Let the Tornado Come: A Memoir

by Rita Zoey Chin

  THIRTY-ONE

  Our driver stops in Fairfax and parks his truck behind a building. Without fanfare, he climbs on top of me in the cramped front seat while Melissa sits motionless at my side. It doesn’t take long, and then we’re standing with our bags on a street in Virginia.

  “Are you okay?” Melissa asks. We start walking.

  “Yeah, I’m fine. You do what you gotta do,” I tell her, trying to sound tough and worldly. I look at her and realize I’ve never really noticed how pretty she is, probably because her Mohawk gets most of the attention. On her forehead, a single curl hangs down and curves to the right, and a purple feather dangles from her left ear.

  We walk and walk. As we pass a cacophony of catcalls from a construction crew, one of the workers leaves his pride to approach us. He pulls off his hard hat, and a wavy blond mane falls to his shoulders.

  “Excuse me, but I just had to come over and say that you are the sexiest woman I’ve ever seen with a Mohawk—in fact, the only sexy woman I’ve seen with a Mohawk.”

  “You got a razor? I’d be happy to give you one of your own,” Melissa says.

  I hold out my hand. “I’m Roxanne, and this is my friend Anastasia.”

  His hand is callused and dusty. “I’m Rick, and this is your lucky day.”

  As we walk the streets waiting for Rick to finish his work, Melissa looks at me crossly. “Anastasia?”

  “What’s wrong with Anastasia?”

  “Well, for one, it’s like twenty-seven syllables long. Why couldn’t you have given me a normal name?”

  Rick brings us to his two-bedroom apartment, where he lives with his wife, Lynn, and a girl named Gina, a spunky twenty-year-old with a tan and frosty golden hair. “Just until I can get my shit together,” she tells us. Her eyes are small but gleaming, her smile wide and eager.

  She invites Melissa and me to freshen up in her room, where there’s a small bathroom. The only furniture is a mattress with the sheets crumpled half off. Beside it towers a purple bong, and beside that is an empty container of butter pecan ice cream tipped on its side. There are piles of clothes and a few opened duffel bags strewn around.

  “So Rick and his wife just let you stay here?” I ask.

  “Yeah, but I have to fuck them.” Gina pulls off her T-shirt and starts washing her face at the sink.

  “Both?”

  “Yep, and his stupid ‘associates.’ ” She pulls on a lavender lace camisole, which glows against her tan. “But, like I said, it’s just until I can get my shit together.”

  Melissa is by the window, looking out. I realize I’ve made a mistake to take her with me.

  That night, Rick takes us to the house of his friend Rob, a tall, blunt-faced fellow with a puffy wheat-colored mustache and a space between his two front teeth. He pulls out five bottles of beer from his refrigerator and hands one to each of us, then looks us over. “You’re all right, Rick, you know that? You are aaall riiight, my man.”

  Rick nods his head. “Hey, look, Gina and Ana here will party with you tonight. How’s that?”

  “What about this one here?” Rob asks, pointing at me.

  “She’s not on the menu this evening.”

  “Not on the menu, huh?”

  “Nope,” Rick says unapologetically. He’s cleaned up nicely from his day job: his hair looks swept off the set of a Pert commercial, and his tight jeans, cowboy boots, and height remind me of the Marlboro Man. Before we left his apartment, he’d pulled out some black-and-white head shots of himself and presented them to us. “I’m an actor,” he announced. And though he admitted to never having actually landed a part, he told us, “Man, I’m acting all day, every day. And when they call me, I’ll be ready.”

  “Okay, ladies, it looks like just the three of us then,” Rob says, putting his arms around Gina and Melissa. “Let’s go on back and have some fun.” Gina looks at me and winks, then rolls her eyes, so I roll mine in solidarity. Melissa doesn’t look at me at all.

  And the three of them disappear behind a dark wood door.

  Rick knocks back his second beer. I finish mine, too, and turn on the stereo. I start to dance. Nothing can ever be wrong, I think, if you’re dancing. So I keep dancing, while Rick watches.

