Let the Tornado Come: A Memoir

by Rita Zoey Chin

  There is one large bathroom that we can use at allotted times, and it has no mirrors. Instead, there are two rectangles of steel bolted to the wall, pretending to be mirrors. We’re given only five minutes to wash, and there are at least twice as many girls as there are sinks, which means a fight for water. They quickly jam in together, reaching over each other, taking turns spitting into the sink. And I am now a part of them, these strangers elbowing each other to get clean.

  Each evening, after we wash and go into our cells, a staff member comes to each door with a box of pencils, a stack of paper, and envelopes. When I ask why we have to give the pencils back, Miss Smith winks at me. “Because they can be used as weapons.” So I write. I write about cornfields and about roads and about loneliness. I write letters to my mother and letters to my father, and I never send them because all they do is beg for things I know they’ll never give me.

  I turn fourteen, and the leaves come down. In the mornings we wake at 5:00, scrub floors with steel wool pads, pour ammonia into toilets, shine the metal mirrors while our warped reflections search back at us. Mice scurry by from one shadow to another, while girls get into fistfights and get hauled away. Winter blows in, wraps its claws around our gray building and won’t let go. I think of the girl who hanged herself, wonder if it was cold then, too, as she pulled the sheet off her bed for the last time. It gets colder, and then it snows. We get donated presents of large cotton underwear, and I flip through magazines and stare at pictures of pie, and I lust for the pie, for everything that lives outside these bars.

  Three months later, my arraignment date arrives. I’m handcuffed and taken to court inside a paddy wagon, then led to a holding cell to await my hearing. The cell is empty and locked inside another small room. There isn’t even a toilet like in the police station. The walls, the floors, and the ceiling are all beige. I wrap my fingers around the cool metal bars and wonder who’s been here before me. I remember the long day I’d spent hiding out inside Cindy’s closet, singing to myself under my breath—but here is not a place to sing. Instead I pace for two hours.

  Things happen fast in the courtroom. My mother won’t look at me. My heart rattles like a wagon speeding downhill. My hands tremble. So do my knees. When they call me to the witness stand, I raise my hand and swear on a Bible and tell the judge the truth. The judge listens without expression. Her hair is gray and stiffened by hair spray.

  When it’s my mother’s turn, she testifies that I pushed her, that I am a violent, drug-abusing, promiscuous runaway. She brings my diary and reads passages out loud to the entire courtroom: I wonder if having sex will ever stop hurting. I want to like it. Maybe I just need to practice.

  No! I want to shout. That’s mine!

  My mother licks her lips and speaks surely. “Your Honor, you can see that if Rita is not supervised constantly, she is a danger not only to me but to herself.”

  And the judge agrees. “In the hope that you might learn a lesson from this and right your ways before it’s too late, I’m going to detain you at the Montrose detention center until a bed becomes available for you at the Good Shepherd Center, where you will have plenty of time to think about what you’ve done, and what you’re going to do differently in the future.”

  The gavel comes down.

  TWENTY-SIX

  I wish panic were fragile enough to crumble under the heft of a heart-bending epiphany experienced from the driver’s seat of one’s car, or that a magical number of conjugations of the word fuck, if exclaimed loudly enough, could annihilate it. But panic is far more tenacious than that, which might explain why anxiety disorders are the most common form of psychiatric illness.

  So I didn’t skip through my front door that day I drove home from the silver-haired lady, revelation in hand like a lasso that would once and for all take down the charging bull of panic. But I had taken a step toward the bull, and I found strength in that. Besides, I was beginning to suspect that the way to approach panic might be gentler than a rope at the throat; instead of a lasso, I imagined carrying a tender tuft of grass in my open hand.

  In a strange way, I was grateful to the silver-haired lady because she let go one gleaming pearl: sometimes below the panic is sadness. I could feel it there, like the hidden body of something you brush against in the dark. I was grateful also for the anger, which can be a useful and motivating emotion, one that’s hard to feel when you’re afraid. So she gave me that, and somewhere in my rant about the things I needed and the things I didn’t, the tightness in my throat disappeared.

