After 9/11

by Helaina Hovitz

  * * *

  It was the early ’90s, before Tribeca was Tribeca. I went to preschool to try to be “socialized” and to get a head start on learning—I didn’t need the child care, because Grandma was home all the time, and she lived in our apartment building. But my poor mom held hope that preschool would remedy certain things and give me a leg up on others.

  As a three-year-old, I didn’t walk around in a purple pom-pom hat looking to hit random kids on the playground, but if someone shoved me on the slide line, they sure as shit were getting a shove back. And if they didn’t want to play Princess Helaina Leads the Way, I might have had to aggressively snatch their jump rope away. Instead of giving me the dirty looks, parents and babysitters would glare at my mom and usher their children away from me. I peed in the inflatable pool and then immediately announced in someone’s ear, “I peed in the pool,” and laughed when all the kids had to get out as someone’s mom drained and refilled it. I climbed the bookshelf at the library. When I was three, I was asked not to return to Gymboree because I abused my Noodle privileges by whacking the other kids over the head with it at a birthday party.

  Enough said.

  My mom would roll me into preschool the three days a week before she went to work, and I cried every single time, clinging to her legs, like someone who was never going to see her mother again.

  “You’ll see Mommy again after school. You have to let her go now,” one teacher, or three teachers at once, would say.

  “Okay, now say, ‘Bye, Mommy! See you later! Can’t wait to tell you everything I learned today!’”

  I had to be removed, literally detached from her, finger by finger, completely inconsolable.

  I eventually managed to get through the day well enough, learning the value of chewing with my mouth closed and raising my hand instead of calling out every single answer, which I always knew, but those mornings were rough. They stayed rough until I entered the third grade.

  We’d occasionally go on field trips, and the teachers would use these multi-child leashes with Velcro cuffs that closed around our wrists to keep us all attached to each other. If one person decided to sway back and forth, it threw the whole group off balance, so we looked like a bunch of teetering Weebles. This was their best effort at making sure that nobody got lost or taken.

  We’d walk down Church Street or West Broadway in this swaying blob of tiny pink jackets and glittery shoes, and I’d watch pieces of the sidewalk sparkle. If I looked straight down at them while I walked, these sparkles seemed to pop right off the ground and twinkle in front of my eyes.

  “What is that?” I asked Sandy, the teacher, one day.

  “That’s recycled glass,” she said.

  I was disappointed, not only because I didn’t really understand what that meant but because it didn’t sound very magical.

  “What about those black spots?” I followed up, noticing all of the dark, raised circles that covered the sidewalk.

  “That’s peoples’ gum,” Sandy said.

  That, too, struck me as odd, because gum was supposed to stick to your shoes, not the sidewalk, and gum was obviously not black.

  I liked Sandy. She had short brown hair and tiny brown eyes and wore berry-colored lipstick. She seemed warm, and I always competed for a spot on her lap during story time. This competition often resulted in my pushing someone else out of my way, or sulking if I didn’t win, which ultimately caused the outcome of nobody getting the lap.

  I also refused to sleep during naptime, so I crawled around to other kid’s mats, usually starting with Shane, who had dark skin and only had a mommy who had white skin. Sometimes, my father would take his choir students to sing for my class—but God help him if he sang one of “our songs.” One day, he sang “Puff the Magic Dragon,” and I stormed off to the corner of the rug with my hands over my ears, facing the wall, until it was over.

  My grandpa usually picked me up at the end of the day, from the sandbox where Shane and I shuffled around. Typically, we were usually the last two kids to be picked up, after begging whichever teacher was there to “make some of it wet sand,” which they treated like a luxury, as though tossing a cup of water into the sandbox was akin to shaving black truffles onto our jelly sandwiches. When my grandpa tried to get me to put my socks and shoes on, I’d refuse to exit the sandbox, or I’d wiggle and worm around defiantly.

  “Ah, c’mon now,” he’d say, frustrated.

  “Don’t give your grandpa a hard time,” the teacher would say.

  Sometimes, she’d have to resort to the threat of, “We’re going to let him leave you here.”

  That didn’t scare me—no, sir. There was no universe that existed where my mom would let me be abandoned at school, or on the street, or anywhere.

  I don’t know where my grandpa found the patience for this. He had been a jeweler and a gambler—one that my grandma had to bail out of jail twice—and there he was trying to shimmy a sock onto a wiseass four-year-old.

  His name was Charlie, but actually, his name was also Gregorio. When his Italian-speaking mother brought him to school here in New York, the teacher couldn’t understand what she was saying, so she offered a list of names. “Michael, Anthony, Charlie …” Apparently, she nodded, and said, “Sì, Charlie!” and that was that.

  Eventually, Grandpa Charlie would manage to strap me into the stroller, kicking and huffing, and pushed down Chambers Street, across City Hall Park, and, finally, home.

  * * *

  Sometimes, I learned, not listening to your parents was a great move.

  When I was four years old, while we were coloring at the table, I heard someone in the hallway of our building screaming, “Help! Help!”

  “Mommy,” I said, “Someone needs help.”

