Let the Tornado Come: A Memoir

by Rita Zoey Chin

  TWENTY

  The music is so loud that I’m thinking some kind of nuclear fission is happening inside my ears. I’m jammed in the backseat with these guys, and the whole car smells like Polo cologne and pot. They’re leaning into me, and one of them has his hand on my knee. Their teeth flash under the streetlights. They’re shouting along with the Stray Cats in heavy Iranian accents and smiling expectantly—“She’s sexy and seventeen!” The truth is I’m thirteen, but no guy wants to hear that—they just want to think it, keep it hidden like a present. So I give them that.

  I don’t know where we’re going. For the moment, I’m glad to be heading somewhere. I’m hoping maybe I’ll get lucky and they’ll give me something to eat. I’d love pizza. I stare past the guy on my right to see the moon gleaming like a seashell on a night table, under a lamp. It disappears when the driver takes a turn onto the highway.

  The guy to my left has run his hand up my leg, where it’s resting on my inner thigh. The wind is pouring into the car like a fit of wings, sweeping my hair around. I keep wiping it from my eyes because I want to see. I want to see everything I can outside these windows—the passing cars swishing by, the spark and tail of every light, the trees standing like shadows in their quiet height, the bright green highway signs.

  The Iranians like steak. In the supermarket, they shove them down the fronts of their pants. I met these guys earlier at the 7-Eleven near my father’s house, when they pulled in with their car thumping and their windows down. They were smiling at me, and their eyes were like firecrackers. When they asked me if I wanted a ride, I got in and they floored it down the road. There are a lot of Middle Eastern people who live here in these towns outside Washington, D.C., but this one guy, Afshin, who now has a lap full of rib-eye, is the most gorgeous man I’ve ever seen, even more gorgeous than Andy Gibb and Shaun Cassidy, whose posters I stared at for years on my bedroom wall.

  I used to keep count of how many times I ran away. I liked thinking it: I have run away five times. But now I’ve stopped counting, maybe because it’s no longer so much a thing I do but more who I am. After I got out of Lutheran Hospital and went back to my father’s house, I thought maybe I could stop running. But by then my stepmother had left my father—after three years of marriage, my father finally snapped and beat her until she clawed her way out of the house and ran barefoot in her nightgown into the February snow—and my sister had gone back to live with our mother, and my father walked around bereft and excoriated and mean, and most days I felt like I was living inside a sarcophagus. So I ran. That was three weeks ago.

  The men take me back to their apartment and fire the steaks up on the broiler. I’ve never really liked meat, but I eat small bites anyway because I’m hungry. “This”—one of them holds his fork straight out—“is how you cook a steak!” Then, to me, “You’re too skinny. Skinny like a pencil. You need more meat!”

  One of the men echoes, “More meat,” and they all laugh—all except Afshin, whose amber eyes seem to be on the verge of a question and whose face is the perfect arrangement of shadow and light.

  “What do you do?” Afshin asks me, and I instantly feel myself blush.

  Unsure how to answer, I busy myself with cutting my steak.

  “Are you in school?” He tilts his head to look at me, and I can hardly breathe under his gaze.

  “I’m trying to figure out my life,” I say, because it is the truest and only thing I can think to say.

  He nods thoughtfully. “College. That’s what you should do with your life.”

  “Meat,” says the one with the fork. “Meat is what she should do with her life.”

  “I’m in college,” says Afshin, and his perfect smile damn near knocks me off my chair. “You should come with me, tomorrow! You will love it. You will fall absolutely in love with it!”

  And I’m thinking that he doesn’t realize I’m only thirteen and that there’s an APB out on me. And I’m thinking that his fingers are so long and delicate. And I’m thinking that his optimism is one of ignorance, which makes it an optimism made out of glitter that will so quickly fall to the ground.

