The Escape Artist

by Helen Fremont

  fifteen

  Spring Semester 1981

  Law school graduation was less than a month away. Between me and graduation lay three weeks of classes and four final exams—a mere hop, skip, and a jump before launching my career as a word-wielding lawyer.

  But the closer graduation loomed, the more I dreaded the prospect of being a lawyer: the suits, the seriousness, the world of corporate finance and commercial real estate. I was not interested in money; I was interested in mountains. Perhaps it was just starting to dawn on me that law, for the most part, was practiced indoors, and this seemed to have been a terrible miscalculation on my part.

  Although the conflict between me and my career path seems pretty obvious now, at the time I didn’t know what my problem was. I was holding my entire life in the fist of my mind. Any effort to loosen my grip felt dangerous—as if the contents of my life would simply blow away, and there would be nothing left of me.

  During this time, I was seeing Kevin on weekends, taking my meds, and attending individual and group therapy, the purpose of which eluded me. I was on autopilot, fulfilling my mandate to live up to my Potential. I needed to get my law degree and satisfy, if not exactly impress, my parents. I had a desperate, prenatal need for their approval.

  But despite my love for Kevin, the panic attacks came back in March with a vengeance, and I found myself in a free-fall funk. There are no precise words for this feeling, and even less reason, but feelings often find rooms that reason cannot enter. I reported this to Flak, who, in those pre-Prozac days of psychiatry, prescribed another drug, Thorazine. I was a walking pharmaceutical experiment, a panic-attacked, unfocused twenty-three-year-old.

  “Tell me about your schoolwork,” Flak said one day in late March.

  I examined his sharply creased gabardine trousers and pressed shirt. He had the most beautiful liquid-brown eyes. I wondered where I had gone wrong in my life. Lara was right. I was a fuckup.

  “Are you keeping up with your classes?” he asked.

  We’d never talked about my classes before, and I wondered why he wanted to know now. Flak was not a detail-oriented guy.

  “I’m not sure,” I said.

  “When are exams?”

  I looked at my watch as if exams might happen any minute. “A few… um, three weeks.”

  “Well, are you able to study?”

  I shook my head.

  “Have you thought about taking a leave of absence?”

  I jerked to attention. “No, I would never do that.”

  “Why not? It might make sense. You know, rather than failing to complete the semester.”

  The thought of interrupting my education was shocking. How would I ever explain it to my parents? Suicide was one thing, but in order to really get attention in our family, you had to drop out of school.

  “Do you feel like you can complete your exams?”

  I dropped my head and fought back tears.

  “Helen?” Flak’s voice seemed to come from very far away. He sounded kind. I started to cry.

  “Look,” he said, leaning forward. “Here’s what I think you should do. Go see the dean, and explain that you’ve got some medical issues that prevent you from completing the semester. Just ask to take a leave of absence.”

  Outside the window, buds dotted the oak trees across the road. There was a baby-green newness to the world; it looked foreign, even psychedelic.

  “I’ll write a letter for you,” Flak said. “I’ll recommend a medical leave from your studies.”

  * * *

  It all happened very quickly. I walked into the dean’s office the next morning as if in a dream. I had put on a new pair of corduroys and a freshly washed shirt. I had even combed my hair. The dean was an energetic man in striped suspenders, with a warm smile and youthful exuberance that I envied. He seemed genuinely happy to see me, and he offered me a seat in a shellacked black chair with the university’s seal embossed in gold.

  “What can I do for you?”

  I felt strangely old, like a soldier returning from a distant war. “I need to ask for a leave of absence,” I heard myself say.

  He smiled. “It’s that time of year, isn’t it?” he said cheerfully. “This is when the pressure gets to people, with exams looming.” He crossed one leg over the other and clasped his knee with his hands. “I think you’ll find that if you just take a deep breath and get through the next week or two, you’ll do fine. It’s always this time of year when people panic.”

