The Escape Artist

by Helen Fremont

  Lara had arrived home the day before. She was working as a general practitioner in a rural county upstate, not far from Evans Mills, where my father had first put out his shingle in 1953. She described her practice as primarily tending to fishing accidents—sewing up every imaginable part of the body where a fishhook could get stuck. But she was growing tired of the drudgery, and she had finally decided to accept a residency in psychiatry to begin the following summer.

  It was in the evening—the night before I was scheduled to leave—that my parents and sister summoned me into the living room. “Sit down,” my mother said. All three of them stared at me as if I were being arraigned on criminal charges.

  “What?”

  “Don’t go to the Peace Corps,” Mom said. “We are asking you to reconsider.”

  “What do you mean? My flight leaves tomorrow.”

  “You’re only doing this to hurt us,” my mother said. “You have no right!”

  I shook my head, amazed that after months of explaining myself, she acted as if I’d just sprung this on her a minute ago. “Mom,” I said. “We’ve been talking about this since August! This is what I really want to do. I have so much to learn and—”

  “What, a law degree and a Wellesley education, that’s not enough? You’re throwing it away to go to the jungle?”

  “I’m not throwing anything away, Mom. And it’s not a—”

  “You will get sick,” my father said. “You will get sick in the middle of nowhere. What will you do then?”

  “Peace Corps will take care of it. They have a nurse—”

  “And your knee is not healed. You should not go in this condition,” he added.

  I was worried about my knee, but I didn’t want to admit it.

  “I don’t understand why you’re doing this,” Lara said. She shook her head. “I just don’t get it.”

  I was surprised by Lara’s response. She had never said anything one way or another about the Peace Corps, and I had assumed she’d be on board. Unlike my parents, surely Lara would get the lure of adventure, the tantalizing hardship and challenge of it.

  Then again, I thought, looking at her in her tidy white turtleneck, Lara was anything but an adventurer. She played things safe; she stayed close to home. Yes, she was an outdoors woman and more or less indestructible when it came to feats of physical strength and endurance, but at the end of the day she liked to come home to a shower, family, and friends.

  “After all the sacrifices we’ve made,” my mother said. “After all we’ve gone through… this is how you repay us?”

  We argued for hours. I was foolish, I was selfish, I was trying to destroy them. Nothing I could say would change that, and eventually I gave up trying. By the end of the evening, I couldn’t wait to leave.

  The next morning, we drove in silence to the airport. Like robots, we hugged good-bye at the curb, and I promised to write regularly. Then, with my crutches as carry-on baggage and a sinking feeling in my heart, I flew halfway across the world to southern Africa.

  * * *

  Twenty years later, when I was disowned by my family, I realized that they had done something similar to me, back when I had gone into the Peace Corps. My crime in both instances was the same: I had chosen to do something so perfidious, so beyond the pale, that in their eyes, it was I who had effectively severed our relationship. Later, with the codicil to my father’s will, my parents and sister would simply make the break final.

  * * *

  After six weeks of in-country training, the other trainees and I were asked our preferences for permanent assignments. I wanted adventure, so I asked to be placed in the most remote part of the country, far from any other volunteers. A week later I found myself sitting in the passenger seat of a jeep on an eighteen-hour, teeth-jarring journey across mountain passes and deep gorges to a tiny village in Mokhotlong. Two men with machine guns hung off the back of our vehicle as protection, in case of ambush by rebels. In the higher elevations, the wheels of the jeep barely clung to the edges of precipices, and when you looked straight down, you could see the twisted metal carcasses of other jeeps that had not negotiated the track as well. At last we arrived at my site: a hut perched high on the escarpment, overlooking endless miles of mountains. Massive and rocky, their sides plunged like green velvet drapes to a narrow sliver of a creekbed, invisible from my hut. I felt I’d arrived in heaven. The weather was sunny and cool; every afternoon, a brief hail- or rainstorm blew through, leaving brilliant, glistening rainbows behind.

  In the morning I woke to the acrid smell of breakfast fires of burning dung, shrouding the village in a bluish fog. I was one of the only white people within half a day’s travel, and people wondered at my skin, my hair, and touched me gingerly, as if I might disintegrate or explode upon contact. During the day I taught science and English at the local mountain school and grew inexpressibly fond of my students, especially the older ones, who had outgrown the wide-eyed shyness of their youth, and who laughed uproariously at my fledgling Sesotho, a language so tricked out with grammatical twists and noun declensions that it made my head spin. And my pronunciation of words containing the impossible letter x—a sort of clucking sound made by snapping your tongue on the roof of the mouth, while somehow uttering the word with the rest of your mouth—made them literally roll on the floor laughing.

  But as time went by, I grew lonely. Occasionally I made the half-day hike across the mountains to the regional camp where four other volunteers lived. They invited me to stay the night, and the following morning, I bought supplies—a candle and matches, a head of cabbage, tins of sardines—and hiked back to my village. I was troubled to discover how much I missed the company of Westerners. As much as I loved my students and the villagers and other teachers, I felt more alone than ever before in my life.

