After 9/11

by Helaina Hovitz

  I still remember the smell of the art room, the scent of dried paint and those brown paper towels you pulled out of the metal dispenser. It’s a smell that years later, when I returned to the school to work as an after-school counselor in college, would bring me back to a time when I was completely enveloped in that world. The shimmer of sequins on the floor, the faded magic marker lines on the table—it was an all-consuming place that held great potential for a creative genius. Everyone else’s drawings were good, and took them a long time, while I made ten drawings that were hastily scribbled, shouting “done!” each time.

  At recess, I’d wander from group to group, always disinterested. I only wanted to be with the adults, and really, I only wanted to be with Grandma. This school stuff was all just a ridiculous placeholder. I had to take the school bus home even though Daddy easily could have picked me up, and I hated the bus. It was hot and loud, and we had to make all these stops before going home, which was so close. Sometimes people’s parents weren’t there and you had to wait extra, and sometimes I was hungry, or had a headache, and really needed to make it home in time to watch my shows.

  Once in a while, Shane came over after school to play circus or Power Rangers, and, on one occasion, he broke my brand-new Skip-It. For some reason, I didn’t cry. I just tied him to a chair and then tried to ride him like a pony. In hindsight, I guess it looked like some sort of weird dominatrix scene, which I’m sure explained the look on his grandfather’s face when he came to pick him up. I did better with Shane than I did with most of the girls who were around, most likely because he would listen to whatever I said and did whatever I wanted. He was happy to watch Zoobilee Zoo, a show I was obsessed with, featuring a bunch of actors dressed as animal versions of themselves, singing their way through life’s most complicated dilemmas.

  The actor Ben Vereen played Mayor Ben, a tiger who existed to “lend a helping hand,” but my favorite character was the pink musical kangaroo named Whazzat, who was kind of the coquette of the group. A close second was the thespian fox named Bravo who was always calling out, “Attention, please!” or “Places, everybody!” and clapping his paws together. Mayor Ben would explain things like how “movies weren’t real, they’re just pictures with stories.” When the Zoo crew was about to embark on their own movie project, he broke into a song that went, “Did you make a mistake? Did you do something really dumb?” took a thirty-second choreographed solo dance break, and resumed by prancing around and crying, “People make mistakes!” He purred with joy, like the realization that people were fallible was the most exciting news he’d ever heard.

  I lived by the motto, “play it again,” when it came to tapes like the ones Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen made. Their first video opened with them explaining how they’re twins but that there was an easy way to tell them apart, because one of them was the cute one. They proceeded to launch into one a series of many tone-deaf songs, like “I Am the Cute One” followed by “Someday, I’d Like to be President,” where they wreaked havoc on the town with a Bill Clinton look-alike. In other videos, the trench coat–clad twins solved mysteries as “super duper snoopers,” and I watched them solve the same mystery over and over. I listened to the soundtrack to The Lion King on a loop. I felt deeply moved by songs like “Can You Feel the Love Tonight,” relating, at age six, to the love in that song and counting down the days until I could feel it about someone.

  * * *

  My favorite place to sleep was at Aunt Fran’s house.

  Aunt Fran coached me, from a young age, to know that her neighborhood was “far more glamorous” than where we lived downtown. Her building had a doorman and carpeted hallways and pretty elevators. The sidewalks were cleaner, wider, and there was less garbage scattered around them. Her stove didn’t work, which didn’t matter because she never cooked anything, and my uncle’s side of the bed, where I’d cuddle up to her to watch movies, always smelled like cigarettes. Aunt Fran had no kids of her own, so she’d take me out to lunch at places like Serendipity, and I always managed to come home with some new stuff, a book or a toy or a headband. At night, she would put all kinds of creams and powders on me after my bath, and I felt like a princess. I slept in her bed and she cuddled with me, holding me tight like a little spoon and a big spoon, until I fell asleep.

  Aunt Fran met Uncle John at my parents’ wedding at the Vista Hotel, right in the World Trade Center.

