Let the Tornado Come: A Memoir (10 page)

“
L
et me tell you what’s wrong with the way you’re sitting.”

Though I’d mounted Shaddad only seconds earlier and we hadn’t yet taken a single step, I was already screwing up.

“Everything.” Tommy approached me and put her hand on my leg. “See how your legs are forward? We call that a ‘chair seat,’ but riding isn’t sitting back on a sofa and letting the horse do all the work. In dressage, we’re constantly engaged—we ride every stride, as they say. In terms of our position, we strive to achieve a straight line from the top of the head to the seat to the soles of the feet—mind you, I studied biomechanics, so I’m very interested in how each individual part moves in the collective whole—so for starters, move your legs back and imagine a string attached from the rafters to the top of your head. Imagine that if we took the horse away, you’d be standing, not sitting.”

I did as she instructed, and for the next half an hour, Tommy
adjusted my inner thighs, the angle of my hips, my back, my shoulders, my stomach, my arms, my hands, and my feet—talking at length about each body part—while Shaddad stood stoically beneath me. In the first five minutes of entering the barn, I’d felt overwhelmed, but now I was so far past information overload that I was losing track of basic English. Which was not a good time to finally start moving. But I wanted to give myself over completely to this lifelong passion, to this elegant world of horses that, though it at times seemed so inelegant it became farcical, kept inviting me to climb over fear in ways I hadn’t known were possible. And if I couldn’t trust that, what could I ever trust? So we started moving.

Standing in the middle of the arena, Tommy controlled Shaddad by attaching him to a long rope called a lunge line. She wiggled the whip in her other hand, and instantly, Shaddad started walking.

“You’re resisting,” she said after a few steps. “Can you feel how his legs move forward one at a time as he walks? Just like a person?”

The simple answer was no. It was hard for me to feel anything; I just knew that I was no longer on the ground and that I was perched on top of a large animal. “I don’t know. I guess.”

“Well, follow that. Let your hips move with him.”

I closed my eyes and tried to feel his strides.

“Don’t close your eyes. When you close your eyes, you automatically tilt your head forward, and that throws off your whole position.”

And somewhere between my feeling for Shaddad’s gait and having to relearn simple facts like which side was my left and which was my right, Tommy asked Shaddad to trot. I had been on a horse a total of one other time in my life—and that was a few weeks earlier, when I’d randomly stopped at a barn and walked around for a few minutes on a horse named Applesauce—so I had no way of knowing that trotting would mean getting banged in the crotch over and over by the hard pommel of the saddle. I felt a somewhat rational fear for my life as I struggled to stay on. But that wasn’t all: I also had to learn to “post the trot”: to rise up out of the saddle with every other beat. Never in my
life had I found a physical activity so difficult or felt so uncoordinated; never had I felt more like a child, not even as a child. My legs got tired almost instantly, but if I tried to sit, Tommy yelled at me to keep posting, and as I gasped out a plea for her to make him stop, she told me this is how you learn, so I kept shakily bouncing around in and out of the saddle, and after a lot of flailing, my first riding lesson was over.

At several points during my lesson, I expected to start panicking. But those moments were fleeting; I was too caught up in my awkward physical rigor to give these deeper, more internal thoughts much airtime. And it wasn’t until later that I understood a difference between panic and other kinds of fear: this haphazard floundering about on Shaddad’s back presented a real concern, one based on some simple laws of physics—namely, how could I keep bumping around these circles without falling. My fear, then, of hitting the ground, had an immediate counterpoint: my fight to stay on. But in the fight-flight of panic, where the source of fear is constantly shape-shifting and shrouded in darkness, there is no obvious counterpoint, no way to fight or flee that which cannot be seen—no last rally of strength in the legs as they clutch the horse’s sides, no last thoughts about how to curl the body and protect the head if the legs fail and the ground comes fast—so the panic quickly moves to consume. Could it be that by putting myself in a situation that was truly scary, I was chasing away this other fear, this phantom? Was it that simple, that one fear could fight another? Maybe it was. Because when Tommy finally asked Shaddad to stop trotting, I was already stronger.

As I slid off Shaddad and took a few steps, my whole body felt like rubber, and my legs still felt as if there were a horse between them. I reached to stroke Shaddad’s neck, and he turned to look at me. In an instant, I was four again. I was reaching out my hand to the sweeping and hungry trunk of an elephant and watching the world turn on.

It had been a rough couple of hours, but I’d survived. I’d ridden a horse. I had looked into the horse’s eye and found a kind of peace.

