By Steven Cheslik-DeMeyer
J and K, the owners of the house, come out to greet us when we pull into the driveway. They live next door in another house mostly hidden by trees. J, a big man in jeans and suspenders, keeps at least ten feet from us. K hovers another ten feet or so farther back. With her straight grey bob, she doesn’t exactly remind me of my mother but she looks like someone my mother would like. They both look like the kind of people who would give you a hug or at least take your hand in both of theirs to shake it. J warns us that the top rack in the dishwasher is a little stubborn. They tell us to text if we need anything. After we lug our stuff into the house, J comes back with a Tupperware container of homemade granola, “from a New York Times recipe,” he says.
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We left the city on an impulse and in a hurry.
At first, in early March, C’s company divided his department into two teams that would take turns working from home for a week, then a week at the office, but a few days later they just sent everybody home indefinitely. I always work from home, as far as that expression describes what a writer does. After two weeks together all day in our one-bedroom apartment, on Saturday the day before my birthday, C was sitting on the couch with his iPad, and he said, “We don’t have to stay here. We can do this anywhere. Why don’t we go somewhere?”
“Where?”
“Michigan?”
Michigan seemed far away and we’d have to fly.
“How about Maine?” I said.
We talked it through—in New York, we share a building with thousands of other people, many of them over 70, over 80, we share the elevators, the hallways, laundry room, and we share the streets and grocery stores with the whole neighborhood. It’s impossible to maintain six feet of space between us and everyone; whereas in Maine we can isolate ourselves for 14 days to make sure we aren’t infectious and, after that, even if we venture out for a hike or to the grocery store, we’ll see very few people—and we came to the conclusion that regarding both our own chances of contracting the virus and our chance of spreading the virus, in a remote location on the coast of Maine was a better place to be.
Within what seemed like minutes, C got a reply to his inquiry about a house he found on a vacation rental web site. “The property is available, and I’d like to invite you to stay! Please come, relax and enjoy the peace and quiet of rural Maine. K.” Though the house would not be ready until Thursday, C booked a rental car to pick up on Monday. The governor was shutting down one industry after another and we were worried that rental car agencies might be next.
On Tuesday an article appeared in the New York Times, “The Wealthy Flee Coronavirus. Vacation Towns Respond: Stay Away,” followed by what felt like a fusillade but was probably only three or four articles here and there along the same theme. A town on Long Island contemplated closing a bridge to keep outsiders out.
We wouldn’t have called what we were doing “fleeing,” but in the days following our decision to go to Maine, we’d become part of an unpopular exodus. Our thoughts veered from “maybe we should cancel and stay home” to “we need to get the hell out now.” For a while (and still, but now we’re used to it) the world seemed to change from hour to hour, over and over some new piece of information would force one to recalibrate every plan, aspiration, opinion, what to do for the rest of the day, everything.
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I don’t think either of us realized how secluded the house would be.
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We emptied our refrigerator and freezer and cupboards of food, packed it all up in bags and boxes, the frozen stuff in a Styrofoam box that Omaha steaks, a gift from C’s brother and sister-in-law, had been delivered in and that we had saved seemingly for this occasion. Having no idea what I would want to read while waiting out a pandemic in a rented cabin on the coast of Maine, I brought Edmund White’s biography of Genet, Flannery O’Connor’s Collected Stories, Proust’s In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (the new translation), City of Night by John Rechy, and Philip Roth’s Nemesis, a late short novel about an outbreak of polio in Newark in the 1940s. I packed empty notebooks, sketch pads, drawing pencils and pastels, my guitar, and a week’s worth of clothes (there’s a washer and dryer there) and we threw everything into the car. We joked, though it wasn’t funny, that we were afraid they might not let us out. Of the city, of the state. But nobody stopped us. Traffic was lighter than you’d expect but there were plenty of cars on the roads. We drove straight through, it took eight hours, and here we are in a charming rough plank cabin surrounded by spruce and birch trees, with a fireplace and a wide porch in back facing a cove on the western side of an island off the coast of Maine. For five weeks which will turn into seven.
What will we come home to?
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I do feel guilty that we are sitting out the pandemic here in this beautiful place, while friends, many of whose incomes disappeared overnight, are stuck in their tiny New York apartments for who knows how long. Because of social media, I don’t have to speculate on whether or not they are struggling, while here, at the edge of the world, it hardly matters that it might be the end of the world; in fact it seems like it is and it’s okay.
