Let the Tornado Come: A Memoir (9 page)

“Put your hand on it,” he says.

But I can’t. “I’ve never done this before.”

Mr. Malekzadeh’s pursed lips curve to a smile, as if he’s seeing me for the first time. “You’re a virgin?”

I nod.

“Then we’ll go slow,” he says, taking my hand and leading me into the bedroom, where he takes off the rest of my clothes and lays me down on the bed. There’s a window behind me, and I tilt my head back to see the moon, a halved pearl.

Mr. Malekzadeh reaches for the bottle of Vaseline Intensive Care lotion on his nightstand and pumps it into his hand, slathering it on himself and on me. The scent reminds me of baby diapers, a thought quickly knocked out by the force of him pushing against me. But it won’t go in.

He becomes relentless with the lotion, pumping, then trying to push himself in again, then pumping, then pushing. It seems as if a week goes by. And then suddenly something breaks. There is the moon. There is Mr. Malekzadeh on top of me thrusting and grunting. There is the moon. There is the pressure, the pain. There is the lumbering sound of my father’s footsteps; there are my mother’s glazed eyes. There is the moon. There is the screaming in my mind with every thrust:
Fuck you, Mom! Fuck you, Dad!
I can’t say it enough. We are both relentless.

When it’s over, there’s a fire between my legs. Mr. Malekzadeh lies back sweating and lights a cigarette. I smoke one, too, and grow older. Our smoke curls toward the ceiling, swirling up to a single haze over the room. On the sheets, my blood is smeared into a sloppy star. There’s a power in the destruction, a strange satisfaction in the proof.

After we press our cigarettes out, he gets up and, without a word, starts dressing, so I get dressed, too. He moves briskly, matter-of-factly,
as he pulls his polo over his head. He won’t look at me. I feel suddenly forgotten, almost like a trespasser. The alarm clock glows 3:37
A.M.
, and I’m exhausted. I want to go back to the bed and close my eyes, to travel back and back, to a Halloween sleepover with friends, to dreams about water and boats, to an early childhood carnival spinning and glittering while trees stand quietly around it in the darkness and all I have inside me is hope.

I
t would be many months before I would stop at a roadside barn and ride my first horse—and even longer before I would meet Tommy and Shaddad. In these early months, I was trapped within my panic and could see no way out. I couldn’t write. I could barely dress myself without tumbling headlong into another panic attack. And though Larry would never say it, I could sense his disappointment. He would say you need to write; it’s your job to write. And I would say I don’t know how to write when I feel like I’m dying, and he would say you’re not dying, and I would say nothing is logical anymore; I’m not me anymore. And he would say you’re you. And I would say I’m not me if I’m not writing, and he would say that’s why you should write.

But it wasn’t just the writing. I knew Larry needed me—the neurosurgery department had been in much worse shape than he’d understood when he took the job—and in the past, he’d always leaned on me, and I’d always been strong enough to hold him. Now I needed him
to hold me, but the timing was wrong. Also, I was vaguely aware that his holding me would require him to face what was happening to me: he would have to look straight at me; he would have to admit that his wife was coming unhinged. But by then we were already five years into a marriage in which we’d both tacitly agreed that I would hide certain parts of myself, that I would let him see only what he wanted, and that somehow this pact would keep us both safe—unsullied by my past. There were moments, though, that tested this arrangement, like the time he accidentally saw a page of a manuscript I’d left open. The sentences he read were about sex I’d had as a runaway. “I don’t like it,” he pouted, “that you had sex with other people.”

“It’s not like I enjoyed it,” I pointed out. “But why should that matter anyway? You’re the only one I want to have sex with now.”

Larry shook his head. “I still don’t like it. I wish I could have met you when you were a virgin.”

“Sometimes I feel like a virgin.”

He shook his head again. “Sometimes I wish I could just put you away on a shelf, so nobody else can get to you.”

“But I’m right here with you. I’m alive.”

It took me days to console Larry after that, as if I were comforting a child who’d just woken from a bad dream. Except the dream was my life.