  I wrote upbeat letters to my parents several times a week, hoping to appease them, to reassure them of my safety and well-being. I also wrote to Lara, describing my isolation and the beauty of the mountains, the double rainbows that sprang up in the midst of afternoon showers. I wanted to be blameless, even though I knew that they blamed me for deserting them. The silence of their rage felt natural and familiar to me. This was simply how my parents were, and it didn’t occur to me that their reaction was particularly unusual. Although I sometimes hoped they would send me something—even a postcard, some token symbol of connection—I was not really surprised that they didn’t. What did strike me as odd was that every other volunteer in my training group received regular letters and packages from their families.

  And I was surprised and hurt that Lara didn’t write. Perhaps it pissed her off that I could so neatly remove myself from her for two years. I don’t know; we never talked about it. Perhaps Lara simply needed to align herself with my parents out of loyalty. If my parents refused to recognize my existence, then Lara needed to follow suit.

  I had trouble imagining what Lara’s life was like in those days, working as a small-town doctor. I tried to picture her in a white lab coat, seeing one patient after another, writing notes in their charts. But what I saw, instead, was an image of my sister and my parents turning their backs, closing ranks against me. After all, what right did I have to complain about their silence? Wasn’t I the one who had left them?

  The emptiness of the mountains, beautiful as they were, crept into me and left me hungry, ravenous. I longed for the voice of a friend. I wrote hundreds of pages in my journal and exchanged long letters with Kevin and other friends in the States, and with fellow volunteers scattered across the country. Mail was sporadic, depending on the weather, the availability of petrol, and the chance that a Land Rover could manage the arduous day’s journey from Maseru. It was in one of those letters that I learned of the death of my college roommate, Janet. She and I had bonded as freshmen over our shared homesickness and fear of inadequacy at Wellesley. The cancer had announced itself and killed her in less time than it had taken the letter to arrive, and by the time I received the news, she had alread
y been dead for months. Like me, she was twenty-five. I sat on the floor of my hut, lit by a single candle, and cried in shock and disbelief. I moved through the next few days in a haze, standing in front of my students in science class and teaching them about gravity, velocity, the forces that act upon us without our even noticing.

  eighteen

  Over the next few months in Africa, instead of healing, my knee got worse. Without warning, it would suddenly buckle and I’d find myself on the ground—sometimes on the trail outside the village, sometimes in the classroom. I hobbled around like that for another half year, and (as I would later learn) succeeded in tearing three of the four ligaments in my knee, completely severing the anterior cruciate. In a letter to the Peace Corps nurse, I finally admitted that I was having trouble with my knee, but I certainly didn’t want to make a big deal about it. In my experience—perhaps having learned from my parents’ dismissal of Lara’s attacks on me as a child—complaining was shameful, and certainly didn’t help your case. In any event, my self-image did not allow for weakness; my body was expendable in the interest of my self-esteem.

  Despite my effort to downplay my condition, the wheels of the U.S. government had been set in motion. One evening I was writing in my journal by candlelight when the school director appeared at my door. “Hurry,” she said. “You must get to Mokhotlong by morning. A plane is coming for you.” The Peace Corps had lined up surgery for me in Washington, DC, so I could recover in time to return to Lesotho for the start of the next school year six weeks later. The news reached me by pure chance; someone in a nearby village had overheard it on a shortwave radio and ran to tell my director.

  I barely had time to throw some clothes into my backpack before starting down the path from my village in the dark. The trail was studded with loose rocks that skidded off into darkness with each step. Although I had a headlamp, I turned it off because it was easier to see by moonlight. This was the sort of harebrained adventure that Lara would have dragged me into during one of our hiking trips, but now it was pure Peace Corps. To meet the bush pilot at dawn, I’d have to hike four hours in the dark on a busted knee.

  At last I arrived at the airfield and was weighed on a giant scale together with my backpack and a couple boxes of cargo. The bush pilot flew me and a few other government types to Maseru, the capital of Lesotho. From there, it was another flight to Johannesburg, then twenty hours to Liberia, and finally another twenty-hour flight to Washington. When my plane touched down in DC, I was sent to the Peace Corps office, where they had already typed up termination papers for me to sign.

  I burst into tears. “No,” I said. “My director told me Peace Corps was arranging surgery here and would send me back in a few weeks.”

  The Peace Corps administrator, an impossibly white woman with gold earrings and a bright-green dress, scanned the papers. “I’m sorry,” she said flatly. “I have instructions to terminate you.”

  “But—”

  “Sign here, please.”

  “What about surgery?”

  “You’ll have to look into that yourself. Contact OWCP to have your medical bills covered by FECA.”

  I was in shock. The fluorescent lights of the office were too bright. The street traffic outside was freakishly loud. I had come from silent long-distance landscapes to this cacophony of earsplitting noise, blinding lights, too many white people, and everyone moving and talking at an incomprehensible speed.

