Friday. Like each morning of the last nine weeks, the Girlfriend and I wake in my Brooklyn apartment. The Kid, who goes to bed at 10:30 p.m. weeknights in CoronaWorld (9 p.m. Before CoronaWorld), has been rustling around as late as midnight this week, getting glasses of water and such, rising as late as 10 a.m. Last night I told her I’d rouse her at 8:45; instead, she walks out at 9, asking, “Why didn’t you wake me up?”
I give us both a brief warning about transitions, the days she swaps parental abodes. Last Friday, when I went to pick her up at The Co-Parent’s, she was nasty to both of us. Two Fridays ago, shortly before she left my place, she and I had our biggest CoronaWorld fight, about chores, which ended in screaming on both sides.
(“You had one job,” The Girlfriend said. “Not to get angry.”
“I know,” I said. “I failed.”)
Today goes better. The Kid takes out garbage and recycling, packs her school bag without complaint. The Girlfriend and I are swift packers. We jam food, bags into The Girlfriend’s car while she waits 15 minutes for a couple of deli sandwiches from my local market. (“I should have remembered how slow the deli guy is,” I say.) We drop The Kid, pick up The Girlfriend’s Son. I decline to go up to her messy apartment, wait almost 30 minutes by the car. It’s a gorgeous spring day; lots of walkers pass, all masked, even the couple holding lit cigarettes, who use a deft one-handed mask technique: remove, inhale, exhale, replace. By the time we hit the road, it’s after noon.
Over the last nine weeks The Girlfriend has visited Manhattan once, to help her eldest move from their college art studio. I haven’t ventured more than 3 miles from my apartment, the Girlfriend’s Son not more than 2 miles from hers. The pandemic is taking notions of New York City provincialism — where, say, a girlfriend moving downtown creates a “long-distance relationship” — entirely too far.
Our map app sends us north via the standard route: Brooklyn Bridge (“Goodbye, borough!”), FDR Drive, George Washington Bridge (“Goodbye, city!”).
“Are you excited?” The Girlfriend asks.
Not really. There’s more traffic than I expected: construction; a “misplaced truck” on the FDR (so warns a road sign; we see only a stalled town car); plenty of congestion, though far less than the typical early-Friday-afternoon, city-departing rush. Traffic persists through the 14-mile northbound New Jersey-17 corridor, which encompasses local diners, flooring sellers, auto detailers, car lots, as well as outlets of apparently every major U.S. retail chain — a stretch many Americans would embrace but fills me with murky gloom. I celebrated moving to a neighborhood dense in retail but with nary a chain store a mile in any direction; I felt disappointed to learn, a year later, that a Home Depot lies a mile to my east and, in the past year, that both Starbucks and Emack & Bolios have clawed their way in. This is no doubt curmudgeonly privilege on my part; but I like buying buckets and mops for $2 more than necessary at my locally owned hardware store, ice cream from a vendor invested in the success of the nearby public schools.
I feel myself start to breathe deeper as we continue north on the New York Thruway, a route surrounded by greenery, cutting through rolling hills. The Son busies himself in the back seat with a game on his phone; The Girlfriend is practically bouncing beside me. It was her idea to leave the city. She’s been depressed for weeks — first sick, then unable to shake CoronaWorld woe.
Ninety minutes later we arrive at our small house — a cabin, really, newly and nicely refurbished — just outside a town built around the local skiing industry. From the front porch we hear the road that cuts through town, see houses on either side, the Catskills rising to our south and west. To our urban eyes it feels remote. In the back yard I see Chip and Dale, a couple of spry chipmunks, chase each other around a birch trunk. Ten minutes after we unpack, The Son calls us to the back door to watch a young bear ambling through our yard, headed, apparently, to town.
It’s mid-afternoon. We take a quick trip to the town’s surprisingly big supermarket, which requires masks, has few customers. After we get back, no one wants to move. We read, write, lollygag. We heat lasagna. The Son and Girlfriend play a game I lack energy to learn. I start a 14-day free membership at The Criterion Collection, watch Paul Mazursky’s “Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice” (1969), which I don’t exactly like but serves as a fascinating time capsule.
After her game, The Girlfriend says, “I’m so happy.”
“Why does it feel so good for you to leave the city?”
