The Escape Artist

by Helen Fremont

  “You have always been selfish,” my mother said coldly. “You’ve always only thought about yourself.”

  It was true. I did not want to go home. I did not want to save Lara’s life. Although I couldn’t be sure at the moment, I didn’t actually believe that I had caused Lara to cut herself up. Had I? It wasn’t my fault, I thought. But part of me believed that it was. Part of me felt that I must now undo what I had done. I did not know whether I could resist the pull to go home and redeem myself. I didn’t know if I would be able to live with myself if I didn’t.

  * * *

  Looking back on those years, I’m struck by how Lara was the focus around which our family revolved. She was our Id du Jour, the gasket we blew when the pressure got too great. Yet Mom and Zosia had always been at the center of the production, pouring all their energy into sealing off the past. Together, we were all sucked into a performance of aggression and loss and fear and betrayal, but the stage on which it was set—suburban America in the late twentieth century—made no sense at all. In the context of our lives in 1980, Lara looked crazy.

  It wasn’t until a dozen years later, in 1992, that Lara and I would begin to research our family history and discover the secret that our parents and aunt had hidden from us all our lives—that we were Jewish, not Catholic, and we’d lost our entire family in the Holocaust. This revelation in our midthirties would radically change the way we understood our family. Maybe we weren’t so crazy after all; maybe it was just our history that was crazy.

  ten

  Boston, January 1980

  It was already late at night when I put on my sweats and sneakers and ran down the empty streets to the river. The skin of the Charles was blistered with ice, and the path was rutted with frozen ski tracks and footprints from what seemed like prehistoric runners.

  I was running from the image of my sister, blood pouring down her arms and over the sheets. From the image of my mother walking into Lara’s room, the shock of that first impression. I ran past the frozen playing fields and boat slips and tennis courts, deserted and windblown at this time of night. I turned at the Museum of Science and ran back, listening to the river groaning under ice. An occasional car sprayed salt from Storrow Drive.

  I spent the next two days running. I found that I could not bear to be still; I couldn’t be alone with myself in my apartment. I could not read. As long as I was on the move, sweating, heart pounding, I could hold the feelings at bay. The minute I stopped, I was flooded with guilt and a terrible anxiety.

  Emma seemed a world away, on the sunny West Coast of happiness, preparing for her wedding, joyfully in love. I’d lost her not once, but twice. I was in a permanent posture of losing her. Even now, five years after I’d lost her to Hugh in Berkeley, it still did not occur to me that I might be queer or that I was in love with her. I knew only that I was achingly lonely and that I was an impostor—a law student who did not want to be a lawyer, a woman who did not want to date men, a daughter who would not go home. The gap between Emma and me now seemed impossible to bridge. I didn’t call her.

  And I didn’t even consider calling Flak, who was on a ski vacation somewhere. What could he do anyway? This was my problem, and in the grand scheme of things, it really wasn’t such a big deal. After all, I wasn’t living in a bombed-out building or freezing in a forced labor camp above the Arctic Circle. I needed to grow up and get a grip. It was time to prove to myself and to Flak that I had outgrown my weakness, my dependence on others. Last year I’d lost control and gained weight, but now I was fine. I had to be fine.

  Except I was scared of the telephone. Nobody had answering machines in 1980; if the phone rang, you picked it up. I was afraid Mom would call again, and that I’d be sucked back into the vortex. So I took myself to matinees, sometimes one after another. I spent my days in coffee shops, reading novels that failed to distract me. I wrote in my journal. I went to the Greater Boston Legal Services office and pretended to work on my cases. There was nothing, really, that needed my attention.

  I kept running: midnight, one, two in the morning. I had no reason to follow the sun. I slept long and hard and dreaded waking. Days flipped over on themselves. I began to nurse my anxiety with coffee cakes and ice cream. I was starting to lose my sense of self-control. I ran and ate and slept and fretted.

