“We aren’t supposed to do that,” said the woman at the inside pickup department. Petra had called to ask if the inside-pickup items could be brought out with our groceries. “But call when you get to the grocery pickup area and we’ll see what we can do.”
So maybe I would have to enter the store after all, which meant I’d better bring a mask. I run the City of Waldhurst’s Facebook page, and I’m always reposting advice to wear masks in stores, so I probably shouldn’t be caught without one.
Petra dug into the closet under the stairs and pulled out some of the N95s she’d bought a long time back during a carpentry project. She had two kinds, one with a vent and one without. If your N95 mask has a vent, I understand, you are supposed to put tape over it, or else your exhalations are completely unfiltered. You’re safe, but no one else is.
I picked one of the ventless ones.
After pulling the car into one of the parking spots in the curbside pickup area and using the Walmart app to tell the grocery porters where to find me, I dialed the store number and worked my way through the phone menu to the non-grocery pickup department. I explained the situation in essentially the same words Petra had used earlier, on speakerphone, next to me on the bed. It sounded like the woman she’d talked to then, the same kind, grandmotherly voice.
“We should be able to have it brought out with your order,” the woman said.
I was filled with relief. I didn’t want to go into the store and risk getting infected.
I really didn’t want to have to walk around in public with a mask on.
* * * * *
The day after the CDC changed its mind about masks, one of my neighbors posted a photo on Instagram showing himself and his wife, heads leaned together, faces hidden behind matching masks in an understated houndstooth. “Freaking out our neighbors walking the dog in our new masks,” said the caption. His wife had made the masks, we were informed. One of the hashtags was #obeytherules. Health department officials had detected this county’s first case just a few days earlier.
What to make of the feeling of revulsion that came over me?
* * * * *
When I carry my parents’ groceries into the garage, it’s strange to notice my mother backing away from me.
Ours has never been a particularly touchy-feely family. A hug here and there on holidays and for long goodbyes. So it’s not that I’m missing some formerly constant barrage of kisses and hugs from my parents. But that doesn’t make it less odd when my mother keeps her distance, treating me like the potentially deadly threat I am, even as I am delivering her food. Which I transfer from the store bags into her waiting totes before backing away, myself. She loads the totes onto the cart she will use to carry it all into the recesses of a house in which I cannot be safely welcomed anymore.
Strange to think how heedlessly and promiscuously we all shared the same air Before, without once thinking how dangerous the mere breath of a loved one might be.
* * * * *
The pet store wouldn’t do curbside pickup for living creatures and we needed crickets for our latest pet, so Petra had to go into the store. She’d captured a tree frog in the backyard over the weekend, and she and the children had converted one of our old aquariums into a habitat.
At the store, the crickets were bagged up by the register, waiting for her, so the transaction was fast.
“I wore the mask,” Petra said. The one I’d taken to Walmart had still been in the car. “I was the only person in the store wearing one. I felt like an idiot.”
* * * * *
I wore a mask for the first and, so far, only time about two weeks after they detected the first case in our county.
A local farmer sends out an email every two weeks listing produce and meats he has for sale. You tell him what you want, then meet him in a downtown parking lot and wait while he assembles each order in the backroom of his brother’s bar and then brings it out to you.
I’d never done one of these pickups before, but my mom wanted radishes and I wanted some of his ribeyes, so I sent in an email for both households and was on my way out the door to the rendezvous point when I realized something. The produce was organic and the beef was grass fed, so my fellow customers were probably going to be wearing masks.
I stuffed a red bandana in my pocket and did not spend a great deal of time thinking about the fact that I was less worried about infection than about not fitting in.
It was a long wait for my order, almost an hour in my case. People stood around the parking lot six feet apart, chatting through their masks. There were dust masks, bandanas like mine, surgical masks, and handicraft masks.
I noticed that, even though the dust masks—some of which might even have been the gold standard N95s—were probably more effective than the craft masks, their dingy whiteness made their wearers look pathetic, unhealthy, desperate, somehow. Some of the craft masks, on the other hand, leant their wearers an air of bravado, a kind of post-apocalyptic tribal elegance.
“I went to Walmart to pick up orders for other people and no one was social distancing,” said one masked young woman. “I ran into people I knew who weren’t wearing masks and I had to shame them.”
“I haven’t been to Walmart in weeks,” said another woman. “Maybe we never need to go to Walmart again when all of this is over.”
* * * * *
Another weekend, another Walmart pickup. For two weeks there have been signs telling customers to remain in their cars “for your safety and ours.” It is psychologically difficult to remain huddled in your car while the Walmart workers walk around outside. A “no contact” pickup will keep all of us safer, but the person inside the car is the only one who is actually safe.
It’s been one month since the CDC changed its mind about masks, but this is the first weekend when all of the Walmart associates working curbside pickup are wearing them. It’s a motley assortment, suggesting that they’ve been procured not by the company but by the individual workers. The fellow loading my car is wearing an N95 with untaped valve.
I decide I’m comfortable remaining in my car after all.
