And now, for the first time in our lives, Lara and I started writing to each other—letters that were funny and self-mocking and oddly reassuring. To my surprise, we actually seemed to like each other. Perhaps now that we were both away from home, we began to see the possibility of friendship rather than rivalry. I took a bus to visit her over the Columbus Day weekend, and we had a surprisingly good time together, biking on country roads past tobacco fields and apple orchards, buying giant cookies at the country store. Lara was inexplicably good-natured and laid-back, no longer the dweeb I remembered from home. She nodded knowingly when I confessed to being intimidated by my classmates’ erudition. Perhaps she was relieved to see that I was becoming less of an asshole—I could finally admit to cracks in my self-assured façade. In any event, it turned out we were very much alike, Lara and I—two college kids trying to impress our parents, for whom we felt a toxic mix of awe and love, and a sense of crushing obligation.
But over the next few weeks and months, it was precisely this similarity to my sister that began to gnaw at me. The pursuit of perfection was grinding me down. The fact that I’d managed to score straight As my first semester only plunged me deeper into despair. How was I going to keep this up? Now that I’d staked my claim at the top of the alphabet, anything else would feel like a failure.
This sense of implosion was new to me. It followed me everywhere—when I ran the tree-rooted trail around Lake Waban, when I tried to drown my anguish in ice cream sundaes in the dorm cafeteria, even when I shot hoops with Janet on weekends. I’m sliding down the same chute as Lara, I thought. Whatever “it” was that had tormented my sister since childhood, I had finally caught it. I was literally turning into Lara, or at least the version of Lara that was unglued. Somehow, Lara and I had quietly swapped places that winter. She had emerged the confident one, and I had turned into an insecure mess. I didn’t know it then, but this was the beginning of a pattern my sister and I would fall into for decades to come.
* * *
It wasn’t until the spring semester that I stumbled upon rowing. Or rather, first I stumbled upon Emma Dunlap, a tall, blond Californian with a goofy smile and calves the shape of mangoes. She seemed to breeze through campus as if she were on a surfboard—long athletic limbs, silky hair, aquamarine eyes. She and I were lab partners in Biology 100 that winter; we operated on the same frog and examined its tiny heart and kidneys. “He’s beautiful,” she murmured. This had not occurred to me. I had seen the frog as a speed bump on my way to a high-powered career of some sort; Emma made me see him as a lush country with rivers of life.
Emma was also a rower and had raced in the Head of the Charles in October. She showed me her photos of the regatta. I’d never seen a crew shell before. She’d developed and printed the pictures in one of the darkrooms in the art center. I caught my breath at the high-gloss images, stunned by her talent, her boundless energy, her off-kilter beauty. I imagined what it would feel like to fly across the water in one of those long, sleek racing shells with Emma and a team of women.
“You have to join the crew,” she said. “We’ll row together.”
I pictured the mist rising at dawn as our boat unzipped the surface of the lake.
“Yes,” I said.
* * *
Rowing was unlike any sport I’d ever done. The fastest crews are quiet and smooth, the perfection of power squeezed into as narrow and clean a line as possible, a speed seamstress streaking down the racecourse, stitching each stroke into the fabric of the river, and finishing before the water even knows it’s been cut.
From the moment I tried it, I was in love. You take four strong women and blend them into a single motion. You slide together, catch together, breathe together. You lose sense of your boundaries. You become one with the boat, with the other rowers, with the water.
We would roll out of bed and stumble down to the boathouse before dawn, when the lake was just a dark smudge surrounded by the shapes of trees. We launched into darkness, our blades sailing over the water and punching holes in the lake. Now the first rays of sunlight seeped through heavy rags of mist. Behind us the shore was barely distinguishable from the soup of early morning. Soon the second boat joined us and we raced side by side.
The morning flew by as if on time-lapse photography. The sun rose like a gold coin in the sky, and the shore came into focus. The woods sprang up, dark limbs snaking through the sharp green of spring. The lake grew choppy, a slate color that turned blue-black, then gunmetal gray. Out on Route 16, cars began their slow descent into the city.
