MARCH
It comes stealthily at first. A handful of deaths in a nursing home somewhere near Seattle. A woman and a man traveling from Wuhan on a plane. I make note of these isolated incidents, store them away in the part of my brain reserved for midnight worry.
His body is soft and white as Wonder Bread. I don’t mind this. He is kindhearted and listens to Nina Simone. He laughs at my predictions of a coming pandemic—a warm, indulgent laugh. On one of our first dates, he takes me to a Narcotics Anonymous meeting. I am moved by this. It is an offering unlike anything my ex-husband ever made. The admission of an inner life. The impulse to share it. What should I do? I ask. Don’t talk, he says. Only the addicts get to talk.
After sex, we lie on our backs and discuss the distant plague. It is not an aphrodisiac, but like the sex itself, it reminds us of our mortality.
It is increasingly clear that the virus is all around us. Biding its time. Spreading quietly from city to city. Bursting forth like crocus from the hard beds of our yards.
Seeing his house for the first time makes me sad. A tumble-down ranch on the edge of town. His refrigerator empty, save for a few energy drinks in brightly colored cans. He’s installed deadbolts on the door of his bedroom. To keep intruders out, he says. There’s a loaded gun beneath the bed. The place is more like a fortress than a home. A photo of his ex-wife, arms around their two small children, gazes down on his king-size bed. You don’t seem ready for a girlfriend, I say.
My friends and I are breathless as we speak into our phones. They are closing the schools, restaurants, bars. At long last, something has come to our shores. But nothing ever happens here, we tell each other. War. Famine. Disease. These things happen across the sea, in places whose names we find hard to pronounce and quickly forget. I am afraid, but beneath the fear runs a current of possibility.
He’s not my boyfriend. He’s made this clear. But the virus could change all that. He and I discuss the news of lock-down. What will it mean for us? I ask. He can’t sleep at night, he says. Anxiety comes in rippled waves. All he can think about is preserving his life for the sake of his kids. He has already purchased a box of N95 masks, a Tyvek suit. No more sleepovers? I ask. No, he says. Not even walks around the lake? No. Not even that. Well, I guess we’ve come to the end, I say. It feels like the snap of a twig. A small thing, but irrevocable.
For the first time in years, I walk around the lake alone.
Hand washing becomes a ritual, like drinking tea or mixing a cocktail. There is intrinsic pleasure, purpose, reward. I hold my hands under the faucet and whisper the 23rd psalm to myself. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.
How easily ritual bleeds into superstition. Salt, mirrors, ladders. Magic numbers and bargains with god. I leave the groceries in their bags for a few hours before unpacking. Maybe the virus will disappear if I turn my back on it. Bleach is the new holy water, and I wipe down surfaces with sponges five times, six times. Without thinking, I run my hand down the wooden banister. Anxious, I calculate how many others have touched it within the past week. Just my daughters and I, and I breathe a sigh of relief. More than the three of us, and my mind is crowded with ventilators and hospital gowns pale as ghosts.
I complete my census form, and before I can stop myself, I lick the envelope. Why did I lick the envelope? FOR FUCK SAKE, WHY DID I DO THAT? I rinse my tongue in the kitchen sink.
My younger daughter heads out into the twilight on her skateboard, the setting sun behind her head, her green hair a nimbus of light. I say a silent prayer that she observe social distancing. No high fives. No body slamming. No furtive kisses or sharing of joints.
People are dying on cruise ships, I tell my elder daughter. I feel like it’s coming for us. She accuses me of melodrama as she, too, slips out the door and into the night.
I feel seasick and lie down on the living room floor.
My ex-husband replaces the locks on all his doors and tells the girls they can no longer stay with him. He doesn’t want them to infect his girlfriend. They toss this off with laughter and a shrug, but there is anger just beneath the skin. The elder asks, Why did he bother becoming a dad if he didn’t even want us around? I sip my tea, close my eyes, wonder at suddenly finding myself a single mother.
My daughters find me in bed, fretting about the ones who got away: husband, boyfriends, scattered men who blew through my life too quickly to earn titles. They drag me out of bed and feed me eggs with burnt toast and honey. The elder pushes hair out of my eyes, suggests I sign up for an online dating site. Forget about the plague, Mom, says the younger. This is your time to run wild.
