The Escape Artist

by Helen Fremont

  * * *

  But I was wrong. Everything was exactly, precisely the same. As always, my father left for his evening office hours at four forty-five, right after our fifteen-minute dinner. For the next several months, as soon as his blue Chrysler slipped down the driveway, my sister would begin. She waited until I emerged from my room, and knocked me into the wall as I tried to reach the bathroom. She threatened to kill me and called me a crybaby if I made a sound.

  Over time I learned not to react. I learned that to cry was to play into her hands, to give her what she most wanted: proof of my terror. I began to learn that my best defense was passive resistance. The pretense of unruffled composure. She could bang me around, she could knock me down, but I swallowed my fear and presented only a calm, bland exterior. This drove her nuts, of course, and I liked that. I sensed my power. Sometimes I even whistled a tune, to really drive her over the edge. Then she had to go to even greater lengths to get a rise out of me. She was training me to ignore pain, and I was learning, but I was also keeping score.

  How did we manage to keep this up day after day? There were no broken bones, no trips to the emergency room. We trafficked in terror and shame, strictly small-time stuff. I remember thinking, This is how I learn to hurt someone. I can do it all by myself, without lifting a hand. I can go numb—and this numbness was my sharpest sword of all.

  I practiced on Lara, and she practiced on me, and we maximized our tolerance for inflicting and receiving pain. And every few weeks, between bouts of murderous rage, like some sort of diabolical interval training, we played well together, swimming at the local pool, playing basketball, collecting stamps, and inspecting insects.

  Our parents stayed out of it as much as possible. They knew, of course, that sibling rivalry was to be expected, and my mother had an uncanny ability to see only what she wanted to see. And so I learned how to fight at home. I learned how to hate, and how to do harm. Sometimes, after long hours of combat, after my mother and sister had collapsed in tears in each other’s arms, I went outside and stood on the lawn, staring up at the stars. Everything dark, silent, mysterious. I wanted to strike the match that would explode the sky.

  four

  In the weeks following the receipt of my father’s will in the mail, I tried to follow the path of my daily life as best I could: I went to the gym; walked the dog; walked my wife, Donna, to the health-care center where she worked, and then took the T to my office downtown. I could do almost everything but sleep. At night I padded around our apartment and wrote in my journal, recording everything I knew about my family, trying to make sense of my father’s last words in his codicil.

  Donna had known my family back when all of us had been close; she had watched our implosion over the years. Now, as I moved restlessly around our apartment, I was careful not to wake her. But I could hear her voice in my ear, a warm, slow-rolling Alabama accent that made you feel that all would be well. She was tall and lithe, with honking red toenails and dark almond eyes that tilted slightly on her thin face. When I’d first met her eight years earlier in my backyard—the neighbors had set us up!—her eyes had been so strangely beautiful, I’d run inside and changed my T-shirt, as if that might improve my chances. It did. Two months later I moved into her apartment, and two years after that we exchanged rings. It wasn’t yet legal, but we knew not to expect much of the law, and therefore we were not disappointed.

  That winter of 2002, Donna was still recovering from ten months of chemotherapy after a recurrence of cancer. We had been through a hard year. She had managed to sidestep a literal death sentence just as I was dealt a figurative one.

  * * *

  I was nine when my parents started talking about divorce during our Children and Family sessions, and they went on talking about it at home behind closed doors, when they thought Lara and I weren’t listening. Of course, Lara and I were always, always listening, especially when they spoke in Polish, a language neither of us understood. All the dangerous, important discussions between our parents were in Polish, and Lara and I translated them into our worst fears.

  Lara’s worst fear was that they’d send her to a mental institution. My worst fear was that they would not.

  I didn’t really understand what divorce was. I had classmates whose parents had died, but none who had divorced. This was back in the days before divorce spread through the suburbs like color TVs.

