The Escape Artist

by Helen Fremont

  “You’re scalping me!” I said. “Leave me something, will you? Like an inch?”

  Harriet bent over, momentarily choked up with laughter. “I left you way more than an inch,” she said, pointing to a tuft of hair above my left ear. She stared at me in the mirror, trying to keep a straight face.

  “Just wait till it’s your turn,” I said.

  It was mid-October, six weeks into my sophomore year, and now that Emma had gone to Berkeley, I found myself (in that same cluelessly self-closeted way) crazy about Harriet Goodwin, a big-boned Minnesotan who rowed right behind me in our coxed four. She, in turn, had a crush on Jim, commander of the Enterprise—the character that William Shatner played in Star Trek. Harriet was a senior and captain of our team, a pure powerhouse of a rower who had been awarded a single racing shell by the U.S. Olympic Development Team. In practices, I could feel her drive with each stroke—she pried the lake open with her oar, propelling our boat forward.

  It was her idea that we cut each other’s hair. “We’ll be more aerodynamic,” she said. It was our private joke—we didn’t include our teammates. Afterward, we both wore blue bandannas to classes, and laughed when we took them off. Neither of us cared, really, what we looked like. The idea was more of a bonding ritual, cutting our hair short in preparation for the Head of the Charles Regatta, in which we’d be racing in a few days.

  I was slated to stroke our varsity boat, with Harriet rowing in the seat behind me. My parents had offered to drive out to Boston to watch me race, and then to bring me home for the long weekend. At eighteen, I was overjoyed that they were coming, and eager to show them off to my coach and teammates. Although Lara and I had been playing on varsity teams all our lives, neither of my parents had ever watched us compete. Girls’ sports were not considered important in those days, and Dad certainly never took time off from work to do anything as trivial as watch an athletic event. So I felt I’d scored the attention of the grand duke and duchess of my world. Later I would realize that they had arranged their visit for completely different reasons than I’d imagined. They had more important things on their minds.

  I still hadn’t broken the news about declaring an English major to my parents; I hadn’t even told my sister about my decision to drop the whole premed thing. I was afraid Lara might feel let down. Weren’t we supposed to be in this together? She and I hadn’t spoken since the beginning of the semester, when she’d told me what science courses to take. In the meantime, I’d spent more time rowing and goofing off with Harriet than studying.

  The morning of the regatta was a New England special: blue sky, trees in flame, river sparkling. Magazine Beach was covered with racing shells and men and women sporting muscle shirts and blast-off legs. When it was time for our race, we stripped off our socks and gingerly stepped on slimy rocks, carrying the boat into the water. We locked the oars, climbed in, toweled off our feet, laced them into the foot stretchers, and rowed down to the start.

  We fought a brisk wind into the basin. When they called our start, we fairly exploded from the line, oars in sync, coxswain screaming. The crowds on the riverbanks were a blur, their cheers a dull roar. We were flying at an impossible stroke rate, and after a few minutes, I started to panic. I can’t do it, I thought. I’m going to let them all down. I yanked wildly on my oar, my breath ragged. The boat lurched to port. “It’s okay, just relax.” Harriet’s voice drifted over my shoulders. “Just settle down and drive with your legs.” Her voice was calm and even, and it cut through my terror.

  I found the rhythm again and we were back in the race. But my face burned with shame. What had happened? What was wrong with me? I poured my anger into each stroke. Soon we passed a boat near the Western Avenue Bridge, and another at Anderson. We did all right in the end, seventh in a field of some twenty crews. Seventh was perfectly respectable, but it was small solace for the realization that I could not rely on myself—that in a pinch, when push came to shove, when everyone was counting on me, I could not deliver.

  “It’s okay,” Harriet said after we’d put the boat on slings and wiped it down. She patted my shoulder a bit awkwardly. We started derigging the boat. Despite my bravado, I knew I was weak at the center of my being. I was not reliable; I could not trust myself. It was at times like this that I felt a creeping sense of identity with Lara. She was the symbol of all that was scary and uncontrollable and irrational in our family. I felt myself slipping into that crater, and it was unnerving.

