Let the Tornado Come: A Memoir (11 page)

A
few days after I resolved to find myself a mother, on a day when I was courageous enough to travel the two miles to the local grocery store, I scoped out potential mothers in the produce aisle, because the way a woman chooses her fruit and vegetables says a lot about her. I watched women delicately cradle tomatoes in their fingers and others tear them roughly off the vine. I watched women knock on watermelons, shake water off romaine, stuff their bags with fiddlehead ferns.

When I spotted a possible candidate, I’d smile at her and ask her how she planned to cook her vegetables. Most women love to talk about what they’re making for dinner that night. “Oh, Brussels sprouts are easy—you just roast ’em in the oven. Cut ’em in half, drizzle with olive oil, a little salt and pepper, and you’re set. Four hundred degrees. Delicious.”

After a few trips to the produce aisle, I’d acquired several cooking
tips but no mother. It had been more than two months since my first panic attack, and almost as long since I’d driven farther than a five-mile radius on our local country roads, and I had to face what I’d become: a woman who accessorized her outfits with medical gear and security devices. Even
Meet the Parents
was losing its charm. I needed a mother, fast. So I called a dog sitter.

My plan was simple: (1) find a sweet and nurturing older woman who loves animals; (2) invite her over for a trial visit with my two dogs; (3) charm her with my sad but eager eyes; (4) become her daughter.

When the dog sitter arrived, I was instantly disappointed. For one, she didn’t smile. And she didn’t acknowledge my two dogs, now in a frenzy of tail wagging at her feet. But I was willing to forgive the first impression. She had every right to be wary about entering a stranger’s house at night. So I smiled at her and knelt down to introduce her to my dogs, giving them both a good scratch under their collars.

“What breed are they?” she asked, still standing.

Maybe she had a bad back, I thought. “They’re a Jack Russell–dachshund mix. I rescued them from the pound when they were ten months old. Littermates. The white one is Aramis, and the black one is Starlet.”

“Pound dogs are the best,” she said.

I can work with this,
I thought. “Come, sit down. Can I bring you a cup of tea?”

I took the opportunity to quickly check my pulse.
Don’t panic, don’t panic, don’t panic,
I told myself while the water rushed into the kettle. Of course, I panicked. Then I sat at the other end of the couch, with the dogs between us, and shakily held my teacup.

The dog sitter looked at me. “Aren’t you going to, you know, leave?”

“Oh, I thought I explained. I wanted this to be a get-to-know-you visit.”

“It’s just that people usually run a few errands or something, so their pets and I have a chance to get to know each other.”

Was this woman kicking me out of my own house? “If it’s okay with you, I’d prefer you guys get acquainted while I’m here.”

As she sighed and looked up at the TV, I examined her profile, the sharp point of her nose, the kinky fair hair obscuring the side of her cheek. I wondered if she had been attractive when she was younger, if she had smiled more then. There had to be some way I could connect with her. “I’m a writer,” I volunteered. “But I haven’t been writing lately because I’ve been going through a pretty intense bout of anxiety.” And that’s when I learned the quickest way to get rid of a dog sitter.

L
ater that evening, Larry came home and took me to the grocery store. He was selecting cuts of meat for one of his stews while I lingered in the bakery, which is arguably the happiest place in any grocery store. I ordered a fruit tart laden with fresh berries and smiled at the baker. I had noticed her before, on first glance because she was taller than everyone else, but also because she seemed to carry a sadness in her eyes, as if any moment they could fill with tears. “Do you make these?” I asked, as she placed the dessert in a box.

“I make all of it,” she said. Her voice matched her eyes; it held a slight quiver.

“Wow,” I said. “That’s a lot of sweet.”

She looked very serious then, and I thought I’d somehow misunderstood something. “This is just what I do
here
,” she said. “I’m a trained chef. I can make more than pie.”

On a whim, I asked if she ever gave cooking lessons. Her eyes shone. “Yes. I do.”

I’d never really learned to cook. After the roast chicken dinner that went so wrong when we were kids, my mother’s exclusive use of the oven was to heat the foil-wrapped Swanson TV dinners of fried chicken, with the small partitions of corn, mealy mashed potatoes, and rubbery apple cobbler. I didn’t complain; I loved those things. I would
zealously pick the breading off the chicken before giving the meat to my sister and starting on the potatoes. Years later, in a kitchen of my own, I figured things out as best as I could. But I didn’t know basic things, such as the proper way to hold a knife or cut an onion or peel a butternut squash. I wasn’t exactly sure what a roux was or what it meant to deglaze something.

“Where do I sign up?” I asked.

The woman quickly wrote her name and number on a piece of paper and handed it to me. Her name was Helen. It was a good name. It was in my pocket.

T
hat night I showered and came to bed in my new lingerie: the stethoscope. After Larry was asleep, I studied him in the dark. He was on his back, naked in the yellow glow of the hall light, covers kicked off. His left leg was bent off the bed. His left hand was reposed straight across his heart, his wedding band gleaming at his sternum—as if at any moment his voice would come through: “I pledge allegiance . . .”
I miss you,
I thought, watching him.

What I wanted from Larry seemed so simple—to have compassion for whatever this thing was that was going haywire inside me—but as I came to him with my fearful mind and turbulent heart, I realized it wasn’t simple at all. He was impatient, disappointed, unsettled. I knew this from his curt reassurances, from the disdain in his eyes, from his unwillingness to ask me about my panic, about how it felt to be scared of the most basic tasks—and ultimately, about where I’d come from.

