This is from my story, "The Closer You Were, The Less You Knew," published in GLIMMERTRAIN STORIES, about one family's intersection with the events of Sept. 11, moving between one family's Jewish history, the present moment, and world politics.

“THE CLOSER YOU WERE, THE LESS YOU KNEW”

-- NYPD Chief Joe Esposito, September 11, 2001

Sept. 10, 2001

East 88th Street, NYC

10 a.m.

When Jules drops Ina off for the procedure, he kisses her deeply, embarrassingly, in the back of the cab and says, “Last time I caress the dear old face of the dear old gal I married.” Smiling, he exits the car to open her door with a flourish and a bow, “Break a leg, baby.”

Ina laughs. “A broken leg would be easier to fix! Remember how bad I’m going to look when I see you tonight, okay? Just think the worst, and it won’t be that bad.”

Jules directs the cabby to his office at the U.N. Plaza, and Ina inhales before entering the offices of Drs. Stein, Moore and Greenblatt. Discreetly, the brass plaque reveals nothing of the sort of doctoring which goes on in these tasteful Upper East Side rooms. “Vanity, all is vanity,” she whispers, then pushes open the solid oak door.

“Mrs. Schoenfeld, how are you?” Here, the nurses wear black Donna Karan; all are flawlessly coiffed and maquillaged. Nothing yet distinguishes the surroundings from an ordinary beauty salon.

Ina smiles ruefully. “I’m entirely prepared, Mia. Better not delay, or I might change my mind. Again.” This is Ina’s third attempt at lifting her face back into youth, aiming to re-capture the beauty of Ina the mother, teacher, wife, “Ina the energetic,” her friends called her, Ina at 61 seeing this fresh promise in Leah, her eldest daughter, herself a mother of two adolescent daughters. At 51 and 57, Ina had confronted her growing despair at the discrepancy between her lively spirit and wizened face, found herself on the verge of surgery here in this office, then about-faced. Her body was lean and strong, the result of daily three-mile runs through Central Park for the last fifteen years. But her face, the face of her own mother, was the picture of age, a crone’s face.

“If you’re ready then, Doctor Moore will see you.”

As the procedure begins, Ina tries to talk herself out of the panic that rises in her belly from the first drip of anesthesia onward. “Fool,” she thinks, “Oh foolish woman. You are not your face. God gave you this mirror of Mama, and you’re de-facing, effacing your own mother, who would never agree to such a barbaric act.” Of course, her mother hadn’t lived to this late age, dying of breast cancer at 30, her only child ten. If Ina had been permitted to weep, she would have. A retired high school English teacher, Ina borrows insults from poets she’s taught. “I will show you fear in a handful of … botox.” She feels strong in herself as an older woman, each year more confident in the decisions she’s made, the ones she makes daily. Yet, here she is, joining the masses of women afraid to age naturally. Now, she is wholly committed. Her life – all lives, she believes – remains a series of trials.

As the seconds pass, the doctor’s deep, expensive voice gentles her: “Now I’m going to do thus and such; you’ll feel a little prick,” etc. This latter makes her want to laugh. Indeed, she had felt little pricks in her time, though her sexual experience was limited to two groping freshmen at Columbia before she’d met Jules. Jules the Prodigious, Jules the babymaker, one, two, three years in a row, and there would have been four if she hadn’t insisted on the abortion. Another Dr. Stein, this one out in Newark, his door opening onto the hallowed back alley – the son she might have had. Without any basis in science, she’s convinced herself that the weeks’ old fetus was male. But she doesn’t regret it, at least, not often. Every few years, on the anniversary of that day, Jules will raise a glass: “To the unknown soldier,” he’ll say – all that needs saying. Without marking the calendar, he keeps track of the date, not Ina.

Later, when she lies resting, taupe curtains masking the sun, the walls sponged a subtle gray, she tells herself: “It’s done. No going back. Like every hard thing in the world.” Without success, she tries to resist reciting her personal list: her mother’s death; her father’s remarriage to the dreadful blonde, whose name she knows but refuses to say; the early and awful deaths of her in-laws; Leah’s left eye meeting a traveling I-beam at an unsupervised construction site on Third Avenue, her young life commencing as a series of operations, brutal, the recoveries from successive procedures longer and longer. But of the three girls, Leah was most like Ina; she toughed out every surgery, as she later bested law school as a single mother, her philandering husband lost to his trust-funded drug habit. He’d “forgotten” to send child support for the last four years, but Leah was proud to support the girls on her own. Ina wonders how her own life would be had she divorced her philandering husband but doesn’t dwell there. Jules had eventually calmed down, as she knew he would. The last affair – as far as she knew, and her information was usually impeccable – had been the year he turned 50. It was to be expected. Her marriage was good, her greatest achievement.

Mia comes in to check her bandages, to see if there’s anything she needs. “Are you sure there’s nothing I can do for you?” The nurse’s voice quavers.

Eventually, Ina falls into half-sleep, sirens serenading her visions of Rachel and Naomi at their Sedona commune, back in the eighties, their unlined faces turning away from hers.