by Michael Rymer
The person who first recommended to me Susan Sheehan’s classic account of the life of a schizophrenic, Is There No Place on Earth for Me?, said the book was “all people could talk about” the year it was published, in 1982. Now that I’ve read the book, I’ve been wondering what people then were saying, and what I have come up with is this question: What could have been done to save Sylvia Frumkin? This question, or one like it, hovers over every page of the story.
The question isn’t whether Frumkin could have been cured of her schizophrenia, but whether she could have managed the disease and avoided the acute episodes that always upended her attempts to live independently.
Frumkin, as the title suggests, has never really had a home. Her de facto home is Creedmor Psychiatric Hospital, a sprawling, crumbling place in Queens. When she’s not there, she camps, unhappily, with her parents. By the time Frumkin is thirty-one years old, she’s logged over a dozen months-long stretches – a cumulative period of several years – at Creedmor. She jokes she’s become the “Mother Goose” of her ward.
In fact, she is its jester. One Sunday morning, she applies “bright red lipstick” to her face, until she covers “every inch… except her eyes.” Then, “marching, pacing, jogging, and trotting all over the ward,” she grabs a fountain pen from the hand of a patient writing in a journal, then asks another visitor for a pencil. Then she throws both writing instruments off the porch and proclaims, “There, I’ve planted a pen and pencil tree.” She bums a cigarette, and, to light it, uses “a lighted cigarette she had pulled out of another patient’s mouth.” When Frumkin tires, she spots an “aqua chair” in which “a timid-looking elderly woman” is sitting. She “lift[s] the frail old lady out of the chair and set[s] her down on the lap of a patient seated on a nearby sofa.” About a week later, when a patient asks Frumkin for a sip from her cup of water, she pours the rest of it over his head.
Frumkin does not merely suffer from schizophrenia, she performs it. This makes her an ideal subject for a book. All her bizarre cognitive lunges are externalized, visible to us.
Her verbal displays – zany, often paragraphs long monologues – are especially marvelous. One of her speeches begins with her claiming, “I’m a doctor, you know,” and continues: “I use Cover Girl creamy natural makeup. Oral Roberts has been here to visit me… My father is five feet two inches, my mother is five feet three inches. They’re like Napoleon and Josephine, and they’re shrinking.”
Sheehan is a conscientious transcriber of Frumkin’s cracked soliloquies and a careful recorder of the choreography of her physical comedy. She’s also a master of the physical minutia of the Creedmor milieu. She describes the Creedmor dining room, a “bright, buff-colored room with tables for four” where “sometimes there were forks, knives, and spoons” and “sometimes (after a patient had used forks and knives as weapons) there were just spoons” and compares the aroma of the women’s bathroom to that of a “big restroom in a busy turnpike restaurant on the third day of a four-day holiday weekend: no better, no worse.”
Some nights, during the two years Sheehan shadowed Frumkin to report the book, she set up a cot next to her subject so she could sleep in the same room. This helps explain her exquisite attunement to Frumkin’s body – her outfits, her diet, and the frequent significant fluctuations in her weight – which verges on the maternal.
We watch Frumkin “noisily slurp[ing] her soup, dip[ping] the challah in the brisket gravy, g[etting] spots all over herself and the tablecloth, and talk[ing] with her mouth full” at a family Rosh Hashanah celebration and, at the Creedmor cafeteria, “shovel[ing] into her mouth three helpings of everything served at dinner.” “Hippopotamus,” not “Mother Goose,” is the nickname that sticks to her.
Is There No Place on Earth for Me? is a story told backwards: it’s not until the book’s midpoint that we encounter a younger version of Frumkin – a lanky fifteen-year old who wears thick glasses, writes poetry, and picks her nose. This is the girl – a problem child but not a basket case – who drops in on her wealthy Aunt Phyllis one March morning when she should be in school and begs her Aunt to adopt her.
That night, Frumkin sleeps in a psychiatric ward for the first time. Two months later, she tells a nurse that she has swallowed a wood block with protruding nails. (A stomach x-ray shows no foreign bodies.)
Frumkin will never escape her diminutive, aging parents, but the wish to snip the family bond, at least for her mother, is mutual. At that same Rosh Hashanah dinner, Mrs. Frumkin tells her family that a young woman named Sonya Finkel has recently killed herself by jumping onto the subway tracks. The Frumkins knew Sonya Finkel from Sylvia’s ward, and she had befriended her parents, Isadore and Gertie, who moved to Arizona after their daughter’s death. “I saw them a while ago, and they looked so gorgeous,” says Mrs. Frumkin. “It’s no wonder. The cause of all their trouble was removed.”
Had Frumkin been adopted by her Aunt, she may never have been admitted to Creedmor, an institution where she once given a course of 35 insulin comas – hypoglycemic comas – as part of a treatment, Insulin Coma Therapy, that was outmoded even in 1967, the year she received it; and where, even as “Mother Goose,” she must cope with a chronic shortage of towels by drying herself with a bed sheet.
The summer Frumkin is 17, a paternal uncle, Benjamin Wilder, takes Frumkin into his home in Chicago for a summer but after only five weeks, asks her to leave. Wilder was upset that Frumkin had walked his Doberman pinscher – and lost it. Had Wilder been a more patient man, Frumkin might have made a life for herself working as an assistant in his lab. But Wilder wasn’t the uncle she needed.
I read Deborah Eisenberg’s 2006 collection of short stories, Twilight of the Superheroes, around the same time I read Is There No Place on Earth for Me,with the hope that one book would help me think about the other, disparate as the two books are in subject matter, genre, tone, and sensibility. Eisenberg’s book is populated by affected but capable Manhattanites, including one, in the title story, whose name is given only as Uncle Lucien. This because it is a story about Lucien’s nephew, Nathaniel, who seemed bound to waste his life in Ohio until Lucien, a gallery owner wary of Nathaniel’s parents “in their tidy, Midwestern house” arranges for him to sublet a downtown loft furnished with “sleek items of chrome and leather.”
Uncle Lucien would have found a better psychiatrist – or a better medicine or hospital – for Sylvia Frumkin; but there’s no bridging Eisenberg’s Manhattan and Sheehan’s Queens.
Sharon, a character in the next story, is a middle-aged schizophrenic who keeps an Upper West Side apartment near the Museum of Natural History, where she often wanders. She’s attended to by her brother, Otto, a Lucien-like figure who owns a townhouse in the Village. Sharon’s life is so much easier than Sylvia Frumkin’s, and, by comparison, so tiny.
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Michael Rymer writes Odd Couples, a periodic Coldfront feature that closely addresses two ostensibly different works of literature. He holds a B.A. in Comparitive Literature from Brown University and an M.F.A. in Nonficition Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, GOOD, and elsewhere. A a graduate of the Writers’ Institute at the CUNY Graduate Center, he lives in the Bronx.
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