The Escape Artist

by Helen Fremont

  Lara had turned the car around and rolled up beside me, the passenger window down. “Come on, Helen,” she said in a tired voice. “Get in the car.” I wheeled around and darted back across the road.

  “I brought our swimsuits and goggles,” she said. “Let’s go for a swim.” Her voice was empty of emotion. She turned the car again and the engine purred as she crawled up beside me.

  “Leave me alone!” I shouted.

  She pulled the car over and got out. I started shrieking as if I were being torn apart by hyenas. “DON’T TOUCH ME!” I started leaping through the crutches, taking a running hop between swings. My knee was on fire. I heard her get back in the car and slam the door. She crawled up beside me again.

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” she said quietly. “Just get in the car, and let’s go for a swim.”

  I was exhausted now, and my arms were worn out. I stopped and stood on the side of the road, leaning over my crutches, shaking with sobs. I knew how crazy I looked, how hysterical, compared to Lara, who had calmed down. And this sudden flip of my reality, from having been attacked by her to being rescued by her, made me even more unhinged. I felt the repetition of my entire history with Lara, my impotent rage when she suddenly reverted to being the calm, rational older sister, as if nothing had happened at all.

  She waited behind the steering wheel for me to calm down. Then she leaned across the front seat and flipped the door open. A minute or two went by, while I tried to come to terms with my anger and defeat.

  “I’m moving out,” I said. “I am not going home with you.”

  She took a deep breath. “We can talk about that later. You need a swim. A swim will do you good.”

  “I can’t live with you,” I said. “I mean it.”

  “You’re upset now,” she said patiently. “You’ll feel better after a swim.” She held up the gym bag with our towels, suits, and goggles. “We’ll just go to Sand Hill, go swimming, and then you can do anything you want.”

  Humiliated, I inched toward the passenger door, took baby hops to ease myself into the car, and sank into the front seat next to her. I dragged my crutches and sleeping bag in after me and yanked the door closed. My leg was throbbing, a monster with its own beating heart. Lara drove up the ramp onto the highway. Sitting as far from her as I could, I stared out my window, crying.

  At the pool I changed into my suit, removed my leg brace, and examined the damage. My armpits were raw; they burned when I eased myself into the water. The rain was coming down hard now, in thick sheets, so we had the entire fifty-meter pool to ourselves. I swam with the fury and frustration of the past year, of the past twenty years, of my miserable future as a cripple. My goggles filled with tears, and I kept swimming. An hour went by, maybe more. I lost count of my laps, I lost track of Lara, and just swam without stopping, wishing I could swim all the way back to Africa.

  Someone was shouting. “Hey! HEY!” It was the lifeguard. He was leaning over my lane at the shallow end, screaming at me. “We’re CLOSED. Get out of the water.”

  I went to the showers. My teeth chattered and my lips were blue, and I toweled dry, replaced my brace and wet clothes. I let Lara drive me back to her place. “I’m moving out tomorrow,” I told her, and crawled into my sleeping bag.

  * * *

  The next morning, I packed my backpack with shirts, jeans, a toothbrush, and my sleeping bag, and waited by the car for her to drive me into the city.

  She came out to the front stoop. “Helen, you don’t need to do this,” she said, annoyed at my stubbornness. “You can stay here.”

  I stared at the ground and moved a stone with the tip of my crutch. “I’m not living with you anymore.”

  “Oh, come on, Helen. You’re being ridiculous.”

  I shook my head. “Just give me a ride to town, and I’ll find my own place.”

  She let out a sigh and rolled her eyes. We drove in silence into the city, and she dropped me off at the medical center. I felt nothing but relief when she drove off.