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The trees thin out as you get closer to the shore, but there are still lots of them. A massive spruce stands just out the back door, between the house and the water, and everywhere dozens, hundreds of skinny white birches. It was through a screen of these birches that we first saw the water, vertical bands of shimmering cerulean between the trees, when we drove up to the front of the house on Thursday just before sunset and parked on the gravel. But through the sliding glass doors in back that lead out to the deck, the water is (notwithstanding that big spruce) fully visible. Its surface—luminosity, color, shape, reflectivity, transparency, motion—changes from hour to hour, and, in the morning and evening light, from moment to moment. At high tide the water looks like it might spill over the rocks and come right in the house. Low tide reveals several tiny islands of rock just a few feet off the shore.
Ducks float patiently in groups of two or three. One will suddenly upend itself and disappear under the water for 20 or 30 seconds, then resurface with a small fish in its beak. Sometimes a gull or two, twice as big as the ducks, will join the floating group and wait for a duck to surface with a fish, steal it, and fly to one of the little islands to wolf it down. The only time the ducks weren’t hunting was during the storm.
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All day I’ve been sluggish and on the verge of tears. I woke to email from the Korean producers of my musical with e-tickets attached for a June trip to Seoul. When we knew we would be unable to go in April, we discussed June as an alternative. I guess I just didn’t, seeing how the epidemic has evolved, imagine anyone was still planning on a June trip to Seoul. It’s true it’s safer in Korea now than New York, but Trump is shutting down all immigration, so won’t the international airports be a mess?
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It’s snowing this morning. About an inch of it has accumulated on the deck and the big spruce and the rocks farther down. I watch the scene revealed incrementally as the sun slowly lights the deck and the cove and across the water to the island opposite.
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A couple packages were scheduled to be delivered in New York in the days after we left (coffee pods, a set of cheap whisks from Amazon, heirloom beans from Rancho Gordo), and who knows where our mail will be? Before we left, before we’d considered the possibility of being met with hostility here in this idyll, I put in a forwarding order with the post office, but a few days after we arrived, we decided to cancel it and lay low. I read that mail delivery is fucked up for everyone in New York right now, so I guess I shouldn’t worry about it.
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I’ve moved my office to the kitchen table. I was sharing the dining table with C, but he shakes his leg and the whole table vibrates, and he breathes loudly and sighs while he works. Used to our little New York apartment, it didn’t occur to me for several days that there were other places I could sit. C is only about fifteen feet away, I can see him, and I have a view of the water here. This place is so heart-wrenchingly beautiful.
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Yesterday the governor of Maine issued an executive order prohibiting rental accommodations: hotels, B & Bs, vacation houses, all of it. Bookings already made can be honored but no new ones. We paid through May 2, so we’re safe for now, except that the order indicates a hostility toward outsiders that feels threatening in contrast to the hospitality of our hosts. On Thursday (four days from now) our 14-day quarantine is over and we’ll have to get some groceries. Will they know we’re not from here?
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C and I have been married for eight years but I’ve never seen him at work before now. He’s an attorney and he takes phone calls all day long, stomping back and forth through the house, speaking forcefully in a patois I don’t understand but that I am mesmerized by. I’ve never loved him more than I do in this house.
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I start habits but don’t follow through: daily walks, practicing guitar, working on new songs, writing in my journal, writing anything. But I’ve always done that, stabbed at habits but stopped short of killing them.
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Our self-isolation period—the Maine governor has recommended that anyone entering Maine from out of state stay inside for 14 days, though that was our plan all along—will be over at six o’clock tonight, and we had planned to go to the grocery store tomorrow, but we ran out of alcohol on the 12th day, so we’re going tonight. We pass very few cars on the half hour drive to the supermarket in Bar Harbor. We tie scarves over our faces and take two carts from the young man whose job it is to sanitize each cart as it’s returned. We want to lay in enough food for the rest of our stay, three more weeks. We spend over two hours in the store.
We buy lemons and limes, beer, whisky, potato chips (bags and bags of them), tortilla chips, avocados, local Cheddar, butter and milk, half and half for coffee, seven pounds of coffee, sugar, middling olive oil, good olive oil, all the sad herbs they have, parsley and cilantro, dill, and onions, celery, and carrots, mushrooms, asparagus, broccoli, several bunches of scallions, ground beef, ground pork, pork chops for the grill, chicken legs, bacon, eggs, garlic, locally made rye bread, beer, Diet Coke, peanut butter, and small jars of cumin and oregano because I didn’t bring any spices from home except a bag of dried New Mexico chilies—I remember thinking when we were packing, “I won’t need spices,” like I pictured my days spent reading big dense books and eating meals seasoned with just salt and pepper. The only things we can’t find are sweet vermouth and flour.
