A Plea for Eros

we had—a sign of solidarity— and they appeared spontaneously on that day in September. Who knew that so many people had old flags in their closets? On the Friday after the attacks, twenty thousand people from my neighborhood streamed onto Seventh Avenue with candles to honor the dead firefighters from our Park Slope station. Many people carried flags or wore flags or had dressed themselves in red, white, and blue. There are a lot of old hippies in our neighborhood. During elections, 98 percent of us vote for Democrats. Many of us, including me and my husband, marched against the Vietnam War. That night someone in the crowd began singing “We Shall Overcome,” the old protest song from the civil rights movement that carried on into the anti-war movement. The last thing anybody in that crowd wanted was more blood. The United States is still at war, and if New Yorkers were jingoists, the flags would still be omnipresent—and their meaning would have changed.

4
    “Everybody was
so nice
after September 11, you remember that?” one woman said to another on the subway a couple of months ago. She had a loud voice, a heavy Russian accent, and while she hung onto a pole with one hand, she gestured emphatically with the other. Her companion spoke softly, and I heard in her sentence the lilt of the islands, Trinidad or St. Lucia, perhaps. “It’s back to the old ways now,” she agreed. It’s true. We were wonderful during the crisis, and we were tender to one another. Volunteers streamed to the site. After only a few days there were so many, they were turned away by the hundreds. Our local bookstore became a donation center and was so overwhelmed by garbage bags, flashlights, boots, socks, and gloves that the owner posted polite but firm signs that made it clear she couldn’t accept any more supplies. Here in Brooklyn, block after block organized bake, tag, and book sales to raise money for the families of the dead. Strangers spoke to each other in the street, in stores, and on the subway. That need to ask, to tell, is over now. People have returned to the business of living their private lives.
    Those of us who are not widows, widowers, or the children of a dead parent have moved from active grief to the repression necessary for recovery, a state of mind that is possible only because the city hasn’t been attacked again and, unlike people in some parts of the world, we are not occupied or living under daily siege. The impromptu memorials of candles and teddy bears, poems and letters, have disappeared. Nobody has mentioned gas masks, Cipro, escape ladders, or kayaks to me for a long time. There was a run on kayaks in the city, purchased by anxious citizens who intended to drop the slender boats into the rivers and paddle upstate or to New Jersey when the next target blew. The fires have finally stopped burning at the site, and the city is no longer counting and recounting its dead.
    P.S. 234 was closed for four months. The children returned to school in January, and Juliette was glad to be back. One of her classmates, a girl who would not let go of her mother for weeks after the attacks, who clung to the maternal body wherever it was—on the toilet, in the bathtub, or asleep in bed—is once again a freewheeling second-grader. The three-year-old boy who refused to walk, telling his parents he didn’t want his feet to touch the ground because he was afraid of “burning sticks,” no longer needs to be carried everywhere. The police roadblocks below Canal Street are gone, and now hundreds of visitors to the city stand in line to buy tickets to view the site of the devastation. The gaping hole in the ground has become New York’s number one tourist attraction. I know of only one family in my neighborhood that sold their house after the attacks and moved to the suburbs. Connecticut is an unlikely target. For months afterward everyone was worried about the air downtown. Nobody could say what was in it. Crossing the Brooklyn Bridge in a cab, I still sometimes imagine a sudden explosion, steel and concrete giving way beneath the vehicle and my own sad, sudden death in the East River. But like a lot of people in the city, I’m a fatalist or, as ray mother used to say, “philosophical.”
    The truth is I can’t leave New York because I’m mad about it, hopelessly in love with this place in a way that is usually reserved for a person. And in this, too, I’m not alone. It’s a big, bad, wonderful city—loud,