Girl Walks Into a Bar & Other Essays
In her reflections, Merrill contrasts the Portsmouth of today with a much grittier version of itself She evokes bars, clubs, and hangouts, most of which are long gone. It's hard to imagine Portsmouth's current prosperous, gentrified cityscape as a rougher world of motorcycle gangs, day laborers, and a lot of alcohol. But the author's skillful storytelling takes us into its smokey rooms. She also takes us deep into her interior landscape with stories of early struggles, addiction, and relationships that hurt but can't be released. Merrill doesn't flinch from the hard details; her accounts, including one of deep personal loss, are brutally honest. Throughout, we realize we're in the company of a compassionate woman who has lived through pain but still loves the world and all its stories. — G.D.
Girl Walks Into a Bar
There were two bars at the intersection of Daniel and Penhallow streets in Portsmouth.
The backroom of a Chinese restaurant, the bar on Penhallow felt like an afterthought. No windows, just a back door flung open, letting the twang of jukebox country-western music and the funk of beer and cigarettes curl out into the street. There was beer and bourbon, but you could top off a day's drinking with a frilly sweet Dragon's Skull from the restaurant, tricked out with tiny paper parasols, nourishing with cream and probably the same orange sugar syrup that coated the sweet-and-sour pork. There were lines of motorcycles parked outside. Afternoons, the bar was largely empty, but from five to closing, the small Formica bar was banked with big guys talking loudly, wearing denim cutoff vests with "Iron Horsemen Motorcycle Club" on their backs.
The bar on Daniel was a brick building with paned windows. A carefully designed sign hung over the door, picturing a vintage typewriter encircled with the name "The Press Room," homage to the owner's former career as a journalist. Inside was a long, polished wooden bar underneath a painting of a nude woman. There was live folk music, good Scotch and Guinness, lots of lively talk.
I know less about this bar. In 1978, when I was looking for a home-base bar, I was drawn to its intellectual atmosphere-Dylan Thomas, or any of the people I drank with in college, would have chosen this bar. But what would I say to all these people who had taken root in interesting lives of art and writing, gainful employment, and family-making? I'd just escaped the reboot of six weeks in a psychiatric hospital in New York City, which in my mind cancelled out any promise I had shown as a young adult.
Imagining gun barrels over a department store makeup counter and receiving coded messages through the radio, only I knew of the revolutionary takeover menacing from the edges of day-to-day life. As life became more hallucinatory, madness had not been the genius-triggering release I'd hoped for. Rather, it became a chaotic disorientation where everyone who cared about me leaned in to ask, "Are you all right now?" I interpreted their concern only as expectation, as Can we get on with it now?
I moved here with a man I'd dated for six months because he gave me an escape route-the poor bastard just happened to be sleeping with me when the bottom fell out of my world. Internalizing the stigma associated with hospitalization, ashamed of my duplicitous relationship to my lover, I did not feel worthy of the Press Room. I snuggled instead into the anonymity and novelty of the China Empress. No one expected anything of me. It was a guilty comfort, a free ride into an unknown world, like joining a carnival, a source of curiosity, which at the time felt redemptive.
When I imagine a rewritten past now, I ask friends to meet me at the Press Room and let them introduce me around, let someone else explain how I came to be there. I can laugh at the witty repartee around me and eventually find a way into conversation- as long as I kept people talking about themselves, I'd discovered in the hospital, no one cared too much about what was up with me. Maybe I'd meet The Man, a life I could attach myself to, grow within, contribute to, and maybe eventually move beyond once I discovered my own momentum.
Or maybe I could have made a lasting connection with the man I am now married to. He was there-a day tripper in bars, not really a drinker. He made his own party wherever he went out of whatever he found there. And yet there was a stable core anchoring his crazy. He went off to his construction job in an art car he created, embellished with erotica, feathers, and colored foam. His wife was the head nurse at a local hospital, reporting for duty competent and in charge, with sparkle still in her hair from the night before.
