COVID: Election Road Trip

November 3, 2020. It is the longest day of the year. This is a strange summer solstice ripped out of its natural order into an endless fall. The sun has been high in the sky, it seems, since at 6 a.m. I tumbled out of bed into time that refuses to travel and a day without shape. This shapelessness, this lack of temporal markers, is due in part to the fact that I voted three weeks ago on the second day of early voting in Texas. The choice of the second and not the first day was deliberate, cautious: my husband and I would vote almost as soon as we could to express the urgency of this moment, but we would be cautious and avoid the longest lines, the greatest threat of COVID contagion. Our decision to vote early makes this day feel belated. I think back to more normal elections in more normal times and about how hard it was to get to the polls between classes, meetings, exercise, and commuting. While COVID has not always mitigated my sense of business—quite the contrary sometimes—today there is not much to do; my calendar tells me that if I were voting today, I could vote almost any time. My one meeting of the day, which usually is still going at the 90-minute mark, stops neatly at its Zoom-allotted one hour. My colleagues and I tell each other that we have done all that we can do.

Released from the meeting, I realize that my goal is to pass the time until 1:30 when my husband and I plan to drive the three hours to Austin to visit my son on his birthday eve, and to watch—or not watch—the election results together. I say “pass the time,” but I might mean something more fraught, more violent. Florence Nightingale argued that “killing time” was actually killing (middle-class) women, defined by their passivity and their leisure. Like many of those women, I kill time by doing household tasks.

I wander down to the kitchen for my obligatory pre-trip cleaning, a ritual inherited, like so much of my magical thinking, from my mother. This is the logic she taught me, mostly without words: “If, when leaving on vacation, you leave your house a mess, when you get into a car accident or your plane crashes or you are mugged and violently hurt, the police will have to break into your home. Under those circumstances, you want that home to be as neat as possible. Moreover, you can (perhaps) preventthat car accident, plane crash, even the mugging, by keeping your house clean enough so that you will not be ashamed when strangers enter you home.” It was from other people—mostly the mothers of friends--that I learned the other, even more intimate, story of disaster and exposure: the warning that you should always wear clean (and preferably pretty but modest) underwear in case you were hit by a bus and had to go to the hospital. My mother’s clean house was other people’s clean underwear. While on one level I buy into my mother’s logic, I hone it to another more topical purpose: if I rid myself of mess and dirt, the country will rid itself of Trump. The kitchen, disappointingly, is empty-nest tidy. Halfheartedly, I wipe down the sink that I once read was the center of a truly clean house.

From upstairs I hear the chime of the dryer declaring that its mysteriously long “normal” cycle is over. There is always, I think hopefully, something to fold. After performing my favorite, most gratifying, household task of emptying the lint filter, I take the pile of my husband’s clothes to our laundry table, aka the cat’s bed. It has been a while since I have folded a whole load of my husband’s clothes; it seems that over the years we have established separate laundries. Of course, a shirt or a sock of mine can creep into his wash; sometimes he folds these items as one might fold puff pastry or an envelope, gently and in thirds so that everything is roughly the same shape. Sometimes he leaves my items in a pile on top of the dryer. I cannot really correlate the two alternatives with anything else: his mood, the state of our relationship, how busy he is. The clothes just appear, one way or the other. He has done what he can at a particular moment. I realize I am similarly inconsistent, although I have three levels of care for his stuff: the pile, the quick t-shirt fold, and the full-on Martha Stewart (definitely not the Marie Kondo) treatment.

Today I am folding like Martha Stewart, perhaps even, like Martha Stewart’s mother, a figure I think about perhaps too often. I am folding like my own mother, as if lives depended on it. The shirts are as crisp as I can make them without ironing; the shorts and socks are molded into regular shapes that still articulate what garment, what part of the body we are dealing with. Some of the garments are new to my folding; I linger on the work, enjoying the contours of these empty garments that are so different from my own. I do intuitively what my mother did after folding: I stroke the fabric into smoothness and twitch a corner—always only one corner-- to signal I have done all I can.

It does not take Freud to know that folding is not only about time, but about control. If I cannot shape the outcome of the election, or even regulate my feelings about it, I can make clothes into shapes and shapes into piles. If the clothes are covered with cat hair, or the dogs sit on the piles and merge pants and underwear, these are disasters I can mitigate. The success or failure of folding is literally in my hands. It feels safe to be matching one corner with another, finding and smoothing out a wrinkle, until I an image creeps in, unbidden, between the layers of shirts and handkerchiefs. I am not given to visions, or hallucinations, but today I pause the rhythm of my hands on cotton, on polyester, on mysterious “breathable” fabrics, to imagine that all this care is not working at all. Like Lucy Snowe in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, I imagine a storm, not quite literal and not quite metaphorical; this one, enters the house from the north, rips the fabric from my hands, leaving shreds and tatters. Unlike the police in my mother’s story of leaving, this force enters the house while I am in the middle of housework.

