One Day in the Pandemic: March 25, 2020 by Denise Duhamel & Julie Marie Wade

In the latest Trump blunder, he says we should all be back in church by Easter, which comes early this year, April 12. This makes me remember an Easter a few years ago, my six grandnephews in straw hats and shirts with clip-one ties. They collected Easter eggs and rolled in the grass, ultimately staining their shorts. One crawled under the car in the driveway and hid there for an inexplicable reason, or a reason that made sense to his two-year-old mind. It was terrifying, searching for him and then finding him there. We all kept saying, What if his aunt had gotten into the car, turned on the engine, and backed up? What if? What if?

What if Hillary had been elected instead? I don’t usually let myself go there, but I couldn’t help it after I watched the documentary on Hulu.  Even if it was propaganda, even if it had holes—Why didn’t she ever talk about how she and Bill knew Trump? Why were they at his wedding to Melania?—my heart went out to her in a way I never let it go while she was running. I picture Hillary in a protective mask and gloves visiting hospitals in New York where there would still be cases but not as many. I picture all the ventilators and protective gear being unloaded from trucks. She would have known this crisis was coming, and we’d have been sheltering at home since January. She’d have gladly accepted the test kits from WHO. The nation would indeed be in church by Easter.

My nieces, who are now moms to my grandnephews, used to wear Easter dresses. I remember taking Kate for a walk with her basket of eggs up the hilly street where my mom used to live. Kate was gregarious, talking, swinging her basket back and forth so occasionally one of her eggs rolled out. Before I could tell her, she’d delight in picking it up, thinking she’d found another. Is this a metaphor for America? Kid-like optimism? Oblivious to what is real? Or does her son reveal it best as he tucks himself under a car’s wheel, never imagining someone would turn it on?

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I see myself in both of those children: the chatty, care-free, basket-swinging girl and the boy who crouches under the car, wanting perhaps to retreat inward or spy on others or simply observe the world around him from a hidden point of view. Perhaps these two selves—and I know you’re the real Gemini here—coalesce to form Teacher Me and Writer Me: one who thrives on the company of others and one who likes to step back and contemplate the world at large.

This morning while I was making coffee and melting vegan cheese on whole grain bread—we’re still trying to stay healthy despite outward signs of apocalypse—I took an online personality test. I knew I had taken the Myers-Briggs as a high school student: several hours in a room, then days or even weeks before we heard back by formal letter the precise “type” we were.

I remembered mine started with an “E” for extrovert and also that there was an “F” in there for feeling, but the 10-minute quiz I took on my phone today jogged my memory by a quarter-century: “ENFJ.” That was it! I remember thinking it was nice to have a “J” at the end, like my name, even though this “J” stood for judging. And “N” I remember thinking was odd because it stood for “Intuitive,” with an “I.”

The website said ENFJs tend to be “friendly, considerate, supportive, readers, writers, and musicians.” I like to think the first three are true, and I am definitely a reader and a writer. The ideal job or role for the ENFJ is “teacher.” The site went on to explain that part of what makes ENFJs “natural teachers” is their buoyant optimism and idealism. I hope very much that this is true.

Yesterday I met with my students through Zoom for the first time since our university, in their words, “transitioned to online learning.” I was nervous and pacing around the apartment before I logged in for class, but then to my surprise, every single student also logged in, their faces and avatars arranged in a grid like Hollywood Squares. We were all there together, in that strange cyber-world, even one student on a landline whose name appeared in a plain black box. We could talk and hear each other clearly. We could read from our shared text, write in our notebooks, and share what we wrote with relative ease.  

Was I guiding my students with my “buoyant optimism”? Was I reassuring them with my “idealism”? Or was I misleading them with the lilt in my voice, the tilt of my head, my effusion of joy at being assembled together again? I don’t know how much of teaching is guiding toward and how much is guiding away. Is it better to encourage or to caution? What if my natural impulse is to promise that everything will be OK, but then, in the end, it isn’t?

News reports show we’re not successfully “flattening the curve” in Florida. Thousands more people are projected to die in the Sunshine State because our governor has not taken strict enough measures to prevent the spread. Is he an optimist too, as foolish and/or arrogant and/or ignorant as any optimist can be?

Just now, as I’m typing this, an email comes through from our building manager with the subject line FLORIDA GOVERNOR EXECUTIVE ORDER COVID-19. The first paragraph reads:

Please be advised that effective immediately, the State of Florida has issued an order that all persons whose point of departure originates from outside the State of Florida in an area with substantial community spread, to include the New York Tri-State Area (Connecticut, New Jersey and New York), and entering the State of Florida through airports to isolate or quarantine for a period of 14 days from the time of entry into the State of Florida or the duration of the person’s presence in the State of Florida, whichever is shorter.

Even now, DeSantis seems to believe the virus is coming from elsewhere—a bad egg rolling into the state, a car without an emergency brake, slipping across the border. Is it optimism or something more sinister (and perhaps optimism is sinister, depending on circumstance) that prevents him from saying the simplest, if also the scariest, truth: “The calls are coming from inside the house. The virus is already here.”

Denise Duhamel and Julie Marie Wade are the authors of The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose, published by Noctuary Press in 2019. Their collaborative poems and essays have appeared in many literary journals, and in 2017 Glenna Luschei Prize from Prairie Schooner for their co-written lyric essay, “13 Superstitions.” Duhamel and Wade both teach in the creative writing program at Florida International University in Miami.