Let the Tornado Come: A Memoir (7 page)

T
he neighborhood is buzzing in electric green while kids my sister’s age scrape their BigWheels along the sidewalks and newly hatched insects take to the air. I rip through it, fast as fever. It’s spring, and everything is vibrating. As I run, I turn to look over my shoulder and can almost see my father as a flickering apparition behind me, growing smaller, plumes of gray smoke rising from his messy head. I can’t see his fists, but I know they’re flailing. The key is that he’s getting smaller, that I have crossed a threshold.

Out of the neighborhood and out of breath, I walk up Rockville Pike. Sometimes a car honks; sometimes guys call out something indiscernible, which I answer with an extra swing to my hips. Last summer when I was twelve, my friend Dawn and I learned that if we shook our asses when we walked, we could get cars to honk at us. Each time we went to the Hawaiian snowball stand on Liberty Road, we’d count how many honks we got.

My father moved us here to Rockville, Maryland, last year, right in the middle of seventh grade. He was in some kind of trouble with his job—I could hear him yelling, sometimes pleading, on the phone, then playing back the conversations he’d taped on his phone recorder and telling my stepmother how he was going to sue everybody (and also how he would have made an excellent lawyer)—so in a hurry we packed up our stuff and moved here. But the moving truck couldn’t fit all of our stuff, so the kids’ things got left behind. I lost my beloved rock collection, my prized Barbie doll collection, the Snoopy that I’d slept with since I was a baby, and the Legos my parents gave me for my fourth birthday—the few things that had made me happy during all those hours I spent hiding away in my room. Luckily, I’d thought to bring my sticker collection in the car with me, and wedged in next to my sister and stepbrother, I kept peeking at them as we headed south—the sparkly stars and shiny ice cream cones and butterflies in every color.

But now that I’ve escaped, I’ve left even those behind. When I finally make it the few miles to the high-rise apartment building where my friend Cindy lives, I call her from the lobby. No one answers, so I sit on the small bench by the phone and watch people get their mail.

The first time I ran away, I flung the front door open with a fury and bolted straight out of the neighborhood. My father had just ransacked my room, and as he sat with Janice on their bed, my red purse emptied on the duvet, my diary splayed, my mother’s letters shelled from their envelopes, I knew I couldn’t spend one more minute in that house, given what would come next. I didn’t stop running until I reached a grocery store a couple of miles away. I had no plan—just a small lifetime of running built up in my legs and a knowledge that out there, somewhere, was something better for me. When I called my mother collect from the pay phone and begged her to help me, she told me she wished she could help me, but she couldn’t. “I’m sorry, but you should have thought about all this before you told the judge you wanted to live with your father.” It didn’t matter that I begged, that I promised
to be the best daughter anyone could ever be. She was done with courts, she said. Her hands were tied.

Defeated and unsure what to do next, I poked around the grocery store parking lot until the police picked me up three hours later. I begged them not to take me back, but they took me back anyway.

That night, my father didn’t beat me; he didn’t even yell. He simply stepped aside and let me go to bed. And when I got to my room, I found that my red purse had been returned to me intact. I will never know what prompted this momentary softness from him—had I shaken him up? given him a brief sense of my latent power?—but pretty soon life went back to its tumultuous norm, and my father didn’t change, and my stepmother didn’t change, and my mother didn’t change. But I did. Feeling the wind rush over me as I ran, I got a sense of the distance I could put between them and me: I’d found my way out.

I ran away several more times after that, but as I wait in Cindy’s lobby, this time feels different. All the other times, I asked the wrong people for help. Once I spent the day at a pay phone calling runaway hotlines. But all the hotline operators did was try to get me to say where I was. “I’m not telling you where I am,” I kept saying. “I just want you to help me. Aren’t you supposed to help runaways?” Finally, the last one I called told me to go home. I guess he thought it was better to get beat up by your own parents than by strangers on the street. But the difference is a stranger isn’t supposed to love you.

Another time I stole a few twenties from my father’s wallet and took a train to my mother’s parents in New York, but they said they were too old to take care of more children. “But I’m not a child,” I said. “I could do all of the dishes. I could go to school and get good grades and make you proud.” My grandmother shook her head while dragging on a cigarette, and the next day they put me on the train back to my father. It was a good night though, sleeping there with the window open and the familiar scent of my grandparents’ apartment.

I don’t know how I know it, but as soon as I see him stick his key
into his mailbox, I know I’m looking at Mr. Malekzadeh—Cindy’s Mr. Malekzadeh, the rich older man who liked to bend her over the washing machine in the mezzanine laundry room. She told me all about it once during recess at our junior high, but when I asked her if she actually enjoyed having sex, she just looked down and kicked at the grass. I think about that sometimes, how she kicked at nothing.

He takes his time with the key and the door and the mail, watching me all the while. “Hi,” he says, in an accent that makes it sound more like
hoi.

A minute later, I’m standing beside him in the elevator. As we rise in silence, his cologne screams. I try to ignore it and pretend I’m a glamorous and sophisticated woman on her way to someplace important.

Mr. Malekzadeh’s apartment is small but plush, replete with mirrored walls, leather furniture, and a bar full of bottles. I’ve never been alone with a man like this before.

“Why don’t you sit down, have a drink?” His words move slowly under the weight of his accent. In this forbidden territory, I don’t know what else to do but awkwardly insert my thumbs into the two front pockets of my jeans, until he hands me my wine, which he pronounces
vine
.

I’ve never had wine before, and it burns my throat. We make small talk, while our reflections mimic us across the room. Then he produces a small pipe and asks if I smoke pot.

