What was going through my mother’s mind, taking one daughter to a mental institution, and the other to an elite college, a school similar to one that my mother herself had dreamed of attending—if only she hadn’t been Jewish, if only the war hadn’t broken out? And what was my sister thinking, at the age of twenty-one, sitting in the nuthouse, while fifty miles away her college teammates were doing their workouts in the pool and snapping each other with towels in the locker room? It must have pissed her off that her little sister was sitting in the backseat, blithely returning to her undisturbed life with her friends and classes and freedom as a Wellesley sophomore.
And I, that lucky little sister, what was I thinking, in the heavy silence of that hour-and-a-half ride to the hospital on a cold gray November day in 1975? I remember only how lonely I felt, how bereft, how empty and angry, yes—angry at the oppressive ruins of my family, the violence and tragedy of its past, and the hopelessness of its present. My life, such as it was, belonged to them and not to me. I did not know who I was without them, and I hated myself for who I was with them.
It was around noon when we arrived at the Institute and went up to Lara’s floor, the solid clunk-clunk of doors locking behind us as we moved down the hall. The air was stifling. Wisps of mental patients in bathrobes drifted by with empty eyes. The shiny linoleum floors and the whispering sadness.
Lara showed us her room that she shared with another patient, who, thank God, was not there. My mother started putting away the clothes she’d washed for Lara. This made me inexpressibly sad, and I could not bear to watch. I turned toward the window, but it had black metal bars, and I could not bear to see that either. Lara didn’t belong here any more than I did, I thought. It was such an obvious mistake—couldn’t everyone see that? She was nothing like those husks of women sitting in front of the TV or standing around the common room like dandelion fluff.
Mom talked quietly while Lara and I stared at the floor. At last it was time to go. Mom left a tin of linzer torte on Lara’s dresser and hugged her good-bye. Lara and I exchanged a quick nod, both of us ashamed to be there. Then Mom and I walked to the end of the hall where a nurse buzzed us through the doors, then down the stairs, and out into the exquisite blast of cold November air.
Mom and I said little as she drove me to the bus station. “She’s doing so much better,” she said when we hugged good-bye.
That night I lay awake in my dorm room, unable to scrub the images of the Institute from my mind. The barred windows. The dead eyes of the women in robes and slippers, sitting like stones on the dreary couch in front of the TV in the common room, staring at Days of Our Lives.
* * *
Another sleepless night, a mounting anxiety, and I felt a growing urge to tell someone. The more I wrestled it down, the more urgent it felt. What was I after?
Attention, I thought, horrified—the most shameful, weak, and egotistic form of self-indulgence in the world. What’s more, I wanted attention for problems that weren’t even mine! After all, I wasn’t in the hospital. My parents were right—I was selfish.
At last I broke. In early December, I knocked on Carrie Hanson’s door. She was our resident assistant, a slim-hipped psych major and natural-born caretaker of the needy and forlorn. I sat on her neatly made bed and told her my sister was in a mental hospital and my parents were getting a divorce, and I was breaking the rules by talking about it. She held me while I cried, and murmured reassurance. Still, I felt strangely detached from myself, afraid that I was making a big deal out of nothing. I felt vaguely false and guilty—like a well-fed dog scavenging for scraps from the neighbors, when I had it better than most.
“Helen, you know, maybe you should talk to someone at Campus Counseling. They’re really good.”
I reeled back. “No way!” I said. “That’s exactly what got my sister into this mess! The shrinks totally screwed her up.”
Carrie nodded, her eyes a beautiful blue that made me want to touch her face. “Okay,” she said. “It’s completely up to you. Anyway, you can always come talk to me.”
I thanked her and stood, embarrassed and a bit confused. What am I doing? I felt the sharp bones of her shoulder blades as she hugged me again. Then I went out for a walk under the stars. The darkness felt good. But as the days went by, I still couldn’t shake it—I felt haunted by my sister and trapped by my parents’ insistence on silence. Finally I decided to tell Harriet, although I didn’t know what I wanted or expected from her. Did I think she would love me more if I told her? Feel sorry for me? Hug me? At lunch one day I forced myself to say, “There’s something I want to tell you.”
