An Unusual(ly Long) Holiday

Toby McCabe

“TOY TOY TOY!” Layla shrieks at me as I knot my starched apron. Even after five weeks, I still can’t decipher whether she’s attempting to say my name, or if she associates me with playtime. To my mum, she squeals “SUE-SUE COOKIE!” knowing my mum will donate the last club crackers to her stomach.

Food is on our minds all day everyday, but especially right now. Being proud owners of a once-turkey-farm-turned-poultry-themed-takeout-store, my family has been cooking for four generations and counting (yet I’m still a terrible chef). From the day you enter this family, you sign on to work all holidays until the end of time. Layla doesn’t know it yet, but as the adopted fifth gen, responsibility awaits her. These past two months have been no ordinary holiday though; most holidays call for closeness, not distance. We still deal out hot food, albeit through the makeshift drive-thru window that lines up cars around the block. For Easter next weekend, we’ll bend cardboard boxes with glazed hams and mashed potatoes through the shrinking glass panes. I know the risk of transmission via aerosol contamination is still scientifically debated, but people are frightened regardless. The distance is reassuring.

To minimize the threat, only family is allowed to enter the store. Full staff is 20 people. There’s 8 of us, 9 if you count Layla who is our morale booster. Layla hastens to remind me that the peas in the pot pie are actually pink. Later, she’ll remind me that, no matter how many times I calculate the number of remaining sandwiches, there are only ever six. She keeps up the hustle until naptime. At two years old, there’s nothing more important than toys, food, and naptime.

At 20 years old, I’m oscillating between being a full time college student and sustaining a family business that’s providing for the community. My uncle didn’t get to choose both. He didn’t go to college, but he now owns and manages his business. I’m taking my classes in my uncle’s kitchen now.

Grateful to be studying molecular biology, I've developed muscle memory for glove removal; a skill handy in the lab and in the kitchen. My uncle earned this skill too, more familiar with the staining pattern of turkey blood than the protocols of a biological Gram-staining. He is the proud owner of the only set of hands in the family that can cook the gravy, repair the mixer, and balance the books. We desperately need his hands around the store.

I beseech him to be careful. As a longtime gym rat and smoker, he is the perfect recipe for disaster. He feels invincible, but his lungs prove otherwise. “The virus is a respiratory one. That means it’ll infect your lungs, making it harder to breathe. You already have a chronic cough.”

“I’ll stop cooking when I feel sick.”

At that point, it’ll already be too late. The virus has an incubation period of 2-14 days meaning it can lay dormant for up to two weeks before the emergence of symptoms. In that time, he could pour and cook over 4,000 pies. It’s hard to argue when hundreds of people return each day, eager to get their gloved hands on any warm food.

By now with all this foot traffic, Layla is not hesitant to strangers. Weary of proximity to any unknown being, I watch with horror as my uncle reflexively approaches for a handshake with the Board of Health member. They journeyed to deposit hand-washing posters, the same ones given to my kindergarten class as we learned basic hygiene techniques. It’s even dated “©2004”. Have people forgotten the essential skills that Layla practices in preparation for kindergarten?

I may have learned basic hygiene in elementary school, but only at 18 did I appreciate the chemical and biological mechanisms by which soap and antibiotics work to keep us healthy. My aunt is convinced her homemade soap -a haphazard mixture of isopropyl alcohol, aloe vera, and lavender fragrance- is effective enough to restock the bathroom. From Layla’s playpen, she can see the elixir radiating a pink glow. I’m relieved our new soap captivates her more than the chaos happening around us.

As a distraction from the world, we resume our daily education. Layla brushes up on her animals while I skim a study on zoonotic transmission, the spread of disease from animals to humans. Zoonotic transmission is a key element of what makes viruses, like the annual flu, difficult to treat. Each time the virus jumps to another species, dangerous mutations arise that make the virus undetectable in our immune systems. Countless other diseases are transferred to humans from the animal world, like malaria, dengue, rabies, salmonella, and west nile virus to name a few. This virus is suspected to have transferred from bats to some Chinese citizens.

Compelled by nasty looks from customers, my cousin, being adopted from China, has been spending more time in the back of the store. My aunt half-jokingly demands that she apologize for the outbreak. More White people are infected than Asian people, but my aunt was racist even before now. Despite trading her high school graduation and prom for some racks of ribs, my cousin obliges with apologies. Even the President expects pittance from my cousin by incorrectly deeming it “the chinese-virus”.

By filling the airwaves, he and the virus are inescapable. Per usual, governmental ignorance of the needs of the most desperate citizens begets exasperating conditions. I can’t help but remember the eerily similar mismanagement of the AIDS crisis that resulted in over 700,000 deaths. Over a week ago, the New York Times reported over 700,000 people were infected with the virus. Now, that number is over a million.

Soon, we’ll all need to stay home as the numbers of infected individuals rise, despite Layla’s confident and consistent measurements of six. I overhear my mum say that she’s almost relieved her father passed away last year, knowing he’d be just another statistic of coronavirus. “Staying in, being alone all the time, it’d be too much for his mental health. He’d transmit the virus to so many people he loves, unknowingly killing himself in the process.”

At 6 ft tall, my grandpa was unstoppable. With these unbearable restrictions, we’d have to tie him down to keep him 6 feet apart from others. My grandpa wouldn’t understand it, but social distancing works. The rate of infection, Rₒ, is a measure of how many people each individual sick person can transmit the virus to. As of now, the Rₒ is around 2.5. If my uncle got ill, he’d infect me and Layla, and maybe even my mum. Then Layla and I would each infect another two people, continuing until virtually no healthy individuals remain. In order to stop the vocerious speed of transmission, Rₒ has to drop below 1. If my aunt got sick, self-isolation would inhibit the other 8 of us from getting the virus and prevent its exponential growth through the population.

My uncle and aunt are taking bets on when the growth curve of infection will flatten enough to resume normal life. Even with my biology-based education, I don’t know when this will be over. I hope that the current aura of fear isn’t transmitted to Layla. I hope that she lives long enough to learn about this moment of her childhood from history textbooks. With each delay of the world reopening, my cousin devolves into languish knowing she’ll read her future college textbooks from the comfort of our prep-tables.