Let the Tornado Come: A Memoir (8 page)

B
efore Claret’s bright eyes and hourglass-shaped blaze changed my life the first time I saw him, there were other horses. The first was a sweet gray named Applesauce, whom I met after pulling up at a roadside barn one day on the way home from a session with a therapist, many months into my panic attacks. I rode Applesauce only once, but he opened the door to the world that would ultimately save me. And in the year that followed, the year before my search ended with a chestnut horse named Claret, I would ride ravenously, if inexpertly—geldings and mares at various barns with various riding instructors. And before those horses, there were the six months I spent at the end of a long rope, riding Shaddad, a small gray Arabian who lived a life of questionably shaped circles based on the shaky communication aids of the small children bouncing around on his back. At thirty-six, I would be one of those children.

Panic was still nearby then, the way a mountain can loom in the
rearview mirror as you drive away from it, but after impulsively stopping at Applesauce’s roadside barn that day, I knew that my childhood desire for horses was greater than my fear of them. By then I’d already hit the nadir of panic, had lost myself in its depths, had tried therapies and chants and healings of all kinds, had questioned more than once if I would ever get my life back. And though, slowly, I was learning the lifesaving strokes that would lead me eventually to resurface, it wasn’t until I followed the hoofbeats of my earliest memories that I would fully find my way free. So while Larry was doing the serious work of medicine, I was getting indoctrinated into a children’s equine lesson program.

My riding instructor, Tommy, was a middle-aged woman who, as far as I could tell, sought the approval of no one. If anything, she sought to make people understand that most likely, she could, and would, kick your ass. This was underscored by a part of her daily attire that I’d never seen before: sharp silver Chinese nail guards that looked like daggers pressed onto the tips of all of her fingers.

My first meeting with Tommy was instantly humbling. As I walked into the indoor arena, she yelled at me. “Stop!”

I stopped.

She was sitting in the corner of the arena, and there were a few people and two dogs looking on. “Whenever you enter an arena, you always yell ‘door’ before opening the door. That way you don’t startle the horses, and you don’t get run over.”

“Door,” I said, though the way I said it made it sound like a
question
.

“No. Go back outside, close the door, and try it again. And say it louder. You want to be heard, don’t you?”

I nodded as I backed out, closed the door, yelled “Door!,” and opened it again.

As I began to walk in, she yelled at me again. “Stop!”

So I stopped.

“Always look both ways when you enter. You don’t want to get trampled, do you?”

I shook my head and looked both ways—there were no horses in the arena—then stood frozen, unsure if I should continue walking in or if she was going to make me go back out and start over again.

“Close the door behind you,” she said. So, a little wobbly from my first lesson in Things You Have to Do Around Horses That You Never Heard of Before, I closed the door, took a deep breath, smiled, and headed toward the corner.

“I’m Rita,” I said, holding out my hand.

“Your half chaps are on backwards,” said Tommy, extending a palm full of silver.

T
hey say when you’re young, it’s much easier to learn new languages. It’s also easier for the body to learn new skills. I was acutely aware of both of these facts as Tommy brought Shaddad out of his stall and attached him to the crossties. All I wanted to do was look at his long white eyelashes and keep touching the soft down of his nose, but Tommy was busy talking about nosebands and throatlatches and leg wraps and girths and billet straps, and suddenly there was a huge chasm between us made up of all I did not know. Worse still was that I had to manipulate these items by placing them on Shaddad, who stood by imperviously, periodically blinking those long white lashes while I fumbled against him.

When, after a lot of struggle and nearly losing a finger, I managed to get the bit into Shaddad’s mouth, Tommy, who was holding the other side of the bridle, told me to buckle the noseband. But when I buckled it, she was clearly irritated. “That’s the flash,” she said. “This”—she grabbed hold of another leather strap—“is the noseband.” I spent the next half hour putting on all of Shaddad’s clothes.

“It’s called ‘tacking up,’ ” Tommy said, and I added that to the long list of new words I was promptly forgetting.

When it was time to tighten the girth, Tommy warned that sometimes Shaddad gets a little girthy.

“Girthy?”

“Basically, if he tries to bite you when you tighten the girth, smack him in the face.”

