Tuesday: I wake up angry. Or maybe that’s not right. I get angry when I learn The Girlfriend isn’t feeling better, that her mild, molasses-moving Covid-19 virus has morphed into something like a head cold. Symptoms seem to be moving up her body, from deep-lung to chest, chest to throat, throat to head. But she feels worse today than she did yesterday, a break in the see-saw pattern that’s been holding for more than a week. She takes a cold-flu medicine with caffeine, which upsets her stomach.
My anger makes sense: every day The Girlfriend feels lousy is another day’s delay from when I can see The Kid (and The Girlfriend can see her kids). We’re waiting for 72 hours after we both return to health. (My sickness, trailing hers by 12 to 24 hours, is so mild I don’t think it counts, which may be bullshit rationalization.) We thought Sunday, when she felt pretty good, might be Day 0; now we have to postpone again.
Whatever. I start snapping at everything, from the bathroom sink (now re-clogging; what is she putting down there?) to the kitchen sink (has she ever cleaned the sink strainer?). We can’t put off shopping another day, so I spend a half-hour zipping through my local market, where groceries I can usually buy for $100 cost close to $200. I check the receipt: the market has nothing on sale, so normally marked-down staples (butter, olive oil, milk, bread, pasta, rice) I’ve bought at full price. Plus a bottle of cloves — I want to put four individual buds into a stew — costs $15. Grrrr.
I put groceries away, open a new bar of soap. When we were ailing last week we used pinch-shoppers, and they’ve bought soap with a synthetic “fresh” odor that — combined with the scent of the toilet paper I was forced to buy — makes the bathroom intolerable.
“I’ve always known the soundtrack in my personal hell,” I say, thinking of the year I turned 12, when best-selling singles included “Laughter In The Rain,” “Mandy,” “Have You Never Been Mellow,” “My Eyes Adored You,” “Before The Next Teardrop Falls,” “Thank God I’m A Country Boy,” and, the year’s biggest hit, “Love Will Keep Us Together.” (Just in case anyone wondered to what punk was reacting.) “Now I know what hell’s smell will be: whiffs of putrefaction — vomit, shit, decay — incompetently masked by wafts of chemical floral freshness.”
I try and fail to return my unopened soap (no returns for the foreseeable future, the market has reasonably decided), check the aisles for more. The only brand available: the one I now know I despise. (I must not be the only one; there’s a lot of it.) I walk to the nearby small pharmacy, buy toothpaste, two rolls of dental floss, two bars of unscented soap. Total: $28. Really?
Partly as a way to keep rage in check I’ve barely read the news for a few days. Now The Girlfriend is going through the front section of The Times; when I hear her mutter “Fuckers” for the third time, I decide to ask. “Wisconsin,” she says: the U.S. Supreme Court’s five right-wing justices overruled a lower court’s order to extend voting-by-mail deadlines, meaning Milwaukeeans have to congregate at their city’s five polling places (only five?) in the rain, literally risking their lives to cast a vote. A precursor for November?
There’s no end to national stories that incite outrage. Why has the U.S. been among the worst nations — if not the worst — to respond? The Washington Post and Foreign Policy offer disturbing summaries. Why are Germany and New Zealand doing so much better? Even Ron Fournier — an old Associated Press hand perhaps the most passionately centrist, “report both sides” D.C. journalist of his generation — says the press should ignore the White House as a relentless source of disinformation. The nation still isn’t testing in anything like sufficient capacity; we’re flying blind, ignoring best practices, have no evident plan to end the crisis.
We’ve already started fights about body counts. Trumpians say we’re labeling too many corpses as dying of Covid-19, since some had underlying conditions that contributed to their deaths. (Under that logic, hemophiliacs shouldn’t be counted as gunshot victims: Hey, they might have been saved if they’d bled out slower.) In fact, we’re almost certainly undercounting: this past month 200 New Yorkers on average have died at home each day, compared to normally 20-25; few have been counted as Covid-19-related since they haven’t been tested. The city is changing its counting method, but what about other cities, other states?
As was true in the Age of Trump BCW (Before CoronaWorld), I struggle to track the incompetence, cruelty, graft. But the overall narrative is clear enough. Why no national manufacturing or purchasing plan for ventilators and other medical equipment, leaving hospitals to flounder and states to bid against each other and waste precious dollars? Why shill for an untested drug? Why put the son-in-law into a position to undermine central planning? Why fire the inspector general assigned to oversee the doling out of $2 trillion?
Fintan O’Toole in The New York Review Of Books crafts a rich narrative to make sense of conflicting Trumpian impulses: his personal germaphobia and his tough-guy cavalierness toward public health. It helps me understand something fundamental: Trump sees this pandemic as an extreme example of the American capitalistic game, the game he’s cheated and “won” all his life. In his world, smart guys profit from the pain of suckers and losers. The kind of profiteering at the heart of the ethical crisis in Arthur Miller's "All My Sons"? That’s Trump’s meat-and-potatoes. Tens of thousands die? Well, my friends and I got mine; only idiots pass up gold-plated opportunities.
Late afternoon The Girlfriend is lying in bed, teaching her class via videoconference. I go for a walk, then remember she wants to eat at 6 so she can get on another work-related videoconference at 6:30. Nothing about this day has gone wrong, really; everything pisses me off. I cut my walk short, fix dinner. The Girlfriend makes me promise to walk afterward. I leave just before 7 p.m., my mood temporarily brightening when I’m on the street for the day’s ritual health-care-worker cheering fest. I can’t be cynical about that. (I have to get The Girlfriend outside for this tomorrow.) But it only lasts three minutes.
Given my emotional state I fear returning my mother’s morning call. But I don’t want to ignore her, so I call while walking. I bark when she evinces confusion over whether New York City schools are open (we closed the day after California, remember?) and where The Kid is staying (with The Co-Parent still, of course!). I catch myself: hey, our story keeps changing about when it’ll be safe for The Girlfriend and me to end quarantine. We’re in a state where nobody knows anything. I think about Daniel Kahneman’s theory, that none of us is equipped to make even small choices in the midst of this pandemic.
Before we hang up Mom manages to brighten my mood a bit. I know she and eight or nine neighbors are gathering daily to kibitz in a courtyard of their age-55-and-over apartment complex in northern California. What I haven’t understood: they’re not just sitting on benches; they’re exercising.
A former resident is returning to lead the workouts: “I think she’s the only one older than I am,” says Mom, 89. “But I wouldn’t call them ‘workouts.’ It’s just stretching, really. And I can’t stretch too far. But I think I’m the only one who can do all the exercises. Everyone else has a shoulder, a knee, a hip, a back. I’ve been really lucky.”
It’s true: in my lifetime, at least, Mom has never set foot in a gym unless to see a child play a game; I doubt she’s ever paid for a yoga class, hefted a barbell. But she’s always walked, and — aside from a crooked little finger on her right hand stemming from a ping-pong table mishap — she’s never been injured.
“It’s fun,” she says. “Sometimes we sit on the benches. Mostly we stand. We move around a bit. We make comments. We joke. We giggle.” Mom giggles. “I don’t know what I’d do without it.”
I walk back to my apartment, try to let the giggles work into the interstices of my rage.
(New York state numbers as of Tuesday: 138,836 diagnosed with Covid-19, up 6.2 percent; 5,489 dead, up 15.4 percent. Overall U.S. deaths: 12,675, up 18 percent.)
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