  “You’re going to hate him,” my mom told my aunt about John, my dad’s best friend, a veteran who had been deployed everywhere but Vietnam during the Vietnam War.

  “You’re going to hate her,” my dad told John about Fran, my mother’s maid of honor.

  My parents were right—they kind of hated each other, but they also must have really loved each other, because they stayed together. After being engaged for fourteen years, they ended up getting married, without any of us there, at an Elvis chapel in Las Vegas.

  I was ten at the time, and when I came home from school and saw how upset my grandmother was, I was furious.

  “They eloped,” she said sadly.

  How dare they make Grandma sad, I thought.

  “It’s okay,” I said to Grandma, putting my head on her shoulder. “You’ll be at my wedding!”

  Uncle John still loves to talk about the time we spent in the reclining chair in the small bedroom of my grandmother’s apartment when I was a toddler. I’d sit on his lap while he watched football. I was mostly mesmerized by the moving colors, raising my hands in the air and shouting, “Touchdown!” whenever he grabbed my wrists, even though I had no idea what was happening.

  He had a slim build and a tiny beer belly, lots of freckles, blue eyes, and pale skin. Like my father, he still has a full head of hair, even though he’s pushing his seventh decade. It was always a surprise whether or not he’d have his mustache at the next get-together, and I could always count on him to fly me around the living room or the bar where he worked, his arm holding my tiny body up between my legs, his hand on my chest to prop me up. That flight never lasted long enough.

  He loves to tell the story of how, when I was baptized, the church was about ninety-five degrees, and I was crying, and he had a broken rib from something or other, and he held me the entire time because I was quiet in his arms. His second favorite memory is of the time he and my parents went to Belmont Race Track, and my “mom and aunt were supposed to be watching me,” and I started running downhill on a gravel ramp.

  “If it wasn’t for me grabbing the collar of your jumper and yanking you up just in time, you might look like a different person today, young lady,” he says. “Your face was less than an inch from the floor, and you were going in for a nose dive.”

  Later, when I asked him questions about his time in the Army for a school paper, my uncle told me about the time he was driving an eighteen-wheeler truck on the Autobahn highway in Germany. A man in a smaller car next to him looked up at him, smiled, and drove right underneath him, using the truck to kill himself. He told me, also, about the time that he held his friend in his arms while he burned to death after a truck explosion.

  On one occasion, we were walking down East Sixty-Fifth Street after dinner at John’s Pizzeria (no relation) when a Chinese delivery person on a bike whizzed passed us down the sidewalk.

  My uncle said, “Excuse me,” and started to go down the sidewalk after him.

  “John, not now, not in front of the baby,” my aunt called out after him, even though I must have been eight years old.

  He stopped, turned around, and came back with an angry look on his face.

  “You’re supposed to ride that in the street, asshole,” he yelled back behind him. Then, just a bit more quietly, “I can’t stand those fucking gooks.”

  After second grade, I transferred to an elementary school called P.S. 116 on Thirty-Third Street that had a gifted and talented program, and I referred to the other classes, the regular ones, as “the stupid classes.” The “popular girls” wanted nothing to do with me in third g
rade, and I preferred to spend my time writing stories on our personal computer by using a story-building program with random stamp graphics. “Sexy Teenage Girls” and “A Singing Pizza” were among my titles, as well as “A Face in the Fudge,” which won an honorable mention in a Reading Rainbow story contest. More than kids my own age, I was interested in my friend’s baby siblings, whom I wanted to play with, take care of, and throw myself on the floor to make laugh.

  I hated my fourth grade class, because this group of girls bullied me, making fun of my “white girl” attributes, criticizing everything I said or did. Worse still, I had contracted mononucleosis without knowing it until it was over. During those months where I had all of the symptoms and no actual diagnosis, I spent a lot of time in the nurse’s office with crippling headaches, asking her to call my dad and begging everyone to just believe me, because something was really wrong. It wasn’t until a blood test turned up the results months later that we even found out.

