The Escape Artist

by Helen Fremont

  “I’ll show you how I make them,” he offered.

  My mother, with her firm grip on the choke collar of my social life, dropped me off at Kevin’s house for the sole purpose of letting me watch Kevin stitch two pieces of leather together. Upon completion of this task, Kevin’s father drove me home.

  Over the next few weeks, I bought a wallet from Kevin that I didn’t need, a belt, and a sort of purse that looked more like a saddlebag, sturdy enough to withstand a stampede of horses. My mother examined and scoffed at each purchase, making it clear that I could throw away my babysitting money however I wished, but I was certainly not going to see Kevin Flanagan for anything other than arm’s-length financial transactions.

  * * *

  My sister left for college in the fall of 1972. A mini-flotilla of two long-finned Chryslers filled to the brim with clothes, stereo, and the members of our nuclear family moved solemnly east across the state line to Smith, an ivy-whiskered institution of Gothic sobriety. My father, whose finger was always on the safety lock of his wallet, broke out in a sweat when he saw the manicured lawns of Lara’s new campus. He was a provider par excellence, and proud of it, but he had grown up in abject poverty, and never felt comfortable with wealth.

  By sundown we had transferred the contents of both cars into her dorm room, and left the old green Chrysler with Lara. She stood at the curb, tearfully waving good-bye to us as we receded into darkness. Stretched out in the backseat, I could barely contain my excitement at having gotten rid of my older sister in this perfectly legitimate way. I spent the ride dreaming of my freedom from Lara’s surveillance: the escapades I would lead, the days I would spend with my friends in her absence.

  I had not yet stumbled upon the addictive quality of misery as Lara had. Every Friday she would drive the hour and a half from college directly to her shrink’s office in Schenectady. From there, she drove home to unleash her first downpour, and our family fell into the familiar pattern. It was like getting Lara’s Doom in concentrate: a full week’s misery condensed to fit a weekend. By midday Sunday, the anxiety in the household had ratcheted up; we were all waiting to see whether she would manage to return to college in time for Monday classes. We tiptoed around her, afraid to start another fight, while she sat slumped over the kitchen counter, anger rising from her like chlorine gas. Sometimes she would leave Sunday afternoon; sometimes she would wander back to bed and not emerge till dinnertime. Sometimes she would leave Sunday night, and sometimes, when our nerves were about to snap, she would brood through the night and not drive back to college until Monday morning.

  * * *

  In the meantime, Kevin Flanagan had enrolled in a nearby college, where his father was chair of the Physics Department. (“He’s not a real doctor,” my mother sniffed, offended that anyone with a mere PhD could appropriate the title of “doctor.”) I was fifteen now, and my mother grudgingly agreed to let me play tennis with Kevin on the asphalt courts behind his school. Kevin and I were both sufficiently athletic, competitive, and inept at tennis to keep this interesting.

  As my mother feared, I actually liked Kevin. He was much more worldly than I, yet he seemed genuinely interested in what I thought about things like the war in Vietnam and the role of students in overthrowing the government. (I was against war, I said. I didn’t know much about overthrowing anything.)

  In those days, Mom monitored me closely and allowed daytime activities, as long as I didn’t date. She defined dating in the old-fashioned sense of the word, where the boy comes to the house, picks up the girl, and takes her out to the movies or the basketball game or the school dance. These common uses of boys were verboten in my family, or at least for me. So instead, on warm Saturday afternoons, Kevin and I went bicycling on deserted country roads, surrounded by endless fields of wildflowers and woods and wilderness. When the sun grew too hot, we leaned our bikes against a tree and walked into the woods and settled on a grassy knoll and kissed. We were surprisingly restrained, and never lost our heads or clothes or any of the other things we had to lose.

  We also kissed in the basement of his house. His parents were upstairs; they’d invited me for dinner. Kevin leaned over me and kissed me full on the mouth and I kissed him back, hard, and we stood there, kissing with necks of steel, pressing against each other like contestants in the World’s Strongest Kissing Competition. Then we went upstairs and had dinner with his parents, and his father drove me home.

