Let the Tornado Come: A Memoir (5 page)

I
f I could have gotten one glimpse of my future life when my struggle with panic started, this is the hour I think I would choose: 9:00
P.M.
on New Year’s Eve, 2009—more than two years after my first panic attack. I’m in a barn, in a horse stall, watching a man knead his hands into my horse, Claret. Sal’s hands are large and rugged—one finger is slightly deformed where he had the tip reattached after a horse bit it off—and they move with an unquestionable intelligence as they work Claret’s muscles. Sal’s agreed to come on a holiday evening, while Larry waits at home for his midnight kiss, because he understands horses, and the people who love them, and he knows I would rather be here than at a party or watching Dick Clark on TV. I know so little about horses compared to most horse people, those who have been around horses all their lives, those who grew up speaking the unique language of horses, but I do know that Claret has been in pain, and I want him to feel better.

Outside the stall window, the night is luminous, ablaze in white.
There are several inches of snow on the ground, and it’s a soft snow, the kind that parts around your feet as you sift through it. As Sal leans into Claret and we all exhale white smoke into the cold, I wonder if people go sledding at night. Surely they must, but who are they? Where do they go? And why aren’t I one of them? I have never thought about this before, but suddenly it seems so obvious to me that I want to be someone who goes sledding at night—that girl who zips up her puffy jacket and pulls down her wool hat with the single pom-pom on top, and takes off down the hill. They say that every day is a day to claim our lives, and tonight, on New Year’s Eve, I’m claiming night sledding. As long as we are alive, there is always the chance to begin again.
Begin again beginagainbeginagainbeginagain
. How easily the mind repeats this mantra.

I say nothing of this to Sal, who is mostly quiet, except when he occasionally comments on a particularly tight spot of Claret’s body. “He’s really reactive here,” he says, pressing so hard that his hand disappears between the base of Claret’s neck and his shoulder blade. Claret rears up in pain, and I step back, out of the way. But Sal doesn’t release the pressure, no matter how hard Claret tries to twist away, and then suddenly something gives, and Claret’s neck softens and his eyes soften and he starts making the slow chewing sounds horses make when they’re relaxed. And Sal keeps his hand there, now palpating a little, while Claret gives in to the pressure, into the relief, into the new space Sal has made for him.

Watching this feels like a holy event. It’s not just because the snow beginning to fall is the fat white dot snow of Christmas movies on TV—walls of it cascading straight down into the windless silver-blue night—or because in these next couple of hours we’ll all be leaning together, with our collective hopes and disappointments and reflections and resolutions, into a new year. It’s because what is unfolding here is the sacred purity of trust. Claret weighs fourteen hundred pounds, and if he wanted to, he could hurt, or even kill, one of us. But instead, despite what Claret has known in the past, despite the hands that have hurt him, he’s choosing now to trust these hands; he’s choosing to trust
the pain. And to watch him come to the other side of it—to watch the release shine in his eyes—is a privilege of the highest order.

“Can I feel?” I ask. “I want to feel what you feel.”

Sal takes my hand and presses into Claret’s back. “Do you feel here how it kind of gives when you press it?”

“Yes.” I nod. “It’s kind of spongy.”

“That’s how it should be. Now keep going down his back and tell me where it’s tight.”

I’ve removed my gloves, and Claret’s body is warm against my hands as I massage along the left side of his spine. “Here,” I say. “Right here it won’t yield.”

Sal checks the spot below my hand. “See,” he says. “You
can
feel it. Now make it yield.”

Unsure of exactly how to do this, I press my fingers into Claret’s tight spot and slowly begin to knead, using the weight of my body for strength. Claret arches his head around and presses his muzzle into my back, moving his lips firmly as I move my hands.

“He’s reciprocating,” Sal says. “That means you’re doing it right.”

S
ome people believe that snowflakes are magnets for words, that every word spoken in a snowstorm lands on a snowflake and is carried to rest, on a rooftop or mitten or field, as if on a magic carpet. Therefore, they believe, people must speak carefully in the snow, choosing every word as a child might choose crayons, one at a time.

