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

live with him and his new wife, Janice, and her son, Bobby. Janice was grand—tall and big-breasted and wafting Halston perfume in every direction. She cooked beef briskets and made a mean Texas sheet cake, and was, from all angles, the opposite of my mother. We all agreed she was beautiful, with her flashy smile and bouncy hair and meticulously applied eye makeup. In the beginning, I followed her around a lot, asking her questions and staring at her pretty red lipstick, but in the way of many mixed families, we never bonded. She wanted my father, and she tolerated Joanne and me.
    Bobby split the difference between Joanne’s and my ages. He was a dark-haired, long-lashed beauty of a boy, who was quiet, asthmatic, and slow at math. I liked him for all of these things and felt, very quickly, the same older-sister protectiveness I felt toward Joanne. My father, however, was less enamored of Bobby. He took his shakiness and failure to make eye contact as a weakness, and often berated him for it at the dinner table. “You’re a putz,” my father would say. “Don’t you know how to hold a fork?” The more my father spoke to him, the more Bobby stared into the abyss of his food, his hands trembling, until eventually all of us, except my father, lost our appetites. Janice just rested her knife and fork on her plate without ever saying a word.
    Janice also didn’t say a word the first time she saw my father hit me. I’d gotten caught attempting to swipe a few quarters from the large watercooler jug my father filled with coins, and was sent to my room. When my father appeared in my doorway a couple of hours later, I knew instantly by the wild look in his eyes that everything I’d dreamed of and fought for was about to come crashing down. Then I saw the gleam of my sister’s twirling baton. He was holding it in his hand. Zapped by a streak of cold fear, I called out for Janice, but was quickly silenced by the first strike of the baton against my head. I let out a howl, and my father raised the baton again. This time, he stopped short of my arm, laughing as I jerked away. After that, he made it a game: sometimes he’d bring the baton up as if he were going to hit me, only to stopmidway and watch me flinch. Then he’d mimic the way I was crying by stretching his mouth into a contorted O and making taunting sounds in a horrid falsetto. And on the few times he let the baton connect, I remember feeling grateful that he hadn’t hit me harder, as if that little bit of restraint was still a kind of love. My father ended my punishment by wrecking my room with the baton, then ordering me to clean it up.
    True to my father’s word, we had a pool and a barbecue grill and a German shepherd named Lady, whom I loved. But that’s where his promises ended. And life went back to how it had been before, with my father cornering me in various rooms in the house while I begged him to stop. What was different now was that, unlike the way my parents fought when they were married, my father didn’t hit Janice. And he must have known that his cruelty toward Bobby could go no farther than the dinner table, because he never hit him, either. And Joanne, of course, had always been off-limits. So I was the only one; my mistakes (the usual mistakes kids make, like continuing to jump off a ladder after I was told not to, or being mean to my sister, or sneaking cookies before breakfast) were the ones he fixated on. Through it all, Janice said nothing, and if she objected, she never showed it. But sometimes when the air changed and it was clear that my father was getting ready to deliver another round, she sent Joanne and Bobby outside to play, presumably so that they wouldn’t have to watch. Those were the worst of the days, the ones when I felt most alone, the ones when I wondered if my father would finally kill me.
    But when it seemed that death had finally come, it wasn’t mine: it was my father’s. He and Janice had been arguing that day, so she