Let the Tornado Come: A Memoir

by Rita Zoey Chin

  “Yes?” I said, smiling. “Can I help you?” He did that sometimes, just looked at me as if he were on the verge of speaking, as if all his words were collecting there, just behind the dam of his throat.

  “I’m glad you’re home,” he said.

  “You know, there was a moment, up on the mountain at Bread Loaf, when I got overwhelmed. It was all so intense, and parts of it reminded me of being in those institutions when I was younger, all crammed in with strangers, and suddenly I had this urge to leave. I felt like a runaway all over again.” I laughed. “But you know what kept me there, in that moment? Why I stayed?”

  Larry looked at me tenderly. “Why?”

  “Because I had your letters to open.”

  I had a dream that Larry and I were going on a bicycle ride. At first I was having some difficulty with my bike—the shocks were too stiff and the seat was too high and the gear shifters were sticking—so we pulled into a parking lot where, by our good fortune, we happened upon a bike repair crew. They took out their wrenches and screwdrivers and went assiduously to work. “Here, try it now,” they said. I sat down in the seat, and the bike fit my body like the hug of an old friend. I bounced up and down, the shocks yielding. “It’s perfect,” I declared. Larry was beside me on his, waiting. “I’m ready,” I said, excited for the adventure we were about embark upon together. We were going to take the road for all it was worth, he and I. We were going to coast down hills and feel the wind fluttering past. We were going to slow down sometimes and talk, just the two of us against a scrim of fog with the scent of the ocean in the distance. We began to pedal, and suddenly Larry started going very fast. He thought it was a race. It was the fastest anyone had ridden a bicycle in the history of bicycles—so fast that he lifted off the ground. And suddenly we were in this very tall building, in a room one hundred feet to the top, and Larry kept ascending, almost to the ceiling by then in a magnificent arc, and I couldn’t believe what he was doing—he was heading straight for the windows. “What the fuck!” I yelled. Larry shattered the windows. I watched the impact hurt him—I could see the force of it temporarily stop him, the glass lacerating his face—but he kept going. He was in the air, at the apex now, so high up, flying over the grass, which turned out to be our own yard. He was coming down the arc’s other side, heading toward the neighbors’ property. I couldn’t reach him; I couldn’t stop it. I felt my organs seize as he came down and crashed into the fence.

  “We have to talk.”

  Larry was on the couch, reviewing a legal case for which he would serve as a medical expert. He was surrounded by pages and pages of medical records.

  I’d seen him on the witness stand once, when one of his cases had gone to trial. “No,” he was saying, “it is not below standard of care because this is an expected complication. It is well known than an intracerebral hemorrhage can occur from placement of an ICP monitor.” As he calmly and eloquently answered each question, I knew that he held the patient’s entire medical history in his mind.

  He took a stack of pages off the couch and placed them down on the floor, then looked up at me expectantly. I sat down beside him and told him about my dream.

  “That’s weird,” he said.

  “I know. But I can’t stop thinking about it.”

  He took my hand. “It was just a dream.”

  “But it feels real.” I wrapped both of my hands around his.

  “How?”

  “It doesn’t feel like we’re pedaling together.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “In life.”

  Larry adjusted his glasses with his free hand. “I think we’re pedaling together.”

  And I realized then that the unspoken deal we’d made in the beginning of our relationship would not hold. I couldn’t go on pretending that I was only certain parts of myself, though for years that’s exactly what I’d done. I’d willingly tried to erase any part of my life I thought Larry might find unsavory or intimidating—in the name of innocence I did this, so that we could both clutch it for our own—but we are all of our lives, and I was beginning to understand that if innocence truly exists, then it can never really be lost.

  “You don’t know me.”

  “Of course I know you.”

  “You don’t know about my past.”

  “I know you now. You’re beautiful.”

  “Who I am now is because of my past. And if I can’t tell you my story, how can you really know me?”