The staff, but very few customers, are wearing face masks. As the cashier behind the Plexiglas rings up our groceries and sends them down the conveyor belt, a woman about my age puts them in bags. Not thinking, I reach out to grab one of the bags and put it in the cart, but mid-reach I realize I’ve come within inches of her hand. “I’m so sorry, I wasn’t thinking.” She says “Pfff. I don’t care. I have to wear the mask ’cause it’s the rule, but I don’t care,” and she rolls her eyes and smiles at me.
The sky was cloudy on the way to the store, but as we come out with our two carts loaded with plastic bags, it’s full-on snowing big wet clumps of snow and we’re soaked by the time we load the car and pull out. Several inches of snow have already accumulated on the winding two-lane highway back through the national park to our house. The headlights seem to be aimed straight ahead, illuminating the blizzard flying at the windshield but not the road. Several times the tires lose traction and the car skates until it finds a grip again. Steep ditches but no shoulders run along both sides of the highway. I think about what we’re wearing (will we freeze to death?), at least we won’t starve, but if we’re injured in a crash, where is the closest hospital and will anyone stop to rescue us? Two New Yorkers driving into a ditch in a little snow in April is such a ridiculous problem. Is there even room for our little car accident when the world is on fire?
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Venus appears every night before sunset, before any stars are visible, in the same part of the sky where the sun will disappear behind the island on the other side of the cove. It is so bright and clear you can see its roundness, like a tiny moon, and it occurs to me—it should have been obvious but it wasn’t to me—Venus is not, like a star, shining its own light on us, but a planet illuminated by the sun so we can see it from here.
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I am primarily a theater artist. Several licensed productions of a musical I wrote, called “Lizzie,” were either running or planned as the epidemic started. A large production in Sweden closed early when the government shut down the theaters. Two college productions were canceled, and other small productions were postponed indefinitely. The biggest, in Seoul, is still running. Audience members are required to wear masks and are forbidden from cheering.
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I have made macaroni and cheese, two quiches, baked pasta, mushroom risotto, casseroles, potato salad, pound cake, chocolate cake, two batches of oatmeal cookies, chicken and dumplings, shrimp and chorizo over polenta. C prepares the coals in the little Weber grill and I grill two pork chops rubbed with garlic and salt. I bake chicken legs like I do at home, 500° for very crispy skin, but the smoke alarms all go off at once, so I finish them on the stove with some mushrooms and deglaze the pan with dry vermouth. I am cooking like there’s no bathroom scale and no tomorrow, and I think, “Why is our life at home so pinched? This is how I want to live, how I’ve always wanted to live, like the days are all special, and when this is over there will be cake every day and cheese on everything and we’ll wear caftans and drink like fish and smoke like chimneys and we’ll be big not small and we won’t be afraid to fucking eat.”
Leaving New York was a rupture we are still in the middle of. Will I want to or need to or be able to pick up work in progress later? It certainly doesn’t feel at all like I will be doing the same thing but “remotely,” like so many people with other kinds of jobs surely will be, but more like I will be starting over. Like everything is either going to end or start over, or end and start over.
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J tells us a big storm is coming, bring the deck chairs inside. The eerie grey light, the roiling water, the spray on the rocks, the loud drama of it, it’s like a Turner seascape. I make a short video and post it on Instagram. Watching it later, out of context, it looks like what you’d expect the coast of Maine to look like, waves crashing against rocks, spray. It doesn’t look like a remarkable storm at all.
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The day after we got here, J came by with a bird feeder on a pole and pounded it into the ground where we could see it from the kitchen window. He said it would take a few days for the birds to find it. The next day I sat in my kitchen table office and watched a pair of finches and one chickadee fly in and out of it, but they didn’t stay long and they didn’t return, and this afternoon J moved the feeder to the back of the house.
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Today Trump tweeted: “In an attempt to create conflict and confusion, some in the false media say that it is the decision of the governors to open the states, not that of the President of the United States and the federal government. Let it be understood that this is incorrect.” Let it be understood.
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Today it has been sleeting or something all day, started in the middle of the night. The view across the water is grey and foggy. Later it changes to snow.
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I have a sort of burning, though burning is too strong a word for it, sensation in the back of my left nostril or possibly deeper in my sinus. It feels like how it feels when you’ve been chopping chilies and touch your face without thinking and later it sort of stings a little and it takes a moment to recall why; in fact that’s what I thought I must have done except that it’s lasted for weeks now. It’s very mild, most of the time unnoticeable. It’s been there since about a week before we left the city.
