Read Let the Tornado Come: A Memoir Online

Authors: Rita Zoey Chin

Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Nonfiction, #Personal Memoir, #Retail

Let the Tornado Come: A Memoir (6 page)

BOOK: Let the Tornado Come: A Memoir
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Bobby split the difference between Joanne’s and my ages. He was a dark-haired, long-lashed beauty of a boy, who was quiet, asthmatic, and slow at math. I liked him for all of these things and felt, very quickly, the same older-sister protectiveness I felt toward Joanne. My father, however, was less enamored of Bobby. He took his shakiness and failure to make eye contact as a weakness, and often berated him for it at the dinner table. “You’re a putz,” my father would say. “Don’t you know how to hold a fork?” The more my father spoke to him, the more Bobby stared into the abyss of his food, his hands trembling, until eventually all of us, except my father, lost our appetites. Janice just rested her knife and fork on her plate without ever saying a word.

Janice also didn’t say a word the first time she saw my father hit me. I’d gotten caught attempting to swipe a few quarters from the large watercooler jug my father filled with coins, and was sent to my room. When my father appeared in my doorway a couple of hours later, I knew instantly by the wild look in his eyes that everything I’d dreamed of and fought for was about to come crashing down. Then I saw the gleam of my sister’s twirling baton. He was holding it in his hand. Zapped by a streak of cold fear, I called out for Janice, but was quickly silenced by the first strike of the baton against my head. I let out a howl, and my father raised the baton again. This time, he stopped short of my arm, laughing as I jerked away. After that, he made it a game: sometimes he’d bring the baton up as if he were going to hit me, only to stop
midway and watch me flinch. Then he’d mimic the way I was crying by stretching his mouth into a contorted O and making taunting sounds in a horrid falsetto. And on the few times he let the baton connect, I remember feeling grateful that he hadn’t hit me harder, as if that little bit of restraint was still a kind of love. My father ended my punishment by wrecking my room with the baton, then ordering me to clean it up.

True to my father’s word, we had a pool and a barbecue grill and a German shepherd named Lady, whom I loved. But that’s where his promises ended. And life went back to how it had been before, with my father cornering me in various rooms in the house while I begged him to stop. What was different now was that, unlike the way my parents fought when they were married, my father didn’t hit Janice. And he must have known that his cruelty toward Bobby could go no farther than the dinner table, because he never hit him, either. And Joanne, of course, had always been off-limits. So I was the only one; my mistakes (the usual mistakes kids make, like continuing to jump off a ladder after I was told not to, or being mean to my sister, or sneaking cookies before breakfast) were the ones he fixated on. Through it all, Janice said nothing, and if she objected, she never showed it. But sometimes when the air changed and it was clear that my father was getting ready to deliver another round, she sent Joanne and Bobby outside to play, presumably so that they wouldn’t have to watch. Those were the worst of the days, the ones when I felt most alone, the ones when I wondered if my father would finally kill me.

But when it seemed that death had finally come, it wasn’t mine: it was my father’s. He and Janice had been arguing that day, so she took us three kids and Lady for a walk. We meandered for miles, into neighborhoods entirely new to us. Down streets and sidewalks Joanne and I skipped, and Bobby and I raced, and Lady sniffed and sniffed, and Janice walked steadily, her shoulders squared, her steps long.

When we arrived back home hours later, I was first in the door. A bright spot on the floor caught my eye—a drop of blood. “Dad?” I called. I stepped forward, toward the spot. Why blood? Why the next
drop, near it? Once when a kid in our Maryland apartment complex got hit in the nose, he bled a long trail as he walked home, and I followed it, those perfect coin-shaped drops, all the way to the steps in front of his building. I felt queasy the entire time, but the intimacy of it lured me to the end. These drops on the tiles inside our house were bigger, and I followed them, too. “Dad?”

The trail ended at their bedroom doorway. I peered in and found my father in his usual place on the bed. But this time, he wasn’t watching television. He was very still. The blinds were closed. Lying across his chest like a seat belt was a shotgun. A comet of blood trailed across his forehead. The lamp on his night table was on. The TV flickered but was silent. He wasn’t moving. His eyes were closed.

The sound in my head was a million airplanes at once. I spun around to run back out but couldn’t move. I needed desperately to erase my last fifteen steps, to erase my father’s blood, which felt like my own blood, from the floor. “Help!” I called. It came out a whisper. “Help!” Now my voice was behind it; now my legs were moving; now I was running straight into Janice. “Dad killed himself, Dad killed himself!” I cried, running past her to the door. Joanne and Bobby were just coming in. “Dad killed himself!”

