The Full Story
Carey
There was no way of knowing whether or not it was there...
A single viral particle ranges from seventy to ninety nanometers in width, invisible to the unaided eye. Seventy to ninety. Only through the magnification of a scanning electron microscope which zooms seven to twenty thousand times over, can the virus be seen.
Seventy to ninety years old. The Centers for Disease Control released the statement that risk of hospitalization due to COVID-19 increases with age. People eighty-five years and older hold the highest risk of developing serious complications from illness.
There are three ways the virus’ presence can be detected. Two swabs up the nasal canal onto one plexiglass slide. A rapid test only detects high viral titer; it scans for antigens, or spike proteins that envelop the viral particles which are specific to the coronavirus. A polymerase chain reaction test will detect the presence of virus in trace amounts. The machine is fed a small swabbed sample, in which it amplifies small amounts of genetic material present in the sample. The genome is sequenced and identified and a result is ready. Positive or negative. The third tests for the presence of antibodies, indicating a past infection. Antibodies would exist if the body had previously fought off the virus.
Carey has never tested positive for COVID-19. She’s worked as a custodian at Dartmouth College for the past fifteen years, but the past year has been different. She’s been tested for COVID-19 more times than she can count.
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Carey
The patch sown into her navy button-down shirt spells Carey. I misread the cursive ebony embroidered letters as Casey. But she agrees to meet me for coffee anyway.
Every weekday morning, Carey slips on the navy button-down uniform and a pair of jeans and a pair of Saucony walking shoes or brown clogs. At at 6 am, she quietly enters the McLaughlin Cluster through the main doors to Bildner Hall, my dorm building, where she empties the trash receptacles on the first and third floor communal trash rooms, then begins cleaning the bathrooms.
I see Carey most mornings when I’m make my daily trip to the common room to fill a mason jar of tap water. It tastes a little metallic but I pour it into my electric kettle where it boils, to be poured over Ethiopian coffee grounds and instant oats. My routine almost always coincides with hers. At 8:30 am, she is just finishing disinfecting the bathrooms across from my room. I always know she’s been there because she leaves the bathroom doors propped open.
Taped on my door is a piece of folded notebook paper that writes “lattes, please knock.” It started as a joke. Which it was, sort of. One slow morning, Carey told the other building custodian, Scott, that she’d really like a coffee. So I promised I’d make Carey a proper latte with two shots of freshly-brewed espresso topped with crema and foamed milk. I’d even make it in a proper latte mug.
…
We keep at a safe from each other as I hand her the short ivory latte. “You don’t need to drink it if you’re not comfortable.” Then I add, “I washed it thoroughly with soap and water.” She thanks me and tells me she’ll drink it later and return the cup. She places it down on the table so that ceramic cerulean polka dots with espresso and foamed milk sits in the six feet between us.
Carey intertwines her fingers as she thinks, and her brows furrow slightly. They displace the silver curtain bangs that hang from her forehead.
Since the start of the pandemic, her job has increased in intensity. She disinfects everything that is considered to be highly-touched: stairwell railings, door handles, toilet seats. Countertops, elevator buttons, tables. While most in the world right now are doing what they can to avoid the virus, Carey is driving down I-89 from South Royalton to Hanover to face the virus herself. It’s understood that she may very well come in contact with the virus at some point. In fact, she’s meant to. It’s her responsibility to eradicate its very existence.
She tells me she does the best she can. What if someone gets sick due to something she didn’t properly disinfect? There is no certainty in knowing. She does the best she can. She hopes her cloth mask provides at least some line of protection from aspiring any amount of aerosolized virus in a space where an unmasked or sick college student might have brought it in.
Since the pandemic, Carey has been working the early shift.
Invisibility. It’s just another part of her job. To go unseen. Her workday has been moved up to 6 am so she can get most of her work done before college students are awake. Carey says she’s not an early riser.