  For me, kissing was a life skill one ought to acquire, like grammar or long division. It never had any effect on me physically. I never stopped to wonder about this.

  Some weeks later, while we were once again standing in his basement and kissing (a bit less strenuously), Kevin ventured to touch my breast, so softly, through the cotton of my T-shirt and the polyester padding of my AA-cup bra. I brushed his hand away. “Come on, Kevin. Cut it out.” For some reason, alarm signals went off in my head. Kissing was one thing—I used my mouth in public all the time, for talking, for eating; it was right out there for all the world to see. But no one had ever touched my breasts before; they were a part of my body that were, to my mind, an unpleasant encumbrance, twin bumps that I preferred not to think about. His touching them was a reminder of the danger that lay within me that my mother was so afraid of.

  Kevin seemed hurt but said nothing, and we continued kissing, like nice people.

  I’m not sure what Kevin was thinking at the time. I suspect he was actually falling in love, or something like it; he was a hopeless romantic, and he was going to get hurt. Or maybe my intransigence was exactly what made the relationship safe for him. Years later we would talk about our natural affinity for disappointment. Both of us were used to making do with whatever we got—a little attention, some affection, some love.

  * * *

  It was after that evening of the Bra Touch that I started to panic. I was clearly doing something illegal behind my mother’s back—something my sister would never have dreamed of doing. Lara would have been as outraged as Mom, and would have ratted me out in an instant. I couldn’t bear to enter this treacherous uncharted territory of boys against my mother’s wishes.

  And I knew this meant something was wrong with me. After all, my classmates had boyfriends in plain view, in front of their siblings and parents, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. There was no way I could do that. Maybe I could fudge certain details that Mom didn’t really care about, but I absolutely could not break the law of family loyalty. Between Kevin and my mother, there was really no contest. I would choose Mom. I would choose my family.

  So I called Kevin in tears. “I have to see you,” I said. “I have to tell you something. You’re going to hate me, but we need to talk.”

  It was a chilly Sunday afternoon in late April. I got my mother to give me a ride to his house. Wringing my hands, I walked with him up and down the hills where he lived. “I can’t have a romantic relationship with you,” I told him. “I want to, and I’ve tried, but I know my mother is against it, and I just can’t make myself go against her wishes. It’s driving me crazy.”

  Kevin murmured reassuring words and tried to calm me down. Why was he being so nice?

  “This is my own problem,” I said, choking back tears. “If I were you, I’d be really angry, and really hurt.”

  But Kevin looked incredibly sweet and concerned. “It’s okay, Helen,” he kept saying.

  “You won’t want to see me again,” I continued, my tears flowing freely now. “And you shouldn’t. You should just move on, find a normal girl who will love you and be a proper girlfriend.”

  To my amazement, he told me it didn’t matter. It mattered more to him that we continue our friendship, even if it remained platonic.

  I was stunned. This fairly blew me away. It had never occurred to me that Kevin would want to be friends if we couldn’t be more than that.

  So there it was. At fifteen, I was still too much my mother’s daughter to be Kevin’s girlfriend. In fact, I was too much my mother�
��s daughter to be myself.

  five

  The summer I turned sixteen, Mom, Lara, and I flew to Rome to stay with Zosia and Uncle in their apartment in the city. Uncle spent his days puttering around his bedroom, which doubled as his office. Stacks of books and papers rose from floor to ceiling: legal documents, genealogical charts, books of heraldry, history, Nostradamus, astronomy, and law. We sneaked a peek now and then when he opened the door a crack, but no one—not even Zosia—ever set foot in it. Zosia’s bedroom was as small and tidy as Uncle’s was big and unwieldy. Mom, Lara, and I slept in the majestic living room on narrow cots that we folded up each morning before tiptoeing out of the apartment at dawn.

