Journal of the Plague No. 2

Many years ago, my grandmother took me shopping, as she always did, to buy my mother something for Christmas and something for her birthday. One year, when I was perhaps nine or ten, my grandmother spent a long time convincing me that what my mother would really like was a fancy frilly set of underpants with a matching bra and camisole. I thought this was insane. Who cared about underwear, which no one but you was ever going to see?

My grandmother told me that whether anyone saw it wasn’t the point: the point was that you knew your were wearing it, and it was a sort of secret that made you feel more powerful and good. I still didn’t get it, but I acquiesced, because I loved my mother and my grandmother, and my mother seemed pleased when she opened the Marshall Fields box.

All these years later, of course, I understand both what my grandmother was saying and what she wasn’t (that, in fact, sometimes other people do see your underwear, and by other people I mean “people other than the girls in your cabin or the old hippie ladies at the swimming pool,” and it can be kind of exciting), but more importantly that there are things you do for yourself even when—perhaps especially when—no one else can see them, or no one else is watching.

I’ve been sick for most of the past week and living in pajamas, which was lovely except for the being sick part. Yesterday my fever finally went down, and I put on real clothes and walked my son to the park to meet his friend. Today I put on nicer clothes and went to work.

My work at the moment is, like many libraries (though by no means all) closed to the public, but we’re all still there, trying to figure out how to reinvent library services in a time of pandemic. We don’t have any patrons in, and the only people who see me are my coworkers and the occasional delivery person, but it bothered me inordinately that I didn’t have any lipstick on, because my doctor mother told me to throw out all my old lipstick and lip balm, and I complied.

Those of you who’ve known me forever probably find this lipstick thing confusing—I often do myself—but a couple of years ago when I had to wear contacts for awhile, I started being inordinately bothered by the dark circles under my eyes, and I decided I’d rather wear lipstick to detract from them than eye makeup to cover them up, and now I’m just in the habit more days that not.

I had to pick up a prescription on my way home, and I wandered around Walgreens for a little while just seeing what was in stock and what was not, and marveling at the “As Seen on TV” aisle, and wondering if I had any excuse for buying office supplies (I don’t), and generally being impressed by the wide variety of bizarre consumer items for sale in the midst of this crisis, and then I noticed they were having a “buy 2 get 1 free” makeup sale. As with most such sales, at the rate I go through things this is not really a good deal, but years of frugality in order to pay off debts mean I almost never buy anything but food and clothes, and the temptation was too great. I picked out three lipsticks (of the kind that the New York Times once told me was the best of drugstore makeup) and some more lip balm and my prescription, and $30 later I was out the door with my day to day equivalent of a white lace camisole trimmed with pale blue ribbon, plus some lithium.

Of course, that was once more than a week’s grocery money for me, and half of me wondered if now was the time for frivolity. After all, someone broke into my friend’s office and stole her hand sanitizer the other day. As a therapist I was talking to recently said, we are going to see the best of humanity, and the worst.

I’d like to think of my purchases today as derpy—a word my son and his friends just taught me, which they say means “a tiny bit stupid and a lot funny.” Given the gravity of the decisions so many must make now—decisions that quite possibly affect people’s very lives—I hope there is still room for some derpiness—or at least for some decisions that give you your secret superpowers, whatever those are, for surely we all will need them.

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