In the winter, Carey floats through the darkness. The frozen roads from South Royalton to the Upper Valley are quiet. Carey listens to NPR. Like a phantom, she works swiftly in the darkness, warm lights lighting the hall. The sun’s on its way up, painting the dim horizon a dusky purple. She’s not an early riser. It’s just a job.
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attachment
Under a microscope, the circular arrangement of spike proteins that envelope the viral genome makes it resemble a crown. When I see it, I picture it in three dimensions. It would more closely resemble the rubber balls with straggly ends we used to buy at the dollar store when I was a child. Or the round squeaky chew toy with the spikes we bought the dog for Christmas. Archie sinks his canines into the spikes, his teeth fitting seamlessly between individual protrusions on the toy as he clenches his jaw. Upon release, slobbering and salivating, a pitched squeak is let out with regret. The process repeats, a sort of inhale/exhale squeaks and squeals as he clasps and releases his jaw, readjusting his grip on the spikes.
Scientists are still unclear about the virus’ mechanism of entry, but once its surface spike proteins securely attach to the host’s, it’s possible the viral membrane fuses with that of the cell. It’s either that or a process called receptor mediated endocytosis. The spike proteins are effective in binding to proteins displayed on host cell surfaces, which, in humans, is the ACE-2 protein. The viral spike protein and the human ACE-2 bind like a lock and key. Like teeth sinking into a chew toy.
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When Carey finishes work at 2:30 pm, she makes the forty minute drive to South Royalton, Vermont, where she has a small farm. Her boyfriend is a farmer. His name is Mike and he milks cows. He doesn’t wear a mask. He doesn’t believe in them. He spends most of his time outside on his farm.
When Carey comes home she throws her navy button down in the wash to be safe. Mike returns from a trip into town, where he visited the post office. Or the store. “I don’t think he has much exposure,” Carey tells me. “He hasn’t come down with anything. He doesn’t get sick very often.” I ask Carey if her boyfriend worries about her getting sick or bringing something back to him. “No,” she says without hesitation. “He isn’t a worrywart,” she says.
“What can you do about it? It is what it is.” Carey doesn’t worry about things she can’t control. Last week she was on her way to work when she felt the road drifting to the right. Everything was moving, melting. Something was off. Deep breaths, she told herself until the nausea had subsided. She was alone. She called her boyfriend and turned the car around to head home.
If you have even one symptom, Carey tells me, you can’t come to work for at least ten days or until you receive a negative test. Carey had experienced bouts like these before, but not to this degree. She was told it was stress. It turns out to be has vertigo. Carey could steady herself. “You do what you have to do,” she says. She doesn’t worry about things she can’t control.
Mike is apprehensive toward wearing masks. Will two plies of cotton bolster the air of the infected? “If you’re gonna get it, you’re gonna get it,” Carey quotes him. Maybe he’s on to something. Maybe a fatalistic outlook is his own form of masking. In anticipating the worst, he defends himself from worry. Don’t give it attention, and it goes away. In a space where you can forget about the virus, it’s ephemeral bliss. But Carey faces it. “I don’t think he really looks at the downside – if you do get it, you can die.”
Carey tells me that I remind her of her step-daughter Jazz — well like her step-daughter — her and Mike aren’t married.
Across the latte and the six feet of space between our seats, I sense unease. We are speaking of a virus that has affected us both in different capacities. She keeps saying that the pandemic is hard for everyone. That it hasn’t impacted her more than anyone else.
“If you have elderly around, it’s hard not to be with them,” she says. She’s not speaking not for herself. Her voice quivers slightly as she tells me about her Gram spent her final years in a nursing home and died in early 2020. “I’m just really thankful that she didn’t have to suffer with the Covid.” She mutters this last word under her breath, after pausing to utter its name through her mask. It’s as if speaking its name might elicit its unwarranted presence. Carey’s mom died in 2019. She had lots of health issues. “I think it would’ve been a lot worse, for her. I hate to say this, but I’m glad it happened when it did.”
I ask about her job again. “It’s had an impact on everything, this Covid” she says.
