Helen Zelon

You know what made them towers fall down?” Marie asked, leaning in close, across the Naugahyde banquette. Her frosted, blown-dry ‘do fringed a shadow above her penciled brows.

“I’m sorry?” I said, faltering in the clatter and din of an Outback Steak House, thronged with patrons tucking in or waiting for tables.

“You know why them towers fell down?” she repeated, enunciating clearly now, eyeball to eyeball, her blue to my brown.

“No,” I said, astonished. “I don’t know. Why?”

“It was seee-yun,” she pronounced with authority.

“What?”

“Seee-yun,” she said again, bangs bobbing as she nodded her head for emphasis. A blooming onion, deep-fried to resemble a crispy sunflower, wafted past on a server’s tray.

“It was seee-yun brought them buildings down, that’s what it was. All the bad things up there, all the people, all the crime and the sex and the wickedness…”

Her meaning clicked in my brain: Context, at last. Sin brought down the World Trade Center towers; not airplanes, or people, or a crazed vision of a different, Shariah world. Sin, pure and simple. The city brought it on itself, deserved it, in its indulgences and hedonisms and appetites and throbbing vitality. It was ’seee-yun,’ after all.

I didn’t know what to say, but knew enough to not say anything, right then. I was a guest of this family — a guest who’d invited herself to the conversation, invited herself more than a thousand miles south, far from that familiar, comforting den of iniquity that is New York, to Montgomery, Alabama, well below the Mason-Dixon, home of the Confederate White House, seat of the nascent civil rights movement, scene of Rosa Parks’ famous refusal to give up her seat and the bus boycott that launched a cultural seismic shift. I was a liberal Jew in Dixie, a gefilte fish out of water, that was clear. Best to keep my lips zipped. I did. …

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Filed in Essays & Memoir