Let the Tornado Come: A Memoir (15 page)

A
fter I cantered with Rascal, all I wanted to do was canter. When I wasn’t cantering, I was often talking about cantering. “It’s amazing,” I kept telling Larry. “It’s like this great rush. It’s better than any drug. Maybe even better than sex.”

“Hmmm,” said Larry, furrowing his forehead.

“It’s so free—it’s like the opposite of panic. It’s powerful and graceful and even a bit clumsy all at once. It’s like—”

“It’s like you,” he said.

And it was sweet, what he said, but not entirely true, because panic was also like me—it was built into me as it was into the horses, built into me the way being a runaway was—and I had the sense that it was, in part, my relationship with panic—along with the residue of my young life—that enabled me to fully submerge myself in the freedom and joy of riding: it was only by holding on so tightly that I could begin learning how to let go. And cantering was like a great pendulum: this
wonderful swing between the two extremes, between the past and the future. The present, then, was right there, on that single point on top of the horse.

So I kept riding. I began taking dressage lessons with a German woman named Gerta, who seemed to hold the dictionary to the language I was just beginning to learn, and I began half leasing a Thoroughbred mare named Danielle, who was a bit aloof but who relished the Pink Lady apples I gave her. And as much as I loved riding—as much as I waxed lyrical about it to anyone who would listen—there was rarely a ride during which I didn’t feel scared at least once. Gerta’s answer to that was to teach me how to go over small jumps made up of wooden rails, also known as cavaletti. The trick was to time my
communication
—whether through my contact in the reins or the speed of my posting or the pressure of my legs—to control Danielle’s pace so that we could get over the cavaletti without toppling the rails. “If you look at the rails, you’re going to hit them,” Gerta warned. Of course, all I thought about was knocking down the rails. But after knocking them down three times, I knew she was right. “Look past them,” she said. “Look where you want to go, and go there.”

The next time I came toward the caveletti, I took Gerta’s advice and looked at the window at the end of the arena.
We’ll go through the window,
I thought.
We’ll fly right through the window
. And that lift in my vision translated to Danielle’s lift over the cavaletti. From then on, we cleared them every time. And with each pass, I became more confident. When I submitted myself to this intense external focus—which is at once an endeavor of will and one of faith—there was nothing left of me to give to the internal world of fear.

A
t the Good Shepherd Center nuns are everywhere. They whiz around on motorized yellow scooters, right through the sunlight with their pale faces and impenetrable layers of black. Compared to Montrose, Good Shepherd is a utopia: cigarettes anytime, makeup, long showers, pens, pencils, forks, knives. Each unit is the size of a large apartment, with a living room, a kitchenette, a smoking lounge, a large bright bathroom and a separate vanity room, both with real mirrors. And the windows don’t have bars on them.

The girls are here for all sorts of reasons. Some have criminal records like me, while others have run away or smoked pot or gotten into fistfights or were considered “troubled” by their parents because they skipped school or had sex or wrote disturbing things in their diaries. I take a shine to a girl named Melissa. She’s got a purple Mohawk and honest eyes like those of a lemur—some dark beauty with night vision.
As far as I can tell, she’s here mainly because of her Mohawk. Her father, a prominent D.C. judge, worried that because she was a punk and skipped the occasional day of school, she was destined to end up like Sid Vicious. I also like the redheaded self-proclaimed biker chick who floods each room she enters with the heady scent of Tatiana perfume. Nobody ever mentions her left eye, which is bigger than the right, crowned by a scar, and slow to close. Maria, an intolerant and intimidating girl who talks to none of us, plays records and dances by herself, better than anyone I’ve ever seen.

At virtually any time of day, a lineup of girls can be found either smoking in the lounge or primping in the vanity room, which is just large enough for the chairs behind the long counter. Staring into the large mirror, we wrap our hair around curling irons, sponge on eye shadow with small black applicators, and talk to each other while looking into our own eyes. We touch each other, push our fingers through each other’s hair. Being pretty is one of our only pastimes.

