These Four Walls
(a quarantine log)
From my kitchen window I watch Pete give his husband Wayne a haircut. Wayne clutches a champagne-colored sheet near his heart. Pete trims. Their two dogs weave around their feet and Pete bats them away with his left elbow. Wayne’s hair falls down the sheet to the grass, blows around in tufts. I like watching all the pieces of this scene. I’m a floor above them, in the house to the north, leaning on my stove. Pete’s turn in the chair now, and Wayne takes the clippers. I say to Iris that we should cut each other’s hair. She says no, she’ll grow it—and she is. It’s long.
*
In the last year, I have taken precut broccoli, yes, and scorched it in a cast iron pot. I have called it dinner and served it on a plate next to rice. This pandemic affords the curated meal. Carbonara from Jeff Smith. Black-bean chili. Dishes that punctuated my thirties and fed my children. Pasta e fagioli, I take my time with you. I drizzle you with olive oil before serving.
*
From my perch on my deck where I’m trying to learn to finger pick my old Yamaha guitar, I hear thud/thud/thud. I peer over and find the other Pete in my backyard. I live between two Petes. This other Pete, he’s throwing over the fence we share, back toward his fourteen-year-old son who catches, throws, thud. He says they were planning to ask for forgiveness. He yells up that, when I sing, I sound like someone famous but he can’t remember who.
*
Like travel brochures for places we might visit in the future, the dating apps show me what might be. It’s hard to build momentum. I’ve been in quarantine long enough for potential romances to kindle, burn, and die. They have their own rhythms. In this 2-D life, I’m an image projected on his scrim; he (John, Dan, Allen) is an image on mine. The rubber never meets the road.
*
I can’t have another April day without pansies. Pansies are essential workers. On our first eighty-degree day, I pay by phone for a flat. Curbside at the garden center, I’m masked and gloved; so are they. Now I have yellow pansies, hopeful citizens, in my planters. They are immune. I leave one for Pete at his back door. Thundershowers douse it all night.
*
When I was sick, there were no swab tests. Now that I’m better, there are no antibody tests. My doctor says, Check back with me. I check and she says, Check back.
*
It turns out we don’t dress for ourselves. Preen, admire, strut: it’s for others. Without others, I would never wear heels again. I can’t imagine a quarantine day where I would put on my on-trend black jumpsuit, all the Spanx underneath it, earrings, my red wedges, to sit on my turquoise couch. If you think you dress for yourself, let’s rumble.
*
Quarantine is so long that it’s divided into chapters. In early quarantine, I paid Iris to assemble a cabinet I had ordered. I used Goo-Gone grout cleaner on my bathroom floor. We admired the “new” bathroom. When I look at that cabinet now—beaded and white with its polished nickel pulls—it looks like a relic.
*
The dogs and I loop and return through the streets of my childhood-turned-adulthood home. I can tell you where my mother and I were walking—she pregnant with my brother—that July day when her water broke. I can show you where I went over my bike’s handlebars and egged my forehead with the fall. The dogs sniff the whole world with focus. It’s spring in Chicago, and Chicagoans must stay at home.
*
If my daughter in California falls ill, I will board a plane. If Iris falls ill, I will nurse her. If they fall ill at the same time, span two thousand miles, I don’t know what I will do. I will atomize.
*
My weekly therapy sessions have moved to FaceTime. I take the call and, for privacy, walk the neighborhood for an hour. I ask Garry about James from Tinder. Is it still dating if you don’t meet in person? I walk south to the expressway. Garry wants to know what I want out of the experience. “It has no future,” I say.
*
Zillow tells me that Nikki has requested to view my property. I give her a virtual tour of the third-floor apartment. We finish on the back patio, looking past Pete and Wayne’s house, past Eddie’s and beyond. The little yards are silent, hopeful, turning green.
*
I order a bra and panty set. It’s the most optimistic thing I do in quarantine.
*
My mother’s gardens are legion. She grows hydrangeas and trumpet vine, roses and black-eyed susans, hosta and sweet alyssum. She labors with her plants and her weeds and devotes herself to their beauty. If you’re looking for my mother, you will find her in the garden.
*
Like the golf pro from Tinder with whom I got as far as a FaceTime call. The second I saw his recliner, the TV on in front of it, I knew. I don’t do recliners. Nothing personal.
*
The day my mother is admitted to the hospital for an allergic reaction is also the day, it turns out, of the COVID-19 peak in Chicago. Something stung her in her garden and her throat closed. The EpiPen she jammed into her leg on the way to the hospital bought her time so the ER doctors could save her life. They admit her and give her a bed. My dad brings her books, a meal, fresh clothes, and a phone charger. He hands them to a nurse at the door.
*
In the mid-Pleistocene, we sort all the photos in their albums. Instead of sprawling over two shelves in two rooms, the photos are now corralled. They chronicle the lives we have lived: the girls with their father when they were small, before our divorce. In the mid-Pleistocene, I also frame five more prints and bang nails into the wall to hang them. The plaster crumbles when the nail enters. I can hear it falling down inside the wall.