Outside I pitched myself onto the lawn. All the fury of my entire life was right there in my fists as I pulled up clumps of grass and screamed and stared accusingly at the sky.

But my father was not dead. Janice explained this to me after she wrestled me from the ground and slapped my face: it had been a joke, a fake; she had gone to him to feel for a pulse, and as she turned to call an ambulance, she heard him move. When she turned back around to face him, his eyes were open, and he was pointing the gun at her.

We left him that night, stayed with friends of theirs I’d never met before. And as I lay in this unfamiliar bed in this unfamiliar house and watched cobwebs float from the ceiling, I was strangely happy. My father had finally done it: he’d crossed the line of crazy, and now everyone would know it, and Joanne and I could return to our mother’s house,
and everything would be the way it ought to have been. My father had lost us now. He couldn’t hurt us anymore. We would never have to go back.

Except we did. The next day, my stepmother drove us home, and no one ever spoke of my father’s pretend suicide again.

EIGHT

H
ere is a story about my mother: for a year and a half, she loved me. After I told the judge to let me live with my father and he did, and my mother tore out of the courtroom in a blur, away from me, and my father’s promises soon began to splinter and implode, and enough time had passed to allow my mother to rise from her grief and find that her new single life was one big party, which often left its guests passed out in various rooms of her apartment, my father began following his end of the visitation order by driving Joanne and me back down to Baltimore to stay with our mother one weekend each month. By then I knew I’d misspent my single moment of power, and I was paying for it. My mother knew it, too. When I called her, she heard the tremor in my voice as I crouched in a far corner of my father’s house and bit my lip so I wouldn’t cry when she asked me how my great new life was. And when we saw her, she felt the lumps on my head. She saw the sadness in
Joanne’s eyes. She’d shake her head and look down at the floor. “What is he doing to you up there?” she’d ask, as if there were an answer.

But then Joanne and I would pull our duffel bags back to our old room, and my mother would play Supertramp on the record player, and we’d dance around the living room on the faded pink carpet as if that were our only life. In the evenings, after my sister went to sleep, I’d stay up late and listen to my mother’s tales of friendship, betrayal, and romance. We’d pull out astrology books and leaf through urgently, looking up the sun signs of her various crushes. “We’re both Libras,” she’d say, “so Geminis are balancing for us.” On those nights, she’d sometimes tell me stories about her childhood, how she still dreamed of the French chocolate-filled pastries of her young life in Paris. Other times, she’d stand in front of her bedroom mirror and try on different outfits to see which one I liked best. “But which is sexier?” she’d ask, and I’d point at various red and black and silky things. And my mother, with her new giggle and new barrettes and new cast of friends, became a heroine of light and laughter, became the moon outside the window of my bedroom in my father’s house, when I lay there dreaming up at it, longing for things I didn’t know how to name and the one thing I did:
mother
. In the weeks between our visits, I wrote her letters, and sometimes she wrote back. And each loop of her handwriting was proof that she loved me. I had a red purse then, adorned with puppy key chains and a small koala bear that clutched onto the strap, and I carried her letters in it so that they would always be with me.

NINE

J
ust after Larry’s first birthday, his parents, Chinese immigrants struggling to earn their graduate degrees in the United States, sent him to Taiwan to live with his maternal grandparents for three years. His childhood picture albums show the gap. It begins with a fuzzy-haired baby smiling in a high chair: before him burns a single candle on a small white cake. He hasn’t massacred it with his fingers or pressed his dimpled face into it the way so many babies do; instead, he’s looking at his mother, who must be smiling back at him from behind the camera. But his mother is missing from the following pages, a few square black-and-white photographs, each not much larger than a stamp. In them, Larry grins in his po-po’s arms or holds hands with his tall and regal-looking grandfather, Gong-Gong. And the next photographs, colorized again, show a four-year-old boy standing obediently beside his parents. Now the boy looks careful, smiling perfunctorily to complete the portrait that says,
This is my family
.

On the plane back from Taiwan, Larry’s grandparents helped him practice his introduction speech to his parents. He had virtually no memory of these people he would soon be calling Mama and Baba. He spoke no English, and he missed his dog—a Pekinese who’d surprised everyone when he ended up killing the family monkey.

At the terminal gate, Larry’s parents waited eagerly, like a couple about to adopt their first child. While Larry was away, his parents had missed him, but having to navigate their rigorous studies in a new language, they hadn’t had much time to think about it.

