The Quiet Room: A Journey Out of the Torment of Madness

Lori opens the chapter by reflecting on how music has become her tool to drown out the Voices. She uses it to either enhance or tamp down her moods and emotions.

Toward the end of her first summer back home, she starts looking for a job. She lands a job as a waitress at a new restaurant in Scarsdale. It is a dimly-lit, fashionable place, and a far cry from the more simplistic Mug ‘N Muffin, where she used to waitress while in college. She therefore finds the job a challenge, due to her inability to remember orders, the restaurant’s fast pace, and computer register terminals. The Voices, too, berate her as she works. So she switches to work the cocktail lounge in the restaurant on Friday and Saturday nights, which is much more doable. When a man is rude to her, the Voices begin to command her to hurt him. She does her job quickly and evades lingering contact with the Voices, afraid of what she might do at their behest.

Significantly, it is this job that introduces Lori to cocaine. She begins to use cocaine regularly in an attempt to feel better. While the psychiatric medications she is still on make her feel “fuzzy and disoriented, as if [she] were at the bottom of a swimming pool,” cocaine enlivens her and helps her to ignore the Voices (106). However, she inevitably crashes from the high, which makes her fiend for more.

Eventually, she meets a man named Raymond because of her cocaine habit: “Like drugs and music, Raymond took me away, for a little while, from all the pain. For before too long, he fell in love with me” (107). Raymond also has a live-in girlfriend, which makes the entire affair seem more exhilarating. Raymond is black, and while Lori finds him and his body very attractive, she knows that he is not the type of man that her parents would want for her. So she makes up lies to them in order to cover for the time that she spends with him. Although she enjoys being desired by Raymond, as well as his company, their relationship mostly revolves around doing cocaine together.

Soon enough, staying high becomes Lori’s singular goal in life. She begins going places with Raymond that she would never have dreamed of going before. She often ends up at the upstairs room of a tiny store in the South Bronx where a dealer works. One day, when Raymond leaves her alone in that room, she finds a rifle and tries to put it to her head. But her hands are so shaky, and the rifle so unwieldy, that she cannot manage actually using the weapon to kill herself.

Dr. Rockland, Gail, and her parents begin to worry about Lori. She knows that her accumulation of lies about both Raymond and her cocaine use are not fooling anyone, especially her parents.

At first, Marvin is very happy that Lori has gotten a job. He is also happy that Lori has joined a video-dating service, which produces an array of men knocking on the door to take Lori out. However, he knows that she is not fully well, and tries to help her “ease back into her own life” with “work and friends, meaning and purpose” (115). He tries to keep their interactions light and fun, devising games like finding and getting the cheapest gas around town, or going out for pretzels and soda.

Although Nancy prefers that Marvin keep the medical psychologizing to Lori’s professional team, Marvin is determined to use his expertise to help Lori. He insists that she talk to him about suicide—due to her two attempts—to the point of Lori feeling hounded by him. However, because of Lori’s need for his support and love, their relationship grows closer.

Professionally, Marvin and the colleagues he teamed up with have won the power struggle at the company, and Marvin has more work as a consequence. He is now in charge of fifteen offices scattered across the country, and must visit them often. He has told the company about Lori’s problems the past spring, and when her medical bills become overwhelming for him, he writes to the Board asking for help, which troubles his pride. However, they decide to help him as a one-time deal. He then keeps his personal struggles with Lori under wraps while at work.

However, he does tell the truth to his friends. He and Nancy agree that they can confide in their closest friends about Lori and their struggles with her condition. And they begin to revise the lies that they told to their friends in the past. Mostly, their friends are cordial and concerned about the news—but also stilted and at a loss for how to help, or entirely avoidant of asking questions about Lori. He and Nancy realize that they cannot go to their friends to gain support with Lori.

By the spring of 1984, both Marvin and Nancy become cognizant of an off-kilter pattern in Lori’s life, including her secretive habit of fielding phone calls at odd hours. They begin to see that one man in particular—Raymond—is calling very frequently, and Nancy tells Marvin that she suspects that Raymond is selling Lori drugs. Although Lori vigorously denies the allegation, she cannot hide the truth. Lori eventually breaks down and confesses, and Marvin forces her to enroll in a three-time-a-week drug treatment program which involves counseling, group therapy, and random urine tests. She is clean by August.