  Though the silver-haired lady insisted on treating me as if I were helpless, I wasn’t helpless, and perhaps I needed to be reminded of that. I also needed to be reminded that saying no is sometimes where power is born, and that what we truly need might be the opposite of what people are telling us we need. In my case, it was knowing that CBT—despite the statistics and testimonials—was the wrong choice for me at that time, even if a psychiatrist thought it was right. So I stopped seeing Dr. E and made an appointment with a renowned author on anxiety who happened to live only a few miles from my house. He’d even landed an appearance on Oprah, so I figured he had to be good. Unfortunately, I would have to wait several weeks before he could see me.

  Meanwhile, when Larry told me about another upcoming work-related dinner, my immediate response was “There is absolutely no way in the world I can go.”

  “It’s not a big one,” he said, sorting through the day’s mail. “I don’t understand why we get so many catalogs.” He chucked a stack in the trash.

  “Just say I’m sick.”

  “Okay,” Larry said, not looking up, sorting through the mail a second time in a way that made me think he didn’t want me to know he was hurt.

  I immediately felt guilty. “Who’s going?” I asked.

  He kept flipping through the mail. “Steve, the chair of rehabilitative medicine, and his partner, Mike, an internist at BMC. I talked to Steve in the elevator—he seems friendly.”

  “Just them?”

  “Just them.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll go.”

  Larry looked up and smiled.

  We met in the city. A light rain had slicked everything shiny. Even the sounds of car horns had a certain gleam to them. Mike and Steve stepped out of their building and onto the sidewalk like a couple of movie stars. To put it simply, they were gorgeous. Primped to the nines in Prada and Gucci, they were a combined festival of black—black pants, black leather, black patent shoes, black glasses. Mike wore a flashy rhinestone skull belt that extended down over his fly. “Wow,” Mike said, eyeing me up, “you’re beautiful.”

  “And I love your boots,” added Steve.

  “I love your boots,” I said, and the four of us spent the next minute on the street corner admiring each other.

  The rain had left a charge in the air, and the city was alive with it. People were laughing, calling to each other, waving from across streets. Their voices kept rising, collecting in the windows’ light and mingling at the rooftops. As we walked to a nearby French restaurant, I squeezed Larry’s hand and watched Mike and Steve stroll confidently ahead of us. Mike leaned over and kissed Steve’s cheek, and for a moment I envied the intimacy I sensed between them.

  When we entered the restaurant, the first thing I was confronted with was a tall wooden flight of stairs. And to get to our table, I would have to climb them. They looked so steep. So hard. An ordinary person would have followed the curvy hostess in the red wrap dress with plunging neckline straight up those stairs without a thought. But for me, those stairs might as well have been Everest. I considered making a run for it—Well, boys, it’s been a blast. Let’s do this again soon!—but Mike and Steve were already heading up, and Larry was looking at me as if to say, Well, are you going to do this or not? and I decided not, and then I walked up the stairs anyway. By the time I got to the top, my heart and I were a rattling mess.

/>   We sat down at our table, and these two sweet strangers were looking at us expectantly, and I was doing my usual chair dance of angst, and I wanted to flee more than anything, and I was pretty sure I was going to collapse right there with my unbitten roll on my bread plate, and it made me sad to think I would never get to be friends with the fancy new doctors, but just then Mike leaned over and said, “I hear you’re a writer. What do you write?” And I took a breath.

  “I’m working on a memoir.”

  “Ooh,” he said. “Tell me more.”

  Some small distant part of my brain was celebrating what looked like the first real conversation Larry and I would have at a dinner with doctors, but then there was my killjoy and devoted stalker, Panic, hovering nearby. I tried for another breath but settled for a short, sharp inhalation instead. “It’s about my childhood as a runaway.”

