A Room with a Darker View Read online

  A ROOM WITH A DARKER VIEW

  A Room with a Darker View

  A ROOM WITH A DARKER VIEW

  Claire Phillips

  DoppelHouse Press | Los Angeles

  A Room with a Darker View:

  Chronicles of My Mother and Schizophrenia

  © Claire Phillips, 2020

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Cover design: Nike Schroeder

  Photograph by Mara Feder

  Book design: Jonathan Yamakami

  Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Phillips, Claire, 1965-, author.

  Title: A room with a darker view : chronicles of my mother and schizophrenia / Claire Phillips.

  Description: Los Angeles, CA: DoppelHouse Press, 2020.

  Identifiers: LCCN: 2020936498 | ISBN: 9781733957908 (pbk.) | 9781733957984 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH Phillips, Claire. | Schizophrenics--Family relationships--Biography. | Mother and child--Biography. | Mentally ill--Family relationships--Biography. | Schizophrenia--Treatment. | Schizophrenia--Relapse. | Psychiatric hospital Care--United States. | BISAC BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs. | PSYCHOLOGY / Psychopathology / Schizophrenia.

  Classification: LCC RC514 .P482 2020 | DDC 616.89/80092--dc23

  DoppelHouse Press | Los Angeles, California

  “It has been said of dreams that they are a ‘controlled psychosis,’ or, put another way, a psychosis is a dream breaking through during waking hours.”

  —Philip K. Dick, VALIS

  1 the small cramped dark inside you

  2 the creeping in the patterns

  3 a room with a darker view

  4 and it was running thin

  5 zinza

  6 relapse and recovery

  7 day-long obsession and torment

  8 love and disappointment

  1

  the small cramped dark inside you

  “And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter—they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long.”

  —Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

  1970–1980

  When the policeman arrived at the wrong house, fire extinguisher in hand, I immediately perked up. “5 Dorset Road is across the street,” my friend’s mother Mrs. Lochbaum declared. Registering that this uniformed man and the accompanying sirens of the fire truck in the distance were headed for my home, I skittered across the Lochbaum’s sloping green lawn to get a glimpse of the action.

  In no time a small crowd had gathered around the leafy property. There was no evidence of flames or smoke, or my mother, who had sequestered herself in her upstairs bedroom of the two-thousand-square-foot, neo-colonial tract home in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, as she did most hot summer afternoons. Aroused by the energized crowd, at six years old I became determined to plant upon Jimmy English, a same-aged neighbor from up the street, a kiss. His unwillingness to be kissed only heightened my enthusiasm. As I chased the small boy with the close-cropped reddish-brown hair about the steep slope of our front yard, between the tall tangle of sinister looking oaks and elms, doing my utmost to catch up with him, I grew dizzy with pleasure and excitement.

  Meanwhile inside the house, my mother, who had had her ear plugs in and was not easily roused, was busy explaining to the many uniformed men that she had only meant to keep the small saucepan on the stove for a short while, until the water had boiled, to make herself a cup of coffee. It was common for my mother to turn on the stove and leave the water boiling in a small saucepan, forgetting about it long enough for it to burn completely dry, leaving behind a chalky black residue, sometimes even warping the metal.

  After the firemen left, despite having burned a section of the kitchen wall behind the yellow enamel stove, and despite not having recognized the sounds of alarm ringing throughout the half-mile development or having sensed the smell of smoke until the firemen had broken down the front door, my mother continued to boil water for her coffee in multiple small pots, ruining them on a continuous basis.

  It was no surprise that she had almost burned the house down. Not for me or for the neighbors, nor for my physicist father.

  1967–1968

  I was two-and-a-half years old when I first recognized that something was wrong. We were living in Oxford, England at that time, when my brother was born. My father had just returned from observing cosmic background radiation at Teide Observatory in the Canary Islands when he took me to the hospital to see my mother. After parking his red Rover, we entered the double doors of the hospital, the ground outside still wet from a brief afternoon shower. Cheerfully swinging my favorite box of sweets that my father had bought for me, I skipped through the entrance and down a long corridor.

  Upon entering her room, I found my mother tucked into a twin bed, a glass thermometer clasped firmly between her lips.

  “Mommy, are you sick?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she guffawed loudly. “Yes, I am.”

  A mild alarm set in. Without meaning to, my mother had disclosed a carefully guarded family secret.

  Moments later, our family’s new addition was wheeled into the room. Swaddled in a blanket, velvety fists clenched in sleep, my pale newborn brother’s thrumming presence served to break the discordant spell.

  Six months later

  I recall my mother cooing delightedly as my brother crawled about the kitchen floor in diapers and a snug white t-shirt.

  “I was stung by a bee,” I notified my parents, clutching at a tender pale forearm.

  Outside, a large swarm of bees circled about our garbage cans in the narrow walkway between our house and the back yard. I had been afraid of these bees but persevered in my march, buoyed by the following parental pronouncement: “If you don’t trouble them, they won’t trouble you.”

