Let the Tornado Come: A Memoir

by Rita Zoey Chin

  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.

  ELEVEN

  Larry 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.

  Between 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.

  TWELVE

  Before 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.

  They 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” an
d to look both ways.

  THIRTEEN

  Having 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.