It would not have gone well then. We were both involved with other people; he never wanted children and being a mother was the only thing I knew for sure I wanted; sex, often indiscriminate, was for each of us a necessary escape hatch, an essential life force, our way of being in the world. Who we were then would not have led to where we are now: fulfilled, connected, and sane.
Smashed
Excerpt from Saved by the Ever-Ready Kid: A Mother's Memoir of Bereavement, Recovery and Redemption
Ships docking in Portsmouth in the '70s sent agents to the China Empress to hire day workers to unload cargo. The base of operations for the fledgling New Hampshire chapter of the Iron Horsemen Motorcycle Club, the bar provided a standing supply of able-bodied, unemployed men. Falling out the side door into the blinding afternoon light, the rowdy hulk of drinkers would stagger down to the docks a block away. Bull-rushing back in around five, they returned red-faced and noisy, covered with sweat and sugar, sawdust, or road salt, revived by work, rolls of bills in their pockets. Before I started hanging out at the China Empress, I didn't know anyone with a tattoo or missing teeth, or who had fought in Vietnam or served prison time. Within six months, this would describe everyone in the support group I'd come to count on.
No one cared that I was fresh out of the nuthouse. For a long time, I hadn't felt as though anybody was ever glad to see me, so it was easy and comforting to be in the presence of these undemanding men. The club's president, Dusty, was my protector and companion, taking me for long drives, buying me donuts. Tall and barrel-chested, his long greasy hair flowed from under a leather top hat he wore. He rode a Harley with an old saddle for a seat. The biker women in the bar supported themselves and their children by working at massage parlors, running drugs, or performing at local low-budget sex shows. I looked after their kids while I drank-happy to be around children, teaching them to read the jukebox or build houses out of bar supplies.
In my mind, I had no future, but I had found a space and company where I felt anonymously safe and marginally alive. My hope was that the boyfriend I'd moved to town with would leave me, taking the moral high ground, the only parting gift I could offer. My relationship with the suitable boy who had seen me through the worst year of my life was over and I felt nothing.
One of the bikers, Jack, had wild red hair and spider veins lacing his ruddy cheeks. He was a raconteur and could imitate exactly every kind of motorcycle or power tool manufactured in the United States or Japan. Bent over a placemat in the bar, he drew cartoons or made sketches for work.
I still have a drawing Jack did of me the summer before we married, when we talked about having children. In the drawing, my sleeping face turns toward my curled hand, amid a riot of mismatched bedclothes. It is an astonishing likeness I kept for our son, evidence to counter all the chaos of the home we made together-that his father once loved me, watched quietly while I slept, and bequeathed a slender legacy of his untutored and unsung talent.
The crises of life with Jack provided a structure that gave me daily marching orders, just as my mother had while I was growing up. It did not make me happy, certainly, but I had stopped seeing happiness as an option. I craved purpose, order, knowing what to do next-all of which this relationship's disarray amply provided. On a roughly monthly cycle, Jack and I had to find a new place to live, and a new job for him.
By Christmas that year, all the earmarks of subsistence living seemed commonplace: the phone and electricity disconnect notices, eviction, kiting small checks at the local grocery store, avoiding driving in certain towns because there was a bench warrant out for my husband-to-be. We lived in motels and on friends' couches. And I had finally found a job I could hold since leaving the hospital. Ricca's Cafe did not sell mixed drinks-just two sizes of beer, 35 cents or "frosties" for 50 cents. The cash register was broken so accounting was easy. In Portsmouth's ecosystem of bars, the Starlight Club and Ricca's were vestiges of the old town, before the malls and the fern bars. Most of Ricca's patrons were older working men, divorced and bitter toward women, bristling that no one seemed to recognize the value of being able to bang nails, haul nets, or fit pipe into their fifties. Bartending consisted mostly of nodding, smiling, and listening to their stories.
The main tasks were opening and closing the bar, and crowd control in between. In the Starlight, where I went after work, there was a handwritten sign taped to the mirror over the bar that read, "If you are on medication and shouldn't drink then don't." My response was to stop taking the medication prescribed in New York. Being my husband's advocate and support was a consuming avocation. I didn't have time to be crazy.