We spent an hour and a half racing each other from cove to cove, turning quickly at the end of each set and pausing—just long enough to pass the water bottle, wipe our foreheads on our shirtsleeves, and gasp for breath. We sat hunched over, shoulders soaked, legs quivering. Our fingers grew blisters and then calluses, hard and smooth.
By the time we docked, the world had awakened. Breakfast was cooking in the cafeteria. We threw on our sweats and ran up the hill to the dorm. Wet, flushed, stained with oarlock grease, we stormed the dining room, where a handful of our classmates sat slumped in bathrobes, sucking down coffee, stunned by the fact of morning. Flush with endorphins, we filled the room with roars of laughter, heaped our plates with food, and sat down to our meal like the victorious army we believed ourselves to be.
Passions crossed from one boat to another. Attraction was unavoidable. We were teenagers, we moved in sync, and it was all pretty much preconscious—most of us hadn’t yet made the connection between love and Lesbos. It was 1975, but I don’t think anyone on our crew had even heard of the Stonewall riots six years earlier. I certainly never imagined that the soaring feelings and giddy excitement I felt for some of my teammates could be more than the inevitable camaraderie of a close-knit team of athletes. My anxiety and self-doubt of the previous semester fell away. I grew closer to Emma. In the evenings she and I would sit on the floor of her room and talk about our families and our dreams for our future, as if our lives were a movie that could be previewed and condensed into tantalizing trailers. I barely mentioned my sister, and instead ratcheted up the romance and drama of our family story. After all, my parents had always been the real stars in my life; Lara and I were the tendrils you pushed out of the way to see them more clearly.
In her photos, Emma’s parents and two brothers looked youthful and happy, bronzed by the California sun, while my family lurked in the shadow of its dark past. Her father had rowed for Berkeley in the fifties, while my father was still learning English and washing his gray hair in the residents’ sinks at Mount Sinai Hospital. I wanted to be just like her. I wanted to grow a second skin like hers—smooth, strong, confident. She and her family hiked in the Sierra Nevada and rock-climbed in Yosemite, and her father was a helicopter pilot in his spare time, when he wasn’t handling major financial deals for his bank. I fantasized about being adopted by the Dunlaps and tried not to think too much about my own family.
six
Lara came home from her junior year sunk in a soul-sucking depression. Her head hung to her chest, and she moved as if her feet were shackled together. She barely said hello to me as she shuffled through the door. I was shocked that the Lara of last fall had dissipated into this other Lara, someone I had buried deep in my memory of our unpleasant past.
She had gotten extensions on her final papers. Our family sprang into action, turned the dining room into our war room, and spread Lara’s notebooks and research materials across the table. My mother prepared the plan of attack. My father did fact-checks, and I was assigned to editing. Lara perked up and got to work.
She completed her junior year with her fine grade point average intact. Then she fell apart. She disappeared into her room and could not be roused from bed for days at a time. It felt as if our house had closed around a festering wound, and my parents and I moved uneasily from kitchen to living room to bedroom, afraid of what might ooze out.
I’d returned home that May after my freshman year with a brok
en heart. Emma was transferring to Berkeley to be closer to her family, and we wrote long, passionate, coast-to-coast letters over which I cried and cried. She sent me pressed wildflowers from the High Sierras and invited me to California. To my astonishment, I burst into tears at the mere mention of her name, and read and reread her letters obsessively. My mother thought this was perfectly normal. After all, it was the way she missed her sister, who was about to arrive from Rome to spend the summer with us, as she did every year now. During the winter months when she and Zosia were apart, my mother would run to the mailbox every afternoon for Zosia’s letter as if it contained the oxygen she needed to get through the next twenty-four hours.
