Let the Tornado Come: A Memoir Read Online Free Page B

knew who I’d become—but not who I’d been. And I wanted him to want to know the rest. Because what was going on inside me, most of the time, was more than what Larry was willing to see. Peeling the layers back and back, underneath it all I would always be, foremost, a runaway—a girl ruled by thetempestuousness of her heart. It would be the story that would tell itself again and again, no matter how I tried to silence it.
    W e didn’t talk about hearts anymore that night. Instead, we ate dinner in front of the television, my hand incessantly darting to the pulse at my neck—as if by monitoring it I could somehow control it; I could be truly certain I was alive—while Larry pretended not to notice. Eventually I picked the stethoscope back up, pressed the circle to my chest, and listened to my heart. It sounded like a washing machine that gets unbalanced in the spin cycle, knocking urgently, louder and louder. I don’t remember what we watched on television, only that it was narrated by the sound of my heartbeat.
    Later that night, in the unfamiliar dark of our bedroom, Larry climbed on top of me, the stethoscope still around my neck like a windblown tie. I liked having it there, waiting to monitor the goings-on of my viscera. As we moved together, I thought it’s amazing, all the different ways one can live in a body.

FOUR

    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—andthe 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