Let the Tornado Come: A Memoir (14 page)

I once read that if you put a variety of foods in front of a baby, she will instinctively eat the things her body most needs. I don’t know if that’s true, but I suspect that we all have that power to unequivocally determine what we need, and to declare it so. “I don’t need you, stupid lady, or your fucking OCD glasses habit!” I shouted. Sometimes, in interpreting what we need, it’s helpful to start with what we don’t.

“I don’t need to be talked to as if I’m powerless! I don’t need Dr. E and her stopwatch! I don’t need this tightness in my throat! And I don’t need a mother!”

What a revelation it was, after thirty-six years, to suddenly understand this fundamental difference between the past and present tense. I once needed a mother, that was true. I had needed her for years, needed her with the grist of my being, with the stake of my feet on the earth. I had needed her to put Band-Aids on my scrapes, to ask me questions about my days, to pull my coat closed when the cold air got in. But she didn’t. And I grew up.

T
he security guards take me to a building called Putts, which, translated phonetically in Yiddish, means idiot. “Welcome to Montrose,” they say and laugh, locking the door behind them. Inside there are about twenty girls in a large room with old fluorescent lights that drown out the daylight, as if the sun stops just outside the bars on the windows. A few girls look up at me from their Spades games. Other girls shuffle ruggedly across the room, on their way to nowhere. Nobody speaks to me. I sit on an empty bench in the corner and watch until it’s time for lunch.

Some of these girls have really stabbed people, have dropped their babies into Dumpsters. I can hear them talking about each other. One of them is talking about how she woke up in the infirmary to the sound of a girl crying. “It was weird,” she says, “but her cries seemed to be coming from all directions at once.” It was a ghost, someone at the
infirmary had told her—the ghost of a girl who’d hanged herself there years before.

We walk single file in silence to the dining hall, manned by security guards and their buzzing walkie-talkies. The stone buildings are the color of thunderheads. Lunch is a plate of noodles under a sloppy brown sauce. We eat with plastic spoons so that we don’t stab each other, and we have fifteen minutes to do it. Before our meal we have to say a prayer:
Our father, God, gives us this food. We bow our heads in gratitude. And from our thankful hearts we pray that we will do God’s will today.

M
y cell has a window with bars on it, an army-green metal cot, and a matching metal cabinet to keep exactly two changes of clothes, one pair of pajamas, a few basic toiletries, and writing paper. Each night, we have to put our day’s clothes out in the hall to be laundered and returned the next morning. “To keep away the crabs,” I hear one girl say.

There is one large bathroom that we can use at allotted times, and it has no mirrors. Instead, there are two rectangles of steel bolted to the wall, pretending to be mirrors. We’re given only five minutes to wash, and there are at least twice as many girls as there are sinks, which means a fight for water. They quickly jam in together, reaching over each other, taking turns spitting into the sink. And I am now a part of them, these strangers elbowing each other to get clean.

Each evening, after we wash and go into our cells, a staff member comes to each door with a box of pencils, a stack of paper, and envelopes. When I ask why we have to give the pencils back, Miss Smith winks at me. “Because they can be used as weapons.” So I write. I write about cornfields and about roads and about loneliness. I write letters to my mother and letters to my father, and I never send them because all they do is beg for things I know they’ll never give me.

I turn fourteen, and the leaves come down. In the mornings we
wake at 5:00, scrub floors with steel wool pads, pour ammonia into toilets, shine the metal mirrors while our warped reflections search back at us. Mice scurry by from one shadow to another, while girls get into fistfights and get hauled away. Winter blows in, wraps its claws around our gray building and won’t let go. I think of the girl who hanged herself, wonder if it was cold then, too, as she pulled the sheet off her bed for the last time. It gets colder, and then it snows. We get donated presents of large cotton underwear, and I flip through magazines and stare at pictures of pie, and I lust for the pie, for everything that lives outside these bars.

T
hree months later, my arraignment date arrives. I’m handcuffed and taken to court inside a paddy wagon, then led to a holding cell to await my hearing. The cell is empty and locked inside another small room. There isn’t even a toilet like in the police station. The walls, the floors, and the ceiling are all beige. I wrap my fingers around the cool metal bars and wonder who’s been here before me. I remember the long day I’d spent hiding out inside Cindy’s closet, singing to myself under my breath—but here is not a place to sing. Instead I pace for two hours.

Things happen fast in the courtroom. My mother won’t look at me. My heart rattles like a wagon speeding downhill. My hands tremble. So do my knees. When they call me to the witness stand, I raise my hand and swear on a Bible and tell the judge the truth. The judge listens without expression. Her hair is gray and stiffened by hair spray.

When it’s my mother’s turn, she testifies that I pushed her, that I am a violent, drug-abusing, promiscuous runaway. She brings my diary and reads passages out loud to the entire courtroom:
I wonder if having sex will ever stop hurting. I want to like it. Maybe I just need to practice
.

No!
I want to shout.
That’s mine!

My mother licks her lips and speaks surely. “Your Honor, you can see that if Rita is not supervised constantly, she is a danger not only to me but to herself.”

And the judge agrees. “In the hope that you might learn a lesson from this and right your ways before it’s too late, I’m going to detain you at the Montrose detention center until a bed becomes available for you at the Good Shepherd Center, where you will have plenty of time to think about what you’ve done, and what you’re going to do differently in the future.”

The gavel comes down.

I
wish panic were fragile enough to crumble under the heft of a heart-bending epiphany experienced from the driver’s seat of one’s car, or that a magical number of conjugations of the word
fuck,
if exclaimed loudly enough, could annihilate it. But panic is far more tenacious than that, which might explain why anxiety disorders are the most common form of psychiatric illness.