  My mother walked to the door, looked out the peephole, and said, “There’s nobody there.”

  I went to open the door, and she put her hand over mine, over the knob, keeping it closed. “Uh-uh,” she said in warning. “That’s how people kidnap children. Look, there’s nobody there.”

  She picked me up by the waist and held my eye up to the peephole so I could see that nobody was in the hall. She walked away, looking back purposefully over her shoulder to indicate that I should not open the door.

  As soon as the back of her slipper was out of sight, I opened the door.

  There, sprawled on her stomach, hands reaching out in front of her, was Jean, our older neighbor who lived directly next door—a view not visible through the scope of the peephole.

  “Please get help!” she said to me in a strained voice.

  “Mommy!” I yelled.

  My mother ran over and immediately called 911.

  As it turned out, Jean was having a stroke—somehow she had managed to push the door open but couldn’t get back up to use the phone.

  When she came home a few days later, she said to me, “If you hadn’t had opened the door, I might not be alive.”

  After that, Jean would bring me little presents, a straw doll from her trip to the Caribbean, a real nutcracker at Christmastime.

  “You’re the little girl who saved my life,” she would say.

  * * *

  I had inherited a singing voice from my dad, who was a musician in his younger, wilder days and even played with Jose Feliciano (the guy who sang “Feliz Navidad”) at a club in Brooklyn. I would sing for pretty much anyone, but it was the one thing I was shy about, so I usually started out hiding behind my mom or a piece of furniture. I sang for the women sitting in front of the building or in the pizza place, I sang for the people eating their lunch in the food court at the South Street Seaport, I sang for the camera, and, most important, I sang for Grandma, who thought—no, knew—I was God’s gift to the universe. She was definitely the gift in mine.

  Grandma Lucy lived two flights up from us in our apartment building. Her home, just like her heart, was a warm place full of unconditional love.

  She was always cooking something and wearing a colorful housedress
. She must have had about twenty of them: some had shiny gray buttons, some had pastel floral prints, some were striped, and some felt hard while others were hardly like fabric at all, baby soft from so many washes with fabric softener. She always wore lipstick and perfume, and her hair was done up in a round, blonde “bulb,” almost like a helmet, on top of her head. She smelled like cotton, hairspray, and that sweet smell that grandmas have that you can never quite put your finger on.

  She was also short, with light gray-blue eyes and what you might call a round potbelly, but slender otherwise. She had a big bunion on each foot, which she hid in high heels and underneath stockings and house slippers.

  She was in her late seventies when I was born, and her arms were the only arms that would make me, a colicky baby, stop crying. She would have to walk through the garage in the middle of the night when my mother, who lived in the next building until I was two, called her in hysterics so that I, and everyone, could finally get some sleep. From the time I could walk on two feet, she diligently watched me put on shows, clapping and making a big fuss. I was her everything, and she was mine.

  I often ran away from home when my parents said or did something I didn’t like, dragging my Minnie Mouse suitcase up two flights of stairs to her apartment, where she was always waiting with open arms.

  Whenever I left Grandma’s apartment, I always said, “I love you,” and sometimes we’d say it ten times back and forth as I waited for the elevator. “Love you!” we’d call out across the hallway, dragging out the syllables.

  “I love you, a bushel and a peck, a bushel and a peck, and a hug around the neck!” we used to sing, and she would scoop me up and never give me one kiss but fifteen or twenty.

  If I knew I was being bad, which I most often did, I would ask, “Grandma, are you mad at me?”

  “No, my dear,” she would say. “Only dogs get mad.”

  Whenever my parents got mad at me, I would call Grandma.

  “Grandma, I’m coming up,” I would say.

  “So she could spoil you,” my mom pointed out.

  Every Friday she would walk to the beauty parlor in Chinatown to get her hair done, and at dances, everyone could count on Lucy and Charlie to be dancing up a storm, dressed to the nines. But though she was fiercely loyal to my grandfather, she was also fiercely independent. She would walk a mile round-trip to Pathmark, the grocery superstore down on Cherry Street near Chinatown, all by herself, with her little red shopping cart in tow.

  One day, after she brought home what turned out to be a carton of “strawberry-less” Turkey Hill strawberry-flavored ice cream, she promptly mailed a letter to the company expressing her disappointment, telling them they should call it “Lucky if You Find a Strawberry.” She was very satisfied with herself when she received a calendar and coupons in the mail good for years to come and posted them proudly on the refrigerator.

  We often cast Grandpa away to the little room where he could watch the horse races in his blue recliner, so Grandma and I could be alone. Or, if we wanted the little room, we sequestered him to the living room. He’d busy himself in the bathroom combing over the few strands of his white hair that still hung around, cleaning crumbs off of the dining room table, and shuffling around in slippers and a T-shirt that had several holes in it, refusing to wear the new ones everyone bought for him. Often, he could be found chasing me around with a comb trying to brush my giant mop of curly hair, or pick lint off my clothing.

  Grandma and Grandpa never seemed to get along—she was usually pushing him out of the way with her arm and saying, “Get away, yeah?” One time, they were yelling so loudly at each other—I must have been four then—that I grabbed the phone, called my mom, and told her she had to come upstairs, quick, because Grandma was going to get a heart attack and die from all of the yelling.

