Signs: Snapshots from Our Pandemic Years
Allison S. Walker
Keywords: parenting, COVID's impact on the economy, hospitalization, global death toll, mindfulness, holistic health
Categories: Parenting and Possibility in Impossible Times; Sick/Disabled Bodyminds during Sick/Disabling Times
Content warning: global death toll
Flashbulb memory: an exceptionally detailed and enduring memory of a personally significant emotional event, rendered as vividly as a photograph in your mind.
We go out at night. After curfew. Though it’s technically forbidden. She needs hours, my designated learner, and what’s the harm anyway? Run a red light or two? No biggie. Donuts in a parking lot? Why not? Where does this road go? Who knows? We’ve become denizens of the night. We navigate by starlight. We test the right-hand turn theory, and it’s true. It lands us back where we started. We find solace in no destination. Just the journey. The collection of time in miles. In minutes. Nothing to see. Nowhere to be. Just a teenage daughter learning to drive.
And it would feel almost normal, if the roads weren’t deserted, eternal sirens in the distance, all the signs we miss or only see in hindsight, the newsreel of someone else’s emergency, and the gratitude that it isn’t our own. Not yet.
* * *
CLOSED. COVID. Was all it said in all-caps Sharpie on used cardboard, duct-taped to the front door. It’s a locals-only sort of dive, the kind of dimly lit watering hole you’d never choose for a birthday drink or a date night, but the kind that has its regulars still, no-frills folks who don’t want artisanal, hand-crafted concoctions in awkwardly shaped stemware. They want a beer they can pay for with the change scrounged from the crack between the driver’s seat and the dashboard console if you’re really committed and don’t mind a fossilized French fry or two.
The sign in the window still reads, “Come on in. We’re already drinking.” above a faded half-curtain of floral print, hung limp and dusty from a dull brass rod that’s likely been there since the 1980s when that sort of thing was in style. If that sort of thing were ever in style. The window may have been washed in the past decade, it’s hard to tell, but the neon OPEN behind it has most assuredly gone dark. The bench outside the front door is vacant. No one sobering up with a cigarette before hitching a ride or a slow walk home.
A bartender and scattershot waitstaff mill about inside, backlit by the naked bulb from the supply closet behind the bar, shadowy figures I don’t recognize though I’m no regular. They’re drinking in there. But none of the familiar sounds of revelry accompany their cups tonight. None of that blowing-off-steam laughter after the patrons have all gone home. They’re emptying the last of the kegs, stale beer, foamy, room temperature, nothing worthy of celebration. Kegs tapped before the citywide curfew hit, before all the bars in town were shuttered indefinitely.
They’re drinking in silence. They’re saying goodbye. To each other. To their livelihood. To all they’d once considered part of a predictable life. Nothing fancy. Just the fistful of fives and ones at the end of a shift, tips never reported to the IRS but income nonetheless. Now even that finicky river runs dry.
One bartender wrangles keys from his pocket, unlocks and shoulders open the front door so a waitress can exit. She’s carrying toilet paper. The cheap stuff. Single ply. Rolls half-full, or half-empty, depending on your worldview. She’s loaded with them. Glances furtively up the street, then scuttles to her ancient Camry in the parking lot, stashing her score in the trunk while the bartender keeps a lookout. One roll falls, unspools itself down the slope of uneven sidewalk toward me, unraveled nearly to its end, that spent cardboard tube leaving its paper trail glowing like a lonely beacon in the night.
I remember a study I read once on the paradox of altruism. The poor have nothing, yet they share everything. The rich have everything, yet they share nothing.
The waitress will survive, won’t she?
The solid click of the lock falling into place echoes across the empty street as the bartender ushers her back inside. One more drink before she goes. CLOSED. COVID.
* * *
When our daughter was only a few months old, we began teaching her sign language. We weren’t fluent, but we could manage the basics of human need. Verbs first—eat. sleep. stop. sit. go.—then nouns, as she devoured her place among a family of things—mom. dad. book. cat. home.—and, finally, the abstract iterations—thank you. i see you.
Our hands, our nimble fingers, threw open a door and our daughter burst forth in simple declarative sentences. Through chubby little fists came her first words, accompanied by bliss when those signs satisfied thirst, hunger, or her desire for one more story. Our first conversations were silent. Yet we spoke. We listened. We understood.
In late March of 2020, my daughter and I sat in her pediatrician’s parking lot, waiting. She, my towering girl of fifteen, stood jittery on the sidewalk, nervously shuffling her feet as the doctor tended to another mother’s infant first, then donned layer upon layer of PPE until her eyes were the only visible part of her face. She asked my child to turn away. My daughter couldn’t see the doctor steeling herself before providing care through a cold stethoscope. But she could see me, in the car, in my mask, in my viral skin, shedding COVID contagion with every breath. She couldn’t see the fear in my eyes through the glare of the windshield. She couldn’t hear my voice. But she could hear my hands. She could see me saying: Stop fidgeting. Be still. Yes. It’s going to be okay. Sit on the curb and wait your turn. Thank you. Let the doctors do their difficult work. Mom is here. We’re still here. I see you. Even though we are far from home.
* * *
Teaching through COVID. Sign in. Don’t cough. You’re muted. You’re muted. Push the microphone button to speak. Can you hear me? Turn your camera on. Do you see me? Turn your audio down. Turn your audio up. Can you hear me? You’re muted. We’re losing you. You’re breaking. Breaking. You’re breaking up. We lost you there for a second. We lost you. We lost. You. Sign out.