So I didn’t skip through my front door that day I drove home from the silver-haired lady, revelation in hand like a lasso that would once and for all take down the charging bull of panic. But I had taken a step toward the bull, and I found strength in that. Besides, I was beginning to suspect that the way to approach panic might be gentler than a rope at the throat; instead of a lasso, I imagined carrying a tender tuft of grass in my open hand.

In a strange way, I was grateful to the silver-haired lady because she let go one gleaming pearl: sometimes below the panic is sadness. I could
feel it there, like the hidden body of something you brush against in the dark. I was grateful also for the anger, which can be a useful and motivating emotion, one that’s hard to feel when you’re afraid. So she gave me that, and somewhere in my rant about the things I needed and the things I didn’t, the tightness in my throat disappeared.

Though the silver-haired lady insisted on treating me as if I were helpless, I wasn’t helpless, and perhaps I needed to be reminded of that. I also needed to be reminded that saying no is sometimes where power is born, and that what we truly need might be the opposite of what people are telling us we need. In my case, it was knowing that CBT—despite the statistics and testimonials—was the wrong choice for me at that time, even if a psychiatrist thought it was right. So I stopped seeing Dr. E and made an appointment with a renowned author on anxiety who happened to live only a few miles from my house. He’d even landed an appearance on
Oprah,
so I figured he had to be good. Unfortunately, I would have to wait several weeks before he could see me.

Meanwhile, when Larry told me about another upcoming work-related dinner, my immediate response was “There is absolutely no way in the world I can go.”

“It’s not a big one,” he said, sorting through the day’s mail. “I don’t understand why we get so many catalogs.” He chucked a stack in the trash.

“Just say I’m sick.”

“Okay,” Larry said, not looking up, sorting through the mail a second time in a way that made me think he didn’t want me to know he was hurt.

I immediately felt guilty. “Who’s going?” I asked.

He kept flipping through the mail. “Steve, the chair of rehabilitative medicine, and his partner, Mike, an internist at BMC. I talked to Steve in the elevator—he seems friendly.”

“Just them?”

“Just them.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll go.”

Larry looked up and smiled.

We met in the city. A light rain had slicked everything shiny. Even the sounds of car horns had a certain gleam to them. Mike and Steve stepped out of their building and onto the sidewalk like a couple of movie stars. To put it simply, they were gorgeous. Primped to the nines in Prada and Gucci, they were a combined festival of black—black pants, black leather, black patent shoes, black glasses. Mike wore a flashy rhinestone skull belt that extended down over his fly. “Wow,” Mike said, eyeing me up, “you’re beautiful.”

“And I love your boots,” added Steve.

“I love
your
boots,” I said, and the four of us spent the next minute on the street corner admiring each other.

The rain had left a charge in the air, and the city was alive with it. People were laughing, calling to each other, waving from across streets. Their voices kept rising, collecting in the windows’ light and mingling at the rooftops. As we walked to a nearby French restaurant, I squeezed Larry’s hand and watched Mike and Steve stroll confidently ahead of us. Mike leaned over and kissed Steve’s cheek, and for a moment I envied the intimacy I sensed between them.

When we entered the restaurant, the first thing I was confronted with was a tall wooden flight of stairs. And to get to our table, I would have to climb them. They looked so steep. So hard. An ordinary person would have followed the curvy hostess in the red wrap dress with plunging neckline straight up those stairs without a thought. But for me, those stairs might as well have been Everest. I considered making a run for it—
Well, boys, it’s been a blast. Let’s do this again soon!
—but Mike and Steve were already heading up, and Larry was looking at me as if to say,
Well, are you going to do this or not?
and I decided not, and then I walked up the stairs anyway. By the time I got to the top, my heart and I were a rattling mess.

We sat down at our table, and these two sweet strangers were
looking at us expectantly, and I was doing my usual chair dance of angst, and I wanted to flee more than anything, and I was pretty sure I was going to collapse right there with my unbitten roll on my bread plate, and it made me sad to think I would never get to be friends with the fancy new doctors, but just then Mike leaned over and said, “I hear you’re a writer. What do you write?” And I took a breath.

“I’m working on a memoir.”

“Ooh,” he said. “Tell me more.”

Some small distant part of my brain was celebrating what looked like the first real conversation Larry and I would have at a dinner with doctors, but then there was my killjoy and devoted stalker, Panic, hovering nearby. I tried for another breath but settled for a short, sharp inhalation instead. “It’s about my childhood as a runaway.”

Mike turned his chair toward me and leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “You were a runaway? That’s
amazing
. For how long? How old were you? Where were you? How did you survive? I have so many questions!”

These were the questions I’d always wanted Larry to ask—about this part of my life I kept secret from everyone else—and now a stranger was asking them, and I wanted to answer, but I couldn’t. I could hardly even breathe. But he was being so nice to me, and I felt I owed him something more than an inexplicable bolt from the table. “Listen, Mike, this might sound strange, but I’ve been struggling with panic attacks for the past few months, so if I get up suddenly and leave the table, that’s why.”

He didn’t miss a beat. “Okay. Should I follow you?”

“You know,” I told him, “that’s the best question anyone’s asked me in a long time.”

I didn’t run from the table that night. But I also didn’t stop teetering at the edge. Panic stayed close, skulking through the room’s shadows, crouching by the stairs, waiting for me—though on this night there was an understood distance between us. As long as I was at the table eating my black truffle and wild mushroom cavatelli with these charming
men, I was off-limits. It was as if by simply being able to name Panic to another person, I had temporarily weakened its power.

If only we could always say our truths—if we could name the things that haunt us—maybe they would float up from us like a kind of helium that the birds would sip in the treetops. Then they would make us laugh and laugh.