Everyone remembers where they were when they heard the news. I was in my father’s tiny, sweltering apartment in Montreal, having breakfast, when the radio bulletin came on just after 8:45 a.m. I still don’t know who to ask forgiveness from, but when I first heard about the World Trade Center, all I felt was excitement that something had managed to strike that icon of imperialism. Not a thought entered my mind about people, the office workers, the cleaning staff, the visitors, the people who were in the building.
I headed for the TV and watched as eighteen minutes later the second plane slammed into the south tower confirming the first crash had been intentional. Then the Pentagon was in flames and there was news of a fourth hijacking.
Whatever this was, it was not going to end.
With the serenity reserved for calamity, I began to search the television footage for my sons, both of whom live and work in New York City—both of whom easily could have been there. Noah worked for a company that rented several floors of the WTC though they also had offices in other parts town. Many times I was sure I spotted my kids among the frenzied crowd running for their lives away from the crumbling monoliths.
I tried and tried, but couldn’t get through. The calls that ricocheted back and forth between family members were a balancing act: concern for Noah and Daniel’s safety, confidence that they were okay—and clarity. When I said to my daughter, Joey, in Toronto, “It’s like war,” she said, “It is war.” For about three hours my life stopped and when my sons were at last able to contact me, my knees buckled with relief and gratitude. My children were safe. Nothing else mattered.
Before long I was overcome with revulsion as I listened to the various kneejerk reactions. Dick Cheney proclaimed, “America has the best system in the world, we are the best country.” His words exemplifying insufferable arrogance. A sycophantic preacher declared of the victims, “They’re in heaven now and don’t want to come back.”
After that, not a moment of escape. My father, usually indifferent to television, was mesmerized by the coverage, and to my suggestion he turn it off, he replied, “No, no, this is really good.” This was not a political but a spectator’s statement. His fascination with the visuals of the event, played over and over, epitomized Susan Sontag’s concept of “disconnect”: that we view actual violence with the dispassion and distance with which we watch Hollywood disaster films.
The next day the street my father lives on was roller-coasting with stories. In just an hour I met a woman weeping on the sidewalk because she’d lost seven relatives at the WTC, giggled almost hysterically with a shopkeeper about her nephew whose employers, the New York Rangers, rented a stretch limo to get him home, choked back sobs as the appliance repairman told me, with tears pouring down his face, about his brother and sister who had recently died, in their thirties, of leukemia after surviving the war in Beirut. They’d been killed by chemicals. Collateral damage.
Daniel said, “Yesterday was the most beautiful day of the year, the sky was the bluest, the air clear and crisp. Today it’s raining. Natural literature.” Noah told me. “I almost took a job at the WTC. Where I would have been, on that floor, everyone, they’re all gone.”
Suddenly it all hit home. It became a feat to focus on even the most basic daily activities. I’d wake up in the middle of the night shivering, hoping I’d had a bad dream. But I never did emerge from the horror, how we had been blasted into living like the rest of the world, never to be able to take peace and security for granted.
In tandem with the earthshaking news of September 11, my family’s tragedies were being played out—personal quakes with their own aftershocks. My father’s biopsy confirmed he had lung cancer from exposure to asbestos during the war when he had worked on the conversion of a ship into a hospital ship. Abe is an otherwise healthy eighty-seven-year-old, and had he not lived this long the cancer wouldn’t have surfaced.
Before he got sick, my father had spent his time with his friend, Dahlia, eighty-five, who had been diagnosed a couple of years earlier with Alzheimer’s. Since he needed to rest at home, Dahlia was alone more and couldn’t remember to wait for the companion her family had hired to help her. She began to leave her apartment daily to shop for meat to cook, though her stove had been disconnected because she’d been forgetting to turn it off, and to buy ever more ham for her overstuffed cat, Queenie. Concerned strangers would phone to say they’d found Dahlia wandering around frightened and lost, sometimes miles from where she lived, asking us to come for her. My father’s was the only number she could recall.
After several such incidents, Dahlia’s anxious children had arranged to move her into a residence, sans Queenie, on September
12. They told her that the images she saw on television of the towers burning were really of her former apartment building on fire. The owner of the boarding house, a converted Victoria mansion, insisted that she be isolated for the initial week to quell her rage, after which she was allowed to receive visitors.
