The Solitude of Self-Quarantine Is Both Terrifying and Lovely

That night, the sore had grown and was wet at the edges. I had taken to sleeping on the couch with the TV playing softly in the background and woke to find a fat brown spider crawling across my pajamas, dropped down from a wooden pallet I’d made my partner bring in off the street so that I could hang some sets of deer antlers wrapped in artificial flowers to brighten up the apartment. The physician’s assistant laughed with me when I showed her the pictures I’d taken of the pallet and the giant, pus-brimming sore at my next chemo appointment a week later. “I’m so stupid,” I told her as we joked about it. I did not tell her that I had also been stupid and bored enough to sterilize a safety pin with a lighter and stab it, probably posing much more risk to my immune system than the spider bite ever had.

A few weeks later, my shingles scars burned, and I could feel the ghosts of the old bumps looking to resurrect themselves now that my defenses were down. Or at least I thought I could. Once again, I kept this information to myself and just took the Valtrex as directed, too embarrassed by the false alarm of the spider bite to cry that particular version of wolf a second time.

To combat the Black Death in the mind even as they had no cure for the Black Death in the body, medieval physicians often recommended staying cheerful, even in times of mysterious pestilence. From the Compendium de epidemia of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Paris (1348): “Since bodily infirmity is sometimes related to the accidents of the soul, one should avoid anger, excessive sadness, and anxiety. Be of good hope and resolute mind: make peace with God, for death will be less fearsome as a result. Live in joy and gladness as much as possible, for although joy may sometimes moisten the body, it nevertheless comforts both spirit and heart.”

Baking is a cheerful activity that can kill hours, even weeks, of seclusion. There’s also a deus ex machina element to it, something gratitude-inspiring that has to do with watching yeast using its death knell to rise flour. I frequently gave thanks to the single-celled microorganisms I killed daily, the oven when the hot-cross bun or dampfnudle turned out alright, and maybe just to the idea of a time-consuming ritual that yields something sweet and soft. There’s a reason bread comes second on the list of things to be thankful for in the Lord’s Prayer, right after living another day.

Loneliness, of course, comes with the circumscribed territory of self-quarantine. Those playing wait-and-see with coronavirus most likely won’t receive many visitors. During plague years, visiting a house under quarantine was punished by locking the visitor inside, which most likely curbed the practice. Even in the 20th century, as recently as the 1930s, those confined to a Louisiana leprosarium called Carville, on the banks of the Mississippi outside Baton Rouge, said they were only allowed to leave the grounds twice a year or so.

Within the walls, patients waited all year for Mardi Gras, that annual Louisiana celebration of decadence before deprivation. The Carville lepers had their own ball in captivity, dressing in costumes to parade around the grounds, watching each other pretend to be people moving about freely in the outside world.

“I decided I would masquerade as Mae West,” one resident said of the Carville Mardi Gras. “I wrote to my sister Myrtie in Texas and she helped me get the necessary paraphernalia together. My sister made the dress and bought me a wig and all the accessories I needed to get my act together.”

Sometimes, in the bathroom, I also often got my act together by taking out my makeup and pretending to be other people. I took the fact that the poison in me had rendered my body completely hairless as an opportunity to draw dark dashes across my now-vacant brow ridge and a weensie little Clara Bow pout over lips I erased with concealer. Sometimes I rubbed spirit gum over my hairless face and pressed on craft glitter, admiring the glint off my stark cheekbones in selfies I deleted as soon as I took them. I always washed my face before my partner came home; these performances seemed silly if there was another body in the vicinity.

Of the Carville Mardi Gras, folklorist Marcia Gaudet says the “opportunity to engage in normative behavior,” is critical for those labeled “abnormal.” Perhaps that’s why during my self-quarantine I sat in a recliner by the window for hours every day, the thermometer’s ping keeping the only time that mattered, and watched Gates Avenue between Bedford and Nostrand in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn as if it were a parade intended purely for me. In the brownstone across the street, one half of a couple may have been having an affair, or at least they had a lot of fights on their stoop about the possibility. Another time, I had a mystery infection that made my teeth and gums throb so badly that eating soup required a Percocet, and I was up with a temperature of 101 at 4 a.m., compulsively testing because 102 was the danger zone. Young people in party clothes spilled out of a different brownstone, two upright bodies clutching a collapsed one between them.

“Call an ambulance,” I mouthed to my closed window. Minutes later, the ambulance arrived and the limp body disappeared inside. A half an hour after that, the body emerged, walking now and drinking water, like a magician’s trick. But even when it wasn’t dramatic, the parade was always engaging: people walked cute dogs, kids played in an open hydrant, an old woman yelled at skateboarders and I cheered her from my chair. The couple in the brownstone that fought on the curb always eventually went back inside, having decided to live together another day.

There were all sorts of things I meant to do while I was in self-quarantine: write another novel, read up on writing a screenplay, use the expensive set of oil paints and half dozen canvases I ordered once in the middle of the night from Amazon, finally get around to the two dozen books languishing on the bookshelf, spines uncracked. But mostly I just baked and watched the street and occasionally put on makeup I washed off a few minutes later. The bookend dates of my first and last chemo seemed endless in both directions as I whiled away the time between, certain that I’d always be trapped, and therefore I’d eventually buckle down and do something productive. But the last chemo came, and all I had to show for my time on the inside was knowledge of the exact ratios of flour to moisture to yeast for basic bread dough and a general idea of what I might have looked like as a flapper.

Anthropologist Victor Turner calls carnival “the denizen of a place that is no place, and a time that is no time.” In my 2016 quarantine apartment, I rarely bothered with lights and my chemo sweats meant that the window units were always full-blast. On the occasions I went outside, the summer heat felt strange, the sun more aggressive than I remembered. Indoors, I’d forgotten that seasons changed whether I felt them changing or not. Likewise, it seems odd to be writing about my two months at home from four years later because that time doesn’t seem like the past. The summer of self-quarantine doesn’t feel like a time at all, but a place I visited once—dark, yes, but also oddly lovely, cool, and quiet.