34 THENEWYORKER, APRIL 13, 2020A TEMPORARYMOMENTIN TIMES
hakespeare did his finest work under
quarantine, I keep hearing. I won-
der how the Bard would regard today’s
“craft hour” in our apartment, which
ended after eight minutes. I’d Googled
“easy art projects anyone can do,” and
selected “DIY jellyfish.” We forged
ahead, with the same delusional opti-
mism that has fuelled our recent “pan-
try meals,” when we have three of a rec-
ipe’s twelve ingredients. We had to
improvise a little, since our shopping
list had prioritized diapers, medicine,
Clorox wipes, gallon bags of dour le-
gumes and their party-girl cousins,
coffee beans. Of the many things I’d
failed to foresee: a need for googly eyes,
hole punchers, and vials of glitter. We
wound up with a Styrofoam coffee cup
stabbed through with neon straws.
“Mama, this is not a jellyfish,” my three-
year-old son, Oscar, said, with a preter-
naturally mature sorrow.
We rarely watch the television, but
on this first weekday morning of an ee-
rily quiet Austin, Texas, we decided to
keep it on, a portal to the wider world.
Dr. Irwin Redlener, from the National
Center for Disaster Preparedness, said,
on CNN, “We are so incredibly under-
prepared for a major onslaught to the
hospitals, which is basically now inev-
itable.” Shortages of I.C.U. beds and
ventilators. Hospitals rationing gloves
and masks. “Googly eyes,” Oscar said,
and I nodded. It took me three min-
utes to remember the word for the doc-
tor’s expression: apoplectic.
Homeschool lessons this morning
have included: “Your sister’s head is not
a bongo” and “Don’t touch those crack-
ers to your penis before you eat them,
son.” Sometimes you need to sacrifice
a good feeling in the name of hygiene.
On the TV screen, the Surgeon Gen-
eral appears, begging Americans to keep
their distance. This paradoxical mes-
sage, “We need to come together bystaying apart,” has galvanized a silence
on the ordinarily festive streets of down-
town Austin that tells a story in a whis-
per: infected droplets are spreading
through the air, and this is the new way
we are caring for one another.
Next, we played doctor, a game that
involves my son hitting my forehead
with his toy hammer and then saying,
in a gentle, condescending falsetto, “It’s
not hurting you, Mama.” It’s a bright,
false voice he learned from us. This
game has taught me something essen-
tial about the gaslighting that kids rou-
tinely experience from adults—some-
times well-meaning, often self-serving.
“Just a little, little poke ... ”
On March 11th, after the World
Health Organization officially an-
nounced that the coronavirus was a
pandemic, President Donald Trump
spoke at a congressional hearing on
the issue. “This is not a financial cri-
sis,” he assured us. “This is just a tem-
porary moment of time that we will
overcome together as a nation and as
a world.”
It’s not hurting you, my son prom-
ised, bringing the hammer down.I
t’s hard to know what’s true right
now. Everything feels heightened and
accelerated, including the speed with
which fact overtakes fiction, and a truth
can mutate into a lie. A few days ago,
I had an entirely different understand-
ing of the threat. My son was still at-
tending his day care. We were debat-
ing whether to cancel a family reunion
in April. On March 16th, staring at our
ghostly reflections in empty store win-
dows, now tenanted by mannequins in
bikinis who failed to get the memo, I
feel a kind of ontological whiplash. Why
was I so slow to understand the grav-
ity of this emergency, even as the virus
caseloads continued to grow exponen-
tially around the globe?
On the television, a bespectacled Dr.
Anthony Fauci, the director of the Na-tional Institute of Allergy and Infec-
tious Diseases, took the stand, explain-
ing the stakes and the contours of the
global public-health crisis to a bewil-
dered nation. He is a man charged with
telling an unhappy story with no clear
end in sight. He insists on empirical
verification, and he has maintained his
equilibrium, and his authority, on the
rolling ellipses that carry him from one
press conference and mounting crisis
to the next.
Fauci’s unvarnished candor is often
at odds with Trump’s jack-o’-lantern
reassurances, glowing and hollow. Fauci
is never self-congratulatory, and, ton-
ally, he sits level on the water, neither
overly buoyant nor despondent.
“Is the worst yet to come, Dr. Fauci?”
Representative Carolyn Maloney, of New
York, asked at the March 11th hearing.
“Yes, it is.”I
am touched, and sometimes rattled,
by the children’s innate faith in us.
In recent weeks, I’ve felt like a child
myself, tuning in nightly to watch press
briefings, hungry for reassurance and
direction, eager to hear experts subtitle
a novel reality for me. A press briefing
is a story told in medias res, and even
our most trusted experts, like Dr. Fauci,
can narrate it only from their blinkered
perspective in the present tense. Nobody
yet knows how or when the COVID-19
pandemic ends.
My son’s questions are my own, and
I have no answers—
“When will the germs go away?”
“What will happen to the people with
no homes?” “When can I see my Gaga?
My Nonni? My Papa? My Tia? My
Lala?”
Limbo is a hard place to settle into,
and describing the unknown to a new-
comer is not easy. The C.D.C. offers
parents this guidance for talking to chil-
dren: “Avoid language that might blame
others and lead to stigma.” Be truthful
and accurate. Fauci has good parentingDISPATCHES FROM A PANDEMIC
Responses to the coronavirus crisis.