The Day The Towers Fell - A Belated 9/11 Retrospective
Why I will "never forget" but why I hope America will.
Like the tri-state area where I grew up, the Bay Area region in which I now live is marked by its bridges and waterways, and the views of a mystical skyline rising out of the fog. I find myself holding my breath as I cross the rickety Richmond Bridge, a habit learned on childhood’s countless journeys to and from my grandparents’ house, across the Tappan Zee Bridge and back. Even before I was literate, before the bridge’s disrepair was a source of embarrassment for the State of New York, the Tappan Zee felt hazardous to me, and I hated to be in the outer lane, where nothing but a guardrail separated us from the harsh brown undulating water below. Once when we were still in car seats with my mom at the wheel, what looked like a brick flew off the dilapidated bridge and cracked our windshield, which even then seemed to underscore for me the blind faith the many thousands of cars crossing the bridge that day placed in feats of engineering they didn’t understand. The threat of cinematic disaster loomed large in my child’s mind, and I remember looking out the south window of the car and seeing the World Trade Center, where my father was at work on the 100th floor, and worrying that the bridge would collapse and the three of us would plunge into the Hudson River without being able to say goodbye.
I struggled to finish this edition of Turtleneck Season while sitting on the veranda of a hotel at the southern tip of the Baja peninsula, feeling a lifetime and world away from the weight of emotions that reliably gurgle up on the eleventh of September and then retreat to lay dormant until the next anniversary. I aimed to press send a few weeks ago, but the twentieth anniversary came and went, and now back at home, I wonder if I lost the moment, because the story no longer feels important to tell. But truthfully, my hesitancy to write about 9/11 has long and tangled roots growing in all directions.
There is the way in which, for years now, I have been ashamed by the importance of this day in my own moral and emotional development, given the way in which it was first co-opted as a jingoist call to arms and has subsequently been used to propagate a sort of corn-fed patriotism that doesn’t personally resonate. I am ashamed of the fact that I am still triggered by the day’s imagery, when unlike so many people that I know, I wasn’t there. I wasn’t even in New York. I did not witness it unmediated. My father was okay. I can’t even remember when and if I saw anything on TV in real time. I worry I have no claim to tell a story about this day when my trauma—if it is even fair to call it that—can lay dormant most of the time.
A few years ago, my brother and I were texting on September 11. I admitted I was particularly distraught that year and, to my surprise, he revealed that he doesn’t actually feel any personal trauma around 9/11. I suppose I assumed that this was the kind of trauma that, as siblings, we naturally shared. His revelation to the contrary caused me to wonder if this would be perceived by my family as yet another attempt by Caroline to invent family melodrama and fodder for therapy and writing, or to appropriate what I assume was a traumatic day for my father as trauma of my own.
But then again, my brother was in elementary school and didn’t really know or understand what had happened until he got home from school, at which point my mom was able to tell him that our dad was okay. Unlike me, he didn’t have a single moment of not-knowing, and so we lack the bond of sitting in uncertainty together, and he can’t validate my experience or emotional memory. No, I’ve mostly kept my experience private, until necessary to explain to a new friend or romantic partner why my family moved from New Jersey to Connecticut, at which point I’m left wondering if I am no better than a contestant on the Bachelor who has willingly traded away her most vulnerable anecdote in exchange for greater intimacy. And still I fear that I’m doing the same thing here.
It was a point of pride, but also distress, to always be able to see my father’s office. It created the sense that I could see him, but that he couldn’t see me--that he was visible but unreachable. In the era right before cell phones proliferated, I had a meltdown on a field trip to the Liberty Science Center, which was directly across the river from the Battery. I wanted to defect from the trip with my mother—who was chaperoning —and surprise my father, who I knew was all the way up there in the sky but who couldn’t see me waving at him.
In my mind, this unreachability rendered him vulnerable, a vulnerability that was perhaps implanted by the fear in my mother’s voice as she yelled at me to get down when I would stand on the radiator in his hundredth floor office and press myself against the glass.
