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This piece was published on the Boston Book Festival website in a section about being at home during the pandemic. This link leads you to the 10 chosen stories. Here's mine:
My Pandemic Calm in Exactly 50 Words
My underlying condition keeps me inside, overlooking Spy Pond from my seventh story window. I am calm, used to living alone in a room, used to being alone as a writer. I’ve been content, prepared for the long haul, until I saw the mouse. Now every shadow is an enemy.
Today is the 100th anniversary of my mother Phyllis’s birth. She was mean to me as long as she lived. She lied. She was violent. She was jealous. She was a tangle of affectations she thought made her seem middle-class.
My childhood memories are dim and unhappy – there aren’t long narratives to spin. So I have written about this period in chapters of 100 words. Exactly. Not 99 words and not 101. This form allows me to tell about as much as I am willing to recall of my childhood, one in which I was the captive of the nuclear family, a private turf where no one in the 1950s would think of intervening, even if violence and cruelty were obvious.
Here are three chapters that relate to Phyllis.
The Day I was Gendered in 100 Words
I was born in August Wilson’s Hill District projects. At 3 we moved to a tiny duplex and at 10 we moved to an attached row house – my mother’s determined ascent up the working-class ladder. I was a kid like other kids, playing summer kickball shirtless in the alley behind our row. Until one boy’s snobby mother turned up at our door saying she didn’t want her son playing with a whore. My mother dragged me from the alley by the ear and drove me straight to Woolworth’s to be fitted in the aisle with a training bra. Public humiliation.
Murder and Revenge in 100 Words
“Pets are dirty,” my mother said, forbidding them. Until at Woolworths I saw the turtle in its plastic dish, complete with a pond and palm tree. I had saved up enough dimes from scrubbing the kitchen floor to buy it for myself. That summer I went to sleep-over camp for the first and only time. My mother promised to keep the turtle pond full of water and the pet fed. On my return, I found the turtle swollen up like a ping-pong ball, dead in a dry plate. I buried it under her beloved hydrangeas bush, which never again bloomed.
Phyllis’s Shoe in 100 Words
My mother blamed me for a long labor during which my father abandoned her to go bowling. My dad, Saul, and I were always tight. My first memory is when I was 5 and Phyllis shrieked at me, “He’s mine! Get your own!” I was 11 when my mother scraped the side of the car in a parking lot. Later she told Saul it happened while we were inside shopping. When I contradicted her, she removed her high-heeled shoe to punish me for lying and for trying to turn Saul against her. I still have those scars on my thigh.
This incident happened in late May.
Now that I have a medical mask and a plastic shield, I can go down the cootie-filled elevator of my building to my car and get out of my Pandemic Palace. I only see one person – my bestie Barry – who, like me, has been entirely isolated from other humanoids. While up until a few months ago I would have been in the midst of the protest crowds with my signs and shouts and comrades, I am prevented from such action by this plague and my age.
So on my maiden visit, we decided to take a drive. Since we went in his car, I needed nothing but my phone so I left my backpack behind. He lent me a sweatshirt, but once I got outside in the sun, I realized I didn’t need it and peeled it off and threw it into his backseat.
We drove around a very wealthy, very green suburb just a couple of miles away, snarking about the gorgeous oversized homes. Suddenly I realized that I could not find my phone. I looked around my seat and then removed my seatbelt to get at the sweatshirt in the back, flashing on a vague memory of having stuck the phone in its pocket earlier. It was not there. Barry called my number but there was no sound of ringing.
I was particularly agitated because just the day before I had downloaded my bank app in order to deposit my stimulus check. I have no password on my iPhone, and could not remember if my bank details came up automatically as they do on my computer. (Note to self – change that!)
We drove back to Barry’s parking lot and retraced every step I took. He was trying my number all the time and my heart sank when we mounted the steps to his apartment and there was no ringing at all.