I want to ask Carey more questions. But it’s 10 am, and she has to finish cleaning the third floor bathrooms and showers before her lunch break. It’s protocol. The management would like her to start on bathrooms first, but Carey always begins by taking out the trash. She wheels a large receptacle around each floor as she visits in the same order: common room kitchen, two bathrooms, trash room, study space, two more bathrooms. The layout is the same on each floor; it’s the same process and the same order on each. It repeats, steady as the drone of the cart being rolled down the hall outside my dorm room.
Later that morning, Carey returns the short ebony mug. It’s cleaned. At least, I trust it is. I clean it again just to make sure. There was no way of knowing whether or not she drank the latte.
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replication
Once the virus enters the host cell, whether by fusion of membranes or receptor-mediated endocytosis, it aims to replicate its genetic sequence. Like anything, the virus depends on the reproduction and survival of its progeny. Since coronaviruses contain a single, positively-stranded genome, they can employ host cell mechanisms to replicate the complimentary negative strand and, in turn, create compliments of these compliments, producing copies of the original. It’s methodical. Routine. It does what it has to do.
A protein called RNA polymerase is the catalyst for recognition of the viral genome. It initiates synthesis when some N-protein binds to some M-protein, and several other processes that occur very terminate. Then the sequence integrates itself into the host’s endoplasmic reticulum, taking part of the coating with it. When the formed particle buds out into extracellular space, having acquired part of the host cell’s membrane, it roams until it attaches to another host cell. Then it repeats the process.
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Carey calls herself a true Vermonter. She was born in Vermont and spent years working at a dairy farm in Windsor. At Oak Knoll Farm, she helped milk the dairy goats. They sold yogurt. “The chocolate milk is pretty good,” she adds.
Before she was a custodian at Dartmouth, Carey worked on a goat farm, an experience she deems okay. “Everything had to be so perfect.” Her boss was into showing goats — “like a dog show, but for goats,” Carey tells me. “She was very particular about hoof-trimmin. I couldn’t get the hang of it.”
Carey eventually left the farm. But her and Mike bought ten goats for themselves. He grew up on a farm and the goats were his idea. “They pay more money for goat’s milk than they do cow’s milk,” Carey tells me. “He wanted to make money, so we tried it. Then we couldn’t get a market for it, so we sold them.” Now they just have dairy cows.
“So how did you and your boyfriend meet?” I ask.
Carey laughs. It’s almost a giggle. I wonder if this is something I shouldn’t talk about. “He’s never been married, doesn’t want to,” she says. “I’d been married once. So we’re all good just being together, no paper.” “It’ll be twenty years in March.”
Before she was a goat farmer, Carey sanded furniture at a place in Thetford called Pompanoosuc Mills. She had no experience but they taught her how to stain and sand. “The guy who owned the place actually graduated from here,” she tells me.
Another pause. “So how did you and Mike meet?”
More laughter. “We met… at a bar,” she musters between chuckles.
“What? That’s a normal thing,” I add, trying to comfort her.
“I forgot to add – I used to work at Walmart,” she says. “In the jewelry department.”
“Does that tie into the story at all, of meeting your boyfriend?”
Carey laughs again. She worked in the jewelry department. And she hadn’t been out with the girls in a long time. She was bugging a coworker about it. “I just wanted to go out and dance. I hadn’t gone out and danced in forever…” she said. At that point, she was divorced. She had two children from that eight-year marriage. “When you’re raising kids… a lot of people don’t make time for that, to get out.”
Her coworker wanted to wait until the next night, but Carey insisted. “No way, let’s do it now,” she said.
“Do you remember what the bar was called?” I ask.
Carey laughs again. “It’s not even a bar now.”
The Music Club? I looked it up. It’s in Williamstown, Vermont and according to manta.com, the business is unclaimed. It was established in 2000 and currently employs a staff of three. I cross checked it with yelp. The place still exists.
“Me and my friend we were out dancing, you know, minding our own business, and him and his buddy came out and started dancing with us.”
But Carey wasn’t looking for anything and thought that he was flirting with her friend. It didn’t matter, she told me. He walked her to her car. It was winter. They talked as the car warmed up. This is when they found out they shared the same last name. Clark.
