Let the Tornado Come: A Memoir

by Rita Zoey Chin

  I brought my half-filled bag to the counter where the cashier told me how lucky I was to have such a nice dad. “You’re his little princess, aren’t you?”

  I looked down while my father clinked some change into her hand.

  “Oh, she’s a shy one,” she said, nodding her head at me.

  And then we were out in the silvery light, then in the small space of his hot car, heading home.

  Occasionally Joanne and I shared days that seemed suspended, that rose up out of our usual lives and shone like balloons in the sun. Take this day, for example. It was spring. It was the stillest kind of day. The trees and bushes and even the hair hanging out of Joanne’s blue and white Good Humor cap were in a deep sleep. She was selling ice cream—white, brown, and pink plastic ice pops she pulled from her plastic Good Humor truck. “Ten cents for ice cream!”

  There was no one around. I sat on the front steps trying to feed a leaf to a caterpillar. As it crawled across my fingers, I turned my hand to keep it from falling off.

  Joanne opened and reopened the lid to check her static inventory. “Get your fresh ice cream!”

  The caterpillar wouldn’t eat. I put him in the grass, and within seconds he was heading down the sidewalk at a steady gait, as if he had someplace very specific to go. Resisting the urge to reclaim him, I plucked a small yellow flower from the grass at the bottom of the hill. “Buttercup,” I whispered.

  I lay up the hill with my legs sprawled into gravity and stared at the muted sky, then turned to rest my ear against the grass. I listened, and they came: hoofbeats. They were galloping, strong, nearer and nearer. I imagined them behind the woods, a fleeting blaze across the field.

  “Ice cream for sale! Ten cents!” Joanne adjusted her cap and looked around for someone she might be missing.

  I walked up to her truck. “What flavors do you have?”

  “I’ve got Chocolate Eclairs, Strawberry Shortcakes, and Toasted Almonds.”

  “I’ll have a Toasted Almond.”

  “That’ll be ten cents, please,” she said eagerly.

  I pressed the buttercup into her hand. “Here you go.”

  She expertly retrieved the white ice cream and handed it to me.

  I sat back on the steps and pretended to eat my fifth ice cream of the afternoon.

  Life is never all bad, and Joanne and I sipped up the joy we could, sometimes together, but more of the time apart. Though I typically spent a lot of time outside while Joanne tended to stay inside and play with her dolls or watch TV, what separated us most weren’t the different things we did as much as the different things we knew, and how we’d come to know them. I knew the terror of how it felt to be pulled down the hall by my hair, backhanded in the face, and wished death by my mother—and of how it felt to be kicked, whipped with the buckle end of a belt, yanked from a bathtub, and thrown onto the floor by my father. Joanne knew the terror of how it felt to watch. We were each alone in our experiences, between which stretched an unapproachable gulf, but we shared what we could—an afternoon outside in the sun, the candy I brought home from High’s, Saturday mornings watching Road Runner or playing Candy Land—when we could. And despite our differences, what we both knew—what we lived every day—was how it felt to be helpless, to wake up each morning and go to sleep each night afraid.

  For as long as I can remember, I knew that my parents were out of control. I knew they were capable of anything. We lived in the hotbed of their most wretched selves, and in it they ran rampant. Yet despite the fear and sadness and shame I carried, hope kept sprouting up like weeds in the cracks, taking root inside me. I dreamed of a different world, wrote poems and short stories, read books and searched their pages—and the small pockets of our neighborhood—for the beautiful things. Like this, the months came and went, and the police came and went, and my father took a job back in New York, from which he came and went, arriving home on weekends. And on those weekends my parents continued to fight each other with a vehemence one could almost mistake for love. Except it wasn’t love. It was my mother’s clothes cut to shreds, my father’s car keyed from one end to the other. It was my mother taking my father down with a coffeepot to the head; it was his hands around her throat. Sometimes you could hear them fighting all the way down the street.

