Richard was rereading Streaming Now, and he said, “I think it’s time to look back at the start of the pandemic.” I said, “Why?” He said, “It was the ‘new Now,’ and now it feels like a piece of history. Back then, people thought it was an event that would end. It had a concreteness we don’t have now. The event sort of dissolved, and we’re not sure where we are.” I said, “Maybe looking back at anything gives it a more concrete shape than the shape of the present. Time is weird—the way one moment it feels speeded up and another moment it seems really far down a hall.”
I started reading the book, and I liked it, even though it was my own writing, and I thought I would recreate some of it here, the sense memory of that period, in hopes you might find some smell or taste of our collective recent past—and maybe a temporary porthole out of the wars of now.
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March, 2020
I bought a forsythia bush in a farm store. I bought purple pansies for when the frost ends. Psychoanalysis says you can alter the course of a behavior by understanding its origin. The brains of homo sapiens will make up a story with any bunch of random things laid out in a row. The brains of homo sapiens will find a plot. We think we can see where something is going from where it has been, and we think we know where a thing came from because of the way it turned out. We can’t do either of these things.
I asked Richard if, to exist, virtue needed a lack of virtue in the picture for comparison. He said, “No.” I said, “The concept of virtue feels Christian to me, and I don’t like it.” He reminded me it started with the Greeks. I said, “I feel vulnerable.” I said, “Saying I feel vulnerable adds a layer of vulnerability.”
A friend writes to say he’s jealous I still have Lysol. Another friend, stuck in the city, writes to say, “I don’t want to see pictures of your rocks. I want to move my own rocks.” Now, I feel guilty about posting pictures of the rocks.
Last fall Richard and I bought a house in upstate New York no one else wanted. It was unfinished. The trees were knotted in hairy vines of poison ivy. The former owners were hoarders and used their woods as a dump. Richard is a type-1 diabetic. In the event of infection by Covid-19, his risk for pneumonia is ten times higher than the rate for other people. Years ago, when Gardner was dying of bone marrow cancer, he kept wanting to live, and some people, I could tell from their faces, were thinking let go already.
The other night I had my first virus dream. I wander into an art gallery, where there is fancy food and trays of drinks. People urge me to taste everything, and I shovel in hors, d’oeuvres, as a voice in my head says, “Wash your hands! Get out of there! People are too close!” But the food is free.
We’re clearing the woods on our property. We’re raking leaves and cutting down sick trees and hauling things to the dump. Mysterious green spikes poke up. The other night I noticed a small blister on my wrist. It itched. More blisters rose up. Every time I looked at my body there were more ribbons of blisters. It was like Linda Blair in The Exorcist, lashed by the devil.
Type-1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease set in motion when a genetic predisposition meets an environmental trigger. The beta cells in the pancreas stop producing insulin. Richard was 23 when he was diagnosed, and at that time his life expectancy was many years shorter than the amount he has lived so far. He was told he would likely lose a limb or two limbs and go blind. There were no continuous glucose monitoring pumps. He had to inject himself with glass hypodermics that had thick needles he would boil in a pan. He had to adjust to the disease or die slowly of organ damage or die quickly of high or low sugars. As new technologies became available, he learned to insert catheters into his body as well, in time, a sensor. There’s no cure for his disease. There are no treatments, really, other than the tight control of blood sugars. He’s less anxious than I am about contagion from Covid 19. He’s already lived most of his life in the context of a disease.
Books and films that take place before the pandemic seem missing a leg or a head, limping along, innocent of what they couldn’t know. Richard says, “I want to plant the things my father grew in his garden. Did you know rhubarb groans as it grows?” I said, “Let’s go to Agway,” and we put on our gloves and masks and drove there. We looked at shovels. The only shovel the right size felt too heavy. There were boxes of rhubarb kits. I wasn’t sure what was inside them. As I approached the counter, a man said to the woman at the register, “Yeah, the bars are open. The problem is the old people, making a big deal about Covid for everyone else.” I put down the rhubarb kit and said to Richard, “Let’s get out of here.”
A friend writes to say she’s looking forward to walking in the city again. A place you cannot walk in for miles on streets is not a city. Another friend is planning to leave the place where she’s sheltering in two or three months. People want to believe in an Afterward, from which they’ll be able to grasp the thing they cannot see from inside the Now. Start again. Hope for a better ending.
The other day I offered free books to anyone who wanted them. I put two boxes at the end of the driveway with a sign that asked people to wear gloves and take what they wanted. People came by. We spoke at a distance. One box of books is gone. A woman drove over with her kids, who stayed in the car. It was the first time they’d been outside for a while.
When my sister was dying, the room I was sleeping in was hot, and l would slip down to the living room, where the air conditioning was better and where, from the couch, I could see the piano that had sat in the home of our parents. I think all the time of calling my sister. A few days before she died, she put glaucoma drops in her eyes, saying, “In case I wake up tomorrow and don’t have cancer anymore.”