“We weren’t related, of course, because it wasn’t my blood name.”
It’s been almost twenty years since that night. They’re not married, but sharing the same last name makes it seem as if they are. They consider each other’s children as their own. His daughter, Jasmin and her two children – Emily and Andrew.
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In South Royalton, Carey lives in what she calls the log house. On her way home, she’d drive up a dirt road, past her boyfriend’s parents’ house, and past the long row of spruces, eastern pines, elms, and scarce birches, until she’d get there. She bursts out laughing as she describes it to me. “Manmade.” She adds. Emphasis on man. More laughter.
She tells me the log house is about twelve years old. “It’s rustic, it’s nothing great.” Its home, but… it’s not fancy, it was a hurry-up thing. Her boyfriend, Mike, and his dad — they built it. “It’s nothing fancy,” she assures me. The twelve-inch spikes needed to be sledgehammered in. Manmade. “They never had built a log cabin, but they did it.” The house is fourteen hundred square feet. It’s a lot to clean.
Carey and Mike lived on the property while building. “We had a mobile home,” she tells me. “A trailer,” she adds. “Like 100 feet from it, but I’m not good at estimating as to how much feet that was, probably more than that.” The house was built on over thirty acres of unpastured wood and ledge. For their animals, they have a big, dome-shaped free-stall with farm equipment laying around.
Carey used to have cows and chickens. Goats, too. The goats were fun, she tells me. Raising them was a challenge. They didn’t like to be herded after being fed. “They like to get out, and they’re not easy to catch.” Carey’s eyes squint as she speaks. I think she’s smiling though I can’t see beyond her cloth mask.
“When they were done milking, and they had their bellies full of grain, they wanted to wander off.” She laughs. Carey and Mike had three goats. Their names were Faith, Hope and Joy. They bought them to start milking and breeding, then they sold them. There wasn’t a market for goats’ milk. Now they just have dairy cows.
One of the baby goats had to live in the log cabin with Carey and Mike because she was not well. Carey can’t think of her name, but she remembers she was born in the winter. She’d lay on the floor and kick her feet in anguish. There was something with her brain. Polio? Maybe. A huge headache. They sold her to someone who was milking goats up in Craftsbury, Vermont. Carey tells me she doesn’t know if she’s living anymore.
“Do you name your cows, too?” I ask.
“He does,” Carey says. “But, I don’t know what they are. He’s had so many.”
She tells me that over the weekend they had a calf. “He couldn’t – oh my gosh, it took like three hours to get the calf out, because the way the head was turned, it was turned under, and the way they come out is feet first, and the head has to be forward, so it was hung up. She was a month early, so she didn’t end up making it. She died.” Carey tells the story empathetically but in a matter-of-fact manner.
“Did the baby die?” I ask concerned.
“No, the baby died.”
“Is the mom okay?”
“Yeah. The mom is fine. But if he wouldn’t have got the calf out she would’ve died,” Carey tells me. “That’s money. She’s making milk. And if you lose that milk, it just brings everything down.”
She tells me that Mike is looking to get rid of calves. They have too many. “They’re not paying a lot for beef right now, so he doesn’t want to get rid of them, until the prices go up.”
The walls of the log house are made of rounded white pine logs, cut flat on two sides — the top and bottom, so they stack flat on top of another. But the outside and inside walls are left with the ebb and flow of rounded logs. Carey wishes they’d cut another side flat so the inside walls would be even. It makes it difficult to hang pictures up, so the walls are blank. Last weekend they cut some more wood for the furnace.
“We wouldn’t have built it as big as we did. But we were planning on having all the kids live with us, but then they decided that they wanted to live with the other parents,” Carey says.
Laminate flooring covers the floors in the log house. Laminate was a bad idea. Mike’s not a carpenter. The boards move and shift out of place. The rounded edges and uneven grooves of the white pine log walls prevent them from sitting flush against the walls.
