Is There No Place on Earth for Me by Susan Sheehan

Author:Susan Sheehan [Sheehan, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8041-6919-6
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2014-01-14T05:00:00+00:00

Twelve

The tenth grade at Music and Art started promisingly for Sylvia. She told her mother that she preferred her new classmates. She complained, however, that she felt under a great deal of strain. The trip from Beechhurst to Music and Art took from an hour and a half to two hours each way. To get to school, Sylvia had to get up at six-thirty and take a bus and two subways. She didn’t return home until five o’clock. She had six subjects — English, French, math, biology, world history, and art. The combination of five long school days, a lot of homework, and the Saturday art and voice lessons was too much for her, she said, but she didn’t want to give up either the school or the Saturday lessons. That November, Sylvia’s friend Arlene, who had gone on to the local public high school, had a nervous breakdown. She spent six weeks at Hillside, a psychiatric hospital in Queens. Arlene’s breakdown upset Sylvia. Because she and Arlene had always felt like outcasts, they had become friends of a misery-loves-company kind. They had read books about children who were “different,” as they considered themselves to be — children who went to special schools, like Summerhill, in England — and they had gone to see movies about troubled adolescents, such as Splendor in the Grass.

While Arlene was at Hillside, Joyce Frumkin decided to break her engagement. She felt that she wasn’t good enough for Roger Sussman. Many years later, she told a therapist that when things were going as well for her as they had appeared to be going that fall, they seemed too good to be really happening to imperfect Joyce Frumkin. On a Friday evening in November, she borrowed a college classmate’s car for the weekend and drove home to tell her parents that she planned to give Roger his ring back the following week. The Frumkins were horrified. They reminded Joyce that they had already told all their friends about her engagement and her emerald-cut two-carat diamond ring. A broken engagement would cause them great embarrassment, they said, and Joyce might come to regret her decision. They reminded her that in a few years she would be the wife of a prosperous doctor. They persuaded Joyce to proceed with her wedding plans. On Saturday, they went with her to a department store and helped her choose a wedding gown and wedding invitations.

On her way back to college Sunday evening, Joyce drove her classmate’s car off the road and into a tree. She received only minor injuries. The car was a total loss. When she called her parents to tell them about the accident, she said she was convinced that it hadn’t been an accident. The Frumkins told her that she was being silly; of course it had been an accident, and her friend’s insurance company would surely cover it. They said that long-distance telephone calls were expensive. Joyce did not break her engagement.

A few days after the accident,

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