Now Mom made up the little couch in the television room as Zosia’s bed for the summer. It was oddly sweet to see Mom dancing around Zosia like a puppy, bringing her tea, offering her fresh-baked linzer torte, and chattering away in Italian. Zosia was still groggy from the long flight, and it took her a few days to get over her jet lag, put on an apron, and start churning out choux pastry and apfelstrudel and panettone in the kitchen. My father, as usual, was at his office or at the hospital all day, stopping by for supper at four-thirty before rushing off for evening office hours a few minutes later. He seemed to accept that Zosia and his wife were a unit. He would join in their conversation in Italian at times—usually to correct them on some point of politics, history, or grammar, depending on the topic of discussion.
I can’t remember exactly what happened to Kevin that summer. When I first came home in May, he’d proposed a summer fling, which I declined, having lost all interest in him. He seemed to be a dull shard from a distant past. I spent that summer of 1975 working the cash register at Herman’s World of Sporting Goods. I was about to turn eighteen, still too young to work in a store that sold guns, but the manager was a Rotary Club friend of my father’s, so he let it go. The rest of the employees, in their little mustard-colored vests with the World of Sporting Goods logo over the left breast, grumbled behind my back. I took my breaks with the High Adventure guys, who sold pitons and chalks and bright-colored climbing ropes. I listened to them brag about their winter assaults and Class 7 climbs. We sat on folding chairs around the dented table in the employee lounge and ate Clark Bars and Raisinets from the candy machine. Cigarette butts cascaded from a hubcap-size ashtray in the middle of the table. Bolted to the wall was the time clock, and next to it the metal rack with our time cards. If you punched in a minute late, you were docked fifteen minutes.
I spent most of my paycheck on climbing gear they recommended, and one of them, Joe Cantagna, asked me on a date. He had dark wavy hair and an uneven mustache, and he was always touching the calluses on his hands with his fingertips. Although I was in college, my mother still did not allow me to date, and boys did not understand my compliance with this rule. I had no interest in dating Joe Cantagna or any other guy. So I lied and told Joe I already had a boyfriend. It was easier all around. In my experience, going out with boys was not worth the acrobatics involved in lying to my mother. I needed my mother; I did not need boys. I didn’t waste time wondering about this.
Lara wasn’t able to do much with herself that summer. Mainly she stayed at home under the covers, playing games with the drugs her shrink prescribed—she’d take them, not take them, stockpile them, pretend to take them, fight with my father about them, etc. She would stagger from her room every day or two, dazed and barefoot. She dragged herself to the kitchen, collapsed in a chair at the counter, and picked at her fingers. She wore the same torn white T-shirt all summer, with a faded emblem of her Amateur Athletic Union swim team across the front.
We exchanged scowls. Would it have killed me to be nice to her? I was obviously in better shape than she was that summer, but it only made me more stingy with my tiny quota of kindness.
As soon as she sat down, my mother jumped to her feet. “Oh, Lara!” she said. “Coffee?”
Lara grunted, and my mother poured.
“Darling, would you like some panettone?” Lara picked at the coffee cake, then pushed it away, then picked at it some more. My mother leaned over her and whispered something in her ear. I refused to look at them, annoyed by the dance that bound them together. I did not want to be as miserable as Lara to deserve that kind of attention. But I wanted something too shameful to admit: I wanted my mother to myself. I wanted our long conversations about books and art and movies. I missed her laughter.
And I couldn’t have said it at the time, but I also wanted my big sister back, the version of Lara who had reassuringly appeared out of the monster of childhood. I wanted the Lara who patiently listened to me and my problems, who took care of me and inspired me to go on adventures with her. I hated it when she was like this, so aggressively depressed, staring daggers and shoving me aside with a smoldering rage. Not only had this lout of a Lara taken my beloved sister away, but she had also taken my mother with her.
Zosia’s presence added a new twist. Until this summer, my mother had managed to keep our family’s misery a secret from Zosia. Lara had always been able to pull herself together around Zosia in the past. But by July, Lara had given up any effort at pretense, and she was having her meltdowns in plain view of all of us. Zosia seemed unfazed by this. “I’m tough,” she would tell me. “I can take a lot.”
“She’s very fragile,” my mother would say of Zosia. “She cannot take it.”
And so we pursued our own ideas about ourselves and each other.