Working at Ricco's anchored me in regular hours and a known community. It allowed me to emulate the hostess skills I'd learned from my mother with a new proficiency. I broke up fights. I'd leap over the bar, throw my arms around the aggressor, pinning his arms to his side while I looked up into his face. In a quiet voice, I'd catalogue the consequences he might face: being barred, breaking parole, facing Ricco's ire, queering chances for child visitation that month. It always worked. I felt more competent than I had since college. Ricco would come in every night to close out the register. "How'd it go?" he'd ask. I'd regale him with stories and updates on customers, relationships, court cases, mental states. Standing behind him as he counted out the change, I sometimes saw his broad back jiggle as he'd chuckle and shake his head.
The bar became a safe space for Jack and me, public enough to give respite from our own fighting and a community with its own comforting rhythms and rituals. In the fall there was always a rash of petty crimes committed by those who couldn't find a job or a girlfriend to see them through the winter. The local jail provided three hots and a cot for the brutal winter months. After smashing several windows on State Street, one of the old-timers bribed guys with beer to break his jaw. As an indigent, he could count on a month's convalescence in the county farm-it would take him through the holidays.
When nights got longer after Halloween, tinseled swags festooned the streetlamps. Fluorescent-lit store windows reflected wrapping paper and cheap ornaments onto the cold blue-dark sidewalks. A street-corner Salvation Army Santa rang a bell. If you were unwelcome elsewhere, you could always come home to Ricco's.
During the holidays we served a free full-course dinner: turkey, ham, side dishes and pies, like a church supper except with a lot of beer. The guys washed up for the occasion. Some wore ill-fitting suits saved for funerals. Ricco led grace to a long table of bowed, pomaded heads. Careful, awkward, and proud, some guys sat next to the children they saw only on holidays-little girls gift-wrapped in party dresses and combed little boysin clean, starched shirts. Grim-faced ex-wives arrived briefly after the allotted hour of visitation to pick up the kids, glance around the bar, and shake their heads.
When Jack asked me to marry him, the idea that anyone could want me that much, for that long, was the sliver of evidence I needed to prove I had value, that I could take root in the world again. I said yes.
He hit me the first time about a month after that. Afterwards, I found him back at our rented room, shaken, silent and sorry. He cried all night, his broad shoulders shaking the foldout bed. In the morning I held his face in my hands and said, "You're a lot bigger than me. If what happened last night happens again, someday you're going to really hurt me." He nodded, unable to speak. Now we had a secret to take to the altar, an intimate, unspoken bargain.
We thought we could just get on with our lives, that the secret had bonded us, and that it would never happen again. His word became my gospel-I suspended all disbelief, siding with him as he walked off job after job in construction work. He argued with my customers in the bar, with landlords, and with employers. I cleaned up after him as best I could. He trusted me to witness his unstoppable pain. I believed in his resolve. We were a tiny nation in a dangerous world, with an iron pact of mutual protection and solace.
All the drama gave my life a trajectory, a story I could tell myself of overcoming the odds and ending up okay. We would look back from our stable middle age, I imagined, and laugh together about these rough early days together. This imagined marriage would be an accomplishment.
The summer before our wedding, Jack sustained a disablingback injury while working as a temporary laborer. The rotted surface he was breaking up with a jackhammer collapsed. Having defined himself in terms of his physical strength his whole life, Jack did not do well with having to explore other, more cerebral avenues of employment, but he found a vocational program that offered drafting. He was glad to provide some income with his disability checks.
Occasionally, I would take new day jobs, but they never lasted. I would show up late, distraught after a fight the night before. The workday was punctuated by highly charged phone calls from Jack, who now had more time to think about ways in which I and everyone else had wronged him. Sometimes flowers arrived, a grandiose gesture that never failed to move me, even though often the next day the florist would call the office demanding payment from me. Ricca's was the only job I could stay with—a demanding relationship, it occupied me full-time.
