The Escape Artist

by Helen Fremont

But I learned not to say this. If I so much as expressed doubt as to whether I loved my sister, my mother would come down on me like rain. “Don’t ever say that!” she would snap. “Lara is your sister. Of course you love her!”

  Her fury always alarmed me. “It’s just that—”

  “She’s your sister!” my mother said.

  I could see I wasn’t going to win this. I kept my angry love to myself.

  * * *

  My father and I parked outside the shopping mall and went into the Sears cafeteria, where we waited for Lara and my mother, who was a dangerously cautious driver. The cafeteria was empty; no one else in the world ate dinner there. We’d never gone there before we started family therapy, and three years later, after we finally quit therapy, we never again ate at Sears.

  I stayed close to my mother as we slid the plastic trays along the steel rails and selected our food. We sat at a table in the far corner lit by orbs of orange lights that hung like giant insects from the ceiling. The whole place was creepy and dark, and even our food had a radioactive orange glow to it.

  We ate in silence. Lara brooded through dinner, picking at her food and looking away. I pushed the meat around my plate until it looked tired and beat-up. Then I dug into my chocolate cake. My father, as always, had engulfed his entire meal before the rest of us had even unfolded our paper napkins. He sat nervously across from us, jiggling one leg under the table, causing his body to tremble as if an electric current were running through him. He had the patience of a fruit fly. We were all nursing our wounds, replaying the awful things that had been said in the session. We were stung by the injustice of our roles as father, mother, daughter, sister. None of us saw any escape, and this realization was so depressing and infuriating, we sat in our chairs and ate until we could leave.

  We didn’t fight till we got home. Then the dam burst. Even before our jackets were off, we lost our heads and were swept up in the torrent of our rage. Sometimes Lara jumped me, sometimes she ransacked my room; sometimes she threw herself on the floor in the doorway to the kitchen, and kicked and clawed at anyone who tried to get past her. My parents fought with each other about how to handle Lara—my mother insisting on patience, and my father on discipline—and I shrieked bloody murder whenever Lara came near me.

  * * *

  But the thing about Lara was that she could also be really, really fun. You just never knew when. “Let’s pig-pile Mom,” she whispered to me one Sunday morning later that fall, her green eyes sparkling with excitement. As usual, my father had gotten up at six, and now, at eight, he was still at the hospital doing rounds. My mother was the sleepyhead of the family, and Lara and I tiptoed into my parents’ dark bedroom. Mom was crashed on her side of the bed as always, lying on her belly like a little kid, arms flung up on either side of her head. You couldn’t see her face for the cloud of thick brown hair, roots graying between monthly visits to the beauty parlor.

  Lara and I drew closer, suppressing giggles—completely unnecessary, since Mom’s relationship with sleep was passionate and exclusive.

  “Now!” Lara whispered, and we jumped onto the bed, shouting, “Pig pile! Pig pile!”

  A groan emerged from somewhere under my mother’s hair. Her voice came as if from a deep cave. “Oh, let me sleep.”

  Lara and I set to tickling her.

  “Ohhhhh,” Mom said louder, a note of sorrow and sleepy joy in her voice. “Give me five minutes. Just five more minutes.”

  Lara laughed. “Come on, you lazy bum! Get up!”

  My mother curled into a ball. “I’m a lazy bum,” she said pleadingly. “Let me sleep.”

  But in my mother’s Eastern European accent, it came out “la-zee bum,” which sent Lara and me into peals of laughter.

  “She’s a la-zee bum!” Lara crowed. I chimed in, and we chanted, “A la-zee bum with a potbel-lee!”

  “What?” my mother said. “A what?”

  “A potbelly!” I said. “A potbel-leee!”

  My mother laughed. Her stomach was flat as a pastry board. There wasn’t an ounce of unnecessary flesh on her.

  “I’m a la-zeee bum with a potbel-leee,” she agreed, pleading.

  We tugged on her arms now, and got her to sit up. We poked at her belly. “Look at the potbel-lee,” Lara said.