  “I think that’s a fundamental difference between us. You want to know things. And I don’t.”

  “But that’s not true. You want to know everything. You know more than anyone I’ve ever met.”

  “Bad things, I mean. I admit, your past scares me.”

  I let his hand go. “Sometimes we have to be more than our fears.”

  One evening while I was watching a fire climb the back of our fireplace, I was thinking about how lucky I was to have the life I had. If you would have asked me as a runaway what I was running for, I would have said this, this life, this kind and steady man, these sweet dogs, this house, this fire. There wasn’t a day of my life that I didn’t feel grateful, if for nothing else than to simply be alive. And as I was thinking about these things—about how I finally had love, had a safe life, the kind of life I used to imagine the people in L.L. Bean Christmas catalogs had—I heard a voice ring clearly in my mind: Too bad you will leave him. The clarity and unexpectedness of that voice, and the words it spoke, jarred me for days. No, I wanted to argue with it, I will never leave him.

  Thoreau writes, “I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks, who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering; which word is beautifully derived ‘from idle people who roved about the country, in the middle ages, and asked charity, under pretence of going à la sainte terre’—to the holy land, till the children exclaimed, ‘There goes a sainte-terrer,’ a saunterer—a holy-lander. . . . Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere.”

  Safety is largely an illusion, and panic knows this. Panic disorder happens when this knowledge becomes unbalanced, when we apply all of our grit and muscle to railing against our own inexorable lack of control. I had always rejected my mother’s saying, “Man plans, God laughs,” but I was starting to see a wisdom in it. On the run, I’d never had the luxury of planning. Sometimes there were beautiful moments, and sometimes ugly ones. And after each, I moved forward with a kind of wonder over it all, wanting to know what would happen next. Life was a series of small choices, one by one—which street to walk down, which car to get into, which candy to buy with the change at the bottom of my purse—and without a map of my future, it was relatively easy to shake off the days when the road didn’t lead where I hoped it would. Panic, I’d found, had been like that; it was only when I surrendered to it that I started to become free.

  So after days of railing against that matter-of-fact voice that told me I would leave my husband, I neither rejected nor accepted it. I simply shrunk the scale: each day I would make a choice. And I would be grateful for my home, knowing also that there was a truth to Thoreau’s words, that in some ways, when we are present, when we abide by ourselves and our own lives, we can be equally at home anywhere.

  FIFTY

  Though things went steadily and unforeseeably downhill during our time at Gerta’s barn, at the end of our time there, after I decided to leave, my relationship with Claret deepened. And we began again.

  I was grateful to the horses I’d known before Claret for what they gave me, but it was Claret who whinnied for me when he recognized the sound of my car pulling up; it was Claret who nickered for me every time I walked through the barn doors, every time he heard my voice. While all the other horses stood quietly
in their stalls, it was always Claret shifting around to see me, to call out to me. And it was Claret who taught me that we could trust each other during the afternoons I spent walking with him through the pastures as he grazed, working the currycomb into his neck and back, feeding him peppermints and letting him lick the sugar off my palms. He taught me balance and strength through hours of training my body to follow his movements. He taught me focus as I repeatedly refined my communication during the different exercises I did with him. And he taught me, when I finally did fall off, how to brush the dirt away and get back on again: as I sat up on the ground after a sudden and hard landing on my back, Claret walked over to me. I was crying by then at the shock of it, quick silent tears despite my will not to cry, and Claret, who had originally spooked at the sound of ice falling off the roof and sent us both flying in different directions, gently put his nose down on the top of my helmet. He stood there quietly for a minute, and I felt his warm breath on my face, and I stopped crying, and I righted myself, and I climbed up onto his back again.

  By demanding my full presence, Claret taught me a calm and strength that panic had no part of.

  In the month before I moved Claret to his new barn near the pond, spring came, and sometimes I stood beside him in the paddock and looked up at the pine trees. He seemed to be looking, too, both of us standing so still. Sometimes a breeze would flutter his mane, and I’d think, You wild, wild thing.

