I don’t give her the “it’ll be fine” speech. I don’t have the heart to lie to her. Instead, I just hold her while she cries, thinking about how right she is. The world has tilted on its axis.
In 1984, the fear was at least singular. We had Reagan and the “Evil Empire” and those “Duck and Cover” drills at school. We’d huddle under our desks like a piece of plywood would save us from a nuclear strike, but at least the threat had a face. Life back then happened in two tiny windows: the six o’clock and eleven o’clock news. If you missed them, you just…went on living. You weren’t constantly plugged into the tragedy of the week.
Now, in 1994, the windows are being smashed open. There’s this new, intense energy to the way we consume the world. It’s not just Dan Rather or Tom Brokaw telling us what happened once the sun goes down. We have CNN now—twenty-four hours of “Breaking News.”
I’ll never forget that night in June when the TV screen fractured in half. My dad and Daniel were at the Garden with floor-seat tickets for the Knicks-Rockets finals, but back at our house, the game became background noise. Eileen, Mom and I were just sitting there, completely flabbergasted, staring at a split TV screen. On one side, the frantic squeak of sneakers; on the other, a grainy aerial of O.J. Simpson’s white Bronco on Los Angeles’ 405.
It was a national parade of the macabre—ninety-five million of us watching a man drive toward his end at thirty-five miles per hour, as if our collective staring could change the outcome. For my parents, it wasn’t just a news story; it was a personal demolition. Dad had been a Buffalo Bills fan since the sixties,and he’d eventually become good friends with O.J. through the industry. He and Nicole had been frequent guests at my mother’s lavish dinner parties. They were the type of people who felt permanent in our lives—the ones who’d drop by for Sunday brunch at the Pierre or share a box at the US Open, laughing over gin and tonics while the sun set over the court. They’d spent New Year’s Eves at our place, Nicole always smelling of expensive lilies and O.J. commanding the room with his easy, Heisman-winning charm.
I still remember the look on Mom’s face when the news first broke that Nicole had been murdered in her own front yard. It wasn’t the practiced, dramatic shock of an actress; it was a hollowed-out horror. Nicole had sat at our dining room table. She had laughed at my father’s jokes. She had gone shopping with me and my mother on the weekends. She had held my mother’s hand while they whispered about the pitfalls of being married to famous men. And now, we were watching her husband lead a low-speed chase through Los Angeles like a scene from one of Dad’s movies, and she was gone forever.
That night changed the chemistry of the news. It proved that “Live” was more valuable than “Polished.” Part of me—the part that still dreams of standing in front of a camera with a microphone, telling the truth to millions—is electrified by this. I want to be in the middle of that chaos. I want to be the one who translates the mess into something people can understand. I want to be the voice that bridges the gap between the event and the living room.
But another part of me, the part currently huddled under a duvet in a freezing Manhattan apartment, feels the weight of it. A decade ago, there was a grace period between the tragedy and the telling. You had time to breathe before the world crashed into your kitchen. Now, the world is crashing in real-time and it’s changing us. We’re becoming a society of voyeurs, addictedto the “Now.” We’re trading the slow, thoughtful analysis of the morning paper for the immediate hit of a live feed. There’s no time for the dust to settle anymore; we’re forced to breathe it in while it’s still hanging in the air. I want to be a reporter because I believe the truth matters, but standing here at the edge of 1995, I wonder if we’re losing the ability to tell the difference between the news and the noise. It’s a strange irony that the very things meant to connect us have left us feeling more adrift than ever.
Leo’s department at Columbia even has something called “email” now. He tried to explain it to me once—how he can type a thought into a glowing box and it lands in California or Vermont instantly. No stamps! No three-day wait! He says the Internet is going to turn the world into a giant, invisible web where we’re all connected every second of every day.
I can see the shift happening, the slow crawl toward everything being “now, now, now,” and it makes my chest ache with a sort of preemptive homesickness. Pretty soon, nobody’s going to bother with the hand-cramping effort of a letter. The delicious, agonizing anticipation of getting mail in the mailbox, the physical weight of a postcard that’s traveled three thousand miles just to tell you someone saw a sunset and thought of you—it’s all being traded for speed.
Efficiency is the new religion, but I find myself wanting to stay behind in the pews of the old one. I want the smudge of ink on a thumb. I want the effort. Because if it doesn’t take effort to reach someone, does it even mean as much when you finally do?
Cori and Marcus are already miles ahead of me. They talk about “AOL” like it’s a secret clubhouse they’ve discovered. We don’t have a computer in the apartment—we can barely keep the toaster from blowing a fuse—but twice a week they head over to the NYU computer lab or that new “cyber-cafe” on 8th Street that smells like burnt espresso and plastic.
Cori says she loves the anonymity of it. She can be anyone. She can type “Hello” into the void and the void types back “ASL?” (Age, Sex, Location, apparently). She finds it exhilarating that she can bypass the subway, the traffic, and the physical act of being a person to only exist as glowing green text on a screen.
