Joy was thrilled when she learned that the grocery delivery service had stopped using cardboard boxes in favor of reusable plastic bags. Not that she would ever order from them again, not after the one time she succumbed and became apoplectic at the sight of a mere head of garlic rolling around a box big enough for a pair of men’s basketball sneakers. Maybe this new practice would reduce the volume of unbroken down boxes that her neighbors blithely tossed onto a rude pile in the basement, a heap made possible by the staggering number of packages that appeared daily in her building’s lobby. Why couldn’t people be happy with what they had?
Despite this new eco-friendly protocol, she refused to be part of the larger problem. The enormous, hydro-carbon emitting refrigerated truck wouldn’t idle outside the building for her. So she wouldn’t have the satisfaction of ceremoniously handing the bags back to an indifferent delivery person. She’d continue to walk to the grocery store with her harmless public radio tote bags. She did take note, with remote approval and a drop of envy, that other shoppers were reusing these delivery bags. Bedecked with monstrous blueberries or orange slices or cherries, the bags were wide-bottomed and sturdy, perfect for taking to the beach or carrying vulnerable baked goods en route to a dinner party. But Joy never did things like that anyway.
That was before. Though she was loathe to do it, when it was clear that it was a bad idea to leave one’s house for any reason and most of all to go to a supermarket where people were madly breathing and grabbing, leaving only a few busted open bags of rice on the shelves, Joy stayed up until well after midnight trying to secure a regular delivery time slot. It took two weeks of refreshing the page, night after night, until she met with success. Thereafter, each Wednesday between 5 and 7pm, just after she buzzed the delivery person in, she taped a five-dollar bill to her apartment door to which she adhered a fuchsia sticky note saying “Thank you!” along with a smiley face. But during this time the company refused to take the plastic bags back since it seemed possible that the virus thrived on all surfaces for untold number of hours or days. In a banner at the top of their web site, it said “We are not collecting delivery bags, please reuse or dispose of properly.” She tried in vain to forgive the comma splice.
The governor repeated the mantra “flatten the curve” at every possible juncture. It’s all anybody said for a while. Joy read this on social media and heard it on podcasts. When she went to the ATM to get tip money for the grocery delivery – pressing her ear to the door and eye to the peephole to make sure no neighbors were milling about before she opened her door as she usually did – she heard people outdoors saying it to each other exuberantly where normally they might say, “Have a good day!” She also saw on social media and heard on podcasts that people were upset that they were so trapped and couldn’t go drink in bars or fly to Europe and that they were losing months of their lives. Joy didn’t share these feelings. Another strain Joy encountered was from people who claimed that this new lifestyle suited their introverted personalities LOL. And there were the people who worked at home in the before times and acted superior to the people who were having a hell of a time adjusting to the remote work situation because they loved chatting with their coworkers in the communal kitchen, it was what gave their workday meaning, etc. Joy didn’t share these feelings either. She had been working from home as a freelance copy editor for 15 years, but she didn’t feel superior or trapped or mournful about her lost social life. Her life was a flat curve, and imposed lockdown didn’t affect it much at all.
At 7pm every night while the other inhabitants of her building and those all up and down the street craned out their windows pummeling pots and pans and ringing cowbells and hooting and clapping, Joy put in her ear buds and maxed the volume on her white noise app. Of course she had admiration for the healthcare workers, but the excessive noise made her nauseous and embarrassed her. She was not immune to the sadness and pain. One of her neighbors had died, from the virus, and she knew this because she saw a printed web site obituary on the bulletin board near the mailboxes. It was affixed to a piece of pink construction paper with crayoned hearts and glued clumps of glitter around the edge. “We miss you, Ms. Lopez,” it said in a childish handwriting.
Joy was just one person, had only ever been one person, so two roomy, fruit-patterned bags of food and toiletries every week was plenty for her. But soon the coat closet where she kept the reusable bags could not accommodate the growing bulk. The closet was becoming the repository for the bags, folded and neat, filed inside one, then two, then three of the perfectly sized bags, stacked on top of one another. She imagined with horror a curve of her ingestion of these bags into her apartment over the past year, going from an imperceptible blip flush with the x-axis to a sudden hideous spike that extended outside of her mental field of vision. She emailed numerous nonprofit organizations asking if they could use the bags. She received only one response, from an animal rescue organization whose regional location 30 miles north who would be glad to take them. Joy did not have a car, and the idea of using non-biodegradable disinfectant wipes – which had been greyed out on the website since day one – to wipe down the interior of a rental car – well, which was worse, that or the CO2 emissions involved in getting there and back?
Joy Googled: what are people doing with grocery delivery bags uses too many. She was shocked at the dearth of complaints on the subject. Were people just improperly disposing of them? Of course they were. Using a global pandemic as a handy excuse to forget all their superficial displays of conservation or giving a crap about the planet and to secretly be glad they didn’t have to be inconvenienced by any of it for a while. Joy reused select-a-size paper towels even though no one was around to see her do it. An actually concerned person didn’t need to crow about it, just like an actual introvert didn’t tell everyone on social media that they were an introvert.
