September 14, 2001

DeAnn Jordan

September 14, 2001

           Three days after 9/11, I sat next to my mother. All the planes in the country had been grounded, save the Air Force jets at nearby Miramar, ascending into the silence of the heavens.
           My parents’ living room was always a sick room since I was a child. My mother’s large, brown chair, the kind with the motorized lift, was at its center, as she was the center of our family orbits. The side table held a battalion of amber bottles with white caps like soldiers wearing helmets. The old Tupperware glass, ever filled with Coke, sat next to her fizzing into flatness. Her hands were more crippled than before, bent first by polio as a child, then by various forms of arthritis, and cerebral palsy twisted her speech—I translated best her often garbled words.
           Despite all that ailed her, she was a fierce woman with fierce demands and fierce loves. She could be endlessly tiring, endlessly anxious, and endlessly generous, often simultaneously.  She held a love for family tradition, and each of her adult children and my father struggled to serve it. My grandmother was born in 1892, my mother in 1927, and I in 1970.  This stretch of generations has feet in three centuries.  I, too, inherited a love of tradition, and though I’m doing my best now to simplify, I’m still pressured by memories haunted by echoes of Victorian ornateness and the need to make every holiday an event.  My childhood homes had beautiful rooms evoking the seasons, but her various conditions meant that I was the one responsible for the decorating, cooking, and cleaning. My earliest memories are of her harsh temper, her yelling to ensure I completed every task to her liking, and the punishments that came when I failed.
           But in 2001, she was not the mother I remembered at five, assisting her with every care, every chore, or at ten, helping her to bathe and dress. Her rages were legendary, but in my increasing age, then just thirty, I began to understand her underworld more clearly, and my sympathy grew in that dark knowing. She never meant, consciously, to harm, only to control that which she could not—her very body betraying her since her mangled birth nearly strangled her before her first breath. 
           Post-polio syndrome was beginning to take what little control she had left in her gnarled knuckles; nearly mute, her speech was even more stunted; her understanding, remote. She was another creature, without her old fierce will spiting her body, her doctors, her family, and life itself. 
           When I spoke to her, she looked at me from behind her cat-eyed reading glasses she’d worn all my life, and for the first time, didn’t know me. I was held tight in her heart, it seemed. My name, clutched in her throat. The confusion was mutual.
           The news continued to play on the television held in the cabinet on the floor. She glanced between the screen and my face, as if to ask, “What’s happened?” but could not utter the words. The screen repeated the Twin Towers’ fall, again, and again, and again; commentators from world governments offering condolences and vows of allegiance. But she was literally ignorant of the constant laments, the confused cries of survivors, searching for loved ones lost, urgencies sent but not received.
           I thought a horrific distraction might help and held up the magazine as if to answer her question, showed her the buildings on fire. I thought her confusion was a media creation, like gossip, like lies. In vain I attempted clarity, over-enunciating the details, like a grim diagnosis—the buildings were attacked, Mom—they flew planes—no, they fell—lots of people died. We don’t know why.
           She looked at the magazine, at my face, and back again. The news on the television, muted. Her eyes widened, then blanked, the question of my name a solid shape between us.




DeAnn Jordan earned her B.A. from San Francisco State University and M.A. from California State University, Northridge in English and Creative Writing. She began her Ph.D. in Mythological Studies and Depth Psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute. She has published two books of poetry, Whispers from the Seaweed in 1997; Deadly Birds of the Soul, from Cherry Grove Collections in 2007; and is currently working on a third, The Hands of Ghosts, as well as a novel. Her work has been published in literary journals, including The Northridge Review and California Quarterly, and she has been a featured poet at many readings. She is the author of Absolute AI: The Evolution of the Human Experience Through Artificial Intelligence.