On that Monday morning, William was reading on his computer and he said, “Did you know a writer named Elsie Waters?” And I was surprised. “Yes,” I said, and he handed me his computer. This is how I found out that the woman, Elsie Waters, the one I was supposed to have met for dinner when I told her I was too tired—that she had died of the virus.
“Oh my God!” I said. “No!”
Elsie was smiling brightly from the computer. “Take this away,” I said, handing the computer back to William. Tears had come into my eyes, but they did not fall, and I went and got my coat and took my phone and walked outside. No, no, no, I kept thinking; I was furious. And then I called a friend of hers that I had known as well, and the friend was crying. But I could not cry.
The friend told me that Elsie had died at home, that she had called 911 but when they got there she was no longer breathing. We spoke a few more minutes and I understood that I could not comfort this friend of ours, nor could she comfort me.
I walked and walked, as though in some tunnel; I kept wanting to cry, but I could not.
* * *
—
By the end of the week three other people I knew in New York had the virus; a few others had symptoms but could not get tested, because doctors did not want them in their offices. That scared me: that doctors were not letting people come to their offices!
I called Marie, who helped me clean my apartment, and I told her not to come to the apartment anymore; I did not want her on the subway. She said she had come the day after I left, but that she would not come again. Her husband was a doorman in my building, and she told me that he was driving in from Brooklyn—to avoid the subway—and that he would water my large plant every week. It is the only plant I have, I have had it for twenty years—I got it when I first moved out from William—and I am terribly attached to it. I thanked her profusely for this, for everything she had done. She sounded calm. She is religious, and she said she would pray for me.
* * *
I had already called the girls when we first arrived, but I called them again, and Chrissy sounded fine, but Becka seemed to be in a bad mood—querulous, I would say—and she didn’t want to talk for long. “Sorry,” she said to me, “I just kind of hate everything right now.”
“That’s understandable,” I told her.
* * *
There was a big television stuck in the corner of the living room, and Bob Burgess had kept the cable hooked up. I very seldom watch television—we did not have one when I was a child, and I think partly that is the reason, I mean I never figured out a relationship to it—but William would turn this one on at night and so we watched the news. I didn’t mind this, I felt it gave me (us) a connection to the world. There was news of the virus: Every day another state had more cases, but I still did not understand what was ahead. One night the Surgeon General said that things were apt to get worse before they got better. I do remember hearing that. And Broadway had already closed its theaters (!). I remember that as well.
* * *
What looked like an old toy chest was pushed up against the wall on the porch, and William and I found inside it an old game of Parcheesi. The corners of the box were so worn they were ripped, but William brought it out. And also we found a puzzle, it looked old but the pieces were there—for all we knew, the pieces were there—and it was a self-portrait of Van Gogh. I said, “I hate this kind of thing,” and he said, “Lucy, we’re in lockdown, stop hating everything.” And he set it up on a small corner table in the living room. I helped him find the corners and the edges, and then I left it for the most part alone. I have never liked doing puzzles.
We played Parcheesi a few times, and I kept thinking: I can’t wait for this to end. Meaning the game.
Meaning all of it.
viii
One week exactly after we got there, I called a doctor of mine in New York. He gives me my sleeping tablets and also pills for my panic attacks, and I called him because I was about to run out of these pills, and I had not slept well since I heard that Elsie Waters had died. The doctor was no longer in the city himself, he had gone to Connecticut, and he told me that day to wash my clothes after I had been to the supermarket. “Seriously?” I asked, and he said, “Yes.” I told him that William was the one who would probably go to the grocery store when we got done quarantining, and he said, Well, then William should wash his clothes when he came home from shopping.
I couldn’t believe that. “Seriously?” I asked again, and he said, Yes, it should be no different from washing your clothes after a workout.
I said, “But how long do you think this will last?” And he said, “We got onto it late, I’m guessing over a year.”
* * *
—
A year.
* * *
—
This was the first time I felt a really—really—deep apprehension, and yet it was slow, that piece of knowledge, making its way into me, weirdly slow, and when I told William the doctor had said that, William didn’t say anything, and I understood that William was not surprised. “Did you know that?” I asked him, and he only said, “Lucy, none of us knows anything.” So what came to me then was the—slow, it seemed very slow—understanding that I was not going to see New York again for a really long time.
“And you should wash your clothes after you go grocery shopping,” I said. William just nodded.
* * *
—
I felt terribly sad, like a child, and I thought of the children’s book Heidi that I had read in my youth, and of how she had been sent somewhere and she was so sad that she walked in her sleep. For some reason this image of Heidi kept going through my mind. I would not be able to go home, and this sank into me deeper all the time.
* * *
And then:
On the television, William and I watched as New York suddenly exploded with a ghastliness that I seemed almost not able to take in. Every night William and I watched as New York City arrived to us in horrifying scenes, picture after picture of people being taken to emergency rooms, on ventilators, hospital workers without the right masks or gloves, and people kept dying and dying. Ambulances rushing down the streets. These were streets that I knew, this was my home!
I watched it, believing it, I mean I knew it was happening is what I mean, but to describe my mind as I watched this is difficult. It was as though there was a distance between the television and myself. And of course there was. But my mind felt like it had stepped back and was watching it from a real distance, even as I felt the sense of horror. Even now, many months later, I have a memory of watching a pale yellow image on the television, it must have been the nurses in their garb, or maybe people wrapped in blankets on their way into the hospitals, but in my mind is this strange yellowish memory from watching the television on those nights. We (I) became addicted—it seemed to me—to watching the news on the television every night.
* * *
—
I worried about the ambulance workers, that they would all get sick, and the people working in the hospitals too. I thought of a blind man I sometimes helped off the bus near the bus stop by my apartment, and I was worried about him, would he now dare take anyone’s arm? And the bus drivers too! All those people they came into contact with—!
* * *
—
And also I noticed something about myself as I watched the news during this time. Which is that my eyes would drop to the floor, I mean I could not look at it all the time. I thought: It is as though somebody is lying to me, and I cannot look at someone who is lying to me. I did not think the news was lying to me—as I said, I understood it was all true; I only want to tell you that for a number of days—and it turned into weeks—I looked at the floor frequently as we watched the news at night.
* * *
—
It is interesting how people endure things.