Sister Maryanne is the nun who works on our unit, and I like imagining her with her habit off, her luscious dark hair falling around her. “Do you ever wish you could get married?” I ask her. With a finger, she pushes my bangs to one side and says, “Oh, but I am married. I’m married to God.”

A
fter several months of good behavior, I finally earn my first overnight visit with my mother. While I was in Montrose, she’d filed for an order of emergency temporary custody of Joanne and me, and won. “You can’t go crying to Daddy anymore,” she’d gloated. “And his big fancy lawyer can’t save him now.”

I know she doesn’t want me to come home, not even for a night, but she also doesn’t want to appear uncooperative to the counselor handling my case. So on a sunny afternoon, she comes with Joanne to pick me up.

It’s surreal to walk freely through the parking lot to her car, and then to merge onto the highway. I’ve been fantasizing about this day for what seems like a lifetime—the first day in almost a year that I’ve been outside of an institution. But as I ride in the car with my mother and my eleven-year-old sister, I find myself estranged. I feel like an animal, some exotic thing being cautiously gauged by humans. I can almost hear their questions:
Does she bite? Will she run? What exactly is she?
But the animal itself doesn’t know the answers.

We spend the day being careful with each other. Joanne makes a paper fortune-teller that predicts she will marry a boy named Joe. “Jo and Joe,” I say. Her face is so serious, even when she smiles. My mother busies herself, fluttering around the house as if she’s looking for something. We all know that this is temporary, that in a matter of hours I’ll be back to my life at Good Shepherd, a life distinctly separate from theirs.

That night I’m a guest in my old bedroom. Our matching twin beds are still beside each other, and as we lie silently with the lights out, I hear my mother’s quick steps up and down the hall. I remember how we used to listen for our parents’ footsteps when we were younger, and how my stomach clenched when I heard them coming, and also when I didn’t. “Rita?” Joanne whispers into the
darkness.

“Yeah?”

“I got your note.”

“What note?”

“The note you wrote in my loose-leaf a long time ago. The one that said to be happy.”

I don’t want the tears, but they come anyway. I push my face into my pillow for a minute before I can speak. “Did you like it?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m glad you got it.”

She turns over in her bed. “So am I.”

O
n a rare day trip to a park, I persuade one of my favorite staff members—a slender brown-skinned woman with a dazzling smile and a husband I’ve never met but refer to as Mr. Dad because I like to pretend that one day I’ll get out of Good Shepherd and go home to live with them—to let Melissa and me ride in the back of her pickup instead of on the bus with the rest of the girls. Melissa and I have been planning this for days, and all afternoon, while hot dogs sizzle in their skins and we dip our feet into the cool stony lake, I keep feeling like a dog on a leash, yearning for the field.

In the truck bed on our way back to the center, the wind diving through my hair is euphoric. “Now?” Melissa asks at a red light. But I keep wanting a little bit more of that wind. “Not yet,” I say, waiting for the truck to accelerate again, closing my eyes again, tilting my head back, gulping up the rush.
If I could just have this,
I think. But it is a wind I can only borrow. And we are quickly heading back to the breezeless corridors, the long mirror with only our faces
in it.

At the next red light, I nod, “Now!” and Melissa and I spring out into the road. We run like fugitives through a maze of cars and into the woods. Twigs snap under our feet as we bolt between the trees as if we’re being chased. Our legs burn, our hearts pound. We run and run, until finally we make it to another road, our breath coming in short gasps. I stick out my thumb to hitchhike.

Almost instantly a blue pickup stops. I get in first. Melissa pulls the door shut, and the driver, a graying black man, steps on the gas.

“Where are you lovely ladies off to?” His breath smells like stale cigarettes.

“That depends on where you’re going,” I say.

“I’m actually headed to Virginia.”

“Funny,” I say, nudging Melissa, “so are we.”

He turns his head and gives me a once-over. “I think we can probably work something out.”

“Just keep your eyes on the road,” Melissa says.