Dahlia’s new house was an obscenity of drabness. The chirping of the recorded birds and the permanent Christmas lights twinkling in the living room only emphasized the gloomy atmosphere. The walls were the colour of rotten mushrooms and the windows were lined with vertical metal bars. Dahlia, who’d kept a lovely and light-filled apartment, was usually lucid enough to know she was in hell. She begged to be released from the prison to which she had been condemned.
My sister Sandy, who lives, as I do, in Vancouver, stayed in Montreal for two soaringly hot months before she had to get back to her job. Cooped up we sometimes roared over family foibles. But mostly we fought, in hisses and hushes, about everything from the smallest daily irritations to the most profound issues of our sibling relationship. We pitched primal battles in whispers. At any other time these fights would have resulted in weeks of excommunication from each other as we licked our wounds. But since we had to get on with caring for our father, we learned to forgive each other very quickly. It was good exercise.
Abe had the only bedroom, so Sandy and I took turns sleeping on the sofa in the living room and in the kitchen on an air mattress, which is a marvelous invention once you become familiar with its peculiarities. If you lie motionless and distribute your weight evenly, it’s fine. But if you reach up to pull a bagel off the counter, or roll over to turn off the lamp beside you, some unexpected part of the bed will slowly but surely rise up and, with a loud farting sound, punch you.
When my father was told he had cancer, I said, “Dad, you’ve been living with it for a long time and you can still live with it.” At this stage there was no treatment. I hid my anguish.
Three different doctors subsequently told me, and I’d phone to tell Sandy our father was lucky if he had a year left. Abe himself never asked about the prognosis. Instead he went into denial and began to look and feel much better. However, he was starting to rely on me for things he could easily do himself, like address an envelope, or make an appointment.
Thanksgiving, my favourite holiday, was coming and I wanted to spend it with my sons, in New York. I’d always been enthralled by its energy, but the city had become a war zone, which I wanted my children to leave. I also needed to test whether my father would be able to cope on his own.
On the Amtrak down, I kept thinking, “I’m taking Anthrax.” I sat next to a young man who, at this point, would be deemed by many to be Public Enemy Number One. “Oh boy,” I thought, “this guy will never make it across the border.” He’d come from far away (his native language was Urdu) to live in Montreal and was pleased that I too was from there. But within minutes he began to criticize one of its neighbourhoods, because of its many immigrants, who, he claimed were bringing down the economy. I reminded him that just about all of us, except for the First Nations, had come relatively recently to North America and that he too was a newcomer. And revealed that I’d been raised in the very neighbourhood, Park Extension, he found so offensive.
Though I was tickled by the irony and figured his maligning was only a matter of him trying to find someone lower on the social pecking order, I was also ticked off and said nothing as he squirmed with embarrassment and said, “I can’t explain myself.” When I let him off the hook by changing the subject, he was so grateful he invited me to his brother’s wedding.
Aside from a charged episode when a customs officer strutted through with a nightmare-sized bomb-sniffing dog, the group on the train was very chatty. Partly out of nervousness about our destination. A middle-aged civil servant from Ottawa tried to strike up a conversation with an attractive young Separatist from Trois-Rivières by saying, “I never learned to speak the language but I sure know how to French kiss.” He seemed incapable of making anything but obnoxious remarks and was eventually frozen out by everyone except for a four-year-old to whom he introduced himself by saying, “Call me anything, but don’t call me late for dinner.” But even she got fed up with him.
I couldn’t help overhearing the American couple behind me who had their speakerphone on as they engaged in a boisterous discussion with a caller about their mutual friend, also an American but of Mexican heritage, who’d just converted to Judaism and was now in a quandary about how to describe himself.
When the train pulled into Penn Station, I was overjoyed to see my sons, who seemed as well as ever, though I could sense their underlying fatigue. Soon I was rigid with fear because we were in a packed, enclosed public space in New York City—an ideal target.
Their apartment in the Lower East Side was close enough to the towers that Noah and Daniel had seen the attack. It took us less than forty minutes to walk to Ground Zero the next day. Enroute we passed several shrines: small memorials in windows and on street corners, fresh flowers left beside weather-tattered photographs of those who had died in the disaster.