“Yeah,” I lie, starting to feel warm from the wine. “Well, once.”

He lights the pipe and pulls on it three times. The pot glows orange as he inhales, reminds me of jack-o’-lanterns.

When it’s my turn, I inhale deeply and cough. Seeing myself coughing in the mirror somehow makes me cough harder. Meanwhile, Mr. Malekzadeh has put the pipe on the coffee table and is leaning close to me. “You’re a pretty girl,” he says.

Suddenly he is all face. It’s kind of a turtle face, and I expect some turtley voice to come out, slightly squashed and nasal. “A very pretty girl,” he says. And I start laughing because the face and voice are too much.

The push of his tongue into my mouth stops me cold. I have kissed a boy only once—a single shy peck on the lips at a birthday party—and this feels nothing like that.

I pull back sharply. “I have to go.” My voice bounds unfamiliarly in my head, and I wobble on my feet as I stand up.

“C’mon,” he says. “You just got here.”

I tell him that Cindy’s expecting me, so he puts the pipe down on the table beside his wineglass and grabs a piece of paper. “Call me anytime,” he says, pressing his phone number into my hand. On my way out the door, he runs his fingers down my spine. Even after he’s closed the door, I can still feel his hand there.

L
arry wasn’t coming home anytime soon, and I couldn’t stay on the front step forever. So I gathered myself and went back inside to my panic and anxiety books. Deep breathing clearly wasn’t for me, but there was still a long list of exercises left to try, including one that would make my “tension melt away”: progressive muscle relaxation. To do this, I lay supine on our blue flowered rug and started with my feet. The idea is that by clenching different muscles in the body and then releasing them, we also release all of the body’s stored-up tension. I curled my toes downward and held the pose for ten tense seconds before moving up to my calves.

Though the book recommended tensing one muscle group at a time, my whole body wanted to participate. When I tensed my quads, all the muscles in my neck joined in. And my glutes were very clearly connected to my biceps. Soon all my muscles were jumping in like
crazed teens in a mosh pit, and that’s how I had my next panic attack. The phone, the front door, the step. The rocking. By the time I came back in again, my body felt at once fatigued and on high alert, like a sleepy watchman at a hideout.

It was getting late, and Larry still wasn’t home, so I decided to do something that left the majority of my body alone: affirmations. I sat up on the edge of the couch with my hands on my knees, my spine straight; I was going to kick some panic ass. “When anxious thoughts come up,” I said aloud, “I can slow down, breathe, and let them go.” The second time, to really concentrate, I squeezed my eyes shut. “When anxious thoughts come up, I can slow down, breathe, and let them go.”

My voice in the room was a strange sound. But I ignored that and tried the affirmation a third time: “When anxious thoughts come up, I can slow down, breathe, and let them go.” It was futile. Worse than not liking the sound of my voice was that I didn’t trust it.

I decided maybe visualization would be easier. According to the book, I was supposed to visualize someplace peaceful. So I closed my eyes and started with the author’s example: the beach—the salty air of the Atlantic, the lull of waves, the moist sand molding into the arches of my feet. As I walked the surf in my mind, I remembered how I’d once read that in the calm before a tidal wave, the ocean pulls back on itself, receding toward the horizon so far that a person could walk out for miles where the ocean had been. I kept thinking about that person, the one who would walk out onto the bare sand, about that giant wall of water.

So I left the beach and headed to the forest, the air a collage of cool bursts and ripples of warmth. I sat under the pines, gazed up at their shagged canopies. I spied deer gliding along the rock lines in the distance. My wooded trail was shaping into a lovely reverie, until suddenly every grim news report I’d ever heard about a woman being abducted in the woods—or found in the woods—began blaring in my mind at once. Forget the air, the trees, the deer—all I could think about was some menacing figure hiding in the brush.

I left the forest and closed the book. There was no safe place.

So I lay on the couch. I monitored my pulse. I sighed audibly. I watched the trees through the window. I thought about the ways people give up and wondered if this was how it would end for me: a fixture on a sofa.

B
etween the ages of four and nine, I spent a lot of time on my parents’ sofa, sick. But when I turned ten—after I moved to New York with my father, ready for the new life he’d promised me—I stopped getting sick. It was the one year of my childhood that my body and I coexisted peacefully, the year before I began to worry about my heart. It was also the year I made friends with a girl named Jennifer, who lived on my street. She rode horses, slept on a frilled white canopy bed, and had the best sticker collection in our neighborhood. Together we pierced the woods with sticks, dove down to the deepest parts of our pools, divulged secret crushes. Her life was the opposite of mine—a safe and cherished life—and I peered into it hungrily.

One day Jennifer invited me to come to the barn and visit her horse with her, and the night before I went to the stable, I was too excited to sleep. I kicked the covers around, looked for stars outside my window, and listened. And I could hear them—so many of them—galloping,
galloping
. . .

When we got to the barn, I knew by smell alone that I was in a different world. The combined scent of hay and manure and sweat was at once exotic and familiar. It registered someplace deep in me—that place where you know things before you know them—yet in those first seconds that I breathed it all in, even as my heart leapt, I began to sink inside. I understood too quickly that all of this belonged to Jennifer—it was
her
beautiful bay horse whinnying for her at the fence,
her
special riding pants and black velvet helmet,
her
mother cheering for her when she and her horse cleared the jumps—and it could never be mine. And
on that day, our differences became a chasm I could no longer traverse. As it turned out, I was simply too jealous to be her friend.

But oh, those horses. How I pined for them. For days and weeks and years after, I imagined what it would be like to feel a horse move beneath me, to be able to trust a creature so large and so powerful.