The man chuckles deep in his chest, and it sounds like a cough. “I like a girl with spunk.”

“Can I turn on the radio?” I ask.

“Sure thing, sweetheart. You can turn any knob you like.”

Melissa rolls her eyes, and I give her a half smile. Then Sting sings to the three of us about the “King of Pain.”

O
ne night after a half hour of sleep, I bolted up with my heart clattering, as I’d been doing every night for months, but this time I was crying. I’d dreamed that I was trying to call Larry, but he’d changed his number, and I kept calling his office, and his assistant kept telling me he was operating, and I knew he wasn’t operating, and that he didn’t want to talk to me.

I woke Larry. “I dreamed you didn’t love me anymore.” My voice was loud in the dark.

He switched on his bedside lamp and blinked a few times to get used to the light. Then he turned to me, squinting, all sleepy and puzzled. “I’ll always love you.”

“No matter what?”

“No matter what.”

“You’ll never leave me, no matter what I do?”

“Never.”

“What if I stole a whole bunch of stuff?”

“I’d never leave you.”

“What if I cheated on you?”

“I wouldn’t leave you, but I’d be really mad.”

“What if I got really ugly?”

“You could never be ugly.”

“Do you promise you won’t change your number?”

“Of course not.” He laughed. “We have the same number.”

I inserted myself deep into the crook of Larry’s arm. “Here,” I said, wrapping his arm around me like a shawl, cupping his hand against my chest, “keep me.” And I fell asleep.

L
arry was a particularly good sport about accompanying me to the location of the next panic remedy on my list: a Tong Ren healing class. Tong Ren was developed by an acupuncturist named Tom Tam, who claimed that by tapping different meridian points on a rubber doll—or voodoo doll, as he called it—roughly the size of Barbie, he could heal people of everything from a common cold to pancreatic cancer. The idea is based on energy healing through tapping into the collective unconscious with a magnetic hammer directed at different energy points, or “ouch points” on the doll, which correspond to a person’s illness.

The room was full when we arrived, so we sat down in the back row. There were about sixty people there, some in wheelchairs, some clutching tightly the arms of loved ones, some with no apparent malady. In the center of the room stood Tom Tam, a slight man with graying hair and a youthful glint in his eye. He wore glasses and a mischievous smile, and he scanned the room shrewdly—noticing us right away—the way a comedian takes stock of an audience.

But this was no comedy. People were sick, some dying, and we were all there for one reason: to feel better. The room had an air of excitement about it—our collective hope buzzing around the windows, the backs of
chairs, the tops of heads. Tom started by congratulating the Patriots on a good game. People smiled and nodded, the way New Englanders do when you compliment their sports teams. And then Tom began at the end of the first row. “How can we help you today?” he asked. The woman, who couldn’t have been any older than I was, announced that she had just been diagnosed with breast cancer, and she didn’t know yet if it had spread. Tom and his crew—a group of eight men and women standing behind him—went to work, tapping on their dolls according to a meridian number Tom announced. The tapping noise was like rain pattering against the side of a house. Some of the tappers were smiling blissful smiles that seemed to be made of the same kind of excitement the room was made of. Others tapped more seriously.

Tom went around the room this way, stopping at each person, giving everyone a chance to be healed. He seemed to be able to recognize anyone who had been there before, even if it was only once. “How’s the cancer?” he asked one woman. She said, “My doctor just told me I’m in remission,” and everyone clapped, and the room got even brighter, “but now I just have this headache,” so Tom Tam treated her for a headache, all of them whacking away at their dolls’ heads with their metal hammers. “How do you feel now? Warm?” he asked when they finished tapping. She answered yes.

He did this each time, asking everyone how he or she felt after the tapping—“Warm? Tingly?”—and they all said yes. And in this way he moved through the rows, treating people for things as varied as arthritis, liver tumors, strokes, allergies, and even hemorrhoids. “How do you feel now?” he asked. “Warm? More good? More nice?” Yes, everyone said. More nice.

