The Escape Artist

by Helen Fremont

I didn’t know. There was no way I would make it till October, the first available surgery in Boston.

  Miraculously, Lara, like some enchanted Goddess of the North, came to my rescue. “Come stay with me,” she offered. “We’ve got one of the best sports medicine departments in the country.” Her voice on the phone felt like the warmth of the sun after a hard winter. In a flash, all of my memories of Lara’s genuine goodness flooded me. She was once again my dream-come-true big sister, the sister I had caught glimpses of throughout my childhood and adolescence. She had always had this guileless quality of caring for the downtrodden, the broken, the forgotten. I basked in her sudden shower of love and concern, and, like so many times before, I simply dismissed the parts of my sister and our past that did not fit this glowing vision.

  “I’ll talk to the head of the department,” she said. “He does all the knees for the UVM ski team. He’ll have you back on the slopes in no time.” Within a few days, she’d arranged for him to do reconstructive surgery on my knee. She drove down to Schenectady to pick me up.

  My parents greeted her like a hero, and I too saw Lara as my savior, amazed at how gentle and generous she was with me. At the time I didn’t realize how our family had always depended on this role-playing between us: one daughter in crisis, the other coming to the rescue. For her first twenty years, Lara had been our crisis, and I had been suited up by my parents to help her, to take her hiking or skiing at her bidding. I had always bristled under these expectations, and when I refused the role of rescuer, I was considered deplorably selfish. Now Lara and I had switched roles: I was the calamity that needed saving, and Lara was our knight in shining armor. Perhaps she also felt this was a setup, a trap, but she seemed to assume the role with genuine good nature, as if she were born to it, as indeed she was.

  “Thanks for doing this,” I said as we zoomed north on I-87 in her Toyota Tercel. “I was going nuts at home!”

  She laughed. We were on common ground, and no one understood me better than Lara. When it came to our parents, to their regimented eyes-on-the-prize attitude and their commandeering ownership of us, Lara and I were the only two people on the planet who knew—really knew—what it was like to be their daughter. Our bond had been forged ever since I was a toddler in Italy, running after Lara while our parents and Aunt Zosia disappeared into their strange languages, holding their mysterious history close to their chests.

  Lara listened good-naturedly as I talked about Lesotho. Before I knew it, two hours had flown by and we were pulling into the gravel driveway of her house a dozen miles outside Burlington. It was set on a hillside, surrounded by woods, with a deck overlooking green rolling hills.

  “Wow,” I said. “This is nice. But far out.”

  “Yeah, my roommates and I missed the country,” she said. “Working inside all the time, we wanted to be able to get away from town at the end of the day.”

  She helped me carry in my backpack and sleeping bag, and showed me around. None of her housemates were in. We made a salad and sat down to eat. I told her I didn’t know where I would be without her.

  And this truth has never changed, throughout the many years and swings in our relationship. Where I am and who I am has always been directly tied to my sister.

  That evening, I laid out my sleeping bag on the soft carpet in her dining room, and she introduced me to her roommates—all medical students or residents—who barely lived there, and didn’t seem to mind.

  The day before I had to report to the hospital for surgery, Lara took me for a walk on a trail in the woods near her house. The trail was gentle, through stands of tall pines and spruce, and the air smelled like freedom, our footsteps silent on the soft floor of pine needles. “You’ll be fine,” she assured me. “They’ll fix your knee, and you’ll be as good as new.” I hung on her every word. She was the leg I stood on.

  nineteen

  One morning, at the age of eighty-eight, Uncle walked down the street in Rome as he did every day in his tailored three-piece suit, tie, and matching handkerchief, to get fresh milk and the morning paper at the corner store. On his way back, he was hit by a car that sped off down the narrow street. Uncle was rushed to the hospital and lay in a coma for the next several months. Although Zosia and my mother kept up their daily correspondence, it would be months before Zosia finally let my mother know that Uncle had been in an accident. Zosia had also forbidden Renzo to tell my mother. “I didn’t want you to worry,” Zosia explained when she finally wrote Mom the news. My mother got on the next flight to Rome. She stayed with Zosia for more than a month, until Uncle died. Then she helped Zosia clean out Uncle’s room.

