Let the Tornado Come: A Memoir

by Rita Zoey Chin

  But on Christmas Eve that year, when the town was cuffed in snow and the sky was the color of bathwater and the cathedral candles flickered in the muted light, we sang a song called “Would You Harbor Me?” It began, Would you harbor me? Would I harbor you? Would you harbor a Christian, a Muslim, a Jew? I held the program in my hand and felt the power of those questions, of what it means to harbor someone. And then a line I wasn’t prepared for came—Would you harbor a runaway woman, or child, a poet, a prophet . . . ?—and before I could get control of the maelstrom of emotion blossoming like a hydrogen bomb inside me, I was sobbing. A runaway. Every day of my life, since I’d first run out of my parents’ house, no matter where I was, no matter what I had or didn’t have, I was always that girl first, underneath it all, that unsure child looking for home. So I cried the kind of sobbing that racks the bones, deep and visceral, the kind that could go on for a very long time if you let it.

  And that was only the beginning of the service. Luckily, I managed to pull myself together, though not before people noticed. They were probably thinking, That girl has a laughing and crying problem. It wasn’t Erin’s turn to preach, so I watched the back of her head as she sat in the front pew. The minister began to deliver his sermon, which was about harboring each other in a sometimes cruel and unsafe world, and about how no one had harbored Mary and Joseph when Mary was in labor with Jesus, and I was thinking that harbor must be one of the most beautiful words of all, that to be harbored must be all a panicking person wants—or what anyone wants.

  Helen came bearing gifts that night—a small bottle of mandarin-flavored olive oil adorned with a red ribbon at its neck, and a collection of her favorite recipes printed on paper with little snowmen at the bottom. I gave her an assortment of rare teas and a book of poems. And it was warm and cozy, and the tree was lit with colored lights, and Larry was sitting in the next room reading a book, and I knew how lucky we were to be harbored there, in those glowing winter snapshots: people moving through rooms in a house in the soft light in a small town surrounded by hundreds of miles of snow. The picture was like one I imagined when I was on the streets, walking the neighborhoods at night, peering into people’s windows to see how they lived.

  Helen and I baked salmon with olive oil, lemon juice, and tarragon, topped with a shallot and caper crème fraîche. We sautéed whole young carrots in butter and honey, roasted sliced red peppers until they turned sweet, and whipped up a pot of good old-fashioned mashed potatoes. For dessert we caramelized pears with fresh maple yogurt. All my life I had been eating food, but now I was experiencing it—the fragrance of tarragon, the brightness of carrots with their tops still on, the sound of things bubbling in the pan.

  Later that night, as Larry and I headed up to bed, he stopped me in the foyer and gestured toward the long wood frame with three pictures of us from his fortieth birthday party. He pointed to the first one and said, “Do you see this?”

  “Yes.”

  “And this?” He pointed to the next one.

  “Yes.”

  “And this?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s us,” he said, smiling.

  Then he gave me a long kiss on my cheek and asked, “You know what this is?”

  “A kiss?”

  “It’s all the love in my heart, traveling up”—he ran his hand up his chest—“through my mouth, onto your skin, and down into your heart forever.”

  So many days we were lost to each other. So many days I felt closest to him in the mornings, just before I watched him drive away. But in that moment, I was harbored there, in his love.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  I have never seen lightning like this before. It’s as if the sky is raining lightning, bolt after violet bolt of it zagging down to the horizon. Sometimes there are several bolts at once, and they make a thin buzzing sound. I can feel them; they raise the hairs on my arms. I walked to this wooden split-rail fence on the edge of this country road from one of Rick’s friends’ houses. We’re somewhere in the middle of Reston, Virginia, which means nothing to me. But I can tell you about the air here, which is warm and very still. It smells of grass and gravel. Back at Rick’s friend’s house, they’re smoking PCP. I decided not to smoke today because every time I do I spend hours wondering if I will ever get my mind back. So I left them—Rick, who was rumbling about the difference between good beer and elephant piss; his friend Rob, who had gone mute and bug-eyed from the drugs; and Gina, who was casually smoking a cigarette and who never seems to lose her cool under any circumstance—and now there is this curtain of lightning at the edge of the field. And there are horses in the field. They keep erupting into frantic bursts, bolting as a herd, then halting and standing very close to each other. When they gallop, their manes and tails fly, and their hooves are thunder. But the sky is not thundering. And it’s not raining. It’s all lightning—these surges spilling from the ether like veins. I reach my hand out, over the fence, toward the horses, toward the lightning. I know I should take cover, but I can’t move—maybe because this is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.

