Let the Tornado Come: A Memoir (12 page)

O
ne thing was clear: this panic wasn’t going away on its own. So Larry made some phone calls and got me an appointment at the Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders (CARD) in Boston. As I sat in the waiting room filling out my intake questionnaire, which seemed to be asking the same few questions in slightly different ways—the gist of which was,
Is anxiety a problem for you?
—I was grateful for two things: (1) I was getting help; and (2) there was an elevator, so I didn’t have to take the stairs.

I was relieved when Dr. E, a statuesque Nordic-looking woman in baggy linen pants, led me back to her office, a large, tidy space adorned with abstract paintings in dusky hues and tribal figures made out of metal and wood. She glanced over my questionnaire before asking me to confirm that I was, in fact, afraid to leave the house, afraid to be in the house alone, afraid to shower alone, afraid to exercise or even walk up stairs, afraid to go through checkout lines, afraid to drive, afraid of
crossing the street, afraid of fainting, afraid of going crazy, afraid my heart was going to stop. “Yes,” I said, for starters.

“I don’t know how I got like this,” I explained to her. “I’ve never really scared easily. Now I even wake up scared in the middle of the night. Every night.”

She nodded. “It makes sense. You’re having panic attacks in your sleep.”

“A person can do that?”

“When it gets bad enough, absolutely.”

I shifted in my seat.

“Are you on any medication?” Dr. E asked.

“I’m afraid of that, too.”

“Great,” she said. “I think we can help you.”

We can help you
. I sank into the bath of those words.

Dr. E folded her thin pale fingers on her desk and told me that I have a lizard brain. “We all have this primitive structure in our brains,” she continued, “called the amygdala, which assesses potentially threatening situations and triggers our fight-flight response when necessary. It’s designed to protect us; it’s the same mechanism that enables the zebra to escape the lion.”

I nodded knowingly, having read all of this in one of my books.

“But here’s something you might not know.” Dr. E leaned toward me, her arms stretched across her desk as if at any moment they’d move the extra few inches and touch me. “Our autonomic nervous system is composed of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. The sympathetic nervous system controls the fight-flight response—which is what happens to all of us when, say, you suddenly swerve your car to avoid a collision. And the parasympathetic nervous system does the opposite: it relaxes us, slows us down. So here’s the thing,” she said, smiling as if she was about to hand me a present: “You never have to worry about a panic attack going out of control, because the parasympathetic nervous system is always there to balance it out.”

I realized this information was supposed to immediately bring me
noticeable relief, and I could feel her searching my face for some sign of it. I should have smiled or said, “Ah, I’m so glad I know this now and never have to worry about
that
again.”

Instead I asked, “But what if something’s wrong with my parasympathetic nervous system?”

She laughed. “Yes, you’re definitely in the right place.”

After taking a brief history of my panic, Dr. E explained the cycle of panic. “Scary thoughts lead to tension in the body, and that tension leads to more scary thoughts, which lead to more tension. So for you, you’re worried about having a heart attack. When your heart rate gets elevated for any reason, this triggers your belief that a racing heart is a sign of a heart attack—which your brain interprets as danger—which makes your heart beat even faster, and so forth, until you’re running out the door and calling 911. Each thing that gets associated with panic—driving, rapid heartbeat, being alone—becomes something you start to avoid, and that’s how panic feeds on itself. It takes more and more of your life, until there is no safe place left, not even your own body.”

It seemed so simple. Yet just thinking of panic made my body feel like a guitar in the hands of a child—plucked and smacked and thrumming.

“Thoughts are at the root of panic,” said Dr. E. “And that’s what we’re going to work on.”

The way we were going to work on my thoughts was through cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), a popular and effective method claiming up to a 95 percent success rate in treating all sorts of anxiety disorders and phobias. The concept is simple: when people are gradually exposed to the objects they fear, their fears soon become little more than distant memories. Dr. E sent me off with a panic workbook, panic homework, and an appointment for the next day. I cradled the book against my side and thanked her. I didn’t ask her the question pressing on my mind:
what if I’m the unlucky 5 percent?

I waited outside the building for Larry to pick me up, while people milled along the sidewalks—the students strapped with knapsacks too
big for their backs, the women with their briefcases bumping against their calves, the men with their open leather jackets. We were all together in the same place, but no one was really there—the people with their blank steady gazes forward were already someplace else. No one looked afraid.

