The Escape Artist

by Helen Fremont

  While Emma went to her classes, I started going from one bakery to another, eating pastries, cookies, muffins, chocolate—and washing everything down with ice cream sundaes. With horror, I saw myself as a giant steam shovel, rolling down the sidewalk, taking out entire city blocks of pastry shops.

  I didn’t gain much weight because in the evenings I went for long runs up the fire trails in the Berkeley hills, sometimes with Emma, and sometimes alone, trying to understand what was wrong with me. Starting tomorrow, I would tell myself reasonably, as if I were someone I could trust, no more sweets. The next morning, I would feel strong and good, and I’d eat breakfast with Emma and walk her to classes, and then I’d wander the bookshops and cafés of Berkeley. And then it would happen. Like a sudden tidal shift, some overpowering force rose up within me and drove me into a bakery. It was as if I’d lost control over where my feet took me. I felt like a serial killer—no, a serial eater—someone criminal, dangerous.

  “Um, could I have a chocolate chip cookie, please?” I asked the girl behind the counter. My voice sounded like someone else’s—higher, more tightly strained than my own. It’s okay. One cookie can’t hurt.

  The girl slipped the cookie into a paper bag.

  “Um, maybe two,” I said, feeling my face burn. I’ll save one for later. I’ll give it to Emma tonight.

  I waited till I was outside before opening the bag and peeking inside. I inched my hand in and broke off a small piece. It was still warm, and the taste was exquisite. But then I felt a prick of panic. What am I doing? I’ll get fat! Where is my fucking self-control?

  To shut myself up, I shoved half a cookie into my mouth and ate it so quickly I could not object. Without even thinking, I tore into the second cookie. In seconds, both were gone. I crumpled the paper bag and looked for a trash can to get rid of the evidence. Suddenly I was starving. I couldn’t go back into the same bakery, the girl behind the counter would think I was a pig. I crossed the street to another shop, and bought a dozen cookies and brownies and chocolates. I walked down the street and ate everything, one after the other, until I had completely filled myself with shame and self-loathing.

  * * *

  Months later, Lara and I were sitting at the kitchen counter watching squirrels blitz Dad’s bird feeder, and she told me about her experience in the Institute of Living. Of course it was the shrinks, I agreed. They had driven her crazy. Lara and I were in the same boat, facing the same pressures to succeed, to become superstars that our parents could be proud of. If Lara could go crazy, so could I.

  “I quit premed,” I told her, an offering of my own failure. “I decided to major in English.” Maybe it wasn’t as great a failure as losing a semester to the Institute, but it was an effort to bring us closer together.

  “Good for you,” she said.

  “So I’m thinking maybe law school or something. You know, it’s only three years. And there are no prerequisites.”

  She nodded. “Yeah, that sounds a lot better.”

  We fell silent, exhausted from our tiny admissions, and committed to our greater silences, allied in the daunting production of growing up.

  part two

  nine

  Lara and I grew closer over the next few years, hiking and biking and skiing together on our vacations as if we’d never had a disagreement in our lives. By the summer of 1978 we were in nearly perfect alignment. We had both graduated from college. Lara had just been accepted into medical school, and I had gotten into law school, and we had almost a month to relish our good fortune—until September, when the grim reality of actually going to medical school and law school would drastically reduce our exuberance.

  We decided to spend our last two weeks of August together hiking in the White Mountains. We crammed our tent, stove, and sleeping bags into two expedition backpacks, drove north to New Hampshire, and parked at a trailhead in Franconia. We hoisted our gear onto our backs and tore across the Presidential Range. Then we continued through the Mahoosucs into Maine. When we ran out of high peaks, we dropped into the valley, hitched a ride back to our car, and drove farther north in Maine to find another week’s worth of hiking. We were in ridiculously good shape, and we galloped over the terrain, bagging peaks at breakneck speed. We wouldn’t slow our pace until we reached the tree line, when we allowed ourselves a glance back at the view that had sprung up at our feet—rock ledges that cut the world in two: sky above, boulders below. At the summits we shrugged off our frame packs and guzzled water. Within minutes we saddled up again and scrambled down the trail until our legs burned and our knees felt rubbery.

