bookstore. If I'm accepted here, I told him, next year I'll come back and see if the gum is still there. All winter I waited, and all spring I ran to the mailbox. I was accepted at Bucknell and Tufts, wait-listed at Harvard and rejected at Northwestern. That fall, I enrolled at Tufts. As my parents were helping me move into my dorm, I walked over to the bookstore. The gum was still there. It was fate.
    At first college life was wonderful. In fact, everything I did had a kind of sheen to it, an exciting biting edge. And academically it seemed I could do anything, even though I decided right from the outset that I had no intention of chaining myself to a seat in the library.
    In the middle of my first year, I moved in with Tara Sonenshine from Long Island. Tara and I were really tight buddies. Later we met another Lori, Lori Winters from St. Louis, and the three of us became inseparable.
    Back home, I was a big shot,