I’ve never run wild. I have no idea what this even means.
I craft a profile for the woman I imagine myself to be: Middle aged, yet overflowing with vitality. Neurotic, yet irresistible. Hungry, but not too hungry.
I meet a man who makes money on the side reviewing people’s online dating pictures for pornographic content. I ask him what he finds. Sometimes tits and ass, but mainly just dick pics, he tells me. Hundreds of them. I invite him to spend the night and we fall into whiskey-soaked sleep. Morning spills through the window, and I watch him ready himself for departure. He pulls on underwear and socks, his movements slow and ponderous. I appraise him part by part. Though none are beautiful in and of themselves, his body—the gestalt of it—is dense with life.
He tells me he wants to keep his options open. Of course, I say. No harm, no foul. I walk him to the door but no farther.
The coffee is bitter. I open my phone and scan the infection rates in my county. I promise myself and the Virgin Mary on the wall that from here on out I’ll follow the rules of lockdown.
I check my email, and he’s sent me a playlist of women in the desert, voices like lonesome flutes. I listen until I can’t stand it anymore.
The dating site is full of people like me, trying to figure out what romance means in the time of coronavirus. Some are glad to postpone human touch. Others seek sexual abandon. They type out what they want to do, whisper obscenities into the phone. I find myself traveling in both circles, depending on the day or hour.
I joke about Eros and Thanatos—love and death—breathing down each other’s necks. It makes sex even better, says one online suitor.
He pitches himself as the perfect plague-time lover. Unencumbered, he says. No wife, no kids, I’m an artist who works from home. He orders his groceries delivered to his door. Safe. Clean as a whistle. I meet him one night after the girls have gone to bed. We stand together, awkward in the darkness. He feeds a bonfire with brambles and logs. Flame illuminates his face. I pee in his yard because his toilet doesn’t flush. My house is a work in progress, he tells me. I try not to think about the tarps that serve as makeshift roof and siding. I imagine instead the house it is destined to become once COVID is over—a splendid thing filled with hand hewn columns, air and light.
In bed, I find he is covered in downy fur, soft as a kitten. This makes me laugh out loud.
I call him the next morning, but I don’t hear back.
A week passes. Then another week. A message lands in my inbox with an apology. I’m sorry, he says. I was scared. I was afraid I was dying.
These are strange times, I tell myself, and forgiveness costs nothing.
He doesn’t want the neighbors to know he’s breaking quarantine, so I park down the street, slip through his side gate like a shadow. He offers me a bird’s nest and a turtle shell. For your collection, he says. I offer him plum cake, fresh from the oven. We eat it in his garden, a cup of kombucha to wash it all down. I look up at the sun and feel like the glass in my hand—fragile and full to the brim with golden light.
Our sex reminds me of small creatures tussling in burrows, all paws and teeth and bellies filled with meat. I make happy animal noises, and he covers my mouth with his hand. Shhhh, he says, the neighbors.
I entertain fantasies of domesticity. There are sharp knives and wood fire and porches. There are fingers that press hard against my waist.
Days go by, and I realize he’s disappeared again—a coronavirus ghost.
I promise myself: No more men who’ve never been married. No more men in half-built houses. No more men who hunker down for the duration, who sever ties at the first upwellings of fear.
APRIL
The teens are running amok. They can’t seem to take lockdown seriously and ignore my pleas for safe behavior. The younger wears her mask under her nose. The elder invites strangers into the house. Neither uses the hand sanitizer I leave on the sink. Both sneak out after dark to drink and vape, to hump in the back seats of Ubers. I smell the alcohol on their breath, the smoke in their hair. There’s a knock at the door. I open it and my daughters tumble into the house, the scent of death and fire in their wake.
But I’m no better. I catch the downtown train to meet someone new. I face backwards in my seat and watch the past unspool behind me. Buildings shrink to the size of dimes, then turn into specks on the horizon.