“I just wish the kitchen was more functional,” Carey says. “He’s got an old-fashioned cook stove. But we haven’t got it plumbed out to the chimney, so it’s just sitting there,” Carey tells me. “I would like to use it, but we haven’t gotten that far yet.”
I tell her how I started fires in the wood stove, or, at least tried to, in the house I was living in last fall. I was a live-in nanny.
“You had to start the fires?!” Carey seemed bewildered, like the sight of such rugged build-it-yourself feasibility couldn’t emerge from a body like mine. A face like mine, with delicate hands scratching notes in a leather-bound notebook I wouldn’t be able to read later, sitting in a big beige leather chair surrounded by high walls. Her words reverberating, laughter floating through the chamber walls up to the ceiling above, in the highness of our current building on one of country’s most esteemed institutions. I tell her that, yes, I had to make the fires.
I tell her how I had to fetch the firewood, and the kindling, too. I was the first one awake, and I had to scramble to find old paper bags from the General Store, and old magazines and mail and discarded children’s artwork and how I had to tear it all into shreds small enough to catch a flame. I say this, I know she knows of all this. I had to stuff it all into the small belly of the stove, poke it around with a heavy metal rod, lump in the kindling — old barn wood from the backyard, and top it with one heavy log of seasoned cord wood from the shed. All of that in five-degree temperatures, the sun rising but not warming, and the fire wouldn’t even start. Only a billow of smoke would permeate the living room, and I’d have to crack open two windows across from each other to create a cross breeze so the alarm wouldn’t go off and wake the baby. And then I’d sit there with my coat on, alone. Waiting for the kids to run downstairs so I could make them toaster waffles and eggs.
Carey’s wood furnace can run all night. “If you have enough coals, you just add more wood to it,” she tells me. She grew up in a house that was a hundred years old. Her stepfather put in a “dinky little wood stove,” and expected it to go all night, but she had to start it. Carey didn’t mind starting the fires.
She still doesn’t mind starting the fires. It’s satisfying.
Carey has two younger sisters, all eight years apart. Carey is the oldest, so she’s twelve years older than her youngest sister. So she tells me she’s like a second mom. “That’s just the way it turned out.” Her mom had three miscarriages between them.“Sometimes we watch these reality shows, Mountain Frontiers, or something.” She searches for the name. I nod. “Mountain Men? They had like six kids… but they had that many so they would have help to do stuff — which is smart. But when I got to the age of having children, and then separated… it’s hard to get them to do things,” she jokes. “My son was pretty good about it, but my daughter, she didn’t like going stuff.”
Carey says her own sister was always in trouble. “Was yours like that too?” She asks me.
I tell her I have an older brother, and then it’s just my twin sister and I — we’re the same age, but she very much still feels like the middle child, and I very much feel like the youngest. Even though we’re a minute apart.
“What’s it like having a brother? I’ve always wanted a brother,” she says.
Emily and Andrew are the names of Carey’s children – then she has a step-daughter, named Jasmin. She’s the youngest. She still has a room in the log cabin.
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contamination
It’s March. The New York Times tells me “It’s time.” Texas and Mississippi have announced that they will lift mask mandates. It’s time.
My friends and I say “It’s time.” We daydream. The pile of gray snow is melting, revealing a little triangular patch of green. I watch it grow outside my window. I sigh when it disappears again. Massachusetts removes capacity limits in restaurants. The drone of the heater in my dorm room, it becomes deafening. I turn it off, but the void of its absence is filled with the sound of the wind whistling through the crack between the sill and the window, itself, and it’s worse. I get a chill.
South Carolina legalizes gatherings of more than 250 people. The people I know who have received a dose of the vaccine now exceed a number I can count on my fingers. None of them are friends or family. Just acquaintances. Far acquaintances. Like a friend-of-a-friend’s mother, or a cousin’s husband’s sister. They talk about Astra-Zeneca, Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson, but those words mean nothing to me aside from their presence on headlines. I imagine their plastic names on cases of plastic syringes. And those cases, I imagine wrapped in cellophane, tucked tightly in a warehouse of cases — the good type of cases — bottles of cases and cases of bottles, a massive production waiting to be packed in the backs of LTL carrier trucks with industrial grade dry-ice cooled refrigerators.
