The Escape Artist

by Helen Fremont

  * * *

  I slept in the spare bedroom of Randall’s ranch house perched on the steep hillside above his mother’s farmhouse and the cow barn, with a view across the valley to the blue waves of mountains beyond.

  At three-fifteen each morning, Randall and I slipped through his house in stocking feet so as not to wake his wife, who worked as a bank teller in town. We pulled on our boots in the basement, refilled the woodstove that heated the house, and trudged down to the barn by moonlight. The nights were well below freezing, and my fingers and toes were always numb. When we stepped into the barn, the damp heat of the cows hit us like a soft wall of warmth. Randall went for the milk cans, while I hooked up the crapper barrel, hefted the shovel, and started lifting a few metric tons of shit.

  Mucking out and milking the cows—our three hours of “chores”—were the bookends of our days. In between was the work. In April Randall and I spent the daylight hours climbing up and down miles of his wooded hills, flushing out maple sugaring lines, bundling them, tagging them, and carrying them back to the sugarhouse for storage until the following spring. The snow was still knee-deep on the northern slopes, and by the time we returned to the barn for evening chores, I could barely walk. Three hours later, at seven, after the last can of milk was poured into the enormous holding tank, we staggered back up the hill under the stars to Randall’s house, where his wife was preparing dinner.

  My body felt as if every muscle had been beaten with a rolling pin. It’s hard to say which I loved more—dinner or sleep—and although I showered in seconds and we ate quickly, I often had trouble keeping my eyes open through dessert. Falling into bed was like diving directly into a dream. Minutes later, it seemed, my alarm clock jarred me awake at 3:15 a.m.

  * * *

  I was so fully occupied, and so completely exhausted, I couldn’t even think about Kevin or law school or my parents or anyone. After that meeting with my parents and Flak, I had called Kevin to tell him my parents had ended our affair. “I don’t know what’s going to happen next,” I said. He seemed to take the news as if he’d seen it coming. We hadn’t spoken since then. My life before the farm slid out of my mind into some slag heap that I had no energy to visit right now.

  My schedule was simple: I worked sixteen hours a day, from three in the morning till seven at night. Every two weeks I got a Sunday off. Never before had I relished the Lord’s wisdom in commanding rest on the seventh day—or in my case, on the fourteenth. I used those Sundays to sleep and do laundry. The rest of the time, I worked alongside Randall, a brilliant self-taught engineer, mechanic, and farmer.

  And I fell in love with the cows: thirty-five big-boned hulks standing in their stanchions, butts out, tails swishing. I loved their clammy breath from giant nostrils, and the steam rising from their slops. I would lean my head and shoulders against their warm, massive flanks, and they leaned gently against me out of friendliness, while I washed their udders with a soapy cloth. Then I’d slip the suction cups onto their teats, and set up the next cow. My favorite was a giant Holstein with a head like a boulder and a whiskered pink muzzle. Hey You was her name. And Gert, the big beautiful Guernsey, with her strawberry-blond eyelashes.

  We poured the cans of milk into the giant stainless steel tank, then took apart the milkers, washed everything with soap and a chlorine rinse, and hung them up to dry in time for the next milking, which started nine hours later.

  * * *

  By May, the snow was gone, the days were longer, and we let the cows out each day to graze on the hills. During the hours that I was working the distant fields, I had time to reflect on the wisdom of my chosen profession—law—compared with the joy of my current employment—shoveling cow shit, posting fences, and harrowing hillsides. I began to think that maybe I wasn’t crazy after all; maybe I just didn’t want to be a lawyer. Over the past month I had grown attached to Randall, who cracked me up with his taciturn one-liners. And I loved the hard work and fresh air, the rhythm of the days, and the warmth of the animals.

  * * *

  One day in May, when evening chores were over, I stopped at the farmhouse for a glass of water. “Ya boyfriend’s here,” Edwina said with a grin. “Seems like a pretty nice fella.” I rushed up the hill and saw Kevin coming out of the basement door of Randall’s house. He smiled and wrapped me in his arms. I was relieved he wasn’t angry at me for having disappeared.