We sit at an outdoor table with two yards of dusky sky between us. I order a cocktail and he orders soda pop on ice. He tells me where he is in the 12 Step Program, how he relapsed a year ago when his doctor prescribed OxyContin for muscle spasms. He keeps running his hands through his hair. A nervous tic, he tells me. Comes from drinking too much Coke.
We take off our masks. He tastes like gum. Here we go, I think. At least he’s pretty. Our shirts come off and we lie down on his couch. His arms are covered in serpents. I ask him how much it costs for tattoos like that. A lot, he says. But they’re totally worth it. Girls love them. He smiles up at me and I almost forgive him for lumping me together with all the others. I get up to use the toilet, and while I’m there, I check his bathroom cabinet. It’s overflowing with ointments and unguents, more beauty products than I will ever own.
He can’t get it up. He apologizes. Middle age is humbling as fuck, he laughs. We neck some more. My leg, trapped against the couch, falls asleep. I stand up to shake out pins and needles. I think about bodies and their fallibility. He switches on the lights. The dog has chewed up my rabbit fur hat, and the carpet is a scene of carnage. He yells at the dog. It doesn’t really matter, I say. It’s just a hat.
He drives me home past midnight. Lost somewhere in the darkness, we get it right for just an instant. He pulls up to a red light. His hand finds the inside of my thigh. I lick the salt from his wrist and think of tide pools, of imperfect lives washed clean by the sea.
The pandemic warps our sense of time. Some days, it gallops by. Other days, it gets stuck like the bathroom faucet, and I can’t stand hearing its drip.
Stopping at an intersection, I see a young man, afro like a dark halo, swinging wildly on a playground swing. Higher and higher he goes. He launches himself like a bird taking flight, or maybe an angel. I hold my breath. The light turns green. He vanishes into thin air.
I am working at my desk when the man with the snake arms calls and asks if I’d like to be his girlfriend. I’m disarmed by his offer – the sweetness, the whiff of elementary school playground. Sure, I say. Why not? Someone who actually wants a relationship. But do I really want him? I sidestep this question and turn up the volume on PJ Harvey’s songs of desire and rage.
After a few nights, I break it off. I need porn, and prostitutes, and street drugs, he laughs, just to get me started. And to finish? I ask. Finishing’s a thing of the past.
Something erupts inside my chest. A tiny volcano.
The governor issues a shelter in place order. We are not to leave home for anything but exercise and groceries. I feel the tears come thick and fast. Finally, the ammunition I need to wrangle myself and two teen daughters.
Life is reduced to its skeletal structure. There is simple elegance to our days. My daughters and I shop for rice, milk, chicken parts. We walk the old blind dog around the block.
Out of the blue, a new fur hat arrives in the mail. Take care of yourself, he’s scrawled on the side of the package.
The ground is littered with bruised camellias. Blossoms are everywhere—in the street, on the hoods of cars, abandoned in gutters. The old dog sniffs a bush. I pick up a fallen flower and inhale.
My mother sends a mask made of purple velvet. I imagine her on the other side of the continent—nearsighted, bent over her antique sewing machine, threading the needle with cotton the color of bearded iris. I put on my mask and feel like I’m channeling Prince. I’m suddenly all kinds of regal.
The paper says grocery store workers are beginning to get sick and die. I leave a big tip to assuage my guilt, but my stomach churns and I have no appetite for eating.
The paper says two of my younger daughter’s teachers have died. One was hooked up to a ventilator. Oxygen forced down her throat like a fist. Both were younger than I am.
The paper says people are dying alone in hospital rooms. I stop reading. I fear death, but more than that, I fear dying without my daughters—touching my face, pouring their love into my ears. When they were small, I made them tell me they would climb into my bed and hold me. Promise me, I said. Promise me you’ll be there when I die.
I am reading Camus. It goes on and on. The life of the village seesaws between terror and tedium. There is no end in sight for his plague or ours.
I turn a new leaf: No more breaking quarantine. No more falling into bed with strangers. No more hypocrisy—same rules for me as for my daughters.
I am already looking for loopholes. […]
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Eve Müller makes zines and paper cutouts. She is a newcomer to the world of literary non-fiction/memoir, but has a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley and has published extensively on autism and language. She is a single mom who lives in College Park, MD with her two breathtakingly reckless teen daughters.