  It was my father who first brought it up one Friday night at the Hoffman Children and Family Center that spring of 1966. He was sitting with one knee over the other in the chair across from me, his maroon striped tie slightly askew under his dark suit jacket. He sounded very businesslike. “After we get a divorce, I could move into my office.”

  A divorce sounded like something that you bought, like a coffin in which you put your discarded marriage. As I understood it, once my parents went out and got one, Dad would visit us from across town, which made sense, because he mostly worked all the time anyway.

  My mother didn’t say anything, but sat very rigid, her back straight and knees together, her mouth a thin line. I stole a glance at Lara, who looked bug-eyed. For once she wasn’t even picking at her fingers; she was barely breathing.

  Dr. Grokle also sat motionless, but her beehive of hair quivered. It was my father who could no longer live with us, he said icily, because he was a realist and my mother was not. Mom, I could tell, was angry—she didn’t say a word, but stared at him as if he were a stack of dirty dishes. I said nothing, believing that things were more likely to go away if I ignored them.

  * * *

  Now I wonder. What if my father had a girlfriend? Or perhaps he wanted a girlfriend, but felt constrained by the vows of marriage? “My word is like iron,” he used to say proudly. He would not break his word for all the nooky in the world.

  But perhaps he would break his marriage for just one big, buxom blonde. Decades later, Lara reminded me that Miss Jameson, the social worker at the Hoffman Center, mysteriously disappeared from our therapy sessions at some point in the midsixties, and was never spoken of again. “She was hitting on Dad,” Lara told me. “She kept calling the house. That’s why we got an unlisted number, remember? Mom went apeshit over it.”

  Dad and Mom were always fighting over the correct use of a word, or the proper translation of a phrase from Latin or German or Italian into English. They ran for the dictionary and gloated when they got the expression right. But what came between them was far more treacherous than grammar or syntax. Mom depended on the illusion of a happy family, and could not admit that ours was broken. She would never have agreed to divorce. My father, on the other hand, could not tolerate pretense.

  Lara’s problems were the field on which they fought, but their troubles went deeper. There was something about my mother’s all-consuming bond with her older sister that my father resented. He complained that my mother’s attention was never on him; instead she lavished her love on Zosia and Renzo in Italy. “It’s not normal,” he said. I don’t think it ever occurred to him that Mom and Zosia might be keeping a secret from him. He only knew that, despite appearances, he was left out of his own marriage. Divorce would be more honest.

  They didn’t get divorced.

  * * *

  Something shifted the fall after I turned eleven and Lara was fourteen—at first it seemed that Lara had simply gone on a diet and lost weight, but then it turned out that she’d more or less stopped eating. We had been on a two-year reprieve from family therapy for good behavior, but now we went back. Anorexia was sort of a parole violation.

  At dinner now, Lara would cautiously tap at her food with the tines of her fork, as if a green bean might suddenly leap from the plate and strangle her. She slowly pushed a piece of steak to the left of her plate, then to the right. She turned it ninety degrees. She lifted her glass of water and took a few sips, then returned it to the counter and stared at it, exhausted by the effort.

  My mother started cooking special meals for her: steamed vegetables, tiny porti
ons of New York sirloin, lettuce with vinegar, fish with lemon. Lara ate less and less and grew tiny before our eyes. My mother became desperate. My father threatened hospitalization. Dr. Grokle at the Hoffman Center continued to bob her beehive at us.

  None of this concerned me too much. What rocked my world was that Lara was no longer a physical threat to me. As I grew taller and stronger, she grew thinner, more frail, twig-like. For the first time in my life, I felt completely safe.

  But within a month or two, Lara had risen to a new kind of power over our family—by disappearing before our eyes. I didn’t see what the big deal was. Let her starve herself, I thought—at least she didn’t bother me anymore. To my surprise, it looked like anorexia might actually get her hospitalized. Even Dr. Grokle started talking about it. Only my mother held out.

  “Please, Lara, you have to eat,” Mom begged at every meal. Please, darling. Try.”

