Since March 12, I’ve written only 4 pages. I gutted them out in my notebook with a good pen I took from my husband’s home office. My husband believes in good pens and stationery. The first gift he gave me was a Waterman fountain pen. When I can’t think, a good pen makes a difference.
I wrote I’m terrified of my own body. Every cough, every tickle. Every loose stool, which I’ve had plenty of, heart pounding as my GI empties out. Every gurgle. Is this it? Is Michael going to die? Did I wash my hands? Did I touch the doorknob and not wash my hands, then touch my face? Why am I cold? Why am I warm? I’m tired of my heart pounding. The pounding pit, the chest tightening. Brain shattered by a brick. My mind is slow and heavy under the brick. It wriggles and is still.
The last save date on my book draft is March 12 at 11 AM. The file is called “Company history plus confession.” The protagonist is supposed to be confessing to a crime, but instead of focusing on that task, which is difficult and draining, I’ve leapt back in time to fill in details about the cleaning company she started with her lover. For good measure, I added a make-out scene. Then March 12 came and plowed dreaming into the mud. Right now it’s meaningless, I said to a neighbor. Don’t say that, he said. In the evenings, my husband and I walk around the city, his long strides keeping us at a smart pace. Yesterday I went alone. I put on music from the 60s and 70s and peered into the viewfinder where the book lives. The protagonists were still there. They were in a sunny truck speeding to California, bopping to Long Cool Woman by The Hollies.
On March 13, my calendar emptied. I lost most of my income. Bare hands on an unsanitized cart, I shopped frantically. I bought red and blue sugar-free Gatorade for my husband and detox tea for myself, hearing my father-in-law admonishing “the body detoxes itself and doesn’t need any help!” At home, I put away groceries without wiping them off. We’ve always been a no-shoes house, but I wore my outside clothes inside, coat included. I didn’t yet know about coronavirus longevity on plastic, on cardboard, on clothing, on stainless steel. I didn’t yet know about coronavirus shards hanging in the air waiting to be sucked into a warm, juicy tract.
We all have our own amateur germ theories. The pile of paper towels behind a public restroom door will tell you that. I have a no-shoes house because I don’t want the outside tracked inside. When I got norovirus from raw oysters, I used the downstairs bathroom and sprayed it down afterwards. After I’m sick, I toss my toothbrush. So I knew, but I didn’t know. I think we all have that 3-day spread. We knew, then we really knew, then we really fucking knew.
Later that Friday I drove to a pharmacy on one last errand for a client. The pharmacist told me that one of the few confirmed coronavirus patients in the county was a customer. I bought two thermometers, one for my client and one for myself, leaving two on the shelf. I bought 5 packs of Pall Mall Blue 100s, and thought again about making a direct appeal to my client to quit smoking. Now it was more important than ever, harangued the part of me that’s self-righteous and prim.
The sun glared with August-like precision. I drove to my client’s house with the sunroof open, my hands shellacked in expensive hand sanitizer, the only kind in stock anywhere. After I delivered the supplies to my client, we regarded each other across her dining room. Her dog was at daycare. The house was quiet and calm, the woodsy space dim in the bright afternoon. A vintage sitcom murmured on the television. The street seemed far away. I joked about feeling like a delinquent kid buying cigarettes. I told her to stay home and stay away from people. We had a rudimentary plan for dog care should she get sick. I wondered if she was going to get sick, and if I’d carried the sickness into her house without knowing it. Foreboding weighed on me. Drink water, I told her. Get your rest. I told her to sit in the sun if she felt up to it. We said goodbye.
In the first few weeks, food and words congealed in my mouth like sawdust. For lunch I ate a handful of nuts and a tangerine, and at night I gorged myself on savory dinners and wine and television, curling up with Golden Girls until I drifted off. The thought of reading books made me physically ill. Writing was repellent. At 2 AM, my heart thumped me awake. My chest wall felt bruised from the kicking. I felt my inferior vena cava pulsing. I said to myself, that’s the good old inferior vena cava.
The list of symptoms grows longer and more baroque by the day: fever, cough, shortness of breath, loss of appetite, diarrhea, vomiting, loss of taste and smell, neuralgias, red eyes, eye pain, headache, chilblains.
One evening on our walk, my husband stopped at his office. While he was inside, I watched the rescue squad return to the firehouse and back into its bay. Their familiar faces were sheltered behind masks. I felt bashful watching them. We waved at a distance.
Reviewing what I’ve written, it occurs to me I have a verb tense problem. I don’t know how to fix it.
I called my mother living in lockdown in Rome, Italy. Their stay-home orders would have protestors on our streets with torches, confederate flags, and Guy Fawkes masks. Police stop you on the street and ask for your papers and your destination; if you are outside your neighborhood and not attending to an essential need, you are sent home. Park closures are enforced by drones.
Once a day, my mother walks laps around the parking lot of her apartment complex, then starts her car. In our video chats, she sits in her immaculate living room, her ruddy face bathed in lamplight. Her silver hair she cuts herself is combed straight back from her face. The BBC flickers in the background. A bulky sweater, what we used to call her “ten o’clock sweater,” hides her small frame. She is still teaching online, still working on translations for a real estate company. She stares down the camera with an unassailable look. My generation has lived through a lot, she says. Polio. She also had 7 children, at least 3 major surgeries, 1 of which resulted in sepsis, and last year, she broke her back and spent over a month in the hospital. My unemployment she considers with familiar distant concern. You have to take advantage of the situation, she says. I don’t know what she means exactly. I listen for signs of the transient ischemic attack she had years ago, and watch for her trembling left hand. But her voice is sure, her thoughts linear, her hand steady.
I study my mother, wondering if I’m looking at a future self. But I don’t feel strong or capable. I wouldn’t last in an apartment alone and far away, even in a country with lapis skies and spring breezes in the palms, and top-tier universal healthcare. That generation is tough, I tell my friend in the Bay Area. My friend’s mother is in her 80s and hiked at Great Falls for her birthday. We laugh and agree we’re not like that.
