Monday
We drove out of New York in a rented minivan with Nebraska plates, squandering the newfound goodwill towards New Yorkers. (In New York, the virus infection rate hovers at 1% while in Nebraska it’s at 9%; New York plates, once the mark of Cain, are suddenly a passport to a warm welcome.)
Our destination, meanwhile, was Massachusetts (infection rate: 1.8% and rising), which is not, for the time being, on the New York governor’s list of 35 states requiring 14 days of quarantine after a visit, which he extended this week to Delaware and Alaska. Such are the demands of travelling in the US in the time of Covid.
There were other, more opaque considerations. How Trumpy was the part of the country we were going to? (As we neared our destination the volume of solar panels, landscaped gardens and Black Lives Matters signs in the windows of tastefully converted barns suggested not very Trumpy at all.) Apart from the virus, what other diseases were we likely to get (tick-borne Lyme disease being the most common and feared)? And, after months of living in a state of acute anxiety, would any of us be able to relax?
Going on holiday with friends is an invitation to dilute the dynamics of one’s own family in those of another. For the first half of the journey, my friend Oliver and I bickered vigorously about which of us got to ride up front in the minivan, an impressive lesson for my children in the fact they’re not the only ones who trigger my rage. After a four-hour drive we drove down a track to a remote house surrounded by wooded hills.
The internet was hit and miss; there was no TV; and on that day of arrival a small, black snake slithered across the lawn, bold as brass, to the horror of the adults, and delight of the kids. But for the first time since March, we were out of the city. It was stupendously, mind-blowingly spacious and quiet but there something even more miraculous than that: in the open country, for days at a time, no one would have to wear a mask.
Tuesday
The relief didn’t last, obviously – although a big temperature drop and the substitute of cricket chirps for wailing sirens did help. The next morning, I opened an email from the Department of Education containing further reassurances that it was doing its best to help us cope as we head towards September and the certainty that most state schools in New York won’t be opening for more than two days a week.
Elsewhere in my inbox, what has become a commonplace: endless promotions and offers from private after-school programmes to oversee homeschooling for a mere $120 (£90) a day per child. In the New York Times, Bill de Blasio, the mayor of New York, was reported to be under pressure from school principals to push the start date of even this limited school reopening to some indistinct point in September. There was no end to the mess in sight. Meanwhile, texts and emails flew between families at the school, as we tried to figure out a way to share tutors and babysitters so we could still get a minimal amount of work done. Inevitably, a school within a school is forming that falls largely along class and behavioural lines: “disruptive” kids won’t be asked to join private pods, nor will kids having to stay home to watch their younger siblings. The one piece of equity in all this is that a certain kind of pain-in-the-arse middle-class parent, who at the best of times blows through teaching resources and sucks all the air out of the PTA, is in danger of being relegated to podlessness. In these stretching times, no one has the resources to smile and say: “It’s fine.”
Wednesday
When Kamala Harris appeared at the virtual Democratic convention, it was as the first woman of colour to accept a major-party nomination for vice-president. She occupied an even more novel position that night: that of being the sole candidate to clear what is probably the lowest bar of any presidential race in history. Harris is extremely smart. But in a group with Donald Trump, Mike Pence and Joe Biden her ability to meet a base-level cognitive function and follow a thought to its rational conclusion – without digression, non sequitur or blatant lie – made her unique in the lineup. (There’s no sense that Pence is troubled by any hardware impairment, but his hang-ups are so deep and strange that it amounts to the same thing.)
There was something moving about watching Hillary Clinton, still the consummate good loser, appear on Harris’s behalf, and something perennially annoying about the appearance of her husband, Bill, thinner and thankfully less visible than ever. Arguably the convention has been Barack Obama’s, the former president launching into Trump’s character faults and calling him out as a threat to democracy. Watching the clip, with frequent buffering, offered a momentary sense of how bleak this will look if things go wrong in November.
Thursday
“Have you heard the good news?” My friend Oliver emerged from the shed at the bottom of the garden, where he had been working all morning. There were so many possibilities. A vaccine breakthrough? A sudden reversal on school reopenings? A gust of wind finally laying Trump’s vanity bare?
“Steve Bannon has been arrested and charged with fraud!” A cheer went up in the garden. As news, it was oddly of a piece with everyone’s vacation reading list. No beach reads here. The books left face-down on the big outdoor table that morning included Jane Mayer’s Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, and Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains: the Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America. It was a relief that the member of our party who had considered bringing along Thomas Piketty’s Capital and Ideology had managed to leave it at home.
Later that day, we got back in the minivan to visit the Mount, Edith Wharton’s beautiful turn-of-the-20th-century house an hour or so’s drive away. The gardens were manicured, the sky brilliant blue, and it made me long to abandon our doomsday reading list for a novel in which the long arc of history could be regarded from a safe distance, in which the villains had been overtaken by time. You don’t always want to know how the story ends.
Friday
After days spent wading through creeks and long grass, the nightly tick-check is of paramount importance. Ticks like warm areas of the body so the audit isn’t pleasant: armpits, belly buttons, hairlines, creases. On Friday night, I did my five-year-olds then began the long, dismal examination of the self. Standing in front of a mirror, craning over your right shoulder while trying to check your own arse for ticks is a sad affair, unalleviated by the dim but powerful sense that it is somehow a perfect commentary on the times.
