Let the Tornado Come: A Memoir (17 page)

O
n those first days I rode Claret after I brought him home, those bright October afternoons when the scent of burning wood traced the air and shadows turned to labyrinths, it seemed like nothing could go wrong. Gerta stood in the corner of the arena and called out instructions—“
ask more with your leg, tighten up your reins, pull your right shoulder bac
k
”
—which I followed. She taught me, and Claret taught me, and the two of us trotted and cantered and made figure eights and serpentines and were clumsy and occasionally graceful, and with each day, we were learning the way each other’s body moved. Claret was a generous but exacting teacher: he did what I asked, but if I asked incorrectly, he let me know. For instance, if, from a halt, I asked him to walk forward while I was leaning forward in the saddle, he’d take a few steps backwards until I sat up straight. If I squeezed too hard with my thighs in the canter, he stopped cantering. If I didn’t use my inside leg to mark the curves of a circle, our circle turned into
something of a parallelogram. But when I asked correctly—when in those brief moments I managed to get the orchestra of all my body parts in
harmony
—Claret became a virtuoso. What an honor it was to learn from him, to receive, each day, the gift of his back.

Outside of work, Claret quickly revealed the full sass of his mischievous nature. For instance, he clearly found it amusing to unzip my jacket with his lips while I curried his neck. He rarely missed an opportunity to snap the elastic band of my riding pants against my back while I bent over to pick his feet, or to generally pick up anything he could reach and drop it dramatically to the ground—hoof picks, riding gloves, brushes, girths, saddle pads, buckets, you name it. He once managed to extract my keys from my pocket, then stretched his neck way up as I attempted to reach for them and shook them like a tambourine over my head. In the paddock, he dug holes, dismantled the fencing so that he could play with the mare in the next paddock, and one afternoon, after Gerta had carefully walked through the paddocks to clear them of rocks, Claret entertained himself by reaching his head through the fence railings and pulling every last rock out of the bucket she’d left them in. He was a silly boy. He made me laugh, and he also exasperated me. But when I looked at him to try to read that mind of his, he was often looking back at me, almost as if I were the one he was studying instead of the other way around.

We were students of each other, Claret and I. And he was teaching me more than I’d ever expected to learn—not only about riding, but about love.

A
nd then there were the beginnings that marked a time when things would start to fall apart—those days that would test my limited understanding of horses and the mettle of my commitment to Claret. One of those days was meant to be bucolic: a trail ride with a fellow rider at the barn, Beth, and her semiretired Thoroughbred. After all that indoor dressage work, I was excited to be doing something fun.
But a few minutes into the trail, Claret started shaking his head rapidly up and down, which made it difficult for me to keep hold of the reins. I didn’t know why he was doing this, though if I’d had to guess, I would have said he was staging a protest. Against what, I didn’t know. But as he flicked his head about, I could feel his back stiffening beneath the saddle, and then, in an instant, we both noticed a white drainage pipe jutting out from some rocks. Before I could gather the reins, he spooked at it and began backing up. And in his panic, he wasn’t thinking about the steep ditch I knew was right behind us. “Stop!” I ordered ineffectually, not being an experienced enough rider to know how to command this with my body. He took another step back, and I could feel his hind legs starting to slip. “Kick him!” Beth yelled. “Hard!”

With both legs I kicked him forward, out of the ditch. At that point, neither of us was happy. My hands were trembling, and Claret was shaking his head up and down again, and I told Beth that I wanted to turn around and go back to the barn.

“Don’t be silly,” she said. “You’re going to be fine.”

“I really don’t think he wants to do this,” I said. “And I don’t think I’m ready to handle him out in the woods by myself.”

“Why don’t we switch?” she suggested. You take my horse, and I’ll ride Claret.”

Beth was a far more experienced rider than I was, and her horse was a calm fellow, so I agreed. But as soon as she got on Claret, I could tell he was even less happy. He began to shake his head more violently, stopping only to swish his tail. “Really, Beth, I think we should go back.”

“He’s going to be fine, you’ll see. He just needs a minute to adjust to a new person on his back.”

