Covid: Packs and Paradox
No one, perhaps, would describe you as “effortlessly elegant,” but you have never before today knowingly gone out with a big stain on the front of your dress. Your excuse is that no one will know who you are behind your mask, which clashes with your stained dress because you have not built a “mask wardrobe.” Perhaps, you think to yourself, it is not a stain after all, but just an effect of the light. You are not sure, because you have not scheduled your eye exam in the world-famous medical center whose ICU capacity is in “Phase Two: Surge.”
Perhaps you are not so much slovenly, as getting older. Perhaps this is a good thing: you could be one of those women who wear bright colors and big hats and says what she thinks even when she is not necessarily thinking straight. You are also not sure if you count as old, or even “elderly.” At the beginning of the pandemic you were riveted by the question of whether, at 61, you were included in the most dire categories, the ones at the far right of the chart, that as far as you can see, ends always in death. One day in one article or study, you were safely “under sixty-five” and therefore sort of middle- aged and sprightly. You could, perhaps run a marathon or, more realistically a 5K, after a (long) lifetime of never running at all. The next day, you read another article, and you were in the dangerously vulnerable “over sixties.” This is when you learned the term “comorbidity,” which you most frequently encountered in the plural. Over time, you learned not to care whether you were old or not. This was not the gracious acceptance of old age practiced, for example, by those who grow out their grey hair even when they discover it cannot, really, be called “silver,” but the kind of not caring that results in wearing a stained dress to the most exciting activity on your weekly “schedule”—the trip to the grocery store. You have stopped wearing makeup, except of course on Zoom, when you pile on the foundation and blusher itself aging in your drawer for possibly many years. When your friend told you about the “touch up your appearance” button on Zoom, you felt like weeping, since up to that point you felt you looked not so much old, not so much ugly, as not quite human. The touch-up button, alas, does not solve the problem of the human; you notice that you and the friends who use it have smooth, slightly glowing faces like high-quality plastic.
Old or elderly, middle-aged, or in your prime, your life is now defined by Things You Don’t Do. Of all the things you don’t do, the most remarkable, from the point of view of a previous self, is to go to restaurants. You loved restaurants more than you should: the fancy ones with the cutting edge combinations of ingredients, for which you had to make reservations weeks in advance; the local dives that were often also grocery stores; the ones you kept going to out of habit, ordering the same comforting dishes. Now your fears about the world outside are somehow all concentrated in the word “restaurant” which now takes on the shape and heft of a horror movies.. When you watch British detective mysteries, as you do every day on the recently discovered Brit Box, you are confused. When the characters—as they do— go to restaurants, bars, or cafes, you expect the spooky background music to be playing. You want to break the fourth wall, leap into the TV and warn them that they are sitting too close together, that while they might other scenes be walking alone down a dark alley or a windswept moor, it is the coffee and pastries that will kill them. Your phobia about restaurants causes you to misread plots entirely and lose your much-vaunted ability to spot the murderer a third of the way through the show. You have better luck with detection in books, especially since even on Kindle you have run out of Golden Age murder mysteries and have started rereading some for the fourth time, which makes it easier to know Who Did It.
Something has happened to time in the pandemic. You are not the first to say or feel this. You are both crushingly bored and reluctant to do anything interesting. Every morning you wake too early or too late; either way, lunch comes too quickly and you are violently hungry or not hungry enough. Zoom meetings, many of which you initiate, happen too often and last forever, although when they are over you miss the faces and voices of your colleagues after you abruptly click on “leave meeting,’ or more satisfying still, when you are the host and can “End Meeting for All.” Your days unfold in thrall to your Apple watch, which you use to make sure you exercise and do not develop comorbidities. Sometimes it gives you exercise minutes for walking fast, sometimes it does not. Minutes pile up fast when you swim in the pool, even if you are just goofing around with the dogs. The watch has its own time, and it is, finally pandemic time and you are subject to it.
You have changed too, and in basic ways. These ways have something to do with what the assertiveness training classes you took in the seventies would have called “personal boundaries.” Sometimes you have none. Sometimes a hard shell forms around you. You are a paradox, and paradoxes make you tired. You did not think, in the days before COVID, that you could be lonely and overwhelmed by the proximity of others at the same time. You crave touch but insist on your bodily space. There are too many dogs in the house, but when you son takes his back to Austin with him, you feel a dog-shaped hole in your heart.
Your biggest realization, your last post notwithstanding, is that during COVID you are not so much part of a household, or even a family, but of a pack—with its shifting but crucial hierarchies, its strange intimacies and interdependencies, its wild enthusiasm, and its obsession with thresholds. It is a pack made up of animals and humans, who move through the space of the house and the time of the pandemic, not knowing quite where they are going, but who are grateful for a sense that others are moving with them.