I never knew this much about trucks. I never knew this much about vaccines. – “Is it time?” I ask my sister. We dream of time. I dream of spruce trees. Of the emaciated tips of their branches, how they won’t be so lonely anymore. I dream of buds sprouting from those barren ends which have been desolate for so long. My sister says soon. I know it will be long.
The buds will blossom into flowers, and the flowers will bloom into emerald leaves, heightening emptiness into viridescent treescapes. I will jump into the green, my iridescent body catching gleams of sunlight’s arms as I free fall into escape. No care, no control, no thoughts. I will forget my mask on the way out, and it will be okay. I will hear the birds again. Their morning songs will be back, in lieu of winter’s mocking crow caws. The sky will burn a blazing orange before mellowing to dusk, closing the lids on a sweltering violet summer’s day. Night will be welcomed with ease because the trees will know, with certainty, of the sun’s presence the next morning.
I stare through the glass. My eyes alternate focus to the wooden pane, then to the smudged glass itself, back to the contents of the outdoors. I know it will turn gray, then beige, then green, I know this. Then yellow, then orange, then red. It will turn these colors before it is time.
…
In the bubble, things are worsening. On February 23, the virus made its presence known through an outbreak. Several outbreaks. the small cluster of cases, identified by the college’s website as “linked”, means there was a chain of transmission. That makes me feel. I don’t know how to feel. 138 students are infected.
…
It’s 8:20 in the morning, again. I see Carey, again, in the hall outside my door. She removes her earbuds so we talk. I take a step back. She tells me that her nephew has Covid. He also has vertigo. Students have been leaving, she tells me, dropping keys in the ORL key boxes and dragging Swiss suitcases across the green to the bus stop.
We’re not surprised. Students would rather be home than here, in their rooms in provisional quarantine. Paranoia. I would rather be here. Carey, she’d rather be home.
All of this, and I can’t stop admiring her pewter pink and violet plaid mask. “I love your mask,” I say. She tells me she hopes she doesn’t have to wear it for much longer.
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“So you want to be writing stories and interviewing people? And sharing it?” Carey laughs.
“That what I’d like to do right now, but that might change,” I tell her.
“So, would you want to work for a newspaper?”
“Maybe.” I liked the idea of writing and living in a big city. It all seemed a bit romantic.
“A lot of things will open, I’m sure — a lot of different things, I mean,” Carey goes on. “Just because I’ve heard it or seen it — students do change their… their, um, what is it…” A pause. I waited a few seconds.
“Their major?”
“Major, yeah.” I remind Carey of her step-daughter, Jazz. “Jazz, she wanted to go to baking school, and she went to the one in Rhode Island there, I can’t remember the name…” I waited for it to come to her. “Johnson & Wales.”
“She hated it. Oh, did she hate it. She came home crying.” She tells me Jazz graduated from college a few years back, probably not too many years but enough for her to lose count, and that she got accepted in one of those graduate programs somewhere down in Boston, one of those schools. She took a year off for some reason Carey could not remember, and she’s been nannying ever since.
I tell her that I’m also a nanny, and this makes her smile. I think there is something about me that reminds her of home, and that makes me feel warm.
“Nannying is stressful for her now,” Carey adds. “She gets how I get here. Bored.” I imagine Carey with her cart and her keys, following the same routine. Trash, showers, bathrooms, carpets. “It’s the same thing every day, all day.” She rethinks it. “I don’t know if boredom is the right word. It just gets monotonous.”
“Everybody says, ‘Oh you’re so good at it,’ you know, ‘how can you be bored,’” Carey says. “I need a challenge. My brain needs a challenge. It doesn’t take a brain scientist to do this job,” she adds, with a laugh. “But it’s good money and it’s good benefits, and those are kind of important these days. So yeah.” I agree with her.