  There was a certain joy to this mad dash through the wilderness, a euphoric blend of mountains, wind, and endorphins run amok. There was no room for rumination. We had become bodies, pure and simple, and our bodies gave us pleasure. They took us through moss-green woods, lush as a fairy tale, and over mist-covered peaks. At the end of the day, we quickly pitched tent, ate a cold snack, and dropped into our sleeping bags like felled timber. Lara woke us at first light, and we broke camp by the time the sun nosed above the horizon.

  As long as we kept moving, we were content. We ate little, spoke less, and disappeared into the mountains. Our bodies provided camouflage for our minds; it was our minds that were dangerous. We did not imagine that we were running from ourselves, from the history we held within us. We were only vaguely aware of a looming fear of failure that propelled us faster and faster along the trail. The result was bliss. The mountains gave us everything we needed: a place to run wild.

  Toward the end of two weeks, a few signs of problems: Lara’s knee gave out; my ankle puffed up. We pushed on until we couldn’t walk, and then we limped back to the valley for our final day. When we got back to our car, we were shocked by what we saw in the mirror: dirt-smudged, sunbaked faces with crazy hair, bruised elbows, salt-bleached T-shirts and sweat-stained shorts. We drove the back roads of Maine, looking for the thrill of a general store, a cold soda, a pint of ice cream. We spent a few dollars on gas, a few more on food and two bottles of cheap wine.

  Our last night in the mountains, we hiked to a lean-to on a remote mountain lake. The air was soft, and we slipped out of our packs and sat at the edge of the water. In another week we would be in separate cities, starting separate schools. We opened the first bottle and passed it back and forth. It was sweet and sharp, but after a while the taste didn’t bother us. The sun slipped through the trees and dropped into the lake. The air turned cool and the water lapped the shore. Loons called to one another. My sister and I were grinning and talking, taking sloppy slugs of wine, and feeling woozy.

  “I love you,” I told her.

  She seemed pleased, almost to the point of tears. “Yeah,” she said. “Me too.”

  “It’s like Zosia told me,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Well, it was weird,” I said. “The day before we left on this hiking trip, Zosia pulled me aside and said, ‘You know, Helen, what the most important thing in the world is? The most important thing of all is the love between two sisters.’ ”

  Lara nodded.

  “She said the bond between her and Mom was stronger than anything else in their lives. And she said it made her so happy that you and I are finally devoted to each other, the same way they are.”

  Lara smiled. I felt very close to her then, brimming over with warmth and love and confidence in our future together. I felt at that moment as if we would always be like this; I dismissed all of the fights in our past in a heartbeat.

  “We’ll team up,” I said. “You and me. Someday we’ll go into business together.”

  “Yeah.” She raised the bottle. “I’ll take care of you. I’ll be your doctor.”

  I giggled. “And I’ll handle all your malpractice claims.”

  She shoved me playfully and I rolled to the side and bounced back, like those children’s weighted punching bags.

  “We’ll be a ‘loctor-dawyer’ team,” I said.

  “Here’s to us!” Sh
e raised the bottle again and took a swig. “The loctor-dawyer sisters.”

  We sat at the edge of the lean-to with our arms around each other and stared at the dark lake. Every so often we could see ripples where fish had jumped. The air smelled of summer and freedom, and I felt lucky and sure of myself. I wanted what my mother and aunt had: a sisterhood powerful beyond words. It was enough to topple nations and bring continents to their knees. My sister and I would rule the world. Nothing would separate us.

  * * *

  Lara and I got home in time to wash the mountains out of our hair and clothes, spend a night between clean sheets, and pack for our first year of professional school. Our parents beamed with pride that we were going to become a doctor and a lawyer, while Lara and I grew quiet under the descending blade of reality. We nodded to each other as Lara got in her car and drove north to med school in Vermont; I headed east to law school at Boston University.

