Claire Phillips - A Room with a Darker View

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

Publishers 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

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 utterthey 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

19701980

When the policeman arrived at the wrong house, fire extinguisher in hand, I immediately perked up. 5 Dorset Road is across the street, my friends 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 Lochbaums 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.

19671968

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 familys new addition was wheeled into the room. Swaddled in a blanket, velvety fists clenched in sleep, my pale newborn brothers 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 dont trouble them, they wont trouble you.

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

No, you werent, 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. Lovecrafts 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 such 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.