“I have a second aunt who looked down on me about that — because I was thinking of the money and not what I wanted to do. But to survive, I think you kind of have to weigh it out. I mean she was successful — she became a judge… What does journalism pay, anyway? To start with, do you know? I’m just curious.”
I’m surprised at the quick turnaround. I tell her that I don’t really know, that it might be around fifty thousand dollars a year. I might have pulled that number from thin air but I say it must vary from place to place. Money is not something I like to think about often.
“Oh, oh. That’s hard, especially in the bigger cities. Rent is very expensive. Jazz – she’s up to what, eighteen, nineteen dollars an hour nannying, and that’s down in Boston.”
Careers. I am scared to profess mine, she talks down on hers. “I think, you got to want to do it, and love it. You know, like Scott, he loves cleaning. I don’t mind cleaning, but…” She sighs.
“You do it because it’s your job?”
“Yeah.”
“And, I mean, I try to do a good job. I’m over it,” she adds, with a sadistic laugh. “Sometimes things just hold you back. You talk about what you would like to do but there’s something right there, in the way. And you can’t move it, basically.”
“Did that happen to you?”
“Yeah. It's fear.”
“Fear?”
“Fear of change.” She is serious. I think. I think she’s smiling under her mask, based on the squint in her eyes. She’s leaned forward now, but not looking me directly in the eye.
“I don’t know… I have the desire to work with animals. I mean, I don’t know if… it takes so long to be a veterinarian, to get there.”
Veterinarian. I wonder if this is the first time she’s vocalized this. It’s an electric feeling to declare your dream to another, to call it out, put it into the world. It’s scary. The possibility of failure becomes very real.
“Last I looked – it was like fifteen years ago, they paid fifteen dollars an hour for vet techs. I would have to pay off some stuff first before I take a dip in pay,” she tells me.
“I don’t know, I’d just like to work with a vet. You know, veterinary assistants? But even doing that, you have to have schooling. I just don’t have enough confidence in myself.” She shifts her gaze toward the carpet between us. “Maybe one of these days, I’ll just do it, I don’t know. Somebody needs to give me a shove.”
She tells me about the animal shows she watches. As I listen, I see a sparkle in her brown eyes behind her grey carpet bangs.
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I have a tendency to jump from place to place, from one story to the next, and so I often find myself moving through time from Carey’s upbringing to where she is scrubbing the mirror in the fourth-floor bathroom. Don’t rush. It’s rushed.
There is a sense of unease between us, when I follow Carey like a shadow for her morning shift. The progression of relationships can be scary. It just keeps rolling forward on the tracks. Trains don’t make sharp turns.
When I ask Carey for her phone number to contact her for our interview, she declines. She cites a professional boundary that would be crossing — she’s had mandatory training where her and her colleagues are taught those rules. “It’s been fourteen years here, and it’s hard not to get close to students,” she tells me. I understand.
They work for us. No contamination. Even if it’s the trace amount produced by a student’s text on Carey’s phone.
If such a training does exist for faculty members, it’s disregarded. Students eat dinners at professors’ homes, some even go out for drinks together. The contamination here borders concern, but it’s encouraged.
During my freshman winter, I was one text away from joining a group of classmates from a biology class to a group lunch our professors at a fancy restaurant. It was week six in a ten-week term, in a class called Emerging Infections Diseases. Maybe I was too shy, or maybe I feared that this contamination of myself into the lunch group might be interpreted as a call for something in return. I didn’t go.
The contamination was what the college would deem a good kind. The kind which my professor might have equated to the mutations of microbes which live deep in unearthed soil. They coexist with levels of life still being examined by man under the microscope. He would explain how these microbes, when exposed to human life, have the ability to harm and sicken, but in these environments, they exist as natural antibiotics. They can serve to protect those living around the infecting agent. This contamination is a good kind. A natural immunity of sorts.
I learned this kind of crossing over was what you were supposed to do at an Ivy league institution like Dartmouth. My friends agreed. That’s how you get research opportunities. That’s how you get internships, they said.
Just not with the custodian.