Larry and his grandparents were among the first people to get off the plane. His grandmother had combed his straight hair neatly to one side and fitted his neck with a red bow tie, which he tugged at during the long flight. His parents stood immobile as they watched the baby they’d sent away now walking toward them, a young boy. Behind him, his grandmother was prodding, pushing him forward. “Go, go!” she urged. Larry acquiesced, walking steadily across the great plain between the generations. In Taiwan he’d seen pictures, and so he recognized his parents instantly; they were leaning over now, holding out their arms. But Larry stopped short, looked up squarely into each of their faces, and recited what he’d practiced: “Respectful greetings, honorable Mother and Father.” Then, as people kept scurrying past him, he bowed.

I
have always loved this story of Larry as a four-year-old boy about to meet his parents, in part because every time I think about it, it breaks my heart. I imagine Larry in his bow tie, wanting so desperately to be a good boy, a boy his parents would want to keep. And as he grew up, he never lost the awareness that parents can put you on a plane and send you away, so he fashioned himself into a boy whose indisputable goodness would prevent that from happening again. He never got into trouble, never missed a day of school, and skipped two grades in the process. There was never a temper tantrum, never a stolen pack of gum, never a cigarette smoked. There was never dirt tracked
into the house or a harsh word spoken or a grade less than an A. Still, his mother was quick to point out when another boy got higher accolades on a science project or when another boy was more adoring of his mother. So for Larry, love was a constant negotiation based on merit. And the formality he’d first experienced when he was reunited with his parents lasted. His parents shared it, too: his father, when he became enraged at his mother, would lock himself in a closet and mutter under his breath. In their home, this was how you dealt with emotion: you quite literally locked it in a closet. Part of what I found comforting about Larry when we started dating was his emotional steadfastness: he didn’t like things that were messy and unpredictable, and after years with parents so violent that the police were regular guests at our apartment, that was fine by me. But the panic attacks happening to me now were exactly that: messy and unpredictable. And they threatened everything that Larry had grown up believing; they threatened the white-picket parcel of his life.

In the weeks following my first encounter with the ambulance staff, my panic attacks had proliferated like mice. I simply woke up one day, infested. I began to fear things I didn’t know were possible to fear: the shower, the grocery store checkout line, open spaces, small spaces, heat, crossing a street, driving, any form of exertion—even climbing a flight of stairs filled me with dread, because most of all, I feared my heart: despite what the paramedics said, despite what Larry said, I was convinced my heart was a time bomb. I didn’t trust it. So I tiptoed around it carefully, as if it were a sleeping monster. And I began to avoid anything that might disrupt it. If I just sat very still, maybe my heart and I could coexist.

But of course, I had to get up. I had to pee, wash my hair, buy eggs. And when I did those things, I panicked. I panicked in the shower, in the car, in the grocery store. I panicked slicing avocados, running a brush through my hair. I panicked for no apparent reason, over and over again, each time feeling slightly more battered than the last. Most of the time I ran outside to the front step, as if it were the magical place
of safety, the cusp, the line between out and in, the place where both options were possible.

When I wasn’t panicking, I worried about panicking and about all the grizzly calamities that can befall a person. I began to narrate everything as if it were a scene in a horror movie. As I got dressed, I’d think,
You’re going to fall down the stairs and break your neck.
No matter what I did or where I went, there were the thoughts:
A plane will crash into the living room. A tree branch will fall on your head. You will choke on a bite of sandwich
.
A mosquito will infect you with eastern equine encephalitis
. There was no end or escape. Everything seemed fraught with danger, even the most benign things, even the most absurd.

Sometimes I couldn’t make it through the checkout line at the grocery store. I’d drop my basket and run from the store trying to catch my breath, my body trembling. Even in the safety of my own home, the most basic tasks, like going upstairs to make the bed or taking a shower by myself, soon became insurmountable. So I planned my showers for times when Larry was home. I avoided the stairs as much as possible. I stopped driving on the highway. Worst of all, I stopped writing.

My life was overrun. So I panicked my way to the bookstore, because I knew one thing: the only way I was ever going to have a chance of getting my life back was to understand what was taking it away.

But even the bookstore I’d always loved had morphed into a terrifying place since the last time I’d visited. There was its cavernous size, the milling people, the lights that bleached the air. There was the weight of so many words, the finiteness of time they suggested, the importance of choice. And there were so many things to account for: where were the exits, where were the bathrooms, what were obstacles between those things and me? And why was that man with the rapidly blinking eyes wearing an oversize coat?

