Lucy by the Sea (Amgash, #4)(6)

Meaning all of it.





viii


One week exactly after we got there, I called a doctor of mine in New York. He gives me my sleeping tablets and also pills for my panic attacks, and I called him because I was about to run out of these pills, and I had not slept well since I heard that Elsie Waters had died. The doctor was no longer in the city himself, he had gone to Connecticut, and he told me that day to wash my clothes after I had been to the supermarket. “Seriously?” I asked, and he said, “Yes.” I told him that William was the one who would probably go to the grocery store when we got done quarantining, and he said, Well, then William should wash his clothes when he came home from shopping.

I couldn’t believe that. “Seriously?” I asked again, and he said, Yes, it should be no different from washing your clothes after a workout.

I said, “But how long do you think this will last?” And he said, “We got onto it late, I’m guessing over a year.”



* * *



—

A year.



* * *



—

This was the first time I felt a really—really—deep apprehension, and yet it was slow, that piece of knowledge, making its way into me, weirdly slow, and when I told William the doctor had said that, William didn’t say anything, and I understood that William was not surprised. “Did you know that?” I asked him, and he only said, “Lucy, none of us knows anything.” So what came to me then was the—slow, it seemed very slow—understanding that I was not going to see New York again for a really long time.

“And you should wash your clothes after you go grocery shopping,” I said. William just nodded.



* * *



—

I felt terribly sad, like a child, and I thought of the children’s book Heidi that I had read in my youth, and of how she had been sent somewhere and she was so sad that she walked in her sleep. For some reason this image of Heidi kept going through my mind. I would not be able to go home, and this sank into me deeper all the time.



* * *





And then:

On the television, William and I watched as New York suddenly exploded with a ghastliness that I seemed almost not able to take in. Every night William and I watched as New York City arrived to us in horrifying scenes, picture after picture of people being taken to emergency rooms, on ventilators, hospital workers without the right masks or gloves, and people kept dying and dying. Ambulances rushing down the streets. These were streets that I knew, this was my home!

I watched it, believing it, I mean I knew it was happening is what I mean, but to describe my mind as I watched this is difficult. It was as though there was a distance between the television and myself. And of course there was. But my mind felt like it had stepped back and was watching it from a real distance, even as I felt the sense of horror. Even now, many months later, I have a memory of watching a pale yellow image on the television, it must have been the nurses in their garb, or maybe people wrapped in blankets on their way into the hospitals, but in my mind is this strange yellowish memory from watching the television on those nights. We (I) became addicted—it seemed to me—to watching the news on the television every night.



* * *



—

I worried about the ambulance workers, that they would all get sick, and the people working in the hospitals too. I thought of a blind man I sometimes helped off the bus near the bus stop by my apartment, and I was worried about him, would he now dare take anyone’s arm? And the bus drivers too! All those people they came into contact with—!



* * *



—

And also I noticed something about myself as I watched the news during this time. Which is that my eyes would drop to the floor, I mean I could not look at it all the time. I thought: It is as though somebody is lying to me, and I cannot look at someone who is lying to me. I did not think the news was lying to me—as I said, I understood it was all true; I only want to tell you that for a number of days—and it turned into weeks—I looked at the floor frequently as we watched the news at night.



* * *



—

It is interesting how people endure things.



* * *





We called Becka every day during this time, and she said, Mom, it’s awful, there are refrigerator trucks right outside our apartment building filled with people who have died, they’re right there when I go outside, and also I can see them through the window. “Oh dear God,” I said. “Don’t go outside!” And she said she didn’t except when they really needed something. When we hung up I walked around and around the house. I did not know where to put my mind.



* * *





There was a feeling of mutedness.



* * *



—

Like my ears were plugged up as though I was underwater.



* * *





William had been right. Becka was now working from home, and her husband, Trey, was teaching his classes online. Becka said, “I’m trying to work in our bedroom and Trey works in the living room, and he complains that he can still hear me. We can’t go out— What are we supposed to do? God, he gets so irritated,” she said.