“New York City?!”

My husband and I are holed up in a rented house on the coast of Maine. We’ve been here since last Thursday and plan to stay until early May, inasmuch as anyone can know right now what they’ll be doing in early May. 

Two weeks ago we started to think, “We can work anywhere there’s internet, why don’t we get away for a few weeks, some place nice?” The day after we booked the house and rental car, I saw an article, I think in the Times but it could have been the Post, about year-round residents in the Hamptons clashing with people arriving from the city to hunker down in their summer homes, and a queasy feeling in the pit in my stomach started to grow. Over the course of the week between making plans and leaving, the articles starting pouring in and stacking up. People not far from the town in Maine where we were headed were threatening to blow up the bridge from the mainland, police in Rhode Island were pulling over cars with New York plates. Each article was more and more breathless and alarming than the last: hordes of rich, entitled New Yorkers were streaming like cockroaches out to the hinterlands to spread the virus. Lock your doors.

Truth be told, my husband had been working at home for two weeks and we were starting to get on each other’s nerves, each trying to carve out space to work undistracted by the other in our one-bedroom apartment. But everybody is dealing with the same tension right now, so exactly no one was going to be sympathetic. Even before the flurry of anti-New Yorker media, I had more or less decided I would lay low on social media about our whereabouts because, I told myself, it was just kind of dickish to be like, “Hey look at this beautiful spot,” while so many people we know don’t have the opportunity or means to leave the city.

I was even reluctant to share our plans with close friends, but you’ve got to let your friends and family know your whereabouts, especially in such uncertain, risky times. Everyone we told said, “That’s such a good idea, I’m glad you’re getting away,” — still, I was feeling more anxious by the hour.

I couldn’t really work out how much of my distress was real guilt (were we doing something selfish and harmful?) and how much was a narcissistic fear of being thought poorly of, by my friends and my wider circle of acquaintances on social media. The initial impulse behind leaving was based on our own comfort; it wasn’t consciously connected to a desire to reduce our risk of exposure to the virus. We just wanted to be some place with a little more room, a little outdoor space, to not exactly take a vacation but treat ourselves after the cancellation of basically everything we’d looked forward to in the last year. But with some thought it became obvious that we would be reducing our own risk, and, if we had already been exposed to the virus, reducing our chances of passing it along. On a walk one evening last week on the sidewalk outside our co-op, a group of children all about five or six, came at us on scooters three abreast with their parents a few steps behind, leaving no room for us to pass. It was clarifying: New York is too dense for anyone to hope to keep six feet apart.

In the city, we live in a building with thousands of other people, all sharing the same elevators, hallways, doorknobs, and laundry room. Here, we are quarantined for 14 days and have not seen a soul but the couple we rented the house from and only from a distance of at least 10 feet. We didn’t touch anything on the way up. So, now that we’re here, my mental conflict has eased up. I’m sure we made the right decision — for the public good and for our own comfort. But the moral certitude meter these days is off the charts. The exhortation on social media and on handwritten signs in apartment windows, “STAY THE FUCK HOME!” means, ostensibly, don’t go to parties or gather in the park or leave your apartment for anything but groceries, but it started to feel like a threat aimed right at us. Not far down the coast a day or two ago, an armed mob of vigilantes cut down a tree and dragged it across the driveway of some temporary residents to make sure they didn’t leave their house.

As late as yesterday I was still being very cagey about our whereabouts except with close friends and family, but then I read this short piece by Masha Gessen in the New Yorker and finally felt like I had permission to get over myself and relax. When they come for us with torches and pitchforks — either on Twitter or down the driveway — I will at least be fairly confident of my innocence.

I want to say for centuries, but I know at least for the entirety of my memory, New York has been vilified by … who? farmers, country mice, real Americans? … as a hotbed of disease, a moral sewer, a breeding ground for pestilence. It’s nothing new.

There is a delicious irony in the implication that someone from New York, a city with half a million Mexican immigrants, couldn’t possibly know anything about Mexican cuisine, but that’s a topic for another day.