Much has returned to normal after 9/11, but not everything.
I wish I could remember what Upper West Side shoe store I walked into on the morning of September 11, 2001. Unlike most details of that day, it isn’t seared into my memory, like the sound of fighter jets screeching overhead or the acrid smell of burning buildings and airplanes and people. What I do remember is that the store was clean and calm, if hurried. It felt oddly suburban.
About an hour earlier, just before 9 a.m., my husband at the time called and asked, “Do you know what’s going on?” I didn’t have any idea. I had been on the subway going from Brooklyn to Columbia University, where I was working and going to school. It was a day whose perfection has been extolled for the past 23 years. It was stunning. One of the first perfect September days that arrive in New York every year after the punishing August humidity: cool, crisp, and cloudless.
I remember feeling blissful; reveling in the blue skies, happy to be letting my polished toes out for one of the last times that season. I was still new enough to New York—we’d just arrived a year and a half before—that I would occasionally feel like I was living out the opening-movie-credits version of my life. You know: a 20-something new to the big city, sun shining, steamy coffee in hand, music playing somewhere in the ether, anything possible.
After the call, panicked students and faculty started abandoning the university’s campus. My only thought was that I needed to get home. The subways had already been shut down and traffic had stalled in unrelenting gridlock. Walking was my only option, but I knew I couldn’t make the 10 miles back to Brooklyn in plastic platform shoes.
As I headed downtown, I kept my eyes peeled for a shoe store and found one not far from campus. I picked out a pair of white and orange Nike sneakers and a multipack of socks. I put them on, chucked my black plastic Steve Madden platform wedges into the box, and asked the clerk to throw them away. I couldn’t fit them into my purse and I didn’t want to haul a shopping bag all the way home, even if they were my favorite shoes.
The clerk took the cash I’d hurriedly pulled out of an ATM near school. Cell phones had stopped working and in a panic, everyone began to withdraw enough money based on very quick survival math: Take more than a normal withdrawal, less than everything you had in the bank. I handed about $100 in cash to the clerk and he added my shoe box to the pile that was amassing next to the registers. I wasn’t the only one caught unprepared for the end of the world.
With my newly purchased sneakers on my feet, I pointed myself downtown and began the walk alone. The uptown sidewalks were frenetic; cars and taxis honking and vying for space in the streets, trying desperately to drive north, away from the disaster. I had to walk toward it, then past it, joining the
mass pedestrian exodus, to get home. Every time a fighter jet ripped through the air, I’d flinch. My pulse would race and I’d quicken my pace, wishing I was not alone.
As the blocks ticked by, the heat of the day intensified. I was hungry and dripping with sweat when I made it to Times Square. I had walked 72 blocks, but I was still less than halfway to Brooklyn. I stopped for a few minutes to rest and catch some news on the electronic billboards before continuing on.
Terrified after countless failed calls on my cell phone, I was finally able to get through to a friend. She invited me to another friend’s loft in the NoMad neighborhood, where I watched the footage of the towers coming down, leaving an empty space in the sky, a ghostly void. My shock was new; everyone else in the room had seen these images over and over, glued to the TV since it happened hours before. I didn’t think my anxiety could increase, but this took it to a level that I’d never experienced, as the gravity of the situation sank in.
I wanted to be home, to be safe. My friend and I lived near each other in Brooklyn, so we carried on together to the tip of the island, where we walked across the Manhattan Bridge. By the time we were crossing, the crowds had thinned, but there were still hundreds of us making our way to Brooklyn, walking down the lanes usually crowded with cars.
The sun was beginning to set, and a thick black plume of smoke emanated from the space where the towers had been. It was so intense that I fished the extra socks I’d bought out of my bag and handed one to my friend. We covered our faces and inhaled, trying to avoid breathing the smoke-filled air. My brain tried to rectify the absence of the buildings in the skyline, etching them back in where they would have been. It would be years before I stopped trying to mentally replace them.
On the Brooklyn side of the bridge, military personnel blocked the entrance in their camo and tactical gear, machine guns slung across their chests. As we passed their massive armored vehicles, we decided to pick up a Junior’s cheesecake. If we were going to die, we wanted our last meal to be dessert. We walked to her apartment in Prospect Heights—just a mile or so beyond the bridge—where her boyfriend was waiting for us. We arrived well after dark; after 12 hours of walking, I was now about five blocks from home.
I didn’t go to my apartment that night, though. My husband was a newspaper reporter out covering the tragedy and I couldn’t imagine sleeping by myself; I was a little kid scared of the dark. My nerves were so shot that my friends put PeeWee’s Big Adventure in the VCR, just so some benign noise would play in the background. They made me a bed on their sofa. As I untied my new Nikes, I was grateful that they’d carried me all the way home. I don’t know what I would have done if I didn’t have them. Would I have had to walk barefoot after blisters destroyed my skin? I really didn’t know.
Many things changed for our country that day, as anyone who lived through it knows all too well. But things acutely changed for those of us who lived in New York. That day had such an effect on people that many of us still cannot bring ourselves to go to the reflecting pools that eventually were created in the footprint of the Twin Towers. That ground still evokes intense emotions and seeing tourists take selfies is too much for many of us to bear.
Much of the trauma of that day has dissipated now, though. When September draws near, I no longer feel the building anxiety. The Tribute in Light doesn’t make me well up with tears anymore. I don’t feel the need to watch and rewatch the footage of that day, trying to wrest some sort of understanding out of an inexplicable act of violence.
But I never go to work in uncomfortable shoes anymore. Ever. I’ve worked fancy jobs in media, important jobs that require something other than sneakers, but I’ll never commute in anything other than walkable shoes again. I don’t care if I’m judged for swapping into a more work-appropriate pair at my desk. Because if the sky ever falls again, and I need to get home, I want to be prepared.
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Lili Zarghami lives with her teenagers in Brooklyn. She’s been writing for and providing editorial direction at women’s websites like Redbook, HGTV, Better Homes & Gardens and more since the turn of the century. She can remember the addresses of all the places she was a latchkey kid but has no idea what her email password is.
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