It was getting cool now, which made everyone move faster. Meanwhile, I stood on the corner and wondered what would happen if I fainted right there. Then Larry pulled up.

“How’d it go?” he asked, reaching for a kiss. I could feel the now-familiar stress from his job surrounding him, the way a scent can stick to you when you brush by it.

At that moment, I wanted to say so many things. I wanted to say,
I’m sorry your job is so hard on you
. I wanted to say
, I’m sorry for crumbling like this. I don’t know when the world became so terrifying. I don’t know if I will survive this day. I don’t know who I am anymore. I know I love you. I know what I want from you must seem impossible. I know I have homework. I know my heart is beating fast.
But the tears came faster than the words.

T
hat evening, I did my homework, which consisted of filling out a Daily Panic Attack and Anxiety Record, along with a Worry Record. After chronicling the times and places of that day’s four panic attacks, I checked off a list of symptoms that applied: “pounding heart, shortness of breath, dizziness, trembling, sweating, feeling of unreality, hot or cold flash, fear of dying, fear of going crazy, fear of losing
control
”—almost everything on the list. On my worry record, I wrote, “Am worried I will continue to be anxious while alone. Am worried about my heart. Am also worried that I’m hypoglycemic and will fall into a coma. Am worried that if I lose consciousness while the dogs are out, I won’t be able to let them back in, and Larry will come home and accidentally run them over.” That’s as much as I could write before I had another panic attack. I handed Larry the stethoscope.

T
he next morning I was back in Dr. E’s office. “Did you do your homework?” she asked, slipping her shoes off. She was wearing roughly the same earthy linen outfit as the day before.

I proudly handed her my anxiety and worry records, and she looked them over. “Good,” she said. “So you know how CBT works?”

I thought about spiders and snakes and high ledges. “By exposing people to the things they’re afraid of?”

“Right. And how do you think we’re going to get control of your panic?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. Suddenly I didn’t like where this was headed.

“Let’s put it this way: we’ve got a staircase in the building.”

No. No no no. “The problem is,” I started, “that something may really be wrong with my heart.” I needed her to understand that this was absolutely not an option.

But Dr. E wasn’t interested in that. She did, however, offer a compromise: instead of braving the stairs just yet, I could run in place in her office until my heart rate went up, while she timed me with a stopwatch. Reluctantly I got up and started to jog. Within a minute I was in the midst of a full-blown panic attack, gasping and trembling and eyeing the door like a fiend.
See,
I wanted to say,
I told you so.

Dr. E flashed a pen and began asking questions about my
symptoms
—how severe, how many, how long they peaked. “Okay,” she said in a voice so cheerful I was expecting pom-poms to pop out, “let’s go again!”

Again? I was surely going to die.

I had three more panic attacks before she called it quits, at which point she showed me on a chart how my last panic attack was less severe than my first. I wanted to be happy about this, but I was traumatized. A feeling of tightness had settled into the center of my throat, like the seconds right before a good cry. I told Dr. E.

“So what worries you about this tightness?”

“It’s not usually there, for one thing.” I pulled my water bottle from my bag and tried to swallow the tightness away, but it wouldn’t budge. “And I’m worried it won’t go away.”

“And what if it doesn’t? Would you still be able to live your life?”

“Yes, I suppose. But I don’t want to live my life that way.”

“But you could if you had to.”

“It’s just that I feel really isolated,” I said, changing the subject. “Everything is new, and I don’t have any friends here, and I’m afraid my marriage is failing.”

Dr. E looked at me wide-eyed, as if I were breaking some protocol. “These things are important, and for sure you should do things—take a class or join a club—to make yourself less isolated. That’s number one. But to get you there, what we need to focus on right now is your panic.”

I understood. I’d read the books. Cognitive behavioral therapy is, as its name implies, about retraining the mind. It likes things clean. It likes charts and statistics and lists. It’s not interested in your emotions or your past or the dream you had last night.

A
t home, I couldn’t shake the tightness in my throat. I walked from room to room trying to cough it away, then panicking when it wouldn’t go, then filling out forms about it. But underneath the fear, I was excited about something: today was my first cooking lesson.

When Helen arrived, all six feet of her knelt down on the floor to cuddle my dogs. She was wearing her chef’s coat and hat, and she brought everything we needed: the ingredients, the tools, the panache. “I thought we’d roast some nuts to snack on while we cook,” she said, pulling things from her bag. Instantly she was at home in the kitchen, organizing her spices in one place and her baking ingredients in another. “I thought we’d make a banana cream pie for dessert, so once we get the nuts in the oven, we should start on that so it’s ready after dinner. What do you think?”