  I studied the bulletin board at a nearby coffee shop, and a notice caught my eye: a battered women’s shelter on Stanford Road offered safe rooms, a common kitchen, and group therapy for $26.50 a week. I didn’t think of myself as a battered woman, but I did need a cheap, short-term place to stay, and this seemed perfect. I made a phone call and took the city bus across town. I completed the intake interview with the program director, an MSW more or less my age. I was her first lawyer. She accepted me into the program, and although I was assigned my weekly chores (cleaning the kitchen, vacuuming and dusting the lounge and rec room), she said I didn’t have to participate in group therapy, since I was already getting physical therapy and psychotherapy at the medical center. Her name was Adrianna, but everyone called her Andi. We became friends. We almost became more, but she was married, and her days with women were over, she said. And mine had not yet begun.

  * * *

  That evening I called my parents from the pay phone at the shelter to let them know how to reach me, and to tell them everything was fine.

  “Lara told us you moved out,” my mother said. I could hear the exasperation in her voice. “What has gotten into you?”

  I knew better than to try to explain myself. Mom never considered Lara’s behavior a reason for me to leave. “I just can’t live with Lara,” I said. “And I found a great place! It’s super cheap, a county-funded housing program.”

  The next day, my mother left a message for me to call her. In the meantime, she and Lara had talked, and Lara had recognized the name of my housing program. She and my parents were horrified that I’d chosen to go to a battered women’s shelter. What was I thinking? Why didn’t I just go home to Lara? She was my sister! Just because we had a fight, my mother said, I didn’t need to make such a big deal out of it.

  I was a little ashamed myself. The other women at the shelter looked truly needy—empty-eyed, beaten down by life. Most were African American, and many had children who tugged at them as they did load after load of laundry in the coin-operated machines. I felt so much luckier than these women; I worried that I might be taking advantage of the system. Yet there were plenty of beds available, and I needed the housing. And although I didn’t want to admit it, I actually had a lot in common with my housemates. I was disabled and unemployed; I had been assaulted by a family member, and didn’t feel safe at home. So I was legit—a bona fide battered woman, by the county’s own definition. I told myself I was giving back by volunteering at the legal aid center downtown.

  * * *

  “She’s my closest friend,” I told my shrink in Burlington. “I just can’t live with her.” I was always talking about Lara—Lara my hero, Lara my tormentor—always swinging from one extreme to the other within the blink of an eye. Once I moved out of her house, I felt much safer. Of course, I still had to live with myself, someone I didn’t know very well, someone who careened into eating binges and pockets of depression without warning. Even so, I genuinely liked living on my own, getting around on the city buses, doing my own shopping and laundry.

  My shrink nodded thoughtfully. The phone rang, and she held up a finger. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I have to take this.” I waited while she gave instructions to admit someone to the hospital. Here was a real emergency, I thought. It made me feel marginally better. I was not that wretched. There were people who had it a lot worse.

  “I’m really sorry,” she said, gathering her purse. “I’m the only one covering.” She glanced at her watch, a thick-banded contraption with multicolored beads. “We’ll talk next time, okay? I have to go.”

  I wanted to impress her with my composure and maturity. “No problem.” I collected my crutches and hopped out the door. It occurred to me then that perhaps she didn’t believe my story that Lara had actually attacked me. I must sound like a hysteric. After all, Lara and my shrink were colleagues in the same department. For all I knew, it could have been Lara on the other end of the phone, alerting my shrink to an emergency th
ey had on their hands. My therapist probably felt for Lara, for having to put up with such a wack-job sister as me.

  Lara and I never spoke about that summer, and now I wonder what her version would be. Memory is unreliable, a beam of light with which we bend the past to suit our needs. In the end, I finally learned, all I can do is lay claim to my own memories.

  twenty

  1983

  My first job as a lawyer was at the Office of Bar Counsel in Boston, steps from the courthouse in Pemberton Square. To my surprise, I actually liked the work. My office of ten attorneys was responsible for overseeing the professional conduct of every lawyer in the state, funded entirely by bar dues (including our own). It was an efficient way to make attorneys pay for the brooms and detergents necessary to clean up their own messes. We were sort of the janitors of the profession.