  “How did you find me?” I asked.

  “Well, it wasn’t easy!”

  He’d called Flak, who told him I was working on a farm near Woodstock. So he drove up and started going from farmhouse to farmhouse. “I had no idea there were so many farms out here!” he said.

  Randall let him camp out in the field below the house for a few days, and Kevin helped with the farmwork before returning to Crump’s Garage outside Schenectady. This became my destination every two weeks for my twenty-four hours off. As soon as the last cow was milked every other Saturday night, I’d run up to Randall’s house to shower and change, jump into my Plymouth, and speed down the dirt road toward Schenectady.

  Kevin would be sitting up waiting for me, nursing a Rolling Rock and listening to the Who, reading the Times, or studying Foxfire for ways to build an eco-friendly underground dwelling. We would collapse into bed together, thrilled to have outwitted the forces of nature (my parents) by managing to be together after all.

  Best of all was sleeping in the next morning. For the first time in two weeks, I was not awakened by my alarm clock at 3:15 a.m. We slept till the sun spread itself across the room, till hunger finally forced us out into the world in search of breakfast. We’d go to a small diner in Cohoes and read the Times over pancakes and eggs. Eventually we’d go back to Kevin’s place, usually to bed, until about four in the afternoon, when I had to get back on the road and return to the farm.

  I don’t remember how the topic came up, but as the summer wore on, Kevin suggested we get married. The idea began to grow on me; it made the prospect of becoming a lawyer more tolerable—I figured I could balance doing something dull and dreary (law) with something fun and comforting (Kevin).

  “Are you going to tell your parents?” he asked one Sunday afternoon as we lay in bed, dreading the moment I would have to drive back to Vermont.

  Just thinking about my parents made me break out in a sweat. “Sooner or later, I’ll have to.”

  “How do you want to do it? Do you want me to be there?”

  “No way,” I said.

  Kevin looked relieved.

  Two weeks later, on my next day off, Kevin and I went to his parents’ house to announce our engagement. His father jumped up and gave me a big bear hug. Mrs. Flanagan pecked me on the cheek, and I blushed, wondering if I could really pull off something as surreal as marriage. I liked the Flanagans, and they liked me, and in any event, they did not consider it any of their business whom Kevin married.

  I drove straight from the Flanagans’ to our house to tell my mother. I knew my father would be at work, and it was always easier to talk with Mom than Dad. She could break the news to him later.

  But when I came up the stairs from the driveway, her face was stony with anger before I’d even opened my mouth. She didn’t even offer me tea—instead, we sat in the living room at a chilly distance from each other.

  “Mom,” I said. “Kevin and I have decided to get married.”

  She stared at me.

  “I know you don’t approve, but I wanted you to know.”

  I could see her face shut down, as if a steel grate had just been lowered.

  “Why are you doing this to us?” she said in an ominous voice.

  “What am I doing to you?”

  “Oh, you know perfectly well!” Her eyes narrowed. “Look at yourself.”

  I glanced down at my T-shirt and jeans. This was how I always looked. “What do you mean?”

  My mother scowled. “As if you didn’t know.”

  “Because I want to marry Kevin? That’s why you’re so angry at me
?”

  “Well, isn’t that what you wanted?” My mother’s lips came together in a tight pinch. “Ach,” she said. A Prussian spitting champion. “Do whatever you want, I don’t care. Go ahead. Throw your life away.” She stood and walked out of the room.

  Shaken, I drove back to Kevin’s above Crump’s Garage. He was happily inebriated after spending the afternoon at his cousins’, celebrating his betrothal. He welcomed me with a goofy grin. I burst into tears.

  “What?” he said.

  I shook my head. We were miles apart, I thought. What had made me think this could work? I sank into the couch, put my head in my hands, and sobbed.

  Kevin stumbled into the kitchen and cracked open a beer. “Wanna brewski?” he said.

  What an idiot, I thought.

  Kevin’s good mood could not be undone. He told me how happy the rest of his family was when he announced our decision to get married. His cousins had gotten a keg of beer, and all the aunts and uncles and kids had come over and sat around the yard in lawn chairs, talking and drinking the afternoon away.

