Coronavirus hasn’t just infected bodies – it’s infected our consciousness too
I’ve been a little hard on myself, not being able to write when I need to spend all morning worrying about whether this $5 bill will kill me. I don’t actually think it will, but since we don’t know enough about the virus, we each have our own protocols, superstitions and theories. Whether or not we disinfect our money, or the grocery bag, we can’t look at a bill or a paper bag without wondering if we should spray it. So the virus has infected our consciousness, regardless of how far we are from a hotspot, how safe or healthy we may feel. It takes time and energy, trying not to think about, or mind how much we have lost.
We got the $5 bill in change for the dozen eggs we bought at the local farm stand, a mile or so from our home in a rural corner of the Hudson Valley, in the foothills of the Catskills. Ingram’s is the sort of modest, thriving family farm that hardly exists any more, a miraculous anachronism now run by the New York state agriculture schooleducated daughters of the quiet, goodnatured dad who was farming the land when we moved here, 40 years ago.
What’s strange is that, except for the fact that the farmers wear masks when customers stop at the stand, you’d hardly know that anything has changed. There are no more or fewer customers than there ever were; the chat about the lateness of the spring is a variant on other years, when spring came unusually early. The same gorgeously flowering trees are in bloom; drivers know to slow down to avoid the chickens flocking over the road, and families with kids pull over to look at the horses. You put your money in one container, get the eggs from a cooler, get the change from another box – and then (this is the difference) you spend the morning wondering if that $5 bill might be lethal. Since the start of the pandemic, I’ve seen almost no paper money; commerce is more often a keystroke, and occasionally, plastic.
I’m thankful for the egg stand, but I do miss grocery shopping, which I love, and which has always given me the comfort and peace, the uplift that, I suppose, others find in religion. For me, shopping for food was never just about stocking the refrigerator or planning meals, but about hope for the future, about the promise of pleasure.
One joy of living in the Hudson Valley is that we have a close-to-ideal supermarket in Kingston. It’s large, but not Whole Foods large, reasonably priced, with zero pretentiousness or attitude; it attracts a range of customers from every local demographic.
A third of the store is devoted to glorious produce you can pick through yourself. The meat and dairy are stellar, their store-made cider doughnuts legendary. There are always lots of customers, but you never have to wait long at checkout, or watch numbers flash on a board.
Now the customers wear masks, but it’s often crowded. So now we get our food by emailing our orders and having a masked hero put the food in the back of our cars. When we pull out of the parking lot, I’m grateful, relieved and sad.
I’ve also been missing the plant nursery. Because we have a large garden – flowers and vegetables – the nursery has been where we most often go in the summer, and where, for those months, we seem to spend most of our money. Lately it’s been closed on weekdays.
And on weekends, when we’ve driven past, it’s been alarmingly crowded.
With hundreds of thousands dying, every experience seems saturated with mortality and privilege. Very little seems important enough in the face of so much suffering and death. The $5 bill and the eggs from the farm are reminders of the long lines of people, jobless and broke, waiting to pick up food. Also it’s hard, for a fiction writer, to inhabit the mind of an imaginary character when I’m so conscious of my own mind, observing how I’m doing, holding up or not. It’s like having a semi-constant out-of-body experience.
Early this Saturday morning we drove past the plant nursery. The parking lot was nearly empty. It seemed like a miracle, really. We put on masks and gloves. My husband went to check out the outdoor plants, and I walked into the greenhouse.
The greenhouse looked just like it always does at this time of year: hanging baskets trailing bright pansies and petunias, tables of seedlings, herbs and vegetables, purple and orange Johnny Jump Ups, sorrel and cabbages, snapdragons, a half-dozen kinds of coleus. It was like one of those blessed dreams in which there is no Covid-19.
I was happy to be in the greenhouse and eager to enter that blissful state of wanting everything but knowing I needed to make sensible choices. It was the same thing I’d done for years. But it wasn’t the same, because I soon discovered that I had no idea where to go, or what to do.
After a while I realized that I was turning around and around, like a kid trying to get dizzy, like the woodchucks that spun in place when our dog cornered them and was circling in for the kill. I saw myself from a distance, and I thought, in that out-of-body way, that this is what I’d become: a woman in a mask, with tears in her eyes, turning around in a greenhouse, slightly stunned and disoriented, like a tourist in another country.
Francine Prose is a novelist. Her latest book is Mister Monkey
Shopping for food was never just about stocking the refrigerator or planning meals, but about hope for the future