  That’s how far I would go some days, pretending that the shrieks and bangs were coming from someone else’s apartment. I collected rocks and dandelions, pressed my face to the cool grass, and felt the warmth of sun. I skirted the edge of the woods, and sometimes I ventured back to the small creek that wound through the trees, where I dipped my fingers into the cool water and peered out at the farm in the distance. No matter what happened inside my home, the world outside wouldn’t stop being beautiful. And I was learning that there was a certain power in assigning my own direction in my small but tangible piece of that world.

  FIVE

  Dusk was slowly settling in as Larry and I got in the car and headed down the driveway—the sky shifting to evening pastels while clouds dusted past like sugar. The lanterns on our gateposts had just come on, and a bat shuddered overhead before swooping into the field across the road. The herd of Belted Galloways who lived there were clustered together at the roadside, grazing. In the first weeks in our new house, I’d grown fond of the cows, their languorous sounds drifting across the country road, though sometimes I imagined what it would be like if horses lived there, too. They were still just a romantic fantasy to me, but I desired them with the same fervor I had as a girl, staring out from the creek in the woods behind our apartment to the farm in the distance and envisioning the flight of my imaginary herd, their manes and tails a streak of motion.

  As we turned onto the road, Larry changed the radio station from jazz to classic rock because he knew I liked to sing along. We were on our way to a dinner in Boston to commemorate Larry’s new position as chairman of Boston Medical Center’s neurosurgery department. One thing that came along with Larry’s profession was my obligation to play the part of the charming, well-groomed wife at medical social events, and that meant dinners—interminable exercises in small talk with virtual strangers over plates of overpriced food. I had never been good at this sort of thing and so always dreaded these dinners, much like dentist appointments—somehow, my teeth always hurt after both. As we drove into the city that night, despite Larry’s attempts to lighten the mood by quizzing me on rock trivia, I could already feel my anxiety—this new brand of terror—blooming like a mold.

  As we exited the highway and entered Boston, I put my window down. Someone had turned the city on, the traffic lights and sidewalk lamps and car lights filling the air with a new glow. In the crosswalk in front of us, a young couple held hands, their faces swept with life and love. I envied the carefree way they moseyed across the street.

  In the weeks before that night, my panic attacks had turned into daily, sometimes hourly, events, and I found myself held hostage to some amorphous yet decidedly growing body of fear. When I was a kid, the adults were always talking about this person or that person who’d had a nervous breakdown. I never knew what that meant exactly, and as I grew up, the expression fell out of favor. But it seemed mythical at the time, almost to the point of being glamorous. I’d overhear my mother on the phone sometimes, talking about it. “Did you hear? Judy’s friend’s uncle’s stepdaughter had a nervous breakdown.” And now, so many years later, I was beginning to wonder if this feeling was what they meant—the feeling of standing on solid ground yet watching myself, as if on a boat in a river, drifting away.

  As Larry and I walked toward the restaurant, all I wanted to do was turn around and run. Instead, I gripped Larry’s hand, and we entered the Chilton Club, a stodgy private social club to which two of the wives belonged. As we approached our table, my knees trembled like windup toys. Immediately I busied myself by noting where the exits were as I shook the hands of the dinner guests: the CEO, Elaine, and her husband; the e
xecutive vice president and his wife; the university dean and her husband; the former interim chair and his wife. I took a seat between Larry and the dean’s husband, a portly man with only a thin horseshoe of hair on his head, and as we all trained our eyes on Elaine, I began to fidget—leaning forward, leaning back, placing my hands on the table, off the table, on the edge of the table, in my hair, on my collarbone, on my knees. I couldn’t stop. After thirty-five years, I’d forgotten how to simply sit in my own skin.

