Excerpts Spotlight
First 9/11
This essay was written by Stephanie Dinkmeyer in Chloe Caldwell’s 12-Month Essay Collection Generator
Raised in a psychological tradition tracing back to Sigmund Freud, Stephanie learned that your first memory is a blueprint for your life. You remember it because it was important. It is important because you remember it.
A first-of-its-kind collection, Do You Remember? A Collection of Firsts explores the ways in which our first times tell us who we are, who we might become, and most strikingly, who we’ve always been. In this millennial riff on Joe Brainard’ s I Remember , Stephanie interrogates panic attacks, Finland, abortion, space flight, and a complicated relationship with water. Through precise and stunning prose, she asks curious and intrepid questions about childhood, home, grief, and the power of fear, all while inspiring readers to ask themselves, “What do I remember?”
The following essay, “ First 9/11,” is excerpted from the collection.
*
“Is that bad?” I asked.
I was hovering over Mr. Bromer’s wide shoulder as he studied the headline on his computer. It was September 11th, 2001, and I was in my eighth grade technology class. My teacher, Mr. Bromer, had just told us a plane had crashed into one of the Twin Towers. The words came out of him like a sputtering faucet. He began them with, “Oh my God.” On his screen was a picture of a tall silver building with smoke pluming out of it like whipped cream.
“Uh . . . yeah. It’s very bad.” He huffed, scrolling, not taking his eyes off the screen, like he wanted to be alone.
I didn’t know what the World Trade Center was, first of all. I didn’t know the plane crashed into it on purpose. Or what kind of plane. Maybe it was just a little one. I didn’t understand why his breath had shortened and he’d gone silent in the middle of class. He was a Christian and he said, “Oh my God,” not “Oh my Gosh.” We were in school, a fortress. I didn’t know my teachers could be upset like this, not here.
I asked is that bad? as though a plane flying into a building could be anything but bad. I was thirteen.
In Mr. Bromer’s class, we produced our own ten-minute news program that aired every morning where we addressed the goings-on at school: sports teams wins and losses, teacher profiles, and PSAs about the dress code. The class was brand new and had only a handful of students, so we met, essentially, in a closet. We canceled our show that morning. Braces, acne, headband pulling back my greasy strands off my greasy forehead. A long-sleeved white tee that said GAP in silver bubble letters. What could I possibly have to say?
*
Pearl Harbor came out the summer of 2001, a few weeks after I turned 13.
Watching it, the dog tags and the sweat, the fire and the red lips, the blood and the “you kept me alive, Evelyn,” I braced myself for the day when disaster and desire might devastate me, beautifully.
*
As I watched Mr. Bromer scroll, something started forming in my belly. A heavy, burning . . . something. Like a paintball had burst in there.
We shuffled to our next class. Down the white cement-bricked hall to the right. I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I just wanted to see the building, gasping and puffing. I wanted to understand. I wanted to see.
Is that bad?
*
“What’s going to become of us all, Rafe?” Evelyn (played by Kate Beckinsale) asks him on their first date in Manhattan, sitting on a utility platform hanging off the side of the docked Queen Mary.
“Well, the future’s not exactly in our hands, is it?” He replies. They kiss. I tingle.
In twenty short Pearl Harbor minutes, Rafe (Ben Affleck) will have been shot down by the Nazis, presumed dead, and Evelyn and Rafe’s best friend, Danny (Josh Hartnett), will be embroiled in a grief-stricken romance under the Hawaiian sun that begins in an air hangar on top of a silk parachute. Her nails are red and the perfect length as she pulls his dog tags to bring him in for a kiss. They are perfectly dewy and undressed. Of course, I imagined it was me.
Rafe returns on December 6th, not dead at all, still in love with Evelyn and soon aware of her and Danny’s love affair. The next day, another sort of disaster strikes.
*
We trickled into our next class. There was a TV on top of a wheeled cart at the front of the classroom, cold and black-screened. Our teacher, Mrs. Cox, stood behind her desk as we all trickled in. She announced we would be watching the news for a few minutes but afterward, we would still have class as usual. Every teacher did this dance that day.
I remember lots of small faces with jaws agape, silver braces and neon green rubber bands stretched vertically inside. I remember hearing a plane had then crashed into the Pentagon. I remembered my sister-in-law had once worked there and that my brother worked in DC or Northern Virginia or somewhere close, and in my scrambled idea of the larger adult world, I figured that meant they might be dead in some abstract way, just by being in proximity to danger. I remember seeing in my teachers’ eyes that they knew something we didn’t. They didn’t want to teach, they didn’t want to turn on the TV, they didn’t want to turn it off, their eyes steadied on the walls behind us, all of them looking like they didn’t want to be there but didn’t know where to go.
When I got off the bus and walked in my front door, my parents were watching the news. The two tall buildings had collapsed, as had another building nearby. Another plane had crashed into a field in Pennsylvania. We know this now like it has always been true. But it was new then.
By this point, I had gotten my period. I had kissed a boy not knowing how. I was practicing kissing in the mirror, on the inside of my forearm. I was on the brink of high school, my last move into a new school building. I was reading Hanson: An Unauthorized Biography and wondering how people went from being normal people to being that special, terrified that they were probably born that special and I probably was not. I was feeling real envy over Britney and Justin’s matching denim AMA outfits, sitting on the edge of my bed saying nuh-uh into the cordless phone when my best friend told me Aaliyah had died, and clogging my brother’s beard trimmer with my very first leg shave, desperate to have “silky” skin like all the adults in the magazines. I was trying to teach myself how to talk without a lisp. “Me time” was thirty minutes in the bathroom mirror, propped up on my elbows, popping all my zits and picking off all the scabs. I was walking behind my friend, Ally, watching the hole in her jeans at the inner corner of her back pocket, seeing skin, wondering if it was time for me to get a thong. I was trying to decide how to be and how I might have all the things I was told I should want.