I could hardly reconcile that this woman was in my kitchen, let
alone comment intelligently on the order of food preparation. “Sounds pretty amazing to me,” I said, as if Santa had just proposed the order in which he would deliver my presents. And from there we mixed olive oil, cayenne pepper, freshly chopped rosemary, local honey, and salt in a bowl. In went the raw cashews, which we tossed in the oil before placing in the oven. Within minutes they were roasted to perfection, and the two of us were happily chomping away.

After the nuts, Helen showed me how to make a piecrust. “You don’t want to overknead the dough,” she said, “or it can become stiff. And butter—you should always use butter.”

I love you,
I wanted to say. Instead, I said, “I love butter.” And then she showed me how to work my fingers into the dough.

By the end of our four hours together, we’d cooked (and eaten almost the whole tray of) roasted rosemary cashews; parchment-wrapped Mediterranean halibut with olives, tomatoes, lemon juice, freshly chopped oregano and thyme, orange zest, and olive oil; sautéed baby squashes; and jasmine rice steamed with coconut. And we baked one hell of a banana cream pie.

Of course, I felt panic nipping at my back as I used a microplane to gently glide the thin layer of peel off the orange, as I watched the vegetables brown in the skillet, as I whipped the cream. And through it all, I felt the unrelenting tightness in my throat. But I was also aware of the gifts that had been given to me that night, and I wasn’t going to let panic devour them before I had a chance to.

W
hen I get back to the 7-Eleven, it’s dark already, a slow and sticky summer night. There’s nothing to do but watch some guy delivering donuts. His blond hair sweeps his shoulders each time he bends to pull a tray from his van, and when he turns around he snaps his head back to clear his sight. He’s cute, and Rockville’s getting old, so in exchange for a ride to Baltimore I have sex with him in the back of his truck on the floor in between all those donuts. He kisses me gently in the sugary air. Afterward, I ride around with him for a while on his route and smoke Marlboros, and when I try to flick one out the window, the wind blows it back in, right down the front of my shirt, and burns a blister between my breasts before I can get it out. “Smart cigarette,” he says. He drones on about relationships and this girlfriend and that girlfriend, and all I know is that the road is like a dark cave we keep entering. When he lets me out a couple of hours later at the High’s near
my mother’s apartment complex, he calls out, “Think of me next time you eat a donut!” I don’t look back.

I walk through the field into the apartment complex and head to Donny and Matt’s apartment. I haven’t seen them since Matt played bartender with my mother’s liquor bottles three months ago and I ended up in the hospital, but I’m hoping they’ll let me stay with them for a night or two. It feels strange to be so near my mother and hiding at the same time.

Outside Donny and Matt’s building I hear the vague bass of music. Their door is slightly open, so I walk in. They’re having a party—people parked everywhere under a thick haze of smoke. Black Sabbath pounds the room:
Happiness I cannot feel, and love to me is so unreal
. I see Matt rolling a joint at the dining room table and am relieved. “Hey, Matt!” I yell over the music. He stares back at me flatly. His older brother, Donny, walks over. “Hi, Donny!” I wave. But he isn’t smiling. He takes another step toward me, and I step back instinctively.

“You need to get out of here,” he says.

My face tingles hot. I’m not sure I’ve heard him right, so I stand there trying to understand. Someone turns the music down.

He takes another step toward me. “Well, what are you waiting for? I said get the fuck out of here.” A spray of his spit lands on my face.

The party falls to a hush, and everyone is watching. My throat burns. “I don’t understand.”

“There’s nothing to understand. You’re a runaway and a slut, and I don’t want you around here.”

Someone laughs. I feel gutted. I’m running out the door.

Outside I sit at the top of the long stairway across the street from my mother’s apartment building. A soft honeyed glow pours from her windows. Against the steps, a few leaves stir in the breeze. Above me, stars turn on in their big blue-black bowl. I notice that I’m shaking.