I could take a lot of yelling and a fair amount of humiliation, but one thing I knew I wouldn’t be able to do was smack a horse in the face. “I can’t do that,” I told her.

“You have to.”

“Well, I can’t.”

“Look at the size of him, and look at the size of you. You think that little hand of yours is going to hurt him? If he tries to bite you, you have to let him know that you’re the one in charge. If you don’t establish that at the beginning, he’ll take advantage of you.”

I looked at Shaddad’s face, ignored Tommy, and attempted to tighten the girth while leaning as far from the range of his teeth as
possible
.

“You can’t cower away from him like that. Use your body language to let him know you’re not afraid.”

“But I am afraid.”

In three quick steps, Tommy stormed over to me and stood facing me, inches from my face. Her shoulders were pitched forward, and instinctively I stepped back, away from her.

“See. That’s what you have to do.”

So I forced myself to stand as if I weren’t afraid even though I was afraid, and not only didn’t I panic, but I finished tightening Shaddad’s girth without him biting me. But by the time we were all finished tacking him up, I didn’t know whether to cry or to run out the door. Instead, I took hold of Shaddad’s lead rope the way Tommy showed me and walked him into the arena, making sure to yell “door” and to look both ways.

H
aving fled Cindy’s apartment building and headed back to Rockville Pike, I don’t know where else to head but in the direction I came from. Cindy never answered her phone, and all I see now is this long road, these headlights coming at me through the bruised dusk.

When I get back to my father’s neighborhood, I prowl past people’s windows. Occasionally someone is eating or walking into a room or just watching TV, its blue light strobing into the street, but mostly the rooms are empty, like dioramas into which you could put anything. You could put a girl there. You could give her real parents.

I think about Joanne. I wonder what she’s doing, if she’s downstairs in the basement watching television as usual, and how she feels being the only kid left in our father’s house. Our stepbrother left months ago. After three years of my father’s torment, Bobby finally broke down and cried three years’ worth of crying, howling and screaming inconsolably, and he wouldn’t stop until my stepmother carried him and his suitcase
to the car and drove him to his father’s house, where he stayed. I envied him that night, how easily he could leave.

I know it’s risky, but I can’t help sidling up to my father’s house and unlatching the gate to his small backyard. I just want a glimpse of Joanne. I’ve been gone for only a few hours, but I still want to know she’s all right. I tiptoe down the steps and sneak over to the patio door, and suddenly I’m looking at her: my little sister sitting alone in the middle of the couch, her hands clasped in her lap. She’s watching television, and her face is sad. It’s surreal to be spying on her like this, to find this sheet of glass marking the line between our worlds. I want to run and I want never to leave her, both at once. I want whatever she’s watching to make her smile. If I could just see her smile—

I wait, and her face is so still, and the longer I stand there, the greater the heaviness that presses on me. For a second, the clock winds back, and I remember her standing behind the balcony door of our parents’ apartment, waiting for me to come home from school. I can see her dark hair. I can see the shape of her, the roundness. I was in second grade then, and she was still too young for school. She was also too young to pronounce my name properly, so she called me Bee, and though I couldn’t hear her as I made my way toward our building from the bus stop, I knew that’s what she was saying as she pointed her chubby finger excitedly and pressed herself against the glass. From the moment Joanne was born, she was the light I came home to.

But now I’ve left her, and she is sitting alone watching television, and the basement lights are spilling out onto the patio, and behind me it’s getting dark, and I don’t know if I should sneak away or stay here watching her. Overhead, birds are making their final trails of the evening across the sky. It’s time to do something.

I knock gently. Joanne doesn’t hear me over the television, so I knock a little louder and whisper her name, and this time she looks. She sees me, and a moment of recognition, deep and visceral, passes between us. As she comes to let me in, I put my finger to my lips to ask her to be quiet, but as soon as she slides the door open, she starts speaking
normally, almost authoritatively. “Where have you been? Dad called the police and said you ran away.”

“Shhh,” I whisper. “Please.”

I try to hug her, but she folds her arms against her ribs. She whispers back, “Why do I have to shush? Why can’t you just come home already?”

I crouch down to hide behind the love seat. “Because I can’t.”

“Why not, Rita? Why not?”

I don’t know how to answer, so I ask her to bring me something to eat instead.

