After 9/11

by Helaina Hovitz

  “That’s not why we help people,” he’d say, and she’d roll her eyes.

  Dad was also very generous. Whenever we passed a homeless person, he always stopped, if he had spare change. So, it got to the point where I would see them from a block away, and say, “Daddddy,” prompting him to start patting down his pockets. On one family trip to Washington, DC, on our way to some colonial museum, we passed a woman who said she only needed fifty cents to get a sandwich. “Oh, sure!” I told her, looking expectantly at Dad, who obliged. My mother said, “She’s not going to get a sandwich.”

  “Oh yes, she is! She said she was,” I pointed out, matter-of-factly.

  When we left the museum, a city bus passed by, and there she was, sitting on board, eating a sandwich, smiling, and waving at us.

  Daddy knew everything. He always knew the twist in the movie plot and that “Directed By” was the last of the credits before the show started. He knew how to make a squirt gun with his hands in the pool, how to make Play-Doh out of baking soda and flour, and how to make sure that the costumed character at the party came over to take a picture with me, even if it looked like we’d never make it through the crowd. He never missed a school or camp play and stuck my report cards right on the wall, whooping for joy, shouting, “All right! That’s my girl!” and kissing me on the cheek.

  He was the originator of names like sugarshack, sweetheart, and baby, whereas my mom simply used Helaina, and more often, “Helaina Natalie” because I was usually in trouble. He was the hero who always believed me when I said I felt sick and needed to stay home, who, later on, respectfully challenged the teachers at school when he felt I wasn’t being given a fair shake. My mother never learned how to drive, so he drove us everywhere: on vacations, shopping, to shows, to birthday parties, or to the hospital, when intense stomach viruses struck.

  My dad worked at a print shop and as a choir teacher at a special education high school in Staten Island. In the early days before Photoshop, he literally “cut and pasted” our faces on cartoon characters or movie stars, writing funny or sweet messages for our birthdays or anniversaries or Christmas, copying the cutouts and then printing and laminating them. He also made collages, cutting out baby photos of me and adding captions on large rectangles of red or black Plexiglas, which hung proudly right in the entryway to our apartment.

  My dad was the spoiler, the one who understood why I just had to have the $75 princess dress for Halloween or another Barbie to add to the pile because that was Grocery Store Barbie. When we went out to eat at all sorts of restaurants, he said, “Don’t worry about what it costs, honey. Get whatever you want.” Not in a “big shot” way, but in a generous way, because that’s who he was.

  “You thought we had money growing up because you always had what you wanted, but it only looked that way,” my mother later told me. “We took out a lot of personal loans.”

  They both worked, and they must have saved smartly.

  My mother was the “silent” hero, who always found fun things for us to do. She took me to our very first Broadway show, Beauty and the Beast, and even though we could only afford tickets in what she called “the nosebleed section,” I sat still, not moving, for nearly three hours. Holding up my little yellow binoculars and wearing my yellow Belle dress, I was completely mesmerized by what was happening on stage.

  We went to see everything under the sun at Madison Square Garden, most often there were shows where people in costume acted out movies while ice skating. We went to the Big Apple Circus, and we went to see shows that the kids at Borough of Manhattan Community College put on. We went to the Renaissance Fair upstate, and we went to the zoo, where my favorite exhibit was the one that was set up to feel like a rainforest. She managed to find all of these fun activities, however people tracked those things down before the Internet or smart phones. Sometimes, she got creative locally: there was a tiny patch of park directly under the Brooklyn Bridge, right by the water, where we went to barbecue. We would bring tinfoil, burgers, buns, charcoal, marshmallows, and a lighter, a city family “going camping.”

  To this day, the taste of Pepsi reminds me of Manhattan Beach, where we’d take our beach chairs and sit out, marching past the Puerto Rican families whose barbecues by the parking lot sent smoke and charcoal fumes billowing out into the crowd. The small yellow hot dog huts served Pepsi, but at home, we only had Diet Coke.