Okay
, I thought, sizing up the second half of the store.
I can make it back to the anxiety books. I can choose one, I can buy it, and I can leave.
As I walked past the racks, I tried to ignore the thoughts, which were like a bully’s finger poking me on the shoulder.
You’re gonna die.
You’re going to suffer a fatal arrhythmia, and they’ll find you on the floor beside the anxiety books.
Screw you,
I thought, trying on bravado like a costume. But then I thought,
My last thought will have been “Screw you,”
and then I thought,
No, my last thought will be a thought about my last thought being “Screw you,”
and then I started furiously pulling books from the shelves, anything with
panic
or
anxiety
in the title.
If I can just make it out with these books .
.
.
I thought, as I scurried to the nearest register.
If I can just make it to the car .
.
.
And once I was back in the glassy still of my house, the conversation continued.
If I can just make it until Larry gets home .
.
.

Until then, I would read. I learned that at least forty million Americans are affected by some kind of anxiety disorder, and that there’s a distinction between anxiety and panic: anxiety is like a sky full of brooding cumulonimbus clouds, ominously dark and amorphous, while panic is the lightning crack that sends you running for cover. I would learn that when a person is in fight-flight mode, the body undergoes an awe-inspiring transformation as several physiological events occur at once: the nervous system sends out a shot of adrenaline, like a war call to the troops; this gets the heart pumping vigorously, filling the major muscles with blood, while blood is directed away from less essential places, like the stomach and the skin, which is why people go pale with fright; respiration increases, pulling needed oxygen into the body; pupils dilate to let in more light, and certain muscles in the eyes relax so that even the farthest predator can be seen; hearing becomes sharper; glycogen stored in the liver is turned to glucose, which gives us the sugar rush needed for energy and endurance; our sweat glands go to work to cool us and to scare off predators with our scent—all of this makes the body strong and fast, in preparation for a life-saving fight or a hightailing chase.

It’s a handy survival mechanism, one that’s been with us throughout our evolution, but when it happens without an actual threat, the symptoms themselves—rapid heart rate, shortness of breath, shakiness, tunnel vision, tingling hands, cold sweats, nausea, a strong urge to flee,
an overwhelming sense that one is going crazy or about to die—are terrifying, and soon become, themselves, the thing we fear.
Fear of fear,
the books call it—that self-feeding beast that can quickly metastasize through a person’s entire life.

Panic disorder can sometimes be triggered by major life events (death of a loved one, divorce, a move, et cetera) but can also appear without any provocation at all. Whatever the cause, once a person starts panicking, it’s hard to stop. On the checklist of panic, I filled every box: my symptoms fit the description of a panic attack like snaps on a coat. Still, the voice in my head taunted:
You have panic disorder
and
a heart disorder.

“There is no passion so contagious as that of fear,” said Montaigne, while Emerson knew that “fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world.” But reading about panic didn’t seem to allay my fear any more than throwing a book at a tornado would have changed its funnel shape. Still, I kept reading, and the books offered some practical suggestions.

I started with deep abdominal breathing. Lying back on the sofa, I concentrated on my lower belly and tried to slowly pull a breath in, but I couldn’t seem to get the air past my diaphragm. I tried again, fidgeting around to find a more comfortable position, but I couldn’t fill my lungs. Each time I tried, my breath got caught high in my chest, until finally I started wrestling with my windpipe, desperately sucking in air.
Great,
I thought.
Now I’ve forgotten how to breathe
. I might have felt humiliated had I not started hyperventilating, which led my heart to begin its mad race.

“Why are you doing this to me?” I cried. And then, as if to answer, my heart punched me in the chest. Once, and then a second time, like the kick of a rabbit’s hind legs. I leapt off the couch, grabbed the phone, ran out the front door, perched myself back on the front step, and called Larry.

“It’s happening again,” I told him, gasping for air. “My heart just jumped in my chest. It
moved
.”

Though I yearned for my former independent self, the self that was logical and strong, Larry was the most unshakable person I’d ever known, and I’d come to depend on it. “It probably just skipped a beat,” he assured me. “You’re having a little anxiety. That’s all.”

“I think you should come home.”

“It was just a palpitation. You’re okay.”

“Do you promise?”

“I promise. You’re my sweet girl, and you’re fine, and I love you.”

I let myself be momentarily soothed, but then couldn’t help myself. “I still think you should come home.”

When I hung up the phone I rocked myself like a pendulum, as if the motion itself would be the one thing to move me from one minute to the next. I stayed like that for a vast span of the afternoon, swaying on the front step with one hand on the phone and two fingers against the pulse in my neck, while birds tossed their voices and the blunt strokes of a hammer reverberated in the distance and the bees skimmed the tops of the pink spirea, while the trees fluttered, tossing the light around.

BOOK: Let the Tornado Come: A Memoir
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