  Though Rick never tells us how much money he gets for Gina and me, I overhear him on the phone one night referring to us as “a ticket to the Virgin Islands.” He laughs. “Did you hear that? Virgin.”

  I remind myself that the sex is better than any institution, that at least now I can have fresh air whenever I want. Only, I never get outside much. Gina works lunch shifts as a waitress, and I spend most days on the mattress doing bong hits and writing on my body. On Gina’s off days, we usually get high, and even if we go outside then, the trees and sky and birds are too far away for me to feel. Soon everything begins to blur together—the drugs, the sex, the bedroom window and its sharp light gathering at the edge of our mattress, the radio feeding me music—and I feel trapped in that blur, indistinct, shrinking.

  I decide to leave. I ask Gina for a ride, and she puts her arm around me. “Sure, I’ll give you a lift.”

  When Gina asks me where I want to go, I say Rockville because I don’t know where else to go. We drive most of the way in silence.

  It starts to rain. I turn to look at Gina. Her profile—her strong Greek nose, her smooth skin and deep dimple—is lovely and familiar. “I’m going to miss you,” I say. “And I really appreciate all you’ve done for me.”

  “I’m going to miss you, too.” She glances at me, then back to the road. “But this isn’t goodbye forever. I’m going to give you my mom’s number, so you always know how to find me.”

  I try to find comfort in this, but I know the odds: I’ll probably never see her again, just as I’ll probably never see my friend Cindy or my old friend Dawn or Afshin or the donut guy or so many people, each one eclipsed by the next. So we drive in the rain, and I write I love you on a small scrap of paper, which I leave on the seat of her car.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  “Dance with me.” Larry and I were getting ready for bed, and I’d put some music on. “C’mon,” I said, extending my hand and swaying my hips.

  Larry stood as if he were waiting to jaywalk across a busy street, unsure about whether he should move, so I took the towel from his hands and drew it around his waist, then pulled him toward me. “C’mon.”

  As Prince sang sultrily about pink cashmere, I let the towel drop and, with my arms wrapped around him, pulled him the rest of the way toward me. But as I tried to entice Larry into my rhythm, his hips stayed locked, and something in his eyes was tremulous: it was the unmistakable look of fear.

  “It’s okay,” I said, releasing him. “We don’t have to dance.”

  And I stepped back, and neither of us moved for several long seconds, while Prince wailed passionately and the towel lay strewn, a gash of white, on the floor.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  Larry once told me about an experience he’d had as a boy on the playground, shortly after he came to the States fro
m Taiwan. With his clean white shoes, he climbed the ladder to the slide again and again so that the slick metal could send him flying. He was having fun, enjoying those few seconds when he let go of his body and let the force of gravity carry him, until a group of kids surrounded him before he could climb back up another time. They were speaking to him, at first one at a time, then all at once, their voices climbing over one another in their bulbous and unfamiliar language. Larry couldn’t tell from their eyes or their postures what they wanted, what they were trying to convey, so he repeated over and over the only sentence he knew: I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know. Then he ran away from them.

  Sometimes I wondered if that’s how he felt around me. I wondered if my language, particularly the language of my body, was foreign to him—if my passion was as intimidating, as demanding, as a group of hungry children.