I
knew my life was shrinking. Despite the books, despite the trip to Larry’s office, despite phone calls to Annie and other friends, I was still terrified of things seen and unseen, of all I could imagine and all I hadn’t yet imagined, of the world at large and of the basic functioning of my own body. But somehow I had deemed safe the space between the front steps and the edge of the azalea bushes, so my daily walk consisted of a few paces of that fifteen-foot swath of flagstone—that is, until I hit the low point of low points.

As I took my ten-step stroll back and forth, phone in my hand in case of an emergency, I was thinking not about the fall air, which must have been getting cooler, or about squirrels, which must have been scampering busily, or about sentences, which I wasn’t writing, but about atriums and ventricles and the heart’s incessant work. It was serious thinking, much like the thinking I do on planes, when I’m reasonably certain there’s no reason we shouldn’t be dropping straight out of the
sky: the heart, magical fist-size ticker that it is, defies my most basic logic. And as I was thinking about these things—about mitochondria and cell death and deadly rhythms, something moved beside me. I caught it in my periphery: large and dark and coming at me. I shrieked and jumped forward like a grasshopper, and my heart pitched into full speed. The culprit? My own shadow.

I was beginning to wonder if I was really going crazy. I thought about my mother’s sister, Nanette, whom I saw only once or twice a year when I was a kid and we drove from Baltimore to Queens to visit my grandparents. At their house, everyone was always talking and clinking wineglasses and singing and dancing and clapping their hands, and next to Grandma, Nanette was my favorite person to dance with, her long blond hair whipping around with each dramatic turn of the tango. I loved hearing her laugh because her voice was always a bit hoarse and her laughter rolled out like a fun bumpy road. You sound like Stevie Nicks, I used to tell her. She sang, laughing,
“Women, they will come and they will go
.
.
.”
Her blue eyes appeared huge beneath the bifocals she wore, and I thought that was magnificent.

Once, when everyone had gone out and left the two of us alone, my aunt started to drink. I was nine by then, old enough to realize, when she passed out, that the pills she took with her whiskey were what had made her lie limp, her eyes half open but not seeing. I tried shaking her awake, calling her name, shaking her harder until the bed began to scuff the wall. I was also old enough to know that the ipecac in the bathroom would make her throw up, so I forced it down her throat. I could have killed her, but I wasn’t old enough to know that. Instead, she vomited, over and over, on the flowery pillows, on her own face, on my hands and arms. I held her in it, and later when we washed ourselves clean, she thanked me, that warm husk of a voice.

A decade later, on an unremarkable day, my aunt sold her condo and walked onto the streets of New York City, homeless. Schizophrenia, the doctors diagnosed—a paranoid schizophrenic. I would see it for myself once while I was visiting my grandparents. She turned up one
afternoon covered in black shoe polish—not just her face, but her entire body. She wore a man’s haircut and baggy jeans. She had lost her glasses and most of her teeth, and she held a magnifying glass up to one giant eye when she arrived. “Look at you,” she said, running the spyglass up and down. “You’re all grown up now. So pretty.” She spoke to me as if she were the aunt I remembered, as if her face weren’t smeared black, as if she didn’t smell of sweat and urine. “It’s a lovely day,” she said, smiling a gummy smile. Then her eyes shifted around the room, squinting. She poked her head forward and began to sniff. “Tell me,” she said, locking her gaze on me, “do you ever smell the mafia?”

I told her I didn’t think I did, and she told me that she was really a black boy named Tony, that my grandparents had castrated her when she was a baby, that people kept operating on her mouth and taking all her teeth. “Do you remember when we used to dance?” I asked her. “When I was little?” She laughed—she still had her same laugh—“Of course I do.” But her eyes quickly narrowed. “They’re doing experiments on me,” she whispered.

She had been nearly my age when the doctors diagnosed her with schizophrenia. And now I wondered if it was my turn, if this was how she’d lost those pieces of herself, quick as a fire destroys a forest. What I knew was this: each second of my life felt like a near escape from death, the way the bridge falls apart in cartoons, rung by rung, just behind the runner’s feet.

I
knew I needed help. And I decided it should come in the form of a mother. Though I had let my own mother go a couple of years earlier, I still hadn’t let the
idea
of a mother go. I still hadn’t stopped wanting that particular and important kind of love. The mother I often imagined was an amalgam of several mothers: Carol Brady from
The Brady Bunch;
several of the hefty no-nonsense brown-skinned women I’d encountered through my years in lockup; and my horse-loving friend Jennifer’s mother, who once wrapped a towel around my
shoulders when I’d gotten out of their pool shivering. My new mother would arrive replete with her sensible shoes and a plate of still-warm banana bread. She would say, “Hey, you silly child panicking on the sofa. You quit it now and come get yourself some banana bread.” And I would.

