Let the Tornado Come: A Memoir (26 page)

T
hough things went steadily and unforeseeably downhill during our time at Gerta’s barn, at the end of our time there, after I decided to leave, my relationship with Claret deepened. And we began again.

I was grateful to the horses I’d known before Claret for what they gave me, but it was Claret who whinnied for me when he recognized the sound of my car pulling up; it was Claret who nickered for me every time I walked through the barn doors, every time he heard my voice. While all the other horses stood quietly in their stalls, it was always Claret shifting around to see me, to call out to me. And it was Claret who taught me that we could trust each other during the afternoons I spent walking with him through the pastures as he grazed, working the currycomb into his neck and back, feeding him peppermints and letting him lick the sugar off my palms. He taught me balance and strength through hours of training my body to follow his movements.
He taught me focus as I repeatedly refined my communication during the different exercises I did with him. And he taught me, when I finally did fall off, how to brush the dirt away and get back on again: as I sat up on the ground after a sudden and hard landing on my back, Claret walked over to me. I was crying by then at the shock of it, quick silent tears despite my will not to cry, and Claret, who had originally spooked at the sound of ice falling off the roof and sent us both flying in different directions, gently put his nose down on the top of my helmet. He stood there quietly for a minute, and I felt his warm breath on my face, and I stopped crying, and I righted myself, and I climbed up onto his back again.

By demanding my full presence, Claret taught me a calm and strength that panic had no part of.

In the month before I moved Claret to his new barn near the pond, spring came, and sometimes I stood beside him in the paddock and looked up at the pine trees. He seemed to be looking, too, both of us standing so still. Sometimes a breeze would flutter his mane, and I’d think,
You wild, wild thing
.

W
hile I was spending days with Claret, Larry was, in his free time, learning to become a pilot. “What’s it like up there? Is it scary?” I asked over sushi.

Larry rested his chopsticks on his tray. “No, it’s not scary, because there are all kinds of things you’re thinking about, like your speed, your altitude, where you’re going next.”

“That sounds a lot like riding,” I said.

“They’re very similar, I think.”

“Does it feel different in such a small plane? Does it feel like you’re actually flying up there? Like in dreams?”

“In the plane, when it’s smooth, you don’t feel like you’re flying so much. It’s like being on the ground, only the view is different. It’s only when there’s a little bit of turbulence that you feel like you’re bobbing a
little, and that feels like flying.” Larry held his hand out flat, imitating a plane. “Not that it’s pleasant to hit turbulence. But if you’re moving through something, like a cloud, you can feel that speed—when there’s some kind of acceleration or deceleration. That’s when you really feel connected with the plane, when you’re making movements. And of course, when you’re taking off and landing. That’s when it can get scary, as you’re coming in for the landing and you’re getting closer and closer. That to me is the most interesting part.”

N
ow that I was driving on highways, I decided to take a trip to Baltimore to visit my sister, Joanne, and her daughter, Kiana, as well as some friends. On the way, I was going to stop in Brooklyn to hear one of my best friends—the fellow Bread Loaf waiter who had a Snoopy shirt that matched mine and whose writing struck bone—give a reading. But on my way to the reading, I missed the exit. My plan was to get off on the next exit, but that turned out to be very far away, and in the meantime I’d hit a giant traffic jam, and I was watching the minutes on my car clock inch closer and closer to the reading time, and I still hadn’t arrived at the next exit, and then it was too late. I’d missed the reading. So I rerouted my navigation for Baltimore, and eventually the traffic got moving again, and suddenly I found my highway merging with another highway to form the biggest highway I’d ever seen. I saw it happening, saw that I was in the center of this megahighway, so I pulled
over on the shoulder just before the merge point, and I began to panic. My heart was racing, and I couldn’t see straight, and everything suddenly got very, very loud, and the traffic was zooming past me, rattling my car, and I knew that if I didn’t move, I would probably get smashed by an eighteen-wheeler, but I was too terrified to move. I thought that if I could just talk to someone, maybe I could get through it, so I called Larry, and he didn’t answer, and I called every friend I could think of, and they didn’t answer, and I started calling random acquaintances, and nobody would answer.