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I sit for hours with my guitar in the loft bedroom looking out at the water. A fragment of melody, an unusual chord progression that I can’t name (I’m pushing myself to try odd things, “bad” things, go somewhere other than where my fingers and my voice want to go) and two lines of lyrics that suggest more, suggest a fuller idea, to me. Sometimes that’s all I need and everything else builds out naturally from that, hangs on it, and sometimes it’s just what it is, a fragment, a few evocative words that lead to nothing.
The endless sky
My love and I
Can a day be too beautiful to write a song about? I take a nap.
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At the beginning of March, I organized a reading of a new musical I’ve been writing for the last three years based roughly on my high school diary. The reading was scheduled for April 14th, but within a couple weeks of setting the date, casting, booking the space, I had to cancel it because gatherings of, I think at that point more than three people, were prohibited by the mayor. I told everyone it was postponed but it’s not likely we’ll do it any time soon. Half the cast were college students uncertain if and when school would start again, or if they’d be in New York for the summer or back next year. The other half were old friends, colleagues of decades I only see when we do such things together. A friend who knows how offered to help me arrange a reading by video conference, which was generous, but I couldn’t bear the thought. I want to be in a room with people and my play. That’s what theater is.
I’ll argue with you until I am blue in the face how essential, how elemental, the arts are, but I still wonder if the cancelation of my reading is a loss notable to anyone but me.
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When we do such things together.
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I am sleeping better here than I have in years at home. I’m still waking up intermittently through the night but I must be sleeping soundly in between because I am alert in the daytime and able to read for long stretches without dozing. It’s not unusual for me to sleep better when I’m away from home—at hotels, when we visit family, in vacation houses, etc.—but I feel truly relaxed here. I guess there’s nothing odd about it, here by the vast ocean and sky and quiet and nothing pressing or unpleasant to do.
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The recycling bin fills with empty wine bottles, gin bottles, beer cans. C jokes that he’s going to drive out and find a dumpster in the middle of the night to dispose of our recyclables so J and K don’t know how much we’re drinking. Isn’t everybody drinking too much?
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Four deer walk by the kitchen window as I sit at my computer. They stay for a while, three young, one older. It’s a wet day. One sits down on a mat of pale green moss on a large flat rock twenty feet from the window surrounded by spruce seedlings. Another eats from the bird feeder. The younger ones look soft as kittens, with large heads and wet curious eyes. One, just feet away from the window, locks eyes with me, neither of us afraid.
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My friend M sent me a link to a story about a group of armed vigilantes a couple islands over from us who cut down a tree and dragged it across a driveway to prevent the residents of the house, temporary construction workers from New Jersey whom these year-round residents had decided were infected with the virus, from leaving.
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When we first arrived, I thought I’d write new songs, a whole batch of them, not theater songs, not part of a show but connected to nothing except my heart and an impulse to say something. But I find myself drawn instead to scour my computer for forgotten sound files and images, to organize, catalog, preserve my old work, or at least what I have here: music I made with bands in the eighties, some of my first theater music, a random assortment of demos. Instead of writing, I am cataloging and archiving. For what? For whom? I start up an email correspondence with my old bandmates, one of whom was my boyfriend though most of my twenties, and we listen to the old recordings and reminisce.
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Well, I had a terrible time trying to sleep last night. I thrashed for a couple hours, my back hurt, I itched all over, finally got up and went to the downstairs bedroom and slept fitfully for a few hours and finally at 5:30 I just got out of bed.
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I’ve started taking late morning walks, after my shower, down the rocks behind the house to the shore. At low tide, the rocks are covered with mussels and barnacles. Walking through this landscape, feeling like I’m in the presence of geological time, like I’m in the presence of a god I don’t believe in, thinking, as I bring to mind each little component of my former life: will that survive? Will that survive? Will we still do that? Will I need that?
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We have weekly Zoom calls: Monday and Friday happy hour with C’s family, Thursday with mine, a Saturday afternoon call with friends I went to Parsons School of Design with, and a Sunday call with a group of C’s oldest friends. I see and talk to my friends and family more frequently now than I have in decades. We talk mostly about the pandemic and what we’re watching on TV. C and I are catching up on Schitt’s Creek. These Zoom conversations are so unexpectedly intimate I am almost in tears just to see their faces on my computer screen, hear their voices, their laughter.
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C found out that an old friend, a classmate from acting school, contracted Covid-19, is in the hospital in New York, and will be put on a ventilator.