  Mike turned his chair toward me and leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “You were a runaway? That’s amazing. For how long? How old were you? Where were you? How did you survive? I have so many questions!”

  These were the questions I’d always wanted Larry to ask—about this part of my life I kept secret from everyone else—and now a stranger was asking them, and I wanted to answer, but I couldn’t. I could hardly even breathe. But he was being so nice to me, and I felt I owed him something more than an inexplicable bolt from the table. “Listen, Mike, this might sound strange, but I’ve been struggling with panic attacks for the past few months, so if I get up suddenly and leave the table, that’s why.”

  He didn’t miss a beat. “Okay. Should I follow you?”

  “You know,” I told him, “that’s the best question anyone’s asked me in a long time.”

  I didn’t run from the table that night. But I also didn’t stop teetering at the edge. Panic stayed close, skulking through the room’s shadows, crouching by the stairs, waiting for me—though on this night there was an understood distance between us. As long as I was at the table eating my black truffle and wild mushroom cavatelli with these charming men, I was off-limits. It was as if by simply being able to name Panic to another person, I had temporarily weakened its power.

  If only we could always say our truths—if we could name the things that haunt us—maybe they would float up from us like a kind of helium that the birds would sip in the treetops. Then they would make us laugh and laugh.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  After I cantered with Rascal, all I wanted to do was canter. When I wasn’t cantering, I was often talking about cantering. “It’s amazing,” I kept telling Larry. “It’s like this great rush. It’s better than any drug. Maybe even better than sex.”

  “Hmmm,” said Larry, furrowing his forehead.

  “It’s so free—it’s like the opposite of panic. It’s powerful and graceful and even a bit clumsy all at once. It’s like—”

  “It’s like you,” he said.

  And it was sweet, what he said, but not entirely true, because panic was also like me—it was built into me as it was into the horses, built into me the way being a runaway was—and I had the sense that it was, in part, my relationship with panic—along with the residue of my young life—that enabled me to fully submerge myself in the freedom and joy of riding: it was only by holding on so tightly that I could begin learning how to let go. And cantering was like a great pendulum: this wonderful swing between the two extremes, between the past and the future. The present, then, was right there, on that single point on top of the horse.

  So I kept riding. I began taking dressage lessons with a German woman named Gerta, who seemed to hold the dictionary to the language I was just beginning to learn, and I began half leasing a Thoroughbred mare named Danielle, who was a bit aloof but who relished the Pink Lady apples I gave her. And as much as I loved riding—as much as I waxed lyrical about it to anyone who would listen—there was rarely a ride during which I didn’t feel scared at least once. Gerta’s answer to that was to teach me how to go over small jumps made up of wooden rails, also known as cavaletti. The trick was to time my communication—whether through my contact in the reins or the speed of my posting or the pressure of my legs—to control Danielle’s pace so that we could get over the cavaletti without toppling the rails. “If you look at the rails, you’re going to hit them,” Gerta warned. Of course, all I thought about was knocking down the rails. But after knocking them down three times, I knew she was right. “Look past them,” she said. “Look where you want to go, and go there.”

  The next time I came toward the caveletti, I took Gerta’s advice and looked at the window at the end of the arena. We’ll go through the window, I thought. We’ll fly right through the window. And that lift in my vision translated to Danielle’s lift over the cavaletti. From then on, we cleared them every time. And with each pass, I became more confident. When I submitted myself to this intense external focus—which is at once an endeavor of will and one of faith—there was nothing left of me to give to the internal world of fear.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  At the Good Shepherd Center nuns are everywhere. They whiz around on motorized yellow scooters, right through the sunlight with their pale faces and impenetrable layers of black. Compared to Montrose, Good Shepherd is a utopia: cigarettes anytime, makeup, long showers, pens, pencils, forks, knives. Each unit is the size of a large apartment, with a living room, a kitchenette, a smoking lounge, a large bright bathroom and a separate vanity room, both with real mirrors. And the windows don’t have bars on them.

