BELUSHI IN THE BLINDS
This is how it begins. You can’t find the new box of saltines, the box only a few hours earlier you had opened, taking a handful of fresh crackers out of the sleeve. Now you’d like a few more, even though you are rationing supplies during “shelter in place,” and it won’t be easy finding an online replacement for in-demand saltines. For you, they are a major food group, since you don’t cook. The only thing in your refrigerator is a plastic container of furry blueberries.
So you scour the 500 square footage you live in looking for the box. At first to sate your hunger. Then to protect your “stay at home” investment. Then in a panic that you did something stupid with them, placed them in some godforsaken part of your apartment that city animals will sniff out, invading and overtaking your tiny home during social distancing.
You already have bulbous Belushi, a humming yellow jacket beezilla. His size is both alarming, like a low-flying blimp hovering over the Jersey shore, and trifurcated, round head, round center, and some kind of business going on in the tail section.
When you first heard his buzzing a few days ago, you mistook it for a sputtering, slow-moving motorcycle on the empty street below. You screamed at the sight of him. The two of you danced around, sizing each other up, while you tried to select a weapon among the hundreds of books and New Yorker magazines piled all over. But you were flummoxed. It was hard to choose. You didn’t want to hurt or soil any of them.
You somehow managed to trap Belushi behind the rickety venetian blinds, hoping he could simply squeeze back out through the window he came in from. This magical thinking left your home dark and stuffy for several days, while Belushi silently planned his next move from the windowsill.
Previously you had been keeping your screen-less windows wide open. Good ventilation is recommended to avoid the virus, though this tip is not listed on your President’s official postcard guidelines.
As a result of the worldwide lockdowns, Italy allegedly has dolphins in the streets. You’ve got Belushi in the blinds.
***
Searching for the saltines, you hastily move everything in the kitchen cabinets, on the top of the fridge, the top of the cabinets, the garbage, the recyclables, the couch in the living room that holds Envirosax bags of more books and miscellany, and nothing turns up.
You pray the saltines are not in your sock drawer. That would mean it’s time for you to be put away, away from your crowded space filled with too many things you stumble over, try to steer carefully around, in a system that won’t work much longer. You will fall looking for saltines and be found weeks later, dead as a doornail. EMT is busy; they won’t find you sooner.
You could be cleaning out these pre-pandemic piles on the floor. But you rationalize you would then need to bring all the discarded stuff down to the building’s basement, creating more work for the handymen and also increasing your risk of running into mask-less, bored neighbors who expel droplets and exhale on you when they talk. As it is, you are making the weekly laundry room trek at 5 a.m. to avoid the chatty, wild-maned, 85-year-old Trotskyite who launders in his boxer shorts.
The saltines are not in your sock drawer. You are relieved. Your sibling’s sock drawer in New England is much tidier than yours, as you learned a few months ago caring for him in his massive, spacious country home as he recuperated from a fall. He would instruct you each morning to select a particular pair of socks, directing you precisely to where that pair was placed in the impressive sock drawer. Your brother’s drive-by COVID-19 test is tomorrow.
You aren’t hungry anymore, but continue to search for the saltines. Where could they possibly be? You realize you may have consumed the last saltine you will savor for the foreseeable future. After a while, you take a break from looking. You take a deep breath.
It’s bad enough that you can’t:
- touch your face
- scoop gunk out of the corner of your eye
- slick a stiff hair in your eyebrow with a moist finger
- wipe away the chunk of layered hairs fluttering over your face that won’t stay put behind your ears
- freely scrape off an eyelash floating near your nose
- explore the inside of your nose
- rub your tired eyes
- use the inside of your wrist or back of your hand to check your forehead for fever
- visit your cousin as she lies on her stomach,“proning” in an uptown hospital, trying to recover from virus-related pneumonia
- pat your cheekbones for comfort or to jolt yourself to focus or to remind yourself you are still here.
You want your face back. You want your saltines back. You want Belushi gone. You want everyone to be well. Is it too much to ask?
Calm down, you tell yourself. You are not in a body bag on a rung of a refrigerated truck. Not yet, anyway.
Belushi suddenly escapes from behind the blinds. He circles the room, floating, buzzing, taunting you.
You reach for your tennis racquet but then realize it could disturb too much in the overcrowded room. Instead, you pick up Ta-Nehisi Coates’ memoir and bash, swing, and scream at Belushi. You clip him and he falls to the ground near the window. You squash and stomp. He really was huge. You hate to waste a sheet of your rapidly declining supply of paper towels but quickly rip off two sheets, scoop him up, and gloveless (!) leave your apartment and toss him down the chute. It takes a lot out of you. You feel spent. But it was necessary. No pets allowed. You wash your hands for twenty seconds.
After a minute, you re-scour the exact places you had already examined for the box of saltines, growing increasingly baffled. Your heart is racing way too fast for a woman your age, with or without any underlying conditions.
You hear an unfamiliar clop, clop sound. Are friends of Belushi clustering near the window? You tentatively peer through the blinds. A blue-masked policeman is leisurely riding a horse down your dusky, midtown street. The horse does not appear to be wearing a mask. The nightly combination of clamoring pots and rounds of hearty applause for healthcare workers had just ended. You hoped it had drowned out your blistering screams at Belushi.
You return to the saltine search. How is it possible the crackers are gone when you held them so happily in your hands just hours ago? Finally you reach the stage of Oh Well. You move on to other things, almost giddy, quasi-laughing borne from quasi-hysteria, versus joy. Remember joy?
You do not think the saltines will turn up.
They turn up.
The box was hiding on the kitchen counter, behind a tall glass jar of iced tea you had made that morning. Why did you put them there? You had never placed them there before. You blame the constant wiping, sung to the tune of “Constant Craving,” to disinfect the counters. You blame Belushi.
You are done for. Game, set, match, it’s over.
You gratefully grab a cracker you no longer want and in fact sort of hate. It scratches your throat as you chew and swallow it down. It’s dinner.
You take a swig of water and decide to mindlessly watch a new coach on The Voice. It’s the blind auditions. You hate to admit it, but you miss Adam. You wonder how organized and big his sock drawer is. Or if he even wears socks.