But as each minute piled onto the next, Claret’s displeasure became indisputable. Frustrated, Beth gave him a smack with her whip. “I’m not your mommy,” she said. “You can’t get away with this with me!” And in an eruptive response, Claret spun around. He backed her forcefully into a tree, then spun around again.

“Oh my God, are you okay?” I asked.

“I’m fine,” she said, but she didn’t look fine. Her face was pale and glistening with sweat, her eyes wide with fear.

I had the sense that I should get back on Claret, but I didn’t have the courage, so instead I led the way back to the barn on her horse, while she and Claret followed. Back in his stall, I stood beside him and watched him eat hay as if nothing had happened. But I felt defeated. “What
was
that out there?” I asked. Claret chewed imperviously. “I just don’t know what I’m doing,” I said. “I don’t know what you need.” He didn’t stop chewing, but he lifted his head and put his nose on my shoulder, and he held it there, and I could feel his chewing in my ear, as if it were happening inside my own head.

D
etermined to learn whatever panic had to teach me, I started carrying around a book by Rilke called
Letters to a Young Poet
. Since I had written my first poem, a third-grade ode to the stars, I had wanted to be a poet. I had always been drawn to the way poems can hold the world in a few lines, the way poetry can change the existence of things simply by looking at them, the way it can change the heart. As I read Rilke’s letters, it was as if I could feel Rilke speaking to me. Of all the volumes of psychology books and cure-your-panic-now books, this turned out to be the book I took with me wherever I went. I underlined my favorite passages and reread them over and over. “Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.” I could feel Rilke’s words taking root inside me. And in the
moments when I felt the most despair, those lines made me feel like I could be brave.

L
arry and I started going to the UU church fairly regularly. Sometimes I would start laughing when we had to sing hymns—the kind of inappropriate laughter that can only happen in a church or in the middle of a college lecture or some other holy place, that silent laughter that ravages your body and sucks your breath away so that you’re shaking and red with it—because I was a very bad singer, and because I was singing badly about such joyous things, and because the women behind me were singing in their joyous falsettos. So I kind of lost it when it was time to sing, as in I came undone, as in I could not stop laughing. Larry would sometimes laugh, too, though always a little uncomfortably—and who can blame him?—but other times he’d keep on singing imperviously, almost as off-key as I was, which only made me laugh harder.

But on Christmas Eve that year, when the town was cuffed in snow and the sky was the color of bathwater and the cathedral candles flickered in the muted light, we sang a song called “Would You Harbor Me?” It began,
Would you harbor me? Would I harbor you? Would you harbor a Christian, a Muslim, a Jew?
I held the program in my hand and felt the power of those questions, of what it means to harbor someone. And then a line I wasn’t prepared for came—
Would you harbor a runaway woman, or child, a poet, a prophet
.
.
.
?
—and before I could get control of the maelstrom of emotion blossoming like a hydrogen bomb inside me, I was sobbing. A runaway. Every day of my life, since I’d first run out of my parents’ house, no matter where I was, no matter what I had or didn’t have, I was always that girl first, underneath it all, that unsure child looking for home. So I cried the kind of sobbing that racks the bones, deep and visceral, the kind that could go on for a very long time if you let it.

And that was only the beginning of the service. Luckily, I managed to pull myself together, though not before people noticed. They
were probably thinking,
That girl has a laughing
and
crying problem
. It wasn’t Erin’s turn to preach, so I watched the back of her head as she sat in the front pew. The minister began to deliver his sermon, which was about harboring each other in a sometimes cruel and unsafe world, and about how no one had harbored Mary and Joseph when Mary was in labor with Jesus, and I was thinking that
harbor
must be one of the most beautiful words of all, that to be harbored must be all a panicking person wants—or what anyone wants.

H
elen came bearing gifts that night—a small bottle of mandarin-flavored olive oil adorned with a red ribbon at its neck, and a collection of her favorite recipes printed on paper with little snowmen at the bottom. I gave her an assortment of rare teas and a book of poems. And it was warm and cozy, and the tree was lit with colored lights, and Larry was sitting in the next room reading a book, and I knew how lucky we were to be harbored there, in those glowing winter snapshots: people moving through rooms in a house in the soft light in a small town surrounded by hundreds of miles of snow. The picture was like one I imagined when I was on the streets, walking the neighborhoods at night, peering into people’s windows to see how they lived.

