Fighting Wind
Mom married Hurricane Gerald because he was strong. Passionate. Because he was too big for the car, too big for the house, too big for an office job. Mom married Hurricane Gerald because she loved the lazy swirl of his clouds. His one eye a dark slate blue, ridged by his cloud wall. She loved that when he showed up all you could hear were ocean waves like the whole world was listening to him. Not even a seagull. Not even the wind in the palm trees.
Mom married Hurricane Gerald because her first marriage was too peaceful, too boring. That’s what she told my dad when she divorced him: he never shouted.
What did you want me to shout for, he said.
Oh, she said, throwing her arms out wide, the tip of her Marlboro making a red arc, to prove you feel something.
When Mom shouted, when she threw things, Dad would take me to the grocery store. Even now I love walking the aisles, choosing exactly the right cereal. The day Dad moved out, we had sixty-four rolls of toilet paper. We had ten pounds of rice.
Mom married Hurricane Gerald because when he was angry he would roar in the backyard. His clouds would spiral, faster and faster, and inside the house books would fall on the ground, the refrigerator would fall open. Hear that? He loves me, Mom would say, her smile enormous, and she would push the bookshelves over so that Hurricane Gerald could hear the smash of the wood against the floor.
Once Mom woke me up early to say she had a surprise. We drove through the pre-dawn light and sang along to Loretta Lynn on the radio and it felt, for a little while, like it had when I was really little, before Dad moved to Delaware. But then Mom pointed out Hurricane Gerald in the rearview mirror, catching up with us. There’s my baby, she said, and waved as he passed, and our car skidded into the shoulder of the highway and Mom hit the brakes, laughing.
When we arrived, she said we were going hot air ballooning, just like I’d always wanted. I hadn’t, though. Once we were in the air with the balloon operator, no sound but the hiss of the gas, buffeted by the wispy ends of Hurricane Gerald’s clouds, it was clear that Mom had wanted to meet him in the sky. To be as big as he was.
Mom married Hurricane Gerald because he was jealous, too. When Mom screamed he’d spent too long gazing at the curving trunk of the maple tree in our backyard, he thundered that she might as well have been riding the balloon operator’s cock, and then he imitated her in a keening whining wind, “Oh, it’s so high up! I didn’t know we’d be so high up!”
Later, she said no man had ever cared for her so much. She said honey, you want a man who will fight for you. And I thought, fight who? Fight what?
Mom married Hurricane Gerald because he was powerful. He can protect us, she said, scrubbing a pot in the sink. I said, I can protect you, and she laughed until she cried and had to redo her mascara before Hurricane Gerald came home.
On the first day of sixth grade, I came downstairs. Mom was smoking at the kitchen table, staring out the window at Hurricane Gerald. It was daytime, but his clouds were dark and swirling fast and it was hard to see the sky. They’d been fighting all night. Go get dressed, she said, I’ll take you to school. She stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray.
We didn’t talk in the car. When we got to school she didn’t look at me. She just stared at the almost-purple clouds. So I went inside. Right in the middle of learning about simple machines, the PA came on and said there was a big storm and we all had to go to the basement. Mrs. O’Brien lined us up at the door and we went downstairs. It felt like a snow day. We played Duck Duck Goose in a giant ring, even the eighth graders. Outside, the wind got bigger and bigger until it sounded like a train was running right over our school and we pretended we were a train too, hollering Whoo whoo! and chugging around the basement.
When the PA said we could go outside, the sun was out. The ground was squishy and there were some tree branches in the road. Parents came to pick kids up, one by one, until it was just me and Mrs. O’Brien. We went to the office so she could call Mom, but there was no answer. So she drove me home. The closer we got to our street, the worse the houses looked—broken windows, a roof peeled back—until we turned the last corner and our house was gone.
Even the maple tree in the backyard. Even the ten bags of rice in the pantry. Where my room had been, where the couch was, our backyard: it was just a hole in the ground. And the sun kept shining and shining. I got out of the car and Mrs. O’Brien caught me before I fell in the hole and held me tight as I screamed for my mom until my throat was raw.