After 9/11

by Helaina Hovitz

  “You mustn’t say that,” she said, but really, I knew she loved to hear it.

  Finally, only after I had finished, she sat down and had just a tiny bit. We watched TV, seated side by side, as close as we could get. I was always dragging my chair closer to hers, even when it couldn’t possibly be any closer. The Golden Girls was on, and we laughed out loud and commented on everything, especially when Sophia, the old lady, said something funny. “She is too much,” Grandma said, shaking her head.

  She peeled an apple from the yellow bowl of fruit she left out, and we ate apple slices, and then, we got to have ice cream. We sometimes used that yellow bowl to hold green beans in after carefully snapping off the ends and placing them in the red plastic grocery bag. It was a simple task, of course, but I would constantly check in on my handiwork when we did it, because I wanted to see her smile and go, “Yes, my little angel, just like that.”

  My grandpa finally emerged from the bedroom, wearing his signature white T-shirt—no matter how many shirts my mother or my aunt bought him, he would only where those same, smelly ones with the holes in them—and began picking up pieces of lint off of the carpet. My grandma looked over at him and did a double take, saying, in harsher tones than I was used to hearing, “Charlie, you’re soiling yourself!” He didn’t say anything, just continued picking up lint.

  She told him to get into the bathroom and take his pants off, and in the meantime, filled a white bucket with soap and water and got down on her hands and knees to clean the carpet while he continued to roam around.

  When Grandpa started to get lost and fall down, I started going upstairs more often. For the time being, I took it as my queue to go.

  I went downstairs, feeling a bit sad and a bit startled, and got started on my homework. My dad had always told me to get it over with the first chance I got, so I didn’t have to think about it over the weekend. I didn’t mind homework, though, because taking notes out of a textbook and answering questions gave me something to concentrate on.

  I watched an episode of Degrassi before starting the ritual of tossing and turning that had become more manic each night, until at some point, somehow, I drifted off after screaming with frustration into my pillow.

  My mother continued to be my best—and practically only—friend, even though our sharp tongues and opposing views on me and my behavior continued to drive a wedge between us.

  We navigated around it, shopping, going out for dinner as a family, alternating between snippy comments and laughter.

  I still called Gina and we spoke on the phone, but she lived in Jersey and was never able to hang out after school and was rarely around on weekends, for some reason. Rose was becoming less responsive to me as well, and I had no desire to hang out with Charles or Nadine anymore. Nadine had found her own group of friends at Baruch College Campus High School, where the three of us had ended up together, and it was clear that I was not welcome among them.

  The next day, Sunday, the Sephora on Broadway was especially crowded. They had taken away the little containers left out to take samples with, most likely because people like Rose and I had abused the privilege, scooping out eye shadow and squeezing out ten tubes of lip gloss while ducking behind the shiny black panels like giggly criminals.

  As I tried to look for the eyeliner I was going for, someone bumped into me, sending a warm surge of adrenaline coursing through me. Someone else did it again, and suddenly, I was grinding my teeth.

  By the time I met my mom at the end of the long line to the register, every minute felt excruciating, not just tedious. The longer I waited, the more worked up I got, watching every move that the cashiers made. Standing still was suddenly intolerable. Too close. Everyone is too close.

  I don’t know where this urgency came from—I wasn’t in a hurry to go back home and sit in my room and stew, think about how it was Sunday night, the worst, how I’d have to endure another week where the clock hands almost moved backward—but it felt like I had to get out of Sephora as fast as possible. I sighed loudly, and the woman on line in front of me turned around and said, “Excuse me, are you having a bad day?”

  Not in a nasty way, but in a way that was almost sincere.

  “No,” I sneered back.

  A battle suddenly struck up inside me: drop the stuff and run away, flight, or, tell her to go fuck herself and get into an altercation, fight.

  My mom gave me a warning look, tightening her jaw.

  “You’re becoming such an embarrassment,” she whispered. “I don’t want to go anywhere with you anymore.”

