Let the Tornado Come: A Memoir (3 page)

M
y earliest memories are of my father’s hands, of attachment. In my first memory, I have no words, only sensation: a tight wrap in blankets, small flecks of light flickering above in the night sky, my father’s hand pressing me to his chest. He hovered godlike above me. The sky was the color of dark plums.

I was born in Queens, where we lived in a dismal apartment near Kennedy Airport. What I remember most about my four years living there was the noise: at all hours, airplanes roared overhead and rattled our apartment. When the planes came, my father would rush to me and cup the fleshy insides of his hands over my ears. Sometimes even at night he’d rise from their bed, from the darkness, and come to me in my crib, where his hands went about their steady work of muffling the sound. But sometimes he and my mother were fighting, and then he didn’t come to me. Then the three of us would be screaming—my father’s deep roar, my mother’s high howl, my breathless wailing—and
the planes would thunder, and my ears would ache, and life seemed like one big rumbling hole that wanted to swallow us.

In my earliest memories, I do not remember my mother’s hands. Or rather, I remember the absence of them. During the days, when my father was at work, I reached for my mother, yearned for all the pieces of her—her hands, her lap, her smile—but she didn’t reach back. Sometimes when a plane came, we would both cry. My mother cried not only because of the planes but also because she was gaining weight, because her mother-in-law told her to cut her long blond hair to the nape, and she did. She was crying because she had no friends and because
Sesame Street
was only an hour long and she didn’t know what to do with me when it was over. She was crying because she was in her early twenties and could already see her life drawn out, a sketch on paper she couldn’t rip up.

Sometimes she sat in the kitchen and asked, “Can you see him?” She always pointed at the same one of the three empty chairs at the table, while I stood beside her leg. “It’s Jesus.”

I looked at the chair and saw only a chair.

She gazed in awe. “He’s beautiful. Just beautiful.”

Another plane came. We cried.

At three years old, I liked the rise of questions: “Mommy, why are you sad?” She sat in the soft green chair and stared toward the window, sobbing in bursts, wiping her nose on her arm. Startled, she turned to me, blinking quickly, as if she’d forgot not only that I could speak but that I was even in the room. “You’re too wise,” she said, but moved her face away again, back toward the window, its delicate haze.

I didn’t know what
wise
meant. I wondered if it was like eyes.

My mother’s belly was growing like a moon. “You’re wise,” I told it, while she slept flat-backed on top of her rust-colored bedspread. She slept a lot, so I watched her a lot, waiting for her to wake up. I watched the light change with the day and move shadows around the room like puppets. I watched her jaw chew invisible bites while she dreamed. I watched her chest rise and fall. Sometimes I tried to wake her by telling
her I loved her—whispering it at first, then speaking it, then kind of barking it—but once she was sleeping, she was not the kind of dreamer you could rouse.

When they brought home my new sister, Joanne, I put the back of my hand to my forehead the way I’d seen people do on TV, and fell to the floor, pretending to faint. At first, I heard my grandma giggle, “Oh, Ritala,” but then no one said anything. I lay there for a while, legs akimbo, head turned to one side, eyes closed, waiting for someone to notice. When I finally stood up, everyone was on the other side of the room peering at Joanne, so I went over, too. She smiled a lot, except when the planes came. Now when they did, my father rushed to her and I covered my own ears.

In the months after Joanne was born, my mother cried more. She cried in the green chair and also in the shower. She cried on her way from the green chair to the shower. But when she talked to Jesus, she never cried. I liked hearing her talk. I liked watching her nod and offer Invisible Jesus tea.

Joanne, now sitting up in her playpen, didn’t understand. She was all rattles and stuffed rabbits and plastic rings that stacked into a rainbow. My game was to make her laugh by popping up over the rim of her playpen and shouting, “Boo!” The trick was to be quick, to make each time a surprise. It almost always worked, and her gummy pink laughter was the best thing I’d ever heard.

When my father came home, he yelled at my mother. “Look at you—you don’t even bother to brush your hair anymore, not to mention cook a meal. What did you feed the girls today? Tell me.” He opened the refrigerator.

“Rita’s too picky. All she wants is spinach. But Jesus said—”

“Fuck Jesus!” He threw a bottle of ketchup. It didn’t break, but it dented the wall. My mother cried. I cried. Joanne cried, too. His voice was an explosion. “I don’t want to hear another fucking ‘Jesus’!” He grabbed her shoulders. “Do you understand?”

She didn’t answer. Instead, her face twisted into a cry that climbed louder and louder, and she didn’t stop for a long time, not even after he let go and she slumped to the floor. That day Jesus walked out of our apartment and never returned.

But the planes never stopped coming, and my mother began to tremble even in the silence in between. When my father said we were moving to Maryland, I asked if Maryland had planes.

“Maryland has peace,” he told me, “peace and quiet.”

Before we moved to Maryland there were two events I will never forget. The first is that for my fourth birthday, my parents gave me Legos. I wanted Legos more than anything, and these people, who were gnarled up in so much pain, had given them to me. By then I was already learning to scarf up the good thing for all it was worth. So I jumped up and down on the bed as two people: a girl who was happy to have this thing she deeply wanted, and a girl who was already self-aware, who wondered,
Am I jumping up and down hard enough? Smiling big enough? Letting them know I am grateful enough?
I was already a girl trying to patch the roaring hole that my parents’ misery had made in our lives.

The second thing that happened is that, in my father’s hands, I broke free. He had taken me to the zoo, and we were standing at a fence, both of our arms outstretched—his lifting me up, mine reaching forward for all that massive gray: an elephant, who with one sweep of his trunk breathed the world into motion. His ears skimmed the air like ragged kites, and all I wanted was for him to take the peanut I clutched in my small hand. And with his stupendous and dexterous trunk, he did. In a single gentle swoop, he lifted the peanut from my palm, and through his swift breeze-like touch, in that moment of give-and-take, I made contact. I was seen. I learned grace.