  When the bedroom door opens an hour later and the girls walk out, I go to them. Gina’s hair has lost its volume, Melissa’s black eyeliner is smudged, and their lipstick has been rubbed away. Rob follows them out, wearing only a pair of jeans. His hairy chest is flabby, his belly button deep. As I follow Gina and Melissa into the bathroom, I catch Rob slipping money into Rick’s hand. I close the bathroom door behind us.

  “Are you guys okay?” I feel as if they’ve traveled to the moon and back without me.

  Gina sits on the toilet while Melissa hunches over the sink and swishes water in her mouth, spitting out forcefully each time.

  “Sure, we’re fine. Right, babe?” Gina looks up at Melissa.

  Melissa spits again. “Yeah, we’re fine.”

  Gina stands up and zips her jeans. In the toilet, a stream of blood swirls down, bright red.

  The next day, Rick pulls me outside. “Ana’s gotta go.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She’s gonna drag you down,” he says, flicking his cigarette ash into the grass.

  “If you want us to leave, that’s fine. But we came together, and we’ll leave together.”

  “Listen, what do you think? I’m stupid? You guys have the word runaway written all over you. I could go to jail for having you here. And everywhere you go, she’ll be sticking out like a sore thumb. I can’t take that kind of risk.” He hands me a cigarette, and I lean into the flame.

  “And if you were smart, you wouldn’t take that risk, either. You have a chance without her, but with her, you’ve got nothing.”

  The image of her spitting into the sink the night before is burned into my mind. “How much nothing, then, did she make you last night for fucking your friend?”

  “That’s not the point. The point is that she’s gonna get you both caught. Besides, you’d be doing her a favor. She’s not cut out for this—and you know it. If you were really her friend, you’d let her go.”

  I know he’s right. I know that when we jumped out of the back of that truck, this wasn’t what Melissa was envisioning.

  I come in and sit beside her. She looks pale. “Too much beer last night?” I ask.

  “No, I’m fine. Just a little tired.”

  I poke at the bottom of my shoe with my finger. “I don’t know how to say this.”

  “You think we should split up.”

  Her impassive delivery surprises me. “It’s just that they’re going to be looking for the two of us together, you know?”

  “I know.”

  “And besides, I don’t think this is good for you. You shouldn’t have had to do what you did last night.”

  “I did what I wanted to do,” Melissa says flatly.

  “I know, but you’re probably making a big mistake. I mean, you don’t have to run. You’ve got this great dad who loves you. Sure, he’s insanely overprotective, but all you have to do is put in a little more time at Good Shepherd and then you’ll be free. It’s different for me. I belong to the courts now, and my dad’s in jail, and my mother hates me. But if I had what you have, I wouldn’t be here right now.”

  Melissa’s toughness crumbles and she begins to cry. “I’m ready to go home.” She presses her face into her hands. “I want to go home.”

  So Rick takes her home, and when he comes back, he tells me to take my pants off. He does the same, then climbs on top of me on Gina’s mattress, while his wife sleeps in the next room.

  With Melissa gone, the four of us establish a rhythm. Rick goes off to his construction job during the day, while his wife spends most mornings and afternoons napping. Gina and I share the mattress, s
leep late, smoke weed, and peer into the refrigerator, which is usually empty. Sometimes we go to the gym at the center of the apartment complex and sit stoned in the hot tub for hours. When she isn’t home, I write. I write on spare scraps of paper, torn pieces of grocery bags, the soles of my shoes, the insides of my arms. I write poems about longing and numbness and the sky. I write about trees. I write letters to my sister and ask her how school is and if she likes any boys. I write to my father, who’s in Rikers Island prison for embezzling money from the newspaper he worked for as an advertising manager, and I ask him when he’s getting out, even though I don’t have his address. I mail nothing. My red purse fills with scraps.

