Covid Island

Alexandra Styron

Word Count 2,588

On March 13th, 2020, I left Brooklyn for Martha’s Vineyard. With me in the car: my 14 year old daughter Sky, our dog, and a couple of weekend bags. Unlike many New Yorkers who would pack up in the coming days and weeks to flee the city’s mushrooming health crisis, I was just heading up for the weekend. My husband Ed was in Atlanta. My son, on spring break, was already on the island with his cousins. Things were getting weird, for sure. Sky’s school had closed its doors “temporarily”. President Trump was about three hours away from declaring a national emergency. But, still, when I popped my coffee mug in the dishwasher and turned the key in our front door, I had no idea just how strange things were going to get.

The late winter sun had already disappeared by the time we arrived at the little house (a cottage next to my mother’s home which my siblings and I share). Inside, the older boys were playing video games. My sister-in-law Phoebe was preparing dinner for her younger son Gus. A charming slip of a boy, Gus was born with profound special needs, including some manageable but persistent health issues. Phoebe is fiercely vigilant, but on this night Gus’s brother and cousins were poised to take over babysitting duties. Phoebe and I were having dinner next door at our friend Elizabeth’s, with three other women. I told her I’d be right back and ran across the lawn to say hi to my mother.

At 92, Rose Styron is still a singular force. A poet, human rights activist, and mother of four, she’s been a widow for fifteen years and a year round island resident for longer. Our property – a slope floored old house with a big lawn and a couple outbuildings – was once a summer home but, over years and generations, has transformed into the center of our family’s universe. My brother Tom was born on the island. My father, the author William Styron, died and is buried there. From her command post on the front porch, or at her kitchen table – which is where I found her that evening – my mother, ever sunny, endures.

“Hi Mum,” I shouted from the doorway, in case she wasn’t wearing her hearing aids. 

I smiled at Bill, her live-in helper, who was tossing a salad. My mother began to pull herself out of her chair.

“Stay there,” I said, waving her away. “I’m not coming in.”

“Why?” she asked, frowning. And then cheerfully, after a beat, “Oh! It’s ok! I’m washing my hands all the time.”

“I’m not worried about your hands,” I replied, sharing an amused look with Bill. “I’m worried about mine.”

It was not the last time we’d have this exchange. From anyone else her age, my mother’s persistence would seem dotty but actually comports perfectly with the woman I’ve always know here to be. Mum fears nothing for herself, and never has. She works her optimism like a scythe, seamlessly clearing the path ahead and laying waste to shadowy intruders.

Bill offered me some extra pasta. I fed my kids and brought the rest of the bowl through the break in the privet hedge.

What do I remember about that meal? How do you siphon memory from significant moments that, when they were unfolding, didn’t seem to matter at all? Did we hug? I don’t think so. But we definitely shared cheese and crackers. Kelley, who lives on the island year round and is a field producer for ESPN, was in a fatalistic mood. She’d been on the road covering the NBA for months and had suddenly been furloughed in the wake of the season’s abrupt suspension. Marilyn, who was selling her off-island house, told stories from Mardi Gras, a celebration she never misses in her native town of New Orleans. Elizabeth had just come back from visiting a daughter in California, Phoebe was up from New Haven, and I, well, I had come from New York City. In the coming weeks, our status as island residents – two full-time, two part time, one in the process of moving here for good -  would silo us in unexpected ways. But that night we were just a bunch of friends getting together for a bite. We were neighbors.

***

These are the pandemic hours we all remember. The world suddenly seemed to be spinning off its axis. On Sunday, Ed, who was visiting his father after heart surgery, suggested we stay on the Vineyard. Phoebe was staying too. Soon my brother and niece came up to join them. With CNN blaring and children darting everywhere-- a vibe somewhere between Christmas and the Apocalypse-- I retreated upstairs to “work”. But mostly I just drank from the Internet fire hose. 2700 COVID-19 cases nationwide. 2500 dead in Italy. Schools closed in North Carolina, Arizona, Connecticut. The first death from the virus in New York City. On the Facebook group Islanders Talk, I caught the first volley in what would become a holy war over summer people and hospital beds and the spread of contagion on an island with limited resources. The underlying concerns were perfectly legitimate. I could almost feel the fear rising from my laptop. I was scared too. But the conversation was ugly and reminded me, ironically, of one in the same group about immigrants during the height of the border separation crisis. Taking umbrage, I waded into the thread briefly, and immediately regretted it. Mostly I sat on the sidelines, dumbstruck and slightly wounded. They’re not talking about people like me, I thought. Are they? 