  My mother puffed her belly out so it would look round. Then she grabbed me suddenly and flopped back on the bed, pulling me down with her. In an instant, Lara and I were tickling her again, but Mom had come to life, and she tickled us back, and the three of us rolled around on the bed, a mother with her two cubs, our delight in each other as natural and easy as the sun streaming through the trees behind the pulled curtains.

  I don’t know how or why these windows of joy opened and closed in our lives. They seemed to come without warning, like sudden changes in the weather. No one ever came up with a diagnosis for Lara. There was plenty of mother-blaming going around in the sixties, and in our double sessions at the Hoffman Center, my father and the shrink seemed to think that Mom’s depression during her pregnancy with Lara had caused the problem. The way I understood it, my mother’s unhappiness had surrounded Lara when she was still in Mom’s womb. It seeped into Lara’s body through her skin, so Lara “caught” a mental illness, the way you caught a cold. By the time I came along, my mother was in a better mood, so I came out okay.

  * * *

  I don’t remember my mother ever being depressed. She possessed a colossal history and big emotions compacted into a body the size of a small vacuum cleaner. She had enormous energy, she sucked everyone into her vortex, and she was virulently anti-dirt. You could not tire her out. She had been through everything—the war, the ghetto, camps, prison, poverty, humiliation, as well as bridge parties, garden clubs, the Women’s Auxiliary. And she tended the grounds and raised the children and got a graduate degree and taught German and sewed the drapes and still had time to read world literature. My mother was a giant. At five foot three and 110 pounds, she had the confidence of a world leader and an even more amazing ability to bluff. She figured that if she was still alive, the world was a very stupid place, and it was not hard to outwit it.

  * * *

  Over the following weeks, our fights got worse. Lara started going on eating binges and tore through the kitchen, devouring boxes of crackers and cookies. My mother followed her. “Please, Lara,” she begged. “Talk to me.” Mom seemed to be as dependent on these fights as my sister—as if she needed to prove her devotion to Lara over and over. Sometimes my mother would fall to her knees and sob that she should have died with her parents, and Lara would start crying and they would hug and console each other for hours. I didn’t understand it at the time, but I think that my mother was fairly drowning in grief and rage; the weight of her secrets and losses was almost too much for her to bear. And Lara had always been the sensitive one in our family. She and my mother seemed to be acting out a drama of love and war and loss and death.

  One time Lara grabbed a carving knife and backed my mother out of the kitchen, before ransacking the cabinets for flour and sugar to make a batch of cookies. Mom marched back in and stunned Lara by pouring half a gallon of milk down the sink. For Mom, throwing away food was like slashing open a vein; it was as if the milk going down the drain were her own blood.

  “You want to bake cookies?” my mother shouted. “You want to eat more?” She slammed the empty carton down on the counter. “There. No more milk. No cookies. No baking.”

  Lara stared at Mom in horror. “I’m sorry, Mommy,” she said. “I’m sorry!”

  I cowered just outside the door. I pictured the police coming afterward to photograph the bodies and wipe up the blood and gather the bloody knife and milk carton and chocolate chips as evidence, and I would be able to testify for Mom. I would be able to tell someone what had happened to our family.

  My father lived at his office during most of these fights. He could not break the grip Lara had on Mom, nor Mom on Lara. He could not compete with Mom in his own hous
e. And so he paced up and down the world outside, fuming over his lack of access. In his office late at night, he wrote in his journal, transcribing his arguments with my mother, his frustrations with my sister, his discussions with the shrink. Hundreds of pages of meticulous record-keeping of how our family had gone so wrong. Years later, he would show them to me when I was home from college. “These will be for you,” he told me. “I am writing them for you so you will have them after I die. Then you will understand.”

  It was so like my father to offer intimacy after he was dead, as if life were no time for explanations or understandings. I felt special being the daughter he trusted, but I knew it wasn’t enough. He needed what he’d never had—a happy childhood, the love of his life, the years the Soviets had stolen from him. And all those journals that he’d written for me, that he put in boxes with my name on them—all of his journals now belong to my sister.

  three

  2019

  I work in the public defender office in Boston. From the minute I started in 1985, I knew I belonged here—everyone is committed to equal rights and justice, and more to the point, we all have a huge problem with authority. We revel in tripping up cops on the witness stand, and crow about our victories over the state’s attorneys with a glee that could be considered… well, undignified.

