We stayed in lockdown for months. No one came or went. No box crossed our threshold without a pert spritz of bleach. The idea of leaving made us examine our reasons. We asked each other absurdities.
“Would you ever in your life?”
“Who in the whole history of pandemics does that?”
One of us always had mockery.
“Sure, you’re ill or whatever, so come on down to the place where all the germs hang out. No thanks.”
We only really left twice. Once for pills, once for eggs. That first time, it all happened so fast. One of us prodded the other with questions about blood pressure.
“Silent killer, isn’t that what they call it?”
The condition made the one vulnerable to the virus, and so it was decided by the other.
“Come what may, there will be a refill.”
* * *
Meanwhile, in 1933, Dr. Hutton of Chicago explained to reporters why he prescribed X-rays to those suffering from diabetes and high blood pressure. It was because the adrenal glands were involved in most cases and X-ray treatments had an immediate effect on them. When asked about potential harms, Hutton reasoned that even if the X-rays did no better than control the illnesses, patients would be better off because they would not have to take so many pills.
* * *
“The only way to do this,” one of us announced, “is a drive-thru pharmacy.”
“We’ll need a reception canister. A chamber to kill the germs on the bag they will hand us. Let’s put a little pool of bleach water in a red mini cooler in the back seat. That way, as soon as we get the bag—right into the death chamber it goes!”
“And shouldn’t we wear hazmat suits?”
But we had no hazmat suits. One of us wore a mask fashioned from duct tape, shoestrings, and a dryer sheet. The other sported a dust mask kept for plastering jobs. We stretched our fingers into rubber gloves and headed out to the car with our plastic bell jar for viruses.
On the drive through town, we passed deserted streets and joggerless sidewalks. No dog walkers or stoic New Englanders waiting for buses. Occasionally, someone walked by, but never in a mask. Only one driver (out of fifty) wore a mask, and even that person seemed to find our face gear worthy of that shocked-eyes-over-a-mask look.
* * *
Why were the streets deserted in Homestead, PA on the evening of July 11, 1892? Because all the people went to bed early. They wanted to wake up to greet the dawn and the militia. Bands would play for the troops called in to quell the strike at the iron mill owned by Andrew Carnegie. The workers met and decided that afternoon to welcome the militia peacefully. The week before, news of the Pinkerton security force coming ashore led strikers to wage a gunfight. They shot at the detectives-for-hire as they attempted to disembark from their barge. Nearly a dozen died, their bodies splashing into the Monongahela River. After that, Homestead was put under martial law.
* * *
At the drive-thru, people put masks on in their cars as they neared the window. The pharmacist used hand sanitizer for every transaction. You could almost see his smile in his eyes above his mask. We felt less alone. His eyes frowned to see us flub the whole bag in the death chamber thing, but we got everything packed away bleach-blanket safe and BINGO! We headed back with our masks on and our little reasons not to die secure in the cooler.
The last time we’d been in a grocery store, it was a disaster movie. We scrambled to the cleaning supplies for the last three packages of disinfecting wipes. All the toilet paper was gone. One remarked on the shelves, how capacious they looked when empty, as the other opened the wipes to clean the handle of the cart.
The clerk who worked behind the fish counter started coughing, doubling over to cough. We steered into the pasta aisle. More empty shelves made one of us feel like laughing. It passed quickly.
Recalling the trip later, one of us wished we bought more meat. After a few days, the refrigerator emptied. Tapping the maple trees in the backyard gave us something to do. One of us, who had been teaching Thoreau, was adamant about breaking any dependency on a crumbling market.
One of us should have responded with mockery, but neither had the stomach for it.
* * *
An ad for Ball mason jars from September 11, 1942 encouraged American women to see themselves as warriors when canning peaches. At a time when empty grocery shelves signaled the priority of feeding the soldiers who needed to fight, women who preserved food might as well have been as munition factory workers. “It’s just like making bombs for Tokyo,” the ad declared.
* * *
Pills are like history; both are processed. History makes us believe we have processed our past—having passed through it, as if the past stayed there the way it does in history books. Pills belong to an empty shelf of history.
In bodies, however, pills are processed twice—once to become themselves and once to become our healing. In a way, the pill is related to the future. It gains its full effect only after it is processed in the factory of our bodies.
* * *
In his first public appearance after being elected in 1924, Calvin Coolidge tried to convince an audience of 300 farmers that food shortages were inevitable. Industrialization and population increase were two factors. A fast-growing America will sometimes produce more new citizens than crops to feed them. Coolidge told the farmers something they had not heard before. Even in 1924, Americans were consuming more calories than they produced. He called on farmers to produce not necessarily more food but more sugar to fuel more Americans.
* * *
At night, we huddled in a televisual haze. There had been marching through the streets for racial justice and uproars at food distribution centers. Many thousands were dying by the day, ushered through lonely hospital corridors never to be seen again.
We bought as much food as we could online. We even tried purchasing the means of producing food, ordering seeds, bushes, and then chickens. Of course, none of it could be guaranteed. None of it would come in time for dinner.
We saw news reports of nurses helping patients have family video chats right before intubation. The sick had to be separated from their families. A cough would set in. Worried ambulance negotiations came next. All of it would lead finally to a hospital and a tube.
* * *
Fred Law Olmsted, of the US Sanitary Commission, enumerated the questions loved ones could ask hospital administrators in Washington D.C. when seeking information about Civil War soldiers in 1863.
1st Is ________at present in the hospital?
2nd If so, what is the patient’s proper address?
3rd What is the name of the hospital chaplain?
4th If not now in the hospital, has the soldier been there recently?
5th If so, did he die in the hospital?
