Let the Tornado Come: A Memoir

by Rita Zoey Chin

  We left him that night, stayed with friends of theirs I’d never met before. And as I lay in this unfamiliar bed in this unfamiliar house and watched cobwebs float from the ceiling, I was strangely happy. My father had finally done it: he’d crossed the line of crazy, and now everyone would know it, and Joanne and I could return to our mother’s house, and everything would be the way it ought to have been. My father had lost us now. He couldn’t hurt us anymore. We would never have to go back.

  Except we did. The next day, my stepmother drove us home, and no one ever spoke of my father’s pretend suicide again.

  EIGHT

  Here is a story about my mother: for a year and a half, she loved me. After I told the judge to let me live with my father and he did, and my mother tore out of the courtroom in a blur, away from me, and my father’s promises soon began to splinter and implode, and enough time had passed to allow my mother to rise from her grief and find that her new single life was one big party, which often left its guests passed out in various rooms of her apartment, my father began following his end of the visitation order by driving Joanne and me back down to Baltimore to stay with our mother one weekend each month. By then I knew I’d misspent my single moment of power, and I was paying for it. My mother knew it, too. When I called her, she heard the tremor in my voice as I crouched in a far corner of my father’s house and bit my lip so I wouldn’t cry when she asked me how my great new life was. And when we saw her, she felt the lumps on my head. She saw the sadness in Joanne’s eyes. She’d shake her head and look down at the floor. “What is he doing to you up there?” she’d ask, as if there were an answer.

  But then Joanne and I would pull our duffel bags back to our old room, and my mother would play Supertramp on the record player, and we’d dance around the living room on the faded pink carpet as if that were our only life. In the evenings, after my sister went to sleep, I’d stay up late and listen to my mother’s tales of friendship, betrayal, and romance. We’d pull out astrology books and leaf through urgently, looking up the sun signs of her various crushes. “We’re both Libras,” she’d say, “so Geminis are balancing for us.” On those nights, she’d sometimes tell me stories about her childhood, how she still dreamed of the French chocolate-filled pastries of her young life in Paris. Other times, she’d stand in front of her bedroom mirror and try on different outfits to see which one I liked best. “But which is sexier?” she’d ask, and I’d point at various red and black and silky things. And my mother, with her new giggle and new barrettes and new cast of friends, became a heroine of light and laughter, became the moon outside the window of my bedroom in my father’s house, when I lay there dreaming up at it, longing for things I didn’t know how to name and the one thing I did: mother. In the weeks between our visits, I wrote her letters, and sometimes she wrote back. And each loop of her handwriting was proof that she loved me. I had a red purse then, adorned with puppy key chains and a small koala bear that clutched onto the strap, and I carried her letters in it so that they would always be with me.

  NINE

  Just after Larry’s first birthday, his parents, Chinese immigrants struggling to earn their graduate degrees in the United States, sent him to Taiwan to live with his maternal grandparents for three years. His childhood picture albums show the gap. It begins with a fuzzy-haired baby smiling in a high chair: before him burns a single candle on a small white cake. He hasn’t massacred it with his fingers or pressed his dimpled face into it the way so many babies do; instead, he’s looking at his mother, who must be smiling back at him from behind the camera. But his mother is missing from the following pages, a few square black-and-white photographs, each not much larger than a stamp. In them, Larry grins in his po-po’s arms or holds hands with his tall and regal-looking grandfather, Gong-Gong. And the next photographs, colorized again, show a four-year-old boy standing obediently beside his parents. Now the boy looks careful, smiling perfunctorily to complete the portrait that says, This is my family.

  On the plane back from Taiwan, Larry’s grandparents helped him practice his introduction speech to his parents. He had virtually no memory of these people he would soon be calling Mama and Baba. He spoke no English, and he missed his dog—a Pekinese who’d surprised everyone when he ended up killing the family monkey.

  At the terminal gate, Larry’s parents waited eagerly, like a couple about to adopt their first child. While Larry was away, his parents had missed him, but having to navigate their rigorous studies in a new language, they hadn’t had much time to think about it.

