Let the Tornado Come: A Memoir (4 page)

“Guess what!” I stood in front of him. “I ate my whole egg!” A wet line dripped down my chin.

He fixed his eyes on me, and his lips pulled back in disgust. “I’d suggest you sit back down in that chair of yours and finish chewing,” he warned. “You look like a pig, chewing like that, talking with your mouth full.”

I went back to the table and let my tears fall silently. Then I felt a sharp pain at the back of my head. I turned around and saw a Play-Doh can rolling on the floor behind me. My father was sitting on the sofa with another in his hand, squinting one eye and cocking back his arm. I turned quickly and tried to duck, but the next can hit me in the same spot. I covered my head with my hands, and he threw two more cans until he missed and knocked a plant to the floor, its terra-cotta pot in pieces.

My mother rushed over. “Enough!” She crouched by the plant and scooped the dirt into her hands.

Joanne sat on the floor in the middle of the room and wailed. My father didn’t move from the sofa.

After the table was cleared, the baby’s breath repotted, the Play-Doh cans picked up, my father walked into Joanne’s and my bedroom. I was lying on my bed, flipping through a picture book of roses that Grandma had given me, distracting myself from the lump that still throbbed on the back of my head. Some of the colors, especially the fuchsias, were so saturated and vibrant that I wanted to eat them. I pressed my nose into the crease to sniff the glossy pages, which smelled the way streets do after a rain.

My father appeared in the doorway, then paused for a moment before he walked over to me, his hands straight down by his sides. His eyes weren’t angry anymore, and the muscles in his face had softened.
He cleared his throat. “I was wondering if you’d like to take a ride with me.”

Sometimes, if my father really hurt me or my mother, he felt guilty afterward. That’s how my mother got most of her jewelry. I looked down at my roses and turned a page. “Okay,” I said, without lifting my eyes.

He sat on the bed beside me, and I cringed a little. “You know I love you and Joanne very much, don’t you?” I nodded, still not wanting to look up. I knew what he would say next, because he’d already told me more than once, perhaps in an attempt to preserve some small morsel of my psyche, that the reason he and my mother never hit my sister was that she almost died when she was a baby. He thought it was important for me to know this, that perhaps if she’d been less fragile, they would have hit her, too.

She had been bleeding inside, and no one knew why. Though I was only five when she got sick, I always remembered those two weeks she spent in the intensive care unit, getting blood transfusions while my parents kept a crib-side vigil. I stayed with neighbors who lived on the same floor as we did and who had two daughters near my age, and it was there that I got my first real tastes of an ordinary life, one where people talked and laughed at the dinner table and the kids were happy and airy. While my sister clung to life, I clung to this otherworld, collecting flint in the woods with those two blond girls, then bringing our rocks inside and, in a manic dance of joy, banging them together until they made sparks. And though I missed my sister terribly, I didn’t entirely understand how perilous her situation was. All I knew for sure then was that I would have traded almost anything to be able to always dance in the neighbors’ living room like that, giggling with wonder, nearly causing a fire.

M
y mother must have taken my sister out to the playground that Sunday afternoon, because they weren’t in the apartment anymore when my father and I left for our drive. It was an
uncomfortable feeling, being offered this kindness from him, because I knew it wasn’t a kindness I could trust, not even when, at the High’s convenience store just outside of our apartment complex, he announced that I could get as much candy as I wanted. My mother generally didn’t let Joanne and me have sugar, so this was a treat beyond all treats. But my head hurt, and the sadness in me felt almost like a sickness. Still, the candy aisle, like a secret corridor, was perennially seductive with its rainbowed wall almost overflowing and its fragrant mix of sugar, chocolate, and plastic. I eyed up the Hershey’s bars and Fun Dip and Charleston Chews, which I knew Joanne would love, while my father stood eagerly at the end of the aisle. He was smiling. Somehow it seemed crucial not to let him down, so I started dropping candy into a small paper bag and nodding my head when he nodded his. Behind him was the door, which was shining in a giant rectangle of midday sun. The longer I stood there in that aisle selecting candy, the more transfixed I became by that door, its glow, the openness beyond it. I wanted to drop my candy and run through it, into light like a warm bath. I could hear the cars whirring past along the road. Here, gone, here.

I brought my half-filled bag to the counter where the cashier told me how lucky I was to have such a nice dad. “You’re his little princess, aren’t you?”

I looked down while my father clinked some change into her hand.

“Oh, she’s a shy one,” she said, nodding her head at me.

And then we were out in the silvery light, then in the small space of his hot car, heading home.

O
ccasionally Joanne and I shared days that seemed suspended, that rose up out of our usual lives and shone like balloons in the sun. Take this day, for example. It was spring. It was the stillest kind of day. The trees and bushes and even the hair hanging out of Joanne’s blue and white Good Humor cap were in a deep sleep. She was selling ice
cream—white, brown, and pink plastic ice pops she pulled from her plastic Good Humor truck. “Ten cents for ice cream!”