  When it was finally time to see the therapist who’d appeared on Oprah—let’s call him Opther—I was pretty disenchanted with therapists. This one was an inscrutable, mild-mannered man somewhere in his fifties. He had pale, receding hair and large eighties-style glasses. I had to take a winding country road to get there. It was dark already.

  Panic drove with me but stayed in the backseat, pecking at me every now and then. I have no time for you right now, I told it. I’m trying to get somewhere. And like me, it was waiting to see what would come next.

  Opther invited me to sit on a couch, where he sat across from me in a chair, behind which was a massage table. I gave him the five-minute rundown of my recent history with panic disorder, followed by the five-minute I-still-think-I-may-have-a-heart-disorder disclaimer, followed by the five-minute snapshot of my childhood. And I concluded with a five-minute explanation of my marriage: “It’s like we’re both stuck. I used to be the one to come with the stick and yank him from the quicksand, but now we’re both sinking. And we rarely have sex.”

  “Well, you have a lot of reasons to be anxious,” Opther said. “And a lack of sexual connection is certainly one. Freud spoke about the link between sex and anxiety.”

  “What sexual link didn’t Freud speak about?” I said jokingly, but Opther didn’t laugh.

  “Your anxiety has been with you a long time,” he said. “You’ve been on high alert since you were a kid. You learned that being in a relaxed state isn’t safe, because you had to keep your guard up. Look at your breathing now, for instance. It’s shallow. Anxious people aren’t deep breathers.”

  I tried to take a deep breath, but he was right: it was all caught up in my throat. Noticing this made me more anxious.

  “My approach to anxiety is to remind the body what it’s like to be in a relaxed state—to teach the body that it’s not only safe, but a natural state of being. Look at a baby—you throw it up in the air, and it giggles with joy without a thought of falling, but over time our environment degrades that trust. And we have to teach the body to regain it.”

  I liked Opther. “How do we do that?” I asked.

  “We start with breathing. Now remember, that primal part of your brain—”

  “The amygdala?”

  “Yes, the amygdala. It’s been in overdrive for a while now, and that’s probably altered the way your brain perceives ordinary stimuli, which is why everything seems dangerous. With a hyperactive amygdala, the world is a terrifying place.”

  “So I’m not crazy for being scared of the shower?”

  “Not at all. In fact, claustrophobia, as well as agoraphobia, is common for people with panic disorder. Checkout lines, exercise, hypoglycemia—these can all be pretty scary things.”

  “Yes, yes—I’m afraid of all of them!”

  Opther smiled. “In the world of anxiety, you’re actually pretty normal.”

  “Do you think medication is the only way to fix my brain?”

  “No. Definitely not.”

  “But if my brain chemistry has changed, what if I can never get it back to how it was before? What if I’m stuck like this forever?” I could feel the panic starting. “I failed CBT, you know.”

  “That’s why we’re going to remind your body to relax.” He nodded his head, so I nodded mine, too. “Nobody ever has to be stuck this way.”

  Opther had me lie on my back on his table. It wobbled when I got on, and I was worried it would break and spill me to the floor.

  “Are you okay with touch?” he asked.

  “Sure,” I said, lying very still, unsure what to expect.

  He placed his hand on my abdomen. His touch was warm, and I could feel it generating energy there. “Now I want you to breathe into my hand.”

  I tried to breathe deeply, but the air didn’t make it past my top rib.

  “Just take your time,” he said. “Breathe into my hand.”

  I tried again, but no dice. How hard it was to simply breathe.

  He presided over me like a wizard, his hand sure. “You’re safe now. You can relax.”

  Eventually the breathing came deeper, and I could feel my lungs expanding. At the same time, a terror skittered through me. “I’m scared,” I said. And the urgency of my voice scared me more.

  “What are you scared of?”

  “I’m scared my lungs will explode if I keep breathing like this.”

  “Impossible. Remember, your body has forgotten what this feels like, so it’ll feel strange at first.”