“I feel released. Like there was a binding around me, of stress and confinement and fear and dismal ennui, which just got released. As much as I understood that I felt constricted, I couldn’t remember what it felt like to be away from the pressure and shadow of the pandemic. We’re not really in nature — it’s like a suburban cut of the natural environment. But I feel like a binding has been taken off, a blanket removed. It’s because the difference between inside and outside doesn’t feel scary. It’s because the air feels clean. It’s because there aren’t people I don’t know up against me. I was thinking last night: as soon as we step with our masks and gloves from your apartment into your building hallway, we’re entering somewhere potentially unhealthy. That’s what all of New York City feels like to me. I understand there’s risk in any place, but the city feels like blighted territory, which I have to gird myself to manage.”
“So is this the first time you’ve felt relaxed in nine weeks?”
“Distance gives me clarity to describe the feeling: It’s the first time in nine weeks I’ve felt unbridled from the pandemic. The bridling comes with repetition, the small number of spaces I’ve been moored to, which each reek of fear because they’ve become spaces of the pandemic: your apartment, my apartment, the car, Prospect Park, Fort Greene Park, the walks I take in a 2-mile perimeter of those places. They’re all places I inhabited before the pandemic with pleasure. But now they register its fear, its grief, a sense of being dirty or sullied or dangerous. Being up here gives me insight into what most Americans must feel. At least for now, it’s a life where you have a lot of space and air, there aren’t many people in stores, it doesn’t feel dangerous because it probably isn’t. I’m aware that people everywhere have the virus, and I’ll take precautions in public spaces. But we’re not all up in each others’ faces, and the percentage of infected is much smaller than in the city that happens to be the world’s hotspot.”
“Did you see the article about how, if we were testing properly, we could create red, yellow, and green zones, so lots of places could safely get back to work?”
“The one-size-fits-all response made sense at the beginning, when no one knew how to react. But we need refinements so we can live through this for the long haul, so conditions are realistically aligned to where people live, so they feel less like the response is a monolithic, totalitarian scam. Harm reduction tells us we can take a lot of lessons from HIV education: responses need to be specific to the communities and clusters you’re educating; they have to be presented in the vernaculars of those communities so people trust and understand them. And that total immunity is not just unreachable but an inhuman response to the threat of viruses, because human need, human pleasure, human activity, demand that we’re in the world, encounter others, are in proximity to each other. So we need to make educated, rational decisions about risk, how much we’re willing to take given multiple competing needs: the need to feed yourself, accept a hug, move your body. And there’s an order to that: you can’t ask people to make those decisions around risk management without educating them first. There’s a need to explain what the zones mean, why they exist. Probably over the long haul — this will take months and years, and we’ll need new federal leaders — we’ll get better at that.
“But New York City precautions make zero sense up here, where there are three people in a store 10 times the size of any city market. The density of human interaction is so different.”
“You’ve talked about doing things differently when we go back. Any thoughts?”
“I wanted to mark a temporal boundary, the beginning of summer, when my children and I finished the semester. I took this trip as a spatial shift to mark that temporal boundary, to allow us some head space and a time of transition. And when I go back, I’ll try to organize my daily life differently than in the pandemic’s first chapter, which has been about managing day to day, without intention, plan, or value beyond surviving. I can’t live like that forever.
“This next chapter has to be more like: I have a real life in New York City, and it needs more of the stimuli, connections, commitments, and structure I’ve built my life around: culture, people, art, diversity, activism. And more of the pleasures. The cultural connections of New York City can’t be replaced by screens. I can’t sit in my apartment and be on the computer all day.
“So maybe I can inhabit New York City differently. Maybe I leave the house every day for half a day, explore the city on foot, by bike, in the car. Maybe I shift the pleasure and stimulation I’ve built my life around and for this period pull a Thoreau: do similar work on a local and environmental level, in New York City or elsewhere. Maybe I need to put my focus on the land, nature, my own body, the health and mental health of the people in closest proximity to me. Those are things I have some control over; I understand I have the privilege to make some of those things happen if they seem right. And that might need to happen away from New York City. We’ll find out.”
(New York state numbers on Friday: 348,232 diagnosed with Covid-19, up 0.7 percent; 174 dead, to a total of 22,478, up 0.8 percent. Overall U.S. deaths: 1,524, to a total of 81,423, up 1.9 percent.)
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