Harriet cocked her head in the most adorable way—as a puppy might, waiting for what would come next.
“Um, my sister—she’s in a mental hospital. I went to see her over Thanksgiving.”
Harriet paused, knit her eyebrows together, and said, “I’m sorry.” Then, a silence that was awkward for both of us, and I changed the subject. We never spoke of it again.
* * *
By mid-December, I had finished reading all 1,534 pages of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa for my eighteenth-century English lit class. Now I was chugging through Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded, another overwritten brick about a teenager who gets abducted and locked up and endures repeated attempts at rape, until she falls in love with her captor. My English major exhilaration was wearing thin.
I moved joylessly from class to carrel and back to class. The snows came, rowing season was over, and I didn’t go to Harriet’s dorm anymore. She and I were both on the basketball team, but I withdrew into myself and she let me be. Mom called to tell me that Lara was improving, and the doctors were very pleased. “It looks like they’ll release her in time for Christmas!” my mother said cheerfully.
The prospect of spending Christmas with my parents and Lara made me break out in a cold sweat. I wanted out from my family. I wanted to be free, light, unburdened. Long ago, Emma had invited me to California for winter break, and now Harriet invited me to spend Christmas with her family in Minneapolis.
I did the unthinkable. I wrote my parents a letter saying that I could not face going home, and that I wanted to go to Harriet’s for Christmas, and to Emma’s for winter break.
My parents let me go. They did not forgive me.
eight
February 2002
A quarter of a century after refusing to go home to my family for Christmas as a college sophomore, I was driving to Schenectady on the Mass Pike as a disowned daughter. I’d gotten the name of the New York estate lawyer from a friend in Boston who had told me I should contest my father’s will. I had never communicated with my family through a lawyer before—but then again, I’d never been legally pronounced dead by my family, so the situation called for adaptation all around.
I paid the toll at the exit ramp and thought about the nearby house in which I’d grown up, the house in which my mother was now sleeping. I no longer had rights to anything in that house—not to the artwork or the sculptures or the Oriental rugs or the Barcelona chairs or the piano that I’d dutifully practiced each day. Everything now belonged to my sister, the beneficiary, trustee, and heir to my parents’ kingdom.
I considered following Natchaug Road north to the house. It was still early; the sun would be slanting through the pines outside Mom’s window. I would creep in through the basement and steal up the stairs and remove the Emilio Greco drawings from their hooks on the walls and swipe the statues from the immaculate coffee table and leave in silence. My mother, who could have slept through the bombing of Dresden, would wake a few hours later and realize slowly that something had happened. But it would be so quiet, so dark, so free of any sign of overt violence, that it would all fit precisely into the contours of her own actions. She did not like to think of herself as an aggressor, but here it was: she’d effectively killed off one daughter. How fitting for the dead daughter now to strike before dawn, without a word, without a drop of blood, and take back what was hers—that is, the r
ight to a piece of the past, the most beautiful piece, the part of my mother’s life that had offered promise and hope and beauty.
Instead, I continued downtown to the lawyer’s office. I arrived early and let the dog off leash for a romp in Central Park. He found a tree branch and carried it proudly in his mouth, prancing across the white expanse of snow. Less than an hour later, I left him in the car at a ticking meter on State Street, while I met with the lawyer on the top floor of an office building. His hourly rate was eight times more than I made as a public defender in Boston. He was terribly civilized, which, I came to realize, was worth paying for, under such circumstances.
* * *
1976
Lara managed to get herself sprung from the Institute after three months, which was sort of a world record at the time, when patients could linger for years. “That place was straight out of Kafka,” she said. She sat slumped at the kitchen counter in her college T-shirt that was torn at the neck. Her arms were tanned and strong, and she sat with an athlete’s disregard for space; her legs straddled the chair like separate beings, and although she was not particularly large, her limbs were everywhere. Her face looked thinner than usual, her mouth puckered so her cheeks puffed out. I felt a pang of regret for making fun of her chubby cheeks as a kid.
