My parents couldn’t do much about this. We fought offstage, while my mother was cleaning the house or writing her sister, and my father was at the office or the hospital. Our fights did not compare to the more pressing concerns of earning a living and running a household. In the annals of competitive suffering, Lara and I knew from an early age that we were lucky to be irrelevant. But on the scorecard of our daily lives as children, we wanted to matter.
And of course we did matter very much to our parents, as long as we did our jobs as blue-chip children and straight-A students.
“My life is over,” Mom often told us. “My life ended in the war. You are all that matter.”
We were small shoots now, perhaps, but with care and feeding and sunlight, with green vegetables and vitamins and snowsuits in winter and sunblock in summer, with French lessons and piano lessons and ballet lessons and swim lessons, we would grow strong and cultured and smart, and we would redeem all that had been taken from her, restore reason in the world.
And, oh my, the love. Our parents loved Lara and me with such a ferocity, it was hard to remain standing in the face of it. They loved us with cyclone force. They loved the arms right out of our sockets. My friends were loved with the casual American ease of prairie love, of cows grazing in a fenced-in field. My sister and I were loved with the blazing heat of immigrant love. The scorched-earth love of a people hunted down, displaced, and resettled countless times before clawing their way to the topsoil of upstate New York.
* * *
Overlooking our increasingly frequent fights, Mom seemed gratified to see how closely Lara and I mirrored our mother and aunt. “You’re just like me,” Mom always told me. “You were an easy child.” I opened my mouth and words came to me. I closed my eyes and sleep embraced me. I went to school and children played with me. For Lara, nothing came easily. She was in constant battle with herself and the world. “Lara is so much like Zosia,” Mom would say. “Always in motion, always restless.” She assured me that Lara and I would be closer than anyone else in the world. Sisters shared each other’s secrets and saved each other’s lives. It sounded good. But by the time I was in the second grade, I started to think I had the wrong sister for that. I brought this up with my mother. “I don’t think Lara is right for me,” I said. Mom smiled. “Just wait. You’ll see when you get older.”
But with time, things only got worse. Night would fall, and Lara’s eyes snapped open with the certainty of danger. Enemies filled her room, hid in her closet, slipped between the sheets of her bed, stole behind the radiator, leaked under the windowsill. If she closed her eyes, they would spring out to get her.
The voices began as whispers, then grew louder, she would tell me years later. Everything buzzed. Her bed began to move. She leapt from it and stared at it—but of course, now it was still. The curtains fluttered. She lifted one corner and traced the pattern of movement across the fabric, a wave on the beach. So elusive, the shadows. The creatures had no shape or form, but only a function—to hurt her, to laugh at her, to twist her into knots.
While Lara was fighting her demons in her bedroom, my father was back in Siberia, and my mother was having her own nightmares of being taken by the “police” from her home, as she would tell us in the morning. I knew nothing of this at the time, but now I wonder if Lara’s voices were coming to her through the walls of our parents’ unspoken memories.
* * *
When she was eleven, Lara finally went crazy in a way that perhaps our whole family had been waiting for. Every night after our mother had turned out our lights and retreated to the living room, Lara would start.
I could hear her get out of bed and flick the light switch in her room on and off rapidly, dozens, maybe hundreds of times. My room shared a wall with hers, and I could hear the sharp click-clack-click-clack, like a rapid-fire machine gun. I’d hear her snapping the curtains back and forth along their runners the length of the room: Zhiiiiing! Zhiiiiing! Zhiiiiiing! Then back to the light switch—click-clack-click-clack. Then a muffled rummaging sound, when she must have dropped to the floor and scanned under her bed. Then the curtains sang again. Now she was rustling in her closet, sweeping the skirts and blouses back and forth on their hangers.
I didn’t understand what she was doing, and I didn’t care. As far as I could tell, most of the things Lara did were intended to irritate me, and I wasn’t about to give her the satisfaction. Out of vengeance, I fell asleep.