  We prosecuted complaints of attorneys stealing their clients’ money; attorneys sleeping with their clients’ wives; attorneys snorting coke; attorneys who didn’t answer their phones or their mail—in short, attorneys who were pretty much just like everyone else in the world. I started at $18,000 with full benefits, and the first thing I did was go shopping for a shrink. Paul Russell, the psychiatrist who had freed me from group therapy, medication, and law school two years earlier, now referred me to a former student of his in her own private practice.

  Her name was Lisa. I sent her a letter before meeting her. My sister, I wrote, is borderline, and also my closest friend. Years later, when Lisa showed me the letter, I was shocked to see that I’d used that term—borderline. Had I really already known this back then? I realized that Lara herself had told me this; she had come up with the diagnosis, and discussed it with her own shrink. For years, I would refuse to believe it; I would pretend it wasn’t true, I’d pretend it didn’t matter. Each time I landed on this word as an explanation for my relationship with Lara, I would evade or minimize it.

  So she had a borderline personality disorder, I would think—but hey, who didn’t?

  So did I, so did you, so did everyone I knew. Borderline or not, Lara was the only person in the world who understood me, who shared my history, who knew in her bones the strange warp and woof of the war my parents had survived and carried to America with them to wrap around our shoulders.

  1984

  Like most medical residents, Lara was saving lives on little sleep, while I spent my days chasing lawyers whose clients’ funds somehow wound up in their own bank accounts. She called me a few times in the spring, moody and depressed. “Helen, this sucks,” she said. “I mean, I like psychiatry and all, but… I don’t know.”

  “Can you get out to the mountains for a break?” I was still on crutches from a second knee operation in January. The surgery in Burlington eight months earlier hadn’t worked.

  “Helen, I get, like, six hours between crazy-long shifts.”

  As usual, we never mentioned our last crisis—the time she’d attacked me when I was on crutches the previous summer. It was uncomfortable to acknowledge these violent rifts in our relationship, and so, by unspoken agreement, we pretended they had never happened.

  We commiserated over our limitations, and compared shrinks. “Lisa is all I think about when I’m not working,” I said. “She’s amazing.”

  Lara too had finally found a therapist she liked a lot, but her shrink was young and pregnant and about to take a maternity leave, which made Lara anxious. We talked about how inconvenient it was to be in love with your shrink. How crazy it seemed to have to respect all those rules and roadblocks—the fifty-minute session; the lopsided conversation focused on you, you, you; the supposed blank slate of the shrink, when she was sitting right there, with her legs and arms and breasts and lips and…

  “I know,” Lara said. “I understand the need for boundaries, but…” She sighed. “It can get ridiculous sometimes. You know?”

  “Yeah. It’s not like I’d want Lisa to go on a date with me,” I said. “I mean, that would completely freak me out. But at the same time, I think I would just like to marry her. You know? We could just live together.”

  Lara laughed. It felt good to know she felt the same about her shrink as I did about mine.

  * * *

  Within moments of having met Lisa, I was smitten. I was in love with her soft lilting voice, I was in love with her asymmetrical smile, I was even in love with her nose, which was perhaps a bit longer than absolutely necessary. She moved with a feline grace, tantalizing and mysterious, but it was the quality of her attention that tipped me off balance and removed my free will. She gazed at me with warmth and interest and intelligence, drawing me into her confidence as easily as a wave pulling me onto the beach.

  I could never keep straight what color her eyes were—blue? gray-blue?—they were somewhere in there, a mountain stream. She was quiet but fierce, and I had the feeling she could fight with surprising verbal strength if she had to. I felt sure she’d had to—but then again, I didn’t really know anything about her.

  I once called her in the evening, because she’d urged me to call if I felt depressed. When she answered, I heard classical music in the background, and I became so overwhelmed by her voice in my ear and the violins in the background that I had trouble remembering what I said or what she said, or why I had called in the first place. It was her presence, her voice, her self that held me transfixed; and although I tried very hard to hold on to the actual words she spoke, the substance of our talk fell away, leaving me adhered to her sublime Lisa-ness.