  It would be many years before I learned that in cleaning out Uncle’s room, Mom and Zosia threw out all the letters and documents and photos of my family’s past. Uncle had kept everything, my mother later told me—family mementos that Zosia had brought from their parents’ home in Poland; letters from German and Italian officials during the war, when Uncle managed to save first Zosia, and then my mother. Documents from the Vatican, when my uncle obtained papal dispensation for my parents to marry in Rome in 1946 as Catholics. And hundreds of letters from family and friends in Europe, America, and Israel. Mom and Zosia got rid of all the remaining evidence of our past.

  After Mom returned to the States that summer, Zosia suffered a breakdown. For the first time in their lives, Zosia became so angry with Mom that she refused to speak or write to her. When Zosia finally did respond to Mom’s repeated pleas for contact, she accused my mother of having betrayed her. “I have no idea why,” Mom told me at the time. “I don’t know what happened or how to reassure her. Something just broke in her when Uncle died.” It would take a year before the two sisters resumed their daily correspondence. Neither mentioned the break again, Mom said, and they continued as if nothing had happened between them.

  Lara and I always covered up our rifts the same way—relieved to be back together, we avoided talking about whatever had separated us.

  * * *

  When I woke up, Lara was leaning over me in a goofy shower cap. “You okay?” she said, jiggling my arm. “Hey, Helen, you okay?” I was gulping air and shaking uncontrollably. My right leg, cocooned in a white cast from groin to ankle, felt as if it were being roasted on a spit. “You’re in the recovery room,” she said. “The surgery went fine.”

  The betrayal was what hit me first: no one had told me it was going to hurt so much. I groaned.

  My sister got right on it. “More morphine over here,” she said to a nurse. “Her pain threshold is very high.”

  I was too miserable to argue with Lara about my pain threshold, which was in fact not high in the least. I knew I was a big crybaby, that I would never make it in Auschwitz or Mauthausen or Siberia. Still, it was nice that my sister was looking out for me. The needle went into my thigh, and I passed out.

  * * *

  My mother came to Burlington to supervise my recovery. She swept into my hospital room like a gust of wind, threw open the blinds, and sat on the vinyl chair next to my bed. I was barely conscious when she touched my arm.

  “Helen,” she said. “What have you eaten today? Have you exercised the leg?”

  I lay in a cloud of morphine. “Hurts,” I said.

  “You can’t lie around all day. It isn’t good for you.”

  I closed my eyes.

  “I’m going to run out and get a few things for dinner.”

  She was staying with my sister and came to visit me every day at the hospital. When I was released a week later, she brought me back to Lara’s house and began to work on my future. Lara had started her ER rotation and stumbled home every couple of days, stunned by sleeplessness and haunted by visions of catheters falling out of body openings. All three of us were deeply unhappy, in the way that mothers and daughters can be when they want to believe they are helping one another.

  “Would you like me to type your résumé?” my mother asked. “You’ll need cover letters too.”

  I closed my ey
es and drifted off to the mountains of Lesotho.

  “I could do a template for you, and you could fill in the names and addresses of the firms you apply to.”

  The idea of a legal job depressed me. I was a failure. Only a year earlier, I had made the exhilarating and career-defying decision to work in Africa. I had wanted a life of danger and adventure, but I’d underestimated my need for conversation. And not just conversation, but companionship and love and intimacy and so many other things that I pretended I didn’t need.

  Now, as I lay in bed, it was starting to dawn on me that my ability to walk—never mind to run or climb mountains—was in question. I would have to rejoin civilization behind an office desk. Trips to the ladies’ room and the watercooler would be my only response to the call of the wild. My self-pity knew no bounds.

  After two weeks, the surgeon cut my cast open, exposing an emaciated yellow celery stalk of a leg. Angry seams ran up and down either side of my knee, tied off with black, blood-crusted knots. It was breathtakingly repulsive. “In another few weeks you can start PT,” he said cheerfully, strapping on a full-length, metal-ribbed leg brace. It had a giant knob and hinge at the knee: Frankenstein in blue Velcro. Gingerly, I swung out of his office, careful not to hook the knob on my crutches.