As the summer wore on, my father spent more time at his office. I wasted my days at the cash register, dreaming of someday busting loose. I had visions of running away to California to be with Emma, hiking the spine of the Sierras, climbing out of my life in the suburban Tri-City area. With my employee discount, I bought a backpack, tent, sleeping bag, headlamp, water bottles, everything I needed to get away from everyone and everything.
One day Zosia pulled me aside. “Your mother has her hands full,” she said. “She doesn’t have time for you. Tell me. I’m the auntie. Tell me what you did today.” With her silvery hair and lined face, she seemed much older than last summer, when we had been together in Rome.
“I worked.”
“What was it like?”
“I can’t stand it,” I said. “I can’t stand watching Mom pour herself into Lara, day and night. It makes me crazy just seeing them!”
“You have to be patient, darling.” Zosia’s voice dropped. “Lara is very sick, and your mother is doing the best she can. She loves you very much—”
“Oh, please,” I said, turning away.
“No!” Zosia caught my wrist. Her eyes flashed. “You have to help your mother. You have to be as nice to her as you can. What she is dealing with is very, very hard.”
Zosia’s anger alarmed me. “If Lara’s so sick,” I said, “then how come she can be raving mad one minute, and then when the phone rings—if it’s some friend of hers—she’s instantly sweet and funny and fine, as if nothing’s happened? Either she’s sick or she’s not! It’s not like some spigot she can turn on and off at will.”
“She’s sick, darling. You have to understand.”
My father agreed with me about Lara. But he took the discussion into dangerous territory that I did not wish to explore. “Mom is deranged,” he said matter-of-factly. “She is damaged by the war.” His face went solemn, and the creases around his mouth deepened. “She never recovered from the killing of her parents.”
I kept silent. I refused to believe that my mother was deranged; I believed Lara was the problem. Remove Lara, I thought, and all would be fine.
I was just as deluded as everyone else.
* * *
One evening my father was driving Zosia and me down State Street to his office to fetch toilet paper for our house. He ordered it wholesale for his office, and we siphoned off the supplies for home use, keeping careful count for the IRS. We were riding in his new Plymouth Duster, and he recorded the mileage and gas expenditures in a little notebook, so he could monitor t
he engine’s efficiency.
“She can’t help it,” Zosia was saying.
“Then she should be properly medicated.”
I listened from the backseat. All we ever talked about was Lara. All day, every day, all my life. This summer was the first time Zosia was pulled in too.
“You can’t just drug her into a stupor,” Zosia said. “She has a problem. She needs help. “Psychotherapy,” she added, coming down hard on the p. “She needs intensive psychotherapy.”
Wrong! I thought. Shrinks had been poking sticks at Lara for the past ten years, and they seemed to be part of the problem here. They could make anyone look crazy, especially someone as messed up as Lara. At least, that was Lara’s position, and I was starting to agree with her. The more she saw psychiatrists, the worse she got.
“She needs patience,” Zosia said.
“She also needs discipline,” my father said. “She needs someone to lay down the law. Maria is too permissive. She gives in to Lara’s every wish.”
Although I was aligned with my father, his idea of discipline scared me; sometimes it looked a lot like sadism. He had Siberian standards of punishment. Once, when I was fourteen, he asked if I’d like to take a walk with him. It was August; we were on vacation in Maine. I chose to wear my new sandals—Dr. Scholl’s knockoffs—of which my father disapproved. “Put on sensible shoes,” he said. “But they’re comfortable,” I assured him. To teach me a lesson, he took off at a breakneck pace, walking as briskly as his long legs would carry him. I had to run to keep up, and by the time we got home an hour later, my feet were pulp, my sandals covered in blood. Neither of us said a word, but I had trouble walking for the rest of our vacation. I suppose I was more like my father than I liked to admit.
“Lara is a sick girl,” my aunt said softly. “Kovik, remember, she’s a child. She has a mental problem. I never realized it till this summer, you know. Maria didn’t want to tell me. But now I see.”
The Escape Artist Page 8