  That afternoon, steeling myself as I passed by the intimidating swarm, the adage was proven false, and I was stung.

  “No, you weren’t,” my mother said. “Now shut up and eat your lettuce.”

  “Daddy,” I turned for what I hoped would be a sympathetic ear, “I was stung by a bee.”

  My parents’ attention diverted then to my brother crawling along the floor in a patch of bright sunlight.

  “Never mind, Claire,” my father responded in a soft register. “Just eat your lettuce.”

  1967

  “If you knew how it worked, you would die.”

  Shortly after my brother was born, I began to have a recurring dream. I would first see a midsection of a brain, followed by an eerie pronouncement: “If you knew how it worked, you would die.”

  Years later, reading H. P. Lovecraft’s celebrated story of cosmic fear, “The Call of Cthulhu,” I encountered the same feeling of self-revulsion and dread from its opening lines: “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.”

  September 30, 1968

  After a five-day voyage on the Queen Elizabeth, the largest passenger ship in the world, our British family arrived in Newark, New Jersey; my father, a budding physicist and member of the “brain drain” of scientific and technologically trained minds leaving for America, would begin work at Bell Labs, the renowned research arm of AT&T, credited for breakthrough innovations s
uch as the transistor, the laser, and the first communications satellite.

  It was here, working with Nobel Prize-winning scientists on superconductivity and the detection of cosmic microwave background radiation, which provided spectacular proof of the Big Bang Theory, that my father co-invented a detector, a micron in size, which would launch the remainder of his career.

  1968–1971

  In New Jersey with time on her hands, determined to turn out her brood’s first genius, my mother taught me to read. The time spent with my mother seated on her disheveled bed was grueling. I often stumbled over words beginning with or containing the digraph “th” and its preponderance of pronunciations as in the case of “this” or “breathe.”

  “We just had that word over here,” she would snap, causing me much consternation.

  I grew anxious during these drawn-out sessions and longed to be released from the gloom of my mother’s heavily curtained room. Together we read the slim Ladybird pocket-sized books, purchased by my grandmother in England, featuring pale, carefully groomed Peter and Jane. Nonetheless I was a dutiful student, graduating quickly from one level of the keyword reading scheme books to the next. By the time I was in kindergarten, I had graduated to reading children’s books: J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, the series of Wizard of Oz books by L. Frank Baum, and Mary Poppins by P. L. Travers, among others. This was more a testament to my mother’s indomitable spirit than to what she was sure was my inordinately high IQ.

  When my brother learned to read, he was spared such brutal expectations. “Peter jumped into the pool,” he cheerfully proclaimed, eyeing the pages of the open Lady-bird book that sat perched between my mother’s hands.

  Pool? I peered in amazement. Peter, with his brown hair parted neatly on the side, was jumping from a tree branch into a natural body of water, a small stream or pond, but definitely not a swimming pool.

  “There’s not one letter in common between those two words,” I cried foul.

  The correct word was “water” but rather than berate my brother, my mother laughed with open delight.

  On memory

  At five years old, before falling to sleep, I would perform a slow review of the day’s most salient moments, patiently waiting for them to register in vivid cinematic detail. The woods redolent with the fragrant smells of spring’s first rain, or the terrifying moments, tightly ensconced within the folds of a scratchy blue blanket, precipitating my first altercation with my grandparents over a stolen box of candy.

  The fastidious encoding of these episodic memories kept me preoccupied for long idle stretches alone in my room, the sun still bright in the early evening sky. That in short order these daily highlights would no longer assert themselves in rich sensory detail was a given. A slow degrade of these encoded scenes meant stories would become the inevitable next-best means for holding onto the past. Distinctly aware that I would not be able to rely on the instantaneous recall of my memory, I had to take extreme care to get the details right for these nightly performances. The stories were then safeguarded as the closest approximation to the truth that I might ever come to know.

  Bears on Wheels

  Leaving for school each morning, the war between us intensified. Remember to tell your teacher you can read, my mother would scold me when she dropped me off at the top of Horseshoe Road, where a big yellow bus would show up like clockwork to usher us children three long blocks to the local public school. Yes, Mummy, I would respond dutifully, fully committed to doing just the opposite. (Our mother detested the Americanized Mommy, and forbade its use.) As the driver of the school bus lurched open the heavy metal door, my mother would then add the following caveat, Remember to sit in the middle, petrified that I might die or become severely injured in an accident on the short ride to Hamilton Elementary.