I lean into the great dark head nuzzling my back. “Thank you,” I say, while time inches closer to midnight.

I
didn’t see the glass when I ran through it. I saw my sister’s face.

She was sitting at the kitchen table, drawing. I was outside on the patio, watching a distant uncle try to light coals on a barbecue grill. We rarely ever visited extended family, so it was an exciting day. Drizzling gently, the patting of rain against the trees sounded like a fire crackling. Someone had left the sliding glass door open, and I could see the women inside talking in the kitchen, waving their hands about. I was nine and thought it was more fun to hang around the adults than to do any of the kid activities my aunt had arranged on the table for us. And when the matches were spent and the grill still wasn’t lit, I wanted to help. “I’ll go get more matches!” I exclaimed, turning to run inside. I could see Joanne then, engrossed in her crayons. I ran toward her. But I hadn’t seen someone close the door. And I didn’t see the glass, either, before I shattered it.

For a second, no one moved. I spoke evenly: “I think I’m bleeding.” Then everything exploded. Someone was shouting, “Oh my God, oh my God!” I couldn’t really see. My mother pulled me toward the kitchen sink and started to throw handfuls of water at my face. “I’ve gotta see if it’s her eyes,” she was saying.

“Someone call a doctor!” my grandmother yelled.

“Call a fucking ambulance!” my mother screamed, wiping at my eyes with paper towels. “Now!”

As they leaned me back into a chair, my head felt dizzy. My mother propped my leg up on another chair, and I caught a glimpse of a gash across my knee. I quickly turned my head away and saw the floor, so much of it now covered with my blood.

Soon the wail of a siren approached. The rain came flooding down. Two men rolled a stretcher toward me, and one of them squatted down beside me.

“Hey, how ya doin’?” he asked, smiling.

“Am I going to die?” Suddenly this seemed like the only question in the world.

“Well, not today,” he said, still grinning. “Not if I can help it.”

At the hospital, my mother stroked my hair while we waited for the doctor. I had four deep lacerations, two on my leg and two on my face, across my forehead and nose. In my small room, loud light beamed into every corner. Though I was drowsy and nauseated from the Demerol they gave me, the comfort of my mother’s hand on my head was a new discovery, and I didn’t want to close my eyes and miss one second of it.

But it didn’t last long. They wheeled me away from her and into a different room, where they injected my wounds with lidocaine. I kicked and punched from the pain, until they finally strapped me down and finished. But when the doctor was about to put in the first suture, my mother broke into the room. “Wait!” she said. “I want a plastic surgeon.”

Four hours and a second round of lidocaine later, I was sewn up neatly with 150 stitches and ready to go home. Outside, the rain came in sheets. The darkness had been settling in for hours and was now immersed in itself, everything immersed in it, so that it was hard to imagine there ever having been a sun. For the ride home, my mother left the radio off. The swish of tires against the road and the rain pelting against the car with the beat of the windshield wipers made their own song.

Maybe because my mother had never formed into a solid enough person, one who believed in her own strength and abilities, she didn’t have much in the way of coping skills. This always made me sad for her, because occasionally I caught glimpses of what she could have been. One of those glimpses had been a costume she’d made for me to wear to school for our second-grade Thanksgiving celebration. With construction paper, string, and crayons, she turned me into an impressive replica of a Native American, and I spent the whole day boasting to everybody, “My mother made this.” My mother could draw, too. I often liked to pull her old boxes of papers from the closet and sift through all the things she’d drawn—mostly faces of long-haired women, beautiful and haunting. “You see the eyes?” she would say. “I like the eyes. It’s as if they’re looking at you.” So I would stare into the eyes of the women my mother made and feel, in a way more immediate and true than most other moments, as if I were seeing her.