  My mother returned to Schenectady and I lay around my sister’s house reading magazines and eating Tylenol laced with codeine. The leg was tender, and voyages to the refrigerator or bathroom required careful planning and mental toughness. Every day or two, my mother called.

  “How are you doing with the résumés?”

  “Um, I’m working up to it,” I said.

  “I put a new ribbon in the typewriter before I left.”

  “Yeah. Thanks.”

  “Are you eating?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What are you eating?”

  “Um, chicken. Salads. You know.” In fact, I was following my usual diet of Doritos, M&M’s, and ice cream.

  “Did you get the check?”

  “Oh. Yeah, thanks.” My mother was sending me money to cover my household expenses. My active-duty Peace Corps salary had been paid in Lesotho maloti, which did not enjoy a favorable exchange rate with the U.S. dollar. By the end of my service, I had amassed $230 in my savings account. This was another source of shame—I was twenty-five years old, and once again my parents were supporting me. It complicated my anger toward them.

  “How’s Lara?” Mom asked.

  “Okay.” Lara and I had exchanged half a dozen words in the last week. She came home exhausted, opened the refrigerator, ate something out of a plastic container, took a shower, and fell asleep until she was due back at the hospital.

  * * *

  Weeks crawled by. My sister was getting the hang of being a doctor, and I was getting the hang of being a wreck. We started swimming together at an outdoor pool when Lara got off work. A standout swimmer in college, she moved through the water like a windup shark. Warily, I removed my Frankenstein brace at the edge of the pool and slipped into the lane beside her. As she powered up and down the pool, I pushed off gingerly and swam next to her, dragging my dead leg behind me. Every twenty seconds I’d choke on the tidal wave of Lara’s wake as she crashed past me. We kept this up for an hour or so. It was our quality time together.

  By July I had established my rehab routine, paid for by Uncle Sam (I was on workers’ comp as a federal employee). Every other day I went to physical therapy, where I cranked out hundreds of reps on the Cybex machine to the soothing voice of a sports medicine man. Then I proceeded to psychotherapy with a psychiatrist in Lara’s department. (As a new intern in psychiatry, Lara had offered me a little free professional advice: “Helen, you should really see a shrink.”) So at Lara’s recommendation, I started seeing a colleague of hers, a funky, frequently distracted young woman who wore long hippie skirts and great earrings.

  On alternating days, I started working as a volunteer at the local legal aid office, researching an appeal on a murder case. Despite my resistance to gainful employment, I was attracted to criminal law. Our client had killed his girlfriend after they’d gotten into a drunken argument over whose turn it was to go out for cigarettes. When she refused to budge, he called her a worthless bitch. “Well, why don’t you just shoot me?” she’d said. “Not a bad idea,” he agreed. He got up, went into the other room for his rifle, and shot her in the head. He immediately called the police in tears. “She’s the only woman I ever loved,” he kept saying.

  I was trying to challenge the admissibility of his confession. We called it the “Not a Bad Idea” Murder Case, and although we had a decent argument, I had the feeling it was not going to be a winner.

  One Friday afternoon, Lara came home from work restless. Her weeks of sleepless nights, dealing with psychotic patients and unpredictable emergencies, were wearing her down. She now had the weekend off, and while wolfing down a container of leftover grilled vegetables, she tried to entice me to go home to Schenectady with her. “We can be there in three hours,” she said, stabbing a chunk of blackened zucchini.

  I would sooner have walked across a desert in high heels than go home to my parents. “No thanks,” I said. “You go ahead. I’ll hang out here.”

  “C’mon, Helen, it’ll be good. I really need a break.”

  A feeling of unease slid over me. Lara didn’t like to go anywhere alone. She needed me to join her.