  Larry and his grandparents were among the first people to get off the plane. His grandmother had combed his straight hair neatly to one side and fitted his neck with a red bow tie, which he tugged at during the long flight. His parents stood immobile as they watched the baby they’d sent away now walking toward them, a young boy. Behind him, his grandmother was prodding, pushing him forward. “Go, go!” she urged. Larry acquiesced, walking steadily across the great plain between the generations. In Taiwan he’d seen pictures, and so he recognized his parents instantly; they were leaning over now, holding out their arms. But Larry stopped short, looked up squarely into each of their faces, and recited what he’d practiced: “Respectful greetings, honorable Mother and Father.” Then, as people kept scurrying past him, he bowed.

  I have always loved this story of Larry as a four-year-old boy about to meet his parents, in part because every time I think about it, it breaks my heart. I imagine Larry in his bow tie, wanting so desperately to be a good boy, a boy his parents would want to keep. And as he grew up, he never lost the awareness that parents can put you on a plane and send you away, so he fashioned himself into a boy whose indisputable goodness would prevent that from happening again. He never got into trouble, never missed a day of school, and skipped two grades in the process. There was never a temper tantrum, never a stolen pack of gum, never a cigarette smoked. There was never dirt tracked into the house or a harsh word spoken or a grade less than an A. Still, his mother was quick to point out when another boy got higher accolades on a science project or when another boy was more adoring of his mother. So for Larry, love was a constant negotiation based on merit. And the formality he’d first experienced when he was reunited with his parents lasted. His parents shared it, too: his father, when he became enraged at his mother, would lock himself in a closet and mutter under his breath. In their home, this was how you dealt with emotion: you quite literally locked it in a closet. Part of what I found comforting about Larry when we started dating was his emotional steadfastness: he didn’t like things that were messy and unpredictable, and after years with parents so violent that the police were regular guests at our apartment, that was fine by me. But the panic attacks happening to me now were exactly that: messy and unpredictable. And they threatened everything that Larry had grown up believing; they threatened the white-picket parcel of his life.

  In the weeks following my first encounter with the ambulance staff, my panic attacks had proliferated like mice. I simply woke up one day, infested. I began to fear things I didn’t know were possible to fear: the shower, the grocery store checkout line, open spaces, small spaces, heat, crossing a street, driving, any form of exertion—even climbing a flight of stairs filled me with dread, because most of all, I feared my heart: despite what the paramedics said, despite what Larry said, I was convinced my heart was a time bomb. I didn’t trust it. So I tiptoed around it carefully, as if it were a sleeping monster. And I began to avoid anything that might disrupt it. If I just sat very still, maybe my heart and I could coexist.

  But of course, I had to get up. I had to pee, wash my hair, buy eggs. And when I did those things, I panicked. I panicked in the shower, in the car, in the grocery store. I panicked slicing avocados, running a brush through my hair. I panicked for no apparent reason, over and over again, each time feeling slightly more battered than the last. Most of the time I ran outside to the front step, as if it were the magical place of safety,
the cusp, the line between out and in, the place where both options were possible.

  When I wasn’t panicking, I worried about panicking and about all the grizzly calamities that can befall a person. I began to narrate everything as if it were a scene in a horror movie. As I got dressed, I’d think, You’re going to fall down the stairs and break your neck. No matter what I did or where I went, there were the thoughts: A plane will crash into the living room. A tree branch will fall on your head. You will choke on a bite of sandwich. A mosquito will infect you with eastern equine encephalitis. There was no end or escape. Everything seemed fraught with danger, even the most benign things, even the most absurd.

  Sometimes I couldn’t make it through the checkout line at the grocery store. I’d drop my basket and run from the store trying to catch my breath, my body trembling. Even in the safety of my own home, the most basic tasks, like going upstairs to make the bed or taking a shower by myself, soon became insurmountable. So I planned my showers for times when Larry was home. I avoided the stairs as much as possible. I stopped driving on the highway. Worst of all, I stopped writing.

