New Variants

I remember when “zooming” meant something like careening down a hill on my ten-speed with my hair whipping back and the occasional bug in my teeth—because I can’t help but smile, of course. Or cruising in Ann’s parents’ car following some guy she knows, and too many of us sixteen or almost-sixteen-year-old girlfriends are smooshed in the back seat, and we slide all up on top of one another as she zooms through yellow lights and takes every too-tight corner. All made-up and looking for something to get into. When we were bodies that came together instead of heads in boxes on screens, we enveloped one another in gorgeous auras—energies colliding and playing all over a room. How easily we shift into presenting ourselves like products or meteorologists before false backdrops or contrived book collections. The diorama of a life. Before, there was at least touching without touching. In those first months, homeowners bounced back and forth between Home Depot and Lowe’s, checking off items on decades-old To-Do lists. What satisfaction! In those houses roomy enough for hosting “pods,” healthy budgets secured tutors. We renters envied their decks in need of refinishing, walls to be repainted in cheerful colors, and especially their private washing machines. This would be the year to have a yard. Playgrounds count the days, bound in yellow police tape. I watch as one dad struggles to tear it down—in a gesture of defiance or helplessness, it’s hard to say—and sticks his kid in a baby swing, dammit. I manage to get the first batch of library books we’ve had since everything shut down. Curbside. I follow the instructions: send the signal, pop my trunk, a masked man meets me, makes the drop. This smuggling books out of the library in paper sacks takes on a certain exciting appeal: the everyday dangerous. It’s summertime, and we are lying on a flat boulder watching stars fall over an alpine lake in the Desolation Wilderness. My nine-year-old’s wish is the same with every shooting star: that no one will get sick and that COVID will be over soon. He’s designing the lemonade stand he’s going to open when this ends. He wants to build it now because the day it’s over, and crowds of joyous people rush into the streets cheering—this is how he imagines it, you see, like those V-day stories—well, they’ll be thirsty. October: I’m in a big box store I’d rather not be in. I am waiting for the cashier’s cue to slide my card and touch the too-touched buttons. The pink-faced man next in line and wearing a mask on his chin is encroaching on my transaction space. I can hear the mucus rattling in his chest as he lumbers toward me, and I surmise his overall health by his flushed pallor and by the food products he’s already begun placing on the belt. I cease breathing as I consider aborting my mission. And then, in my most neighborly voice, eyes smiling above my mask, I suggest, “Hey, how ‘bout that six feet?” He is unreceptive to my midwestern charm, like he’s been lonesome for a confrontation. And suddenly, he becomes for me a composite character with a political stance and high blood pressure; he is an overgrown child who sees everything in terms of his individual rights and would be damned before budged. I’m quite convinced he snores and sweats excessively in the night. He looms closer and asks down to me, “How’s that mask working out for you? Ya know they say masks don’t work.” And I think: all the more reason to give space. But we don’t share this logic. “Well, I’ve got three kids to keep healthy, so I’ll try anything,” I reply, tilting my head to help him hear that I’m still speaking in smiles. Though clearly he’s not the listener-type. “I used to work for the federal government,” he adds. I’m not sure how he sees this as supporting his argument. And I hope the cashier will finish before he releases any more of his hot air into our contact zone. “Well, I have little faith in the federal government these days,” I reply, searching the cashier’s face for alliance. “These people are a danger to you; why doesn’t security throw them out?” are the words I’m not voicing to her. And I imagine her reply about management and power and how there’s nothing she can really do but keep showing up. When I place my video on “mute” I’m totally here. I’m just getting my second-grader into “morning meeting.” His nice teacher will clown around in a pair of sunglasses from her extensive collection and talk about her new puppy. He can’t do subtraction with borrowing or even addition with carrying but at least he will see some of the faces that used to get him smiling. I encourage him to raise his hand and participate but he’s melted across his chair, head flopped under the table now anyway. I am also checking that my fourth-grader is logged in to science and not slipping down the YouTube. I bring my sixth-grader a snack so he knows that I am here at least. These are the pants I slept in but they are the only ones that fit me anymore. I know we’ve got it relatively good with food, plumbing, electricity, and no one really close to us has died yet. So I am grateful. But I fear the long-term consequences of kids blasting at droids all day every day. Even the ones whose parents resisted that shit. And from being locked-down with adults seething with resentment for one another. Ambivalence is hard to overcome. Video back on, I am repulsed by the sight of my own face talking. I might just as well put some lipstick and eyeliner on my lumpy ass. But I am prepared for class at their expense which just kills me. rhymes with doom. Stay in your room or in a cocoon crazy as a loon. ETHNOGRAPHIC STATEMENT “New Variants” are autoethnographic reflections on the hyper-extended period of social distancing we are leaning into, and the accrual of tension as initial fears of surface contamination are replaced by the dread of mutations commonly referred to as “new variants.” Nostalgic longing for togetherness and touch in pre-Covid worlds are balanced against hope and the fantasy of collective events and shared emotions. Inequities become more palpable, where education and health (mental, physical, and fiscal) are felt as proportionate to access to private property. While hair keeps growing and teeth fall out in steady tempo, how we inhabit time shifts from “making the most of a time” to “life deferred.” The voice of one working, zoom-schooling mother takes on the themes of responsibility, care, and guilt as the narrative tone of the “variants” progressively dips, buckles, and finally cracks. [COVID-19, pandemic, shelter-in-place, Zoom

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