The Escape Artist

by Helen Fremont

  These two images of our relationship kept flipping back and forth on me throughout our lives. There was never any transition—no warning, no sense of in-between. It was always black or white. One moment we were best friends, two sisters seeing eye to eye. The next, mortal enemies, the vase of poison.

  * * *

  1980

  Lara and I spent hours on the phone that fall, finding companionship in suicidal thoughts. At twenty-three and twenty-six, the obligation to make up for our parents’ unspoken losses was too great. We owed them our happiness and our lives, and suicide seemed like the fastest way to get out of debt.

  Also, there was the terrible burden of make-believe—the pressure of pretense—that we could no longer sustain. Our family had always looked fine from the outside. Our surfaces sparkled. Our lawn was green, our grades were good, our expenses paid. A double suicide by the children would certainly give lie to all that. We were frauds—desperate to appear successful and well-adjusted on the outside, while harboring the rage and grief of a destroyed people. Suicide would be more honest. My sister and I felt a certain sense of entitlement to apocalypse.

  My father had always dismissed our unhappiness as the ennui of privileged youth. We were bored and restless and unhappy, he explained, because we had too much of everything. And he seemed to be right: our lives had become too easy to bear, and therefore unbearable in light of all that had come before. Hardship would do wonders for us, Lara and I believed. But neither of us wanted to give up too much comfort for the sake of happiness. We would rather be miserable.

  “I think a car crash,” I said. I was sitting on the shag carpet of my one-room apartment across from Boston College. I cradled the phone receiver against my ear while doodling on my tax notebook. “What about you?” I asked.

  Lara sighed. The world turned on its axis with that sigh, wind fluttered through the trees, stars died. “I think knives.”

  Lara, the doctor, scalpel in hand. She had taken anatomy twice—her first year in med school, and then the summer afterward, for good measure.

  “Or drugs,” she added.

  “What drugs?”

  “There’s zillions of meds. I can get anything I want.”

  Medical school had its advantages, I could see that. I tried to imagine swallowing a bottle of pills and lying on the narrow bed against the wall of my room. It seemed too depressing. “I want more of an impact,” I told Lara. “I want something noisier, faster, explosive. Drugs are so… passive. So quiet. It’s like, why bother?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “A car crash would be fast, it would be active. It wouldn’t be like lying around, waiting to die.” Listening to myself, I wondered how serious I was. Would I really kill myself? I didn’t think so, but I thought Lara might.

  “It doesn’t matter how,” she said. “It’s all the same. Nothing matters.”

  “Okay, but I’m just saying—”

  “It doesn’t matter how you do it.”

  When my mother was my age, she’d been smuggling food to her parents in the ghetto by night; by day she worked for the occupying army in Lvov; and by October 1942, she’d escaped Poland altogether, posing as a young Italian infantryman. She had lost her fiancé to the Russians, her parents to the Germans, and her sister to the Italians, until finally she had lost herself as a person whom she could recognize at all.

  And now, as a third-year law student, I did not know who I was or what I was doing. No one was trying to kill me, no one was shooting my friends or gassing my loved ones. What right did I have to be unhappy? My inner and outer worlds did not match. I was starting to break down, and I turned to my big sister as my model of decompensation.

  “Let’s just do it,” Lara said. Her voice was so low I could barely hear her.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “Okay.” The idea of killing ourselves together had growing appeal. It would be more like a mission, a bond we would share. Something that would draw us together. “When?”

  “This weekend,” Lara said.

  I had nothing planned this weekend. It would be a perfect time to kill myself. “You serious?” I asked. My sister was the most unreliable person I knew. It would be so like her to set something up, and then back out at the last minute with some lame excuse.

  “Yeah.”

  “Me too,” I said. I wondered what my obligation was. If we agreed to do it, and I finked out, would I be responsible for her death? If I went through with it, she’d better kill herself too. Otherwise, what was the point?