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J has asked us two or three times if we know our plans in May. No one has booked the house after us, and he will hold it for us if we’d like to stay. No one wants us to go back to New York. Worried that we’d be scolded for leaving, we’ve found just the opposite. Everyone we’ve told has exhaled deeply and said I’m so glad, that’s such a good idea. My friend S who lives in Vermont sends emails trying to persuade us to stop on our way back and stay for a while instead of going home.
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We receive regular email updates from our coop management and board, including increasingly stern warnings that, because the maintenance staff are sanitizing the common areas in our buildings twice a day, anything left in the hallway will be thrown away. We’ve likely lost a few packages that were delivered right after we left (a set of cheap whisks from Amazon, a large order of heirloom beans from Rancho Gordo, other things I can’t remember), and who knows where our mail will be?
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We hiked one of the trails in Acadia National Park yesterday. The park roads and facilities are closed, but many of the trailheads are accessible from the highway. Beautiful day, sunny and 50°. The guidebook described this trail (the Acadia Mountain Trail) as “moderately strenuous.” It was a long scramble up a steep pile of rocks and a long scramble down the other side. We passed two or three people and stepped off the trail to let them pass; everyone is friendly and doesn’t get too close. We lingered at the top for several minutes, looking out over the trees and water, mountains and the ocean in the distance. I pondered what I would do if C fell on the rocks and broke his leg or sprained his ankle. Or what he would do if I did. I don’t think either of us could carry the other down. The hike took two hours and we were exhausted when we got home and very sore this morning.
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Franklin Graham is setting up a tent hospital in Central Park and requiring volunteers to swear they disapprove of gay people. It’s the Chick Fil-A of hospitals; people want the sandwich, but why does it have to come from proselytizing bigots?
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Last night I cut my thumb. I sharpened my own knives and brought them here from New York because rental kitchens never have good knives, and I’ve been very careful using them, knowing this is not a good time to be in an emergency room. But I was washing one with a very stiff new sponge and the knife slipped out of my hand and slid quickly across the pad of my thumb. I knew it was a bad cut immediately, so much blood, a long cut and deep, but I don’t think dangerously so. I pressed a wad of paper towel on it for at least half an hour before the bleeding slowed, and then C put two Band-Aids on it. The cut, in normal times, would need a few stitches.
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It was sunny this morning, and the water was still, but clouds have been gathering all day and the wind is picking up, and the forecast says rain. I feel heavy.
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C is anxious. Since his friend was put on the ventilator, there’s been no news from his wife or any of their mutual friends on social media about his condition.
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I’m watching cookbook author and food blogger David Lebowitz’s live “Apero Hour” on Instagram at noon (6 p.m. in Paris, where he lives) almost every day. It’s just David in his kitchen making a cocktail and talking about it. Paris is shut down and everyone is sheltering at home. The other day, he was obviously frazzled. He explained that he’d had a “meltdown,” argued with his partner Romain who is shut in with him, but then he decided to let it go “because that’s what you do when you love someone, you let it go.” But he was noticeably shaken, in that way that, after a big fight with your partner, even after you’ve come together, forgiven each other, and agreed to move on, your body takes longer to recover than your mind. There in his kitchen, with the sounds of a city (even in lockdown, there are city sounds, cars, bits of conversation when people pass by his kitchen window) and his tall white kitchen cabinets behind him, and his earnest, goofy smile, it was such an intimate confession, such a small gesture, a sharing of the burden, and I cried watching him.
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K brought us chocolate chip cookies. Twice.
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Every night after dinner, C hauls armloads of firewood in from a small shed outside and builds a fire and we sit in two wicker armchairs with a table with a lamp on it between them, and we drink a bottle of wine and watch TV for a couple hours. Once we stumble onto a religious station, but it’s not like the Christian TV I know from Tennessee and Texas, it’s Catholic TV with nuns and the Pope, and the visual aesthetic is very 1950s, like Highlights Magazine or like one of those religious tracts or an illustrated children’s Bible come to life. C finds it less fascinating than I do.
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C’s friend died. He finds out when his friend’s wife posts the news on Facebook. He spent two weeks on a ventilator, recovered enough for it to be removed, but a few days later his condition got worse and he died. He was in his forties.
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Even though it’s cold, late most nights we open the back door and step onto the deck to look at the moon and stars as long as our necks can stand it, until we’re shivering and have to come back inside.
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I don’t know what to do because I don’t know what will exist in its former form, or, if changed, how? Into what? What will be important? Doing something, anything—chronicling my days, writing, practicing guitar, contemplating new songs, even reading— is an act of hope I’m not sure I have. Hope that there will be a familiar venue for my work, that the things I write about will still matter or even mean anything, that there will come a time when I’ll be glad that I learned that thing, that I know that story. The future extends as far as what to make for dinner. It’s likely we’ll still be here in an hour and hungry.