  My saving grace that year was joining the school newspaper, writing articles about the condition of the girls’ bathroom, our recent field trip, and a famous Judge named Leslie Crocker Snyder, who had come to speak to our class.

  In fifth grade, I made a friend who had arthritis and got to take the elevator with her after lunch instead of the stairs with everyone else, and I won a research award at graduation for a feature article I wrote called “Hair Care You Can Bare,” in which I interviewed two experts and did a ton of investigative reporting about egg yolk scalp treatments and how to detangle knots.

  I had an on again, off again boyfriend named Matt, who I married, showed my boobs to, divorced, and remarried over a three-year period.

  Back in my pink and white room, I would lie chest-down on the pink carpeting and wait for my favorite songs to come on the radio, pressing record as soon as the radio DJ stopped talking so I could capture the song on my cassette tape. Sometimes, I only got half the song, and often, I ended up with a tape full of song parts, not necessarily whole songs—some songs were on there twice. You had to be diligent about having that finger on the record button, or you missed out.

  * * *

  I liked Downtown Day Camp much more than I liked school.

  I went there every summer from 1993 to 2001. The idea of sleepaway camp was out of the question for obvious reasons, and the camp, held in the P.S. 234 school building between Warren and Chambers Street, was a very close ride, or walk, from home.

  In my first year, I “claimed” the coolest looking female counselor for my own. Sarah had what I would describe to my mom as a princess-face, long, curly blonde hair, and a body I knew even at age five was smokin’ hot.

  “She’s sooooo sexy,” I cooed.

  When she offered to take me rollerblading, I almost plotzed.

  She was going to take me for milkshakes at Burger King, and then we were going to skate around the complex like great pals.

  When the big day came, I put on my pink kneepads, elbow pads, helmet, and skates, and parked myself right at the table, staring at the front door. It was 5:50, and she said she would come at six.

  “Mommy, what time is it?” I asked.

  “It’s 5:58,” she said.

  “Mommy, what time is it?”

  “It’s 5:59.”

  “Mommy, what time is it?”

  “It’s six o’clock.”

  A few more minutes passed, and I started to worry.

  “Maybe she was just saying she was going to come to be nice, honey. Or maybe she said she thought it would be fun, but she didn’t mean she was coming,” my mom said.

  “No way,” I said, secretly afraid that she wasn’t coming, but feeling so sure she would show up, because she promised.

  After however many more minutes passed, there was a ring at the doorbell, and I practically tripped over myself to get to the door.

  It was her!

  “Ok byeeeee!” I called behind me as I wheeled down the hallway, holding the wall as subtly and nonchalantly as possible. Oh, this wall? Just making sure the internal beams are aligned properly.

  She took me to the Burger King downstairs and got me the large vanilla milkshake, a size I had never held before in my life. Then, we bladed around in circles for an hour on this patch of concrete by the community room.

  I don’t remember what we talked about, but I know she was paying attention to me the entire time, saying “Wow!” whenever I did something on my skates that I considered to be a trick, and laughing at all of my jokes. This was my idea of heaven on earth.

  When we got back home—me all flustered and puffing with delirious happiness, clunking down the hallway and dragging my Velcro skates behind me—my parents tried to hand her a $20, for her time and for the milkshakes, but she wouldn’t accept it.

  Wow, I thought. She just likes spending time with me!

  As I got older, summers were full of sleepovers in which my dad was delegated to the couch, sitting with the camcorder in one hand as Gina and I performed pop standards of the time, like Monica and Brandy’s “The Boy Is Mine,” NSYNC’s “Bye Bye Bye,” Britney Spears’s “Baby One More Time,” and anything that the Spice Girls ever recorded. Outside of those sleepovers at my house, I couldn’t “do” most sleepovers because I was afraid of the dark and didn’t want to risk the off chance that there would actually be sleeping involved.