  My dad didn’t drink soda, but he didn’t drink alcohol either—just water, which was fine with me, because drunken people made me nervous. I didn’t want to be around them, and I would stand in the doorway of a restaurant refusing to go farther if people were being loud and smoking at the bar by the entrance. I didn’t like that these people were belligerent and acting boisterous, and I didn’t like that they couldn’t be stopped. They were out of control.

  “Why do people drink when it makes them sick and smelly and scary?” I’d ask.

  “I don’t know, honey,” he’d say.

  Actually, I’d later learn, he knew exactly why: because they couldn’t stop, and he had been one of those people who couldn’t stop. In fact, he still was, which was why he didn’t start.

  I loved “the arts,” and Mom somehow found ways to afford drama class, music class, art class, swim class, singing lessons, and the cutest outfits you ever saw on a kid—all on a very modest, middle-class income. What I wanted most of all though were mother-daughter outfits.

  Every month we got this clothing catalog, and I would go through with a red marker and circle what I wanted. In addition to tops and dresses, I would always fold down the corner on the pages where mothers and daughters wore matching dresses, or top and bottom sets, then keep my fingers crossed as we went through it together.

  Never, not once, did we get one of those mother-daughter outfits, no matter how much I tried to convince her that they were beautiful, or that everyone who saw us would just love it.

  But she did bring me to the Newport Mall in New Jersey, where my favorite store, the Limited Too was always waiting like a tiny Disney World, and I could barely wait to get through the doors, never knowing where to start. It was stocked with preteen versions of trendy outfits (think fur-lined polyester jackets, velvet baby-doll pajamas, and leopard leggings) that I couldn’t wait to show off to all of the boys in school who couldn’t care less … plus, furry pom-pom pens, neon-colored candy, pillows you could insert your own photo into, and training bras that, at eleven, I actually needed.

  I usually got everything I wanted, at least from that store, but the one thing I didn’t get was a dog, no matter how frequently I asked.

  “When can I have a dog?” I would demand, stomping around the playground or marching up to my mother while she was doing something in the kitchen.

  “When you’re old enough to walk it.”

  “I’m old enough now!”

  “I don’t think so,” my dad would somehow enter the conversation and chuckle, turning back to his computer, which I wanted to throw out the window.

  * * *

  You would never, ever, have seen either of my parents wearing turtlenecks, sweatshirts, corduroys, loose T-shirts in dull colors, anything with a college logo plastered across the front, “mom jeans” or “dad jeans,” visible white socks, or chunky sweaters. Everything was smartly accessorized, well put together, fitted, and stylish. That’s how this family did things, with my mother at the helm.

  She was just five feet tall, a size four with short, dark, loosely curly hair, which she always had cut just above her ears, styled and highlighted by the trendiest salons in the city. They would color it for free if she sat as a hair model for two hours as part of a class to teach young stylists. She had a few piercings in each ear and wasn’t like the other mothers who had long hair and wore long skirts with flowers on them and baked cookies. She also wasn’t a high-powered business type, either. She fell somewhere in between, a travel agent who changed agencies fairly often and worked only part time, three days a week. Bosses were always trying to
get her to work more often, but she wouldn’t do it.

  Her skirts, blouses, and jewelry were modern, always a stone’s throw away from something you’d see on the runway or in a fashion magazine. She knew how to shop and never pay retail, finding one-of-a-kind accessories that caused people to reach out and touch them and coo, “Ooooh, where did you get this?” She never wore a pair of sweatpants anywhere except to the laundry room within the apartment building, and never went outside without makeup on. Over the next twenty years, she would look like she hadn’t aged a day.

  On special occasions she wore contact lenses, but mostly she wore glasses, which she switched out every few years depending on what was in style. Her nails were always manicured, and she was always ready ten minutes later than we were supposed to leave, which caused my dad to sigh loudly and threaten to sit back down on the couch, and if more time ticked by, to get undressed, and ultimately, to “just forget it.”

  I grew up to share my father’s urgency for being on time and impatience for “waiting around,” and when I was still little, I always felt that I had to lay claim to him, since everyone else got to share him too.