“
M
aybe if I go to work with you, I’ll be able to write,” I suggested, “in your office. Maybe if I’m not alone, I won’t be as scared.”

When we were first dating, Larry took me to work with him several times. I was a technical writer then, and I’d met him at a summer party thrown by my boss. The tipsy woman who introduced us joked that Larry was her landscaper, but I didn’t know it was a joke at the time. I didn’t notice at first how soft his hands were. Instead, I noticed that he had a paramecium-shaped scar on his knee that was similar to the two I had on mine. I noticed that there was a boyishness about him that
belied his age. And I noticed that the fields around us were lit gold in the afternoon sun.

So for a short time, I believed this boy-man, whose hair kept flopping forward onto his forehead, and which he kept abruptly brushing away each time with the curve of his hand, was a gardener. I had never dated a man of the earth before, and as I flirted, I imagined his hands reaching into the cool soil. That’s when I eyed his hands—the clean, neatly clipped nails; the unmarked, supple skin—and the truth came out. Of course, it’s hard to be disappointed when you discover that the man you’re flirting with is not a gardener but a brain surgeon.

Immediately, I wanted to know more. I am nothing if not curious, which is how I ended up following Larry, weeks after we met, into the operating room in a pair of loose pink scrubs that could have easily housed two of me. I didn’t tell him about my squeamishness, and he didn’t tell me that the patient’s open skull would be only inches away from me when we entered the room. There would be no special viewing theater like in the movies—just the throbbing, bleeding brain of a human being. As we stood around the patient and the residents told Larry how the opening went, I was bombarded with thoughts, the primary being a question of math: what were the odds that if I fainted, I would fall directly onto this man’s head?

But I neither fell nor fainted. I stood and watched. It was a long five hours observing Larry remove blackish pieces of tumor bit by microscopic bit while I fought back alternating waves of nausea and hunger, but I wanted to be there. I wanted to know everything about what Larry did—not only that he saved lives, but also the grit of it, the blood dripping into a clear plastic bag beneath the patient’s head, the growing hole where the pinkish frontal lobe was disappearing, the acrid smell of bone dust.

N
ow what I wanted was simpler, yet seemingly impossible: to have one whole day free from fear. So Larry agreed to bring me, his emotionally unstable wife, to his new job. I figured if something
went wrong, I was already in a hospital. Luckily, what I’d hoped turned out to be true: being there helped me feel slightly less scared than usual. But still, despite the company of my trusty notebook and laptop, I couldn’t write. So I drew a picture for Larry instead. Only, two-year-olds can draw better than I can, so the elephant I sketched came out looking like George Washington. Larry put it up on the corkboard in his office anyway, and as he pushed the tack in, he smiled. This, I thought, is the family I never had.

When Larry went off to see patients, I busied myself by watching
Meet the Parents
on my laptop. I don’t know what Larry’s assistant thought each time she entered the room to put something on Larry’s desk, but when she said hello and commented on the rain, neither of us discussed the fact that I was curled up on my side watching Ben Stiller spray-paint the tail of a cat. Normally I might have tried to snap the laptop shut or at least make some excuse for myself, but she came in each time without warning. Besides, when it’s a matter of survival, it’s hard to care what people think of you. And for me, that’s what it felt like: survival.

What I found comforting about
Meet the Parents
was that nothing terrible happens, and the wispy blond schoolteacher’s parents will always keep her childhood room as she left it, wallpapered in flowers and frilled with fluffed bedding and a delicate string-pull lamp. And I could imagine that room—that safe, unchanging place—as my own.

W
hen I finally decided to confide my predicament to someone, I called my friend Annie, a sprightly Floridian lawyer with a toothpaste commercial smile and a Suzuki GSX motorcycle. As soon as I told her what was going on, I could feel the slap of her words across the states. “What the hell are you doing? It’s been nearly two months. Two months you haven’t had any control over your life. How long do you plan to suffer with this?”