  I looked at him, realizing he couldn’t possibly comprehend what I had been going through. I had traveled a long distance from the bloody battlefield of my heart to ask for a furlough. He, on the other hand, was used to students who were simply afraid of exams.

  “I don’t think so,” I said, looking down. My lower lip started to tremble, and I felt the beginnings of an attack rising. When I glanced up, I knew that he saw it too—a look of terror spread across his face.

  “It’s okay,” he said quickly, unclasping his hands. “Please, it’s okay.”

  I tried to speak, but my head was beginning to shake, and I had trouble getting the words out. “My psychiatrist advised me to do this,” I said. My hands and shoulders were quivering. Soon, I knew, I would have trouble remaining in the chair.

  “It’s okay!” the dean said again. “Really, please, don’t worry.”

  “He’ll write you a letter.”

  “Okay, that’s fine,” he said, jumping to his feet. “I’m so sorry. You just take all the time you need, and feel better, okay? I’ll see to this, and you just take care of yourself and feel better.”

  I hadn’t meant to scare him, but I was relieved that I didn’t have to explain further. Panic attacks had become my most eloquent form of speech.

  I nodded gratefully and walked out of his office. It had taken nothing to drop out of law school. It seemed so strange and unreal and liberating. Too easy.

  * * *

  The hard part was getting up the nerve to tell my parents. They would be devastated. And I cringed at the thought of Lara finding out, her smug satisfaction that I had finally gone up in flames, after all those years I’d acted so superior to her. She and I were connected to each other as if we were on a seesaw. I was falling fast; Lara would get a nosebleed from her sudden ascension in my parents’ eyes.

  “This is because of Kevin!” my mother said when I called her. “He got you to do this, didn’t he?”

  “No, Mom, that’s completely—”

  “Kevin is a dropout,” she said. “You’re stooping to his level.” She hung up.

  The next day, my father called. “We need to meet with Flak,” he said. “Schedule an appointment. Mom and I will drive out Saturday.”

  I was used to being told what to do by my parents. At this point, I even welcomed my father’s directions—thinking had become difficult for me these days. It was easier just to follow orders. He also told me to get a consult with another psychiatrist. Flak and I had botched things on our end, and he and Mom were going to have to come straighten me out.

  They arrived at my apartment Saturday morning, and we drove to Flak’s office.

  “You have failed in your treatment of my daughter,” my father said as soon as we were seated. He enumerated the conditions of employment, the expectations of services, and the glaring disappointment in results. “She was better off at this time last year than after a year of treatment with you.”

  No one could disagree, so my father continued: “She has taken up with this Kevin, who has distinguished himself by reaching the age of twenty-seven without securing a college degree.”

  “He drives tow trucks,” my mother added.

  I knew better than to say anything. By quitting law school, I’d forfeited my right to speak on my behalf. Besides, I felt oddly proud of my parents’ ruthlessness—they were certainly a force to contend with, and I didn’t think Flak stood a chance. As usual in family therapy, I was once again a spectator, watching the adults duke it out.

&
nbsp; Afterward, in the car, it was my turn to get the law laid down. “No more Kevin,” my father said. “From now on, you will not see him or speak to him.”

  “You can’t do that!” I was shocked by my father’s ultimatum. “Kevin had nothing to do with this. Besides, it’s my choice who I see!”

  “Not anymore,” he said.

  My mother said nothing and stared straight ahead.

  “First thing Monday morning,” my father said, “you’ll make sure the law school credits your tuition for the semester toward next fall, when you will repeat the semester and graduate. Then call and get a consult with another psychiatrist before the end of the week.”

  My parents dropped me off at my apartment and drove back to Schenectady, leaving me with a to-do list and instructions to report back to them.

  * * *

  Dr. Russell’s office had a giant aquarium of neon-colored fish and a long wall of books behind it. I had gotten his name from a friend, and I liked him immediately. Paul Russell was the opposite of Flak: a little shy and very sweet. Although he was easily as tall as my father, with the same stork-like legs, he lacked my father’s fierce athleticism. Smiling, he offered me a chair and sat across from me. I noticed he wore a pair of high-top suede Clarks Wallabees, the exact color as mine in high school.

