Five years later and 40 miles west of the Pentagon, beyond a guard and iron gates and as the sun falls into a warm evening on Chalfont Street, Roya Akhavan-Lovell does not think about Sept. 11, or terrorism, not exactly.
She thinks about what she can make her two kids for dinner — “Should we order a pizza?” her husband asked, arriving home with them from tae kwon do class — whether she feels like a walk, what she has to do to get ready for a business trip to California in a few days.
Across the wide street, a lazy sprinkler waters a lawn, and several neighbors stand outside watching kids play in the cul-de-sac, discussing vacations and the weather.
In this particular corner of Piedmont, a gated golf-course community in western Prince William County, Va., no one lost friends or relatives in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. No one ran down stairs, dived under desks or felt a rolling cloud of choking dust.
If you ask how the largest terrorist attack in US history has affected everyday life here on Chalfont Street, people tend to answer, not much at all.
And yet, as the emotional urgency of Sept. 11 receded like a huge wave, it left behind an altered landscape, both mentally and materially.
For some, there are lingering fears that have become part of the ebb and flow of day-to-day thought. For others, fears have settled into questions about all that has come after Sept. 11 and what it means. Questions have settled into a sober desire to understand the world. And even among those most supportive of US policy after Sept. 11, there is skepticism now — what one woman calls a “more cynical” view of US power and its limits.
Then there are the more personal, elemental changes.
Pulling into driveways on this evening are several neighbors who moved to Piedmont, near Haymarket, Va., precisely because they wanted to be far from the bull’s-eye that the Washington area seems to have become.
Among them are an Iranian, an Iraqi and two couples named Parsons, comfortably affluent professional couples with young kids in a booming part of the region.
Playing in the cul-de-sac is Amber, who is 4 now and who owes her existence to the emotionally intense fall of 2001, when Nicole Parsons and her future husband decided that life is short and had a child. Across the street are Tanya and Scott Charbo. They moved from Colorado when Scott got a high-level position at the Department of Homeland Security, an agency that did not exist before Sept. 11.
Next door is the mom who quit her job to be home with her kids after the terrorist attacks and only last month returned to work. A few houses down is the minivan whose gas tank never drops below half-full, a practice begun after Sept. 11 that has become habit.
And here is Roya Akhavan-Lovell, coming home from a long day at work and opening her refrigerator, where there is a bright-orange bottle of expired amoxicillin behind the A1 sauce.
“I had this fear of a biological attack,” Lovell said, explaining she has kept the antibiotic for years in case it could protect her kids in another terrorist attack. “Who knows if this antibiotic still works, but I was kind of like, why not keep it?”
Lovell, who works in financial services, would put herself with the 63 percent who responded in a national poll this summer by Bloomberg and the Los Angeles Times that Sept. 11 has not changed the way they live.
But now and then, Lovell sees the amoxicillin. And she thinks about things.
“There’s so much intervention, with us in Iraq, and the fighting in Lebanon. ... I don’t know,” she said. “There’s more anger.”
It adds up to her feeling less safe five years later. Sometimes, wheeling down the bottled-water aisle in the grocery store, she thinks about stockpiling — “I think, liquid, liquid, liquid,” Lovell said. She will not fly in a plane with her children, because she imagines a scene in which they look at her and she has to tell them there’s nothing she can do.
For the most part, though, these sorts of darker thoughts are confined to her morning commute, when she’s alone for a solid hour, heading closer to the District, one of the most obvious terrorist targets in the world.
And so Lovell will zip along near Dulles International Airport, where five of the Sept. 11 hijackers boarded the American Airlines flight that hit the Pentagon. She’ll see a plane and wonder, What would I do if it slammed into the cars?
“It enters my head,” Lovell said. “And I stop myself, because I could go on.”
She pulled her daughter into her lap, and her husband, John, tapped an order for pizza into the computer.