“Why should I bring you something to eat if you’re not coming home?” She’s on the edge of tears, I can tell, but holding firm, her arms locked across her.

“Because I’m hungry,” I say, looking up at her.

“Fine,” she says, dropping her hands to her sides, and as she goes up to the kitchen, I start regretting how easily she gave in.

She returns with an ice cream sandwich. “Thank you,” I say, unwrapping it quickly. Sweet cold fills my mouth. “What’s Dad doing?”

“I don’t know. He’s up in his room.” She crouches down next to me. “Is it good?”

I nod. Joanne has always loved food—not only eating it but watching others eat it, and in this regard, she and I have been great partners. When it came to French fries, I ate the soggy ones, and she ate the crisp ones. I sucked the chocolate off peanut M&M’s, and she ate my spit-out peanuts. I licked the cream out of the Oreos, and she ate the cookies. Anyone else would think this was gross, but not Joanne. She watched me wide-eyed and hungry, and whatever I discarded, she ate with gusto—pizza crusts, meat, empty ice cream cones.

I offer her a bite of my ice cream, but she shakes her head no. I sense the wrongness then, not only of this moment when, for the first time, she’s refusing something I’m giving her, but also of our lives, and how neither of us has the power to fix it. “I’m sorry—” I start, but just then I hear the heavy plodding of my father’s footsteps overhead.
Startled, I jump up and drop my ice cream on the floor. Joanne and I look at each other, not sure what will happen next, but then my father’s footsteps are coming closer, and I panic, and I bolt. I slip back out onto the patio, but before I take off, I look over my shoulder. Joanne is standing behind the glass, crying.

I love you
, I mouth to her, and then I’m gone.

As I pound through the neighborhood at top speed, I’m aware that I can’t possibly get far enough fast enough. Still, my sneakers mark their quick and steady rhythm on the pavement, and I think that maybe if I run hard enough, the air will catch me, and I will fly.

But eventually I get tired of running. Then I get tired of walking. I settle onto a back staircase of an apartment building and close my eyes. But I can’t shake that last image of my sister; I can’t stop seeing her face.

Once, when I was in the sixth grade, my gifted and talented group went to a library, where we were told to think of any question in the world we wanted the answer to. We all wrote our questions down on little slips of paper, and when I brought mine up to the teacher, she stopped and looked at me as if I’d offended her somehow. My question was
Why do parents hit their children?
She folded my paper up and handed it back to me, then told me I should think of a different question. My questions now are no easier to answer: How could I leave my sister like that? How could I stay? So I change the question: How can I sleep here tonight? I curl up on one side, just below the top step, and rest my head on my arm. The night is cool, the concrete steps like a vacuum sucking the heat from my body. I briefly consider trying to sneak back into my father’s house and grab a jacket. No going back, I tell myself.

But the night is rough. No matter how I turn my body, the stairs dig into my ribs. Every so often I’m jolted by late-nighters coming home. “I’m just waiting for a friend,” I mutter, sitting up straight and trying to look awake, though they don’t seem to care.

In the morning, I find a church and go inside because I’ve seen in movies how people get saved in churches. Though they’re too far away,
I want to touch the stained glass windows, the glowing colors. One of my favorite toys ever was the Lite-Brite my grandmother gave me for my fifth birthday, because you could push into the black and find light, and because you could actually touch the light—those jeweled pegs—as opposed to the one time I touched a lightbulb and blistered my finger.

So I sit on the wooden bench watching the light change on the windows and waiting for someone to come and tell me about God. But no one comes.

E
ventually I walk back up Rockville Pike. I call Cindy from the lobby again, and this time she answers the phone. I ride the elevator up, and she sneaks me into her room, and we spend the night giggling in her bed, and while she’s in school the next day, I hide in her closet. For eight hours I sit beneath her dresses and whisper songs into the darkness—
sweet dreams are made of this—
until she comes home and we eat hot dogs and call boys and pluck our eyebrows in the mirror.