  “Where do you want to go?” the woman asked me, signing the papers below my signature. Her words came out as quick and sharp as the clicking of a typewriter. It took me a moment to understand her.

  “Can I… I really want to go back to my site. I’m supposed to be there in time for the school year.”

  Without looking up, she shook her head. “You’re terminated.”

  I couldn’t make sense of this. I didn’t move.

  She finally glanced up at me. “You can stay at our residence hall for tonight only,” she said. “Tomorrow we will fly you home, or wherever you want to be sent in the United States. Where do you want to go?”

  I stared at her.

  “I need to issue you a plane ticket. I don’t have all day. You’re flying out tomorrow. If you don’t give me a destination, you will need to make your own arrangements.”

  Tears poured down my face. “I don’t know,” I said. The last place I wanted to go was home; I couldn’t bear the thought of facing my parents. Boston had good surgeons, I thought, but I hadn’t lined up anywhere to stay. I didn’t even have enough clothes in my backpack to live for more than a few days. “Schenectady,” I whispered.

  “New York?”

  I nodded.

  “Your parents have been notified of your return to the States,” she said, stapling copies of forms and filing them in a drawer. “If you want, you can call them on the WATS line in the other room.” She pointed to an adjacent room with a desk and telephone.

  I picked up the black receiver, such a foreign object in my hands. This was all so surreal. I dialed my parents’ number, and my mother answered the phone.

  “Hi, Mom. It’s Helen.”

  “Oh, Helen. Where are you?” She sounded relieved, and I nearly burst into tears. I did not want to be here, I did not want to be calling my mother, I did not want to be sent home, but I tried to keep my voice steady.

  “In Washington.”

  “When are you arriving?”

  “Tomorrow morning at ten-fifteen.”

  We hung up.

  * * *

  I stumbled out of the Peace Corps office into the stifling heat of Washington, DC. The streets were a blur of noise and light—cars and buses flashing in the sun, engines roaring, brakes squealing—I had to lean against the building to get my bearings. It was as if the world had cracked open, people rushing up and down the sidewalks, running for their lives. Yet no one looked frightened; they all looked purposeful—going to work, to shop, to meet, to eat. They rushed past me as I walked to the residence hall where Peace Corps had directed me to go. My leg felt fine, and I could almost believe there was nothing wrong with it. I climbed the stairs to my room. It was mercifully dark and quiet—so quiet, in fact, that I didn’t realize at first that I had a roommate—a very pale-skinned blonde around my age who was lying on the other bed, staring at the ceiling.

  I introduced myself and told her I’d been a teacher in Lesotho.

  She looked at me blankly.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  She told me that she’d been psycho-vac’ed from her village in East Africa because her school had been overrun by marauders. The men had raped and killed many of the local students and teachers, and Peace Corps was letting her hang out for a day or two before sending her home to the Midwest. I wondered whether she too had been raped, but I didn’t ask any questions. She seemed grateful for the silence.

  The next morning, I took the Metro to the airport and flew home, where my mother was waiting for me at the arrivals gate. She was wearing her no-nonsense brown slacks and a button-down shirt. “Do you have luggage?” she asked. I shook my head.

  “Lara is starting her residency in a few weeks,” she said.

  I resented the pleasure in her voice, the pride she took in Lara’s success.

  “She got into a very good program!”

  I didn’t want to talk about Lara, and apparently Mom didn’t want to talk about me. We drove home in silence, but the air around us crackled with tension. I’d refused to heed my parents’ warnings, yet here I was, crawling back to them, dragging my ruined leg behind me.

  “Are you hungry?” my mother asked when we got home.

  I nodded. We sat side by side at the counter, eating babka and sipping tea, but could not find a way to talk to each other. She and I had always had a talent for chatter, for covering over everything with words, but now it was as if weights were tied to each word we uttered. They dropped at our feet like dumbbells, and we could not pick up the strand of a conversation.

  My father
returned home from work that evening and eyed me carefully before speaking. “How is the knee?” he asked.

  I shrugged. “I’ll look for an orthopedist in Boston,” I said. I couldn’t bear to be at home another moment.

  The next morning, I drove to Boston and started shopping for surgeons. I crashed on the couch of friends in Cambridge; they were working and studying and we barely saw each other.

  After a few consults, I realized my prospects were grim. All the surgeons said I’d be lucky if I could walk again without a limp, but none of them could get me into an OR for months. I was devastated. And I was overwhelmed by the sheer noise, speed, and shiny surfaces of America, which after Lesotho felt as foreign to me as the inside of a combustion engine. Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” was blasting from the speakers in every store; people spoke so quickly I had trouble understanding them.

  After a few days, I returned home to Schenectady in defeat. I was angry at the Peace Corps for dropping me like a piece of sheep dung; angry at myself for getting into this mess; angry at my knee for betraying me. And I was angry at my parents, who rose before me, a formidable force of reason and experience that I could not get around. Whenever I mentioned anything about Africa, my mother’s mouth drew a sharp line that shut me up. “What are your plans now?” she wanted to know, eliminating the past tense from my vocabulary.