We were home at the end of my spring semester, sitting side by side at the counter, staring out the window. In the woods next to Mom’s rock garden, my father had erected his latest squirrel-proof bird feeder—a giant spaceship-looking contraption suspended from a high tree branch, and draped with curving sheets of aluminum. Squirrels were leaping onto it from nearby trees, but they kept sliding off the aluminum and falling to the ground.
I shifted uneasily. Part of me wanted to pretend Lara’s hospitalization had never happened. Another part of me wanted to hear all of it—every gruesome, painful detail—as if by absorbing Lara’s experience, I could assuage my guilt for having skipped out on her. I still pictured those shiny corridors of the Institute, the barred windows, the provocative beauty of the landscaped lawns and gardens below. As sisters, we were supposed to get the same servings of meat and potatoes, success and failure, good and bad luck. Perhaps I feared retribution, since I believed—in my medieval sense of sibling justice—that now that she was out, she would make sure I suffered as much as she had.
“How come you signed yourself in?” I asked.
She didn’t answer, and picked at a piece of skin on her thumb. “The whole place was a complete crock,” she finally said. “I couldn’t believe how crazy it was. I went to all their bullshit therapy and ‘activities’ classes, and just played along. I never told them anything I was really thinking or feeling.” She snickered. “I learned to be a good little patient, and just said whatever they wanted to hear.”
Lara’s bitterness reminded me of my father’s. I thought of the stories he’d told me about his years as a prisoner in Siberia, when he too had kept his own counsel. Lara’s escape from the Institute sounded similar. She’d outwitted the system, and I admired her for that. She hadn’t let them swallow her whole.
“The real problem,” she said, “is the shrinks. They have no clue what’s going on, but they have all this power. It’s like Cuckoo’s Nest, you know?”
I’d seen the movie with Emma in Berkeley a few months earlier over winter break, and I’d felt as if the walls of the theater were closing in on me. The Jack Nicholson character, a puckish small-time criminal, gradually gets ground down by the rigid rules of the mental hospital. My sister’s in a place like that, I thought. What right did I have to be at a movie theater in California?
A dull thump startled us; a squirrel had dive-bombed my father’s bird feeder and now clung, spread-eagled, to the giant curved sheet of aluminum. The contraption swung wildly, and the squirrel hung on for a second or two before sliding off and hitting the ground. He shook his tail with irritation, then ran up the tree again, preparing for his next attempt.
Just like us, I thought. All four of us were throwing ourselves at one another over and over, desperate to get the goodies. Love, I suppose. Love was the birdseed we all wanted in my family, but we kept slamming into these crazy barriers between us.
“If not for swimming,” Lara said, “I would have gone completely nuts.”
“They had a pool?”
“No, they didn’t have shit for exercise. But there was a Y a few blocks away, and as long as I behaved myself, they’d give me a pass, so I could walk to the Y and swim every day.” She propped her elbows on the counter and held her forehead in her hands. “That’s what saved me,” she said. “If I hadn’t found that pool, I don’t know how I would have survived.”
I nodded. I relied on rowing and running to protect myself from the chaos of my own mind. Lara and I were alike that way.
“I’ll tell you one thing,” she said. “I’m never talking to another shrink in my life.” She looked me in the eye. “Just stay clear of them, Helen.”
Psychiatry had certainly fucked her up; that was obvious. I took this advice to heart, since I was well aware of the deep cracks in my own foundation. Of course, back then, neither Lara nor I could have imagined that one day she would be a psychiatrist.
* * *
I never told Lara or anyone else what had happened while I was with Emma in Berkeley a few months earlier during my winter break of 1976. I didn’t understand it myself, and I wouldn’t admit it for years.