It is finally time to leave for Austin. Even the process of departure is surprisingly, sinisterly, efficient, although we discover later that, being out of practice at leaving home, we have left several key things behind: toothpaste, an extra mask, my laptop. The clock in the car, still set to daylight savings time, offers the promises of temporal passage, but in the landscape through which we pass between Houston and Austin it seems always to be high noon, cruelly blue and bright. This is Trump Country; we pass sign after sign that tells us so. I wonder, for perhaps the hundredth time, where the voters are in this landscape. I know they are there, that they are in fact so numerous that the much-repeated promise of return to a blue Texas is, in fact, a mirage. Gerrymandering aside, the numbers are about land and landscape—the sheer square miles of the Texas countryside, where in the West the sky is a blue bowl and the road is a black ribbon, and here in Central Texas, the sky over strip malls hints at bigger places to come.

As we approach Austin, the Trump signs give way to Biden/Harris signs; we are in the suburbs now: the site, nationwide, of a move ever so slightly to the left. I think of the “suburban women” Trump has called into an older identity, promising work for their husbands and isolation for their homes. I think of what I have read about “mixed political marriages,” in which the women are more often Biden supporters and the men more often supporters of Trump. I think about marriages in which one partner “cancels out” the other, marriages in which the sum of the parts is, for election purposes, zero. Austin’s toll roads (we have forgotten once again to buy a Texas Tag and will have to pay a surcharge by mail) bypass the houses and neighborhoods at the edge of this small capital city. Again, we see almost no one until we reach the complex where my son lives in a suburb north of the city. Here, within the gates, there are surprising numbers of people—and an enormous number of dogs. I perform my reflexive check to find that almost everyone is masked. Ironically (or not) the masking makes them recognizable to me; I sssume they believe what I do about COVID, about science, and about care for others.

We have done what we can to celebrate Ross’s birthday. He has already received his presents during his visit to Houston two weeks ago. I wish now that I had brought a cake; there would have been so much time to bake it in the long morning that feels like a lifetime ago. I could have done more to make this like other birthdays. We cannot celebrate as we usually do: no restaurants, no brother Paul, no unwrapping of presents. There are, however, four dogs (we have brought three of them) and the election. For better or for worse, we will sit in front of the tv with takeout food and see if celebration feels like the right word for this birthday. Ross turns on his projector system, and the blank wall fills with CNN talking heads and maps of the country. As the results begin, ever so slowly, to trickle in, as we become slowly aware that we might wait for days or weeks for the final result, I think that I have not done enough. Where in past elections I have given time, this year I have given only money. I planned so many times to phone bank, to write letters-- and I did not. Despite the length of all my days, not just this one, I felt that, somehow, I did not have time enough to give. 

As usual, the map of Texas turns from blue to red as the night goes on. Austin is a blue patch. Houston, Dallas, San Antonio and El Paso are blue. The first four are among the top eleven biggest cities in the US in terms of population; Houston is the fourth largest city in the country. They are dwarfed, swallowed by red. We have driven for three hours, from one major city to another, approximately the distance from New York City to Baltimore, which would involve passing through 4 or 5 states. We covered, however, only a small portion of Texas, which east to west is 870 miles (12 hours of continuous driving) and covers 800 miles north to south. As road trips go, this is a short one. Because of COVID we completed it without getting out of the car or waking the dogs who fell into a trancelike state when we crossed the beltway that encircles Houston. In another sense, it is as if we did not travel at all; by staying in the car we have, if you will forgive me for borrowing a term from the world Harry Potter, merely apparated. We have left one blue space for another; while that place is prettier, less cosmopolitan, hillier than the one we left, it is not, in the lexicon of electoral politics in 2020, any different. If it had not been for COVID, we would have stopped at Texas’s famously clean roadside store, Bucc-ees for pickles and jerky. We might have lingered in the town of Brenham with its ice-cream factory and its Rose Emporium. We might have stretched our legs along the roadside in fields that in the spring turn the unique shade of indigo of bluebonnets. We might have paused at historical markers, turned off the road at Round Top and eaten slices of pie as big as Texas before visiting the herb farm for plants and—if we stayed until evening—music. But COVID keeps us in a bubble that moves with us along Route 290. Somehow the pandemic makes Texas bigger, the people and dogs in our car which seemed so big when we bought it infinitely smaller. It is hard sometimes to do anything when you feel so very small.