I was allowed to bring home a souvenir that day: a lime-green flashlight that you had to squeeze on and off. It was attached to a long chain, which I wore around my neck and took to bed with me, squeezing it on
under the tent of my covers. I took that flashlight everywhere because it reminded me of the elephant, and of what would turn out to be one of the last sweet times I would share with my father.

My father and his brother, sons of World War II survivors, had also grown up in Queens. Their father, my grandfather, was already old then. His first wife and three children had been killed in Treblinka, where he, too, nearly died from a gunshot wound to the abdomen. But he’d been an obstetrician in Poland, so he knew how to tend the wound, how to survive. He was a smart and good man who, here in the States, could get little more than a janitor job. He was frail by then—arthritic and nearly deaf.

The latter might have been a blessing, because my grandmother was always yelling at him. Despite her crotchety ways, I loved her because she made excellent French toast. It was soft in the middle, crisp on the edges, and drenched with maple syrup. She kept a clean house, always bending over to remove some small speck of dirt off the floor, and she served meals at the same times each day—a habit that gleamed in sharp contrast to the volatility of our usual life. Occasionally Joanne and I spent the night with her and immediately cozied into her crisp sheets and loyally followed routine. But for all my grandmother’s dedication to homeyness, she seldom had a warm or witty thing to say, so I often ended up asking her to tell me again about the concentration camps. And she always told me the same story: twice a day they were given bread and coffee, and in the evenings, instead of drinking the coffee, she washed her hair with it. She seemed so proud of this detail: that not even Hitler could make her hair dirty.

Of course she was angry. My grandfather was angry because she was angry. My father was angry, too—a young boy getting into street fights, taking odd jobs to bring money home to his parents and still never being able to please his mother. “You’re an idiot,” she used to tell him. “What will people think of me, having an idiot for a son?”

Who knows where all the anger of war goes? Who knows the ways brutality wedges itself into the body, into the synapses of a brain? Who
knows what parts of ourselves we must consume in order to survive? What I do know is that my father’s family was not a happy one. I know that he had a dream of being a lawyer, and that he dropped out of college after one semester so that he could get a job to support his parents. They went without, and he went without, and though for a short time he tried to give to us, his new family, as fathers give, in the end he couldn’t. So we all went without.

My mother often told me that her father, in the midst of a diabetic temper, once yelled, “You should have choked when you were born!” She was very young when he wished this on her, but she took it into herself wholly. She grew up afraid of water, always fearful she would drown. She was born in Paris and boarded a ship to New York with her parents and her older sister when she was four. She spent the entire trip seasick in the cabin, and when they arrived in New York, she hated her first impressions of America—the way people spoke, the food they ate, her estrangement from all of it. She hated that her parents gave her and her sister one doll to share between them, and that her sister hit her over the head with a bat for touching it. My mother didn’t fight back. She was shy to the point of throwing up before school each day, and if I were given only one chance to describe her, then and in all the years I knew her, it was as a person who wanted to hide.

She was sixteen when she met my father on a blind date. They fell in love, and with the love came the fighting. They fought over jealousy, over their parents, over other things I will never know. They fought in cars, in the still space of my mother’s bedroom, in the din of Coney Island. They fought on their honeymoon. Yet no matter how much they fought, they couldn’t change the shape of each other, of their past, of the new life they had already created. For both of my parents, I represented just one more loss of freedom, and when my mother was eight months pregnant with me, my father kicked her stomach. “You came too soon,” she always told me. “Three weeks early. I wasn’t ready. I wanted Chinese food that night, but then you came instead.”

Though my father had promised peace, after we moved to Maryland
my parents’ fights grew more intense. They were staggering and swinging from a combination of drugs and rage. They slapped and punched and bit each other. They called each other long rashes of names. Other times they were too high to do anything. Sometimes my father would sit on the sofa in the evening and watch a blue spinning lamp with crescent moons cast shadows on the walls until his head lolled back and his eyes rolled up, leaving two gashes of white. I liked him this way, because all the menace was drained from him then. He was limp, gone from us.

M
y mother wasn’t much of a cook, but I do remember the last big meal she made for us as a family: a roast chicken with carrots and potatoes. Unfortunately, the potatoes were undercooked, and my father punished her for this by throwing tennis balls at her and then locking her out on the balcony until it got very dark and my sister and I could barely distinguish her profile from the darkness. So it was mostly TV dinners after that. One thing my mother still cooked, though, was soft-boiled eggs, which, to my bewilderment, everyone else seemed to enjoy. Every Sunday morning they arrived at the table, upright and wobbly in their flowery blue eggcups. And every Sunday morning, I gagged at each slimy bite before giving up and pushing my chair back. “You’re not finished,” my mother would say, to which I’d complain that the egg was cold. “Well, that’s your problem. Next time, don’t play with it, and it won’t get cold.” Once when I couldn’t finish my egg, my father kicked me clear across the living room.

It wasn’t the first time my father had struck me, and I knew it wouldn’t be the last. I don’t remember the first time either of my parents hit me, maybe because every time someone hits you, it feels like a first. But by then, part of my seven-year-old self knew that no matter what I did, I wouldn’t ever make my father proud. Still, that didn’t stop me from wanting to, or from trying. So the next week, as my father sat behind me watching television in the living room, I cast a glance at him
over my shoulder and decided to finish my egg. It was a tricky egg. It squiggled to the back of my throat and got stuck there. Even with sips of my orange juice, I still gagged. When I spooned in my last bite, I didn’t even bother to swallow. I ran straight in to tell my father.