  “I’m really sorry,” he said when I told him how it had gone with my mother. “At least you got it over with.”

  He was right. But long after he went to bed, I stayed up, milking my loneliness, realizing that what I’d actually gotten over was the desire to get married in the first place.

  It would be months before I could admit this to Kevin. I’ve always tried to avoid acknowledging my mistakes. By the time I brought it up, Kevin was neck-deep in a ROTC program, slogging through the swamps of Ranger School, and seemingly unsurprised by my latest reversal. I couldn’t explain my sudden change of heart, and I was ashamed of it. It would take me several more years to grapple with the fact that I was gay. But being queer was only part of the problem; at the age of twenty-four, I still didn’t know much of anything about myself. That summer I’d latched on to the idea that maybe I could stow myself away in marriage, but almost immediately I realized it wouldn’t work. I still didn’t really know what I wanted, much less who I was.

  part three

  sixteen

  1982

  Lesbian coming-out stories tend to be similar in at least one regard: most women figure out they’re lesbians when they fall in love with a woman. Usually the body knows what the mind denies, and the body manages to wake up the mind to its needs and desires. In my case, however, there was a complete disconnect between my body and my mind, a sort of Iron Curtain between the Wild West of my heart and the Stalinist regime of my brain. That dividing line was my mother. Or rather, it was my mother in me.

  Like my mother, I had the uncanny ability—well, disability, really—to believe what I wanted to believe about myself, and then to act the part, to direct myself in such a convincing performance that I lost track of who I really was. I was able to fool myself, resulting in the charade that was my life.

  During the winter of 1982 I was studying for the New Hampshire bar exam in Concord. I still hadn’t found a new shrink, so out of laziness, I returned to Dr. Flak for a few months. Once a week I would drive the hour and a half from New Hampshire to Boston to his office, and it was there, suspended in the middle of nowhere in my personal life, that I came upon the realization of my sexual orientation, as one might come upon a large outcrop of rock in the middle of the woods that had been sitting there all along, but had gone unnoticed because it was covered with leaves. I don’t remember how that session started, but I found myself talking about my college days, about the intensity of my feelings for Emma Dunlap, and then, and then… As I talked, my mind unspooled, and a light flickered on, and then another, and another—a little string of lights snapping to attention as I listened to what I was saying. Like a surprise party in my head.

  I didn’t want to admit it to Flak, but as I talked about the women I’d been crazy about, I realized that I’d always been a boy at heart; I’d always played war and football and hated the onslaught of breasts and hips, and I realized I had never liked sex—not with Philip, not with… well—but I did love Kevin. Okay, I really did love Kevin, and sex was even nice sometimes, but setting Kevin aside for the moment, I realized it was tomboys I’d always loved, just like Lara—she and I had been rough-and-tumble kids who loved sports and tests of strength, and it wasn’t just our attraction to starvation and grueling workouts and punishing hikes in subzero temperatures; it was our love of guy things and our disgust for girl things; we didn’t care about makeup or dresses or fingernails or jewelry or any of the stuff girls were supposed to like.

  And setting Lara aside, I kept coming back to the overpowering passion I felt for Emma my freshman year. And then for Harriet as a sophomore. And then, junior year, for Claire! And long before college—in a line going all the way back to first grade—I’d always had a best friend, a girlfriend with whom I’d wrestled and played catch and stayed up late at night talking and laughing and planning daring escapades.

  So my coming out was a process of elimination—I sorted through all my experiences with boys, and realized they didn’t amount to much.

  But. Yet. There was Kevin. My lone straw in the other juice box. He was proof that I was not quite 100 percent lesbian. He was my holdout for bisexuality.

  I drove back to New Hampshire from that session with Dr. Flak giddy with excitement. Of course! All the evidence came rushing in, flooding the “queer” side of the scales. I’m queer! I love women! What a relief! I’m a dyke! My elation was through the roof. It explained so much! After so many years of not understanding what was wrong with me, I finally made sense to myself.