With the help of Dr. Rockland and a resume that omits her stints in the hospital, Lori lands a job at Rye Psychiatric Hospital Center, a small, open-door facility with thirty beds and a relaxing atmosphere. She aids patients in different groups, such as arts and crafts and art therapy. She also does a lot of paperwork, which she finds pleasure in. Eventually, the director of nursing gets Lori to admit that she herself has been in a psychiatric hospital. However, Lori is, miraculously, not fired. Soon enough, Lori is working overtime at the hospital. She writes, “I discovered I was good at the work, I was a hard worker, a good writer, and conscientious” (125).

She tries very hard to be normal, and often goes on errands with her mother. When a pharmacy owner and his assistant, who have known Lori for years, do not recognize her one day, she laments her weight gain and reveals that she hates her reflection in the mirror. When Dr. Rockland encourages her to exercise, she begins to take jogs around town.

Lori also enrolls in preliminary nursing classes, using the logic, “I couldn’t be sick if I was a nurse” (126). However, she cannot maintain her focus during class, and soon drops out. She also cannot hide her moods from the patients at Rye Psychiatric, and the head nurse chastises or questions her several times. Lori lies to cover for her mistakes. After a year of working there, Lori applies to a job at New York Hospital. She sees the prospect of working at New York Hospital as someone who used to be treated there as a chance to secure her ultimate triumph.

Also, she assists in the electroshock therapy of a patient at Rye Psychiatric. Unable to remember any of her own electroshock treatments, of which there were more than twenty, she desires to witness one, in order to reclaim a part of her life. Her job is to hold the patient down, and she finds the entire experience horrifying. She then begins working in the recovery room, where it is her job to gently orient patients to where they are when they come to from anesthesia.

Lori forms a special relationship with a 16-year-old Puerto Rican patient named Carla. Carla is drawn to Lori, and often goes to her for reassurance. When Carla confides that she contemplates suicide, and feels that her family would be relieved if she killed herself, Lori recognizes herself in the girl. She repeats the same counsel that she received from mental health professionals: assertions about hope for the good times ahead. And although Carla is eventually discharged without trying to hurt herself, Lori is not sure that she believes her own words to Carla.

Suicide, once again, is on Lori’s mind. The Voices are berating her very loudly, and Dr. Rockland’s advice to make fun of the Voices as a way of coping makes her feel that Dr. Rockland is making fun of her.

She tries to obtain a gun several times and fantasizes about the outsized suicide that she feels her outsized despair necessitates, including jumping out of a moving car, pouring a can of gasoline on her head before jumping off a bridge, and sneaking into the cage of a dangerous animal at the zoo. The prospect of suicide offers permanent relief from the Voices.

Then, one night, she takes what she knows is an overdose of Mallaril, a very strong tranquilizer, and cuts her wrists. However, she panics and awakens her father, who immediately springs into action. He drives her to the hospital and waits by her side for the whole night as a crisis team tends to her.

Interestingly, the suicide attempt does quell the Voices, and brings Lori a sense of relief for the next several months. Feeling much better, she books a trip to Morocco with the Tufts alumni association. However, the trip is a disaster, as Lori turns out to be the lone single young person amid a group composed entirely of the elderly, couples, or families with young children, and she finds Morocco very displeasing. She has switched to Thorazine after the suicide attempt, and Thorazine makes her extremely sensitive to the sun, from which she can find no relief in Morocco. So she stops taking Thorazine and consequentially becomes actively psychotic.

She soon meets a man named Mohammed who offers to get her high on “real Moroccan hashish” (135). She accepts, but he takes her to a remote place and tries to rape her, instead. However, he cannot penetrate her, no matter what he tries.

After that, she manages to get a call out to Dr. Rockland, but only reaches his voicemail. She leaves a message stating only her name and that she is in trouble.

When she makes it back home, she begins to feel very irresponsible. The Thorazine makes her feel like she is on the verge of a coma, and the Nardil, an antidepressant that she is also on, requires a special diet which she tauntingly breaks while bragging about her transgressions to Dr. Rockland. She also begins to drive recklessly again.

Dr. Rockland then suggests another hospitalization for Lori, which infuriates her. When she says that she will kill herself before she goes back to a hospital, the doctor’s rejoinder is that he thinks she already is trying to kill herself. Thus, with the chiding of her parents as well, Lori is convinced. She ends up at New York Hospital. In a twist of bitter irony, she receives a letter offering her a job at that same hospital a week into her stay.