I put away my car with its conspicuous orange NY plates and began to drive my mother’s old Subaru. 

All the while, Mum remained sequestered in the big house with Bill who, at 70, is also high risk. On group texts with our sisters, Tom and I tried to balance the potential for exposure with the guilt we felt being huddled in one house while the family matriarch was untouchable in the other. I put on surgical gloves and joined her for a game of Scrabble. One night we got takeout and ate it seated as far away from her as possible. It was a brief and chaotic meal – crispy cod with a side of Clorox wipes - but Mum was delighted and pleasantly oblivious to the worries the rest of us shared. 

And here’s where the story picks up speed, though I struggle still to nail down the plot. There’s a fog-of-war quality to this pandemic. Sometimes it’s hard to know what’s happening when you’re in the middle of living it. 

Four days after my dinner with friends, I made a garlicky kale salad that, I noticed, didn’t taste like garlic at all. The Gummi Bears I mindlessly eat when I write tasted like dull nuggets of rubber. I looked for a sell-by date, shrugged, and put them in the drawer.

On a group text, Kelley reported she’d been feeling kind of punk. 

 Elizabeth wasn’t feeling great either. Outside the little house, I picked up after the dogs, pausing to sniff tentatively at the bag. Phoebe saw me through the living room window and laughed.

The next day, the Board of Health announced the island’s first confirmed COVID case. A man in his 50s from (groan) Brooklyn. 

Soon, Elizabeth was up and about. It was just a passing thing, apparently. “I’m going off my allergy medication,” I told her, as we sat on her porch.  “My taste has gone funny, and I can barely smell anything.”

“Hmm,” she said, staring into the distance, “that’s weird. My taste seems kind of off too.”

With the benefit of hindsight, of course it seems insane that we weren’t more alarmed. But I remind myself that back then, few of us understood the magnitude of the crisis. In mid-March, sneezing in public was late night joke material, our Instagram feeds were still full of toilet paper memes, and no one, in the U.S. anyway, had heard of smell and taste loss as a symptom of the Coronavirus. Believe me, I Googled it for days.

As we would learn later, Kelley spiked a fever. By the end of the week her husband John was sick, too. On Saturday morning she drove to the hospital for a COVID test. The triage nurse told her she didn’t qualify and sent her back to her bed. 

A text from Elizabeth appeared on my phone, linking to an article that had just been posted on Forbes.com. 

I stared at the headline - There’s An Unexpected Loss of Smell and Taste In Coronavirus Patients – thought of Gus, and felt my head swim.

Scientists say anxiety affects the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for thinking and planning ahead. Maybe this is why I fell silent for several hours, unable to figure out how to tell my family what I suspected. Maybe, I thought with Trumpian logic, the whole problem would just magically go away! Trying to overcome my cowardice, I began planning the words I’d say. But before I could get them out, Phoebe took me aside and told me about an article she’d just read in the U.K. paper The Daily Mail. I gulped hard. And then she whispered “I can’t taste anything either.”  

The following day, Phoebe and her family drove back to Connecticut. It was March 21st. The house grew quiet and a cold rain fell. I began studying my hands as I used them, washing them over and over, staring at the kitchen counters. I made dinner and put out plates for my children. After eight days in our petri dish of a house it was too late to isolate from them, but I needed to do things differently for a sensible amount of time - a measurement that, with no fever, I’d have to determine on my own.  I told my kids I thought I had the virus because I couldn’t smell. They were incredulous, skeptical, but, by dessert, receptive and subdued. That night I went to bed feeling relatively calm. We were going to be okay, I thought. We just had to ride it out. 

Just before dawn the next morning my phone rang. Bill’s name flashed on the screen.