“I’m just trying to figure it out. If I can start to understand—”

“What you need to understand is that sometimes you need help, and you should get it. Get two prescriptions—one for Prozac and one for Xanax—and pull yourself together.”

I tried to explain that I’d made it this far in my life without medication, so why change now?

“Because you need it,” she said. “That’s why.”

“What if I need something else? What if I’m supposed to learn something from this? Wouldn’t taking drugs just mask it?”

She was silent so long that I thought she’d hung up.

“Hello?” I said.

“Suit yourself,” she sighed. “If you want to suffer, then suffer.”

Of course I didn’t want to suffer. Who does? But a wise social worker once told me that the only way to be truly happy is to also be willing to suffer our suffering. I wasn’t entirely sure what he meant at first, and I didn’t like the sound of it, but what he meant was simple: each of us will endure pain in our lifetimes—there’s no escaping it (there is an entire religion based upon this truth)—and we can keep trying to flee this pain, or we can abide by it. Those are our only two choices. Most of us get twitchy for relief and try to squirm away. But the social worker’s point was that by moving through our suffering, instead of away from it, we learn the most about ourselves.

“I love you, Annie,” I told my friend. “And I appreciate your advice, but I really think there’s something here for me to learn.”

“I love you, too,” she said. “Learn well.”

I
decided to try learning something at a local Unitarian Universalist church, mostly because of the rainbow on the church sign, which suggested people who might be accepting, who wouldn’t judge me for obsessively taking my pulse or for needing to stand near the door for an entire service, people who left their houses each Sunday morning because, like me, they were searching for something.

As I stood with Larry beside the door in the back of the church, I
had to reconcile the difference between the churches I’d attended in the past and this one. By all appearances, they had a lot in common: the acolytes, the hymns, the announcements, the older white man at the pulpit. But that’s where the similarities ended. Because this minister wasn’t quoting from Mark or Luke or John; he was quoting from Vonnegut: “ ‘I tell you, even a half-dead man hates to be alive and not be able to see any sense to it.’ ” That was exactly it. I didn’t understand what was happening to me, but to make it all disappear with a pill wouldn’t solve the fundamental question of
why
. I wanted to make sense of my panic; I wanted the
why
.

The minister went on to espouse words from a local ornithologist, along with Whitman and Pound, all of which were enough to entice me to grab Larry’s hand and, after standing for half the service, sit down in the last pew—still close enough to the door to make a quick getaway in case of a fire or collapsing roof or sudden collective ridicule from a hundred turned heads. As we settled in, I thought I saw the minister smile at us. And it felt good, that quick acknowledgment in our seat beside a woman and her young child. I realized then how lonely I’d been.

The minister gently sculpted the air with his hands as he spoke about gifts, how we should always pass them on, how one of these gifts is “to love whoever is around to be loved.”
Wow,
I thought,
this is one special place
. But then, after placing our money in the tidings bowl, I gave a nod to Larry and we slipped out the back before the exodus.

Time slows. It stretches into a great vat, each second a drop falling in slow motion. Each drop explodes into liquid, changing the liquid each time. We’re standing in the kitchen, lined up like kids at a bus stop. We’re drinking tall glasses of many kinds of liquor from my mother’s cabinet, and someone has given me these pills that are pink hearts, and now they’re leaving, and I don’t know why they’re leaving. Wait, I want to say, but the word resists me, won’t rise. One boy stays, holds his glass, and his eyes are the color of whiskey, and the whiskey is staring at me. He puts his glass on the counter, and the earth stutters. “Come here,” he says, clutching the back of my head and pulling me toward him. The slimy muscle of his tongue grows, snakes its way into my throat. I’m going to throw up.

While I heave in the bathroom, he slips out. Then I am leaving, too, because a weight is pulling me down, out of the
light. I stumble out of the bathroom and vomit onto the pink carpet. I’m trying to get to the phone because I feel a blackness I’ve never felt before, like the pressing of tires against a road. I crawl across the living room floor and pull myself up onto the old pink sofa, to the phone. I try to speak, but my voice comes out like pulp. Then everything falls, and there is nothing but impenetrable black.