  We sat on the 6 train at Bleecker Street waiting for the doors to close, but they didn’t. With every growing second, my heart beat faster. My breath quickened and all of my hairs stood on end.

  Something’s wrong. Something bad is happening. We’re not moving like we’re supposed to. We’re going to die.

  “Mom, we have to go,” I said quickly.

  She didn’t look up from her magazine.

  “Mom, we have to go,” I said louder, standing up.

  “Helaina,” she said, annoyed. “Sit down, it’s fine.”

  Two NYPD cops in police vests walked by, talking into their hand radios, a sight that knocked all the wind out of me. I started to tremble, feeling it in my shoulders and in the bowels of my stomach, everything tightening, my neck suddenly feeling tingly and naked, the train car suddenly losing all of its air.

  “Mom!” I shouted. A few of the bored passengers who had been reading newspapers or sleeping looked up at me.

  We’re doomed, we’re going to die if we stay here. We’re going to die if we don’t run, said the invisible little girl who lived in my brain. She had parked herself right in the center of my frontal cortex, sending down serpent-like tentacles of panic through the rest of my body.

  “Let’s go!” I said. “We have to get out and take a cab!”

  My mother ignored me.

  “What are we going to do?” I asked, my eyes darting from her to the platform, sticking my head out of the car to try to see what was happening. “How do we know what’s going on?”

  I was talking quickly, getting up, sitting down.

  “I’m leaving! I’m going!” I said, my voice cracking.

  Of course, I wasn’t going to go. I was too terrified of separating from her.

  “You’re annoying me now,” she said shrilly. “Sit down!”

  I sat down, legs shaking, for another three eternal minutes before the train doors closed. The train chugged down past Spring Street, past Canal Street, and finally, down to the Brooklyn Bridge station, which was deserted and quiet.

  Monday morning, I sat on the couch, forcing a granola bar down my throat as I watched the MTV music video countdown. I switched the channel to the news during a commercial … then another station, and another, and all seemed to say the same thing.

  “How will they retaliate to Saddam Hussein’s capture?”

  Oh my God. They’re going to get us back.

  Or are they?

  President Bush said, “A dark and painful era is over. A hopeful day has arrived.”

  Is this good?

  Is this bad?

  I couldn’t keep up.

  I flipped back to MTV, and as I watched the video for Outkast’s “Hey Ya,” I wondered, for the first time, if I should just stay home and crawl back under the covers instead of walking out the door at 8:00 a.m. My mom was inside her bedroom getting ready, spritzing on perfume and making last-minute decisions about accessories. The dish that held her breakfast, half a bran muffin with butter, and the knife, thick with butter and crumbs, was still on the table.

  I sat down and finished it, knowing she wouldn’t, looking down at the open newspaper; more headlines about the threat of suicide bombers in department stores on Christmas. I pictured them all pressing down on their red trigger buttons, setting themselves off in a perfectly orchestrated line, like the Radio City Rockettes.

  On the days I didn’t flip through the paper myself,
my mom made sure to tell me the headlines, whether it was about a rapist or a homeless person throwing a brick at someone’s head.

  “Be careful,” she’d say, as if there was some way to actually be careful enough to prevent someone from attacking me.

  I stomped into my shoes, yanked my jacket off of a hanger, and forced myself out the door, despite the fact that my body felt was heavy and bruised, like I had run the marathon and went nowhere at all.

  Before the first day of school four months earlier, I had specifically told my orthodontist that my braces had to come off. No more little kid stuff. I had to be ready for that magical time where I would finally flirt with mature boys and belong to clubs like drama and newspaper. I would finally be a real teenager, no more sitting on the floor in a circle like in middle school. I was going to be out of the neighborhood for at least part of the day, a physical distance that I hoped would bring some relief. Out of sight, out of mind. I was going to meet new people and make great girlfriends and hang out on the weekends and we were all going to study together in the library and run bake sales, and it would be just like in the movies.

  I was going to, but I couldn’t, because none of those opportunities were there.