  While I was spending days with Claret, Larry was, in his free time, learning to become a pilot. “What’s it like up there? Is it scary?” I asked over sushi.

  Larry rested his chopsticks on his tray. “No, it’s not scary, because there are all kinds of things you’re thinking about, like your speed, your altitude, where you’re going next.”

  “That sounds a lot like riding,” I said.

  “They’re very similar, I think.”

  “Does it feel different in such a small plane? Does it feel like you’re actually flying up there? Like in dreams?”

  “In the plane, when it’s smooth, you don’t feel like you’re flying so much. It’s like being on the ground, only the view is different. It’s only when there’s a little bit of turbulence that you feel like you’re bobbing a little, and that feels like flying.” Larry held his hand out flat, imitating a plane. “Not that it’s pleasant to hit turbulence. But if you’re moving through something, like a cloud, you can feel that speed—when there’s some kind of acceleration or deceleration. That’s when you really feel connected with the plane, when you’re making movements. And of course, when you’re taking off and landing. That’s when it can get scary, as you’re coming in for the landing and you’re getting closer and closer. That to me is the most interesting part.”

  FIFTY-ONE

  Now that I was driving on highways, I decided to take a trip to Baltimore to visit my sister, Joanne, and her daughter, Kiana, as well as some friends. On the way, I was going to stop in Brooklyn to hear one of my best friends—the fellow Bread Loaf waiter who had a Snoopy shirt that matched mine and whose writing struck bone—give a reading. But on my way to the reading, I missed the exit. My plan was to get off on the next exit, but that turned out to be very far away, and in the meantime I’d hit a giant traffic jam, and I was watching the minutes on my car clock inch closer and closer to the reading time, and I still hadn’t arrived at the next exit, and then it was too late. I’d missed the reading. So I rerouted my navigation for Baltimore, and eventually the traffic got moving again, and suddenly I found my highway merging with another highway to form the biggest highway I’d ever seen. I saw it happening, saw that I was in the center of this megahighway, so I pulled over on the shoulder just before the merge point, and I began to panic. My heart was racing, and I couldn’t see straight, and everything suddenly got very, very loud, and the traffic was zooming past me, rattling my car, and I knew that if I didn’t move, I would probably get smashed by an eighteen-wheeler, but I was too terrified to move. I thought that if I could just talk to someone, maybe I could get through it, so I called Larry, and he didn’t answer, and I called every friend I could think of, and they didn’t answer, and I started calling random acquaintances, and nobody would answer.

  I had to drive. I was stuck in the middle of the Biggest Highway in the Universe, and all I wanted was to disappear—to be magically airlifted and delivered safely home, with my dogs at my side. But I had to drive. I tried to remember all the things I’d learned about panic along the way, but somehow all I could come up with was the word fuck. So I went with that. “Fuck!” I yelled. I gripped the steering wheel and sat up tall. “I can do this! I can fucking do this!” I turned my radio up so that it was pouring over the traffic. “I can drive on the fucking highway!” I looked in my rearview, and when it was clear, I gunned it and merged back into the traffic. “You’re doing this,” I said. “You’re doing it.” But I was still terrified, so I started singing with the music—I just have to be louder than the fear, I thought. I sang so loudly that I was almost embarrassing myself, and that got me smiling, and since it’s hard to panic when you’re smiling, that’s how I soothed myself to Baltimore, singing loudly, off-key.

  I had about five more panic attacks on the way: as long as I could be next to a shoulder, I was okay, but whenever the shoulder disappeared, my adrenaline lit flames just under my skin and my breath came choppy. I suppose there are many of us who feel better knowing the shoulder is there on the side of the road—that there’s a way out, just in case. But eventually, there’s always a way out. Just wait, I kept telling myself when the shoulder disappeared and I was suddenly speeding alongside a concrete wall in a panic. The shoulder will come back. And the shoulder always reappeared.

