As restrictions ease, tensions linger about what you should and shouldn’t do. So booking a babysitter felt outlandishly exciting
On Saturday night, for the first time in over a year, I hired a babysitter and took a cab downtown. I’d heard rumours about the parallel realities of different neighbourhoods in New York, divided along lines of age and proximity to bars. It was hard to imagine, however; uptown, in areas heavily populated with families, the streets were and still are mainly empty by 9pm. As I got out of the cab on 14th Street, it was like being dropped into Ayia Napa after spending a year in a monastery.
So it has been since the beginning of all this, a tale of two pandemics, in which each successive wave has brought more and more cartoonish divisions with it. If it started in March last year with people fleeing their apartments for large second homes, moving on through the stark divide between fully functioning private schools and the shuttered state system, into vaccination access and the overweening schism between working-from-home and sudden redundancy, then the new border, across and within social groups, is venturing out and how far one will go.
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