But it was when I ran through the plate-glass door that I had the biggest glimpse into my mother’s strength. That one day, she coped. She rose. She threw the water on me, propped up my bleeding leg, insisted on the ambulance. She comforted me in the emergency room. She saved me, at the last second, from having to live the rest of my life with two big scars on my face. I think she knew this was her moment, too, because she never stopped talking about that day, how she’d taken charge from the start, how she’d thought to ask for a plastic surgeon. How she’d been a good mother.

T
hat same year, my father stopped coming home on weekends. Some nights, instead of getting ready for bed, Joanne and I piled into the back of our mother’s car, our pillows and stuffed animals dangling lazily from our hands, and on my mother’s hunch, we took to searching for him. We usually pulled out of our apartment complex just as it was getting dark, when the air had a smoky quality to it, a signal to get a last good look at things before they disappeared for the night. I watched the trees’ charcoal silhouettes against the deepening sky. I pressed my nose to the window and tried to find things hiding in the branches. Then night snapped down like a dome and filled the car with its damp green grasshopper smell.

I was mesmerized by the wispy night clouds, striated like rills in sand, and the flashes of streetlights and the steady thump of the road. Joanne always fell asleep holding her little blue doll with the string in the back that, when you pulled it, made her say
I luuuv you
. My mother sang along with Eric Clapton:
I don’t care if you never come home .
.
.

We drove and drove, circling restaurants and hotels, getting lost in neighborhoods and turning around while song after song kept the car beating. And then one night, we found it: my father’s Cadillac, unabashedly parked under the drop of a streetlamp—a four-thousand-pound revelation shining in its massiveness.

We pulled in beside it, and Joanne popped up awake, but nobody said anything. We just sat there and gaped. Our windows were down, but the street was quiet, the row of town houses dark inside. There were no crickets, no buzz of the streetlamp, no movement. It was a still life, and it could never be part of our world.

“Bastard,” my mother finally said, putting the car in reverse. As we pulled away, the street’s silence seeped into our car.

We spent weeks repeating our adventure. It turned into a kind of game, all of us on a mission to find my father’s car—scoping out restaurants and hotels when we didn’t find it in front of his mistress’s house.
Joanne and I helped by peering intently into parking lots and at other cars passing on the road. “Is that it?” we’d exclaim excitedly. I don’t think Joanne understood why we were searching for his car, but that didn’t stop her from wanting to find it.

We never did anything once we found my father’s car except turn around and go home, but I think my mother just liked knowing she could find it. “I should be a private eye,” she’d say.

My parents finally divorced that same year, viciously, bitterly. Kramer vs. Kramer had nothing on them. My father prepared me for the divorce by keeping me up late when I stayed with him at his girlfriend’s town house, the same one my mother had discovered months earlier. “I know things have been rough for you the past few years. I know your mother and I fought a lot, and we both hurt you.” He wrapped his fingers into gentle fists, as if he were holding bouquets of flowers. “And I’m sorry for that.” His eyes seemed to moisten a little as he scanned my face. He was searching for something.

I clenched my teeth to keep the tears back. I felt like a grown-up sitting there with him, and I didn’t want to ruin it by crying.

“I want you to know that what your mother and I had—our
marriage
—it was poison. It made me do things I shouldn’t have done. But I also want you to know that things can be different now, here. We could be a real family. We could even get a dog. You like dogs, don’t you?”

I nodded exuberantly, not wanting him to stop talking.

“Okay, picture this: a big house, maybe a swimming pool, nice backyard for tossin’ a ball around or having a barbecue, a puppy chasing a Frisbee, and all the love you could ever imagine. That’s what I’d like to give you—a normal, happy life. No more fighting, no more craziness.”

The thought of a normal life, the kind my friends had, the kind I’d always dreamed of, pushed through me and broke the dam. As I wiped at my eyes, I let his movie play on in my mind. I saw picnics and laughter and dinners together. I saw the shimmering burst of blue water in our very own pool. I saw a yard filled with kickball games and snow igloos and a sweet dog panting in the sun.

My father’s voice brought me back. “There’s just one thing. I’m gonna need your help.”