  When I arrived in Baltimore, I recognized the air. I stood outside in the parking lot of my hotel for a while and looked at the fat orange moon, while cars came and went. Having lived in Maryland for over twenty years, I knew there were certain warm nights, like this night, when the wind came in cool fluttery laps through the balmy dark and wanted to seduce you—they were the kinds of nights when, as a kid, I knew it was time to run again—because the air seemed to be promising something, and the invitation—the possibility—was irresistible.

  The next day I went with Joanne and Kiana to the mall across from my hotel. Unlike me, Joanne had maintained relationships with our parents. She lived one street away from my mother and saw my father from time to time on weekends. Family meant everything to her—a single mother, she lived for her daughter, a brilliant and beautiful dancer, and was determined to give her everything we never had. I admired her for that, for her selflessness and generosity when she had been given so little.

  I gave up contact with my mother about a year before Larry and I moved to Massachusetts, but before that I’d spent years trying to be close to her. I listened to her problems and gave her advice, as I’d done during that brief time in my childhood when she’d let me be her friend. I cleaned her house, listened to her stories of her past, wrote her letters of encouragement, brought her fresh vegetables and books and her favorite perfumes, invited her to come stay with me so that I could feed her healthy foods and take walks with her and help her quit drugs and cigarettes—but nothing made a difference, and for me our relationship was often painful and one-sided. When I met the wise social worker—the one who told me that sometimes it is necessary to suffer—I could feel myself reaching an end.

  “She’s never going to be a mother to you,” the social worker told me. “You can prop her up a million different ways, but that won’t make her a mother.” Though he wasn’t smiling, his eyes were smiling, as sages’ eyes do. “So, you can either let her go and grieve her, or you can spend your life chasing a phantom.”

  That evening I took a walk through my neighborhood. It was dusk, and though the streets and trees and houses were dimming, the sky still held the light, like a window lit from inside. A person can lose things, I thought, and still have this. I realized then
that the social worker was right, that what I’d been trying to give my mother were all the things she’d never given me—and never would. So I let her go; I let the hope for her go. And I grieved her. And I suffered. And the sky kept glowing, in its generous, impenetrable vastness.

  I let my father go, too. Our relationship through most of my life had been spotty at best. In the years after I was sent to Montrose, I saw him once, when he came to visit me. I was fourteen then, and it would be almost another two years before I’d see him again. There are photographs marking the event: in the first one, the two of us are sitting beside each other, leg to leg, on a couch in an institutional visiting room. I’m wearing a shirt with palm trees on it; he’s wearing one that says NEW YORK. He has his arm around me, and he’s gazing at me with an expression that could probably be read numerous ways—is it longing in his face? love? curiosity?—while I sit beside him, looking at the camera. In the second picture, he’s touching my hand to his short beard, and we’re laughing. And in the last picture, I’m hugging him. It was two unsteady and strangely intimate hours of our lives, during which his girlfriend took pictures of us and suggested that I wear slightly less eye makeup. Still, the photographs, if nothing else, demonstrate something warm between us. And it was that warmth that nurtured my hope that one day he would finally be the father he promised he’d be; it nurtured my own child-blind love for him. But there came a time—a day many years later when I was hospitalized with viral meningitis and my father came to visit me—that I understood the irrefutable truth: my father wasn’t going to change. It was summer, and I’d been admitted to the hospital in sandals, and it was cold in the room. Despite the blankets they gave me, my feet were icy and I was shivering, so I asked my father, who was wearing a sweat suit and sneakers, if I could have his socks. He said no. I thought he was joking at first, but when I pushed it, he quickly became indignant. “No,” he repeated, “I’m not giving you my socks.” After he left, I lay there wondering what my life would have been like if I’d had a father who thought I was worth a pair of socks. But those things are futile to wonder, so I stopped. A nurse brought me hospital socks, and I began to let my father go.