  She didn’t look the least bit dykey—I was pretty sure she wasn’t queer, and that was fine for a while. I told her that I thought I probably was, though I hadn’t dated any women yet.

  Unlike Dr. Flak, Lisa was highly professional, which posed a number of problems for me. The hour started right on time (this was good), but it ended promptly fifty minutes later, which was difficult to accept. Fifty minutes was a pathetic little serving of love. It seemed absurd for me to be expected to walk out of her office twice a week and resume my life, which was clearly not all that it could be.

  I started bringing her carefully selected gifts to make her love me more: a small beaded witch-doctor doll from Lesotho; a smooth stone I found at the beach; a book of photographs by André Kertész, whom I worshipped; a mix tape I compiled of my favorite garage rock, opera, and jazz tunes. We had to analyze all of these gifts, why I liked them, why I wanted her to have them, why, why, why. It was an exercise in delay of gratification. I don’t think I ever said precisely that I wanted her to love me more than anyone else in the world, and that each gift was calculated to make her do so. Overall, they did not accomplish the intended objective. But it was obvious that some were better than others. Poems were good. I brought her poems from various books I was reading, until a couple of those backfired. To a poem by Ai about the moon and knives and severed heads, Lisa remarked drily, “All this drama.” I defended the poem as art; Lisa dismissed it as sensationalism. She tried to get me to talk about me.

  “I am telling you about me,” I said. “This poem is about me.”

  She looked skeptical, an eyebrow up. “The moon as a severed head. That’s you?”

  “Never mind. Forget it.”

  “Why don’t you tell me what you’re feeling right now?”

  I looked behind her shoulder at a small statue on her bookcase. I wondered what she’d done with the rock from the beach I’d given her. What was I even doing here? I was sick of myself, irritated with my inability to snap out of it, to stop being such a loser. It was my habit of self-loathing that got me down. I found myself boring and hopeless and, well, angry.

  “Are you angry?”

  The clock above my head ticked quietly. What a waste of time, I thought. At least this was covered by health insurance. I didn’t have to pay a penny out of pocket in those days.

  “I’m depressed,” I said eventually. Would it kill you to be a little nicer? I thought.

  We argued about why I was depressed, but I held my ground
about not being angry. I don’t know why this was such a point of pride for me, but obviously a patient must put her foot down somewhere. Over the next few weeks, I admitted to being “frustrated,” “upset,” and “annoyed,” but never angry.

  Lara was the angry one in our family. Not me.

  Of course I wanted to get fixed—I was suffering from mind-reeling bouts of depression and occasional periods of bingeing, and obviously, whether I could admit it or not, plain old-fashioned rage. But it seemed that my first order of business was making Lisa fall in love with me. I wanted to seem worldly and intelligent, a person of substance. I was an elitist, just like my parents, and I had a great deal of disdain for popular culture, which caused problems for me because I was completely and utterly a creature of popular culture, right down to my passion for football and punk rock and popcorn. I wanted to be the sort of person who played classical music and sipped Courvoisier, but instead I played “Sympathy for the Devil” and guzzled Diet Coke.

  I don’t know what she really thought of me. She listened as if everything I said was of enormous import, as if my feelings mattered, which I had trouble believing myself. I fell in love with her just by listening to myself talk to her. It would take a long time—years—before I realized that she was teaching me something I didn’t even know I needed: to look at myself with the same openness and curiosity that she offered, to trust my own truth.

  * * *

  The call came in early April. I was alone in the apartment—my roommates were all out for the evening—and I was standing on crutches in the kitchen trying to solve dinner. The phone rang, and I hopped over to answer it. It was my mother, calling to let me know that Lara was in the hospital. I could hear the strain in her voice as she fought to compose herself.