Helen and I baked salmon with olive oil, lemon juice, and tarragon, topped with a shallot and caper crème fraîche. We sautéed whole young carrots in butter and honey, roasted sliced red peppers until they turned sweet, and whipped up a pot of good old-fashioned mashed potatoes. For dessert we caramelized pears with fresh maple yogurt. All my life I had been eating food, but now I was experiencing it—the fragrance of tarragon, the brightness of carrots with their tops still on, the sound of things bubbling in the pan.

Later that night, as Larry and I headed up to bed, he stopped me in the foyer and gestured toward the long wood frame with three pictures of us from his fortieth birthday party. He pointed to the first one and said, “Do you see this?”

“Yes.”

“And this?” He pointed to the next one.

“Yes.”

“And this?”

“Yes.”

“That’s us,” he said, smiling.

Then he gave me a long kiss on my cheek and asked, “You know what this is?”

“A kiss?”

“It’s all the love in my heart, traveling up”—he ran his hand up his chest—“through my mouth, onto your skin, and down into your heart forever.”

So many days we were lost to each other. So many days I felt closest to him in the mornings, just before I watched him drive away. But in that moment, I was harbored there, in his love.

I
have never seen lightning like this before. It’s as if the sky is raining lightning, bolt after violet bolt of it zagging down to the horizon. Sometimes there are several bolts at once, and they make a thin buzzing sound. I can feel them; they raise the hairs on my arms. I walked to this wooden split-rail fence on the edge of this country road from one of Rick’s friends’ houses. We’re somewhere in the middle of Reston, Virginia, which means nothing to me. But I can tell you about the air here, which is warm and very still. It smells of grass and gravel. Back at Rick’s friend’s house, they’re smoking PCP. I decided not to smoke today because every time I do I spend hours wondering if I will ever get my mind back. So I left them—Rick, who was rumbling about the difference between good beer and elephant piss; his friend Rob, who had gone mute and bug-eyed from the drugs; and Gina, who was casually smoking a cigarette and who never seems to lose her cool under any circumstance—and now there is this curtain of lightning at
the edge of the field. And there are horses in the field. They keep erupting into frantic bursts, bolting as a herd, then halting and standing very close to each other. When they gallop, their manes and tails fly, and their hooves are thunder. But the sky is not thundering. And it’s not raining. It’s all lightning—these surges spilling from the ether like veins. I reach my hand out, over the fence, toward the horses, toward the lightning. I know I should take cover, but I can’t move—maybe because this is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.

T
hough Rick never tells us how much money he gets for Gina and me, I overhear him on the phone one night referring to us as “a ticket to the Virgin Islands.” He laughs. “Did you hear that?
Virgin
.”

I remind myself that the sex is better than any institution, that at least now I can have fresh air whenever I want. Only, I never get outside much. Gina works lunch shifts as a waitress, and I spend most days on the mattress doing bong hits and writing on my body. On Gina’s off days, we usually get high, and even if we go outside then, the trees and sky and birds are too far away for me to feel. Soon everything begins to blur together—the drugs, the sex, the bedroom window and its sharp light gathering at the edge of our mattress, the radio feeding me music—and I feel trapped in that blur, indistinct, shrinking.

I decide to leave. I ask Gina for a ride, and she puts her arm around me. “Sure, I’ll give you a lift.”

When Gina asks me where I want to go, I say Rockville because I don’t know where else to go. We drive most of the way in silence.

It starts to rain. I turn to look at Gina. Her profile—her strong Greek nose, her smooth skin and deep dimple—is lovely and familiar. “I’m going to miss you,” I say. “And I really appreciate all you’ve done for me.”

“I’m going to miss you, too.” She glances at me, then back to the
road. “But this isn’t goodbye forever. I’m going to give you my mom’s number, so you always know how to find me.”

I try to find comfort in this, but I know the odds: I’ll probably never see her again, just as I’ll probably never see my friend Cindy or my old friend Dawn or Afshin or the donut guy or so many people, each one eclipsed by the next. So we drive in the rain, and I write
I love you
on a small scrap of paper, which I leave on the seat of her car.