The air was putrid all through the city but the closer we got to the site the more poisonous it became. Acrid, bitter, corrosive—like a combination of sulphur, burning rubber, singed hair. The stores in the vicinity were now coated in soot and ash, strewn with furniture and broken glass. I felt I was in an eerie old ghost town from another century.
Several blocks had been cordoned off to separate the visitors from the soldiers and the volunteers probing, examining, sifting through the rubble. Many of the surrounding smaller buildings had been totally razed. The ground had been reduced to muck.
Mephitic smoke rose from the epicentre—layers beneath the towers were still burning. Oddly, the smoke was the freest thing there. To be at this wrecking ball of history made me disoriented, dizzy, as if I’d fallen off a steep cliff and landed in an alien landscape, on another planet.
Looming over us were monumental ruins, twists of cement and steel, melts of iron, bursts of concrete guts. Massive, mangled heaps. All on the verge of toppling over. A giant had slammed his fist down on another giant’s sandcastle. The worst was to look into the abyss and to see nothing but to imagine the dread of some, the determination of others, on the doomed planes, the ghastly phone calls from those who knew they were about to die, the bodies buried in the buildings, the jumpers holding hands with each other or hurling themselves alone off the fiery structures. The rescuers who had gone into those death-traps and never came out.
Throughout my life I’ve had the privilege of peace and had never seen, except in the media, the ravages of war, what people have had to live with, or die because of. Though there were hundreds of visitors that day at Ground Zero, the quiet was astounding—we were witnesses to something impossible to absorb. There was no wailing at this heart-and head-smashing scene.
Many bystanders were wiping tears or taking pictures—dabbing, snapping, snapping, dabbing. Framing, capturing the mythological postcard. Some just stared at the gaping holes, at what was and what wasn’t, what had become an expanse of sky and cloud. Incongruous. How to lament the sky?
Grey matter spat down, spun around, flickered into us, infiltrated our eyes, nostrils and lungs; God knows what we were breathing in. The aroma of apprehension, spoor of the threatened, panic was the most pervasive odour at Ground Zero. The frantic were attempting to control an out-of-control reality, bewildered that others would hate them so much they would kill them randomly, wretched that this degree of atrocity, previously inconceivable, could happen again. Nothing jibed.
Everywhere reeked of rabid helplessness, as helpless as tears, of disgust, of powerlessness, of disgust at powerlessness. I too stank of insecurity—emitted a cloying noxious odour, whose very perfume clung to me as I clung to it.
Sunday morning was relaxed until Bush’s face stretched across the TV screen, announcing he was bombing Afghanistan, already decimated by decades of war and the tyranny of the Taliban. The undeniable truth of September 11 had been driven to its most false conclusion—war. Once again the battlefield was remote. His message was “be vigilant” (watch your neighbour), “this will be a long war”(we will slaughter all opposition),“expect a hundred-percent chance of retaliation” (be prepared to die). More jolts to the trauma ward that was New York.
Newspapers at kiosks were at a premium, bookstores were mobbed with customers buying histories of the Middle East, the Koran, anything to help them comprehend. Low-flying helicopters circled overhead in a relentless patrol. American flags shot up by the minute. The largest one I’d ever seen was in the East Village draped outside the headquarters of the Hell’s Angels.
There was no sleep for me that night in my sons’ glassed-in apartment on the seventeenth floor, as I cowered in bed waiting for the explosion, the flash to finish us off. In the morning, my sons went out to work and I went out of my mind. All the news was propaganda transmitted by lunatics about other lunatics. Foaming and fomenting. Until I found a public radio station whose voices were resolved to analyze rather than revise history.
That it was still possible to hear points of view other than the bellicose refrains of the mainstream media, centred me and gave me the courage to go out on the street. The police, the National Guard, were visible everywhere—they, along with any uniformed security, even doormen, were being acknowledged with nods of gratitude by passersby.
In New York you have to look like you know where you’re going and look everywhere. Because they are street-wise, New Yorkers know when they can be friendly. Today they were kinder than ever—even on Orchard Street where a vendor pretended to be insulted because I wouldn’t buy a cellophane-wrapped shirt marked “seconds” unless he let me inspect it. He ripped the shirt out of my hands, but chastised meekly, “Lady, you don’t trust me, I don’t trust you.” At any other time he’d have hollered at me. But these days no one was hollering. Despite their tremendous exhaustion and edginess, or maybe because of it, almost everyone was patient and accommodating. Tender.