  My life was overrun. So I panicked my way to the bookstore, because I knew one thing: the only way I was ever going to have a chance of getting my life back was to understand what was taking it away.

  But even the bookstore I’d always loved had morphed into a terrifying place since the last time I’d visited. There was its cavernous size, the milling people, the lights that bleached the air. There was the weight of so many words, the finiteness of time they suggested, the importance of choice. And there were so many things to account for: where were the exits, where were the bathrooms, what were obstacles between those things and me? And why was that man with the rapidly blinking eyes wearing an oversize coat?

  Okay, I thought, sizing up the second half of the store. I can make it back to the anxiety books. I can choose one, I can buy it, and I can leave. As I walked past the racks, I tried to ignore the thoughts, which were like a bully’s finger poking me on the shoulder. You’re gonna die. You’re going to suffer a fatal arrhythmia, and they’ll find you on the floor beside the anxiety books. Screw you, I thought, trying on bravado like a costume. But then I thought, My last thought will have been “Screw you,” and then I thought, No, my last thought will be a thought about my last thought being “Screw you,” and then I started furiously pulling books from the shelves, anything with panic or anxiety in the title. If I can just make it out with these books . . . I thought, as I scurried to the nearest register. If I can just make it to the car . . . And once I was back in the glassy still of my house, the conversation continued. If I can just make it until Larry gets home . . .

  Until then, I would read. I learned that at least forty million Americans are affected by some kind of anxiety disorder, and that there’s a distinction between anxiety and panic: anxiety is like a sky full of brooding cumulonimbus clouds, ominously dark and amorphous, while panic is the lightning crack that sends you running for cover. I would learn that when a person is in fight-flight mode, the body undergoes an awe-inspiring transformation as several physiological events occur at once: the nervous system sends out a shot of adrenaline, like a war call to the troops; this gets the heart pumping vigorously, filling the major muscles with blood, while blood is directed away from less essential places, like the stomach and the skin, which is why people go pale with fright; respiration increases, pulling needed oxygen into the body; pupils dilate to let in more light, and certain muscles in the eyes relax so that even the farthest predator can be seen; hearing becomes sharper; glycogen stored in the liver is turned to glucose, which gives us the sugar rush needed for energy and endurance; our sweat glands go to work to cool us and to scare off predators with our scent—all of this makes the body strong and fast, in preparation for a life-saving fight or a hightailing chase.

  It’s a handy survival mechanism, one that’s been with us throughout our evolution, but when it happens without an actual threat, the symptoms themselves—rapid heart rate, shortness of breath, shakiness, tunnel vision, tingling hands, cold sweats, nausea, a strong urge to flee, an overwhelming sense that one is going crazy or about to die—are terrifying, and soon become, themselves, the thing we fear. Fear of fear, the books call it—that self-feeding beast that can quickly metastasize through a person’s entire life.

  Panic disorder can sometimes be triggered by major life events (death of a loved one, divorce, a move, et cetera) but can also appear without any provocation at all. Whatever the cause, once a person starts panicking, it’s hard to stop. On the checklist of panic, I filled every box: my symptoms fit the description of a panic attack like snaps on a coat. Still, the voice in my head taunted: You have panic disorder and a heart disorder.

  “There is no passion so contagious as that of fear,” said Montaigne, while Emerson knew that “fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world.” But reading about panic didn’t seem to allay my fear any more than throwing a book at a tornado would have changed its funnel shape. Still, I kept reading, and the books offered some practical suggestions.

  I started with deep abdominal breathing. Lying back on the sofa, I concentrated on my lower belly and tried to slowly pull a breath in, but I couldn’t seem to get the air past my diaphragm. I tried again, fidgeting around to find a more comfortable position, but I couldn’t fill my lungs. Each time I tried, my breath got caught high in my chest, until finally I started wrestling with my windpipe, desperately sucking in air. Great, I thought. Now I’ve forgotten how to breathe. I might have felt humiliated had I not started hyperventilating, which led my heart to begin its mad race.

