Let the Tornado Come: A Memoir by Rita Zoey Chin Read Free Book Online

breakdown. I never knew what that meant exactly, and as I grew up, the expression fell out of favor. But it seemed mythical at the time, almost to the point of being glamorous. I’d overhear my mother on the phone sometimes, talking about it. “Did you hear? Judy’s friend’s uncle’s stepdaughter had a nervous breakdown .” And now, so many years later, I was beginning to wonder if this feeling was what they meant—the feeling of standing on solid ground yet watching myself, as if on a boat in a river, drifting away.
    As Larry and I walked toward the restaurant, all I wanted to do was turn around and run. Instead, I gripped Larry’s hand, and we entered the Chilton Club, a stodgy private social club to which two of the wives belonged. As we approached our table, my knees trembled like winduptoys. Immediately I busied myself by noting where the exits were as I shook the hands of the dinner guests: the CEO, Elaine, and her husband; the executive vice president and his wife; the university dean and her husband; the former interim chair and his wife. I took a seat between Larry and the dean’s husband, a portly man with only a thin horseshoe of hair on his head, and as we all trained our eyes on Elaine, I began to fidget—leaning forward, leaning back, placing my hands on the table, off the table, on the edge of the table, in my hair, on my collarbone, on my knees. I couldn’t stop. After thirty-five years, I’d forgotten how to simply sit in my own skin.
    Elaine was a well-coiffed woman in her late fifties, with the confidence of a race car driver and the eloquence of a politician. She wore pearls, and the hair spray in her frosty hair would have battled any wind. As a server filled our wineglasses, I thrust my wrist under the tablecloth, clocked fifteen seconds on my watch, and measured my pulse at 112, which was still reasonably in control. Then Elaine raised her glass. I followed eagerly, grateful for something to do. As she toasted Larry, a “young talent” who was on his way to “bright new beginnings” at Boston Medical Center, he caught my eye and smiled. If Elaine noticed, she didn’t acknowledge me. Maybe she hadn’t considered that it was my bright new beginning, too, that I had packed up my life alongside Larry. But we were already past that. We were clinking our glasses. And the dinner began.
    “So what do you do?” asked the vice president’s wife, fixing her eyes on me. Her nails looked like rubies against the glass.
    I pinched a tip of the tablecloth between my fingers. “I’m a writer.”
    “Ooh, what do you write? Novels?”
    “I’m a poet,” I said, clearing my throat and shifting in my chair.
    She nodded, as if she were waiting for the rest of my sentence.
    “I’m writing a memoir,” I added impulsively, instantly regretting it.
    The former interim chair—a curmudgeonly, almost endearingly Napoleonic man—laughed. “At your age?”
    I felt my cheeks blush as I sensed everyone’s eyes on me. I couldn’t sit there and tell them about my past, so I looked down and examined the condensation on my water glass. The table went quiet, and I poked my wrist under the tablecloth to recheck my pulse. It was fast.
    As the traffic of conversation got moving again—something about the governor and health care—I thought about what else I could have said to the now less-endearing Napoleonic former interim chair. I could have told him that by the time I was six, I’d known violence the way some kids know bedtime stories. I could have told him that the first number I ever dialed was 911 during what would be one of many vicious fights between my parents; that, to save myself, I started running away when I was eleven and then spent years living between state-run institutions and the streets, where I wandered around looking for a safe place to call home but instead ended up sleeping in staircases or empty cars or, more often, the questionable beds of men and women. I could have told him I’d