After 9/11

by Helaina Hovitz

  “Will you be ok?” I asked, still holding her hand.

  “Of course,” she said. “I’ll be home soon, that’s what matters.”

  But she wouldn’t. She would be transferred to the nursing home, alongside my grandfather, where she had to stay for in-patient rehab to try and walk again. Sometimes, we’d wheel my grandfather into the room to be with her and have them hold hands. I’d bring her flowers, or cookies, and the doctors said, “She should be home in six months.”

  What if something happens?

  How do we transport her with the wheelchair?

  How do they transport all of the other patients?

  Will vehicles be allowed to leave the city?

  Will we be strong enough to carry her?

  What about her medications?

  What about our medications?

  What if my dad has a heart attack?

  Grandma, strong, stubborn, and determined, came home in six weeks.

  She also began to do less.

  She couldn’t cook.

  She had to use the cane.

  She had to use the walker.

  She fell again.

  She was riding the elevators up and down.

  She was wandering in the hallway.

  “I don’t know what’s happening to me,” she said. “I wish I would just die.”

  Report Card Comment, January 26, 2007

  Advanced Science: A: Helaina was a joy to have in class. She is a fantastic student. Her project and presentation on eating disorders was fantastic and a big hit with many of the outside judges. She turned in quality work according to scheduled deadlines and turned in several rewrites leading to a well-constructed and nearly perfect science project.

  English: A: Helaina did stellar work this quarter her papers were very well written and her homework was excellent as well. She sets a wonderful example for the class in her attention to her work and her focus during discussions.

  Creative Writing: A+: Helaina’s enthusiasm for writing has gotten stronger, as has her writing. She’s especially good at expressing deep emotions, especially anger, which is difficult to do. I’ve really enjoyed having Helaina in my class these last few semesters. Her hard work and diligence are greatly appreciated.

  I knew that something was very wrong with Aaron, but I was also always unhappy. How could it be everyone else and not me?

  The truth was, something was very wrong with both of us.

  When his hand slipped down to the back of my neck to pinch it, I had to gasp and try not to cry out in the middle of the sidewalk. Nobody else could tell what he was doing. He’d storm off, I’d run down the street after him, and he’d ignore me after I caught up. I didn’t care what I looked like, on Sixth Avenue, on Eighth Avenue, running after someone who was literally running up and down subway steps to get away from me. If you leave me here, I’ll die.

  One night I went shot for shot with Aaron’s friend, not realizing that Tequila is very different from Bacardi Smirnoff Ice. Aaron let me go home on the 6 train from Bleecker to Brooklyn Bridge alone. I vaguely remember falling in the street before clamoring through my bedroom door with my pants around my ankles.

  “Vin hurt me,” I kept saying, sticking my finger down my throat, making myself throw up over and over, as my parents helplessly watched, not quite knowing what to do. Frankly, I’m pretty sure there’s not much you can do with a half naked teenager in this state.

  The next day I had such a hangover I could hardly believe that there wasn’t another word for it. I still, to this day, will never forget the fierce combination of migraine and nausea that spread through my entire body like wildfire, which stayed for twelve hours, retching, shaking, my head pulsing. Never again, I vowed. For the most part, I did stay away from drinking to get drunk, for a while. I was addicted to something, someone, who was worse for me, and I had so little self-worth that I didn’t have the ability to “choose” anything that was good for me.

  Prom was a week away, and Jordan and I had spent months planning it and coordinating it ourselves.

  We told the school most of us didn’t want to do “prom on the boat” again, and asked if we could have it at a hotel. They said no, they were doing the boat. So, Jordan and I found a caterer, a DJ (the brother of a very famous actress who was in a movie about New York kids in her early career), and a loft space to use on Thirty-Fifth Street and Eighth Avenue.

  Once every kid had bought a ticket to our prom, the school said they’d like to send chaperones. “Nope, sorry,” Jordan said. Everybody, except for Hailey came.

