Sherry got it now: what people meant when they said “stir-crazy.” It was only day sixteen of the statewide stay-at-home order in West Virginia, and she had already smoked half an ounce of weed, drank four six-packs of Founders Porter, and eaten half the food she stockpiled, expecting it to last the duration. Isolated in her little apartment, she indulged in all the things she planned to ration.
She liked that she didn’t have to go to work. Answering phones and organizing files for Jared Shufner, attorney-at-law (“If you’ve been injured in your car, dial S-H-U-F-N-E-R”), wasn’t a difficult job, but she couldn’t do it drunk, stoned, and covered in tomato paste or cracker crumbs. She wondered if everyone else sank into personal debauchery with such abandon, if the constant bad news from New York and Italy saw people seeking shelter in comfort foods and the quest for any minor passing pleasure. The first week, Sherry masturbated twice a day, then just once in the morning, because why not? Now, she lacked the energy for it. When she was too bored for an orgasm, she knew she needed to go outside, even if just for a walk around the block. Couldn’t talk herself into it, though.
Checking herself in the mirror, she saw her eyes banded in the purple of not enough sleep, or else too much. She couldn’t tell which. She slept a lot, but often it was a restless sleep, tossing and turning, dreamless. If her tabby Courtney Love jumped down from a counter in the kitchen, she heard the sound of its soft pads striking linoleum with a loud whoomp like a robin crashing into a window. When the air conditioner kicked on, rattling and sputtering like a mini earthquake, she always rolled over and checked the time on her iPhone. It was not good sleep, although she had plenty of it.
She thought her face had puffed, and her business-cut brown hair was now punk rock. Had she taken a shower yesterday? The day before? She couldn’t remember. The days were a blur of sameness: eating, smoking, drinking, watching the news with a terrified, glassy stare.
Part of her thought she picked the wrong time to break things off with Denise—a mere two weeks before Governor Justice ordered everyone to get the hell inside and stay there. She missed the mango scent of Denise’s curly red hair and the feel of her meaty arms in the morning when Sherry woke up to find one stretched across her back like a weighted blanket. But Sherry knew that if she and Denise were locked in together, they wouldn’t have made it these sixteen days without some irreparable harm coming to one or the other. They had fought for weeks, sometimes over Sherry’s lack of commitment, other times over Denise’s inability to keep her part of the apartment clean (she was such a dirty-sock scatterer). Each accused the other of relationship atrocities, even of poisoning the food one evening after they both got sick.
“Is that d-CON still under the sink?” said Denise.
Sherry said, “Not if you put it in the wine.”
“You made the alfredo sauce.”
“Yeah, but you poured the Pinot Noir. Funny how I came back from the bathroom and it was already there in my glass on the table.”
“Do you think I’d have poisoned my own glass, too?”
“Murder / suicide,” said Sherry.
Neither believed the other would do that, but as they fought for headspace around the toilet, not there to hold each other’s hair, both felt like the possibility existed. The creamy, fruity, sour taste of red wine, white sauce, and stomach acid made any sort of treachery seem real.
By the next morning, they were arguing over something else. An affair. A one-night stand.
It was Sherry who cheated. She hadn’t been with a man in two years, and she wanted to feel that again, if only to remember that it wasn’t anything special. Bobby Conrad, one of the new associates at work, made a pass at her. She could’ve reported him to H.R., but instead said okay and went out with him for drinks and what came after.
Sherry confessed to Denise a week before the pasta incident. That dinner had been meant as a romantic gesture, but ended up leading the way to goodbye.
Now, she sat alone in her apartment, watching Courtney Love tear up a toy mouse. She hoped the downstairs neighbors didn’t start another shouting match today, and that the older guy next door wouldn’t freak her out by coughing loudly—Marlboros, she figured, rather than the virus, but still…. She doubted she could catch the virus through thin apartment walls, but if she could, these were more than thin enough.
As she did every day, Sherry called her dad in Connecticut. He took the virus seriously and said he never left the house without his homemade hazmat suit of mask, gloves, turtleneck, and hat. If the virus wanted him, he said, it would have to come for him “with a stun gun and tongs.”
She called her mom in Ohio. That woman was crazy. She wanted to go back to church regardless of the consequences. She might as well have been a snake handler.
Sherry almost called Denise, but talked herself out of it. What was the point?
She never thought about calling Bobby Conrad.
She ate, drank, smoked. She stared at the walls—an ugly yellow that left her wishing she had stocked up on cans of paint. She had already memorized the patterned stains of insect guts on every side, as well as cobwebs in the corners near the ceiling. She logged onto Netflix, which she rarely used, and hated it more now that it was her primary source of entertainment and how it still didn’t have anything on it that she really wanted to see. She’d probably end up watching the first season of Jessica Jones again, but only if she had enough weed to get through all that emotional abuse.
Good god, she thought. How long will this lockdown go on? She thought that again five minutes later and five minutes after that.
She wondered if maybe Denise would defy the stay-at-home order and risk the virus to come over for a quickie. Not make-up sex, exactly; just a booty call. How much boredom would it take for her to ask Denise that question, to send Denise that text? She considered it. Not sixteen days, she decided. Sixteen days wasn’t nearly long enough.