______________
Conversation always comes back to the log house and the animals. “We have a porch around the back, which I love,” Carey tells me. “It was birthday-slash Christmas-slash-whatever for me for the following four years.” That was four or five years ago. It’s pine wood deck bordered by pine wood railings that overlooks the forest in her backyard. It’s also home for her rabbit.
“What? I didn’t know that you had a rabbit.” I was surprised she hadn’t brought it up sooner.
“Yep.” Carey’s rabbit lives in a miniature house on the porch. “It’s really a nice house, for a rabbit,” Carey tells me. She laughs. “One part of it is where she has her box (she’s box trained) and the top part is her living area, where she sleeps and eats,” Carey describes.
“Bugsy is her name.” She laughs. “Yeah, so original.” She gestures a space between her hands. She’s white with fog grayish brownish fur.
“I love rabbits,” I say. “They’re my favorite animal.”
“Well, our neighbors were raising them for meat… so she’s like, a meat rabbit. She – she’s not really a pet. Well, she is — but she’s very timid, very timid. And she scares me, because she has tried to every now and then — she has this thing about lunging her front feet at you when you’re trying to give her a carrot. I don’t know.”
“So you’re afraid she might bite you?” I ask.
“Yeah!” More laughter. “It just makes me kind of weary about picking her up. I just don’t. I did when she was smaller, but she’s kind of big right now.”
I tell her that my neighbor has a rabbit.
“I’ve read books on how to handle rabbits. Books that will help me. I – I did handle her.” She corrects herself. “I have handled her. It’s just that – every time… if I was – I don’t know. She just… it just – it’s nerve-wracking, because I don’t want to hurt her. If you don’t hold them a certain way, they could injure their back or their hind legs.”
She laughs again. She tells me how she closes the porch off so that Bugsy can wander around. She’ll lay comfortably on the doormat and Carey’ll talk to her. “Her ears are moving, so she hears me.”
“I always wanted a pet rabbit,” I say. “But she’s your pet, right? “You’re not – or are you…” My voice drifts off awkwardly. She picked up my phrase where I left it.
“Um, no. I’m not – I saved her.” Carey laughs. “From that.” I nod.
“I mean…. if we were starving, we’d probably would have to have something,” Carey adds. “But, we’re not… I don’t know if I could eat her or not. I’ve had her for so long. I know there are people out there that are against that, but… being a meat rabbit, I don’t know.”
…
I check my watch. It’s eleven already. I promised to keep our talk short.
“Time flies when you’re having fun.” Carey tells me. “Did I answer all your questions?”
“Yes, I want to make sure you’re not pressured to answer anything you don’t want to,” I say.
“If I was in a room full of people, a lot of people… I just do better one-on-one, than in a group of people. I’m the one that sits there and listens to everybody else talk.” She laughs.
I think I’m the same type of person. I tell her this. We laugh and walk out of the common room. We take the elevator together up to the fourth floor. I go to my dorm, Carey to the cart outside my dorm. Our chats help to break up the monotony. They get me out of my room. They give Carey a break. Now it’s back to the bathrooms. And I’m back in my room, reading. I would go to the library if I could, but it’s closed – we’re in strict quarantine due to a recent outbreak. And Carey would be working someplace in a vet’s office, if she could, handling rabbits, chickens, border collies, horses — none of them her own. She would just heal, like the vet techs she sees on the animal shows. Like she reads in the books.
Mike is currently renovating a room in the log cabin and it’s just for her. She can make it anything she wants. She tells me it’s going to be a home office. She’ll have a computer in there all for herself.
The north wind strikes my window, whistling a chill through my room. There’s no place I’d rather be, I know this. Trying to squeeze semblances of normalcy into this time of my life. Some say, “these are the best years of our lives.” I hope they are yet to come. They’re gone before we know, and we often feel after it’s too late.
The roll of Carey’s cart is audible, it rumbles outside my door. Outside the sun is shining. Snow is melting. Slowly. Some things, you can’t change, I think. Some things you have to wait for.
