The Binge

Yesterday it was raining and unseasonably cold and dreary, and my husband and I sat down to watch one episode of a show we’d started the night before, a medical drama called The Pitt, which takes place in an ER and is weirdly mesmerizing. The one episode turned into three, turned into five, turned into nine, 

and the afternoon slipped away, the two of us parked on the couch, only breaking for meals and shuffling the dog in and out in the rain. When was the last time we did something like this, my husband asked me. Never, I said, but then I remembered the pandemic, 

our daughter and her boyfriend, now her husband, the four of us binge-watching Grey’s Anatomy, another medical drama (what is it about medical dramas?). Something about the intensity, the life-or-death moments, the glimpses of humans in crisis and all the ways we save each other. 

The Pitt covers a single day in a trauma center, each episode one hour in the twelve-hour shift. Slowly you get to know these people, the doctors, the medical students, nurses and orderlies, the head doctor doing his best to lead the place, but grappling with PTSD. Turns out, four years ago, during the pandemic, he was unable to save his mentor and now he’s flashing back, struggling to forget because who wants to remember that chaotic, terrifying time? Not me, but,

once, early on in the pandemic, in between Grey’s Anatomy episodes, I sneaked out of the house and drove across town to meet up with a friend I hadn't seen in weeks. The drive was eerie, the highways crisscrossing the city empty except for my car, a sign flashing over a bridge, reminding me to Flatten the Curve! Stay Home! 

and one man on the side of the road, peeing into a clump of bushes. This is the end of the world, I was thinking, and it was. Except it wasn’t. My friend and I wore masks and spent an hour together doing a socially-distant walk, and then I drove away on the vacant streets, 

home, where my family had moved on to binge-watching The Great British Bake-off, a marathon session of multiple episodes, punctuated only by stopping to bake a cake or whip up an elaborate French pastry. My son-in-law who had dreams of becoming a chef, made me a grilled cheese. The grilled cheese took hours and many episodes of The Great British Bake-Off because first he had to make the bread. 

When he delivered the sandwich, it came on one of my fancy plates, the thick homemade bread toasted, the cheese gooey and topped with thinly sliced pear and slivers of red onion. Nearly five years later, it’s still the best sandwich I have ever eaten in my life. Maybe I shouldn’t have broken the rules to visit my friend. 

I don’t know what spurred me on. The way everything had shifted out from under us, the library where I worked, closed for who knows how long, the claustrophobia of the house in lockdown, the binge-watching and binge-eating, the intensity of the love I had for my family, the terror that any of us might get sick, and suddenly, I thought I might lose my mind if I couldn’t do one ordinary thing. 

My friend and stayed on opposite sides of the street as we walked. When it was time to say goodbye, we held out our hands, pretending we could touch.