In Person

Reentering the world feels a little bit as it did in my early twenties after spending two weeks in bed with a bad back. I am like a clam without a shell—a small, damp and tender thing that could shrivel and rot in the sun.  I can feel the faint breeze as if it is a solid thing pressing on my skin. For the first time since seeing the show “Bodies” at the Museum of Natural History, Natural history museum, I am aware of my skin as an organ, as the last line of protection between inside and outside.

I am shocked by how naked I feel. After all, during the pandemic, I was often outside, —both alone, and with friends— and I often went into grocery stores. I even made regular if infrequent visits to campus, strolling its green spaces and stopping occasionally to chat, an approximate six feet apart, with the few people I recognized behind their masks. Sometimes I could not hear much, mask to mask, our voices seemed often to be projected inward or carried away like breath, like virus particles, in the air. These encounters, however brief, however inefficient in terms of communication, meant something. For all the easy (or do I mean difficult?) jokes about seeing my colleagues in the flesh or in three dimensions, there was something about both of us taking up, sharing, physical space on a path or in a doorway that was deeply gratifying.  It was almost as if being—however gingerly—in-person meant that one (can I say I?) was in fact a person. I realized that sitting at my desk looking out at the window or down at the screen that I had experienced myself as two-dimensional, inhuman, uncreaturely.

This fall was long anticipated to be an “in-person” semester. Although not as sexy as the “hot girl summer” that never quite was—and for which I was, in any case, too old—the promise of being in-person went—let us invoke all the dimensions here— deep. What does it mean to be, to feel, to be perceived as being “in person?” This question is complicated for me by what I take as extraordinary good luck. I am not teaching a class this semester. Between my administrative course release and the fact that I am substituting for a colleague in the spring, I have no fall classes. I will be teaching an extra class starting in January. In my mental calendar my spring courses occupy a place and time of hope where something (“it”) “will be over.” The new year unfolds for me on the other side of some fantasized change attributed to the passage of time itself.  Experience over the past two years has taught me that this is unrealistic; but the semester structure so wired by repetition into my brain still allows for anticipation. 

Perhaps, for the time being, for the fall that still stretches before me, I am in person enough. I sit across café tables on campus and talk to my former undergraduate students, the ones I taught on Zoom last semester. They look different, although I cannot quite place it until they stand up and they are tall. They take up space. I think I do too, although I am not tall. I meet with my graduate students under the trees, with coffee. At first, at the very beginning of the semester, it is terribly hot and there is sweat on our cheeks where the masks we wore inside pressed against our skin. We have slipped off our masks and we see familiar faces, theirs young enough to have changed slightly, my own—who knows—having registered in some form the passage of time and the strange mix of anxiety, work, and leisure that is/was/will always be the pandemic. Speaking of verb tenses, these are meant to be “progress” meetings and a question hangs between us in the air: what have you done so far towards your comps? On your dissertation? What are you planning to accomplish this semester?  Luckily, they do not ask me the same question. It is hard to invoke progress as we ponder together a time when libraries were closed, and fellowships shut down, a time when the academic market has shriveled to nothing, as if it too were receding from contact with the world. And that is to say nothing about loneliness, fear of loneliness, anxiety about illness, illness itself, the upending of family finances, the dissolution of community and cohort on which the often-isolated life of an advanced graduate student writing their dissertation depends. (Since the pandemic I have learned to use the gender-neutral pronoun “their” for the generic singular, after a brief struggle with my horror of number disagreement. This is progress and a partial answer to the question my students do not ask.)

  While I sip my coffee across the table from a single student, my former graduate student is teaching 120 students in three classes in a state university in Georgia. In one of them—a seminar—the students are all masked. In the others, perhaps 80 percent of the students are not. She can provide masks but not require them. Like thousands of her colleagues across the country, she reaches out as if to proffer a gift. Most of them do not accept. I imagine her, frozen in a posture borrowed from Victorian painting, perhaps “Take Your Son, Sir,” by Ford Madox Brown. The mask, the child, are both unwanted offerings, the messily complicated gift of responsibility. 