  He hosted the Halloween parties for kids in the community room, and I trailed him like a member of the Secret Service, a duty that took precedence over running around with my friends, Charles, Gina, and Julie. Sure, I said hello to them, posed for some pictures, and shoveled a candy corn–covered Entenmann’s cupcake into my face, but ultimately, my most important mission of the night was making sure everyone knew that Paul was my dad. I handed out the “best costume” certificates my dad had printed at his job—everyone was a winner, very progressive for the mid-’90s—and smiled condescendingly at each kid when they reached my dad at the front of the line.

  “Wow, look at you! And who are you my dear?” my dad would say and he held the microphone to their tiny painted faces. “A witch!” the kid would exclaim, like a huge mystery had just been solved.

  “Congratulations, here you go!” he’d smile, and that was my cue to hand over the paper.

  He’s just being polite, kid. You’re a store-bought witch. I’m an enchanted woodland fairy. Move along.

  It’s a miracle that the witch didn’t scare me, even in her lame costume, because I was scared of everything.

  Unfortunately, my mother felt the best way to convince me to do things on a day-to-day was by scaring me into them.

  “If you don’t brush your hair, the birds will make a nest in it.”

  “If you don’t hold Mommy’s hand, someone is going to take you.”

  “If you put dirty things in your mouth, you’re going to get ‘trench mouth.’ Your jaw will look like this and it’ll stay like that forever.”

  She also tried to get me to face my fears through her own brand of “exposure therapy.” I was supposed to watch the scary TV show on Nickelodeon because it was meant for kids, “So how scary could it be?” I was supposed to climb through the colorful tube-like tunnels at kids play places, because “All of the other kids are having fun, look!”—which she often said in a way that indicated something was wrong with me because I was not.

  In the first of many years of seeing the play A Christmas Carol at Madison Square Garden every December, there was one scene that I couldn’t handle. A seemingly endless plethora of bellowing, green-lit ghosts in chains swarmed the stage and the audience, if memory serves me—instead of just one plain, old Jacob Marley—and without fail, I trembled and screamed, climbing up my dad’s body.

  “I wanna go home!”

  He stood up to take me out of the theater, but my mother stopped him, saying, “Don’t you take her out of here. No! Paul, no. She has to learn not to be afraid.”

  Year after year, I never stopped being afraid, a scenario they often brought into an ongoing discussion of how they felt the other person was inconsistent in their approach to raising me, which they often had in front of me.

  At Disney World, we spent a lot of time in the gift shops and taking pictures with characters. I was afraid of rides, naturally. When the Wicked Witch popped out during the Great Movie Ride at MGM Studios, I covered my eyes, crying, “I want to go home!” This was my catchphrase, because home was safe. Nothing bad could happen at home. The scary stuff would stop, the ride would always end, I would walk out into the sunlight holding my parents’ hands. I would lead them to the safety of It’s A Small World for the seventh time, and everything would be ok.

  It’s not real.

  This did not make it any easier for me to sleep at night, though. My fear of the dark was crippling, and, most nights, my mother would lay down with me until I fell asleep, or until she got too bored to wait any longer. Sometimes, my parents were like soldiers that I ordered to be stationed at my bedroom door. Ironically, I was too busy vigilantly waiting for them to walk away from the door to actually sleep. If they tried to leave, I would call them out on it, and come stomping out after them like a warden in a red flannel nightgown. Sometimes, I’d sing to my stuffed animals to try to calm my fear, but, like clockwork, after I fell asleep—or I’d killed two hours until they went to bed—I would march right from my room into theirs and nudge my way into their queen-sized bed next to my mom.

  There were times, it seemed, when I was supposed to be scared—or rather, as my mom would put it, “alert”—like when taking the subway.

  When I was two and a half feet tall, she began testing me.

  “Would you have gotten in that car if I wasn’t here with you?” she’d ask as she guided me toward the next silver car with scratched windows marked up in black graffiti.

  “Did you see who was in that car? Half of them were homeless. When you’re a teenager, you’re going to have to take the subway by yourself, you know.”