One afternoon Jack came into the bar to tell me that we'd been evicted again. To soften the blow, he brought my guitar, with a hat tied onto the case's neck, and our only painting strapped across its body. He called it something funny-maybe "home in a box"-I don't remember. The guys in the bar laughed like hell-our marriage had become a standing joke. I laughed too, snapping a lit cigarette from the lips of one of my customers and taking a drag for the first time in six months, the first since learning I was pregnant.
It had taken a while for this new knowledge about the pregnancy to sink in. Initially, I thought I'd just contracted a hangover that wouldn't go away. My periods had been erratic for years and I was used to throwing up in the morning. I abruptly stopped drinking and smoking once I knew for sure, afraid that the cocaine and booze had already damaged the baby. Without my drinking, our bar life made the pregnancy seem like a long stay in bedlam's waiting room, with no magazines to read but Arizona Life.
Driving
When I was little my mother would take my unblemished palm in hers. "My hands were already so callused by the time I was your age," she would say. There is a picture of her as a girl standing with her father, brother, and sister in front of the family car, a battered and snow-covered Ford Model A. Their gloveless hands clench each other's against the New England cold. She talked about getting chilblains as a child, a word I had only seen in nineteenth century novels. She talked about how much she hated chores on her family's chicken farm.
Her adult life was one long repudiation of this childhood deprivation, a way of thumbing her nose at everything she'd grown up with and refused to let define her. She delighted in everything that went with the middle-class professional life she'd made. The only woman in our Virginia neighborhood with a job, she also had her own car.
Neighborhood wives were out by 8 a.m., watering their lawns, wearing pedal pushers and crowns of pink foam curlers. Coiffed and made-up, wafting clouds of Miss Dior, her high heels clicking out a staccato on our porch steps, my mother would jangle her car keys on her way to the driveway. Swinging her stockinged legs under the wheel of her blue '65 Dodge station wagon, she'd wave at her detractors as she drove off to work.
The first car she bought herself, years later, after leaving my father, was a Cadillac. She waved from the passenger seat of our beat-up Pontiac as my husband drove her to the dealership. She came back after a few hours, at the wheel of the biggest car I had ever seen, with my son in the front seat beaming, and his father in the back, clawing at the roof to steady himself as she swerved into the driveway.
From that point on, our own car filled our three-year-old son with disgust. His chubby legs just meeting the passenger seat's edge, he would fold himself in half to crank down the window and, exasperated, say, "You really”—crank—“should get windows like grandmother has.”—crank-"You just”—crank" push a button."
While its push-button windows worked, the new Cadillac soon revealed a fatal flaw-a vapor lock. At any time, without warning, the car would just not start, sometimes for a few minutes, sometimes an hour or so. Trips that involved multiple stops-running errands, picking up children at daycare, gassing up-were particularly risky.
My mother was not a patient person, but the Cadillac could do no wrong. She began to tuck needlework projects into the car's console to pass the time until the car was ready to start. I still have a little car key purse she did in cross-stitch over the course of one winter when the Cadillac was particularly crabby. The purse's color scheme matched the autumnal colors of the Caddie.
In her sixties, my mother and her long-term partner Mike bought an eighteenth-century tavern in Germantown, New York to restore together. She started referring to all new purchases as her last. This is my last house. This is my last winter coat. This is my last vacuum cleaner. This could be my last artichoke, you know. She bought her last Cadillac over Mike's derisive references to pimp cars-an enormous satiny black model with silver trim and red leather seats.
There is a long, steep hill between Hudson and Germantown. Every time she drove the Cadillac down this hill, Mike and she would act like a couple of kids on a roller coaster, even pausing in the middle of a howling fight only to resume it when they reached the bottom. It seemed emblematic of their relationship- there were certain sensations, tastes, aesthetic experiences that trumped, if only for an instant, their mutual need to savage each other. They would ride out these brief, shared moments of delight, then resume where they left off, almost refreshed, ready to return to battle.
My mother was diagnosed with cancer a few years after they bought the tavern. Mike and I spent a lot of time in the Cadillac, driving her to Albany for treatment for three years before she died. She asked that her ashes be buried in a little circle of aspens they planted behind the tavern.