By help, he meant that I’d have to convince a judge that Joanne and I should live with him and not our mother. We were making a deal—a happy life in exchange for a long list on his yellow pad of everything bad my mother had ever done to me: the bruises and the horrible names and the days she didn’t let me in after school—and we stayed up for hours at the table while everyone else slept and the sky got as black as it could get.

“So there were all the times she slapped you in the face when you wouldn’t finish your dinner, right? And made your lips bleed?”

I nodded, remembering the sharpness of her diamond when she used the back of her hand. “But it wasn’t dinner,” I corrected. “It was the raw eggs and milk she made me drink with my vitamins before bed.”

“And she gave you those vitamins because she didn’t cook for you, right? Because she neglected you.”

I watched his pen darken the page. “I guess.”

He paused then, put his pen down on the pad. “You can’t be wishy-washy about this, Rita. Yes or no?”

I felt my stomach tense. “Yes.”

He nodded smugly. “So, ‘fucking bitch,’ ‘piece of shit’—what other names did she call you, besides the usual?” My father’s fists tightened. “You know it made me sick when I heard her call you—I can hardly stand to say it now—Rita Retard. Just sick.”

I was surprised by my father’s sudden protectiveness, but I relished it all the same. I would have taken almost anything he would have given me. And it was true: she’d called me that, and other names. She reminded me almost daily, in one way or another, that I disgusted her—I was too skinny, too pigeon-toed, too hyper—that I would never be as pretty as my friend Kimberly and that, next to her, I would always just be “Creeperly.” That was her most used name for me, and it alone held all of her loathing, and all of my shame.

Still, I knew what we were doing was unfair—we were telling only
half of the story. But I could almost feel it drawing me toward my new life—that particular sun, that particular joy, that particular love. So I sat in the judge’s chambers in an enormous leather chair, and I told him that I didn’t want to live with my mother. I can’t remember what he looked like, probably because my sight bore right through him, through the walls of that courthouse, and into the future my father was promising. “I hate her,” I told the judge. And as I spoke those words, I felt them turn back on me, as if they would devour me. But none of that mattered, because what I was doing there, in front of that man whose face I don’t remember, was fighting for my life. And then I told him the rest. I told him the truth. I just didn’t tell him everything.

During that time, I stopped visiting my mother on weekends, and Joanne started going alone. The last time I’d seen my mother, she’d broken down sobbing. “He’s turning you against me!” she cried. “You think he loves you, that he wants you? He doesn’t. He wants to win. He wants to hurt me. And he doesn’t want to pay child support. That’s why he’s doing all this—for the money.”

“That’s not true,” I protested, feeling doubt rise up like a fever.

“Oh, it’s true all right. It’s all for money,” she kept saying. “Mark my words. He cares about his wallet way more than he’ll ever care about you.”

During their divorce trial, Joanne stayed with friends of my mother, and I spent those summer days sitting on a bench outside the courtroom, filling my notebook with more poems and stories, waiting to see how the judge would decide our lives. I tried not to look at my mother when she walked by—I looked down at my shoes, out the window, anywhere but in her direction—because I didn’t know how to face her. And then one afternoon she tore through those courtroom doors in a bleary-eyed fury and ran right past me, wailing uncontrollably as she disappeared down the corridor. As I watched her go, I felt the same gut-lurching urge I’d felt running after her car when she drove off without me in parking lots. Except now there was nothing left for me to chase. Our fate was in the hands of a stranger, whose face I will never
remember.

In the end, my father won. Joanne and I moved to Long Island to live with him and his new wife, Janice, and her son, Bobby. Janice was grand—tall and big-breasted and wafting Halston perfume in every direction. She cooked beef briskets and made a mean Texas sheet cake, and was, from all angles, the opposite of my mother. We all agreed she was beautiful, with her flashy smile and bouncy hair and meticulously applied eye makeup. In the beginning, I followed her around a lot, asking her questions and staring at her pretty red lipstick, but in the way of many mixed families, we never bonded. She wanted my father, and she tolerated Joanne and me.