"Both are true," Tara tells Jo. They're outside the store on break at the same time, which might or might not violate the social distancing rules. She'd been thinking about "ambiguous," one of the few words her daughter Cassie would say to her since coming back home from college. So annoying, but the concept stuck. "Concept" was another metered word she'd picked up recently.
"Both what?" Jo asks.
Tara waves dissmissively. "Goin' crazy, just popped out." Something about the gloves they were wearing, and the masks they were supposed to be wearing but weren't. About the fact that they'd be going back inside soon, because everybody needs groceries, and some people need to work. But on the other hand, people don't want to get sick and die.
"Stop shelter in place, stop the virus," Jo says, absolutely no transition. It's another installment on a monologue that's lasted weeks, on and off. It started when Jo told her that the so-called epidemic was really a plot to spook the stock market to keep Trump from getting re-elected. Now Jo says "If we don't stand up to them, we'll all be eating bat soup!"
Tara nods.
"A few thousand have died from Covid-19," Jo concludes, "hundreds of thousand die from heart attacks, millions from abortions!"
Tara looks at her toes. She wants to get the enemy right, and Jo could be confusing. There had been a different monologue, one that started the day Jo took out her sewing during break and said she was making masks for the war effort.
"Which war is this one now?" Tara had asked, and Jo had given her a long, funny, searching look.
"I'm so impressed by his leadership," Jo said finally, "the country will unite behind him."
Now Jo shrugs and takes a drag on her cig. "It's like musical chairs, shelter in place" she says. "When the music stops, you're stuck with whoever. This morning I told Michelle, 'confidentially, I hate your guts.'"
"You didn't!"
"I did." She turns her pretty face to the side, and beneath concealing makeup, Tara makes out the contours of a fist-sized bruise. "Big liberal," Jo says. Then she grinds out her cig, and the two friends go back inside to sort produce.
……… ……… ……… ……… ……… ……… ……… ………
On returning home, Cassie surprises Tara by being at the kitchen table. Her daughter had gone into her room and slammed the door when she moved back, rarely emerging except to use the bathroom. She's hunched over her laptop with earbuds in, bobbing her head to private music. Tara peers over her shoulder. There's a world map on the laptop screen, dotted with pulsing red circles, like a depiction of a bad headache in a pain reliever commercial.
Tara taps her shoulder, and Cassie startles and yanks out her earbuds. "Did something happen?" she asks.
"Something … it's 6 o'clock," Tara says, "I came home from work."
"Mom, glad you're OK, but I need to tell you something." She rises and faces Tara, hands on hips, eyes huge and hard behind rimless glasses, strands of long frizzy hair gleaming in stray beams of fading sunlight.
"I'm for the virus. I mean, I understand what it's trying to say. OK, it's like this stupid thing, not even alive, I'll explain the concept to you sometime. But it's outsmarting all of you, not just President Dickhead. And judging you. Are you racist? Sure, why should you worry if a bunch of little yellow people are getting sick. Are you callous? Unambiguously! You're in your car, you pretend you don't see the beggars holding up signs, and you drive off quickly. Will you be able to get away fast enough now that they might be spreaders?"
"Glad to see you're … up and about," Tara says. "What should I make for dinner?"
"Whatever you want to eat, I'm going out with Chris."
"Chris?"
"Chris." She thinks her mom wants to know her date's gender, and isn't about to give her the satisfaction of finding out.
Tara clears her throat. "There's this six foot apart thing."
"Oh mom. If you can't accept me as I am, I'll go stay with dad." Her unbeatable ace-in-the-hole. The doorbell rings and Cassie rushes out, flinging a "Bye" over her shoulder… and leaving her laptop unlocked.
Tara clicks on a red circle pulsing over where New York should be, and the circle dissolves into a photo of a trench, sacks lying on the bottom, a priest standing at the edge. She wonders if the people in the sacks had mothers who adored them, and who they hated; and she wonders what they wondered about. If all families were zoos like theirs? If they would have to die like everyone else? Some of them must have had ways as odd as hers, and collected words as souvenirs; maybe one minute they were trying to decide if "President Dickhead" was a keeper, and the next minute, poof, they're trench filler.