  I’ve just smoked greens. Parsley dipped in PCP. Sweetly chemical, smoother than pot, it’s making the world turn to cotton. Walking is a moon-bounce. My sight is as if through the cardboard tube inside wrapping paper. A Dire Straits song is on the radio, and the radio isn’t here because space keeps pushing it back and back until it’s a small sound cowering in the corner of the room, in the corner of the cottony universe. Air is too heavy, my head is too big, the ground is too soft. Pushing me down like a thumbtack. I’m forgetting who I am. Gina, I’m scared. Help me, please. “You’re okay.” No, I think I’m dying. Gina, I’m dying. And I don’t even know who I am anymore. “You’re Roxanne, and you’re just high.” No I’m not. You don’t even know my name. “It’s okay, I don’t need to know your name. I see your spirit, girl.” But I can’t breathe. Please, someone call an ambulance. “You better shut her the fuck up, Gina—I’m not messing around.” “Why don’t you shut up, Rick? You’re only making it worse. She needs peace.” “I’ll give her a piece all right.” Gina, I’m dying. “You’re going to be fine. Just breathe.” But my heart is beating too fast. Feel it, feel it. It’s beating too fast. A hand like a blanket on my chest. “Your heart is fine.” No, it’s out of control. It’s going to explode. “Just breathe. You’re just high. You’re gonna come down, I promise.” I’m losing my mind. “No, it’s all here. Just breathe. You’re safe.” Her voice is another song. Her hand is stroking my hair. Once my mother stroked my hair in a hospital. The scars on my leg. Do you see the scars? “Yes, and I like your scars.” The hand stays at my head. Please don’t ever leave me. Let me stay here with my head in your lap. When I close my eyes, the faces are hideous, monsters morphing into monsters. Jagged teeth, fat foreheads, eyes stretching long-ways, dripping into chattering mouths, jagged teeth. This world is so scary. Please tell me you love me.

  “I love you.”

  THIRTY-TWO

  On those first days I rode Claret after I brought him home, those bright October afternoons when the scent of burning wood traced the air and shadows turned to labyrinths, it seemed like nothing could go wrong. Gerta stood in the corner of the arena and called out instructions—“ask more with your leg, tighten up your reins, pull your right shoulder back”—which I followed. She taught me, and Claret taught me, and the two of us trotted and cantered and made figure eights and serpentines and were clumsy and occasionally graceful, and with each day, we were learning the way each other’s body moved. Claret was a generous but exacting teacher: he did what I asked, but if I asked incorrectly, he let me know. For instance, if, from a halt, I asked him to walk forward while I was leaning forward in the saddle, he’d take a few steps backwards until I sat up straight. If I squeezed too hard with my thighs in the canter, he stopped cantering. If I didn’t use my inside leg to mark the curves of a circle, our circle turned into something of a parallelogram. But when I asked correctly—when in those brief moments I managed to get the orchestra of all my body parts in harmony—Claret became a virtuoso. What an honor it was to learn from him, to receive, each day, the gift of his back.

  Outside of work, Claret quickly revealed the full sass of his mischievous nature. For instance, he clearly found it amusing to unzip my jacket with his lips while I curried his neck. He rarely missed an opportunity to snap the elastic band of my riding pants against my back while I bent over to pick his feet, or to generally pick up anything he could reach and drop it dramatically to the ground—hoof picks, riding gloves, brushes, girths, saddle pads, buckets, you name it. He once managed to extract my keys from my pocket, then stretched his neck way up as I attempted to reach for them and shook them like a tambourine over my head. In the paddock, he dug holes, dismantled the fencing so that he could play with the mare in the next paddock, and one afternoon, after Gerta had carefully walked through the paddocks to clear them of rocks, Claret entertained himself by reaching his head through the fence railings and pulling every last rock out of the bucket she’d left them in. He was a silly boy. He made me laugh, and he also exasperated me. But when I looked at him to try to read that mind of his, he was often looking back at me, almost as if I were the one he was studying instead of the other way around.

  We were students of each other, Claret and I. And he was teaching me more than I’d ever expected to learn—not only about riding, but about love.