  “Tell me why you’re here,” he said.

  And so I did. I told him about dropping out of law school weeks before graduation; I told him about the panic attacks, about all the medication Flak had prescribed for me, and how I didn’t think it was working. I told him about my older sister’s hospitalization and suicide attempts. I told him I entertained myself with thoughts of crashing my car. I told him about group therapy, which I believed was pointless; I told him about Kevin, whom my parents hated. I told him I’d skipped my senior year of high school to go straight to college, and that I’d gone immediately from college to law school. I told him my parents’ story, how they’d been engaged to marry before the war. That they’d been separated by the war in which everyone was killed. I told him how my father miraculously found my mother in Rome and married her ten years to the day after they’d first met. I told him about the Hoffman Children and Family Center where we’d gone to family therapy when I was a kid, and how—

  “I think we need to schedule another appointment,” Paul said, opening the calendar on his desk. I’d been talking nonstop for nearly seventy minutes.

  The following day, to my amazement and delight, Paul told me he didn’t think I needed medication; he thought “there’s enough other stuff going on.” And if I didn’t want group therapy, he said, I should just quit. He encouraged me to trust my instincts and figure out what I wanted.

  This was a radical idea. I was fairly blown away by professional advice to do what I wanted.

  When I got home, I tossed my meds in the garbage and called Flak to tell him I was quitting group. It was a heady feeling, just doing whatever I goddamned pleased. I called the dean, and he assured me he would credit my tuition for next fall. Then I packed my hiking boots, sleeping bag, and backpack into the trunk of my Plymouth and drove north to New Hampshire. All I wanted to do was get out of Boston and head for the hills.

  My parents insisted that I find a new shrink to see over the summer, but I figured I’d deal with that after I found a job. I arrived at Dartmouth after dark, sneaked into a dorm, and crashed in the lounge. The next morning, I showered and walked into town to look for a job. I tried the bookstore on Main Street, the hardware store, the sporting goods store, a couple of restaurants, and a pizza joint. No one needed help. Finally I sat in a coffee shop with the local paper and checked the Help Wanted ads. There were ads for auto mechanics, secretaries, and nurse’s aides. And this:

  Farmhand: dairy farm, Woodstock, Vt.

  $50/wk + rm/bd. (802) 555-6745

  I knew exactly nothing about farming, had zero experience with livestock, agriculture, or manual labor, but the ad instantly appealed to me. Without thinking, I walked to the pay phone on the street corner, plugged in a dime, and dialed the number. A woman with a scratchy voice answered the phone.

  “I’m calling about the ad in the paper,” I said. “I’d like to apply for the farmhand job.”

  “Ya ever worked on a farm?”

  “No, but I’m a hard worker,” I said. “I’ll work one week for free, and you can decide if you want to hire me after that.”

  She gave me directions. “Come tomorrow morning, around seven,” she said. “We’ll talk.”

  * * *

  The farm lay four miles north of Woodstock, on a frozen dirt road rutted by tractor wheels. It was early April, twenty-eight degrees Fahrenheit, sugaring season. The old farmhouse lay in a crook in the snowy hillside, and I pulled into its gravel drive.

  At my knock, a bulldozer-shaped woman who looked to be about 104 years old yanked open the front door. Her long gray hair was braided and pinned to her head, and she stood stoutly, eyeing me up and down. “Come in,” she said gruffly, brandishing a wooden cane. Her arms, hefty as a butcher’s, emerged from the short sleeves of her cotton housedress. A faint pattern of indeterminate color was barely visible on the threadbare fabric. I followed her across the room to a wooden table crowded with doilies.

  “Where ya from?” she asked.

  “Schenectady,” I said. “But I just drove up from Boston—I went to school there.”