  I preferred when it was just she and I up there, in the warm house that always smelled good, where she praised me and clapped and laughed and watched and tickled and hugged and kissed. We would read the same books over and over—there was this book about an ice cream shop on the beach that only had three flavors—vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry—and the main character, some kid or an animal who could talk, kept asking for all of these alternative flavors, driving the ice cream man crazy. I can still hear her voice as she read it, with so much life, me squealing with delight. I found it so hysterical, for some reason, most likely because that main character was such a pain in the ass.

  Grandma always made oatmeal the best way, with the flakes floating around in the milk among a good amount of sugar. I always complained when my mom made me lumpy old regular oatmeal; no matter how much sugar or milk I added, it wasn’t the same. I didn’t like red sauce, so while my mom and uncle fought over who got to take home the leftovers, I insisted on having plain bowtie pasta with butter.

  Grandma let me sit on the countertop and grate the cheese for the Sicilian pizza she made every Friday. I would kick my little legs against the cabinets below and reach out and hug her around the neck and just babble on and on about whatever it is that goes on in the life of a five-year-old who is too smart for her own good.

  We always picked up our Italian specialties from Di Palo’s, because that was the only real, authentic Italian deli around. They had thinly sliced, velvety prosciutto sans the funny aftertaste, mozzarella, soppressata, and Italian bread that was just the right amount of crusty on the outside and soft on the inside.

  The only time Grandma ever said anything that wasn’t coated in sugar was when I somehow hurt myself while I was “acting out.”

  “God’s punishing you,” she’d say.

  It felt so awkward and uncomfortable inside, I had to refute it immediately.

  “No he’s not!” I would cry, and launch into a Celine Dion song like some sort of panic move. My grandmother loved when I sang Celine Dion songs. Even now, I remember what it felt like inside my stomach to be able to hit those notes with total abandon, something I could never do now.

  She took me to auditions for commercials and for singing parts in something or other, but I didn’t take it too seriously. At the end of one audition, the woman came out and told my grandma, “She was great, but when I asked her what she wanted to be, she said ‘a teacher.’”

  Despite her disappointment at my lack of a showbiz career, I was still the constant light of her life. She read with me, practiced script writing with me, and dealt with the wrath of my frustration when I “didn’t get it.” She took me to Burger King before my ballet lessons, and we made friends with a girl named Isabel who worked behind the counter. Isabel used to sneak me free Hershey dessert pies. My grandma would give me five dollars to give to her, and when she wouldn’t accept it, we made a fun game of trying to get her to take it.

  * * *

  As much as I didn’t want to share my father with anyone, that went double for mom. My mother, by then, was no longer touchy-feely, fussy, or very affectionate at all. I did have one thing left, though: her attention.

  Whenever we walked to the 2/3 train in the morning to head to kindergarten at the Early Childhood Center on Greenwich Street (which only went up to second grade then) I’d think, we better not run into the fuzzy-haired man. We’d pass shiny aluminum carts that left just enough space for someone standing inside to sell bagels, coffee, and pastries—“don’t eat those, they’re exposed all day,” my mom would warn. We were always rushing, because I had spent twenty minutes jumping on the couch and tossing around my wardrobe options.

  More often than not, on the subway platform, right at the bottom of the stairs, we did indeed run into the fuzzy-haired man, a guy who took his two sons to school at P.S. 234. He wore black glasses with thick frames, had wild, curl gray hair, and sometimes wore a black beret.

  Here’s why I hated the fuzzy-haired man, with his stupid conversation about schools and the weather: he would impose on my time with mom, and our train ride together.

  “I’m going to tell Daddy,” I would threaten, as if she were having se
x with him right there in front of me.

  We’d exit the train at Chambers and bustle down Duane Street, where the wind was so strong it almost blew me away.

  When I got to kindergarten, there was more crying and clinging and consoling. By then, my mother had practically become like Houdini, having mastered the art of making her escape and quickly slipping away in a cloud of Jean Paul Gaultier perfume. After I was finished crying, I would meet with my reading buddy named Telly, who, to me, seemed the size of Chris Farley but was probably just a chubby second-grader at the time. We would fly through any number of picture books, and I’d loudly declare that we had to “pick up the harder books from the other classrooms,” because I was so smart. Then, I’d tickle him.

  Each week, we took the time to write and illustrate a page about one of our classmates. My book looked like this:

  Helaina likes to hide in the bathroom during clean up time.

  Helaina tries to kiss Lukas but Lukas doesn’t like it.

  Helaina likes to color her lips in magic marker and pretend its lipstick.

  In my defense, those magic markers, the ones with the fat caps that smelled like Oranges or Chocolate, were begging for a run-in with my mouth. After my lipstick was in place, I would stand two-feet tall in a flower dress and sneakers that were filled with goo that changed into different colors when you pressed down—and I’d point to a boy.

  “You’re my boyfriend!” I would declare confidently, sidling up to sit on his lap as he tried to build a Lego-something-or-other on the desk.