  Gina and I made trouble at camp every year, along with Liana, a girl we accepted into our duo in the summer of 1997. We never wanted to stay with our group, so we left the room to go put on performances for other counselors who were taking their breaks, eating french fries, and looking at their beepers. We amused ourselves by dangling counselors’ MetroCards out the window and taking our makeup and nail polish to the field during outdoor time and charging five cents for makeovers. When the counselors got wise to our plan and said we had to give the shiny nickels back, we ran to the soda machine in the snack room and shoved them in there before they could stop us, listening to the delicious clank of a Fresca landing at the bottom.

  Our little group of Southbridge Towers campers got chauffeured directly to and from camp in a silver van known as Van 4, which they’d call out at the end of the day after the first three yellow buses headed out. I loved that van. It was like a tropical vacation from the stinky school bus I had to take during the school year, the one that made a trillion stops around the city before just getting across town to Fulton Street.

  Sometimes, the cute van driver, whoever he was that year, would let me sit up front, control the radio (why was there so much talking in the morning?), or kiss him on the cheek.

  As much as I enjoyed imprinting on a male counselor every year, it was the girl counselors, like Sarah, that I was really crazy about. I identified so strongly with them because I’d always felt like a teenager trapped in a tiny body, in a tiny life. I may have lived for shows like Rugrats and Gullah Gullah Island and had way too many Beanie Babies, but while that part of me embraced being a kid, I always wanted to be older. One day at a barbecue with my aunt’s drinking, smoking New Jersey friends, I declared, “I want to be an adult.”

  A roar of, “Oh honey, no you don’t!” rose up from the cloud of cigarette smoke and beer breath, and I remember thinking then, even at that young age of six, that they were wrong—I knew exactly what I was saying. I knew that there was responsibility that came with being an adult, and I wanted it. I wanted all of it. Still, I slept in my parents’ bed, waking up every morning to the radio alarm, which played freestyle dance music on KTU. All the while, I knew that being an adult would be better than being a kid, because you had more control over what you got to do.

  * * *

  I was only half Catholic, but I had received my First Holy Communion at age seven. I went to Sunday School at St. Andrew’s Church, a ten-minute walk from home, if you were walking at a leisurely pace. My dad often pointed out that since my mother and grandmother never went to church, he didn’t necessarily understand why I had to go.

  But every Sun
day at 10:00 a.m., I met up with Gina and a couple of other friends, took a lesson in a small group, and sat through Mass, all the while hoping I would get to spend time with Gina afterward, that her parents weren’t bringing her somewhere else to do something else. I looked forward to seeing her every week, especially after we began going to separate schools after second grade. I loved the Church Christmas party and the Secret Santa, I loved Father Jim, who was a “cool” priest, and I loved putting a dollar in the collection basket as I pondered some of the things I was learning.

  Does the wine really turn to blood? The fish, the bread, was it true? Why doesn’t he do this now? Why doesn’t God send people to do this right now and feed hungry families?

  My dad told me that I didn’t need to go to church to talk to God, and he was the only one who didn’t kneel when he attended services, which I found embarrassing. But when I learned that Jesus was Jewish, it softened the blow.

  When I got my first white plastic rosary, I “said it” on the 2/3 train platform on my way to Macy’s with my mom. I frantically tried to get through it before the train got there, afraid something bad would happen to me on the way if I didn’t. It was exhausting, but I believed that I just needed to get to the cross, and I would be ok. At night, I prayed the same way, like if I didn’t, I would be personally responsible for the suffering of the neglected and abused animals, hungry children, and something bad happening to Grandma.

  * * *

  One day when I was ten, my dad and I were walking down John Street when we passed a sheet over a giant lump, surrounded by yellow caution tape.

  “Daddy, what is that?” I asked.

  “A jumper,” he said.

  “What’s a jumper?”

  “He killed himself.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, honey.”

  He went on to explain that if you try to commit suicide and it doesn’t work, they take you to jail.

  “What! Why?”

  “Suicide is illegal because you’re taking a member away from society, and the government also sees that as taking tax-paying money away from them.”