I ventured over to the Marian Goodman Gallery on 57th Street to see a show by German artist Gerhard Richter. If listening to the radio saved my sanity, looking at this work saved my soul. The paintings were neither black nor white, they were hues of grey, with no polarities, no dichotomies. Fields of colour free of dogma they allowed me space in which to contemplate and reflect, rather than to react.
Wandering through Chelsea galleries I kept hearing remarks about how depressed people were. If others found out I was Canadian they’d comment on the great support Canada was giving the US war effort. And that we have the best navy in the world—what?? By late afternoon the atmosphere was slingshot taut, as the city braced itself for the counterattack. To be above ground was hair-raising but to descend underground required another act of faith. New York was rife with reports of anthrax attacks and nowhere was the risk greater than on the subway where it could be invisibly inhaled. The paranoia was palpable.
Now passengers were cringing because I happened to be the only one carrying a parcel and its contents could be deadly. What was in the bag that was scaring everyone so much was a book, The Joy of Cooking, which I’d just picked up for my father. After eighty-seven years, he’d finally run out of women to feed him and wanted me to teach him how to cook.
That evening I made an enormous roast chicken dinner, so that Noah and Daniel would have lots of leftovers for meals to come. During this fraught time, we’d kept casually vigilant about the whirl around us. We were seeking and giving each other reassurance that the crisis would soon pass. But before I left, I asked the kids to consider moving away from New York, though I anticipated correctly that they would see leaving as surrender and choose to stay in this great city. I can’t describe what it was like to say goodbye to my sons. They did not see me cry.
Returning to Montreal, I mentioned to another passenger I had gone through three security checks with the wrong date on my ticket. She said, “Nothing bothers me anymore. My husband was on the eighty-sixth floor of the WTC. He still can’t sleep but he’s in therapy. All I care about is that he’s alive.” We were rerouted because of a bomb scare at the border and everyone, including the armed guard, got involved in guessing which one of us was the plainclothes agent who we’d been informed would be on the train.
The only person who was detained at customs for questioning, because she had a set of tiny woodcarving knives for her work, turned out to be a neighbour of my friends Carole Itter and Al Neil in Vancouver. She told me she and her New York hosts had barely slept since Bush had declared war, they were petrified that the city was about to be attacked again. We both saw Canada as a bit of a haven.
Montreal was reeling from its own anthrax scares and feeling its proximity to New York. At a sidewalk café, a wooden box fell off a passing truck and we all leapt to our feet. But I could tell things were at least superficially back to normal a few weeks later when my father’s favourite radio station was again airing the debate about Quebec’s possible separation—the familiar “oui ou non” now a comforting litany.
Abe’s repertoire of dishes was expanding. I’d taught him a bit about food, but he’d also learned by osmosis from being around so many good cooks all his life. He was still driving, doing Tai Chi for seniors at a community centre, and taking Dahlia out of her dismal residence whenever possible.
During the stifling flight back to Vancouver I beam peaceful vibes out the window just in case the plane that might be escorting us thinks we’re hostile and decides to shoot us down. My seatmate and I compare tales of dealing with the massive line-ups and disorganization at the airport because of the heightened security checks. We laugh about the plastic knives we’re given with which to eat rubbery food we’re served.
He tells me that in Switzerland, where his son lives, this is Vacances de patates, a holiday which originated when kids had to stay out of school to help their parents harvest potatoes. That’s exactly what I intend to do when I arrive, dig up the potatoes I’d planted. My luxury to have a garden, I missed it so much.
Though I know we’re all vulnerable, the West Coast feels more removed from the fray and I wish my whole family were with me, here in my kitchen, where I could feed them. If September 11, 9/11, has mutated into 911, a state of perpetual emergency, it has also provided the opportunity for us to reaffirm what really matters.
On my hands and knees as I dig into the earth on the hunt for potatoes, I notice a lot of comings and goings next door, visitors dropping by with food and flowers. Finally the star appears with her adoring new parents. She is eight days old, the best sight I have seen in a long time, the most sustaining image.