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.