Let the Tornado Come: A Memoir

by Rita Zoey Chin

  In the truck bed on our way back to the center, the wind diving through my hair is euphoric. “Now?” Melissa asks at a red light. But I keep wanting a little bit more of that wind. “Not yet,” I say, waiting for the truck to accelerate again, closing my eyes again, tilting my head back, gulping up the rush. If I could just have this, I think. But it is a wind I can only borrow. And we are quickly heading back to the breezeless corridors, the long mirror with only our faces

  in it.

  At the next red light, I nod, “Now!” and Melissa and I spring out into the road. We run like fugitives through a maze of cars and into the woods. Twigs snap under our feet as we bolt between the trees as if we’re being chased. Our legs burn, our hearts pound. We run and run, until finally we make it to another road, our breath coming in short gasps. I stick out my thumb to hitchhike.

  Almost instantly a blue pickup stops. I get in first. Melissa pulls the door shut, and the driver, a graying black man, steps on the gas.

  “Where are you lovely ladies off to?” His breath smells like stale cigarettes.

  “That depends on where you’re going,” I say.

  “I’m actually headed to Virginia.”

  “Funny,” I say, nudging Melissa, “so are we.”

  He turns his head and gives me a once-over. “I think we can probably work something out.”

  “Just keep your eyes on the road,” Melissa says.

  The man chuckles deep in his chest, and it sounds like a cough. “I like a girl with spunk.”

  “Can I turn on the radio?” I ask.

  “Sure thing, sweetheart. You can turn any knob you like.”

  Melissa rolls her eyes, and I give her a half smile. Then Sting sings to the three of us about the “King of Pain.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  One night after a half hour of sleep, I bolted up with my heart clattering, as I’d been doing every night for months, but this time I was crying. I’d dreamed that I was trying to call Larry, but he’d changed his number, and I kept calling his office, and his assistant kept telling me he was operating, and I knew he wasn’t operating, and that he didn’t want to talk to me.

  I woke Larry. “I dreamed you didn’t love me anymore.” My voice was loud in the dark.

  He switched on his bedside lamp and blinked a few times to get used to the light. Then he turned to me, squinting, all sleepy and puzzled. “I’ll always love you.”

  “No matter what?”

  “No matter what.”

  “You’ll never leave me, no matter what I do?”

  “Never.”

  “What if I stole a whole bunch of stuff?”

  “I’d never leave you.”

  “What if I cheated on you?”

  “I wouldn’t leave you, but I’d be really mad.”

  “What if I got really ugly?”

  “You could never be ugly.”

  “Do you promise you won’t change your number?”

  “Of course not.” He laughed. “We have the same number.”

  I inserted myself deep into the crook of Larry’s arm. “Here,” I said, wrapping his arm around me like a shawl, cupping his hand against my chest, “keep me.” And I fell asleep.

  Larry was a particularly good sport about accompanying me to the location of the next panic remedy on my list: a Tong Ren healing class. Tong Ren was developed by an acupuncturist named Tom Tam, who claimed that by tapping different meridian points on a rubber doll—or voodoo doll, as he called it—roughly the size of Barbie, he could heal people of everything from a common cold to pancreatic cancer. The idea is based on energy healing through tapping into the collective unconscious with a magnetic hammer directed at different energy points, or “ouch points” on the doll, which correspond to a person’s illness.

  The room was full when we arrived, so we sat down in the back row. There were about sixty people there, some in wheelchairs, some clutching tightly the arms of loved ones, some with no apparent malady. In the center of the room stood Tom Tam, a slight man with graying hair and a youthful glint in his eye. He wore glasses and a mischievous smile, and he scanned the room shrewdly—noticing us right away—the way a comedian takes stock of an audience.

  But this was no comedy. People were sick, some dying, and we were all there for one reason: to feel better. The room had an air of excitement about it—our collective hope buzzing around the windows, the backs of chairs, the tops of heads. Tom started by congratulating the Patriots on a good game. People smiled and nodded, the way New Englanders do when you compliment their sports teams. And then Tom began at the end of the first row. “How can we help you today?” he asked. The woman, who couldn’t have been any older than I was, announced that she had just been diagnosed with breast cancer, and she didn’t know yet if it had spread. Tom and his crew—a group of eight men and women standing behind him—went to work, tapping on their dolls according to a meridian number Tom announced. The tapping noise was like rain pattering against the side of a house. Some of the tappers were smiling blissful smiles that seemed to be made of the same kind of excitement the room was made of. Others tapped more seriously.

  Tom went around the room this way, stopping at each person, giving everyone a chance to be healed. He seemed to be able to recognize anyone who had been there before, even if it was only once. “How’s the cancer?” he asked one woman. She said, “My doctor just told me I’m in remission,” and everyone clapped, and the room got even brighter, “but now I just have this headache,” so Tom Tam treated her for a headache, all of them whacking away at their dolls’ heads with their metal hammers. “How do you feel now? Warm?” he asked when they finished tapping. She answered yes.

