That Time I was Quarantined

background a lot but always seemed pleased, until one day when I was teaching him about how vowel sounds are changed by adding an “e”: fat, fate; car, care, hat, hate. And then there was his mom, right in my face, a chipper and helpful expression on her face that would have reminded me of Dolores Umbridge had those books existed yet.

     “We do not”, she chirped emphatically, “say the word HATE in this house.” She waited, eyebrows on high, perky smile starting to scare me. “Okay?” Me: “OK, no problem.” Huge smile, crinkly eyes and everything, and she said, “Well good, that’s OK then!” and was gone again.

     It was a couple of weeks later that the day that started it happened. I navigated the tangled maze of narrow mountain roads, climbing higher and higher through the redwood forest, enjoying the day. Taught the kid a few things, him snuggled against my side, chatted for a bit with his mom, and stood to go. “Hey,” the kid said suddenly, excitement in his eyes. “Hey, I have chicken pox! Have you had it?”

     I had not. When I reported this event to the parent and step-parent back home, all Hell broke loose.

     This was back in the day; chicken pox hadn’t yet switched places with scarlet fever, becoming steadily more dangerous as that other disease, once considered a scourge, lessened to the level of inconvenient childhood illness. I, at 15 and female, wasn’t in a lot of danger. What I didn’t know, though, was that one of the adults had not had it and could become very seriously ill were I to come down with it and pass it along. A frantic call to the doctor later, and steps were taken.

     I was allowed to go to school and behave normally for one more week, because symptoms typically appear at 14 days and contagious status kicks in a couple of days before that. I collected as much homework as possible but the worksheets hadn’t been copied yet; read ahead, I was told in most subjects, and do the sample problems in the books. I didn’t have any friends to part with so when the time came, I retreated to my bedroom without any fanfare.

     Folks, that was the best few weeks of my entire young adulthood. I could read all day long, book after book after book, the radio on, and look out the window at the playing squirrels and birds and the rain dripping off the redwood trees, and draw and paint. Nobody loomed suddenly into my attention, shouting about this or that, or followed me along micromanaging – and still finding dissatisfaction with – everything I did. My time was all free moments, not a series of them (all spent reading) snatched from the day in inconspicuous places where I wouldn’t be found and called lazy and put to work doing something (up a tree out in the forest, for example, or deep in the back of the cluttered garage, or lying on the back seat of the car). For the first week I was afraid I might not get sick and it would all be over too soon, but I did, and not badly. The itching was mild compared to the ravages of a topical allergy I have, to something which I’m thrilled to say doesn’t even exist on the continent where I live now. I didn’t even get a fever.

     Food was left outside my door, a hasty retreat was beaten, and I would retrieve it to eat in blissful peace, nobody pre-emptively haranguing me to eat the stuff I didn’t like Right Now because “I just know you’re not going to eat that”, nobody accusing me of using my knife and fork passive-aggressively or demanding to know why I looked at them that way just then. Nobody telling me I was salting my meat wrong or sitting in my chair rudely, or taking personal offense if my elbow hit the edge of the table.

     I had the bathroom at that end of the house to myself. Weeks without someone accusing me of using the expensive shampoo or criticizing my footprints on the bathmat, shrieking about the hot water if I was in there for more than four minutes, virtually white-glove checking my toilet brushing technique.

     Again, though, what made it such sheer heaven was the books. I could just read. I think it may have saved my soul; this was all-round rather a bad time and I’d been having a variety of dire thoughts. Just being able to be in there, though, alone, reading without the fear of someone flinging the door open and slapping the book out of my hands because I forgot to take out the trash, or snatching it up to read a paragraph at random to determine if it was “suitable”… it was amazing. It gave me some time to put myself back together, get my feet under me a bit. I was even able to take the hidden books out of their niche; after the book burning incident, which still traumatizes me today, I kept certain categories and books hidden: horror and thrillers, most science fiction, all kinds of stuff. Because the situation had developed after said highly unpredictable adult randomly read a paragraph in one of the most celebrated feminist science fiction books of the 1970’s and declared it sexist, I was at a loss as to what to hide and what to display, so basically if it wasn’t nauseatingly mainstream, it was out of sight under the floor. The only way I could get my own back on that one was a doozie, though: rules were rules and if a rule had a loophole, most of the time it was respected if I exploited it. The rule laid down after the burning was a misguided attempt to slap some realism into my benighted scifi soul: all nonfiction was deemed totally OK. I quickly accumulated an interesting little bookshelf in the most visible spot in my room, and took to reading The Happy Hooker all over the house whenever the adults were throwing a do.

     Eventually, of course, the itching died away, the scabs receded, and vitality returned to my body. At a certain point I was wrapped in blankets and hustled out to the car, driven to the doctor, and declared illness-free, and the status quo reasserted itself, but this period, the first time in my life I had ever had protracted meaningful private time to myself, had made me stronger, and it wasn’t that much later that I was able to leave that place and go live with some of the most nurturing, supportive people who have ever lived; their patience with the mess I was kept me together until I could clear my head and start acting right and figuring out who I wanted to be now.