I had to drive. I was stuck in the middle of the Biggest Highway in the Universe, and all I wanted was to disappear—to be magically airlifted and delivered safely home, with my dogs at my side. But I had to drive. I tried to remember all the things I’d learned about panic along the way, but somehow all I could come up with was the word
fuck
. So I went with that. “Fuck!” I yelled. I gripped the steering wheel and sat up tall. “I can do this! I can fucking do this!” I turned my radio up so that it was pouring over the traffic. “I can drive on the fucking highway!” I looked in my rearview, and when it was clear, I gunned it and merged back into the traffic. “You’re doing this,” I said. “You’re doing it.” But I was still terrified, so I started singing with the music—
I just have to be louder than the fear
, I thought. I sang so loudly that I was almost embarrassing myself, and that got me smiling, and since it’s hard to panic when you’re smiling, that’s how I soothed myself to Baltimore, singing loudly, off-key.

I had about five more panic attacks on the way: as long as I could be next to a shoulder, I was okay, but whenever the shoulder disappeared, my adrenaline lit flames just under my skin and my breath came choppy. I suppose there are many of us who feel better knowing the shoulder is there on the side of the road—that there’s a way out, just in case. But eventually, there’s always a way out.
Just wait
, I kept telling myself when the shoulder disappeared and I was suddenly speeding alongside a concrete wall in a panic.
The shoulder will come back
. And the shoulder always reappeared.

W
hen I arrived in Baltimore, I recognized the air. I stood outside in the parking lot of my hotel for a while and looked at the fat orange moon, while cars came and went. Having lived in Maryland for over twenty years, I knew there were certain warm nights, like this night, when the wind came in cool fluttery laps through the balmy dark and wanted to seduce you—they were the kinds of nights when, as a kid, I knew it was time to run again—because the air seemed to be promising something, and the invitation—the possibility—was irresistible.

The next day I went with Joanne and Kiana to the mall across from my hotel. Unlike me, Joanne had maintained relationships with our parents. She lived one street away from my mother and saw my father from time to time on weekends. Family meant everything to her—a single mother, she lived for her daughter, a brilliant and beautiful dancer, and was determined to give her everything we never had. I admired her for that, for her selflessness and generosity when she had been given so little.

I gave up contact with my mother about a year before Larry and I moved to Massachusetts, but before that I’d spent years trying to be close to her. I listened to her problems and gave her advice, as I’d done during that brief time in my childhood when she’d let me be her friend. I cleaned her house, listened to her stories of her past, wrote her letters of encouragement, brought her fresh vegetables and books and her favorite perfumes, invited her to come stay with me so that I could feed her healthy foods and take walks with her and help her quit drugs and cigarettes—but nothing made a difference, and for me our relationship was often painful and one-sided. When I met the wise social worker—the one who told me that sometimes it is necessary to suffer—I could feel myself reaching an end.

“She’s never going to be a mother to you,” the social worker told me. “You can prop her up a million different ways, but that won’t make her a mother.” Though he wasn’t smiling, his eyes were smiling, as sages’ eyes
do. “So, you can either let her go and grieve her, or you can spend your life chasing a phantom.”

That evening I took a walk through my neighborhood. It was dusk, and though the streets and trees and houses were dimming, the sky still held the light, like a window lit from inside.
A person can lose things,
I thought,
and still have this
. I realized then that the social worker was right, that what I’d been trying to give my mother were all the things she’d never given me—and never would. So I let her go; I let the hope for her go. And I grieved her. And I suffered. And the sky kept glowing, in its generous, impenetrable vastness.

I let my father go, too. Our relationship through most of my life had been spotty at best. In the years after I was sent to Montrose, I saw him once, when he came to visit me. I was fourteen then, and it would be almost another two years before I’d see him again. There are photographs marking the event: in the first one, the two of us are sitting beside each other, leg to leg, on a couch in an institutional visiting room. I’m wearing a shirt with palm trees on it; he’s wearing one that says
NEW YORK
. He has his arm around me, and he’s gazing at me with an expression that could probably be read numerous ways—is it longing in his face? love? curiosity?—while I sit beside him, looking at the camera. In the second picture, he’s touching my hand to his short beard, and we’re laughing. And in the last picture, I’m hugging him. It was two unsteady and strangely intimate hours of our lives, during which his girlfriend took pictures of us and suggested that I wear slightly less eye makeup. Still, the photographs, if nothing else, demonstrate something warm between us. And it was that warmth that nurtured my hope that one day he would finally be the father he promised he’d be; it nurtured my own child-blind love for him. But there came a time—a day many years later when I was hospitalized with viral meningitis and my father came to visit me—that I understood the irrefutable truth: my father wasn’t going to change. It was summer, and I’d been admitted to the hospital in sandals, and it was cold in the room. Despite the blankets they gave me, my feet were icy and I was shivering, so I asked my father, who was
wearing a sweat suit and sneakers, if I could have his socks. He said no. I thought he was joking at first, but when I pushed it, he quickly became indignant. “No,” he repeated, “I’m not giving you my socks.” After he left, I lay there wondering what my life would have been like if I’d had a father who thought I was worth a pair of socks. But those things are futile to wonder, so I stopped. A nurse brought me hospital socks, and I began to let my father go.