  And I could not hide from the phone altogether. One evening it rang and rang and rang; I held my breath until it stopped. Then it rang and rang again. I finally unplugged it, but could not remain in its company. I drove aimlessly through the streets of Newton, Brighton, Allston. I wanted desperately to prove that I could survive without my family, that I could flourish, but it was an impossible test. I was sunk from the minute I’d left Schenectady. I was going to have to sabotage everything I did from now on. I did not deserve peace.

  Reflections on Suicide

  Despite her years of violent moods and crazy behavior, I still had trouble believing Lara had a bona fide mental illness. In public, among friends or acquaintances or even strangers, she was always charming. “She’s sick,” my mother would tell me in a low voice. “She can’t help it.”

  I believed she was only selectively sick. If I were sick, I thought, I would not do it in such a pantywaist way. I would not limit it to my family or my home or my loved ones. And if I were suicidal, I vowed, I’d do it right. I wouldn’t spend all that time threatening to do it, or making half-assed attempts that made everyone wring their hands and talk about “cries for help.” Mental illness, I believed, came with moral imperatives. If you were going to kill yourself, you should stop dicking around and just do it.

  * * *

  A week after school started, I received a letter from my father. His sharp handwriting on the envelope seemed to cut my hands. I opened the letter, took a deep breath, and read.

  Lara’s condition had gotten worse, Dad wrote, and she would not be returning to medical school that semester. They used the old excuse that my father had had a heart attack, and Lara had to stay home to tend to him. The irony was almost too rich, but I recognized it as my family’s quintessential solution to the truth.

  Lara’s psychiatrist had advised my parents to handle Lara with “kid gloves.” She is homicidal, my father reported, and suicidal. Mom was calling Lara’s doctor two, three, five times a day: Lara won’t get out of bed. Lara won’t eat. Lara has found where I hid the knives.

  We are closely monitoring her medications, to make sure she doesn’t hide them. Mom has taken over the role of full-time nurse, to prevent her from having to go into a hospital. Her condition is volatile. She could snap at any minute.

  It had been three years since Lara was institutionalized during college, and it had nearly torn my parents apart. Lara had never forgiven them. My mother would never let it happen again—and despite my father’s overbearing presence, it was Mom who held the power in our family.

  As I reread Dad’s letter, my heart went out to him. What I loved most about it was that he did not suggest that I was the cause of Lara’s breakdown, or that I should come home. He simply wanted me to know that their home life was hell. He asked how I was, how my studies were going. Lara is very angry at you, my father wrote. She is fixated on you. Write me at the office.

  I folded the letter and replaced it in its envelope, grateful that my father had extended a hand from behind enemy lines. The suggestion of using his office address was a relief. My letters would be safe there; Lara wouldn’t even know about them. I wrote my father back, telling him that I was fine, that I was busy with classes and studies. I tried to make my life sound interesting and upbeat.

  But soon my eating disorder was back in full swing, and I didn’t want to admit it to Flak. It was too humiliating to tell him how many gallons of ice cream I was eating, or that I’d missed days and then weeks of running. I gained weight—a pound or two at first, and then a surge: ten, fifteen pounds. I missed Emma. I was listless and losing control, and although I would never say this to him, I was ashamed of letting Flak down. I
was afraid that if I didn’t perform well, Flak would give up on me.

  “Does your father know?” Flak asked.

  “Know what?”

  “How you are.”

  I shrugged. “We write. My parents are having a horrible time with Lara.”

  “Maybe we could have a session with him,” Flak said. “Do you think he would be willing to come out and have a session with us?”

  The idea appealed to me. I knew my father would never go to a shrink for his own sake, but I was pretty sure he would do so for me. Now that my mother had turned against me, I needed Dad more than ever.

  * * *

  My father and I sat next to each other in identical chairs facing Flak. Dad had driven to Boston that morning in his brand-new Ford Escort, a car that did not do him justice, but one that appealed to his sense of economy.

