story2177.xml

story2177.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2002-09-11

When I think of that morning, I see myself as if I was another person, drinking coffee and waiting for my co-worker Ophelia to arrive, sitting outside of the glass doors of the store that we worked in. Now I know that that's when the first plane hit. The second plane hit right around the time that we must have been taking the daily deposit to the bank. I imagine that most people in the building, and out on Boylston Street, must not have known what was happening in New York, because every indication was that it was an ordinary, if especially blue-skied day.

At 10:00, I opened the doors, letting in a technician who had arrived to fix our air conditioner. I followed him back to the office, leaving my co-worker out on the floor. I sat down to complete the morning?s paperwork when the phone rang. This wasn?t unusual, since the management office had a service that dialed our number a few minutes after opening each day, prompting us to enter the previous day?s sales figures. I started my usual phone greeting, expecting to be cut off by the familiar female voice asking for the store?s pin number. I was indeed interrupted by a familiar female voice, but she wasn?t automated. She was real, and the tone in her voice was incredulous.

?You?re still open?,? Alisa said. She was one of our co-workers, who had the day off.

?Of course, why wouldn?t we be??

?Oh God, you haven?t heard.?

She explained what had happened. Her anger turned to sadness when she told me that she?d seen the south tower collapse in front of her eyes on every television channel. In the few months that we had worked together, Alisa and I had become friendly, not in small part due to our mutual love of New York, the city we had grown up around and both thought of as the center of our universe, even if we did live in Boston. An unspoken understanding passed through those first few exchanges of our conversation. I immediately felt a grieving love for our city, but also a more specific pain. My father had rather suddenly retired only a week or so before from an office high up in the tower that now no longer existed. I don?t think she had remembered that he had worked there, but if she did, it was awfully brave of her to call when the possibility existed that she would be the one to deliver such potentially devastating news to me.

My mind raced. I thought about my father, and then his only recently former co-workers, some of whom were good friends of his. When I remembered that Ophelia?s daughter lived in Manhattan, I let Alisa go and rushed back out onto the floor to tell my co-worker to call her daughter immediately. She told me later that she sincerely thought that I had gone crazy in that back office, because she just knew that what I was saying to her couldn?t possibly be true.

Amazingly, she reached her daughter right away, who had been sleeping far uptown, only vaguely aware of the sirens. On the other line, I tried to reach my family on Long Island, but got only a fast busy signal. As soon as I hung up, the phone rang again. This time, it was Allan, who worked at one of our sister stores in the same building, calling from home to see if we had heard the news. The voice of a female newscaster on his television in the background announced that two of the flights had originated from Logan Airport. I immediately felt a brief thankfulness wash over me as I remembered that my fiance, whom I?d earlier left sleeping at home, wasn?t flying that week.

Allan said that there were planes still in the sky, and that there were rumors that other attacks on tall buildings were imminent. This snapped me back into a professional mode as the person responsible for a workplace in one of the landmark structures of Boston. I quickly hung up and tried to reach those from whom I?d have to get permission to close early. I felt the adrenaline rush of the fear of a personally unprecedented kind of unknown. The receiver shook in my hand as I met either phones that rang unanswered or the same fast busy signal I?d gotten when I?d dialed my family?s number. In the chaos, it appeared that no one was able or functional enough to give us any direction.

Ophelia and I agreed that we needed to get out of the building as soon as possible. We ushered our one customer, to whom we had just broken the news, out of the store and locked the doors behind her. The two of us went to gather our things from the back office, where we nearly knocked the air conditioning technician off of his ladder. I had forgotten all about him. When we explained that we were closing the store, he looked at us nonchalantly and said, ?Oh, yeah, I heard about what happened on my way in. I guess if the building?s closing I can go home then.? Ophelia answered the phone, which was ringing on both lines again with the concerns of other co-workers at home. I let the technician out and watched him saunter through the corridor as I once again locked the doors. Everything felt surreal.

I made a last ditch effort to leave notice with someone higher up that we were on our way out. I was leaving a message on my manager's answering machine when he groggily picked up asking me to explain again why we were going home. I sped through the now all-too familiar story, now just wanting desperately to get out and on the train home. I imagine that he was the second person that day to think that I was insane.

As quickly and calmly as we could, we turned out the lights and set the alarm, leaving the store behind us. (When I came to work the next day, I would amazingly be reprimanded by technical support for not closing down the registers, too.) We explained to the owner of the store next to us that he should get out, too. Lights were going out all across the mall as we walked quickly to the front door. Ophelia and I headed off in opposite directions, sharing a sad hug first, and then hurrying towards our homes.

As I walked towards the T fighting back tears, it felt like people on the street were living in two obviously different worlds. There were those of us who knew what was going on, and those who obviously hadn?t heard. I envied them desperately, if only for the brief moments that they would enjoy before they felt the same specific pain in their stomachs that I did.