  When I was growing up, both my parents ruled my world, but it was my father who had always represented unassailable authority. Dad was a man of principle. He was a man of honor. He was a man of his word. He had impressed upon us that these were rare commodities, and he had all of them. He always obeyed the law, but he was also quick to point out that the law was often misapplied, misinterpreted, and even mistaken. Lawyers, he said, were slippery opportunists who capitalized on other people’s misfortunes. He was not particularly thrilled when I became a lawyer, and he was even more disappointed when I chose a field of law in which I made no money at all. “But I’m fighting for human rights and justice,” I told him. Americans already had human rights, he said. Just look at the Soviet Union for comparison. What I was really doing as a public defender, he scoffed, was obstructing justice. My father’s moral compass was flawless—of this he was certain.

  It was his certainty that was most annoying, more so than his morals. He was not a particularly pious man, but his confidence was almost too much to bear. He was always right, and this seemed unfair. My sister and I were eager to find him wrong on something, but it never happened—at least, not until much later.

  Like my colleagues, I felt at home on the side of the lowly and despised, crusading for civil rights. I took everything personally. But the adrenaline rush of trial work—the whiplash of highs and lows—got to me. When I lost, my guilt at having failed my clients was overwhelming. I couldn’t bear to see them handcuffed and led off to prison. I thought of my father, sentenced to ten years of hard labor without the right to defend himself. It was complicated—he was at once authoritarian and ruthless, a force against whom I fought, and also a man who had been unjustly condemned, a man I wanted to rescue.

  “Daddy’s little defender,” he used to call me when I was little, because I stood up for him in family fights. Despite his size and strength, he didn’t hold much power in our household. It was my mother and sister who called the shots. I sided with him so he wouldn’t be outnumbered.

  Given his disdain for lawyers, it’s ironic that in the final months of his life, my father relied on a lawyer to create a legal instrument—a codicil to his will—to disown me. And it’s also ironic that in order to find out what had happened, I had to hire a lawyer myself. Through my attorney I learned of my mother’s role in seeking out the lawyer who wrote the codicil for both of them. It was Mom—and perhaps Lara—who drove my father to the lawyer’s office four months before his death, and who helped him hold the pen to sign the codicil. My parents’ final words to me were executed by law. The man they’d hired to eliminate me shared my profession.

  1966

  Lara felt great sensitivity to animals, and grieved for weeks when one of our pet turtles or mice died. I recovered from such losses within the twenty minutes it took my mother to drive us to the pet store to get a new one. But I had an unseemly devotion to things—my things—and I kept everything I owned in a pristine, OCD state of unblemished perfection. I worshipped my collection of shiny Matchbox cars that I took out to play with (indoors only) and returned to their special carrying case, fitting each car into its corresponding numbered compartment. And I was devoted to my collection of little souvenirs from various trips—a small wooden skier from Vermont, a miniature seal from Canada, and so on. I dusted them every Saturday and replaced them in precisely the same configuration on the display shelf my father had built for me. My prize possession was a diary my parents had given me in 1965. I wrote in it every day, and carefully hid it in a box in my desk drawer. I recorded various important facts about my life, like what we did in gym class that day, or what the weather was like. And with the knowledge that I was committing a subversive act, I wrote about how much I hated Lara. Writing was dangerous, and my diary reflected the fact that I lived in the country of Big Sister. Discovery meant certain death.

  When I was eight, I begged my parents for a lock for my bedroom door. I would be able to lock myself in my room, I explained, so that Lara couldn’t get me. And I would be able to leave my room without worrying about Lara wrecking my things in my absence. To my surprise, my father agreed and went to Sears, purchased a doorknob and lock, and installed it in my door. He kept one key for himself and gave me the other.