But her rituals got even longer and more elaborate. I would wake in the middle of the night to the sound of my sister’s drapes flying across their runners. I would listen for what would come next. Midnight, one o’clock, two. The rest of the house was dead, and only Lara’s room was alive with sound. Her Concerto for Lights and Drapes.
It never occurred to me to tell my parents about this. One night, though, I tiptoed down the hall to the bathroom. Lights blazed in my sister’s room, and I could hear the murmur of my parents’ voices. Just as I walked past the door, I heard my mother say, “psychologist,” and the door to Lara’s room swung shut. The hairs stood up on my neck.
Lara’s gone psycho, I thought with a chill. Like those wide-eyed freaks in the horror movie reruns on TV, arms outstretched, lurching robotically. All of a sudden, I realized that stuff like that didn’t just happen to people on TV; it was happening to my sister.
The implications were terrifying. If such a condition could strike Lara, it was only a matter of time before I too succumbed. She’d given me everything—measles, chicken pox, mumps—and I’d catch this from her too. I hovered outside Lara’s closed door, transfixed by the seam of light glowing under it. I could not make out my parents’ words, just their hushed mumbling voices.
After that night, Lara skulked around the house under a dark cloud of dread. I was careful not to get too close to her, but I studied her for signs of craziness. Her hair had always been thick and unruly, and now it looked even worse. She had dark hollows under her eyes, and her fingernails were picked to bloody stumps. When she caught me looking at her, she bared her teeth and growled wolfishly. My parents spoke Polish all the time now in hushed tones.
A few days later, my mother carried the skinny fold-up cot from the basement and set it up in Lara’s room. Mom assured my father it would only be for a night or two, but it turned out to be three nights and then four, then a week, then two weeks, and then we just pretended it was normal that my mother slept in Lara’s room.
* * *
Soon after she moved into Lara’s room, my mother told me that Lara was going to start seeing a psychologist who would help her feel better. “You cannot mention a word of this,” she said in a low voice.
I nodded. Mom looked hardened, like metal.
“I want you to take a vow,” she said. “You must promise never to say a word about this to anyone.”
“Okay,” I said.
“This is a private matter,” she said. “A family matter.”
I knew what that meant. Our family had many things we were not allowed to speak of. We didn’t speak about my parents’ war, or about their parents, or about anything that had happened Before.
When I went to school the following morning, the secret of my sister’s illness weighed on me. I saw my eight-year-old classmates as if from a great distance, and I felt a strange gap open up between us. They were still my friends, but suddenly they seemed so young and free. They were unaware of the enormity of danger in the world, and although I myself didn’t understand what that danger was, I knew that our family had it, that it was in our house. A deep, unspeakable line separated me from everyone outside my family.
two
I was in the kitchen one afternoon after grade school when my father came home to take Lara to the psychologist. “Make me!” she shouted, throwing herself to the floor. “Go ahead, make me!” My father grabbed her by the wrist. Lara kicked and clawed and spat at him as he dragged her to his car and planted her in the front seat. He had a hard time of it. My father had been a world-
class athlete before the war, and although he seemed to rise above everyone in the state of New York, he really only had the use of his good arm. Lara, however, seemed to have a dozen arms. He finally got her in the car and gunned it down the driveway.
An hour and a half later, he brought her home. Lara burst into the kitchen shouting that she hated the psychologist, and she hated my parents, and most of all she hated me. As if the idea had just occurred to her, she lunged and knocked me to the floor. My mother had been cooking dinner, and the kitchen smelled of mashed potatoes, which I hated, and I remember a splotch of potato on the green linoleum. It was my father who pulled her off me, and while Lara was screaming that she would kill me, my father hustled me out to his car. Even before I’d closed the passenger door, he had started the engine. I was still sniffling, rubbing my elbow where I’d hit the linoleum. “Fasten your seat belt,” he ordered. I understood that my crying was grating on his nerves, so I clicked in and shut up.
He turned onto Natchaug Road. “Are you hungry?” he asked. I shook my head.
“Let’s get a hot dog,” he said. We drove to a fast-food place near his office, and he gulped his down in two bites.