The day I arrived, a classmate of Emma’s, Hugh Mattling, a tall, loose-limbed lunk of a boy, took us out to dinner in San Francisco. I sat in the backseat of his tiny Datsun as he circled the block, looking for a place to park. He wanted to show off a great little German restaurant he had found, and he made a big deal of ordering us Weissbier with raspberry syrup. We sipped and talked. I didn’t like the way he looked at Emma, the way his blue eyes lit up, the way he blushed and smiled with those winsome dimples, the way his long dark hair fell over his face when he leaned in to her. He barely looked at me, as if I were a knapsack on the chair next to her.
A waitress came by in a dirndl, which I thought was overdoing it a bit. Fake grapevines hung from the ceiling to suggest a biergarten, and the menu was written in Gothic script. Hugh advised us what to order; he said the spaetzle were quite good.
I had flown across the country to spend my winter break with my best friend. I did not want to share her with anyone, and certainly not this guy, with his long, smooth arms and strong shoulders. You could see the muscles rippling under his shirt. Emma was mine, not his. But as I sat across the table from Hugh, I was surprised at the intensity of my feelings. Why did he grate on my nerves so? His head lolled, as if he had weak neck muscles. He’s lazy, I thought. Too lazy to lift his lovely head of hair.
But now he was telling Emma about seat-racing on the Cal rowing team last semester, about getting up before dawn to lift weights and do sprints before practice. And he was going to double major in biology and environmental science and hike the Pacific Crest Trail.
Okay, so he wasn’t lazy; I still hated him. What was my problem? He was a perfectly nice guy. Who cared if he was hitting on her? She too was long-limbed and athletic, and with her sparkling blue eyes and easy laugh, her silky blond hair that fell below her shoulders, she looked good sitting next to him. She was beautiful in an unselfconscious, almost accidental way. I was lucky, I told myself; I would always be her best friend, her friend friend. Hugh and I weren’t rivals. Why did I always have to be so competitive?
After dinner, Hugh drove us home and invited himself in to see Emma’s apartment near the university. It was a small studio with two twin beds. Her roommate was out of town, so I had spread my sleeping bag on her roommate’s bed. While I was brushing my teeth, Emma came up to me. “Helen,” she whispered. “Um… he wants to sleep over!” She laughed nervously. “I mean, I don’t know how to get him out of here!”
What a jerk, I thought. I was relieved that Emma seemed to think so too. I felt for her; we were both young and inexper
ienced, and neither of us wanted to appear… well, young and inexperienced.
“Are you okay with that?” she asked.
I shrugged, affecting nonchalance. “Sure,” I said. “I don’t care.” To say anything else would have been unthinkably uncool.
After washing up, I got into bed. Emma laid a sleeping bag on the floor for Hugh, brushed her teeth, and climbed into bed while Hugh took his turn in the bathroom. He came out and flicked off the lights. Next I heard them whispering. “Hugh! You can’t just—” Then the rustling of sheets. “Ow! What are you…” My ears pricked up, every nerve in my body on high alert. I held my breath, listening: Snuffled giggles. Sheets swishing. My heart was pounding so hard it seemed it would fly out of my chest. Momentary quiet, then more giggles. What should I do? It was up to her to throw him out, not me. I remained tense, listening. It was nearly dawn before I fell asleep.
The next day, after Hugh left, Emma apologized. “I didn’t think he was going to get into bed with me!” she said. “Not that we did anything—but that’s not what I had in mind!”
I waved it off, relieved that she too had been shocked, but hadn’t known what to do. It seemed obvious that now she would tell him she wasn’t interested. But she didn’t. Hugh came over the next day, and the day after that. He walked Emma to their first day of classes, and since I had another few weeks before my semester started back east, I tagged along. Soon it was apparent that Hugh was not going away, and despite Emma’s assurances to me that she didn’t like him “that way,” his persistence seemed to be working. He and Emma became more or less inseparable. Not knowing what to do with myself, I spent hours wandering up and down Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. I was utterly unconscious of my attraction to Emma; my feelings of physical longing were buried deep beneath the ocean floor of my awareness. Instead, what I felt was an insatiable hunger for sweets.
The Escape Artist Page 11