  “Thank you for coming,” Flak said. “How are you?”

  “The situation at home is very bad,” my father said, wasting no time on pleasantries. “We are keeping Lara under twenty-four-hour supervision.” His voice was quiet, deep, and matter-of-fact. “My life is anguish.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  “The home is essentially a mental institution.”

  Flak nodded. He already knew this from the letters I’d been getting from my father. “How do you feel about that?” he said.

  My father gazed at the ceiling for a moment. “What I wish for, quite simply, is to put an end to it all.”

  This sounded pretty normal to me. I too had often wished that we could simply remove Lara from our midst and put an end to our agony. I was only surprised that Dad would say this to a stranger, to Dr. Flak.

  “Yes,” Flak said, as if he’d been hoping for precisely this sort of confession. “When do you think of this?” He leaned forward and gazed at my father.

  Dad’s broad forehead was creased now.

  “Do you think of this often?” Flak said.

  My father shrugged. “Most of the time.”

  Flak was sitting so far forward in his chair, he was in danger of falling onto the carpet at my father’s feet. “And have you thought about how you would go about it?”

  Flak’s question alarmed me in a way that my father’s words had not. Flak, I suddenly realized, was talking about suicide here. It had never occurred to me that my coolheaded father was in danger of killing himself. My mother was the one who always wished she’d died with her parents. And it was Lara who was now recuperating from her recent adventure with razor blades. But Dad?

  I stared in shock at the two men. Everything else in the room seemed to fall away, and all that was left was the line between their eyes. Neither of them looked in my direction. I had ceased to exist. I was the Soviet bug in the chandelier, the unseen, unacknowledged eavesdropper.

  “I’m a physician,” my father said. “I have all the means at my disposal.”

  I felt as if a vacuum cleaner had sucked out my insides. I couldn’t listen to this.

  Flak nodded. “How close have you come to doing anything?”

  His eyes were riveted on my father. Dad was staring out the window now, and I followed his gaze. Suddenly I wanted to bolt from the room, get out of Newton, get out of my own skin.

  “You’ve come pretty close, haven’t you?” Flak said.

  I looked from my father to Flak. I could barely breathe. Although it didn’t occur to me at the time, my claim to pain had been preempted. Dad didn’t appear any more depressed than usual, but his declaration of the wish to kill himself was new, and it scared me. He was in worse shape than I was.

  My father tilted his head. White hair rose in a column from the top of his head and was combed straight back. “I’m a physician,” he repeated. “I have all the means at my disposal.”

  I pictured Dad in the little lab of his office, concocting a potion that would remove him from his misery. He would calculate the dosage, titrate the chemicals, prepare the syringe, the pills, the means.

  Flak nodded. Here we were, in the shrink’s office, mano a mano with death. The deeper my father and Flak explored his suicide, the more I needed to remove myself from it. I transported myself in my mind to a palatial movie theater with stadium seating; I looked down with a critic’s detachment, and considered the performances. The struggle was an ancient one: a father’s wisdom and patience succumbing, in the end, to psychological torture. The able young psychiatrist using all of his Harvard training to contain the threat, to ascertain its dimensions, and then, very carefully, to disarm the overwrought hero.

  “Have you thought about what it would be like?” Flak asked. It was so lovely, so intoxicating, the degree of attention Flak packed into those words. His entire body—his shoulders, his waist, the muscles in his legs—was poised.

  “Yes. Yes. It would be an enormous relief,” my father said. He did not sound terribly upset. You could see him going over the steps in his mind. Opening his office door, striding to his lab, flipping on the light switch…

  “Do you ever think how it might affect Helen?” Flak asked.

  My father glanced at me, then back at Flak. “Yes,” he said. “That is why I haven’t done it yet.”

  Holy shit, I thought. I’m the only reason he’s still alive.

  My sense of self-importance bloomed, but the pressure made my knees buckle.