From the corner of my eye I catch my mother move quickly past a window, and it feels at once as if something has moved across the
span of my chest. I know the distinct bounce of her gait, like the beat of a familiar song. I used to listen for it at night, always wondering if she might come into our room. I spent a lot of time listening for her, sometimes after school, when I was locked out and I’d press my ear to the door. By then I’d already knocked and knocked, pressed my mouth against the door and called her name, but sometimes she forgot I was coming home. I always worried about her—was she asleep? In the bath? Breathing?—because I sensed her fragility, knew that she was stitched together with the weakest thread. But sometimes when she laughed, she invited me in, and I laughed, too, and in those moments I could almost touch her.

I spent years roaming the hills and fields and woods of this apartment complex. I knew where to find flint in the woods; I knew the best doors to knock on for candy at Halloween; I knew the distinct pitch of each slope. But now this place is my past, and I feel like a ghost coming back to haunt it.

At the end of eighth grade, my school guidance counselor told me I could be anything I wanted to be. By then I’d been running away for most of the year, and when I wasn’t running, I was skipping school. “I’ve seen your test scores, Rita,” he said, “and with a mind like that, this world could be yours.” I knew he was doing something nice for me—passing me through to high school even though I should have failed eighth grade—but I didn’t care much about my test scores or any of that, so I sat quietly in his office and looked at his black and gray beard. After that, I never went back.

The truth is I never wanted the world to be mine. I just wanted some small piece of it. I wanted what my friends had. I wanted not to be afraid. Now it’s hard to know what to want. But suddenly, sharply, I know what I don’t want: I don’t want to keep having sex with strangers. I don’t want someone to yell
slut
at my face again. I don’t want to spend the night in another empty car or staircase. I don’t want Mr. Malekzadeh.

I look up at my mother’s windows, and they seem like the only
warm spot on earth. I wonder what will happen if I knock on her door. And I wonder what will happen if I don’t.

“
W
ho is it?” she calls. I know she’s pressing her eye to the peephole.

“It’s me,” I say to her one eye.

She swings the door open and stands there looking at me. “Where have you been?”

“Can I come in?”

“You can’t stay here,” she blurts out, stepping aside and opening the door the rest of the way.

I walk in and look around. It’s as if I’m seeing her apartment for the first time—the walls cluttered with mirrors and prints of things that have nothing to do with our life: sailboats on a sea, Chinese landscapes, a Parisian cityscape, a smiling needlepoint tiger; the tables strewn with books and ashtrays and knickknacks; the stacks of record albums leaned up against the cabinet.

“Where’s Joanne?” I ask.

“She’s at a sleepover.”

“I miss her.”

“You should have thought about that before you ran away.”

“Oh, because I got to see her so much when you put me in that psych ward, right? You never even came to visit me once.”

“Sure, blame me. It’s all my fault.”

“I’m sorry,” I say.

She lights a cigarette. “You should count your lucky stars that you were only in a hospital and not someplace worse.” The smoke curls from her nostrils as she talks.

“Someplace worse?”

She shakes her head as if she’s disagreeing with something. “I tried to have you put in detention. I told the police you were in too much
danger on the streets, but they said they couldn’t lock you up because running away isn’t a crime.”

I look at this woman who is my mother. She pulls hard on her cigarette, her mouth tight, then taps the cigarette roughly over the ashtray. The kitchen lights emphasize the sheen of her skin. I remember how once a long time ago I brought her a bunch of dandelions from the hill outside, and when I handed them to her, she held them to her nose, then to her heart. I remember thinking that I had fixed her, that maybe all she ever needed was this bright yellow slightly wilting gift. She put them in water in a small cup, but later that day I saw them in the trash.

“I was thinking that maybe I could stop running away. Maybe I could start high school like I’m supposed to.”

“I already told you, you can’t stay here.”

Again I feel my throat burn. “Why do you hate me so much?”

“Because I’m a terrible mother, remember? Just like you told the judge.”

“You’re right,” I say. “I was wrong. I didn’t tell the judge about the bad things that Dad did, and I should have. But it was because I thought that was the only way I could have a happy life.”

“And you see how far that got you.”

“I was only nine. You’re going to have to forgive me sometime, you know.”

She doesn’t answer, but her expression softens. “Are you hungry?”

She boils some spaghetti and serves it with butter and salt. I eat ravenously and get full long before my plate is clear. “Thank you,” I say. “That was delicious.”

“One night,” she says. “You can stay here one night, but I want you gone before Joanne gets back in the morning.”

Suddenly, the morning fills me with dread. Where will I go then?