  That night, I sleep on a bare mattress beside Afshin, and I smell his skin, and I smell the black waves of his hair, and every single thing about him is sweet, and I can hear, somewhere far off in my mind, my mother calling me names, and I feel wretched lying there beside this stranger, who I want with a hunger that seizes me and who I know I will never have.

  In the morning, when I wake, he is gone. I shower in their bathroom, then start walking back down the road, my hair still wet.

  TWENTY-ONE

  One thing was clear: this panic wasn’t going away on its own. So Larry made some phone calls and got me an appointment at the Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders (CARD) in Boston. As I sat in the waiting room filling out my intake questionnaire, which seemed to be asking the same few questions in slightly different ways—the gist of which was, Is anxiety a problem for you?—I was grateful for two things: (1) I was getting help; and (2) there was an elevator, so I didn’t have to take the stairs.

  I was relieved when Dr. E, a statuesque Nordic-looking woman in baggy linen pants, led me back to her office, a large, tidy space adorned with abstract paintings in dusky hues and tribal figures made out of metal and wood. She glanced over my questionnaire before asking me to confirm that I was, in fact, afraid to leave the house, afraid to be in the house alone, afraid to shower alone, afraid to exercise or even walk up stairs, afraid to go through checkout lines, afraid to drive, afraid of crossing the street, afraid of fainting, afraid of going crazy, afraid my heart was going to stop. “Yes,” I said, for starters.

  “I don’t know how I got like this,” I explained to her. “I’ve never really scared easily. Now I even wake up scared in the middle of the night. Every night.”

  She nodded. “It makes sense. You’re having panic attacks in your sleep.”

  “A person can do that?”

  “When it gets bad enough, absolutely.”

  I shifted in my seat.

  “Are you on any medication?” Dr. E asked.

  “I’m afraid of that, too.”

  “Great,” she said. “I think we can help you.”

  We can help you. I sank into the bath of those words.

  Dr. E folded her thin pale fingers on her desk and told me that I have a lizard brain. “We all have this primitive structure in our brains,” she continued, “called the amygdala, which assesses potentially threatening situations and triggers our fight-flight response when necessary. It’s designed to protect us; it’s the same mechanism that enables the zebra to escape the lion.”

  I nodded knowingly, having read all of this in one of my books.

  “But here’s something you might not know.” Dr. E leaned toward me, her arms stretched across her desk as if at any moment they’d move the extra few inches and touch me. “Our autonomic nervous system is composed of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. The sympathetic nervous system controls the fight-flight response—which is what happens to all of us when, say, you suddenly swerve your car to avoid a collision. And the parasympathetic nervous system does the opposite: it relaxes us, slows us down. So here’s the thing,” she said, smiling as if she was about to hand me a present: “You never have to worry about a panic attack going out of control, because the parasympathetic nervous system is always there to balance it out.”

  I realized this information was supposed to immediately bring me noticeable relief, and I could feel her searching my face for some sign of it. I should have smiled or said, “Ah, I’m so glad I know this now and never have to worry about that again.”

  Instead I asked, “But what if something’s wrong with my parasympathetic nervous system?”

  She laughed. “Yes, you’re definitely in the right place.”

  After taking a brief history of my panic, Dr. E explained
the cycle of panic. “Scary thoughts lead to tension in the body, and that tension leads to more scary thoughts, which lead to more tension. So for you, you’re worried about having a heart attack. When your heart rate gets elevated for any reason, this triggers your belief that a racing heart is a sign of a heart attack—which your brain interprets as danger—which makes your heart beat even faster, and so forth, until you’re running out the door and calling 911. Each thing that gets associated with panic—driving, rapid heartbeat, being alone—becomes something you start to avoid, and that’s how panic feeds on itself. It takes more and more of your life, until there is no safe place left, not even your own body.”

  It seemed so simple. Yet just thinking of panic made my body feel like a guitar in the hands of a child—plucked and smacked and thrumming.

  “Thoughts are at the root of panic,” said Dr. E. “And that’s what we’re going to work on.”