T
hough Larry was, in many respects, boyish, he was also a brave man. Sometimes I referred to him as my hero, not because he once received a Shock Trauma Hero Award from the University of Maryland’s Shock Trauma Center, but because he had more integrity than anyone I’d ever met, and because I trusted him more than anyone
I’d ever known. Part of that trust came from his humility. On the night of our first date, he didn’t try to impress me by casually mentioning all the lives he’d saved, though there had been many; instead, he told me how upset he was with himself over a patient he’d seen that day. He’d thought the patient had radiation necrosis, a side effect from radiosurgery, but it had actually been a recurrence of a metastatic tumor.

“Do they look different on a scan?” I’d asked.

“No, that’s just it. They look very similar. And he was in the expected time window to have necrosis.”

“So then any surgeon would have thought the same thing?”

“Maybe, but I just wish I hadn’t.”

That was the beginning of us—this honest moment, this confession of possible failure, this deep concern for another human being—and it warmed me through. Larry was a healer. He removed tumors, clipped aneurysms, cleared out blood clots, dislodged bulging disks in the spine, dealt daily with the aberrations of the body. And his specialty was brain tumors—all the varied masses that, if left untended, displaced the other parts of the brain, causing the most basic functions to go awry.

Larry healed brains. Yet here he was, married to a woman whose mind was out of control, and he didn’t know how to touch it.

T
he music is so loud that I’m thinking some kind of nuclear fission is happening inside my ears. I’m jammed in the backseat with these guys, and the whole car smells like Polo cologne and pot. They’re leaning into me, and one of them has his hand on my knee. Their teeth flash under the streetlights. They’re shouting along with the Stray Cats in heavy Iranian accents and smiling expectantly—“She’s sexy and seventeen!” The truth is I’m thirteen, but no guy wants to hear that—they just want to think it, keep it hidden like a present. So I give them that.

I don’t know where we’re going. For the moment, I’m glad to be heading somewhere. I’m hoping maybe I’ll get lucky and they’ll give me something to eat. I’d love pizza. I stare past the guy on my right to see the moon gleaming like a seashell on a night table, under a lamp. It disappears when the driver takes a turn onto the highway.

The guy to my left has run his hand up my leg, where it’s resting
on my inner thigh. The wind is pouring into the car like a fit of wings, sweeping my hair around. I keep wiping it from my eyes because I want to see. I want to see everything I can outside these windows—the passing cars swishing by, the spark and tail of every light, the trees standing like shadows in their quiet height, the bright green highway signs.

T
he Iranians like steak. In the supermarket, they shove them down the fronts of their pants. I met these guys earlier at the 7-Eleven near my father’s house, when they pulled in with their car thumping and their windows down. They were smiling at me, and their eyes were like firecrackers. When they asked me if I wanted a ride, I got in and they floored it down the road. There are a lot of Middle Eastern people who live here in these towns outside Washington, D.C., but this one guy, Afshin, who now has a lap full of rib-eye, is the most gorgeous man I’ve ever seen, even more gorgeous than Andy Gibb and Shaun Cassidy, whose posters I stared at for years on my bedroom wall.

I used to keep count of how many times I ran away. I liked thinking it:
I have run away five times.
But now I’ve stopped counting, maybe because it’s no longer so much a thing I do but more who I am. After I got out of Lutheran Hospital and went back to my father’s house, I thought maybe I could stop running. But by then my stepmother had left my father—after three years of marriage, my father finally snapped and beat her until she clawed her way out of the house and ran barefoot in her nightgown into the February snow—and my sister had gone back to live with our mother, and my father walked around bereft and excoriated and mean, and most days I felt like I was living inside a sarcophagus. So I ran. That was three weeks ago.

The men take me back to their apartment and fire the steaks up on the broiler. I’ve never really liked meat, but I eat small bites anyway because I’m hungry. “This”—one of them holds his fork straight out—“is how you cook a steak!” Then, to me, “You’re too skinny. Skinny like a pencil. You need more meat!”

One of the men echoes, “More meat,” and they all laugh—all except Afshin, whose amber eyes seem to be on the verge of a question and whose face is the perfect arrangement of shadow and light.

“What do you do?” Afshin asks me, and I instantly feel myself blush.

Unsure how to answer, I busy myself with cutting my steak.

“Are you in school?” He tilts his head to look at me, and I can hardly breathe under his gaze.

“I’m trying to figure out my life,” I say, because it is the truest and only thing I can think to say.

He nods thoughtfully. “College. That’s what you should do with your life.”

“Meat,” says the one with the fork. “Meat is what she should do with her life.”

“I’m in college,” says Afshin, and his perfect smile damn near knocks me off my chair. “You should come with me, tomorrow! You will love it. You will fall absolutely in
love
with it!”

And I’m thinking that he doesn’t realize I’m only thirteen and that there’s an APB out on me. And I’m thinking that his fingers are so long and delicate. And I’m thinking that his optimism is one of ignorance, which makes it an optimism made out of glitter that will so quickly fall to the ground.

That night, I sleep on a bare mattress beside Afshin, and I smell his skin, and I smell the black waves of his hair, and every single thing about him is sweet, and I can hear, somewhere far off in my mind, my mother calling me names, and I feel wretched lying there beside this stranger, who I want with a hunger that seizes me and who I know I will never have.

In the morning, when I wake, he is gone. I shower in their bathroom, then start walking back down the road, my hair still wet.