But apparently, in the background of all of this, in the background of my looking for answers by flipping through Seventeen under the talismanic glow of my Lance Bass poster, the world changed forever.
*
As soon as the first plane hit the first tower, all of the adults around me were feeling more vulnerable. They wondered about their sons and grandsons going to war, the price of oil, another attack, their palms maybe a little bit sweatier picking peanuts out of a mini bag on a flight.
On September 12, Mr. Bromer said we would be filming a segment about 9/11 with our science teacher, Mr. Reeder. We lined up three rows of chairs in an empty spot in the library. Our small class of four sat spaced out in the chairs like an audience of the press: We each had a notebook with questions.
Mr. Reeder was the reddest man I’d ever seen: His skin was always sunburnt, his mustache and eyebrows and the hair he had left on the sides of his head were strawberry blonde. He was petite and intense. In his khakis and short sleeve polo shirt, he stood with his hands clasped behind his back and paced the floor in front of us. He was a Vietnam War veteran. We asked him what had happened and what would happen as a student-run camera filmed us from behind. He told us we were at war and there could be a draft, which I learned that day was when your dads, uncles, and older brothers were forced to go to war.
Mr. Bromer told us the next day we wouldn’t be airing the Mr. Reeder segment. He said it was too scary, too fatalist for middle school. Besides, all of us were too young to be drafted anyway. We had nothing to worry about.
I was already worried. I was already vulnerable.
*
Evelyn, Rafe, and Danny all survive the attack on Pearl Harbor. Evelyn, a nurse, is overwhelmed by the horror, but she does her job. Rafe and Danny, having fought the Japanese in the sky, return to the hospital together and ask how they can help. “We need blood,” she tells them. The three of them in a room together, all of them sweaty and dirty, the men with shiny flexed biceps, bleeding into two glass Coca Cola bottles. A wartime love triangle.
Danny and Rafe are asked to be part of a secret mission that later turns out to be a retaliative airstrike on Tokyo. Before the men leave, while leaning on a gas pump, Evelyn tells Rafe she’s pregnant with Danny’s child and that while she is giving Danny her whole heart because these are the cards she’s been dealt, she will love Rafe for the rest of her life. The tears on their faces make the most perfect tracks on their cheeks. Mine don’t. Mine slide out fat, at uneven intervals. My forehead wrinkles. I can imagine it, their pain and their love.
*
Although I’d had a couple of boyfriends in middle school, I’d had no great loves. The flings had started on AIM and ended on the phone, with tight folded notes passed across a room and light hand holding in the hall in between. I never really liked these boys that much, but I was searching for butterflies.
I wanted to feel something more.
*
Before they board the plane for their next mission, Danny tells Evelyn, “The only thing that scares me is you might love him more than you love me.”
“I love you , Danny. And I’ll be here waiting for you when you come back.”
After bombing Tokyo and crash landing in China, Danny is shot dead by Japanese soldiers in front of Rafe. Rafe holds him as he dies and says, weeping, “You can’t die, Danny. You know why? ‘Cause you’re gonna be a father. You’re gonna be a daddy.”
Danny smiles slightly and his final, gasping words are, “No. You are.”
I cried so hard I felt sick.
The same music plays as Danny dies, as his coffin is carried off the plane in Hawaii, as Evelyn’s still perfectly manicured red nails grip the patch on his bomber jacket laid atop his coffin, as she and Rafe embrace, as they are shown together, years later, kissing, with her and Danny’s son they are raising as their own, whom they named Danny, whom Rafe takes up into the same airplane he used to fly with his best friend Danny. It ’ s all the same music.
In this world, romance and tragedy sound the same.
*
The day I asked is that bad? was a Tuesday where I woke up thirteen, put together a person in the mirror I hoped would remind people of someone or something they wanted, got on the bus, and within the hour found myself breathing out of my lip-glossed mouth into a computer screen, needing to be told how to feel about a big thing I didn’t understand. A big thing like tragedy. As we shuffled around the building under the weight of it, a disaster I couldn’t conceptualize, I felt the familiar syrupy ache I felt watching Pearl Harbor . And Armageddon . And Twister . Deep Impact . The Perfect Storm . Titanic . All movies I’d taken to heart that told me disaster and desire were often found intertwined.
Tragedy, especially tragedy the whole world watches and can re-watch over and over, has a way of engendering complex feelings. There is not just sadness or fear. If we are being honest, there is also awe. Awe at something so big, so awful. Something once only approximated on a screen.
By then, I’d seen so much approximated on a screen, in a magazine, on a poster. How to be, how to want to be, how to feel, how to want to feel. All of it big, bigger than me. Glossy. Rich. Fire and longing in color.
*
While cleaning out a closet recently, I found an autographed eight by ten photo of Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett, a movie still from Pearl Harbor : Ben and Josh, Rafe and Danny, stand tanned and dirty, heroic in their dog tags and unbuttoned Hawaiian shirts next to a plane. It was a gift from my brother for my fourteenth birthday. In the same box was my eighth grade yearbook.
I flipped through, scanning faces, every page flooding me with memories of characters I’d long forgotten. Handwritten notes on the blank pages; so many I <3 U ’ s, stay a sweet girl , and long disconnected phone numbers. By the end, there was no mention of 9/11. It was just a sea of thirteen-year-olds. I was there in braces, an awkward haircut, and uneven eyebrows, smiling in black and white.