So that was my plan. And I heard no God laughing. I was going to go out and find myself a mom, plain and simple. A calm fell over me then, and I was able to get up and let the dogs out without panicking at all.

L
ater that day I found a long chain in the back of a kitchen drawer, with a small white plastic device at the end of it. It was roughly two inches long, with a button in the center and the name of our alarm company printed above it. Below the button was the word PANIC. My very own panic button! I must not have noticed it when we’d moved in, but without another thought I promptly pulled the chain over my head. All I would have to do, in the event of robbers or a deteriorating arrhythmia or the accidental inhalation of a dried apricot, was press the button. It was a revelation. It was my new necklace.

M
y second lesson on Shaddad was roughly a repeat of my first lesson, even down to Tommy’s reprimanding me about bridle parts. But to a novice, a bridle is an evil thing, a leather contraption full of loops and buckles that you have to manage while maneuvering a metal bar, the bit, into the horse’s mouth. “Look,” Tommy said, holding up the bridle. “See the shape of the horse’s head? Now look at the shape of the bridle and you can see how it fits.”

But what I saw didn’t appear to match the shape of Shaddad’s head at all. “Yes.” I nodded, not wanting to let on that I was failing some kind of basic IQ test.

“Then go ahead and do it by yourself this time.”

Tommy handed the bridle to me, and I looked at Shaddad, and he blinked, and then he sighed. “Okay, let’s see here,” I said, slipping one of the loops over Shaddad’s nose.

“Nope,” said Tommy. “You forgot to put the reins over his head. You
always,
always
have to put the reins over the horse’s head first, so that if he tries to go somewhere, you have something you can stop him with.”

I tossed the reins over Shaddad’s head, and then attempted to reinsert his nose into the same loop as before.

“Nope,” said Tommy. “That’s the browband.”

“Oh.”

It took me several tries, but Shaddad, in his tremendous patience, stood calmly while I wrestled with the bridle, fumbling the various straps against his nostrils and cheeks. Finally Tommy, who could no longer bear the spectacle, took the bridle from my hand. “One day,” she said, easily slipping the bit into Shaddad’s mouth, “you’ll be able to stand right beside him like I am and put the bridle on without even looking.”

But I was discouraged. And for a moment I felt foolish for attempting to enter a world that I had no business entering. All the other people I encountered in the barn seemed so at ease around the horses, and I wondered if that was the kind of confidence a person could learn only as a child—if maybe it was too late for me.

But when I climbed onto Shaddad and wrapped my legs around him, I could feel that between my first lesson and this one, something had already shifted: immediately I remembered the sensation of the straight line my spine was supposed to make over his back, and I sat up tall, and Tommy said, “I see you remember something from last time,” and I beamed with the learning.

And then Tommy flicked her whip and Shaddad began to trot, thumping into all the already sore parts of me, and the glowy feeling I’d been enjoying was promptly swallowed by desperate pain. After a few minutes I asked Tommy to please make him stop, but like the last time, she refused. “If a horse is bolting on you, you might not be able to make him stop. Then what do you do?” But I couldn’t answer her question because every iota of my consciousness was focused on one thing: making the horse stop.

“I’m serious,” I said, flailing in an endless loop around Tommy. “I need to catch my breath.”

But Tommy kept the whip moving across the ground, which kept Shaddad trotting. “I once had a sixty-year-old asthmatic woman ask me to make the horse stop. And you know what?”

“I . . . really . . . mean . . . it . . . Stop!”

“I kept him going, that’s what I did. She was so mad. But later she thanked me, because she learned she could push herself farther than she thought she could.”

It was at that moment that I felt unadulterated terror. My life was in the hands of a virtual stranger, a stranger with obvious control issues, and my lungs and legs and crotch were burning, and Shaddad was moving along as if he would never tire, and it occurred to me again that I might panic, but I was too busy trying not to die to panic, and just when I was sure I was seconds away from collapsing, Tommy asked Shaddad to walk. And though I never would have admitted this to her, what she’d said was true: I was learning, in those many circles of torture, that I could push myself farther than I thought.

W
eeks went by, then months, and in that time I came faithfully to ride Shaddad and get yelled at by Tommy. The learning process was slow and repetitive, and my inner thighs were constantly sore, and the world of horses continued to feel like an elite club to which I was undergoing a seemingly endless initiation. But I was learning. After a while, I could put on Shaddad’s bridle without poking either of us in the eye, and I could post the trot without wishing I were wearing a jockstrap. Some days I wanted to cry and some days I did cry and some days I gave Tommy the evil eye when her head was turned, but what kept me coming back were the horses, plain and simple. Just being near them felt like an oasis, as if the rest of my life switched off and there was only horse smell, horse sound, horse motion, horse stillness.