Covid: Housebound
From the time I was able to notice such things, I knew that my grandmother Rosie, my mother’s mother, did not leave her apartment on the upper west side of New York City where she had lived since my mother was a teenager. For years I was strangely uncurious about this fact of her life and mine; she was, in her own words, ‘housebound,” and I accepted the term as its own form of explanation. As far as I knew, being or becoming housebound was a natural stage in a woman’s life, perhaps transmitted through the maternal line. I imagined a time when my mother would no longer go out-and even, somewhere at the chronological horizon of possibility, a time when I too would be housebound.
As I grew older, I began to think more diagnostically: Rosie, as I called her, had “heart trouble,” although that trouble did not stop her from cooking different meals every night for her husband, her four bachelor brothers, and my uncle. By the time Rosie died (of heart trouble) when I was in college, I knew the word “agoraphobia,” but no one in my family used it, just as they did not use the word “alcoholic” for my father who, my mother agreed, “drank too much.” I am torn even now between medicalized terms and the more familiar, homier ones my family employed. Philosopher and cultural historian Michel Foucault writes of a shift in or around the end of nineteenth century when descriptions of behavior (for example, “he likes to have sex with men”) became identities (“he is a homosexual”), and of a turn from personality quirks (“she has black moods”) to a medicalized lexicon (she is a depressive). “Agoraphobia,” or the more damningly individualized nominal form “agoraphobic” swallow up my grandmother as I remember her, making invisible all she did in the apartment that defined and pathologized her. As I struggle to remember her without photographs (dislike of being photographed was another—perhaps not unconnected—quirk or symptom of hers) The label dims her cooking, her family stories, her sense of humor, her love of my (alcoholic) father: “I love Canada,” she said often. “It has brought me three great things: those wonderful Hudson Bay blankets, the cool fronts in September, and my beautiful son-in-law.”
Had we wanted to go there, to agoraphobia, we certainly could have. My grandmother was an (almost) textbook case. After Rosie’s death my mother told stories of my grandmother in early middle age, when she would only rarely agree to visit other people’s houses. My mother remembered the embarrassment she felt when Rosie would arrive at a friend’s house in a hat with a veil, sitting stiffly on the chair nearest to the door, and refusing food. If this posture, this position by the door was explained by Rosie being Rosie, there were also more comprehensive and larger-scale explanations for her behavior. In college I read that agoraphobia was a classic response among Jews of a certain generation to an experience of the Holocaust, an event Rosie experienced from a distance, her family having moved to New York in the 1890s. Perhaps she took on, I thought, the burdens of a missing generation, perhaps she was paralyzed by survivor guilt.
The very secular Rosie’s relation to Jewishness was a mystery to me; it surfaced only in two family stories. The first had to do with Rosie’s mother, the saintly “Mama Helena” after whom I was named. Mama Helena was so beloved that when she died the nuns at the convent next door tolled the bell as they would for one of their own. Rosie, sitting alone in her apartment for the last ten years of her life, began the process of revising the Mama Helena myth, wondering why she, the oldest girl of nine siblings, was the one to take care of the younger children, cooking, cleaning and visiting them in the hospital while her mother took to her bed . Being alone at home gave Rosie the time and place to think and to reevaluate. The second story was always told as a warning: one morning Rosie bent too close to the bacon she was cooking for breakfast and was blinded in one eye by splattering grease. In my mother’s telling the moral of the story was quite literal: be careful when cooking bacon. I wonder, though, how the bacon signified in this story of disastrous consequences. Was it, as my friend Susan (jokingly) insists, about her travails with her German-made car, a punishment inflicted by Jewish ancestors? Even now, I am quick to narrativize cause and effect: perhaps the bacon incident (which I now have no way of pinpointing chronologically) was the trauma that kept Rosie tethered inside.