But to me, it feels like we’re losing the “between” times. The space where you sit with your thoughts while you wait for a reply. If everything happens instantly, when do we get to miss people? When do we get to wonder?
My grandpa Clive was a legend in Technicolor, a name mentioned in the same breath as Clark Gable and James Dean and Marlon Brando. But the history books usually skip the grit. They don’t mention how, at twenty-seven years old, he walked away from a million-dollar MGM contract in 1942 at the height of his fame. He couldn’t stomach playing a hero on a soundstage while real men were dying in the trenches. The studio threatened to sue him for every cent he had, claiming his face was “studio property,” but he went anyway. He traded silk suits for a flight jacket and spent three years flying B-17s through flak-filled skies in Germany—a part of his life he refused to discuss in a single interview until the day he died.
The world has his movies, but my grandma June has the truth. She keeps all of his letters in an old hatbox from Bullock’s, tied with the cream silk ribbon from her wedding bouquet. When I hold one, I’m touching paper that his hands touched while they were still shaking from a mission over Germany. There are smears of grease on the envelopes and ink bled from sweat. They’re heavy with the effort of staying alive.
If my grandpa had been able to send an “email” from his B-17, would my grandma still have those bundles in her closet? Or would they just be ghosts in a machine, deleted once a harddrive got too full? I have this terrifying sense that we’re trading our history for convenience.
I want things tostayheavy. I want the world to stay slow enough that I can still feel the grit of it under my fingernails. I know the clock is ticking, and I know I can’t stop it, but I find myself wishing I could reach out and grab the gears of this decade and just…hold them still.
“I’m sorry,” Cori whispers, finally breaking the silence. She pulls back enough to look at me, her eyes bloodshot. “I’m just…I’m a mess. I’m dumping the entire contents of my disastrous life on you before you’ve even had your coffee.”
“Cori, look at me.” I reach out, my fingers catching the wild tangle of her hair to tuck it behind her ear. “There is no ‘dumping.’ We’re in a foxhole together. That’s the roommate agreement. We share the rent, the shitty radiator, and the existential crises. You’re allowed to be a mess.”
She nods, but her eyes stay fixed on a loose thread on the duvet. She looks like she’s waiting for the floor to give way.
“For what it’s worth,” I say, waiting until she finally tilts her head to meet my gaze again. “Think about how our parents must have felt. Even when we were kids, Ted Bundy was out there in the seventies, and there was Jonestown. We literally sat in our classrooms and watched the Challenger explode on live TV. There was the draft and Watergate and race riots that make the ones now look like nothing. They must have been terrified half the time, wondering why they were bringing us into the middle of the mess. But they did it anyway.”
I shift on the bed, the old springs letting out a groan that sounds like an old man complaining about his knees. “The world is always ending, Cori. Every generation thinks they’re the ones standing on the brink of ruin. But then you have this…this tiny person. And they don’t know about the Trade Center or politicsor stocks or the economy. They’ll just know that your face is their entire universe.”
I can see her starting to soften, the tension in her jaw finally giving up way.
“You’re going to be exhausted,” I tell her, a small laugh bubbling up. “But then they’ll probably do something like grab your thumb with their whole hand, or they’ll laugh at a ceiling fan like it’s the funniest thing on God’s green earth, and the fear just…it’ll lose its teeth. You’ll get these small moments that make the rest of the noise feel…calmer.”
I’m surprised the words are even coming out of my mouth. Just a few weeks ago, I couldn’t even scramble an egg, and the idea of being responsible for a miniature human felt like being handed a live grenade. I thought I’d be the world’s most incompetent nanny. I have no experience and no natural grace with children.
But somehow, Emma and I just…click. Or maybe four-year-olds are extremely forgiving. We’ve spent the last few afternoons in Strawberry Fields doing “competitive watercolors,” where we try to paint the clouds before they change shape or blow over the Dakota, or we’re busy making “luxury penthouses” out of discarded shoe boxes and glitter glue for the stray kittens she’s convinced live under our favorite bench near the Imagine circle. Yesterday, we spent forty minutes bedazzling a pair of her old rain boots with mismatched vintage buttons I found in my old sewing kit. I thought I’d be terrible at this—I expected to feel like an imposter in a world of juice boxes—but it turns out nannying is just having a very small, very creative partner-in-crime who doesn’t mind that I can’t cook a basic breakfast.
Cori’s face crumples, but it’s the good kind of crumpling this time—like clouds breaking right before the sun comes out. She lunges forward, wrapping her arms around me in a hug that’s fierce and shaky, her whole body pressing into mine likeshe’s trying to absorb my calm by osmosis. She smells like the night before; a heavy, clinging scent of Lucky’s—stale cigarettes, spilled whiskey, and the general tang of a dive bar—but beneath that, there’s her sweet coconut shampoo. It’s the smell of New York and home all tangled up together.
She holds on tight, her whole body shaking with a long, final sob that feels like a release valve. When she finally pulls back, she wipes her salty cheeks with the backs of her hands and lets out a long breath.
“Annie?” she asks, a flicker of that old, mischievous light coming back into her eyes.