“I hate her guts,” I said.
My father looked at me sternly. “Don’t say that.”
“Well, it’s true.”
He said nothing. We drove through the seedier part of State Street to his office, where he let me hang out in one of his exam rooms while he did his bookkeeping. Neat jars of sterile gauze and long Q-tips, bottles of ammonia and medicines gleamed on the Formica counters. In his kitchen he had beakers and test tubes and a centrifuge and an autoclave so he could do his own lab work and minor surgery. He even had his own X-ray equipment down the hall, a monster of a machine that filled the entire room, and a separate little glassed-in booth where my father worked the controls like the Wizard of Oz. He was a family doctor, and his patients were mostly immigrants and working-class people who came to him because he didn’t charge much, he worked around the clock, and he cut his patients some slack if they couldn’t pay him right away.
Being with my father made me feel safe (he was big) and proud (he was successful), but he was not my mother, whose warmth we all craved. When I was younger, I used to crawl into her lap while she was reading on her chaise longue, and she would absentmindedly stroke my hair and tuck it behind my ear. But after a moment she would tell me to find something to do with myself and I would climb down and go to my room, feeling that I had gotten something precious—a small package of warmth from the one I adored.
My father, by contrast, was all sharp edges and modern efficiency, like a chrome-framed chair to my mother’s chaise longue. When he finally drove me home late that night, I could hear my mother in my sister’s room, murmuring over and over that she loved her, she forgave her, it wasn’t her fault at all.
My jealousy caught flame and heated my face as I crawled into bed. I kicked off the covers, hating my sister for taking my mother away from me. I wanted Lara out of the house; I wanted her dead. The feeling was mutual; we were exactly alike in that regard.
* * *
In the all-or-nothing language of childhood memories, by the time I was eight years old, I saw Lara as two separate identities—sometimes she was my beloved big sister, and other times she was a wild animal, unpredictable and vicious. But of course the reality was much more complicated. The Lara who helped me herringbone up a ski slope when I was five, who calmed my fears and planted her poles in the snow to prevent me from slipping downhill, was the same Lara who taught me to eat lemons (rind and all) to gross out the babysitters my parents hired when they went out to the movies; the same Lara who taught me how to swallow the giant penicillin pills Dad prescribed for my ear infection. (She demonstrated by using M&M’s.) And it was the same Lara who later taught me to dribble a basketball, switching hands as we ran through an obstacle course of sneakers she’d thrown down on the driveway. My sister and I had always been teammates, coconspirators. But something happened in 1965 that changed our relationship—it was then that my sister seemed capable of turning suddenly into this other Lara, a terrifying creature whom I could neither recognize nor reason with. Decades later, when we tried to talk about those times, our feelings were still too brittle, and in order to preserve our adult bond, she and I inevitably switched to safer topics. To this day, I think, both of us preserve within us the inconsolable core of an injured child, each certain of our own innocence—convinced that it was the other who caused such irreparable damage, the other who deserved whatever justifiable rage we unleashed on each other.
But maybe Lara and I were just set up by history—the war, the secrets, the silence. Or perhaps we were set up by the perfect sisterhood of Mom and Zosia. Sometimes Lara and I felt that we could never fulfill their expectations; sometimes we felt we weren’t even supposed to be alive. More than once our mother told us that surviving the war had been her biggest mistake.
History Lesson
From the time Lara and I were little kids until we went to college, my mother had told us bits and pieces of her life before we were born—partial truths, incomplete stories that didn’t always fit together. She, Dad, and Zosia were the only ones from their city in eastern Poland who had survived the war, she said. Although they were Catholic—or so they said—their parents, friends, and entire community had been killed by bombs.
Zosia, seven years older than Mom, had left Poland before the war. Zosia had gone to graduate school in Italy in the 1930s, fallen in love, and eventually married my uncle Giulio, an Italian count and high-level lawyer in Mussolini’s government.
