MVP

My husband sleeps in the guest bedroom below me.  He is confined to the tv room and the bedroom.  I come down the stairs and watch him watching TV with a mask on his face. Not the N95 one, but a looser one with an upper tie and a lower tie.  He makes me nervous.  It is day two of the quarantine for him.  He last saw a Covid patient on Monday.  I have been leaving plates on food for him during the day and at night bottles of wine.  We are all drinking a lot.  There’s a baseline level of fear which is hard to assuage. Like fucking unbelievably difficult. The fear runs through everything. In my bathroom, it takes a while for the water to heat up. I wonder if washing my hands in cold water helps at all.  I don’t wipe down my groceries. I wash my hands every time I pull them out of the fridge. I keep thinking every choice I make is the wrong choice and somehow everyone in this house will end up coughing the dry cough. Stephen is symptom free in isolation. I hear his TV. We text. He says he is watching ‘1917’ and the actors have bad accents in the movie. I can hear the bad accents through my floor.  We are connected but separate.

Today was a jail break. My daughter and I went to the post office.  In a period of four short weeks, the post office has become one of the scarier places on earth. The post office is the size of a cheap NYC apartment, postage stamp tiny (forgive the pun), dark, no ventilation and a line.  My daughter is waiting for boarding school swag.  She was recently accepted at her first choice and we are hoping there is a school to go to in the fall. Plus there are my face cream orders and my estrogen, I could not get Fedexed to my front door. She wants to go to the post office, she gets to go in without me.  She is young, an athlete and has no outlying medical conditions. I give her a mask, gloves and a pair of scissors. A giant pair of kitchen scissors.  We do a tik tok dance video in the car. She’s amazing and I am lame.  She gets out of the car, masked and gloved, and I hand her the scissors. As God as my witness, I will not take the dirty Wuhan packages back in my car.  BTW I call every enclosed space with more than one person, the dirty Wuhan (fill-in your own noun here).  The dirty Wuhan JFK.  The dirty Wuhan Costco,  The dirty Wuhan, any elevator in any building in New York City.  She and I have a stare down.  She doesn’t want to take what appears to be a weapon into the PO.  I do not want killer coronavirus in my car.  We compromise.  She takes all the packages to the sidewalk and de-boxes on the street.  She is mortified.  I think she is a hero.  She is my MVP. 

My husband just FaceTimed me.  He wants to know when he will grab my boobs again.  I tell him to get a Covid test in Riverhead.  Apparently you cannot get a Covid test unless you have symptoms. I wonder if this is true.  I’m afraid to google anything because I am paranoid the government is watching.