COVID: The First Quarantine- Packages

This is not my first quarantine. The first one dates back to, I don’t know, four years ago, the year I became a member of Amazon Prime. Although that quarantine, like the one that is a result of COVID, made me spend more time alone at home, I am not alone in having experienced a form of pre-COVID house arrest. For half a decade now, perhaps for longer, people who can afford it have been encouraged to do as many things as possible from what is usually referred to as “the comfort of their home.” Activities that once took us out into the street, to “brick and mortar” stores, to stadiums, and movie theatres, museums, and universities, can now be done, as advertisement see it, “in our pajamas.”  As malls shrivel and die, as post offices close, and as many movies go straight to video, it is not hard to imagine a world in which the affluent (aka “the comfortable”) need rarely cross the threshold of their homes. The world, in the form of packages, wireless internet, and services that maintain and clean the house, comes to us. Increasingly, we meet fewer and fewer people outside our social class, or who are different in any way. Those whom we do meet are increasingly in our lives to service us—at home.

Advertisers tell us their products and services are only a click away, that the distance between home and the world of consumption is negligible, even unreal. When we buy a book, a bathing suit, or groceries from Amazon Prime, we tend not to think of the warehouses from which these objects come, or the  exploitative labor practices endured by  those who identify, load, and package the goods which appear to us to come out nowhere to our somewhere, our everywhere: our house , apartment, RV.  We do not think about the injuries they risk trying to pack 700 items an hour, the exhaustion of a day with breaks so short that there is no time to get to the bathroom and back, or the pressure for inspectors to scan 30 packages a minute. And these numbers come from before COVID, during the first quarantine.

We are interested only in the end product, the package that arrives so quickly, but perhaps not quickly enough that we, who have ordered so many things, remember what is in each one of them. That act of unconscious--or perhaps willed--misremembering allows us to continue associating packages with surprises, with intriguingly shaped parcels under a Christmas tree, or hidden up high in a parent’s closet. We may fool ourselves into humming “My Favorite Things” from The Sound of Music, even though these packages are not tied up with string but securely taped by machine. Unlike, say birthday presents of old, what is in them is fungible, returnable, easily turned back into a notation on a credit card, a number in an online banking account. 

If we get tired of the addictive strains of the Sound of Music, we may try substituting “The Wells Fargo Wagon” from the Music Man, which imagines an entire town lined up on the sidewalks as the wagon drives by, each inhabitant pleading that the delivery is “for me.” As I come out on the porch to pick up my almost daily package, I see that there are one or two on almost every one of my neighbors’ porches, lawns, or driveways. Packages not just for me, but for everyone. Very little suspense. Unlike the musically inclined inhabitants of River City, we often do not even see the person who drives up in a truck carefully following (by GPS) the most efficient route, who comes to our gate and throws the package over it, or who walks up the stairs to our porch or package room. Usually they do not make themselves known by knocking or ringing a bell; even their arrival is virtual, announced in a text even to those who are lingering, perhaps waiting, on the other side of the door. Your home is your store.

The history of the package, its route through many places and many hands, appears only when something goes wrong. Delivery people appear to us, perhaps on our security camera footage, which we check if seamless delivery is interrupted, by for example that new figure in the cultural imagination, the porch pirate. We resent these pirates, in part of course because they steal or property, but also because they steal onto our property to do so. Even more importantly, perhaps, they make visible the tangible nature of our packages, the fact that boots and wine and kitchen scissors are not streamed to us through the thin air of the internet into the safety of our home.  Like the tangle of wires that remind us that “wireless” is a problematic term, the porch pirate, named after the homes’ vulnerable threshold, makes us imagine, perhaps, a body, fingerprints, or even the life that makes stealing packages from porches attractive.  Individual property owners have been very creative in combatting these figures who have stolen into our lives and lexicon: one leaves a package of dog poop, one an exploding package that marks the pirate with paint or glitter, one opens to reveal a clever, obscene, or threatening message.

The first package prepared me in uncomfortable ways for the second. It taught me that my house is a hub at the Center of a network of invisible and underpaid labor, a network that attempts to render time and place invisible as well. This is the fantasy: If Amazon or other warehouse and delivery workers (and the people who make the objects to be delivered) work fast enough, the whole process should take no time at all.The network will collapse into what George Eliot called the “pilulous smallness” of a pinched cobweb. Those who can afford to receive packages will only have to imagine for them to be realized at the door. To wish, to desire, will be to receive. Although clearly this is a fantasy, it animates the speeding up of work and the increased vulnerability of workers, as we push against physical constraints. 

I have tried, during both quarantines, to interrupt the network. Before COVID this meant buying locally: all the birthday and Christmas presents I bought last year (except the inevitable electronics) were from sores in nearby neighborhoods. The season of birthdays and holidays is beginning again under the second quarantine, and I cannot repeat the work, the pleasure, the contact of local shopping. Instead, I am trying to order directly from stores rather than relying on Amazon or other services. For my husband’s birthday next week (I have told him not to read this post yet), I ordered a platter from Sicily, the last place outside the US we visited before both Harvey and COVID. Decorated with an abstract octopus (a favorite food), it recalls a sustained period in the past where we encountered unfamiliarity—of place, language (although I understand Italian, Sicilian dialect is very different), food, and history. Growing up in Rome, I learned from my parents and Roman friends that Sicily was somehow “other”; they spoke of it as a New Yorker might speak of Alabama—or Texas. My mother summed it up thus: “they put oregano in everything there.” Encountering Sicily, and discovering and ultimately writing about its Arab past literally changed my world. Writing about trade and migration and war, with Sicily at its center, widened my approach to Victorian Studies. The world Sicily gave me shrunk to a tracking number, as my package lingered in Taormina and then seemingly fell off the grid for a month. I would get messages from Marco, owner of the shop that made the plate, writing with incomplete information and in broken English. I would answer in broken Italian. I cannot pretend we made a lot of sense to each other. But the plate came yesterday—it is a platter bigger, brighter, and slightly odder than in my imagination. It is by no means a local gift, but in some ways that is the point. After the journey of that octopus across land and water to my house, I found myself capable of real surprise as I opened the enormous box: surprise that nothing was broken, that the package had arrived at all, that the octopus had a head consisting of that other Sicilian icon, the orange. I hope my husband is surprised as well.