  “You should go, then,” I said carefully. “That’s a good idea.” Even as I said this, I sensed that she couldn’t manage to go home without me. Perhaps she didn’t want to acknowledge how much she needed Mom to take care of her. Perhaps, like me, she was ashamed of how dependent we were on our parents for comfort and support, even in our midtwenties, when our friends had left home long ago. Her housemates spent their days off with their boyfriends, throwing parties, inviting friends over. How would it look if she went home for the weekend and left me to hop around the house on my own? I didn’t know; I only knew that something more was going on here, and it made me nervous.

  “We can hit Record Town,” she offered. She knew I’d been eyeing the new Eurythmics album. “And we can stop at Ziggy’s and get bagels.”

  I shook my head. “I just can’t handle a weekend with Mom and Dad right now. They’ll drive me crazy.”

  Lara’s face clouded over. I recognized that look. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up, and I could feel the familiar panic seep through me.

  “I’m really not up for it,” I said as gently as I could. “You go ahead.”

  Something flashed in her eyes, and in an instant, I knew I was in trouble. She flung the food container across the room. “You’re coming to Schenectady!” she said.

  I was up on my crutches in an instant. She lunged at me, fists clenched. “You’re coming with me!”

  I ducked and spun away from her. My mind raced. I had to grab whatever I could of my belongings and get out of the house. I’d sleep in the woods if I had to. Frantically, I crutched into the dining room where my sleeping bag was stuffed into its sack in the corner. I scooped it up with one hand, managed to grab my wallet and shove it into the pocket of my shorts. In my haste, I slammed my leg into the dining room table. The pain took my breath away, but I kept going.

  Lara was bearing down on me. “We’re going to Schenectady!” She grabbed my shoulder and slammed me against the wall. I tried to keep my balance and protect my leg, holding the crutches in front of me to keep her at bay.

  “I don’t want to! Leave me alone!”

  She grabbed the sleeping bag and used it to bat my crutches aside, shoving me into the wall. She was breathing hard now, her face red with fury. She was the Lara of my childhood, and we were once again alone with her rage, in a house in the middle of nowhere. I tried to protect my face with the crutches, but she kicked my leg instead. I let out a shriek, twisted free, and hopped across the room to the foyer. Her fingers clawed at my back. I reached the front door, threw it open, and hopped out to the landing. The s
leeping bag flew out after me, hitting me in the back of the head. “Fuck you!” she yelled, and slammed the door.

  My arms were shaking as I leaned over and picked up the sleeping bag. It was nearly six in the evening, and the sky was steel gray. I sidestepped puddles from earlier showers, and made my way down the driveway onto the country road. The highway was visible in the distance. I began crutching the half mile or so toward it. I had just cashed a check that week, and I had eighty dollars in my wallet. It began to sprinkle lightly, and I realized I was crying. Tears streamed down my face, and the rain felt good. My arms were getting tired, but I didn’t dare slow down. I had to hitch a ride into Burlington. Once there, I could find a place to stay for the night. Tomorrow I’d go to the university and look for a cheap room. My clothes and belongings were in Lara’s house, but I had my down bag and my wallet, and that was enough.

  By the time I neared the entrance ramp to the highway, my armpits were burning. A solid drizzle pasted my hair to my forehead. I stood on the shoulder of the two-lane road propped on my crutches, holding my thumb out. My leg brace absorbed the rain like a sponge—it felt as if a baby whale had attached itself to my thigh. I knew I looked deranged. There was almost no traffic, but the few cars that passed me swung out in a cautious loop, and I could see the drivers and passengers peering out at me as if I were an axe murderer on crutches.

  Nearly an hour went by. I was soaked and chilled. I considered hopping up the ramp and onto the highway itself but I didn’t want to get stopped by a trooper. So I stayed on the road near the ramp and waited. Surely someone would be heading to a grocery store in town. Finally a car appeared in the distance, coming slowly toward me. It was taking its sweet time, and I thought my chances might be good—maybe a local farmer or his wife. When it was a few hundred feet away, I realized it was Lara’s dark-blue Tercel. I began crutching down the road like a maniac. Within seconds, she was upon me. I cut across the road, reversed direction, and hopped wildly, hoping another car would come by. Now I had to get to that ramp, get up to the highway, where I would be able to head against traffic so she couldn’t reach me. I no longer cared about state troopers. I was running for my life.