I said to Richard, “We need to have living wills and medical power of attorney." He said, "Why, is someone going to die?”
July, 2020
I’m remembering a day I walked along Halsey Street in Brooklyn. Halsey Street is lined with town houses in various states of disrepair. I walked past a park with patchy lawns, then through a section where men—it was mostly men—were cooking on grills, and laughing, and listening to jazz, and drinking beer. A man was burning incense. He was tall and burley. I said, “That smells great.” He said, “It’s called Barack Obama.” There was a gap between his front teeth, and they were capped in gold. I said, “Oh, you are making me cry.” He said, “Don’t cry. Pray for him. He’s a good man.” I said, “I will.” I don’t believe in prayer. I wanted to make him happy. He said, “Would you like some incense?” I said, “Thank-you. I’m going to a bar.”
It's hot, and there isn't enough rain. In Beckett's plays, first there are carrots and turnips, and then there are only turnips. First you are buried up to your waist, and then you are buried up to your neck. The birds are singing as if everything is great. In the 1960’s and 1970's, when we used phrases like “social transformation,” we didn't know the extent to which trillionaires controlled everything. The truth of my life is I was always going to miss a lot of what's going on.
I bought a pot roast to grill as a steak. Richard is reading Foucault's last lectures on telling the truth about yourself. We attached Tiki lamps we found in the garden shed to the railings of the deck, and we are burning citronella oil to ward off insects. The place looks like Don Ho's. If you come here, I will serve you a cocktail with a small umbrella in it.
I visited the house of a friend, and we sat outside on wooden chairs, watching a thundercloud approach like a large rolled carpet. You could see rain in the distance smudging the chalky sky underneath. She gave me a bowl of potato chips while she ate raw cabbage. It amazes me when people stretch toward self-improvement. Really, we like our sloppy, unhappy lives just fine.
My friend looked pretty in the dim light. We were women who had fashioned a look somewhere along the line and expected to retain it until the universe expanded and we were swallowed by darkness.
I found postcards my mother had sent to me at camp. She said, “I miss you. I can’t wait for you to come home.” And I could see her, standing alone in the back of our little house in Long Beach, staring past the flagstone patio to a giant green hedge.
My sister died three years ago yesterday. Yesterday I asked Richard to explain the behavior of a friend who was running hot and cold. He said, “No one knows why anyone does anything, including the person who is doing the thing. We remain a mystery, and then we die." I found this consoling and asked him to hold me as I bent backwards in the tiniest, lamest backbend you will ever see. It cured all my ailments immediately. Along a roadside, I dug up a clump of wild rose, soaked the roots in a tub of water for several days, and planted it in the front yard. Most of the branches turned brown, but a few spindly ones retained their leaves, and after some time one of the tiny branches sprouted new leaves. It was thrilling.
September, 2020
The characters in Beckett’s plays blurt things out in a way that seems random. Enough disconnected blurts, and a world forms. Here we are: intimate, anonymous, in love with each other, dead. The erotic jolt of certain words still amazes me.
Yesterday I ate two kinds of cake. At the dump, an attendant lifted my bags from the car. I said, “Do you need help?” He said, “Not unless you’re a shrink.” A friend on Facebook said it was Yom Kippur and he was fasting. He wanted to know the kinds of cake I had eaten. I said, “Frozen cheese cake from Sara Lee and frozen lemon layer cake from Pepperidge Farm.” His interest stirred my cold, dark heart.
People don't give away power. They may feel a moral obligation to give away some power, and then don’t do it. Change happens if people become bored by repetition or by the things that have given them power. It’s the same as falling out of love. They just don't care anymore about being the things you thought you were supposed to be. Suddenly, other kinds of people look interesting, look creative, look important—or at least new. This almost never happens if you have power.
It's hot again. A golden rudbeckia is poking up over the railing of the deck. The tomatoes are beginning to pack it in. The smell of their leaves is fading. Who knew? We drove to Hudson to pick up the strips Richard uses to test his blood sugar. On the way back, we passed a chair on the road. I thought it might by the kind of lawn chair, with a frame of bent metal, I’m always looking for. It took everything in Richard to turn the car around. The chair was white and made of plastic with a mesh seat, and at first I thought, Oh no, this is too ugly. Then I pictured it in the backyard, covered with colorful cushions, and loaded it into the car.
At home it looked like a broken tooth in an otherwise rosy mouth. I placed it near the stone patio. No, completely awful. I placed it on a hill and tried sitting in it. It was low to the ground. It was a chair you would be placed in during an interrogation in a hostage situation.