  Well, except for the newspaper.

  As I walked to the 6 train, everything around me was smoking: rusty metal grates where men chopped meat and then flung it to the side of the grill, people puffing on cigarettes and joints and cigars, smoking street carts filled with nuts that smelled like heaven but tasted like badly burnt candy. Fog billowed up from potholes and long orange construction pillars, and hot, bitter exhaust emanated from the tailpipes of cars. I was caught up in every specific movement of people around me, of the wind, of cars stopping and starting, the roar of plane engines overhead, and the booming noise of trucks going over speed bumps.

  The most neutral of looks from fellow subway riders were ominous, and the budding journalist in me was skeptical of everything.

  What are they looking at?

  What are they saying?

  What’s in that backpack?

  When I arrived at the school building on 23rd and Lexington Avenue, there was a crowd waiting for the elevator, as usual. A few minutes passed before we could all cram inside to get to our classes. The elevator slowed at the tenth floor, and when the doors didn’t open immediately, my body surged with adrenaline, falling while standing still. It was like one of my feet was on the gas, the other, on the brake, sputtering and sputtering and going nowhere.

  Eventually, the elevator doors opened and spewed us out, a shuffling procession of clunking backpacks and squeaking sneakers. I tried to walk with the other kids, my throat dry as I attempted to blend in and look as bored as everyone else did. My first class was Global Studies with Mr. Schwartz, my favorite teacher. As he talked about Africa’s geography, I zoned out, picturing things that pushed their way in with more force whenever I tried to shut the door. Someone on the floor above us moved a piece of furniture, and I flinched.

  How strong could a building be, really, to take all of that weight and wear and tear every day without eventually crumbling down?

  I felt like I knew something everyone else didn’t, and I wasn’t being paranoid because I knew firsthand how realistic any sort of threat was.

  I saw myself trapped under desks and choking on sawdust, the last to be rescued if I was rescued at all, but just kept scribbling with my pen, taking notes on whatever he was saying about Somalia, which, on a quiz later that week, I would remember incorrectly as “Jumalia” (perhaps a combination of Jordan and Somalia, but in any case, not a real place). Later, in biology class, I took notes on the different stages of cell meiosis and mitosis at a hundred miles an hour, my pencil breaking, then breaking again. There was this weird pressure I couldn’t figure out that made my thoughts quicken, made me unable to focus on actually taking in what I was copying down.

  “Any questions?” the teacher asked.

  I raised my hand and formulated one. Since participation was a big part of our grade, I always participated, and that made the other girls suck their teeth, roll their eyes, and hate me even more. I don’t know why they didn’t like me in the first place; maybe it was because I wore a short skirt on one of the coldest days of the year, or maybe it was just this vibe I gave off, like they could sense how I felt inside. Maybe it was just because someone had to be “that girl” that nobody liked.

  Whatever it was, usually, everyone’s classes ran over, so I had to wait awkwardly in front of classrooms, hoping to God that someone didn’t come up and ask me a weird question with a smirk, then walk away laughing, relaying the whole thing to someone else. Girls turned briefly to look at each other and whisper in that cruel, obvious way teenage girls do, which made me hope for things like a long line at the cafeteria’s vending machine, giving me something to do that didn’t require socialization.

  That day, like most days, was bleak and painfully lonely.

  Only a few more days until Christmas break, I told myself.

  At lunchtime, we were given a ridiculous twenty-two minutes to go out onto Twenty-Third Street buy food, come back, and eat it, a time constraint that made the entire ordeal a nail-biting nightmare.

  With two minutes left to go before class and barely digesting the sandwich I’d scarfed down, I waited for an Asian girl named Sisi—a large majority of students at Baruch were Asian—to finish shuffling through “our locker.”

  Because of limited space, everyone had to share lockers. This created all sorts of anxiety, whether it was the prospect of someone’s iced tea spilling everywhere because they didn’t screw it on tightly enough, or your locker buddy giving someone else the combination.

