We lived in Northampton, MA; I’d just begun my second year as a visiting writer at Amherst College; our daughter Livia, our first child, was only seven weeks old. September 11 was a Tuesday; I had no classes; our first babysitter was to arrive in the late morning, to spend the day and get to know us all. I woke before my husband, James, before the baby—not early; we’d been up in the night—and went to the kitchen to make coffee. I turned on the radio, NPR: the local station frequently played music, cheaper than airing national shows, but they carried the 9 a.m. five-minute national news. The report announced that a “light aircraft” had crashed into the North Tower, unexpected because visibility was so good. They didn’t know more. But then the second plane hit while the news was still on air, and the five-minute newscast grew longer, and longer.
“Wake up, wake up,” I called to my husband as I ran back down the hallway to our bedroom. “Something terrible has happened.” Though we didn’t yet know quite what had happened, we knew at once that it was monumental.
By the time Argelia, our new babysitter, arrived, Livia was washed, dressed, and fed. At the back of our railroad apartment, the radio blared; at the front, in the living room, CNN ran the same footage over and over. Argelia sat in front of the television and wept: Her father had been killed in the Mexico City earthquake in 1985 when she was a child, and watching the footage, she relived that experience. James and I wept too, uncomprehending—the flames, the smoke, above all the people jumping. Those images remain seared in my mind: faced with the choice between the burning building and hurling themselves to certain death, they chose to jump. A pyrrhic choice, but a choice.
We’d just returned from New York the previous day: We’d been there for our friends’ Sunday wedding, the reception at an elegant club in midtown. Livia wore a white dress with blue ribbons that my mother had saved from my infancy. She was very popular among the aspiring grandmas, who all wanted to hold her. The actor Sam Waterston, also a guest, amiably stroked her head. At one point James hastily changed her diaper on a table in a niche in the library, a transgression that we laughed about afterwards. After supper, we danced with Livia in our arms. The bride and groom beamed throughout, so happy. We were all young and full of hope. We drove home on the morning of Monday, September 10.
After harrowing hours in front of the television—the third plane crash, in Pennsylvania; the towers falling, one after the other; the constant replays of the same horrifying footage; the pervasive chaos—we turned it off and went for a walk. Unaware of global events, Livia had grown restless; so had our dachshund. Argelia, meanwhile, wanted to learn Livia’s routines: They’d be alone together before long. Wandering the Northampton streets felt surreal: Shops were shut, few people outside, the town wreathed in eerie calm. We were surrounded by the aggressively glorious blue, the brilliant sun, birds singing, oblivious.
September 11 was just the beginning. In the days after, nobody knew whether to expect more attacks, and if so, from where they might come. The murderous Anthrax scare which began merely a week later provoked such alarm that when mist emanated from the ceiling vents in our Amtrak carriage, we worried it might be lethal. Only weeks later, in December, the infamous Al-Qaeda shoe bomber tried to ignite his bomb-lined sneakers on board an American Airlines flight, using matches; mercifully the other passengers overwhelmed him.