  The way we were going to work on my thoughts was through cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), a popular and effective method claiming up to a 95 percent success rate in treating all sorts of anxiety disorders and phobias. The concept is simple: when people are gradually exposed to the objects they fear, their fears soon become little more than distant memories. Dr. E sent me off with a panic workbook, panic homework, and an appointment for the next day. I cradled the book against my side and thanked her. I didn’t ask her the question pressing on my mind: what if I’m the unlucky 5 percent?

  I waited outside the building for Larry to pick me up, while people milled along the sidewalks—the students strapped with knapsacks too big for their backs, the women with their briefcases bumping against their calves, the men with their open leather jackets. We were all together in the same place, but no one was really there—the people with their blank steady gazes forward were already someplace else. No one looked afraid.

  It was getting cool now, which made everyone move faster. Meanwhile, I stood on the corner and wondered what would happen if I fainted right there. Then Larry pulled up.

  “How’d it go?” he asked, reaching for a kiss. I could feel the now-familiar stress from his job surrounding him, the way a scent can stick to you when you brush by it.

  At that moment, I wanted to say so many things. I wanted to say, I’m sorry your job is so hard on you. I wanted to say, I’m sorry for crumbling like this. I don’t know when the world became so terrifying. I don’t know if I will survive this day. I don’t know who I am anymore. I know I love you. I know what I want from you must seem impossible. I know I have homework. I know my heart is beating fast. But the tears came faster than the words.

  That evening, I did my homework, which consisted of filling out a Daily Panic Attack and Anxiety Record, along with a Worry Record. After chronicling the times and places of that day’s four panic attacks, I checked off a list of symptoms that applied: “pounding heart, shortness of breath, dizziness, trembling, sweating, feeling of unreality, hot or cold flash, fear of dying, fear of going crazy, fear of losing control”—almost everything on the list. On my worry record, I wrote, “Am worried I will continue to be anxious while alone. Am worried about my heart. Am also worried that I’m hypoglycemic and will fall into a coma. Am worried that if I lose consciousness while the dogs are out, I won’t be able to let them back in, and Larry will come home and accidentally run them over.” That’s as much as I could write before I had another panic attack. I handed Larry the stethoscope.

  The next morning I was back in Dr. E’s office. “Did you do your homework?” she asked, slipping her shoes off. She was wearing roughly the same earthy linen outfit as the day before.

  I proudly handed her my anxiety and worry records, and she looked them over. “Good,” she said. “So you know how CBT works?”

  I thought about spiders and snakes and high ledges. “By exposing people to the things they’re afraid of?”

  “Right. And how do you think we’re going to get control of your panic?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. Suddenly I didn’t like where this was headed.

  “Let’s put it this way: we’ve got a staircase in the building.”

  No. No no no. “The problem is,” I started, “that something may really be wrong with my heart.” I needed her to understand that this was absolutely not an option.

  But Dr. E wasn’t interested in that. She did, however, offer a compromise: instead of braving the stairs just yet, I could run in place in her office until my heart rate went up, while she timed me with a stopwatch. Reluctantly I got up and started to jog. Within a minute I was in the midst of a full-blown panic attack, gasping and trembling and eyeing the door like a fiend. See, I wanted to say, I told you so.

  Dr. E flashed a pen and began asking questions about my symptoms—how severe, how many, how long they peaked. “Okay,” she said in a voice so cheerful I was expecting pom-poms to pop out, “let’s go again!”

  Again? I was surely going to die.

  I had three more panic attacks before she called it quits, at which point she showed me on a chart how my last panic attack was less severe than my first. I wanted to be happy about this, but I was traumatized. A feeling of tightness had settled into the center of my throat, like the seconds right before a good cry. I told Dr. E.

  “So what worries you about this tightness?”

  “It’s not usually there, for one thing.” I pulled my water bottle from my bag and tried to swallow the tightness away, but it wouldn’t budge. “And I’m worried it won’t go away.”