  After our team loaded the boats back onto the truck, I found Mom and Dad waiting for me on the dock of the Weld Boathouse. Among the crowds of spectators in jeans and T-shirts, my father stood out in his dark business suit and my mother in a formal pantsuit.

  “Do you have everything?” my mother asked, eyeing the small sports bag slung over my shoulder. I’d only packed two textbooks; I didn’t feel like studying much over the weekend, and I was looking forward to spending time with my parents. Mercifully, my mother said nothing about my haircut, and I couldn’t tell whether she’d even noticed it.

  We walked to the car. I knew it was of no consequence to my parents how my team did. My father had been a decathlete on the Polish Olympic team, but instead of competing in the 1936 Olympics, he had chosen to study for his medical exams. “Sports are an excellent outlet,” he’d always said, “but a career is what matters.”

  It was fine if I wanted to row, as long as my studies didn’t suffer.

  One of my teammates’ parents had invited the whole team to dinner at their home in Cambridge, one of those quiet multimillion-dollar houses three blocks from Harvard Square. It never occurred to me to be impressed by these folks. On the contrary, I wanted to show off my parents, who, I thought, were so foreign and exotic, so clearly extraordinary, everyone would admire me for my affiliation with them.

  “We don’t have time to stop,” my father said.

  “Oh, please,” I begged. “Can’t we just drop by for a couple minutes to say hi?”

  We were the last ones to arrive. Mom and Dad stood stiffly in the foyer, politely declining offers to eat or drink. I felt inexplicably proud, simply because they were my parents. But their awkwardness was obvious, and we left quickly.

  Night had fallen. Cambridge was strangely quiet, a planet of empty streets. My mother and I climbed into the Chrysler and my father started the engine. My eyelids closed of their own accord, and in the darkness I saw the racecourse again, the crowds cheering on the riverbank like colorful bits of confetti, crew shells skimming the water, fighting each other through the bridges. I was looking forward to the weekend at home. I would have a chance to rest and recover before returning to classes.

  And I also wanted to talk to my mother about what had happened to me during the race. I didn’t want to admit my weakness to my father, but I figured tomorrow, when Dad was at work, I could talk to Mom about it. She was better at that kind of stuff.

  My father slipped the car into gear and we floated silently through the city and onto the Mass Pike. I began loosening the seat belt, longing to slide across the backseat and fall asleep.

  “Helen,” my mother said. “We have something to tell you.”

  I stiffened at the sound of her voice, and studied the outline of her head. Something was wrong. She didn’t turn toward me, but stared straight ahead out the windshield. Stars had popped out in the sky, and we seemed to be driving into them, scattering them.

  “It’s about Lara,” she said.

  I held my breath.

  “Lara has… well… you know she was having a very difficult time this summer.” My mother’s voice broke. “She’s gone into an institution.”

  “What?”

  “The Institute of Living,” my mother said. “It’s the best of its kind. Near Hartford, Connecticut.”

  “Of Living?” It made me think of death.

  “It was last month. She just couldn’t continue—” Mom paused to dab her eyes with a Kleenex. “She was terribly sick.”

  “But…” I gripped
the seat as if it were a flotation device.

  An institution?! I tried to organize this information into a logical beginning, middle, and end. While I’d been messing around in boats all fall, my sister had gone nuts. Why hadn’t they told me sooner?

  “She didn’t want you to know,” my mother said. “And there was nothing you could do anyway. She made me promise not to tell you. But in another month it will be Thanksgiving, and you would find out then anyway.…”

  No no no no no. I’d spent a good chunk of my childhood hoping for Lara to get locked up someplace where she couldn’t hurt me. But so much had changed since then—I needed Lara now. She and I were in this together, this terrible battle to grow up—and I couldn’t lose her to the loony bin.

  “She finally agreed to go,” my mother said in a dead voice. “We took her to the Institute, and she finally agreed to sign herself in.”