  I knew how to identify a homeless man by age four, and always felt sorry for them. Sometimes people asked for money, and we had money. They asked people for food, and we had food. Why didn’t they have food?

  My mom never gave to them.

  “There’s help for them if they want it,” she said.

  But one night there was an exception. It was around Christmas, and a man who was shaking pretty badly came into our subway car. He spilled his cup of change, sending quarters and nickels and pennies rolling everywhere. As people bent to help him pick it up, my mom quietly added a dollar.

  “It’s Christmas,” she said.

  In a conventional sense, I grew up very well versed in keeping myself safe by New York City standards. If I got lost, I was to find a police officer or go over to the guy in the little plastic box by the subway turnstiles and tell him I was a lost child, giving him my name, my address, my phone number, and my mother’s name. I wasn’t supposed to step on the sewer grates in the street—in fact, I supposed to stay very far from them, especially if they were smoking, because that meant they were probably going to explode. I was never allowed to wear a nameplate necklace, because someone could pretend that they knew me or my mom and try to kidnap me.

  I was never told what terrible things would happen after I was hypothetically kidnapped, but I had an active enough imagination to fill in the blanks.

  Mom taught me always to walk with confidence, especially when I got older.

  “Keep your head up, and look straight ahead. Take meaningful strides. Don’t let anyone see that you’re scared, or think that you are. You’re tough. Never keep your head down,” she said.

  “If you think you need to cross the street, do it, but don’t make it obvious. If you need to change subway cars, wait until the next stop. But do not look afraid.”

  At the same time, I was also brave, or at least, that’s what people told me.

  There was the time in preschool that I got a splinter on the jungle gym at Washington Market Park on Chambers Street, right behind the Borough of Manhattan Community College and across the street from P.S. 234.

  The class gathered around to watch as the teacher, Heather, tried to get it out. I cried silently, and she told me, “You are s
o brave!”

  How am I being brave if I’m crying? I thought. Besides, what other choice did I have? I could let her get the splinter out, or I could walk around with a splinter for the rest of my life.

  In third grade, when I got a stomach virus so severe that I had to be hospitalized, the night nurse took me into a room to try and give me an IV. The nurse, who had orange colored, fanned-out hair and wore crimson lipstick, kept poking at my vein and making me bleed but failed to insert the IV.

  “Damn it,” she said under her breath, sending a trail of blood down my arm.

  I wasn’t bothered, it was just blood, but Mom had to go sit in the hallway so she didn’t faint.

  “You’re a brave kid, you know that?” the nurse smiled through yellowing teeth.

  What am I going to do, run away? I thought. There was nothing to do but wait for her to fix it and make it better.

  * * *

  My mother and her sister, my aunt Fran, grew up on Orchard Street, in a building next to what is now the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. They were raised near streets you weren’t supposed to walk down after dark, streets that are now full of clubs and bouncers guarding red velvet ropes that you can’t get behind without forking up a fortune or showing some serious cleavage. The people around Mom and Aunt Fran inspired the characters in movies like Donnie Brasco and Goodfellas. In large groups, they went out to eat at Little Italy’s Mafia-run restaurants and sometimes had the check picked up with the wave of an arm by “Big Sal” whose life was later made into a movie you may have seen.

  They moved into Southbridge Towers in 1971, until my aunt later moved into a condo on East Sixty-Fifth Street on the Upper East Side. Grandma had given them each a choice: an apartment or a wedding. They made their respective choices quickly and easily.

  Southbridge Towers is a residential community in the Financial District near the South Street Seaport, an affordable housing complex comprised of nine buildings, four tall ones and five short ones. The tall ones have twenty-seven floors, the short ones have six. There’s a community room in the middle of the square block where people hold small parties or art classes for kids and holiday parties for the seniors. It is a little community that very few people knew existed downtown, an area best known for its Wall Street stock brokerage firms and law offices. In the ’90s, little communities were coming up downtown, and a few schools also arrived to meet the need. Buckle My Shoe was one of the first to debut, and the things I remember from my days there are clear and random, the way most early memories are.