  “Ya ain’t in college, are ya?” Her voice rose, and behind her thick plastic-framed glasses her eyes were fierce.

  “No,” I said. “I was in law school.”

  She seemed relieved. “That’s good,” she harrumphed. “We got no use for them college kids. All that fancy schoolin’. Think they know everything.” She narrowed her gaze. “So you’re a flatlander!” she said with a mischievous grin.

  “What?”

  “FLATLANDER,” she bellowed, laughing now. “That’s what we call folks ain’t from around here.”

  I smiled. “Well, I lived in New Hampshire for a little while,” I said, careful not to reveal that I’d gone to Dartmouth College as an exchange student.

  “Well, you’re a flatlander all the same. Ya ever worked on a farm?”

  “No, but I’m pretty strong.”

  “Well, I can see that,” she said, sizing me up with a critical eye, then grumbled, “Probably eat a lot too.” After a moment, she added, “My name’s Edwina. Randall’s my son. You’ll have to talk to him about it. I don’t have no say in it, but I like ya okay.”

  With that, she stood up painfully, and I followed her into the kitchen. “That’s my sister Darline,” she shouted, waving her cane at a small woman scrubbing clothes on a washboard and wringing them through a hand-crank into a large metal bucket.

  “Go out there to the barn,” Edwina said, waving her cane in the direction I should walk. “Talk to Randall. You’ll have to see what he says.”

  She threw open the kitchen door and sent me off across the yard.

  Inside the barn, the thick odor of cow milk and manure swallowed me whole. It was warm and musty, an altered universe of low ceilings and worn floorboards. Once my eyes adjusted to the dark, I spotted a man at the far end of the barn. I walked past the long row of cows’ hindquarters. He was leaning over a cow, and straightened to his full height when I approached. Randall was a lanky man in his fifties, with a chiseled and clean-shaved face, very short-cropped gray hair, and the same plastic-rimmed glasses his mother had. He was wearing a worn-out zippered jacket covered with the short hairs of his cows.

  I introduced myself, and he looked me over carefully. “Ya know anything about cows?” He pronounced the word with two syllables; it sounded like “cayoos.”

  “No,” I said. “But I like hard work.”

  He nodded slowly. “Ya Catholic?” he asked.

  “Um, yes,” I said, surprised, but I figured it couldn’t hurt my chances.

  “I don’t trust Catholics,” he said.

  “Well, I’m not much of a Catholic,” I said quickly.
“I mean, I haven’t been to church since I was, like, six. It really doesn’t mean anything to me.”

  “Catholics are always tryin’ to convert ya,” he said, studying me closely.

  I shook my head and laughed. “I don’t even know enough about Catholicism to tell the difference.”

  He nodded. “Well, I believe ya,” he said.

  And so in March 1981, within ten days of dropping out of law school, I became my mother’s worst nightmare: I became what she would have referred to as a peasant.

  * * *

  “I’ve got a job,” I told my parents when I called to check in. I gave them Randall’s phone number. “I’m helping out on a farm—it’s really beautiful up here.”

  I heard my mother suck in her breath.

  “You will finish law school,” my father said from the other phone.

  “Of course. My tuition for the fall semester is all set.”

  “Have you found a psychiatrist?” he asked.

  I had forgotten about that. “Um… not yet. But, you know, I really don’t think I’ll have time. I mean… well, maybe I’ll just take the summer off from shrinks.”

  I waited for a response, but there was none. I think my parents were worn out. Perhaps they were simply relieved that I would be returning to law school in the fall. And that they had effectively gotten rid of Kevin, whom none of us even mentioned.

  We also said nothing about Lara, though I was pretty sure she would rise as Star Achiever, now that I had crashed and burned. I hadn’t heard from her since spring break, when she’d blasted me for choosing to spend the week with Kevin instead of her. Lara and I wouldn’t speak again until the following fall, and by then we’d both pretend that nothing at all had come between us.