*
When call-him-Sean tells me on Tinder that he’s not staying home because he’s not a lemming, I unmatch with him posthaste.
*
I read a story in the New York Times about a family whose grandmother was taken to the hospital with COVID symptoms and was lost to the system. They couldn’t find her or where she was admitted. They cried for days, searching for their grandmother. They presumed she was dead, and perhaps she was. Is. On another day, we might have lost my mother to a ward, to death. I am saying, please don’t let the grandmothers out of your sight.
*
My sister writes from Berkeley to say residents are leaving sourdough starter in trees for neighbors to take. It’s nice to have it, if it’s something you want, she says.
*
The gauzy, white curtains in the living room window are where I left them. My office nook remains untouched. Here’s the lava lamp, not plugged in. The kitchen stools: sentries. Over the days, guitar sheet music travels on surfaces until it touches six spots: my dresser, the ottoman, the bench, more. On Wednesday, I meet Mike virtually for my guitar lesson. He shows me on the screen how to pick with my whole arm, not my fingers. Swing your arm, he says.
*
I see my friend Dora in the park. She’s stopped near the water fountain. We’ve been friends since we were ten. She looks puzzled when I wave and doesn’t know me through the mask, sunglasses and hat. I announce my name to her. “Oh!” We keep walking past each other.
*
Zillow says someone else is interested in my apartment for rent. She writes she is an “exec.” If you are an “exec,” why do you want to rent my crappy apartment?
*
We invent games and play them. Tonight’s game is How Fast Can Mommy Type? I turn to a page of Terry Tempest Williams, fix my eyes there and go. After one minute, I have 84 words and one error. So, 83 words. I dazzle Iris. I would make someone a great secretary.
*
I don’t like the fear and I don’t invite it in. But I strap my mask on—pink—and I cross the street when anyone comes toward me. The fear is shaking me by the lapels and announcing, I’m here.
*
Friday, we drive to the loop to see it empty. We think police will stop us on the way, turn us back home. They hover, but they don’t stop us. We exit at Franklin and drive toward my office where the lunch places clutch like a pearl necklace. All the crosswalks seem haunted. It’s not as funny as we thought it would be. It’s sad and desperate. It’s the same day that COVID-19 cases balloon at Cook County Jail, where there’s no distancing, no ride home, where no one can leave.
*
A distanced walk with a friend is all. A family Zoom call is all. A virtual lesson is all. A slow and simmering meal is all. Sun on my face is all and everything. I search out the good and lovely. I fill my gratitude jar with the names of the people I miss.
*
On the night John Prine dies of COVID-related causes, I break my Facebook fast. I find my friends there, posting his songs and sad emoji face with a large tear creeping down the cheek. I play three of his songs for Iris. They are small, musical poems about people messing up, people loving hard. She is patient and I try to grip the pick lightly, try to swing my arm.
*
I am out of mascara. Iris says it’s not essential, but I need mascara for Zoom calls.
*
Apropos of Tinder matches, I text my friend Mimi and ask her if she’s ever dated someone eighteen years younger than she is. She writes back: “I would date a grizzly bear right now.”
*
Iris attends a Zoom seminar-for-credit at her future college. The topic is the COVID pandemic we are living through. Zack the dog throws up at her feet while she’s introducing herself to her discussion group. I live in Chicago, I love languages and politics, she says. Then she mutes herself to ask me to clean up the mess.
*
Good morning, I text a shockingly young man I seem to be virtually dating. Hey beautiful, he texts me back.
*
On the day my mother is discharged from the hospital, the nurses wheel her off the floor. They steer her into the elevator and push the L button with gloved hands, wheel her out through the automatic doors where my dad is waiting for her. I text her that April is beautiful, that she’s living, that we’re both still on this beautiful earth together, and that Bernie dropped out of the race as a special gift to her so the Dems can consolidate and win. My dad drives her to Walgreens to pick up her prescriptions. They return to their contagion-free shelter by the lake. Waiting.
*
Open the windows. Close the windows. Morning, night. Snow, sun. A day. Another day. Beads on a string, but only for the lucky.
*
I dream I meet a man where skin occurs, a place beyond masks. We’re on the Riverwalk downtown, a normal year. A crush of people and no danger. There it is, I say, cupping his thick beard. Here you are, I say, taking his hand. On this thirty-third day of quarantine, I wake and shake the dream off, brew coffee. I don’t know who I will meet at the end of the story. (Hi beautiful.) I know I will remember to wear my new, hopeful lingerie. (Can you date someone solely by text?) I know I will be embodied. 3-D. Blazing sun, loved man with a name I speak. That’s how I will know it’s over. I will feel us holding on.
Cameron Gearen’s full length collection, Some Perfect Year, came out from Shearsman Press in 2016. Her essays and poems have appeared in the Washington Post, Chicago Magazine, Hippocampus, Dame Magazine,the Antioch Review, Green Mountains Review, and many other journals. From 2017–2019, she was the writer-in-residence at the Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park. Follow her on Instagram: @camerongearen