  “There was no other choice,” my father said bluntly.

  My mother practically leapt out of her seat at him. “Oh, you’ve been wanting this for years!” she hissed. “You’ve wanted to send her away since she was a child!”

  My father stared straight ahead, the hairs on his head shining in the headlights of a passing car.

  “How could you?” my mother shouted. “How could you do this to your own daughter?”

  I’d never heard my mother speak like this—it was as if Lara’s rage were spilling directly out of my mother’s mouth.

  I had the sudden impulse to flip open the door, jump to the side of the road, and run back down the highway to my dorm. My teammates would be sitting around in the lounge, laughing and talking about the races.

  “You know that’s not fair,” my father said in a low voice.

  I concentrated on sitting perfectly still and making no sound.

  “It’s true!” my mother cried. “You’ve wanted this all along!”

  I stayed quiet and let my father take the rap, though I was the one who had always wanted Lara sent away when I was little. For a moment in the sixties, when Lara was fourteen and starving herself, my wish had almost come true. There was a hospital in White Plains, and the Hoffman Children and Family Center had made all the arrangements. They were just waiting for my mother to agree. It sounded good to me—I pictured a distant, desolate land stretched across a white expanse of New York State. She would be safely out of reach.

  But it had never happened. Week after week, Lara always cleaned up her act at the last minute and ate something. I’d always imagined that with Lara gone, my parents and I could live in peace. It hadn’t occurred to me that without Lara to distract us, my parents would turn on each other.

  My mother was too angry to speak now. She stared ahead, and we plunged forward into the darkness.

  * * *

  We arrived at home late and my mother put the kettle on for tea. My father walked past us without speaking.

  My room seemed so much smaller than I remembered. The blue shelves my father had built held the same childhood collection of figurines, some glued together after Lara’s tantrums. They looked forlorn, remnants from a previous life.

  Without thinking, I found myself walking into my sister’s room next to mine. Her room was dark. I sat on her bed and lost all sense of time. She was gone, and I felt sick. I missed her. Her absence felt physical, a broken shell tumbling in my stomach. This couldn’t be happening. I should have done something; I should have helped her.

  From the kitchen I could hear my father murmuring and the staccato of my mother’s response. The kettle screeched, and as I walked into the kitchen, my father brushed past me. “Good night,” he said.

  Mom and I sat at the kitchen counter, stirring our tea, staring at our reflections in the window. “It was very hard,” my mother said. She unwrapped a hard candy and popped it in her mouth. “Want one?” She held the little bowl out to me. I shook my head.

  “The doctor says she is doing better.” She took a sip of tea, holding the candy between her teeth. “It was very bad the first few nights.”

  A light was on in my parents’ bedroom, and I had the feeling my father was listening as he read the enormous black tome on psychiatry that he kept at his bedside.

  “After Lara signed in, I hugged her good-bye, but when the aides came for her, she got very violent. She pushed them away and started screaming and fighting.” My mother took a Kleenex from the cuff of her sweater and wiped her nose. “They had to wrestle her down and put her in restraints. There was nothing I could do. And Lara was yelling at me, ‘You did this to me! It’s your fault!’ ” Mom’s voice cut off, and she brought the teacup to her mouth. “Eventually,” she said, “they sedated her and took her to a room downstairs.”

  I put my hand on my mother’s arm, but I didn’t know what to say. I pictured Lara on one of her wild rampages. It must have taken half a dozen guards to bring her down.

  “You know,” my mother said, shaking her head, “I felt… I felt I’d betrayed her. Never again will I let that happen to her. Never.”

  My mother took a sip of tea. She blinked away tears.

  A chill crept down my spine. I had conveniently forgotten that Lara could get like that, and it was a jolt to be reminded. Why couldn’t I ever hold those two parts of my sister together in my mind—Lara the beloved, and Lara the ballistic? When things were good between us, as they had been the year before, I simply washed her postal periods from my mind. Or rather, I tucked them into some hidden compartment called “the past,” a chamber in which our family threw everything that was dangerous and scary. We pretended—no, we believed—that nothing from the past could ever return to haunt us. I rarely thought about our childhood fights, and when I did, I shrugged them off. Whatever had happened in the past, I told myself, couldn’t have been as bad as I remembered. In any case, it was over and done with. We were fine.