At some point in elementary school I began to attach ritualistic importance to saying goodnight to my father, and eventually we had to add on a morning goodbye ritual. He left for the train hours before I was due up for school, sometimes in the dark, but my bedroom was over the garage and so when I heard the garage door go up, I would run to my street-facing window, peek behind the shade, and wave. My father would flash the headlights at me three times, our code for “I love you.” On the mornings when we missed each other for whatever reason, I was inconsolable, and would cry myself back to sleep, the omitted goodbye feeling like an inauspicious sign.
Upstairs in my parents’ house, a frame houses thirteen school portraits—twelve tiny thumbnails for kindergarten through eleventh grade, and a larger portrait for senior year, my hair finally long and smooth and my skin almost clear.
The school picture taken right before I learned that an airplane had flown into the North Tower is the last in which I look like a child. I am on the cusp of being caught in between, but there is an innocence in my eyes in that photo, which are still framed by light wire-rimmed glasses that could belong to a white-haired librarian in Maine. My smile reveals braces with pink and green bands to match my outfit. My bobbed hair is parted in the middle for the last time. I am embarking on a decades-long struggle to figure out how to deal with my hair, which is neither straight nor curly, and which will not consistently flip out or curl under. I want to look like Rachel from Friends, but I look nothing like Rachel from Friends—I am wearing a size 16 fuchsia ruffly-necked blouse from Talbots Kids. But it is nevertheless strange looking at the child in that photo because the body in that photo is the first one I can remember inhabiting. The girl in that photo had felt the first flutters of romantic attraction, the first pangs of crushing disappointment, and longing for the freedom of the wider world.
I have long had a recurring nightmare that I am in an emergency situation and trying to dial 9-1-1, but my fingers are leadened and swollen and I keep misdialing as time is running out.
What I remember from that day is a clear blue sky, the middle school lawn cold and dewey on my sandaled feet. The chill of September mixed with the warmth of the sun; my bare legs, recently shaved for the first time, goose-bumped, while I kept my arms clamped to my sides for fear of pit stains. Standing around while I waited for it to be time for my photo.
And then the news arrives, though I don’t remember how. My photo must have been taken already, because my innocence is preserved in the smile of that little girl whose primary source of suffering is having a crush on a boy whose bar mitzvah she won’t be invited to. I think there was a TV in the art room, the news spread from the eighth grade studio art class. I have no idea. Did a student come outside and shout the news? Did it spread by hushed whisper? Did someone come tell the head of the middle school, who was wandering around the lawn with a clipboard making sure picture day ran smoothly? In the cinema of my imagination, a television was rolled outside and we crowded around it, but this can’t be so. It seems absurd that teachers would let twelve year olds watch bodies fall through the sky, but then again, no one knew what was happening.
I can’t remember if I had even seen seen a single image of smoke ballooning out of the side of the tower before my body knew to fill with dread and to excuse myself to use the phone in the lobby reserved for students who needed to call their mother after forgetting their flute or their cleats.
Perhaps I question whether my 9/11 trauma is performative because I perceive so much of America’s 9/11 trauma as performative. Most of America wasn’t there, had never been there. The town of Idaho Falls, Idaho, when I recently visited, had posters advertising its annual 9/11 tribute banquet. Cars in Arizona with “Never Forget” bumper stickers. Anyone whose life 9/11 actually touched doesn’t need a bumper sticker to remember.
It took me several sittings to get through Jennifer Senior’s beautiful and haunting elegy to Bobby McIlveine in The Atlantic. The piece is a study in grief and a portrait family still grappling with the death of their 26-year-old son and brother in the collapse of the Twin Towers. The family’s grief is not performative. It is the only piece of twentieth anniversary coverage that I consumed, but given its depth, I felt no appetite for breadth, no need to read any of the other thousands of stories like this one about someone who lost someone they did or didn’t say I love you to the night before.
It’s not that I think these stories haunt or pain me anymore than they do anyone else, but I find them hard to read. I imagine they are for an America who has no other way summon the emotion of 9/11, but who needs to find a way to resuscitate the feelings that created our modern era, in order to understand how we ended up here in this time of fear and precarity and fake news and American victimhood. It was perhaps the last time I can remember feeling a sense of rallying unity around the American flag, before the aftermath divided us into two camps that have been warring ever sense.