  He did this each time, asking everyone how he or she felt after the tapping—“Warm? Tingly?”—and they all said yes. And in this way he moved through the rows, treating people for things as varied as arthritis, liver tumors, strokes, allergies, and even hemorrhoids. “How do you feel now?” he asked. “Warm? More good? More nice?” Yes, everyone said. More nice.

  When he got to me I had an immediate surge of regret. What if all that tapping actually worked? Was I ready, just like that, to have my panic hammered out of me? Suddenly, inexplicably, I wasn’t so sure.

  I once had a dream in which a man broke into my house. When he got to the threshold of my bedroom, I shot him. The bullet had mortally wounded him, so I laid him on my bed to die. Then I lay down beside him, and he began to speak to me. He told me about his life—about his secrets, his memories, his desires—and I said, “We are so alike.” We smiled at each other with the delight of recognition, and all I wanted to do was keep talking. But he was dying. And I wished I’d never pulled the trigger.

  “This your first time here?” Tom Tam said, looking at me.

  “Yes.”

  “How can I help you today?”

  “Actually,” I said, rubbing my palms on the tops of my thighs, “I’m just here to observe today.”

  “Oh,” he said, “you’re learning.”

  “Yes.”

  Larry shot me a bewildered look. But when I smiled at him and took his hand, and he smiled back at me, I knew he understood.

  I don’t know firsthand if Tong Ren works, but on that day I saw a woman with severe arthritis lift her arm straight out in front of her. “This is as far as it goes,” she said, straining. Tom Tam called out his formula of numbers, and he and his helpers eagerly got busy with their dolls. The room was quiet except for the tapping. When they were finished he asked the lady, “How you feel? Warm?” She answered yes, and he asked her to try lifting her arm again. This time she was able to lift it to her chin. The crowd gasped, then began clapping. Tom Tam clapped, too, looking very satisfied. It’s in her mind, I thought. She was able to lift it with the power of her mind.

  Though I believed in the healing force of energy, I also knew well the powers of the mind. And
maybe because I believed in this power, I didn’t want to abruptly depart from my panic like a passenger waving manically from the deck of a cruise ship to the one they left standing on the docks—because, as Tom Tam said, I was learning. And it seemed panic really had something to teach me. So I was going to try to listen, instead of simply bidding it a bon voyage and saying, That was weird. Now what’s for dinner?

  The question was, What was I supposed to learn? I realized then that I had been asking the wrong questions—questions like How can I get rid of this troublesome panic? Where can I find a good mother who bakes banana bread? How can I be guaranteed that nothing bad will happen to me, ever? But the question was simple: What can panic teach me? It seems to me that so much unhappiness in life comes not from a lack of answers, but from a lack of knowing the right questions to ask.

  On the phone with my friend Meg, a poet I met at a reading, I told her I thought panic might be a bird.

  “Write it to me,” she said.

  I hadn’t written in months, but I opened my notebook anyway.

  The bird is wet black, the size of a half-open fist. Sometimes it flutters in fits. Sometimes it leaps in fast explosions from low branches. Sometimes it sits out of sight, as high as the hawks will let it, watching. When it flies it slices the sky into triangles. Panes of glass. It is a smart bird, its sight like a heartbeat. There are days it watches me through my kitchen window and I can feel its feathers in my chest, its blood in my legs. Sometimes when the music’s on, I don’t notice the bird, which is a nonmusical bird, a bird that doesn’t glide, that doesn’t sing, but that is faithful, and that is, frankly, only trying to help.

  I still panicked—not that day, but the next. But to have a day free from it—one whole long splendid day—was a message of its own: I was heading in the right direction. Sometimes we don’t trust ourselves, so it’s easy to believe that the power to healing lies in someone else’s hands, just as the woman who couldn’t lift her arm perhaps thought, I didn’t lift my arm—Tom Tam and his group with the dolls and hammers did! But ultimately it doesn’t matter. Whether by the supernatural or by our own inner wisdom, our own vibrant wills, we can get better. For me, the act of searching for answers, of trying one thing and then another and then another, was more empowering than any other single thing, because I was taking control of my life, and that action stood in direct opposition to the helplessness of panic.

  Simply, we change by trying to change; we heal by trying to heal; we are strong when we stay faithful to those few words: I know what I need.

  THIRTY

  In addition to my cavaletti lessons with Gerta, I rode other horses with other instructors whenever I got the chance. There were jumping lessons that taught me to rise up out of the saddle and give the horse the reins and let myself get carried through the air. And there were trail rides into the mountains that taught me the many different sounds horse hooves can make against the earth—and that in the sport of riding, there should always be time to relax and meander through the trees.

  I was learning so much, and the more I learned, the more I kept coming back to dressage. The first time I heard the word dressage, I was in college, rehearsing lines for an acting class with a girl who lived in Belmont, the wealthy horse country of Maryland. She was a lovely girl—articulate and upbeat—and when she told me she “did dressage” with her horse, I didn’t want to admit I had no idea what that meant, though it sounded fancy, like the kind of thing a girl like me would never do. But as I stumbled somewhat accidentally into it as I learned to ride, I discovered that the history of dressage (derived from the French: to train) belies what one might think when watching the prancing of upper-level horses in competitive dressage: those dance-like movements are arguably more athletically demanding than any other equestrian sport, and their earliest uses were actually to prepare horses for war, through fostering obedience, strength, and agility. Dressage replicates movements horses make naturally in the wild—whether at play, under threat, or while courting. Ultimately, so much of dressage is based on balance: on the equilibrium and strength of both the horse and the rider to carry themselves separately and to work together as a team. And none of this can happen without the willingness of the horse, which is based on his trust of the rider.

