Streets may be full, but subway, stores are, oh, so empty
Toronto rides, shops and protests. People find a distant way to be together, but the mood is eerie, the frame of the city off-kilter.
I took the TTC for the first time in three months, expecting fetid heat, people squirming like minnows and a seething sub-murmur of violence. But that is the American story, immersed as we are now in American news.
The Toronto subway at noon on a weekday is placid and pleasant with the kind of wideopen spaces cowboys are said to enjoy. The Line 1 cars gleam and Line 2 does its faded best.
“Come along, children. Spit spot!” as Mary Poppins would say, and we do, sitting obediently on the seats with warning cards on the back. Or should it be the seats without the cards? On Line 2, the cards have detached and slipped to the ground, but people improvise.
Everyone sits beatifically alone, silent on a peak in Darien, regal on a bank of seats. Riders don’t touch poles or clog doors. They stand back from each other and don’t even fill the seats with backpacks now that there is more room for backpacks than riders.
Surprisingly, they rarely man-spread. Courtesy hangs in the air, unspoken.
The contrast with the main streets is stark. There is no way for anti-police demonstrators to distance properly, just as there is no way for pedestrians to walk safely by store lineups and bike lanes. As ever, the car is supreme.
On Bloor Street West, still relatively crowded although most stores are closed, almost no one wears a face mask. Men rarely wear them — it’s not clear if this is toxic masculinity or cheerful unawareness of bodily fragility — but cheerful young women buying handmade $5 face masks through a café window don’t either.
We do everything else right, paying for the masks by scanning credit cards through glass, but why line up uncovered, breathing damply on each other on a warm day, and buy masks too late?
At any rate, I go to the Bay at Yonge and Queen, a great store that may not survive bad American management, real estate greed and the pandemic, and do my bit. Pre-Amazon, the Bay used to be our Everything Store, easily as useful as a downtown Canadian Tire, but the pandemic has changed that.
The great spaces are initially a bit of a horror movie, if you saw “Get Out,” about a Black man who should have exited a white country estate before he got there. The store is deserted, as if the police had cleared the place and you were in the washroom and missed the announcement.
In normal times, the staff would be elsewhere and I would have had to yodel to find anyone to take my money and remove the “you-are-a-thiefand-look-there-is-guilty-inkon-you” device.
Sometimes I would talk to myself. “Do you have this in a 4? Why yes, here it is,” and I would hover by a fitting room and wait for someone to pass by with a key.
Now the fitting rooms are locked and blocked off. This renders the lingerie floor pointless, not that it stopped me. The staff were at something of a loss. Underwear is essential, but you have to try it on. It’s like buying household essentials — polenta, batteries, mangoes — that you have to hold in your hand to sense if they’re right.
Finally, there were staff. They easily outnumbered the customers, all four of them, and were wonderfully kind, eager to help customers now that they had time and space. Everything was on sale, aggressively so — it was very “Take it, we like you” — but unlabelled so you’d take a wild shot in case it was 80 per cent off, which made it compelling even if it was something Ivanka would wear to a Bible-burning.
If you can slip on a pair of jeans under your dress in a quiet corner overlooking Bay and Queen watched only by security cameras, and go for the win, pandemic shopping is for you.
Until all this ends, how are people supposed to buy things that have to be technically right and correctly sized, i.e., in person?
The face masks I bought on Bloor, untouched through the window, were artisanal, code for tiny, thin and threadbare.
They were bought for authenticity, but, as so often happens, were authentically awful.
When I got home, I worried I had sat in COVID-19, so I changed and washed the COVID-19 out of the clothes I had just worn and the clothes I had just bought. Clothes are funny things. You don’t know where they’ve been.
The American T-shirts and jeans I bought at the Bay were made in Mexico, Vietnam, Portugal and China, fine stuff sewn by viciously underpaid people in nations exploited, tormented, and sometimes bombed by the U.S. which buys low and sells high. I eyeballed the garments in a deserted, failing American department store that was once a Canadian emblem.
Globalism will shrink. I won’t miss it.
When I got home, I worried I had sat in COVID-19, so I changed out of the clothes I’d worn and just bought