March 23, 2020
“It’s the future,” my mom said when she saw the picture of my son poking up through the sunroof of the car. The laptop was balanced on the roof of the car, and he was having a Zoom meeting with some of his first-grade buddies. They were showing each other their hideouts, and within a few days of our self-quarantine starting last week, his had become the car. He’d ask me to open the sunroof and windows so he could hang out in there and listen to his audiobook or play a Kindle game while eating Tootsie Rolls or chips. I supervised from the porch.
The first week felt like a lark, a tough but funny imposed staycation. I came up with interesting ideas for projects the two of us could do together for art time and for social-emotional development. Soon I realized that with my co-parent stranded out of town, I would have to scramble to get any of my freelance work done during times he was watching a screen. And my son began to imagine that the adults he knew might get the virus and die.
Today I wrenched Minecraft away from him for art time, and we both proceeded to have a meltdown. Finally, he settled down and drew two machines for eliminating coronavirus — his idea. He seemed happier then. I helped him build a fort out of couch cushions and a sheet on his bed, so he could sit inside and do math games on his Kindle.
I thought of “big blankie,” a quilt an older relative had made for me. One side was patchwork and the other side was a single piece of cloth with a pattern of overlapping, realistic leaves. I liked to hide under there and be unto myself.
I took a picture of the outside of the fort on E’s bed, envying his child’s compactness. I could see nothing of him from the outside.
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Minecraft Ars Poetica
“How do you enchant an anvil?” my son calls. He’s playing his computer game. “Grindstones can repair and disenchant?”
I need to remember to live an actual life so I have something to write about. I’m holding this stone from the witch store—Ionite—and studying the one coppery fleck. Other than that it’s dark blue, almost indigo, with white veins … Oh, wait, here are a few smaller coppery flecks.
At the grocery story today, I turned down an aisle and away from a couple in dairy with an unhealthy disheartened look. Pale and slumped. Who am I to say? The landlord of a recovering addict friend once told him he had the “look of the damned.” Do I have the look of the damned? As I turned down the aisle, I felt a presence latch itself to my back, like someone coming up too close behind me. When I looked around no one was there, of course.
I almost said “wolf” before. “Unhealthy disheartened wolf.”
My son comes in to tell me he didn’t mean to kill another sheep in his game. Yes, he dropped it from a great height, but he didn’t know it would die. He can tell it died by the floating block of wool left behind.
I live in a bubble of small movements, grateful students, antidepressants, child support. After a year it started to hurt even more. Then that began to ebb and I was left on this floating rock, studying the glinting bits, wondering what they even were.
“I have to stop killing sheep, right?” my son says. “Even if just on accident?” Finally I reply, “OK … yes. I guess so.”
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For the Record
I wanted to tell you that my uncle took the potted azalea I brought over for what would have been my grandmother’s birthday and planted it in the hole in the backyard where the big oak had been. I want to fill the hole with plants, he said.
I wanted to tell you that we’ve been trying to fill holes for years, like the hole in the yard when my other uncle kicked over the pine tree after taking karate and the hole in the front of the house from when my teenaged mom parked the car at the top of the hill with no parking brake. The hole someone punched in a wall. Ruffians. A word my grandmother would use. You’re acting heathenish! ruffians!
I wanted to tell you how funny this all is, how it makes me chuckle, given how staid we seem at other times. I would also note that we are all of us a little too helpless in the presence of these holes. Except for the front of the house, which my grandfather bricked in, the holes linger there for years, partly filled in.
I want you to know that “I love you but I just can’t deal” is a thing I’m familiar with from men, starting with birth onward. I want you to know that it’s the women I know who’ve been forced to deal. I would have you to understand how tired we are.
There’s some kind of therapy where you realize that you’re looking for your parents everywhere, and you finally learn something from it this time.
There are things we could learn and things we could slow down and observe. I want to record here the dream of walking downstairs at that house with the holes and out the back door to the sloping backyard with the oak that was there my whole life but started falling apart, falling on the house in storms.
Back there was itself a record, something printed on the inside of my mind as I approach the dim woods, like those kits you can get where the sun makes a print of leaves pressed onto developing paper. The print shows the edges shadow make where a growing thing is pressed down onto a surface and then exposed to light.
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The Doll
I was small, playing in a yard alone, probably wearing boys’ hand me downs from my mom’s baby brother, my stringy blond hair hanging loose or in pigtails. I believe this was when my mom was a social worker in Michigan. It was cold there, blustery. The wind pushed me along the sidewalk in my snowsuit when I walked with my mother; it gave me nightmares about Frankenstein and industrial spaces. But this must have been summer. I was playing in the yard alone when the old woman from next door called me from the back stoop, beckoned me with her claw-like hand to come to her, and then pressed a small, rigid rubber baby doll in my arms, telling me that it had belonged to her daughter but that she wanted me to have it. Recalling the doll’s face now, I wonder if she saw me in it — blue eyes and bow lips, little doll face. When I was back at home in North Carolina visiting my grandmother, people were always pinching my cheeks and I was always wishing they wouldn’t.
I knew when the old neighbor lady gave me the doll that I was being entrusted with a great responsibility — be nice to the old woman, even though old people scared me. Care for the baby doll, even though her fading brocade dress and lace collar made her seem older than I was. Somehow explain to my mother what had happened, that I had been entrusted with this, called to hold this woman’s memory of her daughter and to carry on the tedious, impossible task of caring for the baby and showing others that I cared, of playing the part of the little girl so that they could reflect on vulnerable tenderness in charge of vulnerable tenderness. I was the heart being held, holding the heart, all the other hearts. I didn’t know if I could do it.