“Sorry to bother you, Al” he said in his typically gentle voice, “I can’t stand up. I think I need you to call me an ambulance.”

I asked him if he had a fever, to which he replied no. I remember calling 911. And I remember thinking “well, here we go.” When the ambulance arrived, I was standing on the porch in the rain, wearing I realized, nothing but my nightgown. A burly EMT climbed down from the cab and scanned the driveway, looking for the best way to position his rig. He looked at the cars, and backed up a step. “Who’s from New York?” he yelled. I pulled the neckline of my gown over my mouth and identified myself, then directed him to the other house. His voice sounded angry. But when our eyes met I was sure I could see fear mirrored back at me. 

Photo By Marilyn Roos

***

As of this writing, forty five million Americans have contracted Covid. Every single survivor has a story to tell. Like 9/11, or the day President Kennedy was shot, crises vivify memories in such a way that they seem to breathe on their own. My Covid story lives in a pitiless New England spring, suspended by a seemingly fathomless unknown. After forty eight agonizing hours, word came back that Bill, blessedly, did not have Covid. Sick but not sick, at home but in hiding, I hunkered down with my children as rainy March turned into a frigid April. Every evening, Elizabeth and I drank wine on her porch. Every morning we rose with our dogs, and walked. 

On empty paths in relentlessly awful weather, we traveled through woods and meadows. Positing theories, sharing data, spinning potential scenarios for us and for the world. Elizabeth had heard that loss of smell was a precursor to the virus. I advocated for my sources which had the symptom showing up late - mostly because it comforted me to think the worst had passed. As the days ticked by and we got no sicker, we obsessed about obtaining antibody tests. How else we wondered, would we know we were healthy again? How would we know we were done? Sometimes, Elizabeth felt tired and took long afternoon naps. I, meanwhile had nothing more than a nagging headache and some night sweats – in other words, Tuesday for a woman my age. Looking back I suppose there were some other subtle early signs. One morning, before I lost my taste, I woke up, blew my nose, and found a bright red clot of blood in the tissue. My eye sometimes twitched. My gums ached. But, when everything is a symptom, as it is with this virus, what do you pay attention to? And when you can’t get tested, how do you decide you’re actually sick?  

My lungs were clear and my body determined. But my head was, frankly, a mess. It’s not that I was afraid for myself. Ed calls me a cockroach for a reason. But I couldn’t stop perseverating on whether I could have sickened others. As Kelley says, the guilt is as exhausting as the virus. I tried to remember every time I’d entered my mother’s house, every person I might have stood too close to. My son developed a chest cold that I was certain indicated infection. My mind spun with the rotors of each MedFlight helicopter taking off over the harbor. 

I also found myself uniquely isolated by the liminal aspect of my citizenship. In early April, Elizabeth and Kelley were the anonymous subjects of an article in the Martha’s Vineyard Times titled “I Was Not Sick Enough To Be Tested.” Both women considered going on the record – indeed, they’d reported themselves to the local Board of Health as soon as they became ill - but the chatter on island was so Salem-Witch-Trial-y they decided against it (all the people in this story gave me permission to use their names, a decision Kelley attacked with the same enthusiasm she does the tennis net. “Tell them I was Patient Zero!” she shouted, advancing our unproven theory, “and pour me another glass of wine while you’re at it.”). As for me, I kept a low profile. Back in Brooklyn, my husband described the awful symphony of sirens. When the few people whom I told expressed sympathy, I didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t sick. But I wasn’t entirely normal.

Eighteen months in to this epic era, there aren’t enough white flags in the world to mark what we’ve lost. I was astonishingly lucky. In mid-May, the first antibody tests became available on the Cape; everyone in my family, but me, tested negative. The results were the same for Elizabeth’s family, and Phoebe’s as well (In a tragi-comic coda, Marilyn was barricaded by her college aged children in her room for 14 days for what turned out to be a pesky case of strep). I still can’t smell or taste, and I’m not sure I ever will. This is now my Covid story. But so is this: my mother, now 93, is still home to greet me at her kitchen table.

Alexandra is the author of a novel and two non-fiction books, including the bestselling memoir Reading My Father. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and Vanity Fair among other publications.