There was no one around. I sat on the front steps trying to feed a leaf to a caterpillar. As it crawled across my fingers, I turned my hand to keep it from falling off.

Joanne opened and reopened the lid to check her static inventory. “Get your fresh ice cream!”

The caterpillar wouldn’t eat. I put him in the grass, and within seconds he was heading down the sidewalk at a steady gait, as if he had someplace very specific to go. Resisting the urge to reclaim him, I plucked a small yellow flower from the grass at the bottom of the hill. “Buttercup,” I whispered.

I lay up the hill with my legs sprawled into gravity and stared at the muted sky, then turned to rest my ear against the grass. I listened, and they came: hoofbeats. They were galloping, strong, nearer and nearer. I imagined them behind the woods, a fleeting blaze across the field.

“Ice cream for sale! Ten cents!” Joanne adjusted her cap and looked around for someone she might be missing.

I walked up to her truck. “What flavors do you have?”

“I’ve got Chocolate Eclairs, Strawberry Shortcakes, and Toasted Almonds.”

“I’ll have a Toasted Almond.”

“That’ll be ten cents, please,” she said eagerly.

I pressed the buttercup into her hand. “Here you go.”

She expertly retrieved the white ice cream and handed it to me.

I sat back on the steps and pretended to eat my fifth ice cream of the afternoon.

L
ife is never all bad, and Joanne and I sipped up the joy we could, sometimes together, but more of the time apart. Though I typically spent a lot of time outside while Joanne tended to stay inside and play with her dolls or watch TV, what separated us most weren’t
the different things we did as much as the different things we knew, and how we’d come to know them. I knew the terror of how it felt to be pulled down the hall by my hair, backhanded in the face, and wished death by my mother—and of how it felt to be kicked, whipped with the buckle end of a belt, yanked from a bathtub, and thrown onto the floor by my father. Joanne knew the terror of how it felt to watch. We were each alone in our experiences, between which stretched an unapproachable gulf, but we shared what we could—an afternoon outside in the sun, the candy I brought home from High’s, Saturday mornings watching
Road Runner
or playing Candy Land—when we could. And despite our differences, what we both knew—what we lived every day—was how it felt to be helpless, to wake up each morning and go to sleep each night afraid.

For as long as I can remember, I knew that my parents were out of control. I knew they were capable of anything. We lived in the hotbed of their most wretched selves, and in it they ran rampant. Yet despite the fear and sadness and shame I carried, hope kept sprouting up like weeds in the cracks, taking root inside me. I dreamed of a different world, wrote poems and short stories, read books and searched their pages—and the small pockets of our neighborhood—for the beautiful things. Like this, the months came and went, and the police came and went, and my father took a job back in New York, from which he came and went, arriving home on weekends. And on those weekends my parents continued to fight each other with a vehemence one could almost mistake for love. Except it wasn’t love. It was my mother’s clothes cut to shreds, my father’s car keyed from one end to the other. It was my mother taking my father down with a coffeepot to the head; it was his hands around her throat. Sometimes you could hear them fighting all the way down the street.

That’s how far I would go some days, pretending that the shrieks and bangs were coming from someone else’s apartment. I collected rocks and dandelions, pressed my face to the cool grass, and felt the warmth of sun. I skirted the edge of the woods, and sometimes I
ventured back to the small creek that wound through the trees, where I dipped my fingers into the cool water and peered out at the farm in the distance. No matter what happened inside my home, the world outside wouldn’t stop being beautiful. And I was learning that there was a certain power in assigning my own direction in my small but tangible piece of that world.

D
usk was slowly settling in as Larry and I got in the car and headed down the driveway—the sky shifting to evening pastels while clouds dusted past like sugar. The lanterns on our gateposts had just come on, and a bat shuddered overhead before swooping into the field across the road. The herd of Belted Galloways who lived there were clustered together at the roadside, grazing. In the first weeks in our new house, I’d grown fond of the cows, their languorous sounds drifting across the country road, though sometimes I imagined what it would be like if horses lived there, too. They were still just a romantic fantasy to me, but I desired them with the same fervor I had as a girl, staring out from the creek in the woods behind our apartment to the farm in the distance and envisioning the flight of my imaginary herd, their manes and tails a streak of motion.

As we turned onto the road, Larry changed the radio station from jazz to classic rock because he knew I liked to sing along. We were on
our way to a dinner in Boston to commemorate Larry’s new position as chairman of Boston Medical Center’s neurosurgery department. One thing that came along with Larry’s profession was my obligation to play the part of the charming, well-groomed wife at medical social events, and that meant dinners—interminable exercises in small talk with virtual strangers over plates of overpriced food. I had never been good at this sort of thing and so always dreaded these dinners, much like dentist appointments—somehow, my teeth always hurt after both. As we drove into the city that night, despite Larry’s attempts to lighten the mood by quizzing me on rock trivia, I could already feel my
anxiety
—this new brand of terror—blooming like a mold.