But that evening, the police find me in her room, and this time instead of taking me home, they take me to a group home called Open Door, where I spend two weeks with girls who tease me for being a virgin and who make my short experience as a runaway seem laughable. But we cook tortellini together in a big kitchen, and that’s sort of fun. In order to be released from the group home, I have to promise I won’t run away again. So I promise, and then it’s summer, and Joanne and I go to stay with our mother, and Joanne and I are still in our different worlds even when we’re right next to each other, and she starts spending most of her time with her best friend’s family across the street, and my mother is like a giant beanstalk of anger, cracking things as it grows, and when I start wearing a bra, my mother starts saying I’m just like a hooker, especially when I’m sitting down and forget to cross my legs, and now she’s raging through the house, flinging books and candles around and yelling at her boyfriend, telling him he’s a dumb fuck and why does he have to be such a dumb fuck, and then at me, wanting to
know why I’m such a slut and why I have to wear so much eyeliner. I don’t know why my eyeliner makes her so angry. But I can’t stop remembering that once, for a little while, she loved me.

“I’m going outside,” I say.

She puts her hand on her hip and looks toward the window. “You better not go farther than where I can see you.”

The air outside is balmy and slightly sweet. A streetlight emits a small halo into the dark, while summer lingers around everything—my bare shoulders and legs, the occasional car that whooshes by, the silver half-face of the moon. There’s something exciting about this stillness, about the slow air settling on my skin. I sit on the hood of my mother’s car and tilt my head back to watch the sky.

Someone has turned on music, and Roger Daltrey’s gravelly voice comes surging from an open window into me. He’s singing about teenage wasteland, and the force of his voice, surrounded by the power of the guitar and drums and even a violin, is like a dozen hands on my body, lifting me. After the song crescendos, I feel its last note resound inside me, and though whoever turned the music on has now turned it off again, all I can feel is the lasting vibration of it. The stillness that, a few minutes earlier, was welcoming, now seems stagnant. And suddenly I can’t stop thinking about the road outside our apartment complex. All I’d need to do is cross a field to get to it.

I make my move.

Out on Liberty Road, I hitch a ride back to Rockville and check my reflection in the pay phone outside a 7-Eleven. Here there is motion, every minute a new car, a new face, the sound of tires moving over the asphalt. I waste no time calling Cindy.

“Guess what!” I practically yell. “I’m on Rockville Pike!”

“What are you doing here?” Her voice is guarded, and it crushes me instantly. “I thought you were supposed to be at your mom’s for the summer.”

“Yeah, but she was going psycho again, so I took off.”

“Wow, girl, you’re crazy! What are you gonna do now?”

A car pulls in behind me and lights up my legs. “I’m not sure.”

“Well, I’d tell you to stay here, but you know what happened last time. After the whole police thing, Uncle Frank would throw a fit if he saw you.”

“I guess he’s home, now, huh?”

“Yeah, he’s here all right. Look, Rita, I really wish I could help you, but—”

“No, I totally understand.” My voice comes out too high. “Besides, the police would probably check there again anyway.” I scrape at the sidewalk with the front of my sandal.

“Do you need any money? I could meet you,” she says, apologetically.

I push through the makeup and scraps of paper in my purse and collect my change. “No, I’m fine. I’ve got money.”

“Okay. Well maybe we can get together soon, meet at the mall or something.” We both know this won’t happen.

“Sounds good. Thanks, Cindy.”

“Be careful, you.”

I stand leaning into the phone booth for a minute, trying to think. Cars keep driving by and it’s late and warm and I’m getting tired. I consider walking back the mile to the apartments near my father’s house, but I can’t bear the thought of another night on those steps. I dig through my purse again and find a phone number I’d been keeping, just in case.

Fifteen minutes later, a Rolls-Royce pulls into the 7-Eleven, and I get in. The car reeks of cologne.

“I’m so glad you called,” says Mr. Malekzadeh, stretching out the last word. “I thought you probably got rid of my number.”

“Why would I do that?” I ask, looking out the window at the buildings passing by. I know I should feel nervous, but I don’t. I feel resigned.

We drive the rest of the way in silence, and this time in the elevator I don’t pretend to be glamorous. This time, I know where I’m going.

Out comes the wine, the pot, the tongue—and now I don’t resist.
Now I will know what Cindy knows, what the group home girls know. Mr. Malekzadeh unties my halter and shoves his tongue inside my mouth. But when he unzips his pants, I step back. I don’t expect it to be so big, so aggressive-looking.