I just finished reading a story by a student in one of my freshman composition classes, a bright, quiet girl with dark shoulder-length hair and glasses. She sat in the row of desks nearest the door and three seats from the front. I haven’t seen her or any of my students in four weeks, and I won’t see them for the rest of the semester.
When I reached the end, I laid my pen on the last page and stood up from my desk, which sets in my kitchen next to the pantry door. I walked into the living room and looked out the window facing the quiet parking lot and the row of townhouses on the other side. Off in the distance a train chugged and rumbled upriver. I walked back to the kitchen, stood in front of the sink, and stared out the window. Though I couldn’t see the Susquehanna because of the dense row of cedars just beyond the porch, I knew that its wide water moved steadily southwest. The train grew nearer and louder, the engines’ deep throaty rumble pulsing like the bass cranked in some teenager’s car and vibrating the pane.
In her story this dark-haired girl related a conversation she had with her cousin F as they sat in her car, F asking where the dad was. She described going inside the clinic alone, the receptionist’s questions, the umbrellas on the doctor’s scrub cap. And then the procedure. Afterwards, her cousin returned to the clinic, picked her up, held her as they sat together inside her car, and took her home. Except for F, she was alone through this. The friends who told her they’d be there for her were not. But in the end, somehow she was still hopeful and knew on whom she could depend.
After extending spring break an additional week and moving all classes online for the remainder of the semester, Bloomsburg University closed on Friday, March 20. Faculty are no longer permitted in our offices, so each afternoon I drive downtown to the Greenley Center, a university-owned building on Main Street about a mile from where I live. There I sit in a sprawling computer lab with two chemistry professors who also have unreliable Internet service at home. I try to keep my four writing classes running — classes with more than ninety students enrolled — and do it all by pecking away at a keyboard.
Sunday morning I left the house at 6:45 and drove through Bloomsburg’s dark streets, west past the fairgrounds and then north a couple miles to the Wal-Mart in Buckhorn along I-80. Drizzle spattered the windshield, and a maple bud from the tree in front of my place was stuck under the wiper and left a damp smear arcing across my line of sight. When I pulled into the parking lot, a dozen people stood outside the doors, so I waited in my Jeep. A couple minutes before 7:00 I got out and walked down the long empty row of parking spots reserved for customers who order online and then across the two lanes running past the front of the store. There I waited — about ten feet from a middle-aged couple and maybe fifteen feet from a tall young woman who walked up to the entrance at the same time I did.
When the doors opened, people slowly went inside and then waited at a distance as those ahead pulled shopping carts from the blue-and-gray lineup in the long alleyway, at the far end freezer strips hanging from the ceiling. A man with short hair and the hood of his brown coat laying against his back wore a square green mask over his nose and mouth, the white bands pulled behind his ears. As people rattled their carts up to a sanitizer-wipes dispenser, a young couple stepped inside the door — the man wearing a cap, the woman pulling a dark kerchief over her nose like my brothers and I did when playing outlaws as kids on the farm.
I walked quickly, lining out items on a handwritten list as I went, and, in case the governor announces a stay-at-home order in the next few days, I got what I needed, including another package of six chicken breasts, an extra box of spaghetti, a gallon of milk, and a four-roll pack of toilet paper. I went through the self-checkout, loaded the bags in the cart, pushed my groceries through the drizzle to the Jeep, and drove home. I’m not sure if or when I’ll leave the house again.
As of that Sunday afternoon Pennsylvania had 3,394 cases of the novel coronavirus. Of the state’s 67 counties, 58 reported at least one case of COVID-19. Thirty-eight Pennsylvanians have died of the disease.
I sat at my desk and read more papers about football and field hockey, snowboarding and lacrosse, hospitalizations and leaving for basic training. One student wrote about the time her father disowned her when she told her parents she’s bisexual, another about when her family’s house burned down, several about getting busted for possession of marijuana or underage drinking, and even more whose dalliance with speed resulted in an expensive ticket or a near-fatal crash. But that was before. That was when teenage impulsiveness, invincibility, and belief in their own immortality seemed normal, even enviable. That was before breathing became dangerous.
Less than twelve hours later—by 12:01 a.m. Monday—the number of cases in Pennsylvania had grown to 4,087 in 59 counties. And by Wednesday, the day Governor Wolf expanded the stay-at-home order from 33 counties to all 67, the total of confirmed cases rose to 5,805. Seventy-four Pennsylvanians have died of the coronavirus while next door in New York the number of deaths is approaching 1,400.
On Thursday after I left the Greenley Center, I drove down Market Street, slowed as I crossed the railroad tracks, and passed a service station on the left, where the price of gas was the lowest I’ve seen it in Bloomsburg since I moved here in 2009: $2.00 a gallon. The Major League Baseball season was supposed to start a week ago—the Twins in Oakland playing the A’s, the Phillies in Miami playing the Marlins. But on fields across the country, the stands are dead silent. First is vacant, base runners at the mercy of the cut-off, left filled with echoes, and the warning track grumbling its lonely counsel to no one.
It’s Friday now. In the predawn darkness, robins sing in the maple outside my living room window. Students have submitted more papers, which I’ll have to grade online. I started a new grocery list—ranch dressing, Sweet Baby Ray’s barbecue sauce, and yogurt—though I shouldn’t have to go to Wal-Mart for several days yet. The numbers continue to rise: 7,016 cases and 90 deaths in Pennsylvania and over 1,900 fatalities in New York state. And somewhere in Jersey a rotund umpire dozes in his La-Z-Boy, an unfinished calzone drifting toward the edge of the plate on his stomach, and in his sleep he mutters, “Safe, safe.”