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It is our eighth wedding anniversary on May 5th. We’re in Maine; we should have lobster! On the roads we’ve passed lots of signs for lobster pounds and fresh seafood, but nothing looks open. J came by for something else, I don’t remember what, and C asked him if he knew where we could get two live lobsters. He lingered to chat on the back deck, at a safe distance. We all feel the strangeness of that distance. It’s just enough beyond a normal distance that people who have only recently met but like each other would put between them when they’re chatting about nothing in particular in such a lovely spot. J tells us there’s not a lot of “fin fish”—they’re overfished. He tells us about his business, a store that sells outdoor equipment. Everything used to be made locally, but now most of it is imported from China. He used to visit China every year but he thinks his trip last year—to Wuhan—was likely his last. He says he’ll put some thought into it and let us know about the lobsters.
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Trump muses in his daily press conference on the possibility of injecting disinfectants into people to kill the virus. Perversely, the despair, weariness, fear, and spiritual exhaustion we were all experiencing already just from enduring years of this monstrously cruel man looming over every moment of our days tempers the shock of the pandemic.
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My friend, who lives alone in a small apartment in Brooklyn, watches Governor Cuomo’s press briefing every morning and posts a detailed summary with charts and graphs. Number of new cases, number of deaths, hospital capacity, etc. My friend was divorced two years ago. He has a steady girlfriend he hasn’t been able to see, or touch, or hold, for weeks. He posts on Facebook a photo of a visit with his 21-year-old son—they wear face masks, meet in a park, and stay six feet away from each other.
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Sometimes iTunes on shuffle is like a Tarot reading. Just now Bruce Springsteen singing the old Baptist hymn:
Through all the tumult and the strife
I hear the music ringing
It finds an echo in my soul
How can I keep from singing?
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C texted J to say that we’d like to stay an additional two weeks, through mid-May. We will have been away from home, or, more specifically, left our apartment untended, for seven weeks. Neither of us could come up with a reason why seven weeks is worse than five.
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J came by with another container of granola and a box of green recycling bags.
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Yesterday’s hike: the Gulley Trail to the Long Pond Trail. The first two-thirds mostly followed a not completely dry creek bed, thick with exposed tree roots and piles of large rocks, every step landing at a different angle. The last stretch was flat, along the edge of the pond, but by then I had trigged my bad ankle and had to limp most of the way back.
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Headline this morning says, “Nearly Two-Thirds of Artists in the United States Have Lost Their Livelihoods as a Result of the Coronavirus, a New Survey Says.” I swing back and forth between enjoying the disruption, the feeling that everything is askew—the constant striving, or the feeling that I should be constantly striving, has eased up; I feel released—and then remembering that the reason I feel like this is that I have no clear hope for the future, not just in the regular “you never know” way, but at all.
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I found two YouTube videos, one demonstrating how to cook lobsters, the other how to eat them. It surprised me that they came in a paper bag, two of them sort of curled up, wet and sluggish. I think I expected a cage. A man delivered them early in the afternoon, so we put them in the refrigerator. I made potato salad. When we opened the fridge later to retrieve them, they were lively and crawling around. The video suggested putting them in the freezer (first it said for 10–20 minutes but later in the instructions said 30–60 minutes, so I settled on half an hour) to “put them to sleep” before boiling them. As C pulled them out of the freezer, one of their arms fell off. Just fell off onto the floor. We took the rubber bands off their claws and dropped them into the pot of boiling salted water and watched. The one on top, the one that had lost a claw, was sort of squirming, and then quite clearly trying to climb out. A stream of white liquid seeped out from under its shell and coagulated, like an egg white, or semen in a hot shower. I pushed it down with a set of long metal tongs. It climbed up again. I held it down. After the recommended cooking time (I think it was nine minutes, but I’ve forgotten), I pulled them out and plunged them into cold water. They smelled foul, but I reminded myself that lots of foul-smelling things are delicious, like fish sauce. I washed as much of the white stuff away as I could, put the lobsters on plates, C opened a bottle of wine, and we sat down to eat. As the video instructed, we grasped them by the body and tail and twisted to remove the tails. C’s looked like the one in the video. Mine, as soon as I twisted, emitted a flood of black viscous matter all over my plate. Nowhere in either video was there black sludge. C laughed. I jumped up from the table. We argued.