  A girl who’s father owned a chain of restaurants brought handles and handles of vodka, we had too much food, people got drunk and mostly hung out and smoked weed in the staircase. The room, and the dance floor, was mostly empty at any given time. It pretty much looked like any other New York City high school party. One of Aaron’s friend worked “security,” dressed up in a suit and basically just checked everyone’s name off of a list. He was also in charge of putting a junior who drank too much and threw up in the sink into a cab. I didn’t enjoy myself even for a second, but then, I didn’t enjoy anything anymore.

  I received a number of awards at graduation, as I had the year before, with my Uncle John yelling “Wow!”, and as the teacher read off the long list of classes I’d excelled at, Aunt Fran, Grandma, and my parents clapping loudly. I made a well-written and recited speech that got more whoops and hollers, looking up at the audience and looking down at perfectly timed intervals. A few other kids made lame, three-line “thank you” speeches that they read off of crumpled piece of paper.

  Instead of sitting with my family to snack and relax, I spent the entire reception chasing people down to sign my yearbook or take pictures, not realizing until I got home that while everyone else’s names were written perfectly under their picture, mine had a “typo.” Under my picture, it read, Helaina HOvitz in black and white. I was on a lot of committees, so I was in a lot of pictures: literary journal, yearbook, newspaper, and, upon further inspection, it seemed that in each of my pictures, my eyes had been darkened so that it looked like I had two black eyes.

  Hailey, I thought. No, I knew.

  On the way home, I sat in the car between Aunt Fran and Grandma.

  “Fran was upset because you ignored her,” she said. “I wonder how Fran got home.”

  We had a dinner that felt celebratory but depressing, as everything I did that was supposed to feel celebratory felt depressing. A few days later, on June 3, four men were arrested after it was discovered that they were going to try and bomb the fuel line at John F. Kennedy Airport.

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER TEN

  A heightened awareness of potential threat might make someone prone to fighting, as she would be looking everywhere for signs that someone might be about to attack her again, causing her to overreact to the smallest potential signals.

  In one specific case of a teenage girl diagnosed with PTSD, I observed that she tended to view the entire world as a potential threat.

  Positive comments from others or neutral remarks were spun into negative exchanges and catastrophic personal attacks. She constantly perceived slights where none were intended, which made the relationships she did have difficult and eliminated many others before they could start.

  She “sensed other people could sense she was bad” and projected her self-hate into the world, becoming sensitive to any sign of rejection. Everyone was out to hurt her. She was creating a self-fulfilling prophecy that people didn’t like her by giving “leave me alone signals,” that got negative responses.

  Of course, those reactions further enforced her perception that the world was full of people who didn’t like her.

  —Dr. Bruce Perry, The Child Who Was Raised as a Dog

  I made my entrance at the New School with all of the enthusiasm I could muster.

  It was scary, pushing my way through the courtyard that separated the Twelfth Street building of the New School from the Eleventh Stree
t building.

  That small enclosure was essentially one big cigarette smoke cloud full of hopelessly emo kids from Alabama or Baltimore; trendy fashion students who were also taking classes at Parsons, the New School of Design; and guys who just pulled out their guitars and started playing. On my first day, I saw one of the actresses from the beloved show of my youth, Degrassi, who, as it turned out, was also taking classes there.

  In some ways, I made a new start. That first semester, in 2007, my classes were called “The Spiritual Autobiography,” “The Girl as Media Image,” and “Poet in New York.” There was no math, no science, no lectures, just discussion-based classes in a small group setting. I wrote personal essays for “The Spiritual Autobiography” about what I had been through with Vin, penning revelations about what I’d learned about myself and what love was.

  “Poet in New York” with Mark Statman was my favorite, even though it wasn’t my favorite subject. Mark, who told us to call him Mark, had a ponytail and earrings and tripped over the chair to get to the board because he just had to furiously write down this thing a student said. Something about that class—this place, this school—felt very real, and very alive.