The morning of the burial, before anyone was up, Mike drove the unwieldy car over the long back lawn and parked it at a respectful distance from the circle of trees. As we buried her ashes, the morning sun glinted off the Cadillac's hood, as it stood like a fallen knight's steed, or a Viking boat, ready to serve as a floating pyre.
Boys Will Be Boys
Weekends, my son, Josh came first for the pile on, delighted to be waking the grown-ups, then stayed for the warmth. My partner Dan's king-sized bed was jammed up against the uninsulated wall with windows. Sunday's paper would be spread out over the bed, coffee cups cooling on the windowsill. After the ambush, Josh and I would burrow back under the covers, me spooned around him with Dan reading the paper and stroking my back. If Josh had a friend over, the friend would pile on too, astonished at the ritual, the heady experience of breaching an adult sanctuary. I grew up in such a formal household-I loved waking up on weekends into this mess, this laughing, this closeness. The summer after third grade, the sleepover pile on suddenly involved squirt guns. A few squirts, lots of laughs, pile on, snuggle, done.
It intensified one weekend when Dan wrested the gun from the boys and started squirting back. They were all laughing still, but there was an edge. It was one of those red flag moments you can't see when you're newly in love with someone.
When Dan first started hiding a loaded squirt gun next to the bed I was amused—such a serious man, it was fun to see him so playful. The boys loved the escalation and reconnoitered the following weekend. I heard their giggling approach, then a metallic clattering as they leaped on the bed wearing saucepans on their heads, holding cookie sheets as shields, squinting their eyes shut, squirting with renewed energy. Dan retaliated and suddenly the sheets were a lot wetter than you want.
The boys found more inventive ways to augment their tactical gear: garbage bags, umbrellas, dish pans. Somebody else would have been able to say, "It's not funny anymore." But I couldn't. We were all dripping. The paper was tangled up in the wet sheets.
The boys looked like the Tenniel drawings of Tweedledee and Tweedledum. It was still funny, but the cozy laughing winding down seemed harder and harder to achieve.
Dan disappeared during one attack. I thought he was just leaving me alone with the boys because he knew that I loved this ritual. But he came back holding a pot of water with two hands. Feeling bested by two eight-year-olds, he needed to up the ante. Maybe he rationalized, "If that was fun, this will really be fun." I yelled no in my sharpest mommy-no-more-nonsense voice, pointing not at the boys but at him. He stopped and came back to his adult self, pot poised, like after one of those cartoon slaps that knocks someone out of hysteria.
I did not recognize playful exchanges like this as the technical run-throughs for the larger conflagration. The conflict between my partner and my son did not reach critical mass until Josh hit adolescence. When testosterone clashes, men and boys seem to commit at a cellular level to bringing more firepower to the generational battle of who will be left standing.
Mourning Person
If there was ever a time not to buy clothes, it is now. Yet I've never felt under more pressure to pass as a professional woman. I just took a new job after years of working at home. It is not just the bad economy muting my urge to shop-a little over a year ago, I lost my on1y son, Josh. I am told religious Jews observe a year of mourning, avoiding all public events. I'm not Jewish, but this year I've found solitude and the ritual of wearing black comforting. However, as a fifty-six-year-old, single, self-employed woman with a mortgage and bills to pay, when a client offered me a job, I took it.
The dressing gene skipped a generation in my WASP family. My mother and son always looked effortlessly pulled together. My son Josh used to look me up and down before we went anywhere, sighing, "Mom, just look down-if you see socks, go change." I always look like I just walked across one of those old-fashioned funhouse air vents. Luckily, my friend Sally Ann has great taste and gives me her castoffs. Pant length is still a problem. I am about three inches taller than she is. Before, when I worked for myself, I could leave meetings before it registered that my pants were too short.
Now I need five viable ensembles a week, and it can't be the same five week after week. I am one of two white women in the Brooklyn office. My Black colleagues are dauntingly elegant and discuss sample sales the way I imagine seasoned hunters track their prey's scent. The standing compliment is, "You better hold on to that-I have my eye on it." My white colleague and I surreptitiously check each other each morning, tucking in flyaway labels and straightening seams. It's an uphill struggle.