  Mom marched Lara and me all over the city. She knew and loved Rome as a native, and blossomed into a new person here, as if she’d stepped into another version of herself, one with color and joy. Her exhilaration was contagious, and Lara and I fell under her spell. This was the city where she and Zosia had reinvented themselves, where they had begun their lives together after Mom had escaped the Nazis in Poland.

  Here was the grand Teatro dell’ Opera, and here the catacombs of Sant’Agnese, my mother told us, where she’d taken groups of American GIs from the Red Cross Rest Center during the war. And here, the rusticated palazzo of the Ministero dell’Agricoltura where she’d worked as a translator after the war, before handing her job off to Zosia and emigrating to the States with Dad. Lara and I followed her everywhere, enthralled. She introduced us to her Italian friends, who told us stories about how she had bartered for food on the black market; how she’d helped them smuggle cigarettes out of the Red Cross Center.

  Years later, my mother would tell me that she had never wanted to emigrate to the States with my father after the war. “I wanted to stay there with Zosia,” she said with tears in her eyes. “And with Renzo. He was eight years old when I left.” She shook her head. “It was Zosia who forced me to go.”

  “Why?”

  My mother wiped her eyes. “Zosia knew Dad would never fit in in Italy. You know Dad. He would have been so unhappy there.”

  Remembering this now, I marvel at the guilelessness of my mother’s stories. On the surface, her explanations are completely true. My father, with his mathematical certainty of right and wrong, would indeed have been driven crazy in Italy, where the laws of physics are so easily curved to accommodate the needs of personality and politics. But later I would come to realize that Zosia’s reasons for sending her sister and brother-in-law overseas after the war were more complicated. After the war was over, the secrets took on a life of their own, and it would be decades before I could begin to piece together the whole story.

  * * *

  That fall, I applied to colleges, eager to launch. Now I looked beyond Wellesley—to Brown, Dartmouth, Bowdoin. My mother pretended that the choice was mine, but she dropped hints in case I made the wrong decision. “A women’s college,” she said. “You want to get an education, not a husband.” In fairness to my mother, Kevin Flanagan wasn’t the only boy she wanted gone; she seemed intent on removing the entire gender from my life.

  My mother also helped me choose my career that year. Unlike Lara, a science geek, all I cared about was languages. I loved writing stories and dreamed of one day writing the story of my parents’ lives. At the time, I didn’t realize that my mother had created a fiction of her own life, but I was captivated by what little I knew of her past.

  “I want to be a writer,” I said. “A novelist.”

  “A foreign correspondent,” my mother corrected. “You’ll live in Paris, or perhaps Rome or Heidelberg, and submit articles on art and culture to the New Yorker or the Atlantic or the New York Times.”

  Clearly, if you didn’t write for the New Yorker or the Atlantic or the New York Times, there was no point in writing at all. I was going to be a huge disappointment to my mother, but neither of us knew exactly how huge at the time.

  My mother drove me to my college interviews—in the end, I’d obediently applied only to two women’s schools: Wellesley and Smith, where Lara was a sophomore now. She had finally settled into dorm life, and was actually sort of fun to be with, and I felt the familiar tug of sisterhood to join her. My mother kept dropping hints about how nice it would be if Lara and I were together. “Lara has a car,” Mom pointed out, as she drove me to my interview at Smith. “You and she could come home together on weekends.”

  As it turned out, while I was being interviewed in the admissions office, my sister was two flights above me in the dean’s office, being disciplined for breaking into the cafeteria with some classmates and raiding the ice cream bins. This caper had great appeal to me, and I pictured Lara and me bonding over similar adventures once I enrolled here. But another part of me remembered the volatility of our relationship. The urge to stay away from her was as strong as the urge to join her, and eventually I decided it would be safer for us not to go to the same school.

  I was on crutches that fall, thanks to a field hockey injury that had torn my left quadriceps. Apparently, admissions committees could not resist a theatrical entrance; both colleges admitted me immediately, without waiting for me to finish my junior year of high school. And so, two weeks after my seventeenth birthday, in the fall of 1974, I became a high school dropout and college freshman.