  Not that I knew what it meant to be queer. I just knew that I was, sort of. I tried to attach a feeling of attraction retroactively to Emma. It was a process of reconstruction in my mind. As I said, it was a head game; my body was barely implicated.

  But now I started looking around me, and there they were, everywhere! The girl at the register at the grocery store—we exchanged a knowing smile. The woman at the post office. The woman who sat three seats away in the bar review class. Everywhere I looked I saw lesbians.

  * * *

  I told my sister about my revelation that winter, and she nodded and smiled with what I took to be recognition and something like relief. A few years earlier, she had told me about a brief flirtation she’d had with another woman in med school, but Lara was crushed when the woman decided to remain faithful to her girlfriend back home. Being gay—or bisexual, or whatever I was—was something Lara and I had in common, something that brought us closer together, something we shared as sisters. Neither of us had ever dated a woman, but we both knew this about ourselves, and that knowledge was huge.

  Of course, we didn’t breathe a word about any of this to our parents, or at least not until many years later. It was hard enough figuring out who we were and what we wanted while our parents were still calling the shots in our lives.

  * * *

  As soon as I decided I didn’t have to be a lawyer, my panic attacks simply melted away. In retrospect, I think I had to go a little crazy my third year of law school in order to give myself permission to disappoint my parents on a grander scale. Maybe that’s what Lara had been doing all her life—acting psycho to earn the right to catch a break and figure out her own path. Not that any of this was conscious, but looking back, I think our family relied on mental illness as a sort of free pass from our responsibilities as members of our Family Cult of Success.

  Years later, after we learned that our parents were Holocaust survivors, Lara and I immersed ourselves in the psychiatric literature about children of survivors. Often in families of survivors, we read, “separation” becomes associated with death. A child who does manage to separate may be seen as betraying or abandoning the family. It was oddly reassuring to realize that Lara and I fit a pattern carved by a history of genocide. But that still didn’t explain the secrets that Mom and her sister continued to hide from us throughout their lives.

  seventeen

  Fall 1982

 
; After passing the bar, I applied for the Peace Corps. I told my interviewer I wanted to go to Nepal or anywhere in the mountains, and he laughed and assured me that no one was actually sent to a country he or she requested. In September, I received my assignment: I would teach science and English in Lesotho.

  I had never heard of it, and looked it up: a small black mountainous kingdom in the Drakensberg Range, completely surrounded by the Republic of South Africa. This was back in the days of apartheid, when Nelson Mandela was still in prison. A few days after I arrived in the country, special forces of the white South African regime invaded Lesotho and assassinated several members of the African National Congress. Later I would live in the midst of the bloody infighting between the African National Congress and the more radical Pan Africanist Congress.

  My parents considered my decision to serve as a Peace Corps volunteer in Africa a giant fuck-you to them. Of course I’d known they would disapprove; but what I didn’t expect was that they would cut me off altogether. Not once while I was in Africa did I hear from either my parents or my sister.

  To complicate matters, I had injured my knee playing basketball shortly before leaving for Africa and was on crutches for two weeks. The orthopedist in Schenectady, a friend of my dad’s, grudgingly cleared me for the Peace Corps. I’d had sports injuries all my life, and I wasn’t about to let this hold me back.

  My last day at home was Thanksgiving. As usual, my mother roasted a huge Butterball for the four of us, complete with enough side dishes and desserts to feed… well, a small African nation. After we ate, I stuffed my backpack with everything I thought I’d need for the next two years. A nervous energy ran through me, as if I had just launched myself from a very high diving board, and now hovered in midair—that delicious but nerve-racking moment of suspense before falling headlong into the water below. Something about my decision felt desperate—I was more afraid to stay on firm ground in America, where I would have to figure out what to do with my life, than I was to catapult myself into the unknown, halfway around the world. The Peace Corps, I thought, would give me a chance to grow up, something I couldn’t seem to do here in America. My attraction to deprivation was at once punishing and hopeful—I assumed it would toughen me, I later realized, as Siberia had toughened my father.