As we exited the highway and entered Boston, I put my window down. Someone had turned the city on, the traffic lights and sidewalk lamps and car lights filling the air with a new glow. In the crosswalk in front of us, a young couple held hands, their faces swept with life and love. I envied the carefree way they moseyed across the street.

In the weeks before that night, my panic attacks had turned into daily, sometimes hourly, events, and I found myself held hostage to some amorphous yet decidedly growing body of fear. When I was a kid, the adults were always talking about this person or that person who’d had a nervous breakdown. I never knew what that meant exactly, and as I grew up, the expression fell out of favor. But it seemed mythical at the time, almost to the point of being glamorous. I’d overhear my mother on the phone sometimes, talking about it. “Did you hear? Judy’s friend’s uncle’s stepdaughter had a
nervous breakdown
.” And now, so many years later, I was beginning to wonder if this feeling was what they meant—the feeling of standing on solid ground yet watching myself, as if on a boat in a river, drifting away.

As Larry and I walked toward the restaurant, all I wanted to do was turn around and run. Instead, I gripped Larry’s hand, and we entered the Chilton Club, a stodgy private social club to which two of the wives belonged. As we approached our table, my knees trembled like windup
toys. Immediately I busied myself by noting where the exits were as I shook the hands of the dinner guests: the CEO, Elaine, and her husband; the executive vice president and his wife; the university dean and her husband; the former interim chair and his wife. I took a seat between Larry and the dean’s husband, a portly man with only a thin horseshoe of hair on his head, and as we all trained our eyes on Elaine, I began to fidget—leaning forward, leaning back, placing my hands on the table, off the table, on the edge of the table, in my hair, on my collarbone, on my knees. I couldn’t stop. After thirty-five years, I’d forgotten how to simply sit in my own skin.

Elaine was a well-coiffed woman in her late fifties, with the confidence of a race car driver and the eloquence of a politician. She wore pearls, and the hair spray in her frosty hair would have battled any wind. As a server filled our wineglasses, I thrust my wrist under the tablecloth, clocked fifteen seconds on my watch, and measured my pulse at 112, which was still reasonably in control. Then Elaine raised her glass. I followed eagerly, grateful for something to do. As she toasted Larry, a “young talent” who was on his way to “bright new beginnings” at Boston Medical Center, he caught my eye and smiled. If Elaine noticed, she didn’t acknowledge me. Maybe she hadn’t considered that it was my bright new beginning, too, that I had packed up my life alongside Larry. But we were already past that. We were clinking our glasses. And the dinner began.

“So what do
you
do?” asked the vice president’s wife, fixing her eyes on me. Her nails looked like rubies against the glass.

I pinched a tip of the tablecloth between my fingers. “I’m a writer.”

“Ooh, what do you write? Novels?”

“I’m a poet,” I said, clearing my throat and shifting in my chair.

She nodded, as if she were waiting for the rest of my sentence.

“I’m writing a memoir,” I added impulsively, instantly regretting it.

The former interim chair—a curmudgeonly, almost endearingly Napoleonic man—laughed. “At your age?”

I felt my cheeks blush as I sensed everyone’s eyes on me. I couldn’t sit there and tell them about my past, so I looked down and examined the condensation on my water glass. The table went quiet, and I poked my wrist under the tablecloth to recheck my pulse. It was fast.

As the traffic of conversation got moving again—something about the governor and health care—I thought about what else I could have said to the now less-endearing Napoleonic former interim chair. I could have told him that by the time I was six, I’d known violence the way some kids know bedtime stories. I could have told him that the first number I ever dialed was 911 during what would be one of many vicious fights between my parents; that, to save myself, I started running away when I was eleven and then spent years living between state-run institutions and the streets, where I wandered around looking for a safe place to call home but instead ended up sleeping in staircases or empty cars or, more often, the questionable beds of men and women. I could have told him I’d been a stripper, a junkie, the kind of girl who would never be welcome in an elite place like this. I might have also mentioned that I’d put myself through college and grad school summa cum laude, that I’d taught college students how to write, and that I did these things after dropping out of junior high in the eighth grade. I could have said that in my short life, I had teetered at the abyss of death more than once. But a charming doctor’s wife wouldn’t tell him any of that.

And that’s how I lost my moment: by staring at my water glass, mute. I knew then that not only had I failed myself but I was failing Larry, too. I wanted to be the supportive wife he deserved, a first lady of sorts, one who would make Elaine think,
Everything’s going to be great because Larry has this strong woman beside him
. But instead, I was the girl who kept fidgeting in her chair on the brink of a panic attack, then excusing myself to the restroom, where I hyperventilated into my hands and wished for a sudden exit, like a school
fire drill.

To my good fortune, no one asked me another question all night. And then, finally, the dinner was over. Our standing up from the table marked the liveliest any of us had been all evening as we bid our farewells and Larry and I broke out into the open sounds of the city at night, where the streetlights stood as if their only role was to be
beautiful
.