  I made a couple of new friends, Katie from New Mexico, whose mothers were gay, and Lisa, who was from Los Angeles and wore winged eyeliner the same way I did. We were put in the same awkward circle of people on “accepted students day,” who had to discuss their hopes and dreams for college, and we both had the same sarcastic, why am I here attitude.

  We also had participate in a mandatory weekly advisory class, and I got stuck listening to everyone talk about “adjusting” to New York City, making observations about how people either did or didn’t fit “the ‘rude’ stereotype,” or how the food was really expensive and how “great it was to see drag queens and gay couples just walking around.” I felt ownership over the city and my place here, and that ownership made me resentful of these who had been dumped here from whatever fucking suburb they came from. I did not share their collective sense of awe and wonderment at how “late” everywhere stayed open until. There was no big “wow” about the number of pizzerias around. I had no desire to “discover” the world above Ninety-Sixth Street, like Harlem, or across the river in DUMBO (the area right under the Brooklyn Bridge on the opposite side of the river), or Williamsburg.

  What I did have a desire to do, even though I was still “with” Aaron, was stay close to a guy named Patrick.

  Patrick was an Irish, pouty-lipped, guitar-playing, weed-smoking guy from Boston with big biceps whose flirtation with me was kept alive until it came to the throwdown of “Why don’t you kiss me” and “Because I have a girlfriend” after a few beers on my friend’s roof, where we had been singing Hey There Delilah at the top of our lungs along with my iPod.

  Patrick told me I had “the soul of the blues,” but I didn’t know what that meant. When he explained, I half believed him.

  I don’t know who heard us when we belted out songs with no inhibition, into the sky, high notes rattling up against people’s windows. Maybe nobody, maybe everybody.

  He taught me how to hold a guitar, and I kept quiet about Aaron and what he was like, for the most part. I didn’t want him to see me as this damaged girl who was looking for a savior in the new guy from out of town. As for Aaron, he knew about Patrick, but he didn’t act jealous in a way that I hoped would cement his feelings for me, perpetuate the thinly veiled illusion that he actually really needed me, too. Once in a while he would offer, “Why is this dude hanging around you?” but that was it.

  In other ways, college felt like one long continuation of high school—all of these kids were starting on this exciting journey on their own, in a new place, and here I was, everything the same—my neighborhood, my situation, my boyfriend, my feelings, my fucked up brain.

  The subway was still a house of horrors.

  Getting to and from class every day, even six years after 9/11, was like entering a house of horrors.

  On the platform, I’d look over my shoulder to make sure that the guy who was standing a little too close wasn’t going to whop me over the head with a bat. I’d listen to the haunting soundtrack of announcements about police activity or how the train would no longer be running, causing me to panic in trying to figure out how to get home or get to class on time.

  Around this dark turn was a train pulling into the station with a young black man bleeding from the head, screaming, his hands up against the glass of the doors, banging on them before they opened, shoving me to the side and running while two guys followed him. Around that turn, you had a Muslim man clutching a backpack on his lap, muttering something in another language with his eyes closed.

  Around the next corner, someone was lighting up a cigarette while sitting on a bench, and people were walking past, looking back at him over their shoulders like that was just the beginning of something else that was about to start smoking. Through the next dark passageway was the startling image of a woman running down the subway platform at Fourteenth Street, and other people running, too, forcing me to decide if I was going to get off of the train or if I was going to stay on, popping a Klonopin to keep from completely losing my shit before class.

  Above ground, the world became a caricature of itself.

  Girls chattering with nasal voices rubbed me the wrong way, every syllable digging deeper into that fresh bruise, making me want to be the violent one who hit them in the back of their heads with a bat.

  A homeless man with a dog stayed with me all day, even after I ducked into a deli to buy a can of dog food and a banana for them.