  I’d rented an apartment with two other women on the first floor of a triple-decker in Allston. Our landlady, a squat woman shaped like a jar of gefilte fish, lived upstairs with her two sons in their forties. A few blocks from our apartment, Harvard Avenue crossed Commonwealth Avenue, with its liquor stores and bars with boarded windows. Spanish grocery stores mysteriously opened and closed at will. Our street boasted the highest number of rapes in Boston that year—no small feat, since the competition was fierce. At night we’d run the few blocks from the trolley stop to our apartment with our keys clenched between the fingers of our fists. It took a minute or two to open the two dead bolts and the police lock, and then we were safe. We chained ourselves in till morning.

  I wanted to like law school, but the Darwinian atmosphere got to me. In the hallways my classmates argued about the fine points of cases we’d been assigned to read, radiant with the sound of their own voices. It began to dawn on me that I’d made a serious mistake. I was studying law because my mother believed a law degree would come in handy; Uncle had a law degree, and he had used it to save my mother’s life in 1942. My classmates, on the other hand, seemed to be in law school because they actually wanted to be lawyers. We had nothing in common, I thought.

  Heavyweight, 1979

  The eating problem I’d acquired in Berkeley three years earlier sprouted up with a vengeance my first year of law school. I would starve myself for days, run great loops around the city, drink liters of diet soda and nibble on iceberg lettuce—all the tricks I’d learned as a lightweight rower in college. A week later, or sometimes only a few days later, I would stuff myself with pints of Häagen-Dazs, unable to control the hand that held the spoon to my mouth.

  I came home from my first year of law school in May weighing twenty pounds more than I had at winter break. My mother was alarmed. “Are you eating right?” she asked. “Yeah,” I said with a shrug, “I guess so.” I was too ashamed to admit my bingeing to anyone. But I could see that Lara, an Eating Disorder Lifer, was eyeing me with a knowing satisfaction; she knew exactly what was up with me. We silently sized each other up now, calculating who was keeping her weight down, and who was losing the battle.

  My father sent me to see an endocrinologist, to rule out some kind of hormone or blood chemistry problem. I played along, and was not surprised when everything turned out to be fine. The doctor was about my parents’ age—sixtysomething—a tall, trim man in a starched white lab coat. He invited me into his office to tell me the results.

  “Great,” I said. “Thanks.” I stood to leave, but he didn’t, so I sat back down.

  “Tell me,” he said slowly, “are you happy?”

  I nearly fell off my chair. This struck me as an inappropriate violation of my privacy. “Yes!” I said, shocked by the implication that I might not be. “I’m very happy.” Of course I’m happy! There’s nothing psychologically wrong with me! “Except about my weight,” I added.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Of course!”

  He shrugged and stood, shook my hand, and wished me luck.

  My parents were relieved that nothing was wrong with me, and that was the end of it. I dropped the weight after a few weeks of virtuous dieting and running. But soon I found myself once again eating on the sly. I ate for solace and for company and for fun. I ate out of rage and fear and shame. I focused all these feelings into everything I ate and turned them into a larger, more undeniable problem: Helen the Overweight. In the month of August alone, I had gone from a trim 135 pounds to a shameful 150. Weight had become a measure of my self-worth.

  As September approached, I finally confessed to my mother that I had a problem with eating. She consulted my sister, and they both decided that what I probably needed was a carefully circumscribed intervention.

  “Behafe-your modifeecation,” my mother said.

  “Stay away from Freud,” Lara said. “You don’t want anyone messing around with your childhood and all that crap. Just tell them you want behavior modification.”

  “Right,” Mom said. “No digging up the past. Just to control the appetite.”

  “I’d like behavior modification,” I told the Mass Mental Health Center when I called, as if ordering a lunch special.

  They gave me names. Before fall classes started, I drove out to Newton to meet a shrink named Martin Flak in his psychiatric empire called Learning Therapies, Inc. It was a huge Victorian on Walnut Street, filled with therapists. I wore a large green tent of a dress and embarrassed myself by leaking tears when I told Dr. Flak about my problem with food.