  And then there were the beginnings that marked a time when things would start to fall apart—those days that would test my limited understanding of horses and the mettle of my commitment to Claret. One of those days was meant to be bucolic: a trail ride with a fellow rider at the barn, Beth, and her semiretired Thoroughbred. After all that indoor dressage work, I was excited to be doing something fun. But a few minutes into the trail, Claret started shaking his head rapidly up and down, which made it difficult for me to keep hold of the reins. I didn’t know why he was doing this, though if I’d had to guess, I would have said he was staging a protest. Against what, I didn’t know. But as he flicked his head about, I could feel his back stiffening beneath the saddle, and then, in an instant, we both noticed a white drainage pipe jutting out from some rocks. Before I could gather the reins, he spooked at it and began backing up. And in his panic, he wasn’t thinking about the steep ditch I knew was right behind us. “Stop!” I ordered ineffectually, not being an experienced enough rider to know how to command this with my body. He took another step back, and I could feel his hind legs starting to slip. “Kick him!” Beth yelled. “Hard!”

  With both legs I kicked him forward, out of the ditch. At that point, neither of us was happy. My hands were trembling, and Claret was shaking his head up and down again, and I told Beth that I wanted to turn around and go back to the barn.

  “Don’t be silly,” she said. “You’re going to be fine.”

  “I really don’t think he wants to do this,” I said. “And I don’t think I’m ready to handle him out in the woods by myself.”

  “Why don’t we switch?” she suggested. You take my horse, and I’ll ride Claret.”

  Beth was a far more experienced rider than I was, and her horse was a calm fellow, so I agreed. But as soon as she got on Claret, I could tell he was even less happy. He began to shake his head more violently, stopping only to swish his tail. “Really, Beth, I think we should go back.”

  “He’s going to be fine, you’ll see. He just needs a minute to adjust to a new person on his back.”

  But as each minute piled onto the next, Claret’s displeasure became indisputable. Frustrated, Beth gave him a smack with her whip. “I’m not your mommy,” she said. “You can’t get away with this with me!” And in an eruptive response, Claret spun around. He backed her forcefully into a tree, then spun around again.

  “Oh my God, are you okay?” I asked.

  “I’m fine,” she said, but she didn’t look fine. Her face was pale and glistening with sweat, her eyes wide with fear.

  I had the sense that I should get back on Claret, but I didn’t have the courage, so instead I led the way back to the barn on her horse, while she and Claret followed. Back in his stall, I stood beside him and watched him eat hay as if nothing had happened. But I felt defeated. “What was that out there?” I asked. Claret chewed imperviously. “I just don’t know what I’m doing,” I said. “I don’t know what you ne
ed.” He didn’t stop chewing, but he lifted his head and put his nose on my shoulder, and he held it there, and I could feel his chewing in my ear, as if it were happening inside my own head.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Determined to learn whatever panic had to teach me, I started carrying around a book by Rilke called Letters to a Young Poet. Since I had written my first poem, a third-grade ode to the stars, I had wanted to be a poet. I had always been drawn to the way poems can hold the world in a few lines, the way poetry can change the existence of things simply by looking at them, the way it can change the heart. As I read Rilke’s letters, it was as if I could feel Rilke speaking to me. Of all the volumes of psychology books and cure-your-panic-now books, this turned out to be the book I took with me wherever I went. I underlined my favorite passages and reread them over and over. “Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.” I could feel Rilke’s words taking root inside me. And in the moments when I felt the most despair, those lines made me feel like I could be brave.

  Larry and I started going to the UU church fairly regularly. Sometimes I would start laughing when we had to sing hymns—the kind of inappropriate laughter that can only happen in a church or in the middle of a college lecture or some other holy place, that silent laughter that ravages your body and sucks your breath away so that you’re shaking and red with it—because I was a very bad singer, and because I was singing badly about such joyous things, and because the women behind me were singing in their joyous falsettos. So I kind of lost it when it was time to sing, as in I came undone, as in I could not stop laughing. Larry would sometimes laugh, too, though always a little uncomfortably—and who can blame him?—but other times he’d keep on singing imperviously, almost as off-key as I was, which only made me laugh harder.