At night, Joy thrashed about, waking up with hot flashes every hour. If only she could harness the astounding heat that came off her body, siphon it off with a body vacuum bag and collect it in rubber bladders to save for winter. She fashioned this rudimentary suit in a half-awake state one night when it came to her that the grocery delivery bags could become something. A tarp, a citrus quilt, something useful that would last. She hadn’t used her sewing machine in ages because her neighbor was annoyed by the sound of the treadle thumping on the floor. But Ms. Lopez, it dawned on her with a sickening jab of relief, had passed away.
Joy began sewing before the sun rose, before she even had a glass of water. First simple squares and rectangles, then with slits in the middle, they became ponchos. Then she started adding hoods. As her productivity increased and the piles of bags in her closet decreased, one by one, Joy’s freelance jobs fell away. Small publishing companies were folding, book projects went on hiatus, and concern for proper grammar became an expendable luxury for magazines. Joy saw the curve of her income dip, almost flush with the x–axis, crossing with her credit card balance in the opposite direction. When she ran out of delivery bags, she posted a note on the lobby bulletin board in the middle of the night. “If you have collected too many reusable grocery delivery bags, please drop them off at Apt. 5F.” She didn’t include her name, just a thank you with a smiley face. She placed it next to the obituary of Ms. Lopez, covering up a yellowed notice about the 2003 extermination schedule. The next morning, she opened her apartment door and found three bags full of bags. They kept showing up, some with thank yous and smiley faces stuck onto them. She looked at the names on the address labels, names to which she could not affix faces because she didn’t know anyone. One day a bag of delivery bags appeared bearing labels that said Anna Lopez, Apartment 4F.
On the day of her trial run, as soon as it was light enough, she struck out, armed with two bagfuls of her bundles. Each bundle had a tarp and a poncho, and each bundle was tied with a strap made from the nylon bag handles. She had put a reinforced slit in the corner of each tarp so that it could be tied to something else with the strap. Nothing was wasted. The bundle itself made an ideal pillow. People without homes and places to sprawl things wouldn’t throw away what they had; they saved things until they disintegrated. Not like suburban people or even her urban neighbors who mindlessly threw plastic salad boxes into trash compactors instead of using them to store compostable food scraps.
She went into the subway station which was empty except for one likely homeless person and an unattended duffel bag with a stained and misshapen neck pillow tied with a shoelace to one of the bag’s handles. She placed one of her bundles on top of the bag. At the opposite end of the platform, she wordlessly handed a bundle to the man sitting on a wooden bench. Two destined-to-land-in-a-tree Stop & Shop bags sat at his feet, stuffed with plastic bottles and murky clothing, the tines of a metal fork poking out of the bottom of one. The man took the bundle with a nod as if he’d ordered it from a food delivery service.
That afternoon, Joy got an email from the coop management company reminding her that she had missed two deadlines for her maintenance payment. The following morning, she walked around and through the park, handing out bundles to anyone with a shopping cart full of personal-looking belongings or seated on a piece of cardboard. She knew of a small homeless encampment in the woods, an area she usually avoided. She walked there deliberately, half expecting not to find it still there, given the downfall of so many enterprises. But homeless lives were flat curves, weren’t they? Birds and squirrels and plants, she was sure, sensed unrest and darkness and an altered pattern of movements outdoors. She envied their ability to exist above the fray. Did homeless people, socially distanced by any definition, live in that realm, unencumbered by internet outages and cluttered desks?
Her wondering was interrupted with the surprise of finding, instead of the usual conglomerate of shanties fashioned from warped, grey plywood, a series of domed huts, skillfully woven with tree branches and pine boughs. She approached one to leave a bundle at its entrance and to inspect the craftsmanship more carefully. It was exquisite. The unbidden thought came to her: what a beautiful home.
Every day for a month, Joy walked out of her building lobby, shutting her eyes when she passed the tower of packages waiting to be claimed. She made her rounds, widening her circle and finding new homeless hot spots. Joy admired the homeless peoples’ tidy, tightly stored belongings, every space and strap and hook used efficiently. Marie Kondo entered her mind. The fact that Joy even knew the name bothered her almost as much as the fact that the name had become a verb. She focused on emulating the efficient packing systems the homeless had perfected, rolling and tying her bundles more economically so she could carry more in her delivery bags.
Her next grocery delivery order turned out to be her last. Joy had reached her credit card limit. She closed her account. She had two bundles left. After a night of patchy, wakeful, fiery sleep, her sheets banished to a battered bunch on the floor, she dressed at dawn, toting a papaya bag containing the two bundles, and headed into a wooded part of the park that she had spied on her rounds. There were no discernible paths leading to it, but she could see from a distance through the pines, a small copse of trees with a stump in the center. She worked her way into the area, swishing through dewy fronds and sat on the stump, surveying the surroundings. It had a good Feng Shui. She opened a bundle, unraveling the package, imagining the others opening theirs not far away. She put a lemon quilt on the ground and tied an avocado one to two trees above it. She put the other bundle under her head and lay down, gazing out at the leaves patterned against the flat white sky.
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- Footprint Zero - March 7, 2022