  * * *

  After the session, my father and I drove in silence back to my apartment. The plan was that he’d return to Schenectady that afternoon. I wondered whether he might put himself out of his misery that night or that week or that month, but I was afraid to ask. I sat up straight, as if to demonstrate reliability and strength. I knew that my own problems—whatever they were—were nothing compared to my family’s drama. Now I needed to focus all my attention on helping my father not kill himself.

  My father turned left off Comm Ave and wheeled onto Algonquin Road with élan, which is hard to do in a Ford Escort. Then he pulled into the driveway outside my apartment, but declined to come in. “I don’t want to get caught in traffic,” he said.

  “You should call him, Dad. Call Flak.”

  My father shook his head. “What for?”

  “Just to talk about stuff. He really wants you to. I think he wants to help.”

  “Well, are you feeling better?” he said.

  Was he kidding? Was I supposed to feel better now? “Yeah,” I said. It was the required answer. And relatively speaking, I was in no position to complain. I was the only one in my family, it seemed, who did not have the immediate urge to kill herself.

  “That’s what matters, then.” He put the car in reverse. “Okay, well. Good-bye.”

  I went into the apartment and stared at my tax and commercial paper casebooks. I felt nothing, just numb. I considered changing clothes and going for a run. You didn’t have to solve anything on a run. Just breathe in and out, put one foot in front of the other. It took up all the concentration in the world; it kept you safe from feeling.

  Instead, I opened the freezer and found a quart of Brigham’s ice cream. A package of Chips Ahoy! in the cupboard. A bag of Doritos. I was suddenly starving. I could always run later, I reasoned—after dark, when there was nothing left to eat.

  eleven

  Labor Day 1980

  The following fall, before starting my last year of law school, I spent the Labor Day weekend with a friend on Martha’s Vineyard. We walked for miles along the shore, swam in the ocean, and talked late into the evenings. Obeying my family’s rule of secrecy, I didn’t mention a word to her about my summer—I had been exiled from home by my parents, who were still caring for Lara around the clock. The last time I’d called home, Lara had grabbed the phone from my mother and screamed that she would kill me, and Mom too, if I ever called again.

  The Labor Day traffic back to Boston was heavy. When I finally pulled up in front of my apartment, I froze. There in my parking space was my mother’s Plymouth. Lara’s killed herself, I thought. She’s finally done it. I jumped out of the car
and ran up the steps. Breathe. I fumbled with the keys, then burst into the apartment. My mother was lying on my bed reading the New Yorker, and rose to greet me.

  “Hi, darling,” she said pleasantly. “Your landlady let me in. She’s very nice.”

  “What happened?”

  “What do you mean?” My mother gave me a hug and took my knapsack from my shoulder, as if it were the most natural thing for her to be in my apartment on a Monday afternoon.

  “What are you doing here?”

  My mother shrugged. “I just thought I’d come for the weekend.”

  Mom had never shown up unannounced before. She sidestepped past me into the little kitchen. “I’ll make tea,” she said. “Are you hungry?” She flipped on the electric hot plate and filled the kettle with water.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?” I asked.

  My mother shrugged. “I didn’t even know till Saturday morning, and when I called, there was no answer.”

  “I’d just left for the Vineyard—”

  “It’s all right,” Mom said. “I was fine here. I had a very nice time. I read and relaxed.”

  “Mom, what’s going on? Is Lara okay?”

  She narrowed her eyes and picked her words carefully. “Well… last week was very difficult. But everything is all right now. I think I’ll be able to go home tomorrow.”

  I didn’t know what to make of this. My mother didn’t just drive three hours across Massachusetts and show up out of the blue for no reason. The last time I’d seen her was three months ago, when I’d driven home for the summer. Before I could even get out of the car, she and Dad had intercepted me in the driveway. “You can’t stay here,” Mom had said. “Lara is too unstable. She’s very angry at you.” Stunned, I’d driven back across the river, got a room at the Y, and started my summer clerkship in Troy the next day.