I
n the week since my mother admitted me to this teenage psych ward, I’ve learned to play Spades, taught a few of the girls the perfect three-part eye shadow application, and met a cute boy named Tony. I’m partnered up with him in the middle of a Spades game when a jowly middle-aged man approaches our table. We’re playing against Paul and Stacey—a pretty girl who compulsively puts on lip gloss—and Tony and I are winning.

“Hi, Dr. Kosarin,” Stacy sings.

“Rita?” he asks, looking at me.

“Yes.”

“I’m Dr. Kosarin, the psychiatrist here. Would you please come with me?”

“We’ll pick this up later,” assures Tony with a wink.

I nod back, smiling shyly, and follow Dr. Kosarin to his office.

“So, Rita, can you tell me why you’re here?”

I lean back in my little metal-legged chair. “I guess because I keep running away.”

The last time I ran away, that night after Mr. Malekzadeh was finished with me, I roamed through the apartment building, riding the elevator up and down, meandering down one hall and then another, until finally I went to sleep on a back staircase, which was carpeted and much warmer than the last one. When a security guard discovered me, I told him I was eighteen and just very tired, and he smiled sadly
at me and told me we could call either my parents or the police. I chose my mother. The sun was up by the time she drove the hour to get me. I hugged her and thanked her and wondered, as she lightly hugged me back, if she could sense what had just happened to my body. If she could, she didn’t show it.

Dr. Kosarin leans back in his plush leather chair and pulls off his glasses. “Is that all?” he asks, rubbing his hand over his eyes. He puts his glasses back on and picks up my file. “It says here that you were recently admitted to Baltimore County General Hospital for an overdose of—let’s see here—a mixture of amphetamines and alcohol. Do you want to tell me about that?”

“There’s not much to tell. Some friends came over, and we made these really strong drinks, and then one of them had some speed, so I tried it.”

“Uh-huh, I see. And have you ever attempted suicide prior to this episode?”

“Of course not. I wasn’t trying to commit suicide.”

“Okay. Tell me then, have you ever had any suicidal thoughts? Ever feel like it might just be easier to end it all—you know, run away for good, that sort of thing?”

“No.” I’m starting to get annoyed. “I mean, yes, I’ve thought about running away for good, but I’ve never wanted to kill myself.”

“Because it’s okay if you have. A lot of people do. We’re here to help you, Rita.”

I’m beginning to learn that many adults aren’t any wiser than children, that, in fact, they can be the blindest, meanest people on earth. “Right,” I say. “But I’m not suicidal.” I look him defiantly in the eyes. “Why don’t you ask me why I run away?”

Dr. Kosarin sighs, and I can see he’s equally annoyed with me. “Today’s purpose is to do an initial evaluation. We can talk more about that later. Now if you could just answer a few more questions. Tell me, how do you sleep at night?”

“Fine.”

“No trouble falling asleep? No waking up in the middle of the night?”

“Like I said, fine.”

“Do you ever feel like you want to hurt someone?”

I imagine knocking him off his big chair. “No.”

B
ack on the unit, I hear the sound first—growling, low and feral. It’s coming from a girl who’s squirming on the floor. Three staff members are trying to hold her down as she snarls, punches, kicks, and bites them. The counselors flinch. One is bleeding from her hand. The girl looks at nothing. She is all limbs. Her shirt has come up in the tussle, exposing her pale belly and the underside of a breast. Within seconds several men come rushing down the hall. They pin her arms and legs down as easily as if they were a doll’s. One of them produces a needle, and soon the girl’s eyes are rolling back in their sockets.

“They probably gave her enough Thorazine to knock her out for days,” someone says.

“What happened?” I ask.

“Oh, nothing. She just goes off sometimes. They’ll probably put her in seclusion for a week.”

“What’s wrong with her?”

“Honey, don’t you know where you are?”