  The girls are here for all sorts of reasons. Some have criminal records like me, while others have run away or smoked pot or gotten into fistfights or were considered “troubled” by their parents because they skipped school or had sex or wrote disturbing things in their diaries. I take a shine to a girl named Melissa. She’s got a purple Mohawk and honest eyes like those of a lemur—some dark beauty with night vision. As far as I can tell, she’s here mainly because of her Mohawk. Her father, a prominent D.C. judge, worried that because she was a punk and skipped the occasional day of school, she was destined to end up like Sid Vicious. I also like the redheaded self-proclaimed biker chick who floods each room she enters with the heady scent of Tatiana perfume. Nobody ever mentions her left eye, which is bigger than the right, crowned by a scar, and slow to close. Maria, an intolerant and intimidating girl who talks to none of us, plays records and dances by herself, better than anyone I’ve ever seen.

  At virtually any time of day, a lineup of girls can be found either smoking in the lounge or primping in the vanity room, which is just large enough for the chairs behind the long counter. Staring into the large mirror, we wrap our hair around curling irons, sponge on eye shadow with small black applicators, and talk to each other while looking into our own eyes. We touch each other, push our fingers through each other’s hair. Being pretty is one of our only pastimes.

  Sister Maryanne is the nun who works on our unit, and I like imagining her with her habit off, her luscious dark hair falling around her. “Do you ever wish you could get married?” I ask her. With a finger, she pushes my bangs to one side and says, “Oh, but I am married. I’m married to God.”

  After several months of good behavior, I finally earn my first overnight visit with my mother. While I was in Montrose, she’d filed for an order of emergency temporary custody of Joanne and me, and won. “You can’t go crying to Daddy anymore,” she’d gloated. “And his big fancy lawyer can’t save him now.”

  I know she doesn’t want me to come home, not even for a night, but she also doesn’t want to appear uncooperative to the counselor handling my case. So on a sunny afternoon, she comes with Joanne to pick me up.

  It’s surreal to walk freely through the parking lot to her car, and then to merge onto the highway. I’ve been fantasizing about this day for what seems like a lifetime—the first day in almost a year that I’ve been outside of an institution. But as I ride in the car with my mother and my eleven-year-old si
ster, I find myself estranged. I feel like an animal, some exotic thing being cautiously gauged by humans. I can almost hear their questions: Does she bite? Will she run? What exactly is she? But the animal itself doesn’t know the answers.

  We spend the day being careful with each other. Joanne makes a paper fortune-teller that predicts she will marry a boy named Joe. “Jo and Joe,” I say. Her face is so serious, even when she smiles. My mother busies herself, fluttering around the house as if she’s looking for something. We all know that this is temporary, that in a matter of hours I’ll be back to my life at Good Shepherd, a life distinctly separate from theirs.

  That night I’m a guest in my old bedroom. Our matching twin beds are still beside each other, and as we lie silently with the lights out, I hear my mother’s quick steps up and down the hall. I remember how we used to listen for our parents’ footsteps when we were younger, and how my stomach clenched when I heard them coming, and also when I didn’t. “Rita?” Joanne whispers into the

  darkness.

  “Yeah?”

  “I got your note.”

  “What note?”

  “The note you wrote in my loose-leaf a long time ago. The one that said to be happy.”

  I don’t want the tears, but they come anyway. I push my face into my pillow for a minute before I can speak. “Did you like it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m glad you got it.”

  She turns over in her bed. “So am I.”

  On a rare day trip to a park, I persuade one of my favorite staff members—a slender brown-skinned woman with a dazzling smile and a husband I’ve never met but refer to as Mr. Dad because I like to pretend that one day I’ll get out of Good Shepherd and go home to live with them—to let Melissa and me ride in the back of her pickup instead of on the bus with the rest of the girls. Melissa and I have been planning this for days, and all afternoon, while hot dogs sizzle in their skins and we dip our feet into the cool stony lake, I keep feeling like a dog on a leash, yearning for the field.