  The earliest surviving documents on dressage come from the Greek master Xenophon, who advocated sympathetic training based on kindness and reward, a bedrock for an ideal practice: to combine what is best in the horse and best in the rider and cultivate this powerful harmony, this beautiful and unassailable force. Unfortunately, the reality of modern dressage is often quite different. But as I traveled around meeting horses and horse people, I didn’t fully understand this yet. I was still naïve, but full of verve and hope, and after six months of lessons on Danielle, I knew it was time: I was ready to find a horse of my own.

  I had planned to meet lots of horses before I made my choice, but it turned out there was only one, and he chose me: this spark-eyed chestnut looked at me—peered intently into my eyes—until I felt my world shift underneath me as if I were standing on the edge of a mountain. The first time I saw Claret, I fell in love. His face was marked by a white blaze shaped like an hourglass, and his sweeping back rose into high withers and a long neck. Not only was he beautiful but he was absolutely engaged in the world: he would paw the ground the minute you stopped paying attention to him and wasn’t shy about frisking a stranger’s pockets for treats. In those first few minutes he burned himself into me the way the shape of a light stays on the retina after you’ve closed your eyes. “Hi there,” I said, running my hand along his blaze. As if to answer, he pressed his nose into my hands, then resumed his frisking. When he found the pocket with the jelly beans, he rubbed at it with his lips. “You win,” I said, reaching in for the jelly beans, which he lifted gently, one at a time, from my hand.

  When I rode him for the first time, I knew he was special. Bigger than most of the other horses I’d ridden so far, he trotted smoothly. His canter was comfortable and deep—a fluid power—and even though we were moving in circles, to me it felt as if we were going somewhere.

  I already knew I wanted to bring him home. Gerta and I went out to his barn in New Hampshire to watch the vet conduct the prepurchase exam: a thorough physical examination that assesses a horse’s soundness and seeks to uncover any underlying conditions. “He’s a big boy,” the vet noted, as he put Claret on a lunge line to examine his trot and canter. When he asked him to canter, Claret gave a little squeal, then bucked high into the air. “Feeling good today, huh?” The vet laughed, and I was thrilled to see Claret’s spirit, right there—flashes of it igniting in the air above him. Throughout the exam, I kept noticing Claret’s eye on me, and I couldn’t help wondering if he was checking to see what I thought. But it wasn’t until the end of the exam, when the vet tranquilized him in order to take X-rays, that I understood how deeply this horse had gotten into me. Within seconds, Claret’s inquisitive eyes went sleepy, and his head drooped down into my arms. And as I held the weight of him, I felt the ache of responsibility you feel only for those you love, and I knew right then that I already belonged to Claret. I was his.

  A few weeks later, I officially made him mine and brought him home to a barn ten minutes from my house. Soon even those ten minutes seemed like too much distance between this magnificent creature and me.

  Despite all the lessons I’d taken over the last year, as it turned out, I still knew so little about horses. For starters, on the day I tried to bring Claret home, I realized I had no idea how to load a horse onto a trailer. I figured he’d simply waltz on, perhaps lured by a carrot or two, but even with Gerta attempting to wrangle him, he went in every direction except the trailer. It was only after a lot of angle calculation and strategic coaxing that he walked in. As I handed him the carrot, he looked around nervously, and I stroked his forehead.

  Once we arrived at the barn, I walked Claret outside and led him to the paddocks, then to th
e indoor arena, and he followed eagerly. As we explored, he put his nose on each new thing, sometimes pausing for a couple of seconds as he inhaled deeply before turning back to me to see where I’d lead him next. “That is your mounting block,” I told him. “That is your radio. That is your plastic chair.” I walked him back into the barn. “This is your stall,” I said, leading him in. He pressed a nostril between the bars separating the stalls and touched the nostril of the horse next door, and they breathed into each other for several seconds before Claret dismissed him and put his eyes back on me. Perhaps I should have felt fear, to stand in this small space with this relatively unknown and sizable animal, but I didn’t: instead, I felt longing. So I pressed my nose to Claret’s nostril like he’d done to the horse next door and I exhaled into it. Claret exhaled back, and his breath was warm and grassy and sweet, and we cycled through many breaths like this, unmoving except for the susurrus of these small waves between us. I could have spent the rest of the evening breathing into that velvety muzzle.

  Eventually, he began to eat his hay, but after each time he dove down to take a bite, he lifted his head and touched his nose to my palm before diving back for another bite. We played this game until it was dark, and it was clear that he wanted me there as badly as I wanted to stay. He was calm then, and happy, and even after I left him to go home, my mind kept tracing the white hourglass on his face, until everything—the moon, the porch light spilling onto the walk, the sheets on our bed—became a reflection of his face, of this horse who, although I didn’t know it yet, would change my life.