After I wash the dishes, I go into the living room, lie back on the worn pink couch, and call my father. When he answers, I blurt into the phone, “I want to go back to school.”

“Rita?”

I’m not sure which of us is more surprised by the suddenness of this statement. “Yeah, it’s me.”

“Where are you? Are you okay?”

“I’m at Mom’s. She doesn’t want me to stay here past tonight, but I was hoping I could come back and live with you.”

“Wow, Rita. I don’t know. Are you serious?”

I think for a minute. I imagine going to the store to buy school supplies—fresh pencils and new pads of paper and soft pink erasers. “Yes,” I say, “I am.”

He takes a long breath into the phone, followed by another. “Then I think maybe it’s time you come home.”

And in that moment, I feel more hope than I can remember feeling. It’s as if the curtains to my future are finally opening. “Thank you.”

I
thank my mother, too, for letting me stay the night, but when I try to hug her, she stands stiffly. “I guess your father’s the big hero now.”

“No,” I say. “It’s just that you said I couldn’t stay here.”

“Big fucking hero he is.”

“No, Mom, he’s far from a hero.”

“Well, I’m glad you’re all lovey-dovey with each other now. Maybe you could ask him where my child support is.”

“I’m sorry. I know it isn’t fair. I’m just tired of running.”

I reach to put my hand on her shoulder, but she backs away, and I give up. “I’m going to bed.”

I leave her and slip back into my old room, into my old bed, and fall into a dreamless sleep. When I wake up, it’s still dark, and the apartment is quiet. I can’t sleep, so I tiptoe into the living room, where the records are. On the table opposite the stereo are Joanne’s schoolbooks. She has a big loose-leaf binder now, the kind she’s wanted since the first time she saw mine. On the front, she’s drawn a single smiley-face,
dead-center and perfectly round. I open the binder and look at the new block of paper, which she’ll slowly fill with all the things she’ll learn. I flip to a page in the middle, grab a pen, and start writing.
I love you, Joanne! And I miss you. Love, Rita
. I add a smiling dog and a postscript:
P.S. Be happy.

I put on my mother’s headphones, decide on Led Zeppelin’s
In Through the Out Door,
and lean back on the carpet with my eyes closed. And as the music goes, I go with it. But in the middle of “Carouselambra,” there is suddenly a hand yanking the headphone jack out of the receiver. My mother startles us both, and now the music is blasting through the apartment.

“Why aren’t you in bed?” she shouts.

I turn the volume down. “I couldn’t sleep.”

“Why are you listening to druggie music? Are you on drugs? Did a little coke? Is that what you did?”

“I’m not on drugs, and this is
your
album.”

She squints down into my face. “How did you get coke anyway? Who’d you fuck to get it?”

“I told you, I’m not high.” I can see there’s no use in my staying any longer, so I head back to the bedroom to get my bag.

She follows me. “It’s not my fault you turned out to be a slut daughter. I never taught you that. You know, your father beat me black and blue because he wasn’t my first. One lousy guy before him.” Her voice bounds erratically up and down.

I turn around and brush past her. “I’m leaving.”

“Where do you think you’re going?”

“I’m calling Pat to see if I can stay there.” Pat is my favorite of my mother’s friends. She’s a tall and beautiful force of a woman who lives across the street and who once made me memorize her number in case I was ever in a bind. Her daughter is Joanne’s best friend, and though my mother won’t tell me where Joanne is, I’m pretty sure she’s there. I reach for the phone, but my mother beats me to it and snatches it off the cradle. “Please!” I beg. “Let me call her.”

She sits down on the chair and clutches the phone to her chest. “Pat doesn’t want any druggies over there, either,” she chides.

“Give me the phone!” I lean in and try to grab it from her hands, but she kicks at me. Reflexively, I swat her leg away, and she falls backwards in her chair. Then, silence.

“Mom? Are you okay?”

She starts squirming around, and when I hold out my hand to help her up, she smacks it away. “You fucking bitch!”

“I didn’t mean it! I’m sorry!”

I try again to help her up.

“Get the fuck off of me, I’m calling the police!”

“It was an accident! You know it was an accident!”

She dials the phone. “Yes, can you please send the police to 3449 Carriage Hill Circle, Apartment 104? I’d like to press charges against my daughter for assaulting me.”

“What are you doing!” I shriek. “Why are you doing this?”

“You’ve had this coming for a long time,” she says.

At that moment I realize there’s only one thing for me to do. Run.