  Lara would slouch so low over the counter you couldn’t see her plate for her hair.

  “I’m too fat!” More of a moan than words.

  My father, sitting next to me at the opposite end of the counter, had just finished my potatoes and pork chop for me. I was not a big eater in those days, and my father was always hungry. When my mother wasn’t looking, I’d broom my leftovers onto his plate. He hoovered them up before anyone noticed. Sometimes I wondered whether he even realized that the food had come from my plate.

  “But you’re skin and bones, darling! Look at yourself! Do you know how many times I’ve had to take in your school uniform? It’s hanging off of you.”

  “Well, I’m not hungry,” Lara said. “You can’t make me eat when I’m not hungry.”

  “Oh yes we can,” my father said in a low voice.

  Lara leaped up, sending her chair crashing to the floor. “No you can’t!” she shouted. “You can’t make me do anything!”

  “They’ll do it at the hospital,” he said coolly. “If you don’t eat, they’ll insert a food tube and force the food directly into your stomach.”

  “Oh, you’d like that, wouldn’t you? You’d love to see—”

  “Lara, please—” My mother held out her arms, but Lara swatted them away.

  “Get away from me!” she shouted. “Why do you hate me so much?”

  “We don’t—”

  “Leave me alone!” She ran to her bedroom and slammed the door.

  At the time I had no sympathy for Lara, and even less curiosity about what she might be going through. Looking back now, it occurs to me that she was given an impossible role as my older sister—everything was riding on her. All of my parents’ losses—their broken hopes and dreams, the heartbreak of our murdered grandparents—landed on Lara’s shoulders. There was no way she could repair the past, and the weight of our parents’ needs must have been crushing. Perhaps Lara fought against the burden, thrashing and kicking and bucking them in the only way she could—with her body. I was luckier: I came after her, and while she commanded everyone’s attention, I was able to slip by relatively unnoticed. At least for a while, until I grew old enough to engage in the battle with our family’s past as a full-fledged participant.

  * * *

  Hospitalization was my father’s ace in the hole. Even my mother knew she couldn’t keep Lara at home if she didn’t eat. Deadlines were set, weigh-ins established, calories counted. Cheating, broken promises, threats to call the police. New bargains, new deadlines, more fights. Lara ate enough to stay out of the hospital, and we settled into a sort of detente. Time slipped by, and Lara got better, apparently all by herself. By the time she was seventeen, Lara was feeling good enough to switch from the safety of St. Mary’s to the raucous regional public high school for her senior year.

  I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was learning from a master. Years later, when I was in college, I would follow in Lara’s dangerous footsteps and engage in my own food wars. But back in 1969, when I was twelve, food was my friend. The bigger I grew, the safer I felt around Lara. Our mutual hatred was alive and well, but now our skirmishes became more strategic.

  “Helen is going out with boys,” she told Mom when I was thirteen.

  This was a stroke of genius on Lara’s part, because Mom considered my interest in boys evidence of my lack of allegiance to our household. At the time, I would rather have been almost anywhere than attached to the flypaper of my family. And it was this apparent desire of mine to escape from home that most angered my mother. To her, family was sacrosanct and friends were suspect. Boys—the entire gender—were just plain off-limits.

  “You are not to date,” my mother informed me.

  “I’m not dating anyone,” I lied. “I hang out with my friends. We go to parties.” This was true. I didn’t mention that we also paired off and necked with the lights out.

  “All right, no more parties then,” my mother said. “Weekends are for family.” To Mom, I was worse than crazy or violent like Lara: I was disloyal.

  Lara had never had a boyfriend in her life, and her standards were even more Victorian than my mother’s. I couldn’t fight both of them. And to be honest, it wasn’t that much of a sacrifice—I didn’t really care that much about boys or partying to begin with. I just wanted to be loved by everyone.