I checked the three thrift stores in my neighborhood, thinking I would extend my Sally Ann Hard line with some more black pants, scarves, and earrings, and maybe a "signature" jacket or two. When it didn't matter, I always found things that could pass office muster. In New York City, everyone wears black, no matter what the season. Now that I care, everyone is looking for affordable options. East Village thrift stores are starkly picked over, leaving hoochie mama tops with dangling sequins, spandex slacks explicitly forbidden in our HR manual, and flowery dresses with shoulder pads so extreme they should come with a complimentary set of Tammy Faye eyelashes.
It's not just the procurement, it's the upkeep. The suiting-up for work is relentless. I used to stroll to the bodega in the morning dark for coffee, leisurely watching my neighborhood come alive, listening to the birds on the rooftops. Getting up early is not my problem. It's what gets done with those first precious, sparkling hours of the day. Day in, day out now: laundry and dry cleaning, button-sewing, sock-finding, shoe polishing-a seemingly endless string of things that must match-and all that before I even get into makeup, nails, and hair.
Returning to work now feels like the occupational rehabilitation I imagine they offer at adult daycare centers, stringing macaroni necklaces or moving beads between Dixie cups. Given the currenteconomy, I am fervently grateful to have a job. I am becoming a folk hero among friends who still work from home. Jan sent me an email the first weekend after I started, "You SO deserve it, you daily-commuting-salaried-employee-warrior you!"
I just have to remember how I used to fit life into the margins around a job. Getting ready Monday through Friday gives me some foothold within this "new normal," while I sweep my scattered life
into different shapes, waiting for that jolt of recognition signaling what comes next. Besides, the new commute gives me time to take mental notes about what people are wearing.
Generation Sex
Being single on Valentine's Day as a middle-aged woman used to make me sad. One year I was checking into a hotel and the twenty-something clerk cocked her pretty head and said, "Just one key? It's Valentine's Day!" Our eyes locked. "I know," I said, quietly sliding the key card across the desk and slinking back to my room defeated.
I'm not sure when it shifted, but I've started planning to celebrate the lovers' holiday as a festive day of unexplored possibility: I'll try on clothes I wouldn't normally wear, torch-sing into my hairbrush to new music, fix broken things in my apartment, and write gratitude lists of the life gifts received from past relationships.
But there is one new frontier I won't be crossing, although I haven't yet decided how to tactfully decline. My son's childhood friend Corey sent me an "event announcement" on Facebook inviting me to a "Girls' Night In:' The "Passion Party" apparently "presents tasteful and informative presentations, featuring lotions, lingerie, and adult toys that are purchased in a confidential setting."
I need to back up here to say that all contact and invitations from my son's friends are especially precious to me because, two years ago, at twenty-nine, my son Josh died of an accidental overdose. We held a memorial in New Durham, the small New Hampshire town where he grew up, and I was overwhelmed by how many friends showed up-many of whom he hadn't seenin a decade. Josh played Peter Pan in fourth grade and Captain Hook, Wendy, and a string of Lost Boys, now grown up with children of their own, all took me aside to tell me how much they would miss him.
Facebook facilitates our staying connected. Girls I didn't know existed tell me about their enduring crushes on him. His friends regularly post new pictures from high school and tell me when they dream of him. Some of these relationships are taking root beyond condolence and the connection to Josh. I am flooded with Farmville gifts and photographs of toddlers, new cars, and first houses, and delighted to be invited so open-heartedly into their daily lives.
At Christmas, Corey had written on Facebook how worried she was about money with two kids and a recently laid-off boyfriend. She alluded to a new business venture. She is now a "Passion Consultant," with a hostess party franchise "enhancing the sexual relationships of our clients with sensual products designed to promote intimacy and communication between couples."