  What, exactly, was the point?

  “All right,” I said. “So what day? Saturday?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Or maybe Sunday.”

  Here we go, I thought. She can’t even commit to the day. She’s never been able to make a decision in her life. I felt my irritation rising. “Well, pick one,” I said.

  “I’m not sure yet.”

  “But you’re sure you want to do it, right?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “Well, I don’t want to talk you—”

  “I said I want to do it.”

  The sun was out. In two hours the Patriots would host the New York Jets at Foxborough. It all sounded so crazy. Lara and I were being dramatic. She had tried to kill herself before, but my depression was sharp and fresh. I wanted to be serious enough to go through with the plan, but I was pretty sure I didn’t have the guts. It all seemed so unreal. “Then we’ll do it,” I said.

  “Together,” she said.

  “Well, you do it your way, I’ll do it mine.” I didn’t think we should have to synchronize our acts. But I needed her support, and she needed mine, and together we might be able to pull it off.

  “All right,” she said. “This weekend.”

  We were quiet for a moment. “So what are you going to do now?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Are your roommates around?”

  “No. They’re never here.”

  She lived with a group of med students who barely skimmed the surface of the planet. They studied all day and night; they partied and slept with each other between classes. My sister was isolated by a scrim of gloom that her roommates could not guess lay behind her convincing smile. I had spent my life distancing myself from her, and now I was closing the gap. We were not so different after all. We were both lost.

  “You all right?” I began to worry that she might kill herself ahead of schedule.

  “I’ll be all right once we do it,” she said.

  We hung up, and I felt better. Maybe it was not the healthiest of relationships, but Lara and I bonded well over suicidal depression. It felt good, knowing that she was also depressed. I didn’t feel so alone. And there was something we could do about it: we could kill ourselves. I felt an obligation to her. I would have to find a road on which I could really slam into a wall without killing anyone else. I had to do it responsibly. I would not be a menace to other drivers. When I did it, I would do it right.

  * * *

  The weekend came. My conversation with Lara seemed ages ago. I wasn’t in the mood for suicide, and I was pretty sure she wasn’t either, and anyway, neither of us called. I didn’t even think about it until Sunday night, when I vaguely wondered whether maybe she’d gone ahead and done it. But I knew she hadn’t.

  It wasn’t until a week or two later that Lara called. We talked for a while, both of us miserable, but neither of us mentioned our suicide pact. Apparently it had expired for lack of interest.

  Looking back now, I think we needed our pact to get us through whatever blackness had descended. For that half hour or forty minutes, we’d gotten some relief, some acknowledgment that we weren’t alone, that we were, in fact, “normal” sisters, since both of us were suicidally depressed. If we weren’t both feeling exactly the same way at the same time (whether up or down), the vase of poison would come between us.

  * * *

  A dozen years later, in 1992, after we discovered t
hat Mom and Dad were Jewish Holocaust survivors, Lara and I never discussed those times in our twenties when we had been so troubled. Just as our parents had avoided talking about their war, Lara and I avoided talking about ours. Instead, we searched for clues from our parents’ past, and tried to find people who had known them before and after the war. We even tracked down Dr. Grokle, the shrink at the Hoffman Children and Family Center, who was now seventy-five, to see if she could shed light on our family.

  “I remember your family quite well,” she said, sitting in a wingback chair in her living room in Schenectady. Lara had contacted her twenty-five years after we’d seen her as children. “I have seen so many patients and families over the years, you know, and I’m more or less retired now.…” She looked down at her hands. They were thin, spotted with age, free of jewelry except for a gold band. “I’ve forgotten a great deal, but you and your parents stuck in my mind.”

  She looked at Lara and smiled. “I’m afraid we didn’t really do much for your family,” she said.

  No shit, I thought.