I wasn’t able to reach either of my parents from the phone in the lobby, both of their phones ringing and going to voicemail, before the bell rang, one of those old bells that sounds like a fire alarm. I went to my history class, where my teacher excused me and told me I could use the phone in his office.
As far as I knew, my father was at the World Trade Center, where he had worked until recently, where he was supposed to have an early morning meeting, meaning that morning was like a dream, when the worst is happening but you can’t believe it is really happening, meaning I remember spending the rest of the morning calling my dad’s cell phone from my history teacher’s office, which alternately rang and rang and went straight to voicemail (wires crossed as my mother and his sister also called repeatedly).
At some point I must have stopped calling, or been told to take a break and go to lunch, since I remember sitting in the cafeteria wanting to scream and flip over the crowded table, at which seventh graders tried to outdo themselves by showing concern for their second cousins who might still live in Queens, when my history teacher found me and told me that my mother had called, that my father was fine. I asked whether she was coming to pick me up, and he said no, she hadn’t said so. I remember being stunned that she expected me to get through the rest of the school day, and even more stunned when someone else’s mother picked me up at school that afternoon, per the carpool schedule, someone who was not in the habit of discussing the news with 12-year-olds. “Oh, it’s so horrible,” the other mother acknowledged, but not horrible enough to listen to NPR instead of 96.5 TIC, and so the soundtrack of the ride home that day was Justin Timberlake and car dealership commercials like normal. And then when I got home, ready to throw myself into the arms of my mother and release the hysterical lump in my throat that had been amassing all day, I was stunned by the feigned normalcy when I walked into the kitchen that afternoon, the counter clean, dinner on the stove as usual. I don’t remember my mother, who had spent the day in the same tortured state of unknowing as I, revealing a single crack in her foundation, except of course to the extent that her performance of normalcy was evidence of the enormous rupture that had traumatized us both.
My father’s meeting had been switched to Monday, apparently. He had been there the day before, on the 100th floor, but on Tuesday, he was in midtown, rattled but fine, cell service down throughout Manhattan. A friend drove him home. When the garage door went up and he walked in that night around 7 pm, I threw myself at him, in a non-performative display of emotion. As I remember it, my parents greeted each other with restraint which, I imagine, was somewhat performative—intended for the benefit of the children. At the time, it felt like I was inhabiting a dream. Though my actual life had contained its share of histrionic emotional reactions, only in my dreams were they ever warranted. Now looking back on that reunion in the mudroom, it seems like it could be a scene from a play, a scripted reaction to a tragedy of cinematic proportions, one that we could only react to by falling into the roles of archetypical Daughter and Wife and Father and Son. But it was Real. It was real for me, it was real for my family, and I suppose I’ll never really know if it was real for America who didn’t survive the uncertainty of that day.
I suppose this essay stems from a desire to reconcile my personal memory with our social cultural one. Though I won’t forget, it is natural and necessary for America to, and I don’t think that is something to grieve. It is possible to both acknowledge the enormous and tragic loss of human life in 9/11 and the senseless wars that followed, but also necessary to move on. “Never Forget” cautions against the slippage of 9/11 from our from collective memory, but I wonder whether forgetting what it felt like to be attacked by an unknown enemy would be the worst thing, and whether it would allow space in our collective consciousness for something new. That enemy never reall united us anyway. The twentieth anniversary of 9/11, if anything, marks the end of an era, the 9/11 era. It coincides with our withdrawal from Afghanistan, a symbolic, if not actual, end to the War on Terror. The military is now recruiting children who were born after 9/11, children who have grown up in a country that has spent the last twenty years trying to convince its citizenry that the largest threats to our democracy are external, while those same children were educated in a society that could not protective them against active shooters. Might it be necessary to recalibrate in order to acknowledge that the existential threats to our democracy cannot be stopped by a TSA checkpoint- that they never could?