If you ever want to give yourself a flashback to the early weeks of the Covid-19 pandemic (maybe you’re a masochist, how should I know), I recommend washing your hands while singing the “Happy Birthday” song twice through. Remember that? Sometimes the customs of just a few years ago can feel like they belong to a distant, incomprehensible past.
Consider, for example, the following passage from “Face Time,” a piece of fiction by Lorrie Moore. The story, which centers on a woman communicating via FaceTime with her father while he’s in the hospital with Covid, appeared in a 2020 issue of The New Yorker.
Who wanted to share the banalities of this life right now: the low buzz of dread in the head like a broken wire; the endless YouTube links; everyone frantically not socializing; the recently furloughed male friends doing their insane air-guitar concerts on Zoom; the hours of television news interspersed with highly theatrical, mind-boggling insurance ads; the early-morning senior mixer at the supermarket; the neighborhood walks with face masks hanging from one ear like dream catchers. Women created e-mail threads of their readings of the Bible. It was all ghastly, especially the singing ‘Happy Birthday’ twice as you washed your hands, because it might never actually be your birthday again so have at it.
Isn’t it interesting how something can feel so familiar yet so strange yet so triggering all at once?
After the worst part of the Covid crisis was over, my mom told me she was babysitting one of my nephews, who must have been around 5 years old at the time, and she noticed he left the bathroom without the sound of running water having preceded his exit.
“Don’t forget to wash your hands,” she said.
“Oh, we don’t have to do that anymore,” he assured her.
I’m certain he didn’t get that information from his mother—my sister—for she, like me, has an outsize fear of any contagion that might lead to gastrointestinal distress. Preventing that kind of tragic outcome is the primary reason why I wash my hands after using the bathroom. The secondary reason is that I would die if anyone thought I was the type of person who didn’t wash his hands after using the bathroom.
You might assume that consideration would only apply in public restrooms, but such is my subservience to groupthink that I’m pretty sure the judgment of the crowd somehow keeps me in check in front of my own sink when I’m at home by myself, too.
You know what they say: Character is what you do when no one is watching and, besides, you don’t want to get diarrhea.
Mind you, I’ve made plenty of terrible decisions when no one was watching. To take an example related to the ostensible subject of this post, I once tried to masturbate using a squirt or two of antibacterial hand soap as lube.
I don’t know what I was thinking. The stuff burned like hell. My only defense is that I was in that lust-crazed chapter of adolescence when any slimy substance seems like a come-on. Which is to say I wasn’t thinking at all.
The definitive literary treatment of that phase of teenagehood appears in Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth. The novel’s protagonist famously defiles a piece of raw liver that his family later has for dinner—not knowing, of course, what the meat has recently been up to. So to speak.
I never did anything that depraved. But I’ll tell you: I get it. I might find the recent past bewildering, but horniness-driven behavior always makes sense.
Indirect Objects 