Coming from Manhattan, where we can’t leave the house without our faces covered, it was a real.” I’d planned to say shock, but what came out instead was “vacation”. At the grocery stores hardly anyone had a mask on. “The coronavirus never happened on Emerald Isle,” I told Amy. If I was overreacting, it was because New York had borne a bigger brunt of the year 2020 than many other places – North Carolina, for instance. The country had gone from one massive headline story to another, and it felt like anything might happen next: a cataclysmic natural disaster, an alien invasion. The New York we’d left behind us had already been changed by Covid-19, but now that we’d returned, it felt doubly different.įor the first time since February, the virus was no longer the only news: the unrest was. He and I had just returned from two weeks at the Sea Section, our beach house in North Carolina. “You’re never there when I really need you.” “Yes, well, you weren’t there, were you?” I said. “I could have spelt Schenectady for you.” Hugh headed indoors to make fresh drinks for himself and Amy. I mean, it’s part of their address.” She dropped the olive stone into a planter Hugh had just filled with pansies. “I’m sure there are plenty of dummies in Schenectady who have no problem spelling their town’s name. “I don’t know that being smart really plays into it,” Amy said. “I guess I don’t think that people who read Bibles on planes are all that smart.” “What does that have to do with anything?” Amy asked. “Why hadn’t I turned to her in the first place? I told myself I’d asked the flight attendant because it was his job to serve me, but how true was that, really? Did I ask him because he was white or because he wasn’t reading a Bible?” “He told me that he had no idea, and just as I was sort of hating him for it, the woman with the Bible said, ‘S-c-h-e-n-e-c-t-a-d-y.’ She spelt it with her eyes shut, maybe to prove that she wasn’t cheating.”Īmy spat an olive stone into her palm.
“I was working a crossword puzzle and said to the flight attendant – a white guy, not just gay but a queen – ‘Excuse me, but do you know how to spell Schenectady?’ “Years ago, I was on a plane, seated next to a middle-aged black woman who was reading a Bible,” I began. From where we stood, we could hear the roiling cauldron 20 storeys below us: sirens, shouting, the distant sounds of breaking glass – all blended together into a furious, muffled roar. She was with Hugh and me on the terrace of our apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
When George Floyd was killed, and seemingly overnight all of New York came to smell like fresh plywood, I thought of Schenectady.