* * *
April 16, 2020. I celebrate Mom’s birthday over text. Emoji cake. Emoji candles. Emoji hugs. It’s all I can do. A sign of the times. How many times will I say “unprecedented” in my mother’s 73rd year of life? Is virtual confetti too tragic? Is there an emoji for the way tears slip past the upper seal of a surgical mask and pool at the end of your nose? The way a homemade cloth mask can become saturated with them until your breath feels cold and slightly salty when you breathe it back in?
No phone call even. So she can’t detect illness in my voice. Mothers can hear it, sense it, with their Mom ESP, even through tangled phone lines. Definitely no FaceTime. Even though it’s her birthday.
Because I’m sitting alone in Room 101, talking to a doctor through a closed door on a landline, one with the long corkscrew cord, the kind I used to gossip on in middle school, stretching it taut to reach the pantry or change the cassette tape on the stereo. He stands there, cocking his neck sideways like a bird sensing a worm. He twists the cord around his wrist, the way I used to when I was talking to a boy. He’s watching me, observing me, his specimen behind glass, through facemask, through goggles, as I lie here in fading sweatpants, linked to beeping machines and trying to speak. In complete sentences. Without coughing.
My phone vibrates. Heart emoji. Should I tell her the truth? Tell her how it felt to walk into the ER, looking back to see my husband driving away and wondering whether I would ever walk out?
No family permitted beyond this point.
We didn’t tell her granddaughter where we were going. Would she approve of my motherly choice to obscure, obfuscate, deny? Should I shield her from this knowledge too? It’s the only birthday gift I have to offer. Heart emoji. Kiss emoji. Smiling pile of poo.
* * *
Emotion work is the ability to mask your emotions for the benefit of others. You do it when you smile while talking to a telemarketer. You do it when the customer is always right. Or when the child throws a tantrum on the bathroom tile because bedtime is nigh and teeth won’t brush themselves and the pajamas have the wrong cartoon animal grinning maniacally back at you. Emotion work happens when the mother makes pancakes sprinkled with cinnamon she can’t smell. When the daughter says she’s fine. When the husband says he’s fine. When the Zoom feed freezes for the hundredth time. And still you’re fine.
A hike off the Blue Ridge Parkway is a treat no matter the season. It’s especially sacred today, six weeks into quarantine. Three weeks after oxygen in the ER. It’s deserted, as if we’re walking a path through the woods worn by ancient hunter-gatherers. Today, there’s no distant hum of traffic. No noise. Just signal. Creeks high from winter snowmelt, squirrels digging in the brush, birds darting overhead as if we’re encapsulated in some epic aviary.
Only I can’t really breathe.
This should feel like nothing. A few miles, a gradual slope, a trail barely punctuated by knobby roots and wet rocks. An easy hike. But we’re not even halfway and I’ve sucked every cough drop down to nothing but artificial orange, uncomfortably strong and lingering on a raw tongue coated in a bloom of thrush. Another weird symptom of this disease.
At least they don’t know I’m struggling to keep up.
Emotion work.
At least I can taste, even if the flavor is wrong.
Emotion work.
At least I can put one foot in front of the other.
Emotion work.
At least we’re here. Together.
I put another rock on the top of the cairn, a sign left by others to tell us which way to go. A rock for those we’ve lost. For how far we’ve come. To let the next person know. We’re still here. We’re still on the path. And the view will be amazing from the top.
* * *
Dawn on the back porch steps before the rest of the neighborhood awakens. It’s just me and the riotous birdsong. Two cats slink past my legs as I nurse a cup of homebrewed coffee. I breathe. I drink. I breathe. Gratitude. The signs of prosaic routine. So unimaginably, heart-wrenchingly beautiful. Why did I never notice the way the light caresses the tips of the tallest trees? Just listening is ecstasy. The bells echoing down from the church on the corner, the trains bellowing in the distance, and the birds, oh the birds, pouring their hearts out.
* * *
Time to get swole, bitches! Bring your A-game. This ain’t daycare. Sundays we gather in the driveway, sweat safely outdoors through endless squats and push-ups, six feet apart. The ages vary from youthful and pregnant to graying to full-on gray and post-menopause. But we’re all strong. We’re all fearless. We’re all women. Women who, after months of isolation, craved the support of other women. So we carved out one hour a week to craft quarantine bodies with muscular curves. We shouldered the burden, sculpting power from pain, knitting strength over scars you can’t see but you know are there just the same.
We’d never have met without COVID, without closed gyms and yoga studios, monotonous hours spent on couches or under blankets, bingeing another series on a screen. Will we weather this? It’s heavy lifting. But we’re all in it together. Signs point to yes.
Until one of us falls. One out of six million and counting.
Bio
A graduate of the University of Alaska Anchorage, Allison S. Walker received her M.F. A. in Creative Writing in 2004. Her poems have appeared in numerous literary journals and her recent scholarly work in the Community Literacy Journal and The Journal of Writing Analytics. Her research interests include narrative medicine and empathy studies. She also directs HPU LifeLines, a service learning initiative that harnesses the healing power of poetry by connecting students with residents of local assisted living facilities and after-school programs. In her spare time, Allison likes to volunteer for the Feral Cat Assistance Program of Guilford County.