I went inside to cook, and what was staring back at me through the kitchen window? The chair was more starkly white than before, a glowing, poisonous white against the grass that was electrified from hours of rain. Never did the backyard's fanciful bird bath and flower-stand stumps stand out in more touching relief than against the grotesque chair. I moved it to the back of the house that was desperately untended. Nothing had been planted. You could see the cinderblock foundation of the house, and still it was degraded by the chair.
I grabbed the chair and carried it to the road. Richard made a sign that said, FREE. Poor chair. No sooner rescued than abandoned again.
Last night I was awakened by the smell of skunk. I smelled skunk in my dream and in the bedroom when I opened my eyes. I whispered to Richard, “Are you awake?” He said, “I am now.” I said, “I smell skunk.” He said, “I don’t smell it.” He went downstairs. When he came back, I said, “Did you think a skunk might be on the porch?” He said, “No. There is no skunk.” I said, “Do you smell it now?” He said, “No.” We went back to sleep, and when we got up, the smell was gone. Richard said, “You dreamed the smell.” I said, “Can a dream smell linger when you aren’t dreaming?” He said, “Apparently.” He opened his closet and said, “It smells funny in here.” I went in. It didn’t smell any funnier than usual. I said, “If there was a skunk in your closet, you’d know it.” He said, “A wasp is crawling on the window. Do you think it’s inside or outside?”
Squirrels have invaded the bird feeders. I don’t care. A tomato has 50 million seeds (more or less), any one of which will make a tomato plant that will yield a million tomatoes (more or less). And it will do this with a scheme, a motive, a justification, a judgment. The unexamined life is worth living.
I miss the dead. Even the dead I did not miss when they were alive. The light is beautiful fading into the trees that soar 70 feet into the air. People on bikes and on foot wave as they pass the house. Even drivers wave from cars. I wave back. We’re saying, “I see you,” the way in Waiting for Godot every day the Boy reassures Gogo and Didi they exist.
Stanley Crouch died the other day. Stanley was the author of Notes of a Hanging Judge and The All-American Skin Game (among many other books). We hadn’t been in touch much the past few years. I’d heard he was sick. I don’t know from what. I felt sad and shocked. I always liked him. We got along. People like you, and you think, Okay, I like you too. He would beam the biggest smile when he saw me at the Village Voice. He liked me, and he liked Paul Berman. He liked that we were Jews. He thought there was such a thing as a Jewish writer. I don’t, but it made me smile the way he thought this, and he could have explained and maybe he tried to on more than one occasion before I said, “What are you talking about?” I think what he liked about me and Paul was the shape of our sentences. Their smell, their roundness. Paul wrote great sentences from the heart. Stanley had so much confidence. I had the desire to do the things I was doing. Paul knew a lot. I had feminism and the logic of this analysis. I think Stanley got this or maybe he just liked the look of me looking at his face. Stanley, I’m so sad you’ve died.
Richard says he will dig out the trash in the ravine. He doesn’t want Mike, the man who helps us, to get ticks. Mike has a gentle smile, poor eye sight, and a ZZ Top beard that floats as he strides along. Richard tells Mike to find something else he feels like doing instead of digging out the ditch, and Mike trims the lower branches of the cedars that look like dirty petticoats around the legs of the trees. I say to Richard, “You’ll get ticks.” He says, “I’ll use the stuff that keeps them off.” The stuff that keeps them off is on the floor of the mudroom. We can’t keep up with all the ways we need to be careful here.
I say, “I’ll help you dig out the trash,” and we climb over mossy rocks into the ravine, and it’s like entering a museum. Trees that have grown through twisted barbed wire have keeled over, their roots exposed like the limbs of accident victims tossed into a common grave. We dig up rusted sardine cans, cobalt blue bottles of milk of magnesia, the lids of pots, the soles of shoes—all the innards of a life no one was supposed to go looking for. Most of the time I pretend to be less happy than I am.
On the phone the other day a friend asked if there was a future, and I said there was a future with a narrative that had been broken. It’s good this narrative has been broken. In the narrative that has been broken, people ignored the way so many things they wanted required the suffering of others.
I don’t know why something goes right or wrong in the garden. I fail and succeed in the dark. It will be absurd to pot and maintain as many plants as I will try to save over the winter, but I will try to save them. I miss drinking in a bar. I miss seeing faces in the subway. I feel I know you, although I’ve never met you. The wind is rustling.
Wow. That was beautiful, Laurie. I don't think many have come to terms with the pandemic as a whole; I did since I happen to be a survivor and was left with no choice. I had to adapt to such tremendous loss. But, I haven't accepted the hard truth that my mom is gone or that she left here on her own terms, rummaging through Family Dollar stores in spite of her cancer. Soon after that, she had multiple strokes and then the virus did what it does. She was the 7th member of my family on her side to have died in a very short time frame of 1.5 years.
“Most of the time I pretend to be less happy than I am.” Me too.