  But now part of me felt relieved that hospital staff—people outside my family—had seen Lara when she was like that. So it was real. There were witnesses. There was a record.

  “The following day, they put her back on the general ward,” my mother said. “She called me afterward. She was very angry.” My mother lowered her voice. “She demanded that I get her out of there, that it was all my fault.”

  I said nothing, but my heart broke for my mother, whom I held blameless. Lara’s crazy, I thought. How could she guilt-trip Mom like that? But then again, maybe Mom wasn’t so innocent after all. Why was she always catering to Lara’s shit?

  Sitting at the kitchen counter that night, I felt ashamed that I’d known nothing about Lara’s hospitalization—I’d been encased in my own little bubble those past weeks while Lara and my parents had been flying through the woods of mental illness. My own meltdown during my race seemed so insignificant by comparison, it didn’t even warrant mentioning. Instead I felt overwhelmed by the larger family drama—angry at my sister, sorry for my mother; angry at my mother, sorry for my sister. I couldn’t sort it out.

  “How long will she be there?”

  Mom shrugged. “It all depends on how she does.” Then she added, “You mustn’t say a word of this to anyone.”

  Of course not, I thought. Secrets were the lifeblood of our family. No one must know that Lara was in a mental institution; her future was at stake, her brilliant career as a physician. Not even Zosia would ever be told.

  * * *

  It would be many years before I realized the connection between my mother’s leaving Lara at the Institute that day, and an earlier separation that had occurred long before Lara was born. It was in October 1942, Mom told us, when she left her parents, cut her hair short, dressed up as an Italian soldier, and escaped to join Zosia in Rome. Her mother had talked her into leaving them and saving herself. Mom never saw her parents again. They were killed in a death camp months later. Mom had been twenty-three at the time—two years older than Lara was when Mom and Dad dropped her off at the Institute. Both separations, thirty-three years apart, were surrounded by secrecy, shame, and a sense of
irrevocable loss. Leaving Lara at the Institute, I now realize, must have been excruciating for my mother, and she would never let it happen again, no matter how desperately ill Lara might become in the years ahead.

  * * *

  It cost a fortune, Dad told me years later. To prevent any record of my sister’s hospitalization, my parents didn’t file for insurance; my father footed the entire bill himself. My parents told Lara’s college that my father had suffered a heart attack; they made this up as the reason for Lara’s leave of absence.

  Around the same time, my father installed a single foldout couch in the basement of his office on State Street. Also a refrigerator and a little ice-cube-size shower stall. He drove me to the office to show it to me. “I did this for a reason,” he said in a low voice.

  I tried to read his face, the deep lines around his eyes, the sharp dagger of his jaw. He looked away from me. “Mom and I are going to get a divorce.”

  It took a moment for this to sink in. No one had mentioned divorce since I was little, at the Hoffman Children and Family Center. I stared at him now as he turned to face me. His eyes were red. Everyone I loved was falling apart.

  * * *

  It wasn’t until Thanksgiving that I saw Lara. She’d gotten a pass from the Institute to come home for the holiday, and she sat hunched over the kitchen counter or in the living room—wherever we were—just picking, picking, picking at her nails. Look what you’ve done to me, she seemed to be saying. It didn’t matter that she’d signed herself into the nuthouse; we were all accountable and we were all guilty.

  At the end of the weekend, my mother drove Lara and me to Hartford to drop Lara off at the hospital, and then to Springfield, so I could catch the bus back to Boston. The three of us rode the Mass Pike in silence, Mom gripping the wheel at sixty miles an hour, my sister in the passenger seat, face hidden in a duck blind of dark-brown hair. And I sat in the backseat, staring out the window at the trees whizzing by.