Sherry brushed herself off and headed for the fridge. Binge-eating seemed the thing to do these days. When she opened the door, she found the shelves barer than she would’ve liked. All the cheese was gone, along with the apples and grapes. The porter, too. She still had a six-pack of Dogfish Head IPA, some limited-edition winter white that Denise had picked out months ago. Sherry hated IPAs, yet figured she’d get to it eventually. The beer, at least, she understood. But how had she managed to eat through two cartons of eggs? She considered it a moment before recalling that she used some for the lemon cake on day two, and some for the brownies on day seven. What else had she baked? What else had she devoured, aside from her own self-pity and dread?
She checked the cabinets next. All the noodles were gone, along with various jars of pasta sauces. Guess none of those had rat poison in them. She was running low on cookies and snack cakes, too, not to mention soups, stews, and other canned goods. She had plenty of tuna and a few bags of pinto beans. It wouldn’t be long before she started on those. Only one box of Jiffy mix, though, so the beans would make for a pretty bland feast.
Looking back at her last trip to the store, she realized she bought enough cleaning supplies and toilet paper to survive any zombie apocalypse that might come along, but not nearly enough consumables, especially at the rate she consumed them.
“Sherry, darling,” she said aloud, “you’re gonna have to suck it up and make a store run.” The thought of it terrified her. To get herself clean, comb the knots out of her hair, put on out-of-the-apartment clothes—dread, dread, dread. Not to mention that she’d have to be among people, those plague rats in shoes. Any one of them could be a carrier for the virus. The woman behind the deli counter? The man lewdly fondling avocados? The young couple with two screaming kids in the ice-cream aisle? Vectors of infection, all of them. The world outside had become a game of Russian Roulette, modified so every person had a gun but you couldn’t tell which one had the bullets. “Shit fire on the Fourth of July,” she said, before adding, “Well, I guess I better go and get it over with.”
She didn’t bother to shower, squeezing into her jeans and an old Marshall University sweatshirt. She dug out a green knitted cap to cover her mess of hair despite how warm she knew the spring air would be. There were kitchen gloves under the sink, and then of course she had a box of generic cyan surgical masks that she bought at Walgreens the night before the stay-at-home order was announced. She hadn’t opened it yet. Now, she cracked the perforated triangle of cardboard on top and reached into the opening, grabbing three masks just in case. Checking herself in the mirror again, this time she thought she looked like a broke ninja who couldn’t afford anything that came in black. The only parts of her that were visible were her eyes, a sort of dull gray today. She wondered if she could catch the virus through her eyes. She knew from watching The Walking Dead that getting zombie blood in your eyes leads to all kinds of bad things. Was the virus like that? She wished she had some goggles. She was sure her dad in Connecticut would wear goggles. “Safety first,” he’d tell her. She had some cheap sunglasses, at least. That was a start. Now she looked like a broke ninja who was trying to act cool and fit in.
Sherry reached for the doorknob. Moment of truth, she thought, then opened the door and stood there staring past the threshold until she felt like she could move. Her heartbeat sped up—she felt it in her head. She tried to breathe deeply, but the mask stifled. Under half a breath, she muttered, “Day sixteen can suck it.”
She walked slowly downstairs and along the dusty hallway to her building’s main door. With every step, she imagined Alabama Shakes blaring behind her as if an action heroine’s slow-walking music in a film, that raspy voice urging hooold onnn, you gotta hooold onnn. She marched to that music. One step, two, until she reached the door, opened it, and stepped outside, surprised to find it bright from the sun holding court overhead, and she was glad she wore the shades after all.
When the door closed behind her, Sherry clumsily pulled her mask forward, breathing in the free air of the outside world. It smelled cleaner than she remembered it, like there was no soot or ash or grit from the nearby coal and chemical plants.
She heard starlings cussing in Starlingese from a crabapple tree in the neighboring yard. She glanced their way and saw there must have been a hundred of them, resembling a murder of crows except for the stars on their backs.
She also heard the rattle of keys and a thudding sound to her right, so she turned to see the mail carrier trying to shove envelopes into her overstuffed box—all the bills and fliers and catalogues she hadn’t collected in sixteen days. The postman wore shorts and a short-sleeve shirt. No mask, no goggles, no gloves. His blond hair rippled a little in the breeze.
His presence startled her, and her instinct told her to step back inside, but the door was closed and locked behind her. “How’s it going?” she said, timidly, letting the mask snap back into place.
“Hey,” he said. “This you?” He nodded toward the open mailbox.
“Yeah, guess so.”
He took a step as if to hand her the newest batch. When she flinched, he said, “I’ll just set these here on top.”
“Thanks,” she said, adding as an afterthought, “You’re working a little late today.”
He checked his wristwatch. “It’s not even one o’clock.”
Sherry didn’t believe him. She fumbled for her iPhone, digging it out of her back pocket, then struggled to get the screen open because her gloves didn’t make the right kind of contact. When the screen lit up at last, she saw 12:43 staring back at her like the eyes of a badger readying to tear her leg to shreds. “So it is,” she said. “Shit.” Day sixteen wasn’t done with her yet.