  Six nuclear weapons had been accidentally loaded onto the wing of a plane going from North Dakota to Louisiana. Accidentally, because, you know, accidents happen.

  Steam pipes were exploding in midtown.

  More allegations came of US troops killing innocent people in Baghdad.

  The President of Iran was trying to visit Ground Zero, but “we” wouldn’t let him, which meant, to me, we would see some sort of retaliation.

  * * *

  One night, I invited Lisa to come hang out with Aaron and his friends in Brooklyn. The boys played beer pong, blasted rap songs, rolled blunts, and made runs to the deli for more forties. The tables were covered with cartons of Orange Juice, Dutch guts, ashtrays, crumpled brown paper bags, packs of cigarettes. Hats and sneakers were in pristine condition, while the boys who lived in them weren’t.

  I thought she would think it was all really cool, like I half-did, but the next day, she said, “Helaina, they don’t have any ambitions, they’re not doing anything with their lives.”

  For a couple of months, I called her when Aaron and I had fights. She tried to help me, but I was so clearly unwilling to help myself that she finally just threw her hands up and said, “Forget it.”

  Although, she didn’t say “Forget it.” She just stopped answering my texts.

  I felt abandoned, like for the life of me I couldn’t find someone who knew what it was to be a friend. I thought she was mad because I wouldn’t listen to her, the same way I, myself, took everything personally. I didn’t see that I was treating her like a human life preserver, calling for help, clearly able to make a choice to leave him, then backing out.

  I still hadn’t gone back to therapy, and the few other friends that I made when I arrived at The New School quickly gave up on me, further proving that I was worthless. I still had these knee-jerk reactions of anger, impatience, feeling slighted. It was not hard to trigger this deep mistrust that sat bubbling like a cauldron of tar, just waiting for something harmless to set it to a boil. Despite how nicely dressed and made-up I was on the outside, I must have emitted an energy that made people think, Not with a ten-foot pole. Soon, it became very apparent just how sad I was, because I wasn’t able to contain it like I imagine other people did. I was an easy tell, walking into class bleary-eyed, books crumpled from when Aaron ripped them out of my hands and threw them across his bedroom.

  On
the inside of the girl’s two-stall bathroom on the second floor of the Eleventh Street school building, I hyperventilated before class, hiding behind my big black Chanel sunglasses. I’d saved up to buy them with my own money, and it wasn’t long before the lenses looked worn out after being smeared with so many tears and streaked with so much mascara. I blotted at my eyes with the unforgiving, rough bathroom paper towels that smelled like mothballs.

  Once inside the classroom, I’d slip into a chair around a medium-sized round table, “rewetting” my contact lenses with eye drops so that I had a reason for the redness under my eyes, and probably not fooling anyone because of the redness around my nose.

  Focus. This is all you have. Focus.

  For a few hours a day, I did focus. Somehow, with that determination, I maintained a 3.8 GPA during that first semester. I turned in papers early for constructive comments, and I shared as often as I could get my hand up or get a word in during class, and I never missed an assignment.

  On the outside, I was a pretty girl with a promising college career and a grandmother who would be so crushed by a suicide that God knows what would happen to her. So, I kept going for her, and for my mom and dad, and because my mother had told me, when I was little, that “Only cowards kill themselves and take the easy way out.”

  On the inside, I was the same girl, crying herself to sleep, sitting alone on my bed and operating a halfway house for intrusive thoughts, disturbing new fears and paranoid delusions, rehashing the past and kicking myself for everything.

  Panning out even further, you’d see a girl sitting in the corner at some guy’s house, like a kid being punished, while her boyfriend played video games with his friends. You’d see me getting drunk and standing dangerously close to the curb on a moving highway. Or, you’d see me stoned, sitting along the ledge of my friend Syd’s roof, the roof that had been a stage for all of those “performances” with Patrick, who was now also out of the picture for the same reason everyone eventually faded away.