TUCSON, APRIL 2020, 95°
QUARANTINE WEEK 6, GESTATIONAL WEEK 23
A pile of failed paper cranes is accumulating in my lap. They are shiny gold and marked by wrong folds, off angles, hesitant bend marks. I had thought, when I ordered the sheaf of yellow gold paper on the internet, that I would become excellent at origami and I would make a paper crane for each day I was quarantined. I thought I would end up with a fun pile of glinting birds, and it would be like meditating. I thought I would find some peace. Instead, I have burned through much of my paper with only this pile of crumples to show for it.
I am thirty-seven, pregnant, in love, and effectively locked in my apartment. In April the temperature nears the record high in Tucson, the southern Arizona desert town that has become my home. I did not intend to land in the Southwest—I was just stopping by for a few years to earn a graduate degree before heading back to Hawai’i, where I had settled. And yet, now I live here, nestled between the Catalina, Tortolita, Santa Rita, and Rincon mountain ranges, on a dusty alluvial plain tucked into great expanses of red voters and stabby cacti and desert creatures that hiss and howl at night.
On my couch sits my reason for staying here. His hair, nearly black, curls around his ears as he squints to read something on his phone screen. N: strong and gentle and wise, the person I spent so many years of my life stumbling around looking for. Our baby will be born at the end of the summer, into three-digit temperatures and monsoon rains.
My apartment is a collection of white objects nesting inside more white: white sheetrock living room, bedroom, and bathroom containing white modular shelves, white appliances, white table, white chairs. I keep the gauzy white curtains pulled tight against the Arizona sun at all times of the day. I keep the surfaces as clean as possible. I fold and crumple the golden cranes. Inside this small, tidy world, I can maintain order.
N works as a coach and trainer for athletes. I watch a muscle on the back of his arm rise as he shifts around on the couch. So much of the story of his life is visible in his body, a solid mass of strength and damage, a collection of experiences and reactions and corrections. A football lineman, a gymnast, a fighter. When he moves, body parts I didn’t used to know about rise and ripple: rear deltoids, latissimus dorsi, trapezius. He is a father, a son, a man, a boy. The parts of him I love most fiercely are the soft ones that balance all his strength: his gentleness, his open heart, his eyes that make and keep contact.
In the apartment we sit with our limbs tangled up, a bowl of berries balanced between us on my knee. I never liked sharing anything until I met him—always preferred my own space, my own bowl, my own chair. Now, I like everything being both of ours. I like sanding down the rough spots of my rigidity, my stubbornness, my ways of being that have ossified over three and a half decades of holding carefully together the boundaries of my heart. Inside our apartment, I feel safe and loved.
Outside, though: disintegration. It is the middle of April and the COVID-19 pandemic is raging. We watch the death rates rising on the news, buy face masks on Amazon, and drop our clothes at the door for decontamination after we go for walks. It’s fair to say we are freaked out—me much more than N, who is cooler under the pressures of the unknown. I have spent at least twenty-two hours of each of the last seventy days inside the six hundred square feet of the apartment. I have let many days pass without once stepping outside.
I spend numb hours scrolling through the news, and in every article it sounds like death is imminent, like we are all one bad doorknob touch away from drowning in our own lungs on dry land. My body has just come out of a rough year and feels so vulnerable to infection, infiltration, and compromise that I do not trust its ability to fend off even a regular cold, let alone this new and frightening respiratory virus. My pregnancy feels like a one-time gift, precious and precarious, and protecting it feels more important than anything else I might do. Hence the cranes.
N goes out into the world every day. He goes to work training clients in their private home gyms despite the shelter-in-place order in our state and most of the country. He goes to the grocery store, where he dutifully wears a face mask and fills bags with my favorite treats, the things that make me happy and healthy: greens and root vegetables, sweet potatoes and garlic, different kinds of berries, organic eggs. Dark chocolate and nuts, glistening slabs of grass-fed beef, bubbly waters, slippery oils, crunchy cucumbers. Sweet potato chips and sugar-free coconut milk ice cream. There are more reasons than ever, now, to take care of my body. I have not once been inside a store in the seventy days I have been in quarantine. He has brought and paid for everything I have eaten, waiting in the long lines, navigating the anxious vibrations of the stores, carrying everything up the stairs, cooking me meals from what he has gathered.
Contrary to my fears and expectations, my body is well. It makes me nervous to say so, because the well-being of my body has been so uncertain—since forever, but particularly in the last few years. My body has felt weak and vulnerable, even when it has been growing stronger. But I’ll say it anyway: my body is well and strong. Inside this body a small seed of a person is growing, suspended in amniotic fluid. South of my heart: a baby. Our baby.
I wonder if it is better that our baby will never have known a world of high-touch surfaces and carelessly shared meals, if the new normal of masks and distance will not feel like loss to them because they will never have known anything else. On the news I watch as New York—my city, my birthplace, my first home—loses itself, loses everything that makes it what it is and that has made me what I am, and I feel a deep ache that our baby might never know the New York of warm bagels eaten on the subway out of crumpled paper bags, the New York of the Russian baths and La MaMa, halal carts and yellow cabs, hot knishes and greasy Dominican chicken, bodega bacon-egg-and-cheeses but with oat-milk lattes because we stopped drinking bodega coffee a long time ago, paper copies of the Village Voice, the fucked-up L train, the smell of schwag weed in the park. Not all those losses are from the virus—not even most of them. Maybe not any of them. It’s been a long time coming, this orderly folding in of what once was vivid and ungovernable. I haven’t lived back east in nearly ten years. But still, it feels hard, to be so fully of a place that has receded into myth and memory.
Our baby stirs inside me as I drink the one daily cup of black coffee I permit myself. The morning light glints off my pile of half-cranes. I know our baby is safe right now, within me. I have more control now over their well-being than I ever will again, and even though shit is weird, it is also simple.