We Found Love in a Hopeless Place, Part 1

On moving, by accident, in the middle of a pandemic.

Five years, seven weeks, and six days ago,¹ I packed up my car—a ten-year-old Subaru Legacy which, like most of the things I owned at that point, was technically marital property, and which, unlike most of those things, would subsequently go to my ex-husband in our divorce—and drove from my apartment in central Brooklyn to my parents’ house in central Vermont.

Typically, the trip took at least six hours, longer if we left after mid-morning in the middle of the week. But on that day, a Thursday, it took fewer than five, because there were no other cars on the road. (It feels wrong to admit it, but even apocalypses have their advantages.) My daughter, then a kindergartener, rode in the back with her iPad and approximately two dozen stuffed animals; the front passenger seat was piled high with backpacks and insulated grocery bags.

I’d filled a wide-mouthed plastic water bottle with peonies and ranunculi, the remains of an arrangement that my friend Kat had made me for Mother’s Day, and set it in one of the cup holders on the center console. I knew it was silly to try to transport fresh flowers in that fashion—my arm kept bumping the blossoms as I drove, causing them to drop petals and dust my elbow with yellow pollen—but I couldn’t have thrown them away. Those were difficult times, and I needed all the evidence I could collect that the world contained both beautiful things and people who loved me.

It was the search for same, I suppose, that led me to Vermont in the first place. I adored Brooklyn, and I still do; I dragged L to Fort Greene Park every halfway decent day that spring to look at the blooming magnolia and cherry and crabapple trees. But I was scared enough of getting infected as we traversed the dangerous terrain between our apartment door and the sidewalk in front of our building (a hallway, an elevator, another hallway, and an air-locked vestibule) that I limited our excursions to one per day. We stayed out as long as we could—I packed snacks and drinks and books and sidewalk chalk—but eventually one or the other of us would have to pee and we’d be forced back inside until the following morning. The thought of spending an entire summer thus imprisoned was intolerable.

Also, I was very lonely. The only non-L person I saw with any regularity for the bulk of that period was my husband, A, who’d moved out at my request just over a year before. He’d rented a studio a few blocks away, but he rarely took L there. Instead, he stopped by our apartment daily, at pretty much whatever time he wanted, to spend an hour or so with her in our living room. (Except, of course, when he wasn’t feeling well, which was often—he was an alcoholic, a smoker, a depressive, and, maybe, a hypochondriac.) Our interactions were, as you might imagine, challenging.

People had begun to talk about forming pods, but nobody was actually doing it yet. Even if they had been, L and I weren’t the most attractive candidates. Our frequent contact with A meant that we couldn’t really isolate; while I didn’t know exactly what he was up to when he wasn’t with us, I sincerely doubted that he was strictly adhering to social-distancing protocols.

I did have one friend who was somewhat receptive nevertheless—around mid-April, we’d begun timing our outings to coincide whenever possible, so that our children could, if not play, at least shout at each other from a short distance through their homemade masks—but that receptivity had been premised on her and her husband’s belief that their entire family had gotten sick with the virus right around the time the schools shut down, and was therefore immune. When the antibody tests they’d lined up for hours outside of CityMD to get said otherwise, I knew that L and I were on our own.

Even still, I dithered, waiting to leave until practically the last possible moment, just sixteen days before my parents would arrive from their other house, in Port St. Lucie. (There’d been an intrafamily debate earlier that spring vis-a-vis the advisability of them getting on a plane—technically, my father still had cancer, even if it was so small that the doctors couldn’t figure out exactly where it was—but by mid-April, he’d decided that he’d rather risk death than endure a summer in Florida.) I figured we’d remain in Vermont, in their finished basement that was bigger, and in some ways nicer, than our place in Brooklyn, just long enough to make our two-week quarantine worth it—maybe six weeks total, or eight, or ten.

But that’s not what happened. By late June, I’d decided to stay until at least mid-August. By mid-August, I’d begun thinking that maybe we’d leave when my parents did, in the beginning of November. And in the beginning of November, I enrolled L in the local elementary school.

Remote learning, which we’d been attempting through her Brooklyn school, had been, for L, a disaster. She was still only five, and while I wasn’t that concerned about her education, I could see that she very much needed to be in the physical presence of other children. I rationalized that even if I pulled her out of the local school and re-enrolled her for in-person education at P.S. 11 at the next opportunity, just after Christmas, the seven weeks of extra socialization would have been worth it.

“Yeah, you’re not going back to Brooklyn after Christmas,” my then-boyfriend, S, said when I told him this.

I don’t know why he was so certain, but of course he was right. Perhaps it was just that he’d been watching me not move back to the city for months, ever since we’d met² in early July. Living with my mom and dad again at 44 wasn’t ideal, but it was much better than the isolation we’d experienced in the spring; I honestly didn’t quite believe my friends when they started telling me, circa midsummer, that the situation had changed, and that if I came back, we could (sometimes) hang out. The lockdown had shown me that, when the shit hits the fan on a world-historical level, people mostly choose their real families over their chosen families. And while I didn’t blame them—at least, I tried not to—I felt like I needed to do the same thing.

[To be continued…]

1. I started writing this goddamn post two months ago. The original lede was, “Five years ago today…”, followed by “Five years ago yesterday…”, et cetera, et cetera.

2. Tinder, obviously. How else would I meet another forty-something not-quite-divorcé in a rural state in the middle of a pandemic?