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It snowed thick, wet snow that didn’t accumulate on the ground and wind blew hard all evening, but later I opened the back door and the giant spruce in the dark, with every branch articulated by a layer of snow, was alive, undulating, waving slowly, speaking in a language we couldn’t hear. What was it trying to tell us? We stood and looked at it for a long time, terrified but giddy.
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Staring at the computer, reading another prognosticating think piece about this uncertain time, another and another and another. I declare a moratorium on reading the literature of prediction. You don’t know. Nobody knows. It will get worse. It will get better. You don’t know. I will be 60 years old in nine months. This was supposed to be the home stretch.
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I toggle between, “I’m done. I’ve done enough. I don’t have another reinvention in me,” and “I can work with this. It’s a puzzle I can solve.” I put it in the general context of disappointment and suddenly I’m sitting in a familiar room. Disappointment is the air artists breathe.
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An email from the National Alliance for New Musicals this morning: “On behalf of our Festival Selection Committee, I want to thank you for submitting your new musical for consideration for our 32nd Annual Festival of New Musicals. You were a part of a record-breaking year for the Festival, with 343 quality submissions from all around the world. We were in awe of the energy and commitment put into each submission, and it was our privilege to read them. Unfortunately. . .” and so on, you get the gist. Why can’t they just start these things with “Sorry, but no.” My first thought was, “Okay, thanks and good luck with your old paradigm,” which was followed by, “What’s to become of us all?” It is no consolation that this is the least disappointing rejection I’ve ever experienced.
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Woke to a dream, holding a friend, but it is a homunculus, exposed and raw, sentient but silent, I say over and over, it’s okay, it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter. A tender ache that seemed to lack location. Is the ache in me? In the homunculus I’m holding? The air all around us? I was so worried. It felt unbearable. I was worried in a way I knew I couldn’t sustain, and I was worried knowing that.
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The water in the cove this morning is bottle green and looks like moving glass in this wind and clear sun. The storm windows rattle in their frames all day.
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My brother helped my father get on the Zoom call. We’re all surprised to see his face pop up. He has video but no audio. We ask him if he can hear us and he writes “YES” on a piece of paper—in the block letter handwriting he’s used since his first job out of the Army as a draftsman for an engineering firm in Waukegan, Illinois—and holds it up. We can’t hear you. He listens to us talk for 20 minutes and then his image disappears.
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I got a request by email today for a “perusal copy” of the Lizzie script from a small theater company in Washington D.C., with the subject line, “We are dreaming of the future season.”
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Lying in bed trying to fall asleep, I’m watching the black silhouette of the spruce trees against grey sky and water, no visible horizon, no perspective, just a field of grey. The water is present, you can hear it crashing ashore, smell it, feel it, but it is not discernible. This landscape is unlike anything I’ve ever seen, more mysterious than any other landscape. Withholding, unconcerned with your opinion of it. I trust this landscape. It is not a needy landscape.
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It’s almost May. Spring is coming, but so, so slowly and I think that’s for the best.
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J texted yesterday that he was smoking some chickens, and did we want him to throw one in the smoker for us. Yes. We ate it for dinner last night and cold the next day with a yogurt sauce with lemon and herbs. Later I made stock with the bones and cooked black-eyed peas in it. How old are J and K’s children? How old are J and K? She seems about my mother’s age, the age she was when she died five years ago. The way they are taking care of us makes me think they miss their children. I want to stay here forever.
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I am flossing my teeth every night. Is that hope?
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We are leaving in two days. We want to hike up Cadillac Mountain today. Till today we’ve chosen trails that are accessible from public roads, but we really want to do this one— it’s the highest peak and the most popular trail. We read that people usually drive up most of the way and then walk to the top, where there’s a paved viewing area, but there’s also a hiking trail up. On the map, the trailhead looks to be a short walk from a residential street in Bar Harbor. We leave the car, over my protestations, in the parking lot of a golf club, and walk through the neighborhood that butts up against the park. I’m very anxious—we’ve kept our noses clean for seven weeks I don’t want to have a run-in or get our car towed two days before the end of our stay—but C dismisses my apprehension and I follow him up a street that looks like a driveway to me, where we find what looks like a path into some young woods and set out. We have no idea if we are in the park or someone’s back yard, but eventually we can tell with Google Maps that we are near the trail and in a few minutes my nervousness wanes when we start to see the blue-painted trail markers.
