Covid: Working from Home

Tomorrow is the first day of classes for the fall semester, the day I “go to work.” Like all the verbs we long ago took for granted (like “attend” invite” “show up” “hug”) “go” has audible air quotes around it. I have chosen to teach my graduate seminar online from what has gradually become my “home office”—some combination of my bedroom on hot days and my porch when (and if) it gets cool.

But I have also in the last few days stripped the air-quotes from “going.” The past few weeks I have left the house for my non-virtual workplace three times: twice to get books to prepare my class, and once to get tested for Covid. Although I occasionally went to campus over the summer to get something I had forgotten, these recent trips have felt different; shaped by the official calendar of the approaching semester, they feel less like getting out and more like actual going out—or even, perhaps, “diving in.” My summer trips were small adventures; I drove around looking at restaurants as they closed, opened, and sometimes closed again; at the tent-like structures being constructed on campus to hold in-person classes; at the mansion that is being built on the lot we abandoned after Harvey. Now leaving the house feels like more like business, more like business-as-usual.  

Before heading out I collect myself and my belongings, remind myself that in the old days there were certain things I did before locking the door behind me. I fed the dogs and gave them their medicine. I watered the plants in the backyard. I ate breakfast. There were also certain things I took with me: my wallet, my key to the office, my tablet and the phone. These now seem like a lot of items to remember and to carry over the threshold. My quarantined self only took with me into the world a small ring of keys, a mask, as well as  two cards I slipped into my pocket: a driver’s license and a health insurance card. I would joke to my family that these were necessary in case I got hit by a bus. What I really imagined was, improbably and mysteriously, being stricken by Covid and having to be rescued by masked medical professionals. This fantasy remained unspoken, as I borrowed words I had used to my family in more normal times.

During the summer, when I went to the grocery store, I would sometimes forget my purse, or remember my purse but forget the wallet that I always kept inside it. I would have to return home and initiate a search for my wallet, which was usually where I had left it when ordering something online. Although easy to spot across the room with its multicolored compartments (I bought it to be visible in my inevitably black purse), my wallet under quarantine did not look like itself. Sometime in April I had removed most of the cards from it—the business cards, loyal customer cards, and multiple credit cards that signaled exchanges, interactions, and proximity to others. During quarantine my wallet resembled an aging face without dentures; collapsed on itself, but bearing the signs of a fuller life consigned to the past. Now it was time to rebuild my wallet and my former identity. My work ID came first. I replaced the card in the last year, so the picture on it is not the Dorian Gray of so many IDs  I am not, on the card,  the 30-year-old who came fresh to Rice as an Associate Professor. Still, the face, appropriately aged and wearing the reading glasses that have marked that aging so clearly for me, looks to me like something from a different life: my hair recently cut, my gaze calm and confident. Professional.

Walking the short distance to the car, feeling the heft of my purse and the objects in it, I feel something like I imagine a crab might feel without a shell. My skin burns in the sun. Although I have often been outside in the last five months for exercise, dog-walking, or gardening, this feels different. Stripping the air quotes from “going” has stripped me of protection. This is odd, because before March I wore my professional identity like armor, albeit an armor so light and so familiar to me that I was able to forget that it was there.. On teaching days, or days when I met with administrators, the old me would add a layer: a more dignified dress, a slightly stiffer material, sometimes a jacket, or even the scarf that my mother repeatedly told me “finished an outfit.” Now it is my very casual version of professional garb that makes me feel more vulnerable.

These are my feelings as I cross my threshold to something like work. But my feelings, as I often have to remind myself, are not everything. Of all the people crossing their thresholds—if they have them—today, I am among the most protected. I have a house, a car, and a tenured job, one that, crucially, allows me to work from home. This fact—these protections—are not an accident, but the sum of a series of acts, policies, prejudices, laws, and expectations that have been built up, as surely as the foundation of a house, over my lifetime and those of my parents. My father’s job at the United Nations, which helped pay for my middle and high school education at the UN International School. My four years at an elite college. The bank account that had just enough in it that I could supplement my graduate stipend to spend one precious summer writing instead of getting a minimum-wage job. The timing of my entrance into the academic market in between economic disasters that fundamentally reorganized higher education . All of these things have given me the ability to turn pleasures into work and work into pleasure. Sometimes, even then, I would work at home.

It is no accident, either, that many of these privileges have to do with safe homes—and, later in my life, home ownership. Although my parents never owned a home until my mother bought an apartment with the proceeds of my father’s life insurance, they were never unhoused. They lived in glamorous, sprawling apartments in Italy, and then downsized to a tiny New York apartment where I slept in a walled-off dining room. The homes—even the small one where there was little privacy—were safe and clean and pretty, filled with objects my parents loved. 

As they built their sense of home together, redlining became a practice in cities across America, shutting out people of color from generations of wealth building.  As my mother spent the money for the apartment in New York that created the wealth that allowed me to buy  a house in Houston, housing in both cities became astronomically more expensive. As my mother remade an apartment without my father, becoming the first person in her family to own real estate,  the Trump family and innumerable other landlords in New York and across the country were systematically breaking equal housing laws.

When Harvey hit, I had the protection of the family money. It had come to me, not through generations of home ownership, but in a more indirect way, through European-style employee benefits that allowed my mother to turn my father’s death into what we now call a starter home. I had   enough that I knew that I could leave the flooded house to rot for a few (admittedly panicky) months and try to build a new life elsewhere. As professionals, my husband and I made enough money that we paid taxes and therefore got a tax break. This unequal relation to the tax code was repeated all over Houston after Harvey, drawing a line between those who recovered and those that did not. Our tax return money went to a generator whose installation was finished this morning, as another hurricane threatens the Gulf Coast. If Laura knocks out power, we will in theory still have light and air conditioning and access to the food in our fridge. The man who sold us our generator told us we will get to choose at any given time between running the drier and running the upstairs air conditioner. This is a choice I can live with—a choice most people do not get to make, a choice both small and large in scale.

Now, more than ever during Covid, houses structure access to money, power, and health. It is not only owning a home that puts you on one side of a thin red line or another; it is the ability to work fromhome. There are “essential workers” who must leave their houses to work, and those of us who can approximate our work from the safety of our apartments and houses. We are the ones who worry about “reliable wifi.” We are the ones who can carve out places to Zoom with minimal interruption. We are the people who complain (understandably) about work, school, and home-life taking place in the same location. We are not immune to Covid, but Covid is structurally “out there,” in the streets and stores and busses and trains with which we do not have to interact. No matter how I feel as I walk out the door, my job and my home protect me, wrap me in the thick, white, and resilient skin of privilege. I am on one side of the door; many people, including some of my students, are on the other. Homing has its burdens, its difficulties--even, as I hope to explore further, its dangers. But it is better than being unhomed.