  Elaine was a well-coiffed woman in her late fifties, with the confidence of a race car driver and the eloquence of a politician. She wore pearls, and the hair spray in her frosty hair would have battled any wind. As a server filled our wineglasses, I thrust my wrist under the tablecloth, clocked fifteen seconds on my watch, and measured my pulse at 112, which was still reasonably in control. Then Elaine raised her glass. I followed eagerly, grateful for something to do. As she toasted Larry, a “young talent” who was on his way to “bright new beginnings” at Boston Medical Center, he caught my eye and smiled. If Elaine noticed, she didn’t acknowledge me. Maybe she hadn’t considered that it was my bright new beginning, too, that I had packed up my life alongside Larry. But we were already past that. We were clinking our glasses. And the dinner began.

  “So what do you do?” asked the vice president’s wife, fixing her eyes on me. Her nails looked like rubies against the glass.

  I pinched a tip of the tablecloth between my fingers. “I’m a writer.”

  “Ooh, what do you write? Novels?”

  “I’m a poet,” I said, clearing my throat and shifting in my chair.

  She nodded, as if she were waiting for the rest of my sentence.

  “I’m writing a memoir,” I added impulsively, instantly regretting it.

  The former interim chair—a curmudgeonly, almost endearingly Napoleonic man—laughed. “At your age?”

  I felt my cheeks blush as I sensed everyone’s eyes on me. I couldn’t sit there and tell them about my past, so I looked down and examined the condensation on my water glass. The table went quiet, and I poked my wrist under the tablecloth to recheck my pulse. It was fast.

  As the traffic of conversation got moving again—something about the governor and health care—I thought about what else I could have said to the now less-endearing Napoleonic former interim chair. I could have told him that by the time I was six, I’d known violence the way some kids know bedtime stories. I could have told him that the first number I ever dialed was 911 during what would be one of many vicious fights between my parents; that, to save myself, I started running away when I was eleven and then spent years living between state-run institutions and the streets, where I wandered around looking for a safe place to call home but instead ended up sleeping in staircases or empty cars or, more often, the questionable beds of men and women. I could have told him I’d been a stripper, a junkie, the kind of girl who would never be welcome in an elite place like this. I might have also mentioned that I’d put myself through college and grad school summa cum laude, that I’d taught college students how to write, and that I did these things after dropping out of junior high in the eighth grade. I could have said that in my short life, I had teetered at the abyss of death more than once. But a charming doctor’s wife wouldn’t tell him any of that.

  And that’s how I lost my moment: by staring at my water glass, mute. I knew then that not only had I failed myself but I was failing Larry, too. I wanted to be the supportive wife he deserved, a first lady of sorts, one who would make Elaine think, Everything’s going to be great because Larry has this strong woman beside him. But instead, I was the girl who kept fidgeting in her chair on the brink of a panic attack, then excusing myself to the restroom, where I hyperventilated into my hands and wished for a sudden exit, like a school

  fire drill.

  To my good fortune, no one asked me another question all night. And then, finally, the dinner was over. Our standing up from the table marked the liveliest any of us had been all evening as we bid our farewells and Larry and I broke out into the open sounds of the city at night, where the streetlights stood as if their only role was to be beautiful.

  SIX

  If I could have gotten one glimpse of my future life when my struggle with panic started, this is the hour I think I would choose: 9:00 P.M. on New Year’s Eve, 2009—more than two years after my first panic attack. I’m in a barn, in a horse stall, watching a man knead his hands into my horse, Claret. Sal’s hands are large and rugged—one finger is slightly deformed where he had the tip reattached after a horse bit it off—and they move with an unquestionable intelligence as they work Claret’s muscles. Sal’s agreed to come on a holiday evening, while Larry waits at home for his midnight kiss, because he understands horses, and the people who love them, and he knows I would rather be here than at a party or watching Dick Clark on TV. I know so little about horses compared to most horse people, those who have been around horses all their lives, those who grew up speaking the unique language of horses, but I do know that Claret has been in pain, and I want him to feel better.