Mom, in the meantime, had remained in Poland during the war and stayed alive through her wits, enormous luck, and a daring born of desperation. She told us that after her parents were killed in 1942, she escaped the Nazis by cutting her hair short, dressing as an Italian soldier, and marching out of Poland with the Italian Army. She had grown very close to an Italian officer named Luigi, who helped her escape. “He risked his life for me,” Mom told us. “I was trying to reach Zosia in Rome, and without Luigi, I would never have gotten out of Poland.” Mom was arrested at the Italian border and presumed to be a spy, but with Zosia’s and Giulio’s help, she was miraculously saved from the firing squad and imprisoned in a camp instead. Afterward she lived in Rome with her sister, her brother-in-law, and their baby, Renzo. Mom got a job as a translator with the American Red Cross and married my father after the war; finally, in 1950, she and Dad emigrated to the States.
In 1953, the postwar relief services sent my parents to Evans Mills, a tiny outpost in upstate New York not far from the Canadian border, where my father replaced the country doctor who had just died. It was there that my thirty-five-year-old mother became pregnant with Lara and fell into an all-consuming depression. In the emptiness of Evans Mills, separated from her sister and nephew by an ocean, the sheer weight of Mom’s losses crushed her.
My father, on the other hand, was on fire to build his new life and start a family. Nearly forty years old, he’d lost half his twenties and thirties to the war. Imprisoned for six years in forced labor camps in Siberia, he’d miraculously escaped in 1946 and made his way back to his hometown. There he learned that everyone had been killed except his sweetheart—my mother—who, he was told, had escaped to Italy to live with her sister. He spent the next several months walking across Europe by night as a fugitive until he reached Rome, found my mother, and married her in November 1946, ten years to the day after they’d first met.
Within months, he had learned Italian and passed his Italian medical boards. But jobs were scarce in postwar Rome, and my mother, now a translator for the new government, was the sole supporter of her sister’s family. The only work my refugee father could find was at a tuberculosis sanitarium in the Italian Alps. So for three years in the late 1940s, the newlyweds were once again separated. They saw each other once a month, when my mother made the long journey north to spend a weekend with Dad. Often (to my father’s c
onsternation) she brought along her five-year-old nephew, Renzo, who could not bear to be separated from her.
It wasn’t until 1950 that my parents were finally allowed entry to the United States. My mother immediately got a job at an import-export firm in New York City, while my father worked as a resident at Mount Sinai Hospital. It took him another two years to gather sufficient evidence of his medical credentials to be allowed to sit for the New York State medical boards. (His first medical diploma, the Polish one, was in the hands of the Russian police; his second, the Italian license, was unacceptable in America.) Finally, after passing his medical boards in America, he was hungry for the happiness—or at least the freedom and productivity—for which he had struggled for so long. Instead, in 1954, at the age of thirty-nine, he found himself starting a medical practice in an impoverished town a few hours from Schenectady, while his baby screamed in the other room and his wife stared at the ceiling of her bedroom, sunk in a state of despair so profound she could not rise from bed.
* * *
My mother later told me that in Evans Mills, after a brief stint as my father’s receptionist and bookkeeper, she told him that she would never again have anything to do with his medical practice. “I couldn’t stand him telling me what to do,” she told me. “I was a women’s libber before the word was even invented.” Headstrong as my father was, it turned out Mom was even more so. “That’s when I laid down the rules of our marriage,” she told me. “I told Dad he could have sole authority over his medical practice, and I would have sole authority over the household and the children. I wouldn’t interfere with his business, and he wouldn’t interfere with mine.”
By the end of my father’s first year as a struggling self-employed physician, my parents had managed to save a few hundred dollars by scrimping on their own food and necessities. It still wasn’t enough to cover the cost of a plane ticket for my mother to visit her sister, so instead, my mother bought the newest American invention—a washing machine—and shipped it to Zosia in Italy, where no one had heard of such a thing. Two years later, in 1956, my mother could finally afford the round-trip airfare for herself, my father, and Lara. This was the trip to Rome that my father captured with his first movie camera.
The Escape Artist Page 3