  “Why are you doing this to me?” I cried. And then, as if to answer, my heart punched me in the chest. Once, and then a second time, like the kick of a rabbit’s hind legs. I leapt off the couch, grabbed the phone, ran out the front door, perched myself back on the front step, and called Larry.

  “It’s happening again,” I told him, gasping for air. “My heart just jumped in my chest. It moved.”

  Though I yearned for my former independent self, the self that was logical and strong, Larry was the most unshakable person I’d ever known, and I’d come to depend on it. “It probably just skipped a beat,” he assured me. “You’re having a little anxiety. That’s all.”

  “I think you should come home.”

  “It was just a palpitation. You’re okay.”

  “Do you promise?”

  “I promise. You’re my sweet girl, and you’re fine, and I love you.”

  I let myself be momentarily soothed, but then couldn’t help myself. “I still think you should come home.”

  When I hung up the phone I rocked myself like a pendulum, as if the motion itself would be the one thing to move me from one minute to the next. I stayed like that for a vast span of the afternoon, swaying on the front step with one hand on the phone and two fingers against the pulse in my neck, while birds tossed their voices and the blunt strokes of a hammer reverberated in the distance and the bees skimmed the tops of the pink spirea, while the trees fluttered, tossing the light around.

  TEN

  The neighborhood is buzzing in electric green while kids my sister’s age scrape their BigWheels along the sidewalks and newly hatched insects take to the air. I rip through it, fast as fever. It’s spring, and everything is vibrating. As I run, I turn to look over my shoulder and can almost see my father as a flickering apparition behind me, growing smaller, plumes of gray smoke rising from his messy head. I can’t see his fists, but I know they’re flailing. The key is that he’s getting smaller, that I have crossed a threshold.

  Out of the neighborhood and out of breath, I walk up Rockville Pike. Sometimes a car honks; sometimes guys call out something indiscernible, which I answer with an extra swing to my hips. Last summer when I was twelve, my friend Dawn and I learned that if we shook our asses when we walked, we could get cars to honk at us. Each ti
me we went to the Hawaiian snowball stand on Liberty Road, we’d count how many honks we got.

  My father moved us here to Rockville, Maryland, last year, right in the middle of seventh grade. He was in some kind of trouble with his job—I could hear him yelling, sometimes pleading, on the phone, then playing back the conversations he’d taped on his phone recorder and telling my stepmother how he was going to sue everybody (and also how he would have made an excellent lawyer)—so in a hurry we packed up our stuff and moved here. But the moving truck couldn’t fit all of our stuff, so the kids’ things got left behind. I lost my beloved rock collection, my prized Barbie doll collection, the Snoopy that I’d slept with since I was a baby, and the Legos my parents gave me for my fourth birthday—the few things that had made me happy during all those hours I spent hiding away in my room. Luckily, I’d thought to bring my sticker collection in the car with me, and wedged in next to my sister and stepbrother, I kept peeking at them as we headed south—the sparkly stars and shiny ice cream cones and butterflies in every color.

  But now that I’ve escaped, I’ve left even those behind. When I finally make it the few miles to the high-rise apartment building where my friend Cindy lives, I call her from the lobby. No one answers, so I sit on the small bench by the phone and watch people get their mail.

  The first time I ran away, I flung the front door open with a fury and bolted straight out of the neighborhood. My father had just ransacked my room, and as he sat with Janice on their bed, my red purse emptied on the duvet, my diary splayed, my mother’s letters shelled from their envelopes, I knew I couldn’t spend one more minute in that house, given what would come next. I didn’t stop running until I reached a grocery store a couple of miles away. I had no plan—just a small lifetime of running built up in my legs and a knowledge that out there, somewhere, was something better for me. When I called my mother collect from the pay phone and begged her to help me, she told me she wished she could help me, but she couldn’t. “I’m sorry, but you should have thought about all this before you told the judge you wanted to live with your father.” It didn’t matter that I begged, that I promised to be the best daughter anyone could ever be. She was done with courts, she said. Her hands were tied.