  Charles was the only kid who never used a locker, because he was unwilling to risk having to leave all of his stuff in case of an emergency.

  Therefore, everyone wanted to be his “locker partner,” but not everyone wanted to be his friend. There were a few people who were friendly toward him, but he was hesitant about how “close to let them get,” as he put it.

  Charles was still obsessed with current events and politics, overly concerned with the future and researching conspiracy theories. He was more interested in being the school’s “town crier” when it came to global, breaking news than he was in discussing everyone’s weekend plans.

  For the most part, New York City public school students are anti-war; they demonstrate, petition, write papers, write letters, enter, guns blazing, into heated lunchroom discussions. At fourteen, Charles suddenly became pro-Iraq war, professing assertions like “We should take over the world and blow up all our enemies.” His new stance was more of a coping mechanism than an actual “thirst for revenge,” but as far as the school bullies that inevitably found him, Charles was now biting back. If someone shouted something cruel at him, he’d yell back louder. If they touched him, he’d shove them back harder.

  He didn’t start any confrontations, but he reacted to them. While many students found themselves, especially with the new outlet of the Internet, bullied to the point of wanting to take their own life, Charles never considered it. He was too afraid of death to think about suicide, and preferred instead to think about the future. He just bounced from group to group in the lunchroom but rarely hung out with anyone after school, and when he did, it was with Sarah and other kids from the neighborhood, because they understood each other in a way other people couldn’t.

  At the end of the day, I was handed a report card full of scores in the 90s and letter grades in some variation of the letter A in my backpack, the greatest gift I could give Grandma. Armed with this report card, it was like I had a gold bar in my pocket.

  Trying desperately to go through the motions, I decided to join a few kids I had become friendly with, and we walked to Union Square Park, a mixed bag of crackheads and wayward businessmen. We smoked cigarettes and they took well-concealed swigs from a rotating bottle of Peach Schnapps as we splayed out on the sprawling steps that opened up onto Fourth Av
enue, watching the skateboarders fall off of their boards. Some rally was under way, or maybe it was a protest, and we took whatever pamphlets were handed out to us.

  I was actually afraid to drink, at that point, and figured it wouldn’t matter anyway.

  No matter how many people I was around, I felt disconnected from all of them, like they were all made up of a different substance than I was. This group, in particular, made me nervous. They drank in the bathroom during school, and one of them talked back to the teachers, and I didn’t want to get into trouble with them, or do illegal things, or skip class, or be late from lunch. I think they knew that I wasn’t quite one of them, but they were all I had, and they were the only ones who didn’t seem to think anything was wrong with me. They even brought me to the occasional party, where I would stand, afraid, jumpy, like a nervous dog during a fireworks display until I couldn’t take it anymore and found some reason to leave.

  Devin, also, seemed to still have a soft spot for me. That soft spot was in his loft bed, in the walkup apartment he shared with his mom on an infamous strip of West Eighth Street. The building, with its white columns and marked-up door, was tucked away between a hat store, a sneaker store, and an Army/Navy shop with studded belts hanging in the window. Across the street was a sex fetish shop, a dumpling restaurant, and some other confusing place whose only window display was a mannequin wearing a rainbow afro wig, red feather boa, and nipple tassels. Sets of steps leading down to cellar basements were scattered along the sidewalk and left wide open, beckoning anyone who wasn’t looking down to fall in and break their neck.

  We had settled into a routine: smoking weed, which I discovered I found kind of relaxing, making out, and scooping sloppy handfuls of peanut butter and chocolate syrup out of the jar while watching Dora the Explorer or one of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies. Alone in his room, listening to the dull roar of heavy metal songs crackling through the speakers of his computer, I was able to blur myself into a prickly delusion that everything was going to be okay. We “touched” each other, but never more than that. Even underneath his sheets, inside that dank pot cloud, there was something heavy lingering over me, screaming that the worst was yet to come—and I was somehow smart enough to know that having sex wasn’t going to push that feeling any further away.