Product parties are big in rural areas where jobs are now fewer than ever. Several women I've known piece together a financial existence from Tupperware and Pampered Chef parties. Although I'm not generally a big fan, I've driven through snowstorms to attend just for that glimmer of human warmth, during the long winters when the video store shelves are empty and plumbers are working twelve hours a day to unfreeze pipes. For once, I'm glad I'm not living in New Durham now-I know Corey's sunny energy. She'd drive over to invite me personally and I wouldn't know what to do with my face.
I like to think that I was a "sex positive" parent, not stigmatizing sex, willing to discuss intimacy and safety comfortably. I am flattered that she feels so at ease with me, but a quick scan of the guest list shows that I am the only mother invited who is over fifty. The habit of thinking of myself as a grown-up and them as kids dies hard.
"Why me? " I ask my college roommate over the phone.
"You still got it!" she suggests, but I can hear her stifling a chortle.
Wanting to help Corey out, I perused her online catalog at Christmas and decided I could safely order some gold dusting powder. Then I noticed it was flavored. Call me old-fashioned, I just don't want Corey to have a visual in her memory banks of me being licked. I'm not a prude-although, come to think about it, the one time I went into a sex shop, I wished I could spontaneously combust when a young man my son's age asked me if I needed help. I just can't get my mind around being assisted on "a personal journey of sensual discovery" by somebody whose coat I used to zip up.
I want to encourage Corey in her endeavors, but I break out in a sweat thinking about games with "dirty dice" with the girls who used to skulk across my living room barely making eye contact, who are now married to the boys who used to take my car for joyrides and return it "secretly" with the grill packed with mud. I think I'll send regrets and just visit the next time I'm home. Maybe I'll bring a batch of cookies, just to remind us both of who is who and what is what.
Pandemic Day
When the bakery where I work closed, I was relieved. I miss my weekly hit of comradely cooking and laughing with young people. But so many of our regulars are older and more vulnerable to the
virus, and I feel that cooking in the close quarters of the bakery is like making pizza in a petri dish. The owner is itching to reopen. I know I'll have a job when she does. I still have work from New York that I can do online. This remote work also keeps me connected to the city I love even as the spreading pandemic turns its epicenter darker and darker.
I feel like a quarantine underachiever. I have not done a jigsaw puzzle, made masks, baked bread, or learned a language. I have enough to eat, a working vehicle, secure housing, stable income, and health insurance. I live with someone I can touch, who I love and even still like after three months relatively confined to a small apartment.
Even without the pandemic, being married this time around has been like a geriatric do-over of kindergarten: art time, music time, naptime, snack time, little field trips. We've established some daily rituals: I write as soon as I get up, have coffee with my husband when he wakes (which is earlier and earlier). We do qi gong with Mimi, a YouTube instructor we like. Sometimes I walk around the mill pond. On Mondays, I Zoom into my old AA group in New York. My husband Russ suits up to go downstairs to get the mail, usually reporting back on the neighbors. "Judy is having coffee at the picnic table." "I think there's a leak in the basement." "Is that guy at the end of the hall Frank or Bob?" "Angela wants a ride to Market Basket." So far, our senior housing home is intact. Nobody got sick.
We each call friends daily. This is a time when having nothing of interest to report is a good thing. I love sleeping now even more than the too-fat food I can't seem to stop making.
The PBS NewsHour reminds us at the end of our day that a disaster rages outside our comfortable life. My husband doesn't care about politics and rarely swears. But the pandemic has changed. that too; as we watch the news, he whispers, "What an asshole." I have a crush on all the newscasters, love seeing their pets. I am worried but also a little relieved that Judy Woodruff seems crankier.
The news brings home the fact that I can't do anything about the pandemic out there that affects the world, my country, my friends. Knowing that the disaster could leak into our lives at any minute, I can only tinker away at doing small things: cook, connect, contribute what I can, create something daily. Every passing day, things seem more precious, more fragile. If we make it through, we will have made a habit of delighting in the small moments, leaning into any instance of reprieve, recognizing each opportunity for engagement, and feeling deep gratitude for human connection. I will take these habits into whatever comes next.