My First Tornadoes, and: In the Hotel Bed

Abstract

My First Tornadoes, and: In the Hotel Bed Maria Mazziotti Gillan (bio) My First Tornadoes Outside the window, the wind is an eerie sound,hissing like a snake ready to strike. The windreminds me of our first months in Kansas Citywhen the siren sounded to warn us of tornadoes approaching and all the children ran out of the streetinto their separate houses and the children and I rushedinto the basement and huddled in the corner, though Iwasn't sure which corner we were supposed to crouch inand I tried not to let the children see how afraid I was. The basement was not really a basement. It was mostlyabove ground with big windows. I wasn't sure it wouldcount as a safe place to hide. Natives of the area told me [End Page 123] about houses and schools blown to the ground and carslifted off the road and smashed like toys. Some nights when Dennis was teaching, the sirens would sound,and I'd take the children and go to our neighbors,two retired people who were both heavy drinkers and withwhom I shared nothing except our bedroom wall, a fact that always worried me, and thinking back, I realize I wastoo terrified of being alone to worry about whether theywelcomed the presence of a young woman and her twoyoung children. When we moved into the big stone housein Kansas City, the one with the huge pillars that ran all theway to the roof, I stopped being afraid, grew accustomedto the sirens and thought that the old house had withstoodyears of tornadoes and was unlikely to fall down now, with us in it, besides, I loved that house. It was my ideaof an upper middle-class house, the kind of houseI wished I had grown up in with its back stairway and itsbreakfast room and fireplace and its big bedrooms full oflight. I painted the kitchen bright yellow and painted smallblue chickens on the walls above the chair rail that ranaround the room and turned the glass-fronted cabinet into stained glass. Time falls away when I hear the soundthe wind makes, forty years vanish, and for a moment I amthat young woman again, happy with my husband, mychildren, my big old house, so much of life ahead of me,unable to see myself forty years later in this classroomsurrounded by the wind outside the windowand the students and the poems they write so bravethey set the room on fire. [End Page 124] In the Hotel Bed It's ten past midnight, my eyes unwilling to close,no matter how many times I count backwardfrom a hundred. The bed is a huge white lakeand I am the boat that rolls from side to sideas though pushing through deepand turbulent water. Worry swirls to the surface growing largeras the digital clock cuts off the minutes,the hours. The voices of the past refuseto be silent, shrill, accusatory. I hear my husband's voice on the phone, how shakyit has become, how thin, like his legs, no excessflesh on them, the long bones sharply defined,sticking out of his diaper; even the small sizeis too big for him now. In my mind my eyes travel to his tortured face,his body twisting and turning so I can't reachhis face to kiss him goodnight. Sometimeshis face reminds me of the tormented Christyou see in so many houses in South America, not like the white bread Christ whose torment seemsmanageable, but these images are bloody and closerto what it would have been like, the Crucifixion,not pleasant or angelic but horrible and cruel. I have seen more death than I wanted or could haveimagined. I want to remember only soothing, calm,beautiful things; instead I see my sister's twisted feet,my mother-in-law's raging face, my mother's eyes [End Page 125] when she died, my father's fury at what illnessand old age brought...