  * * *

  During the fall of 1971, Lara was applying to colleges, and brochures were spread across the dining room table—Williams, Amherst, Middlebury, Smith. All those glossy scenes of swirling autumn leaves, students tossing Frisbees and reading books under giant oak trees. My mother had done her homework, and I could see the excitement growing in her eyes. College, I realized, was where I needed to focus my energy. I tagged along with Mom and Lara on their tours of prospective schools all over New England. As we strolled across the leafy campus of Wellesley College, I recognized immediately what my mother’s eyes said: they said, I want. She wanted the luxury of time and books and immersion in the world of academia. I decided to give her Wellesley. She’d worked hard to make college material of me, and she deserved to have me go to the college of her choice.

  I began amassing my credentials. I threw myself into the student government, the school newspaper, varsity sports. I performed in a talent show at the old-age home. I was aiming high—for the beam in my mother’s eye. Even my dad started noticing me—I had finally risen to his line of vision. This was wealth. I would soar into the stratosphere for my parents.

  I asked my teachers for extra-credit assignments in addition to my schoolwork, in order to inch my grades higher. Now I was spending all my time reading, studying, brownnosing, ass-kissing, teacher-petting, and good-girling. My teachers loved me because their jobs were hard and I was easy. I wanted to please. I followed directions, and only rebelled in the privacy of my own mind, when no one was looking.

  Mainly I wanted to prove to my parents how capable I was; I wanted them to beam with pride. I considered that my job description: Perfect Child.

  Looking at my photos from that freshman year of high school, I see I was relatively dark-skinned, with long dark hair and brown eyes. I liked myself, or thought I did, and I had a self-confidence that I did not deserve, perhaps, but I believed I would go places and do things that other people would not do. It would take decades to realize that my young confidence covered for a sense of terrifying responsibility to excel, and a life-threatening fear of failure.

  My ninth-grade physics teacher, a John Belushi look-alike with muttonchop sideburns and a wreck of rumpled clothes, was the only one who saw this as a problem. One day after class, Mr. Moskowitz grabbed me by a few strands of my hair and said, “C’mere.” I thought he was joking (he had a malicious sense of humor that was usually pretty funny), but this hurt, and I had to bend sideways and tilt my head toward him as he pulled me down the hall. Students gaped as we passed by. When we reached the cafeteria, he sat me at a table across from him. My scalp was burning.

  “You’ve got to stop this,” he said.

  “What?” I still thought this was some kind of joke, but I co
uldn’t figure it out.

  “Just cut the bullshit.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “All this extra credit, all this trying to get into college. You’re fourteen! Cut the crap! You’re missing out on your own life.”

  I was stung. I suddenly hated Mr. Moskowitz.

  “I am living my life,” I snapped.

  In retrospect, it’s strange that Mr. Moskowitz, the most unlikely person on the planet, had me nailed. He just didn’t know the half of it, or how to help. Of course, no one could have helped me then; my need to impress my parents trumped my own interests, whatever they were.

  * * *

  The spring of my freshman year, through no fault of my own, a senior named Kevin Flanagan took an interest in me. My sister happened to be in the same homeroom as Kevin, now that she was in the public school system. Lara immediately reported to my mother that Kevin was a thug who smoked dope and mouthed off in class.

  This was only partly true. He did smoke dope and mouth off in class, but he was also a voracious reader, passionate about history, philosophy, and ethics. And he was tall and broad-shouldered, with a head of free-flying rust-colored hair, a tanned face from working outdoors, and something like a beard-in-progress. Despite our four-year age difference, Kevin and I were in the same elective French class, where we learned to speak French with a Brooklyn accent like our teacher. One day Kevin approached me after class, introduced himself, and told me he made leather belts and wallets; would I like one? He pointed to his own belt as evidence of his craftsmanship, and I felt a little funny staring at his hips. He was long-waisted and trim, and his faded jeans rode low on his hips. He pulled his wallet from his back pocket, and handed it to me so I could admire how smooth the leather was, how fine the stitching.