  * * *

  Wellesley wasn’t what I expected. I thought it would be like high school, only more beautiful, with better sports facilities. I’d gone to a semirural regional public school, so it was something of a jolt to find myself in a cerebral New England bastion of WASP privilege. Not that I knew what a WASP was; I only knew I was different. In my sweats and pixie haircut, I felt like an impostor, a kid from the boonies who did not belong with the sophisticated, sharp-dressed students on campus who called themselves “women” instead of girls. I wasn’t used to this feeling of being a misfit, and it dawned on me that perhaps this was what Lara had felt like all her life. I felt a creepy shift in allegiance to her now.

  Even more unnerving, the workload was killing. In high school, I’d never had to study more than an hour or two to outshine most of my classmates. But here, the syllabus for a single course listed more books than I’d read in the last two years of my life. One of the students in my literature class had read Beowulf in the original, and another discussed the political ramifications of nineteenth-century German philosophy over lunch. Cowed, I shackled myself to my desk and studied until the words on the page melted together.

  My roommate was from the North Shore of Boston and had gone to a private boarding school. I liked her immediately—a tomboy in an oversize Brooks Brothers shirt, Levi’s jeans, and Top-Siders without socks. She tied her limp hair in a ponytail and threw parties in our room for the whole floor, at which she served imported cheeses and bottles of gin. I’d never drunk anything more than a glass of wine in my life. Our room was small, so our classmates piled in, sitting on our beds and desks, on the floor, and even on the bookcases and dressers. Those who couldn’t fit inside clogged the doorway and overflowed into the hall. At first, I liked being the social hub of our dorm. I could feel my coolness quotient rising. I passed the cheese and crackers, and quickly shed my unspoken identification with Lara. But after four or five parties in so many days, I started to worry about my studies. I couldn’t figure out how to sneak off to the library without looking like a complete dork. So I played along and pretended to sip gin from my plastic cup of tap water, and tried to hide my growing anxiety over losing precious study time. But my affectation of a Fun Person was showing signs of wear.

  Soon our parties attracted upperclassmen and students from other dorms. My roommate, flush with success, took periodic head counts of our guests. Later in the evening I would hear her talking excitedly on the phone with Mummy, proudly reporting the number of people who had attended our party.

  That’s when I understood that she and I were not so different after all. We were both desperate to impress our mothers; the only difference was how our mothers measure
d our success.

  A few weeks later, my roommate and I were approached by some classmates who’d brokered a floor-wide freshman roommate swap to mix things up. I would move to a room at the end of the hall with another misfit, Janet Kairns, a public school kid like me in denim overalls, tube socks, and sneakers, who came from a hick town not far from my own. She and I bonded immediately over our common affliction of homesickness, something we hadn’t dared admit to anyone before. And something else about Janet: in her geeky, good-natured way, she was a sweeter, simpler version of my sister. I felt comfortable and safe with Janet; she was like an overgrown eight-year-old boy mixed with a golden retriever. But strangely enough, I also found myself longing for the complicated edginess, the danger and sheer Lara-ness of Lara.

  As if a switch had been flicked, I was now flooded with fond memories of skiing and hiking and swimming with Lara, of ganging up on Mom, who always seemed to delight in being the brunt of our silly jokes.

  Here at college I was ashamed of this part of me, this childish, homesick Helen. It was time for me to become a successful adult in the world. So I spent my first semester holed up in the library and studied all weekend as if my life depended on it, which, of course, it did. Janet too disappeared into the stacks of the library, while the other women in our dorm smoked dope and drank vodka tonics from giant bowls, and fucked the boys from Harvard and MIT and Dartmouth and whoever else showed up on campus. I now missed my family in a way that took my breath away. I’d always been so self-assured, so hell-bent on getting out of there. But here in the world, I discovered I was more like them than like anyone else.