To say that my grandmother never went out is an exaggeration. I can think of two exceptions, one big and one small. One day in the mid-seventies, some time after my family had moved from Italy to New York, my father rented a car and persuaded Rosie to come with us on a trip to the cemeteries on Long Island where so many of her family members were buried—and where all of the adult members in that car—my father, mother, and Rosie—would be buried themselves. Long Island has cemeteries the way other suburbs have car dealerships—miles upon miles of acreage where the dead are parked in rows under regular rows of tombstones. Like, I suspect, many New York families, our relatives’ graves are distributed along the elongated spine of the island. The cemeteries have different names, allegiances, brands, religions. There are veteran’s cemeteries, Jewish cemeteries, Hungarian cemeteries, Hungarian Jewish cemeteries, to name just a few. The one where my mother and father are buried in perhaps the least distinctive and the most anonymous—so large that my half-sister the Anglican priest, her existence only partly known to me, presided over many graveside ceremonies there without noticing what she had seeking for decades—the name of her father and mine. Although I have been to various of these burial places many times, I do not remember being there with Rosie, or how we got back to her apartment. I see her only on the journey out, unveiled but sitting erect, as close as she could get to the passenger door.
My grandmother, late in life, also left her apartment for hospital stays and stretches of various lengths in nursing homes. Her bothers—four of them at that point—and several of her cousins followed suit in a generational exodus from their apartments into institutional life. My mother, fresh off the ship that took us from Rome to New York City, began a long period of life as a visitor, often going to see a relative in a “home” six days a week. On weekends, I would often come too. Before I was old enough to be allowed inside individual rooms, I would sit in the lounge reading the longest novels I could find to pass the time while my mother visited. After I was twelve, I was mostly allowed inside, where my grandmother was no longer housebound but bedridden, and my great uncles would reminisce about evenings at Rosie’s. Perhaps they too, starting in middle age, after their “bachelor” lives were muted, were agoraphobic, although in a different sense, drawn nightly to their sister’s house and to the roles they had played as children.
I have thought often of my grandmother during COVID, and have thought also of the word “housebound” as a possibly better way to describe what so many of us were doing (and not doing) than “quarantine” or isolation, or the clumsy “staying safe at home” of public health campaigns. Quarantine is for those who have, or think they might have, been exposed to the virus; my sons quarantined within our home after attending the George Floyd protests earlier this summer. Isolation is technically for the sick, although it names what so many of us feel. Stay at home is both literally an order, voiced as though to a dog, and a statement of mild preference, as in “I’d rather stay at home tonight.” “Housebound” recognizes both the pull of home and its demands, its status as simultaneous sanctuary and prison. “Bound,” itself, that like “cleave, “(to cut, to join) has two opposite meanings—one voluntary and one decidedly not.
My mother, it turns out, escaped being housebound, although I think it was increasingly hard for her to leave home. I was amazed and moved that months before her death, when she must already have been feeling some of the effects of the cancer that was soon to kill her, she took a cruise with a friend to the East Coast of Canada. Nothing—the cruise, the cold, the travelling with a friend—could have been more unlike my mother, or a braver thing to do. Ironically, I, the career woman and traveler, am the one who is following my grandmother indoors. It has taken COVID for me to feel what she might well have felt—the frisson of fear at seeing other people on the street, the power and heft of the threshold, the sense of defending all that is loved and precious by drawing inward.
In my bedroom, behind me as I write, is a painted miniature of Rosie; it is part of a set that includes her mother and father that has traveleld with me from home to home for the past forty years. I do not know if there are similar pictures of her siblings that were inherited by other family members. In the picture, Rosie is perhaps 20, her red hair piled on top of her head has the shape and movement of the grey curls I remember. She wears a high-necked lace blouse that I associate with the turn of the 20thcentury, and a heart-shaped locket I am surprised has not been passed down. She is almost expressionless, her teeth set in a half-smile that does not disturb the stillness of her face. No matter whether I place the companion picture of Mama Helena above or below Rosie’s (and I have done both in different houses over the years), Mama Helena looks away from her daughter, gazing slightly upward as befits the saint she was for so long in family lore. The saint is gone, and in her place for me, as I think for Rosie, is the mother who kept her daughter homebound. Perhaps it is my nominal connection with Mama Helena that allows me to see her too as a prisoner—of a brood of children, of my great grandfather about whom I have never heard a word, of the need to be a Jewish saint. She too was bound herself to home and to bed as Rosie kept house.