  “You see, family therapy was in its infancy in those days,” she said. “In the sixties, we really didn’t know that much about family dynamics or treatment techniques.” She paused, perhaps remembering the low-lit room of the Hoffman Center, where my family took our appointed seats each week and waited to be cured. “I must confess that I was a bit intimidated by your parents,” Dr. Grokle said. “I mean, given what they’d gone through in the war. I never tried to ask them about their past. Frankly, I was relieved that they didn’t talk about it. In those days… well, none of us wanted to talk about the war. We were all too happy to sweep it under the rug.”

  fourteen

  December 1980

  I was home for winter break during my last year of law school. The phone rang and I picked it up. The voice of my high school boyfriend, Kevin, surprised me; we hadn’t spoken in years. I still had the leather belt and wallet he’d made for me. Our romance had been doomed for a number of reasons—first, my mother forbade me to date boys, and second, I’d lost interest in guys altogether when I went off to college. But over the past few years, Kevin sometimes came over when Lara was home and they’d run a five-mile loop together.

  “Helen? I didn’t know you were home.”

  His voice was sweet, and it made me think, suddenly, of Lake Tear of the Clouds in the Adirondacks. In January six years earlier, he and I had climbed to its frozen shore, just below the final pitch up Mount Marcy.

  “How are you?”

  “Good,” I said automatically. Actually, considering I’d contemplated suicide with my sister a few weeks ago, I was pretty good. “How’ve you been?”

  “Okay,” he said. “I’m taking some classes at SUNY, you know, doing some work for Greg Crump, just hanging out.” I remembered coming home for Thanksgiving three years earlier with my then-boyfriend Philip, and the awkwardness when Kevin joined Lara, me, and Philip for a run. Philip had felt the need to sprint past us all at the end. I was ashamed to think of it.

  “Well, look,” Kevin said. “I was going to invite Lara for dinner—I’ve been working on a couple quiche recipes I got out of the Times, and they’re pretty good. You know, Craig Claiborne’s column. You want to come too?”

  “You’re cooking quiche?”

  “Yeah, I know, I’m a total Renaissance man.”

  My mother was a huge Craig Claiborne fan. She clipped his recipes and folded them into her little metal recipe box. It would blow her mind if she heard Kevin was making Craig Claiborne’s quiche lorraine. She had always considered Kevin some sort of blue-collar rapist.

  We made a date.

  * * *

  Lara seemed relieved that I was coming along for dinner at Kevin’s. She and Kevin had been uneasy classmates in high school, and although she didn’t mind him coming over for a run now and then, she still suspected him of being a jerk.

  She and I put on clean jeans and sweaters and drove out to Kevin’s. He lived in a little apartment above Crump’s Garage, an old truck repair shop near Verdoy, with dead engines and parts out back and a retired 1960s gas station in front. In the winter of 1980, Kevin was the tow-truck driver in residence. He received free use of the premises and a regular paycheck in exchange for responding to calls for disabled tractor-trailers. In bad weather, he often spent entire nights in subzero temperatures, hauling out rigs that had skidded on ice and snow off the Northway a few miles away.

  Kevin served us a knockout meal of quiche, salad, and hot rolls with a bottle of chianti. We ate by candlelight, killed the bottle, then opened another. Lara, as usual in the presence of others, was perfectly polite, drank half a glass, and watched Kevin and me get blotto.

  To my delight, Kevin was exactly my size of silly. We entertained ourselves with a freewheeling sense of humor that swung dangerously between the sublime and the ridiculous, often crashing into delicate subjects, doing damage to friends, loved ones, and entire segments of the population.

  “Worth it!” he said.

  “Who needs friends?” I agreed.

  By nine o’clock, Lara had had enough. She signaled toward the door with her eyes, and poked me with her elbow to get me to leave. But I didn’t feel like going.

  “I’ll drive Helen home,” Kevin offered. “Don’t worry—I’ll wait till I sober up.”

  Lara frowned. Her self-appointed responsibilities as big sister included preventing me from having too much fun, or, alternatively, from getting splattered across Route 7 in a drunken car crash.