A
t the mall, I took my niece to buy some clothes while my sister got a pedicure in the nail salon. Kiana was thirteen and in her bliss as she stepped from the dressing room modeling one outfit after another, twirling around under the glaring store lights. We’d just made our first purchase when my sister called, upset. I told her we’d be right over, and when we arrived, she was in the waiting area in the front of the nail salon, her face flushed. “What’s wrong?” we asked.

“That girl over there”—she nodded with her head—“did a terrible job. She rushed through everything, barely did my cuticles, and massaged me for like three seconds, like this.” She demonstrated by hastily and sloppily rubbing my hand. “And it’s streaked!” Her voice was raised and unsteady, and I could see she was near tears.

I looked down at her feet. She’d chosen a coral polish, and I thought it looked okay, but I’d never had a pedicure and didn’t know what to expect. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Let’s just get out of here.”

“No. I want my money back.” She approached the counter. “This is ridiculous.”

The manager came up, and Joanne repeated what she told us, and he said, “No refunds. It says here on the sign.”

My sister’s response to that was to get louder. “I don’t care what it says on your stupid sign. I didn’t get what I paid for, and Miss Thing over there has an attitude problem. What, is she too good to massage my feet?”

By then some customers in the store had begun to notice. I touched
my hand to Joanne’s arm and said, “C’mon, they’re not worth it. Let’s just go.”

Her daughter stood behind me. “Yeah, Mom, let’s just go.”

But instead of going, Joanne walked further into the store and yelled, “I’m not leaving until I get my money back!”

And the manicurist, who was still sitting at her little station, yelled back, “No money back!”

By then everyone in the store had gone silent. Immediately to our right was a wall of women up high with their feet in tubs, sort of like an audience in bleacher stands.

“C’mon, bitch, let’s take this outside!” yelled my little sister.

The manicurist responded with something unintelligible, to which Joanne responded by pulling the purple foam toe separators out of her toes and throwing them at her. Only she missed, and hit a customer in the back of the head. The customer hunched forward and put her hands over her head, and I pulled my sister out of the store.

I felt sad for Joanne. She was a single mother who’d put herself through school and worked hard to make a living as a nurse, and she rarely treated herself to anything. She spent all of her time as a caretaker, both at work and at home, and she’d always done this alone—she’d never believed in herself enough to date a man who was good to her, so no man she ever dated was good to her. And this one special thing she was giving herself didn’t end up being special at all. The lady had rushed her. She’d made her feel small. And I saw then a fundamental difference between my sister and me. I’d gotten away from our childhood home—I’d had the shoulder on the side of the road—and she was left there alone, with no choice but to fight. She’d been fighting since she was three and stood in between my father’s belt and me. And she was still fighting. What a struggle it was to know when to fight and when to flee.

A
fter we left the nail salon, I took my sister and niece shopping, and we laughed and held hands and made things better. Then
I drove back to Massachusetts from Baltimore, fighting through several more panic attacks on the way, taking circuitous detours on back roads to avoid the highway when I could.

Once I was home, I stopped driving on highways completely. I was defeated. It had been more than a year since my last panic attack, and I’d thought I was cured. Then one drive changed everything.
When we’re in a child place
, Norm had told me,
we go home
. I couldn’t stop thinking about my sister, how I’d gotten away from our parents but she hadn’t. The way I’d always assuaged my guilt for leaving her was to remind myself that she never got it from my parents like I did, that I was the firstborn, the target, and she was the round angelic baby who almost died but didn’t. In my heart, she was still that baby, and I was wrapping her in sparkling things from a jewelry box with a twirling ballerina inside. But I was aware of my helplessness, the vastness of it, and how the past keeps happening, though it remains so firmly out of our reach.

“The potential is always there,” Norm said, as I sat pouting across from him on the big white couch, “for any of us to revert back to a child state. We all have the capacity for panic, so there is no
cure
, per se. But as long as you can continue to separate the child from the adult, panic will never rule you again.”

Norm suggested that we do some EMDR to process what had happened on that Brooklyn highway, but I wasn’t ready to go back there. And my inability to drive on highways simply became a fact of my life.

“Be careful,” said Norm. “Avoidance is what panic eats for breakfast.”