  “And what if it doesn’t? Would you still be able to live your life?”

  “Yes, I suppose. But I don’t want to live my life that way.”

  “But you could if you had to.”

  “It’s just that I feel really isolated,” I said, changing the subject. “Everything is new, and I don’t have any friends here, and I’m afraid my marriage is failing.”

  Dr. E looked at me wide-eyed, as if I were breaking some protocol. “These things are important, and for sure you should do things—take a class or join a club—to make yourself less isolated. That’s number one. But to get you there, what we need to focus on right now is your panic.”

  I understood. I’d read the books. Cognitive behavioral therapy is, as its name implies, about retraining the mind. It likes things clean. It likes charts and statistics and lists. It’s not interested in your emotions or your past or the dream you had last night.

  At home, I couldn’t shake the tightness in my throat. I walked from room to room trying to cough it away, then panicking when it wouldn’t go, then filling out forms about it. But underneath the fear, I was excited about something: today was my first cooking lesson.

  When Helen arrived, all six feet of her knelt down on the floor to cuddle my dogs. She was wearing her chef’s coat and hat, and she brought everything we needed: the ingredients, the tools, the panache. “I thought we’d roast some nuts to snack on while we cook,” she said, pulling things from her bag. Instantly she was at home in the kitchen, organizing her spices in one place and her baking ingredients in another. “I thought we’d make a banana cream pie for dessert, so once we get the nuts in the oven, we should start on that so it’s ready after dinner. What do you think?”

  I could hardly reconcile that this woman was in my kitchen, let alone comment intelligently on the order of food preparation. “Sounds pretty amazing to me,” I said, as if Santa had just proposed the order in which he would deliver my presents. And from there we mixed olive oil, cayenne pepper, freshly chopped rosemary, local honey, and salt in a bowl. In went the raw cashews, which we tossed in the oil before placing in the oven. Within minutes they were roasted to perfection, and the two of us were happily chomping away.

  After the nuts, Helen showed me how to make a piecrust. “You don’t want to overknead the dough,” she said, “or it can become stiff. And butter—you should always use butter.”

  I love you, I wa
nted to say. Instead, I said, “I love butter.” And then she showed me how to work my fingers into the dough.

  By the end of our four hours together, we’d cooked (and eaten almost the whole tray of) roasted rosemary cashews; parchment-wrapped Mediterranean halibut with olives, tomatoes, lemon juice, freshly chopped oregano and thyme, orange zest, and olive oil; sautéed baby squashes; and jasmine rice steamed with coconut. And we baked one hell of a banana cream pie.

  Of course, I felt panic nipping at my back as I used a microplane to gently glide the thin layer of peel off the orange, as I watched the vegetables brown in the skillet, as I whipped the cream. And through it all, I felt the unrelenting tightness in my throat. But I was also aware of the gifts that had been given to me that night, and I wasn’t going to let panic devour them before I had a chance to.

  TWENTY-TWO

  When I get back to the 7-Eleven, it’s dark already, a slow and sticky summer night. There’s nothing to do but watch some guy delivering donuts. His blond hair sweeps his shoulders each time he bends to pull a tray from his van, and when he turns around he snaps his head back to clear his sight. He’s cute, and Rockville’s getting old, so in exchange for a ride to Baltimore I have sex with him in the back of his truck on the floor in between all those donuts. He kisses me gently in the sugary air. Afterward, I ride around with him for a while on his route and smoke Marlboros, and when I try to flick one out the window, the wind blows it back in, right down the front of my shirt, and burns a blister between my breasts before I can get it out. “Smart cigarette,” he says. He drones on about relationships and this girlfriend and that girlfriend, and all I know is that the road is like a dark cave we keep entering. When he lets me out a couple of hours later at the High’s near my mother’s apartment complex, he calls out, “Think of me next time you eat a donut!” I don’t look back.