Had I activated the “Find My iPhone” app on my cellphone? Was the sound turned on? Inside his flat, I found the website on my laptop and it brought up a smeary, unclear dim map (above) that showed the phone as a green dot! It was on Central Avenue, apparently less than two miles away according to a map search. I went to pee and we got ready to go look. I checked the site once more and the phone appeared to have crossed the street. I plotzed! Was it in someone’s hand? Was it still on the move? I waited some more, but it no longer seemed to be moving.
We rushed to the vague location the app’s poor map gave us, absolutely mystified as to how the phone could be there. Once in the area, I began searching up and down along the long tall fence that enclosed the front yard of a big house on one side of the street. I suspected this area had been the original location. Barry searched on the other side of the street, although there was no sidewalk there. I heard some people talking behind the fence and asked if they had seen or heard a phone. At first they said no, but once I popped my head into the driveway, one man, who appeared to be a gardener, came out and said, “Yes, I heard a noise down the end of the fence.” We walked there (photo of the fence) and I had Barry, across the street, ring my number.
The man lifted his head, concentrating, and then looked across the street. “It’s not here anymore,” he said, “it’s there.” A utility pole stood between Barry and the street. “I can see it,” the man said. He was young, and so were his ears and eyes.
Now comes the biggest mystery. Someone had built a teepee-like structure out of twigs, using a dirty discarded postcard for a shelf, and had placed my iPhone on it. You can see it in the photo.
I was weak with gratitude, borrowed a twenty from Barry to give to my savior, and only once I was back in the car, realized that not only was he only the second person I have talked to face-to-face since March 11, but that he wore no mask. I had kept my distance and am not worried, just reminded that everyday is no longer everyday.
I rushed home to check my bank account – which was undisturbed. And then noticed that my Otterbox phone cover (a very rugged rubber protector) seemed to be rather loosely attached and the inside quite dusty, as if it had been taken off and replaced rather haphazardly. Why? Had the phone been run over? And why didn’t the person who found it go to “recent calls” and ring the first couple of numbers there? And how did the phone get on a street where we had never stopped?
Mysteries must be matched with theories. I can only surmise that I put my phone on the roof of Barry’s car when taking off the sweatshirt before we went on our drive, although I doubt I have ever put anything on the roof a car before. Maybe the heavy rubber Otterbox kept it from falling off as we went out of his driveway, a skein of harsh potholes, and that as we progressed it somehow by increments inched itself to the edge and fell off well into the trip.
Why move it across the street? I imagine that the person who found it couldn’t figure out how to display it on that smooth tall fence and so took it across the street where there was grass and trees in order to build that exhibition stand for it. Why do that instead of taking the phone with them and waiting for it to ring or trying favorite or recent numbers?
Who found it? My theory is that it was someone who was fearful of being accused of theft. Perhaps children. Perhaps adults worried about a racist or anti-immigrant reaction.
And now to lessons learned. Use passwords for bank apps and probably for your phone if you’re going to have such an app in the first place. Although, an added password on my phone means a person wouldn’t be able to look up last calls or favorite numbers.
And then there’s the Find My iPhone website. Learn that at the bottom right corner of their splash page, in the smallest dimmest font every created by an out-of-touch young geek, are three alternative views. Really this menu is so hard to see that I didn’t see it. Until I got home with the phone. One view is “Satellite” and it is a bird’s-eye-view of every house and tree and driveway. This would have made locating the phone a breeze, had I discovered this view beforehand. I tested its reliability, by moving the phone across the living room and watching the change on the site!
The ultimate lesson I learned is that routine is your friend. Older people learn this lesson at one point or another. Take me, for instance. I always carry my backpack. It has all my essentials from phone to credit card to tissues that can double as toilet paper. Better to maintain one’s regular habits than grab out just one important item, leaving it orphaned from its customary resting place. For someone who has herself only been out of my apartment twice in well over 80 days, it was all a bit much and I was relieved to be tucked back into my room that evening, where the chaos is familiar, for it is my chaos. And where I never lose anything.
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