  “Go ahead,” I said. “I’ll catch a ride with Kevin later.”

  Lara clomped down the stairs and out the door. We heard the Chevy’s engine struggle in the cold, then the wheels crunching on the snow as she turned onto Route 7. Kevin put the Stones on the turntable and opened another bottle of wine.

  “This is just temporary,” he said, meaning his life. “Crump pays me pretty good money, but I just don’t know what I want to do yet—you know, like a career.”

  We put our feet up on the coffee table and talked about the future, which scared us with its sheer size.

  “I can’t really see being a lawyer,” I said. “I don’t know if I can survive wearing pantyhose for the rest of my life.”

  “At least you’re close to finishing school.” Kevin was taking the scenic route through college, a few courses here, a few there.

  “Well, I’ve had some real problems this year.” I told him about my odyssey through the land of psychiatry: the panic attacks, group therapy, medication. I told him Flak had now proposed I might be unipolar, which was like bipolar, but without the benefits of mania. I just had depression, with intermittent breathers of okay-ness.

  You could say I put Kevin on notice.

  But he did not seem shocked or uneasy with my revelation of crazy. On the contrary—he was interested and sympathetic. “That sounds really rough,” he said. “I’m glad you’re feeling better.”

  He was no stranger to unhappiness. I liked that about him.

  We talked for hours. He told me about his former girlfriends, what he had hoped for, and why they hadn’t worked out. We looked up, and it was already past midnight. By then we were kissing, and then we found ourselves on the bed, and one thing led to another, and by the time he drove me home at two-thirty in the morning, I couldn’t wait to see him the next day.

  And so, absurdly, over winter break, I fell in love.

  * * *

  When I got up the next morning and came into the kitchen, my mother’s face turned to ice. She watched me pour my coffee in silence, then left the room. Zosia was staying with us over the holidays, and I could hear the staccato of their voices as my mother intercepted her in the hallway. I knew, without her saying a word, that she was furious at me for having stayed out late with Kevin. I had violated the solemn law of family loyalty.

  “You left coffee for Zosia, didn’t you?” Mom asked, staring daggers.

  “There’s a whole pot, Mom.”

  She
brushed past me, too angry to speak.

  “What’s the matter?”

  She said nothing.

  “Mom?”

  She took the coffeepot and a mug out to the dining table for Zosia. I left them alone.

  Kevin called, and I drove downtown to meet him at the library. We both had classwork to do, so we studied for a few hours and grabbed lunch at the Lark Street Grill. I told him my mother and Zosia weren’t talking to me.

  “I do have that effect on your mother, don’t I?” he said. “But what did I ever do to your aunt?”

  “Package deal.” I finally didn’t care what my mother thought of me and Kevin, or at least that’s what I told myself. Being with him these two days had felt like opening the curtains after a long hard winter. I think I was happy. I think that’s what was going on here.

  * * *

  The problem with falling in love was that I was starting to separate from the family, and that was not okay with them. And it put a crimp in my sisterhood with Lara; our bond in the fall had been based on mutual depression and anguish, neither of which I was feeling at the moment. Now when she called in a blue mood, I listened and sympathized, but it was disconcerting for both of us that we didn’t match. I think it fueled her resentment.

  Despite her wild rampages, Lara’s loyalty to our family had never been in doubt. She might try to blow us up, but she would never run away. I, on the other hand, was always trying to duck my family to be with my friends. “Escape artist,” my mother always called me. “You’re always trying to get away!”

  Many years later it would occur to me that what my mother most resented about me was precisely what she saw in herself. Throughout her life, she was racked with guilt for having abandoned her own parents in order to survive the war. She had built the façade of a new life on top of the secret of her old one, and from the outside, it looked smooth. But within our family, her invisible past filled our rooms. She had nothing left but her children, and she watched in shock as we dismantled first the walls she had built, and then ourselves.