  “But I really think my lungs might pop.”

  “No. Your body needs to remember this, so just try to go with it. This is your life force. Let the air come in.”

  I opened my eyes and gave him the imperative of my gaze. “Do you promise I’m safe?”

  He placed his other hand over my sternum. “I promise.”

  His touch felt like a sun-bright stream. It was moving through me, this soft force. And he kept his hands on me, and the table wobbled a little as I breathed, but I kept breathing, thinking how funny it was that he would have a wobbly table for us anxious types, but I could hear his voice saying I was safe, and it felt like a cocoon around me, and then suddenly I was crying, and he was telling me it was good to cry, and I couldn’t believe how many tears there were, how fast and silently they came. And he stood there, and he kept his hands on me, and turned me into a stream.

  THIRTY-SIX

  I’m going on a date. This tall blond named Bruce saw me hanging around outside the 7-Eleven and asked me if I wanted to go see a movie, so of course I said yes. Dates are something that pretty girls in novels have, but not me. They’re the same girls who get walked to the front doors of their houses on lush summer nights and who smell like flowers and shampoo and who get kissed by wide-eyed football players beneath their porch lights. They’re the same girls who wear pink puffy ski jackets and drink hot chocolate by fireplaces in ski lodges. They have sweet sixteen parties and straight teeth and confidence. They have homes.

  Bruce has very long arms. He wears his Converse sneakers loosely tied and his hair long in the back and spiked on top. I don’t mind that he doesn’t get us any popcorn or candy, or even that he’s chosen the last row. I’m still happy to be sitting in the theater, waiting for the rumble of the big screen: Back to the Future, starring Michael J. Fox, the kind of guy who would definitely walk a date to her door. But when the theater goes dark and the previews start, Bruce wants to make out. I let him fish his tongue around in my mouth for a few minutes, but when the previews end, I turn back to the screen. Bruce grabs the back of my head and pulls it toward him again.

  I resist. “Can’t we watch the movie?”

  “Yeah,” he says, “sure.” But a minute later, he grabs my hand and puts it on his cock, which he’s popped out through the fly of his pants. “Go ahead and suck it,” he whispers, trying to push my head down.

  “I want to watch the movie,” I whisper, pulling away.

  “Just suck it first.”

  I look out at the rows of
dark heads, all poised forward. Nobody else is pushing anyone else’s head down. Shame sears my throat. “I just wanted to watch the movie,” I say, my voice louder than I expect. Then I get up and leave.

  Near the popcorn, I hear a voice behind my shoulder. “Are you all right?” The voice is sweet, like a child’s.

  I turn to see a couple standing arm in arm. “We saw you in there with that guy,” the woman says. Her eyes are pale blue, concerned.

  “I’m okay. He was just a jerk.”

  “Where do you live?” the woman asks. “Do you need a ride?”

  I look down at my jeans. I’ve been wearing them for weeks, and there’s a blotch of pizza sauce on my right thigh. “I’m kind of between places right now.”

  She gives me a long, considered look, and for a moment I think she sees me—I mean, really sees me. “Bader,” she gives her boyfriend’s arm a little tug, “I think she should come with us.”

  His eyes are playful, his smile sweet. They are both like children. And I am going home with them.

  The first thing Giselle does when we get to the apartment is heat up a can of New England clam chowder. She sits and watches me for a few minutes until Bader puts on music and starts twirling her around the living room to Madonna’s “Lucky Star.”

  Giselle moved here from France three years ago and works as a translator for a company with letters for a name; Bader is here from Kuwait on a six-month visa, along with several of his friends who all live in the same apartment complex. Some of them work as firefighters, but many, including Bader, are looking for jobs. Bader’s apartment is a one-bedroom, so I sleep on the sofa. Giselle spends weekends there, and then she and Bader are always giggling. Neither of them asks me about my life, and Bader never asks me for money or how long I plan on staying. I feel like a stray dog, and I want to nuzzle them both.