  From then on, I always locked my door whenever I stepped out—even for a moment—when I walked to the bathroom, or to the kitchen, or to ask my mother a question. It drove Lara crazy, because she had always counted on being able to jump me in my room, or to get at my diary, or to ransack my belongings when I was out. As long as I was vigilant, I could keep the contents of my room safe from her. I carried the key in the front pocket of my jeans, and miraculously, Lara never succeeded in getting it away from me. I was prepared to die for that key.

  On Easter Sunday 1966, we were invited by the Palowskis to an afternoon cocktail party. Unlike my parents, who typically observed the Easter holiday by cleaning the house and eating matzos, the Palowskis were real Polish Catholics who had fled Kraków to escape the Communists. That morning, Lara refused to get out of bed. My mother sat at her bedside, pleading with her to get dressed and come with us. Mom pushed a strand of Lara’s hair behind her ear, and Lara swatted it away. My father strode down the hallway in his dark-blue suit and polished shoes. “We’ll leave her here,” he said. “It’s time to go.” This is what the experts at the Hoffman Children and Family Center had told us to do when Lara refused to participate in family outings. She was almost twelve, capable of making her own decisions and staying home if she chose not to go. Lara hated being left alone, but wouldn’t budge from bed. “It’s all right, darling,” my mother assured her as we left. “We’ll be home in a few hours.”

  The Palowskis’ house sat on a hill like an exotic gem on green velvet. It had a grand entrance and powder-blue Oriental carpets in the living room. I went out to the yard with the children of other guests, all of us painfully overdressed in Easter outfits, ruling out the possibility of any real fun. The grown-ups drank cocktails and laughed and spoke in Polish. After a few hours, my parents called for me. We put on our coats and walked down to the car, my patent-leather shoes clacking on the asphalt and my mother’s high heels making little bird-pecking sounds. We drove home in silence.

  As usual, my father slowed the car to a crawl as we approached our driveway so that we could admire the grounds. I could see him mentally comparing his work to that of the Palowskis’ professional landscapers. The blue spruce and fir trees he had planted years before were already taller than I was, and the forsythia bushes were starting to burst open.

  It was eerily quiet when we came in the house. There was no sign of Lara. My mother went to the closet to hang up her coat. I
went to my room to take off my stupid dress, but for some reason my key wouldn’t fit in the door. I looked closer and saw that nails had been hammered into the keyhole. From her bedroom, I could hear the low rumble of Lara’s laughter.

  The assault felt visceral, as if she had hammered nails into my own flesh. I let out a scream. The sound was terrible, but I couldn’t stop. My father and mother came running. When they saw the doorknob, they rolled their eyes. “Oh, Helen, it’s nothing,” my mother said. “Nothing happened.” They were tired and battle-weary, and they wanted to take off their formal clothes and relax and get a look at the Sunday Times, and maybe have a cup of tea and unwind. They did not want to deal with what they always dealt with: their children fighting childish wars.

  My father went down to his workbench in the basement and returned with a hammer and pliers and a screwdriver. He set to work and yanked and pulled and twisted and banged. Eventually he was able to remove the ruined knob and open the door.

  What lay before me was even more devastating. It looked as if a bomb had exploded: everything I owned had been flung across the room. Matchbox cars, games, figurines, socks, underwear—all ripped apart and scattered. My clothes had been clawed from their hangers and shelves and tossed in all directions. The desk drawers were yanked open, shredded papers and pens and books everywhere. And on the upended desk chair, my diary—torn open, pages fluttering.

  It took a moment for me to grasp what had happened. My windows had been pried open with a screwdriver, and the screen had been removed from the frame. My sister had come in through the windows. I began shrieking with new horror. It was the end, I thought. I could not live here anymore. I wanted her dead; I wanted her sent away, locked up, thrown out.

  My father spent the rest of the day repairing my window, replacing the screen, and removing the nails from the doorknob. The key still worked, after a fashion. I locked myself in my room and sat on my bed, rocking and crying and folding my clothes. I would never be the same, I thought. Nothing would ever be the same.