Shelter in Place #2: “The Suburbs in Crisis”
BY OWEN MATTHEWS ’22
“I tell ya, it’s because they’re so kissy kissy,” I overhear a woman pontificate to her friend. Her companion, dressed in a similar, yet not identical pair of purple leggings, nods in knowing agreement. “Those Itaaalians,” continues the first woman. “They have just such a…such a… what’s the word? Kissy kissy society.”
“I know!” responds the second. “Even guys kiss each other when they see other guys.”
The first woman’s rather large dog begins pawing at the second woman’s rather small dog. The women, who walk six feet apart from each other, ignore it. “That’s why it’s not gonna get that bad in America. We aren’t as… kissy kissy.”
Worried they’ll notice that I’ve slowed to listen in, I pick up my pace and continue on my run.
April days like these were always my favorite growing up — sixty-eight degrees, sunny, cherry-blossoms beginning to bloom. An avid runner, I’ve always taken advantage of them — by now, I’ve jogged nearly every side-walk in this sleepy New Jersey suburb. I’m not used to the company.
Throughout my five-mile route, I dip and dive in an attempt to stay socially distanced from the small clusters of walkers that pepper the sidewalks. Running paths that usually lie untrodden now suffer from hesitant traffic jams as walkers, bikers, and joggers attempt to squeeze through narrow straightaways, silently maneuvering around each other as if surrounded by invisible force fields.
I pass family after family after family on group bike rides — the type of collective exercise usually reserved for only the most exemplar of suburban households. You know the type of family I’m talking about — they also eat gluten-free dinners.
I pass a sign that says, “Honk for Will’s birthday.” I wish I had a car.
I pass a father and his two young daughters drawing with colored chalk on their driveway. Actually, I pass a thirty-year-old man furiously scribbling the final, indigo strip of a rainbow, unwilling to abandon the project that his toddlers so easily dismissed.
When I turn down a particularly remote road, a woman cusping on old age wobbles past me on a pair of roller blades. I smile at her. She offers back a grimace — a valiant effort to smile through her unease.
Throughout the run, I am engaged in a drawn-out race with a middle-school bike gang. The pre-teens may whiz past me down hills, but on inclines I stride past the huffers and puffers at the back of the pack. The gaggle has to stop every half-mile because someone’s gear-shift isn’t working, or someone’s mom called, or most inconveniently, Jimmy needs another water break. Meanwhile, I, the tortoise, trudge steadily along.
A young man dressed in pajama bottoms and a Hook ’Em Horns t-shirt stands in the patch of grass in front of his house, tossing a ball into the air and catching it with the same hand. With his other, he holds a cell phone to his ear. “Yes ma’am, I’m just calling to ensure you that we are still open and are doing free deliveries throughout the entire state of New Jersey.” A pause. “Yes ma’am, you heard that correctly: free, f-r-e-e, free pizza delivery straight to your door.”
I do a double take as a Model-T-Ford-looking car sputters past me. An old man leans out the window and calls, “Isn’t it a lovely day to take her for a spin?!”
I watch two couples stop to chat as they pass each other on their respective daily walks. “Paul,” one of the wives interrupts her husband’s animated sentence, “six feet! Six feet!” Paul raises his hands to prove his innocence and takes an overexaggerated step back. He makes eye contact with the other man — women.
I pass a woman explaining to, presumably, her mother that if you want to make iced coffee, you need to make your coffee stronger, like, much stronger, like, twice as strong, because the ice will dilute the coffee when it melts. The mother, who apparently has a basic understanding of how liquids work, purses her lips and silently absorbs the lesson. She must know her daughter’s unnecessary explanation comes from a place of love — from concern for her mother’s ability to adapt to life in this strange new world, especially to the lack of daily Starbucks.
This new world — the one filled with tricycles and middle-aged men on road bikes and people taking the time to enjoy the cherry blossoms — though strange, feels alive.
The world of stifled cities, goggle-shaped bruises, raspy breath, and lonely death is confined to the television. Like Game of Thrones and magic diet pills, it feels imagined.
I feel the virus only indirectly, through the precautions taken to curb its spread, rather than through the grief and pain it is wreaking around the world: my brother’s quarantine “beard,” the uncomfortable tug of my too-heavy hair that should’ve been cut weeks ago, and most disturbingly, through the eerie blossoming of my suburban community. When you have savings, being newly unemployed means an opportunity to enjoy the outdoors.
But even in this quiet suburb, the virus has started to slip beyond the screen.
On my jog, a woman shrieks at me for coming too close to her. Not a shriek of anger, but a shriek of fear — fear of me.
In my living room, I turn to see my mother take her temperature for what must be the fifteenth time since the start of the movie — it’s Amadeus tonight. Spoiler: 39-year-old Mozart dies of strep throat at the end.
About halfway through, she goes to the kitchen to check her blood-oxygen levels. She ordered the toy-looking monitor on Amazon last week, the day after she heard her friend Alan died, a casualty of coronavirus.
He was in the hospital for fourteen hours total, from start to death. He died alone.
In the morning, I log into Zoom for a class called Human Rights. We discuss the greatest atrocities in recent history — Rwanda and Bosnia among them. And how the United States failed to prevent them, or didn’t even try.
Next up, Zen Buddhism. We learn about the Blood Bowl — the period-blood-filled hell that awaits women whose sons do not pray for them enough.
And then Chinese. This week our lesson is on government propaganda, specifically the media’s coverage of a 2016 flood in Wuhan. The textbook was published last year.
And finally, journalism. We video call professors, government officials, reporters, analysts. From our respective living rooms, we discuss Viktor Orban’s authoritarian power grab in Hungary, the Covid-19 outbreak on the U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt, the acid a Chinese woman in New York had thrown in her face, the overwhelming waves of patients, the overwhelming wave of unemployment and domestic violence, the methods doctors use to choose which patient gets the last ventilator and which dies, Texas’s decision to make abortion an elective surgery, how China is going to use the virus to justify authoritarianism, how other countries are going to follow, how this virus, and the rally-around-the-flag effect that comes with it, will likely be Trump’s key to success in the next election, if it’s worth even broadcasting Trump on prime time television, why the United States was so unprepared, how we could’ve been better prepared, who has died because we weren’t, the vandalization of 5G telephone poles in England so that the Chinese can stop sending the virus over through radio waves.
Through a tiny square on my screen, I watch my classmate shoo her puppy away; another shoos away his mom, who was wondering if he wants steak or chicken for dinner. An analyst’s child toddles into the frame and tugs on his shirt. He sits her down in front of the TV — Peppa Pig. Dogs and mothers and toddlers simply don’t get that we are in class, discussing very very very important things.
Tasked with writing my own stories, I cold-email dozens of experts, asking if they can spare a minute to talk to a college student about the effects of this virus on their respective areas of expertise.
I sign each message,
“Hope you and your loved ones are doing as well as possible in these unprecedented times!”
All the best,
Owen Matthews”
Then I go for a run. Another trip through pandemic-spawned paradise.
Shelter in Place is a new series featuring student artists’ and writers’ responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.
This story was updated 5/1/20.