When he got to me I had an immediate surge of regret. What if all that tapping actually worked? Was I ready, just like that, to have my panic hammered out of me? Suddenly, inexplicably, I wasn’t so sure.

I once had a dream in which a man broke into my house. When he got to the threshold of my bedroom, I shot him. The bullet had mortally wounded him, so I laid him on my bed to die. Then I lay down beside
him, and he began to speak to me. He told me about his life—about his secrets, his memories, his desires—and I said, “We are so alike.” We smiled at each other with the delight of recognition, and all I wanted to do was keep talking. But he was dying. And I wished I’d never pulled the trigger.

“This your first time here?” Tom Tam said, looking at me.

“Yes.”

“How can I help you today?”

“Actually,” I said, rubbing my palms on the tops of my thighs, “I’m just here to observe today.”

“Oh,” he said, “you’re learning.”

“Yes.”

Larry shot me a bewildered look. But when I smiled at him and took his hand, and he smiled back at me, I knew he understood.

I don’t know firsthand if Tong Ren works, but on that day I saw a woman with severe arthritis lift her arm straight out in front of her. “This is as far as it goes,” she said, straining. Tom Tam called out his formula of numbers, and he and his helpers eagerly got busy with their dolls. The room was quiet except for the tapping. When they were finished he asked the lady, “How you feel? Warm?” She answered yes, and he asked her to try lifting her arm again. This time she was able to lift it to her chin. The crowd gasped, then began clapping. Tom Tam clapped, too, looking very satisfied.
It’s in her mind,
I thought.
She was able to lift it with the power of her mind.

Though I believed in the healing force of energy, I also knew well the powers of the mind. And maybe because I believed in this power, I didn’t want to abruptly depart from my panic like a passenger waving manically from the deck of a cruise ship to the one they left standing on the docks—because, as Tom Tam said, I was learning. And it seemed panic really had something to teach me. So I was going to try to listen, instead of simply bidding it a bon voyage and saying,
That was weird. Now what’s for dinner?

The question was, What was I supposed to learn? I realized then
that I had been asking the wrong questions—questions like
How can I get rid of this troublesome panic? Where can I find a good mother who bakes banana bread? How can I be guaranteed that nothing bad will happen to me, ever?
But the question was simple:
What can panic teach me?
It seems to me that so much unhappiness in life comes not from a lack of answers, but from a lack of knowing the right questions to ask.

O
n the phone with my friend Meg, a poet I met at a reading, I told her I thought panic might be a bird.

“Write it to me,” she said.

I hadn’t written in months, but I opened my notebook anyway.

The bird is wet black, the size of a half-open fist. Sometimes it flutters in fits. Sometimes it leaps in fast explosions from low branches. Sometimes it sits out of sight, as high as the hawks will let it, watching. When it flies it slices the sky into triangles. Panes of glass. It is a smart bird, its sight like a heartbeat. There are days it watches me through my kitchen window and I can feel its feathers in my chest, its blood in my legs. Sometimes when the music’s on, I don’t notice the bird, which is a nonmusical bird, a bird that doesn’t glide, that doesn’t sing, but that is faithful, and that is, frankly, only trying to help.

I
still panicked—not that day, but the next. But to have a day free from it—one whole long splendid day—was a message of its own: I was heading in the right direction. Sometimes we don’t trust ourselves, so it’s easy to believe that the power to healing lies in someone else’s hands, just as the woman who couldn’t lift her arm perhaps thought,
I didn’t lift my arm
—
Tom Tam and his group with the dolls and hammers did!
But ultimately it doesn’t matter. Whether by the supernatural or by our own inner wisdom, our own vibrant wills, we can get
better. For me, the act of searching for answers, of trying one thing and then another and then another, was more empowering than any other single thing, because I was taking control of my life, and that action stood in direct opposition to the helplessness of panic.

Simply, we change by trying to change; we heal by trying to heal; we are strong when we stay faithful to those few words:
I know what I need
.