  “It’s a question of who’s in control,” he said.

  This struck me as the most brilliant thing anyone had said to me in my life. I thought he was a genius. I nodded and blew my nose. Then he suggested I might be a good candidate for psychotherapy.

  “Oh no,” I said, alarmed. “I just need to lose a few pounds.”

  He gave me an appointment for another session a week later. I left his office and went home, changed into running shoes and shorts, and went for a run. A thread of hope slipped through me, and as the traffic thinned and the sun rose higher, I ran with relief in my newfound mental health. I was cured. It was a miracle.

  I returned home, showered, and made myself a salad. The next day I was fine. I ran. I studied. I ate sensibly. I was happy.

  A week later I returned to the shrink, and told him I was all set. He seemed surprised and pleased. He suggested I keep a daily log of my eating and exercise.

  I met with him weekly all fall. I lost tons of weight. I increased my running to sixty-five miles a week. I chatted with Dr. Flak about my progress, and he chatted with me about his own running regimen, and together we spent a lot of Blue Cross Blue Shield’s money, without ever having to look at what might be wrong.

  * * *

  Like my mother, I had always been able to arrange my denial in such a way as to enjoy the illusion that I was mostly just fine, at least compared to everyone else. Lara, on the other hand, was so painfully in touch with her feelings that she was incapable of self-deception. As long as I had Lara around to act like a maniac, it was easy for me to preserve my ignorance of the extent of my own problems. Perhaps the same was true for my mother. It would be years before I could see that our family drama served as a brilliant, albeit uncalculated, distraction from the past that Mom and her sister kept hidden from us. But all that would come later. Back in our twenties—the same age at which our parents had suffered through a real war—Lara and I found ourselves engaged in battles with ourselves that felt shameful, strange, and unjustifiable.

  September 1979

  Another thing happened that fall. Right before classes started, Emma—more or less out of the blue—came to Boston. We hadn’t seen each other in four years. She and her new boyfriend, Travis, an Alaskan bush pilot, had rented a Cessna, flown from Berkeley to Boston, and landed at my doorstep. Emma was starting grad school at BU while Travis finished up college in California. “You and I can room together!” she said.

  Seeing her again was like being blindsided by a Mack truc
k of joy. I felt as if I’d spent the past few years living in a tunnel underground. She’d flown east, and the sun came up.

  We waved good-bye to Travis and set up house together. I was ecstatic. Every morning we bicycled to classes, and at the end of the day, after my run, we fixed dinner and talked. We spent our weekends together when we weren’t studying. Gone were my eating problems, gone was my excess weight, life was good. At twenty-two, I still wasn’t aware of wanting to hold her hand, or drape an arm over her shoulders, or touch her face, her neck, her arms. I was happy just being with her. The fact that she had a boyfriend in California was fine with me. Even law school was tolerable now, and I started thinking maybe I’d actually be a lawyer after all. I was doing an internship with Greater Boston Legal Services that year, so after classes I biked to the GBLS office, put on a suit, and picked up cases assigned by my supervisor. I liked my clients; they mattered to me in a way that my equity and evidence classes did not. When I won a case, I felt I’d actually helped someone; I felt important and grown-up, with just the hint of an underlying feeling that I didn’t know what I was doing.

  But a few weeks before Christmas, Emma came running into my room to tell me her good news. “Travis and I are getting married!” she said. “Next summer! Oh, H, I’m so excited!” She did a little dance of joy.

  Oh, wow, I thought. My life was over. Over.

  “It’s a secret, okay? We’re not going to tell my parents or anyone till Christmas. Promise me you won’t say a word.”

  I nodded. I still didn’t know why Emma’s news was so devastating to me.

  “Travis is flying out here to take me home.” Her eyes lit up, and her blocky nose was strangely endearing. “We’re going to drive back to California together. And I’m going to take next semester off and prepare for the wedding!”