In the second week of the semester, as director of the Center for the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality, I invited graduate students to our annual planning lunch for new and continuing students. I can’t remember what we did about this event last year; I think we held it online, lunch only in name and time of day. This year, we held the event on campus: outside in the mid-September heat, tucked under the roof of a portico in a small patch of garden. The department administrator reported record-breaking RSVPs; while usually we have to send reminders, students answered our invitations immediately and enthusiastically. Although I always enjoy the lunch, normally I don’t get very involved in planning it. It has for years taken place at the faculty club, where I don’t have to think about the food or the tableware. I plan only for the agenda—the content of the meeting. This year, the Center staff and I pulled together tables, arranged chairs, counted and recounted places. As we tried to place chairs at a safe distance from each other while maintaining a sense of community.  I made cookies and brought tablecloths, falling back, as I always do, on food and table linens to express festivity and hope. As we opened our carefully boxed lunches (no unhygienic platters allowed) and ate slowly and in parallel I realized we were doing something paradigm-shifting. We were, however hesitantly, in person.

Across the south and much of the west and Midwest, faculty in public institutions are forced to tell intimate stories of hardship and illness in order to try to convince their students to mask in class. They speak of their children too young to be vaccinated, or immunocompromised family members, of their own health conditions. They beg. Sometimes this works, often it does not. Some faculty have quit, one of them, again in Georgia, in mid-class when a student, apparently smirking, declined to cover her mouth. Few professors can afford to resign, especially in this academic market. Some have banded together to petition their administrations, some have flouted the rules and required masks. Some have been disciplined or fired. 

My husband, who is also my colleague, is teaching this semester. On his first day, and for the first time, I took a picture of him as he left. If I had “first day of school” pictures of my sons, I would add this one to the album. Instead I post it on Facebook, where my friends have posted their annual photographs of their children posed with their belongings and poised on the threshold of the new year. Like many of the students I see in my feed, my husband sports a backpack.  His faithful dog stands behind him wondering where he might be going after all this time together. In the foreground of the pictureare the things he must find a way to carry:  a large HEPA filter, a small fan, mysterious objects in plastic bags. You can see his water bottle, from which he can only drink before and after class. You cannot see the wardrobe of masks that are probably stuffed into the backpack: an N95 for class, and less effective and cheaper ones for more casual wear. Like many an elementary school child, Scott seems bemused at the day ahead—and overwhelmed by his accoutrements, which surround him without quite protecting him, like a cracked hard shell.

 In Iowa state schools, professors are not allowed to bring up the pandemic in any class in which it does not figures on the syllabus—say, a class in medicine or public health. At least for the first year of the unmentionable time, students flocked to medical humanities classes and those that offered histories of the pandemic, or the representation of infection in literature. Anecdotally, the interest in these classes seems to be waning as students struggle to return to normal. Although syllabi get longer and longer in response to administrative and pedagogical demands, there is no pace on them for COVID, for the thing we are all thinking about.

If my husband is not as fortunate as I am, he is still lucky to be teaching at Rice—at an institution with a mask mandate that all students seem to obey during class. We cannot have a vaccine mandate because the governor will not allow it (we seemed to have rebelled against the governor’s edict in the case of masks but not vaccines, something I am not sure I understand). Nonetheless, over 90 percent of our undergraduate population is vaccinated—and slightly less for grads and faculty/staff. Our surveillance testing program, after a few glitches, is now running like the proverbial well-oiled machine. My required weekly test takes place in a large, airy temporary building across from my office. I am in and out in less than a minute. 

Across the street, Main Street, in the largest medical center in the world, the ICUs are full. Despite the fact that the number of  new cases are waning in Houston, the  number of people in ICUs appears to have plateaued.  It has been many months since a second level of ICU has been added. Yesterday, after a dip in hospital admissions, that second-level ICU was still 85% full. I haven’t heard much lately about mortuary trucks lining up in the Medical Center Parking lots. This might be a sign that the delta variant has peaked, or that we now take these trucks, these extra levels of ICU, for granted. A few weeks ago, a young child had to be flown out of Houston to a hospital in a smaller town because there was no room in the pediatric ward. I can see three hospital buildings from the road between my office and the testing tent, just as I can see my office building, as perfect as a brick doll house, from many a doctor’s office in the medical center.

The patients who enter St Luke’s Hospital, Ben Taub, Methodist, enter in person, their bodies signally present. There are, in fact, too many bodies, too many persons in the ER, the ICU, the hallways and hospital rooms. To be in person there, is, despite the best efforts of nurses, doctors, and other health personnel, to be dehumanized, rolled over on one’s stomach, attached to machines. Being in person is no guarantee of humanity, as we know each time a student refuses to wear a mask in the face of a teacher’s request that they take the health of her child, her parent, her self into account. The fantasy of the in-person semester depends on a fantasy of personhood that seems somehow to have eroded: being face-to-face is no guarantee that people understand or empathize with each other. That fantasy has gone the way of the hot girl, or of normalcy itself.