  At home after school, I was then asked whether I had told my teacher I could read. “I forgot,” was my usual excuse. I dreaded standing out among my peers. An immigrant with asocial parents, my predominant concern was to fit in. Finally my mother lost patience with my thin excuses and called the teacher, blowing my cover. To test my mother’s claims, I was given Bears on Wheels, by Stan and Jan Berenstain. At first I thought my teacher was playing a practical joke on me. Why had she given me something this simple to read? Caution prevailed, and I did as I was told, assiduously reading the simple book out loud. In no time I was advanced to the first grade, where I soon learned that it was de rigueur to appear disinterested in whatever lesson was at hand. During reading group, our tall willowy teacher chalked the two-letter word “no” on the board.

  “Now,” she asked the group of students seated about the low school table, “can anyone tell me what this says?” No one raised a hand.

  On being Jewish

  “Never tell anyone you are Jewish,” my mother warned me. It was 1971. Nixon was in office advocating a New Federalism, and second-wave feminism had established itself with defiant protests and marches for equal opportunities and equal pay. Both my parents were of Jewish descent. For some reason, however, I was disallowed to speak of our heritage.

  While my father enthusiastically toiled away at Bell Laboratories and my mother did her best to defy the conventions of housewifery, I played in the remodeled basement of Sally Gunning, a school friend who lived at the upper boundary of the Horseshoe Estates. Hers was one of five cookie-cutter homes in our small, two-mile square development, a hilly, exclusively white suburb of northeastern New Jersey.

  Sally Gunning was the proud owner of a dizzying array of Barbies—a doll I was expressly forbidden from owning by my mother who deemed me too old at five for such claptrap. Reveling in the bending of Malibu Barbie’s long, tapered appendages into a glut of modish poses, I was suddenly asked a revealing question.

  “What religion are you?” Sally asked, blonde and superior in her fashionable plaid jumper. My mother’s prohibitions on discussing the subject had not included an appropriate dodge. Unprepared, I stared blinkingly up at Sally.

  “Christian,” I managed to say after a decidedly awkward moment.

  “Really?” she seemed excited. “What denomination?”

  I searched blindly for an answer. Having never stepped inside a church or synagogue, I had precious little to offer on this topic. Finally I managed to issue forth a multi-syllabic answer, one that escapes me to this day.

  “Wow,” Sally enthused. “Me too!”

  After this, I vowed never again to follow my mother’s incomprehensible rules.

  Horseshoe Estates Development

  Everyone knew where the other three Jewish families in our subdivision lived. These homes were notably cared for better than ours, with their custom paint jobs, superior roofing, carefully clipped hedges, and shiny new cars parked out front. My parents were bookish, busy with invisible realities. Our cars were bought used and often in need of a paint job. The grass often went uncut in summer. Our back yard was flinty and covered in crab grass. And in the front, instead of the deliberately planted trees like the neighbor’s, a copse of irregularly spaced mature elms and oaks loomed over our home like a sinister cabal.

  The solicitous phone call we received each summer from a paint contractor came as no surprise. My father would confide to my mother in an aggrieved tone, “A neighbor has complained about us again. We are bringing down the neighborhood real estate values.”

  My mother’s throaty laughter, a giddy pleasure in defying convention, would then be accompanied by my father’s ironic grimace. In their derision of the neighbors, my parents were in complete accord.

  1972–1975

  Prejudice in our neighborhood was not restricted to religion. When the first African-American family purchased a house on Springfield Road, it was literally the talk of the town.

  The prejudice grew even more apparent in fourth grade when my family migrated back to England for what turned out to be a brief time. In our absence, our home was rented to an African-American family, a fact never openly discussed in my household, perhaps becau
se it was simply of no concern.

  This move that would allow my mother to revive a hastily abandoned law career would not end well. In the summer of 1975, we emigrated back to the United States. While visiting a neighbor whose daughter I often babysat, I came to learn that our tenants had not been white.

  “Did you have to fumigate your house?” our neighbor mockingly asked, supine on her redwood deck under the shade of a massive oak, the racial-hatred underpinning our white suburb erupting shockingly into plain view.

  Don’t!

  Before my mother found purpose again, and whenever my father went out of town on business, I would be required to take his place in bed. I’m afraid to be alone, she would complain of her husband’s lengthy absences. During those long, anguished nights I would lay on the hard mattress next to my mother, stricken. If I so much as moved a muscle, turned over or breathed too loudly, I would be sharply rebuked. Stop moving. Or, Don’t! she would exhort in a threatening tone.

  Too afraid to sleep, I would lie awake throughout the night, mesmerized by the steady rhythm of a popping sound—a bubble of spit that would form between my mother’s lips and pop before another would promptly take its place. Mortified by this involuntary behavior of hers, I would bide my time waiting until she would turn over before I might attempt a stealth move. The heavy curtains of her bedroom drawn tight, I would wait until dawn for a chink of light to appear under a wide crack in the flimsy particleboard door to her bedroom. May I go to my own room now, Mummy? Okay, darling, she might murmur in her sleep.

  Permission granted, I would traipse down the hallway to my bedroom, aggrieved and full of spite, vowing to grow up to be nothing like her. A foolish if spirited proposition.