Brittany Iatarola
9/11 Paper (Rough Draft)
4/23/17
I guess it would make sense to start with the planes. Which had seemed benign and far away before the day they kept us inside for recess. The strangest part of it all was the fact that the day they kept Mrs. Engle’s 3rd Grade class inside, was,in fact, the only afternoon, on whichnot a single plane would appear in the sky. But I didn’t learn about that part until later. Until my, now, fellow teachers, older teachers, had talked about it over lunch. Talking about the worst day of school. The day when principals made the worst announcements. When the guidance office was filled up with children who were waiting for phone calls. The classrooms, vacuum-sealed inside of impossible questions: where will they strike next? And who ARE they? The teachers at my lunch table swapped stories about forced plane landings, and the way the phone lines got garbled up in the panic. It had started around nine that morning. Became my first piece of true historical common ground with the rest of my country. It would become one of those days on which everyone can tell you exactly where she was.
As a teacher, I can appreciate the panic of the decision Mrs. Engle was undoubtedly forced to make—the how do I tell my kids about the attack decision,or maybeDO I tell them anything at all? She must have agonized over it, as I imagine I would. Not knowing who would understand or how to make any child understand the deaths of almost 3,000civilians. There was no starting the conversation in common knowledge. Pearl Harbor wouldn’t be taught until middle school, at least. The Holocaust, not until early high school. And as much as she must have deliberated, as carefully as she might have chosen her words, I can say, quite honestly, that I don’t even remember if she told us at all.
Maybe she did. And even if she did, I might have just thought to myself what is a world trade center? And continued reading my book, or rearranging my beanie babies on my desk. That’s the funny part about young memories—I remember the beanie babies, but not my 3rd grade teacher’s 9/11 announcement. I did think about calling her, when writing this. Or e-mailing her—we work in the same district now. After all, I still remember exactly how to spell her name and know she would answer a question from a student that loved her. But I decided against it.
As far as what I do remember about that day, I do know that kids began to leave early. That it didn’t feel exactly like a “real” day of school. If we had studied fractions or Egypt or simple machines, it certainly wasn’t with the focus we normally would. Parents arrived. Not through the office. They went straight to the classroom that day. They would come in quietly, they would grip their children in their hands, and they would leave.
And the blinds were drawn even though it wasn’t raining. And even though it was an indoor recess day, everyone was quiet. Maybe because most of us had been picked up. But maybe because we were aware of the wrongness, and had created, in our ignorance, a sacred space to house the questions we were all afraid to ask.
We ate lunch in the classroom, we must have. Sat, and ate, swallowing the strangeness of staying in one place too long without asking why. What is it about shared silence that makes everything seem serious? People weren’t playing or really reading either. I, for one, took a turn on the computer, told my mother, when she arrived, to go home. I’m stayinghere, I insisted as I blasted lasers at pixilated octopi,I never get to play computer games at recess.
She didn’t fight with me. Or grip my wrist too tight—the way she used to when she was I was young and stubborn, when she wanted to say I was in trouble without “making a scene”. She said Okay. She left. I would later learn that she took my little sister, Meghan,home without argument. That my baby brother, Brian, was being picked up next. Both too young to argue, I think, and to know that it was a special day. Special, being absolutely the wrong word. But the word I’m sure I had in my mind on the day that teachers stopped teaching, but didn’t send us home.
The actual day, for me, was just that moment. The rest was dark space that, later in life, after I came to realize what that day might have meant, I filled in with the blue-white glow of television screens in dark family rooms. Of planes ever-crashing into towers that would always fall. I would fill in the space with the way that people in my class treated Katie, in the weeks that followed. Walking softly past her as she stared out blankly. Her sad and empty brown eyes. Because her dad was in there. At least, that’s what we thought.
I remember thinking about her at dinner that week, and of looking hard at my dad.As though he would be able to tell me the truth. Or at least, if it was the truth, how it might have felt to lose a father.I even remember trying to give her extra colored pencils when it was my turn to pass out supplies that September. Isn’t that always the way things are after we witness a loss? Searching to repay the people that are left over with things like colored pencils? Or casseroles? Or flowers? I never asked her about it. Thinking about it now, maybe her dad wasn’t even there. Maybe someone just made it up one day. It didn’t much matter. The rumor had given a face to the day. I accepted it.
The rest of the days that followed unfolded in stages. The uncomfortable realization that planes could topple buildings crashed intomy 8-year-old world with crushing slowness. I began to question the soft, squishiness of skin. Began to trace my fingers over my belly in the dark, wondering what it meant to be “killed on impact”. Wondering what it meant to die any other way. Or any way. Or at all. And if there was anything to do about it
Mrs. Hennigan, who famously hated me for leaving my razor scooter in her garage and beating up her son, but was still my best friend’s mother, apparently had told her daughter toLook out for strange planes. As if, having seen one, we could run inside her basement door and be safe from the war that would follow. Even when I was small, I knew this was stupid. I went to sleep one night, and I dreamed of their house destroyed—my childish imagination overdramatizing destruction so that I imagined it collapsingintoa small mushroom cloud, glowing bright orange and yellow outside my window.
Then dreamed of the men who had done it chasing my family through the house like we were in a Scooby-Dooepisode than a real nightmare—we ran in a confused line, the villains, following. But it wasn’t like a cartoon, because there were guns and they were there to hurt us. I don’t remember the order my family died in, in the dream. Don’t think I imagined the bullets entering their skin. I had never watched a show where people were shot on screen. Had never seen a gun in real life. That kind of violence didn’t exist to me. It wasn’t see-able.
In that dream, which I would only have once, I remember being, of course, the only one left. Remember running up the stairs, one of the shadowy men following behind me. (He didn’t have a face in the dream. I did fill in those details later, drawing on the pieces that were handed to me from news stations swept up in the xenophobia of after-wards. I tried to strip them off later, but never quite unstuck them. I never did have the dram again. But I never forgot it either). He held me to the wall, pressed a gun to my forehead. We were only like that for a second in the dream. But I heard the gun explode just before I woke up. I remember lying awake that night and thought about it. Of lifting my blinds and to check that the Hennigan’s house was still there before running through the dark to my parents room. Before whispering my mother’s name and letting her body wrap around mine—safe from the nightmare.
9/11 is part of the American story now. Every American’s story. For those that remember, and for those who do not. It became a root-evil for me. I would tie things to it that didn’t seem to belong there, just because I didn’t understand them. The middle school bomb threats I grew up dreading were part of it, and so was Kevin’s hit list in 8th grade. It built the foundation for a landfill of fear that I couldn’t imagine away. Mixed up in it too, was the way that Derek would follow Renee around school and call her “sweet cheeks”. And way I sat next to her in band class feeling sick and sorry for how glad I was it wasn’t happening to me.
It was the way I learned what terrorism felt like. Not Terrorism with a capital “T” like they talk about on news shows that don’t exist to report news—that fear-mongering word which created a new “them”. Not that Terrorism. But the way I learned that people can sink their fingers into your fear and twist until you give them what they want. And that I was soft and breakable, and that my father can’t survive a gun. That my mother’s decisions are not actually final, and that Mrs. Hennigan was only watching us play to report what happened if something went wrong. The thin cords of adult reliability that had held me to the earth were undone with certainty on the day that the planes shattered windows and splintered desks and cracked tile. Everything sturdy had become breakable. I learned not trust stability—to always feel for the sturdiness of each step before trusting my weight.