The hike up is about two hours, all uphill, all rock, some solid table rock but also a lot of piles of smaller boulders. It’s only 50° or so but sunny and the trail is exposed. I take off my long-sleeved shirt and tie it around my head. We encounter no one on the way up, and one man on a bicycle at the top. We wonder, as we stroll around the paved loop at the top, looking out over every island and inlet, the town of Bar Harbor, and the ocean blue and flat in the distance, how many people in the decades since this park was created have been alone at the top of this mountain. We can see everything from here.
We decide, instead of taking the same trail down, to walk down the park road and see what other vistas it offers. The silent, empty paved road with its freshly painted yellow line down the middle, switch-backing down the mountain, is unexpectedly poignant, full of menace and sadness. My husband watches The Walking Dead and says the setting looks familiar. My ankles, and C’s too, start to hurt, the smooth paved road somehow harder on our joints than the steep, uneven rocks and tree roots on the way up. We round a sharp bend and see an older couple, dressed in sportier outdoor wear than ours, coming toward us on the other side of the road. As we pass, they both smile and say hello. C says, “Don’t speed!” and we all laugh.
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Back home in New York, the Blue Angels are flying over our apartment building scaring the crap out of everyone and Jared Kushner has declared the crisis over and the government response a success. Covid-19 deaths in New York City are down to just under 300 per day and are still climbing in rural areas.
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Email from our coop’s management:
We have had several staff members contract the virus, some were quite sick for a number of days. All are now in recovery or back at work. . .
It now seems clear that both the Governor and Mayor are intent on opening segments of the state and city according to a plan that continues to track new infections and hospitalizations. . . . We will move cautiously, because as everyone knows, there has not been a building within our coop that has not experienced illness and loss. How do we come out of this? We will begin to answer this question in the coming days.
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C has decided that when we leave here he will drive to North Carolina. His mother has pancreatic cancer. Before the pandemic, he was flying down every other week to see her, but now it’s been two months. Since we have been virtually isolated here for several weeks, this may be the safest time for him to visit her. Should I go to North Carolina? I want to see my mother-in-law and I worry about how long it could be before another opportunity comes. But I want to go home.
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We’re leaving tomorrow. I had planned to spend today packing but I realize that we brought so little I don’t need much time. All that’s left of the food and booze are a few half-full bags of different kinds of rice and lentils and half a dozen cans of beans, tomatoes, a couple boxes of pasta, half a bottle of dry vermouth, bitters. Half the clothes I brought I never wore. Nemesis is the only book I read and I didn’t touch the art supplies. Notebooks, my guitar. It doesn’t amount to much.
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We waited and waited and just as we’re leaving spring is finally apparent here: buds on trees and the scrubby bushes along the path from the house to the rocks down to the water. Walking down, it feels crucial not to damage or disturb a single branch for fear of knocking off the tiny, fragile red buds. Two or three days have been sunny and a glorious 48°, otherwise cold. The only actual leaves so far are on the sticker bushes beside the gravel spot where we park the car.
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The trip to Korea in June is canceled, of course. They will remount the show next year and invite us to come then.
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Leaving, driving through town up the peninsula to meet the highway, forsythia is everywhere, huge wild bushes of it, all blooming, like forsythia always does, every year, to signal spring. Some trees are barely budding; from a distance like clouds or swarms of pale green and pink on their branches. The roads are lined with ancient graveyards, some big, some just a few tombstones half fallen down but cared for, the grass cut around them and fences in good repair.
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Traffic is not light, but it never stops, driving into the city. We find a parking spot across the street from our building. Street cleaning has been suspended for now, so the car will be fine there until morning when C will leave for North Carolina. As we unload the trunk, the neighborhood erupts with cheering and applause and banging on pots and pans. They do this every night at seven o’clock to acknowledge the nurses and doctors, the transit workers, ambulance drivers, cops. It goes on for several minutes.
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When I step out of the elevator on our floor, I see a neat pile of packages in front of our apartment door along with two large stacks of mail bundled and held together with rubber bands, waiting for us.
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My first night alone, after C leaves for North Carolina, I wake from a dream in which I wake and open my eyes to find a young man, a teenager, sitting at my bedside holding a long gun aimed at the middle of my face. The boy is calm and silent. I am perfectly still. It is a moment in perfect balance. And then I wake up.
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I keep pots of herbs and flowers on the balcony. When we left, the season was just beginning when I’d have put in new plants and the old ones would show new growth. I reconciled myself to the fact that the perennials would all be dead after seven weeks of neglect. But the thyme and chives are full and bushy and green. They look better than they ever did last year, probably because I haven’t been snipping them every day and they’ve had a chance to grow. If I’d had time to plant anything new, it would surely have died, but the thyme and chives are thriving.