6th If he was discharged from the hospital, was he also recently discharged from service?
7th If not, what were his orders upon leaving?
* * *
War was on our minds. The plot of each neighbor looked different to us on our walks through the still world. A fence meant extra security. Against whom or what? Nightmares filled in the gaps where optimistic reports fell short. That fenced yard with two or three attack dogs next door didn’t brighten our morning walks.
Then there were the creative neighbors on the corner who repaired their house all by themselves, showing off their know-how for every passing car. You would see them on makeshift scaffolding fixing and painting the siding or hoeing rows in the backyard. First, there were fake ducklings and swans in the yard. Then, real animals. Chickens, dogs, bees. They had a sign in front. Honey for sale. Big wooden sign in the shape of a hive. The one for eggs was in the shape of an egg. They transformed stumps in front of their house with chainsaws and paint, refiguring them into the shape of gnomes with pointy hats and elfish shoes.
* * *
The second time we left, we did it for eggs. Eggs have a double life. What they mean is birth, life. What they are is matter prior to animation. History is a pill we take to regenerate or heal our memory by suturing gaps in the past.
The past is an egg holding the present inside of it.
* * *
In the 1850s, there was a rash of bombastic discoveries of an egg within an egg, each time reported as though it were the only time in human history such a “freak” of nature had been witnessed. In Louisiana in 1853, it is the size of a small goose’s egg with another inside it, “looking quite as well as if it had been born into the air, instead of being enclosed within.” Another strange hen’s egg was found in Stroudsburg, PA in 1855, containing a perfect replica of a snake on the outside of it. That was because an actual snake lay dead inside the egg, though no one could figure out how it got there. They put it under glass to be marveled at in a hotel lobby in Lauray. Another egg from 1855 had a perfectly- scripted figure of the number eight on it in Natchez, LA, and was found to be so mysterious for bearing such an exact account upon it that it was displayed in a doctor’s office for all to witness. But none of these eggs struck with as much force as the one flung at President Pierce’s head, knocking his hat off on August 5, 1854. A man from Charleston named Jeffards had been drinking heavily, and when the President, who was exiting the Capitol, declined to join him and his friends in further drinking, Jeffards flung a hard-boiled egg at the President. Once in jail, Jeffards began to sober up and panic. After stabbing himself in the leg in an attempt to bleed to death, saying he wouldn’t survive in jail and wished to die, Jeffards was exonerated by Pierce and released from custody.
* * *
We were heading towards the other neighbor, on the other side of the school, where there were chickens, swans, goats, and turkeys, (not to mention a hog,) all happily sunning themselves in an area comparable to a backyard, near a garage gutted by animal patience and weathering into a barn.
“I can hear the goats. These neighbors.”
“There are probably people.”
“And a pig!”
“So they have a pig? Our cupboards are not too bare,” one of us proclaimed. “Maybe in other houses there are no big plans for escape. Maybe in other houses there are goats and swans. So what. We’ve got a tent and three brand new shipments of sleeping bags.”
“And never in the history of maple syrup tapping has there been an operation big as ours.”
Our appetite for satire faded as we tromped back towards the house with the gnomes, where chickens gathered at the signs. We may have pictured the reality of our joking as we walked:
A) Three thimbles of syrup in vials on our windowsill.
B) Unopened camping material stashed where it would not be seen by others,; in case our house and its stores had to be forfeited temporarily.
C) A grocery bag full of browning leaves, data from experiments in foraging; nota bene: lamb’s ear tea tastes blander than pine needle tea.
“Wait.”
We stopped by the egg sign.
“Shouldn’t we reach out to them?”
Reasons A-C in the list above made this seem like a good idea. This was the origin of our second reason for leaving lockdown.
We hatched a plan. We would use the mailbox. We would give them a twenty or some large bill, (not too large!), and ask for eggs. We’d leave our number and address. We’d ask them to drop the eggs at our house.
Things got exciting. There would be more than new ideas at the other end of this tête-à-tête. There could be omelets.
* * *
In 1950, an alumnus of Middlebury College donated three dozen eggs to his alma mater. He sold the eggs and traded the money for postage stamps because it was “more economical on postage sending postage stamps than eggs.” In April of 1954, vandals broke into the Atwood Heights Elementary School in Chicago. They stole eggs from the school kitchen and waged a yolky war through the hallways and classrooms before fleeing the scene. On Memorial Day in 1954, a Pennsylvania Farmer got lost in the New York City subway station while transporting his eggs to Brooklyn. When he missed the train, he carried his cargo of eggs under one arm and crawled along the narrow catwalk of the subway tunnel to his destination. During his trek, not a single egg broke.
* * *
We rushed home to gather the egg box and the cash. Once arranged, we made the second promenade in lighter spirits. We planned for the future without satire.
They called us back within the hour. One of their boys, his name already known to us, as it is carved at the base of one of the gnomes, brought the eggs to our door. We did not want to open it all the way. None of us were used to the new rules of exchange: hands-free, talk-free, paper-money-free.
In the kitchen, we gloated over the breakable orbs in rows. Three dozen. Enough eggs to last the week. Each one orange-hearted, fragile, and filling.
* * *
To see history like a pill is to see how the past can be made ingestible in the furnace of the body, which is always to be understood in the present tense.
To see history as an egg is to see how the past creates the impression of something new—of new life—by erasing its origins in the body of the past.
Michael Chaney and Sara Biggs Chaney's multimedia artworks have been exhibited in national art exhibitions and published in Puerto del Sol, The Pinch, Redivider, and Quarterly West. Their collaborative nonfiction appears in Spirituality and Health, Sycamore Review, Green Mountain Review, and Hotel Amerika.