  Outside the stall window, the night is luminous, ablaze in white. There are several inches of snow on the ground, and it’s a soft snow, the kind that parts around your feet as you sift through it. As Sal leans into Claret and we all exhale white smoke into the cold, I wonder if people go sledding at night. Surely they must, but who are they? Where do they go? And why aren’t I one of them? I have never thought about this before, but suddenly it seems so obvious to me that I want to be someone who goes sledding at night—that girl who zips up her puffy jacket and pulls down her wool hat with the single pom-pom on top, and takes off down the hill. They say that every day is a day to claim our lives, and tonight, on New Year’s Eve, I’m claiming night sledding. As long as we are alive, there is always the chance to begin again. Begin again beginagainbeginagainbeginagain. How easily the mind repeats this mantra.

  I say nothing of this to Sal, who is mostly quiet, except when he occasionally comments on a particularly tight spot of Claret’s body. “He’s really reactive here,” he says, pressing so hard that his hand disappears between the base of Claret’s neck and his shoulder blade. Claret rears up in pain, and I step back, out of the way. But Sal doesn’t release the pressure, no matter how hard Claret tries to twist away, and then suddenly something gives, and Claret’s neck softens and his eyes soften and he starts making the slow chewing sounds horses make when they’re relaxed. And Sal keeps his hand there, now palpating a little, while Claret gives in to the pressure, into the relief, into the new space Sal has made for him.

  Watching this feels like a holy event. It’s not just because the snow beginning to fall is the fat white dot snow of Christmas movies on TV—walls of it cascading straight down into the windless silver-blue night—or because in these next couple of hours we’ll all be leaning together, with our collective hopes and disappointments and reflections and resolutions, into a new year. It’s because what is unfolding here is the sacred purity of trust. Claret weighs fourteen hundred pounds, and if he wanted to, he could hurt, or even kill, one of us. But instead, despite what Claret has known in the past, despite the hands that have hurt him, he’s choosing now to trust these hands; he’s choosing to trust the pain. And to watch him come to the other side of it—to watch the release shine in his eyes—is a privilege of the highest order.

  “Can I feel?” I ask. “I want to feel what you feel.”

  Sal takes my hand and presses into Claret’s back. “Do you feel here how it kind of gives when you press it?”

  “Yes.” I nod. “It’s kind of spongy.”

  “That’s how it should be. Now keep going down his back and tell me where it’s tight.”

  I’ve removed my gloves, and Claret’s body is warm against my hands as I massage along the left side of his spine. “Here,” I say. “Right here it won’t yield.”

  Sal checks the spot below my h
and. “See,” he says. “You can feel it. Now make it yield.”

  Unsure of exactly how to do this, I press my fingers into Claret’s tight spot and slowly begin to knead, using the weight of my body for strength. Claret arches his head around and presses his muzzle into my back, moving his lips firmly as I move my hands.

  “He’s reciprocating,” Sal says. “That means you’re doing it right.”

  Some people believe that snowflakes are magnets for words, that every word spoken in a snowstorm lands on a snowflake and is carried to rest, on a rooftop or mitten or field, as if on a magic carpet. Therefore, they believe, people must speak carefully in the snow, choosing every word as a child might choose crayons, one at a time.

  I lean into the great dark head nuzzling my back. “Thank you,” I say, while time inches closer to midnight.

  SEVEN

  I didn’t see the glass when I ran through it. I saw my sister’s face.

  She was sitting at the kitchen table, drawing. I was outside on the patio, watching a distant uncle try to light coals on a barbecue grill. We rarely ever visited extended family, so it was an exciting day. Drizzling gently, the patting of rain against the trees sounded like a fire crackling. Someone had left the sliding glass door open, and I could see the women inside talking in the kitchen, waving their hands about. I was nine and thought it was more fun to hang around the adults than to do any of the kid activities my aunt had arranged on the table for us. And when the matches were spent and the grill still wasn’t lit, I wanted to help. “I’ll go get more matches!” I exclaimed, turning to run inside. I could see Joanne then, engrossed in her crayons. I ran toward her. But I hadn’t seen someone close the door. And I didn’t see the glass, either, before I shattered it.