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She assumed it was UPS dropping off a package, but then through the window she saw there was still a guy standing outside, wearing a polo shirt stitched with, "American Pest." He'd just finished her annual outdoor mosquito spray, he explained, and since he was already there --- did Kumar have any indoor pest problems?
As a matter of fact, she did. There were gnats clustering around one of her light fixtures inside. Kumar, an assistant professor at American University, had already called an exterminator once to ask if they could mail her a DIY chemical spray, but they'd said no because she wasn't licensed. Now, magically, here was a licensed bug guy offering to come into her house and solve the problem.
As Kumar reached for the doorknob, she thought ---
Actually, before we get to what she thought, I should explain that this isn't some kind of horror story where a murderous impostor exterminator tries to scam his way into a defenseless victim's house. This is a different kind of story, where a regular exterminator tries to do his regular job and, because we are in the era of covid-19, inadvertently creates trepidation. It's a genre of mild startlings that always begins the same way: There was a knock at the door.
What Kumar thought was: She'd been scrupulously social distancing for months. She didn't even hug her sister when they met up for six-feet-apart walks. So, which was the crazier option: turning away this nice stranger who'd come to fix the very insect issue she'd been complaining about? Or letting him in, when he might be a carrier for a more dangerous and invisible pest?
"You have to be so prepared for any unexpected interactions now," Kumar says. "I've gotten so awkward around other people."
She didn't let him in.
"But once he left," she says, "I thought, maybe I'm a total idiot."
Knock-knock.
Who's there?
Your pandemic anxiety, warring with your internal sense of politeness.
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"Every time I hear the doorbell ring, there's a rush of adrenaline," says Cheryl Davis, a graphic designer for a Colorado company. "I freeze in my tracks."
Should she pretend not to be home? (We're all at home.) Shout through the door? Davis lives alone and she keeps, for personal protection, an aluminum bat. These days when the doorbell rings she's had fleeting thoughts about grabbing the bat. Which makes perfect sense if it's 3 a.m. and you're afraid the rustling at your door is a burglar, but zero sense, as Davis knows, if it's 2 p.m. and what you're trying to protect yourself from is a virus.
But this is where we are, fighting an invisible enemy with whatever ill-suited tools are within reach.
Viv Groskop heard a knock at the door.
Her husband answered it, and she overheard the conversation. It was a man selling fish - "freshly caught fish from North Shields," specifically, which seemed suspect: They were in London. North Shields was 300 miles away. It was morning. Had this guy caught a fish at midnight and then immediately hopped on the highway? "I do not want to cast aspersions about the origins of this fish," says Groskop, a podcast host, "but I am cynical about the origins of this fish."
What Groskop found strangest about the situation was that the man wasn't wearing a mask. Which really says something about 2020 --- that that was the strangest thing.
Anyway. Groskop didn't buy the fish. And maybe her husband shouldn't even have opened the door. "But your response is to answer it," she says. "You're already starting to answer it before you remember you're not supposed to answer it. And sometimes you still do need to sign for a package; you do need to do that dance --- how far away can I stand without you being able to reach the thing?"
Right, yes, it could be someone dropping off a necessary, non-fish delivery.
It could be someone who needed help.
"It could be someone from a public utility," offers Daniela Battistella, who lives in Ontario. "Someone reporting a gas leak."
It could be something important, is what she's saying, and that is why she, and Viv Kroskop's husband, and Cheryl Davis and Pallavi Kumar and many of us continue to open doors to strange knocks.
When Battistella heard a knock at the door, the stranger was offering landscaping services. Battistella waited until he'd stepped back before opening up --- and even then opened it only a crack. She later laughed at her own paranoia, and then wondered if it was paranoia or just reasonable caution.
An unexpected knock these days can provide a reminder of mortality, as it surely did for the healthy British gentleman who tweeted about answering his door and coming face-to-face with a team of paramedics in full, space-suit-looking protective gear who had come to take him away in an ambulance. It turned out they had the wrong address.
It can also be a reminder of all the human kindness that still exists in the world, in the form of saran-wrapped loaves of banana bread, or batches of teacher-appreciation cookies, or complete sets of the Elena Ferrante novels, or whatever other totems of connection we are leaving for each other in an oddly touching version of Ding Dong Ditch. More than ever, our doorways have become a portals for both fear and love, for the push-and-pull of loving our neighbors and also wishing they would just go away.
You know what we're going to have to do, of course. We're going to have to call the Jehovah's Witnesses.
If anyone could provide guidance for understanding door-to-door interactions right now, it would be a representative of the Christian sect known most publicly for its door-to-door ministry. So I called their headquarters in Warwick, New York.
"The two principles that motivate our ministry of knocking on doors are love of our neighbors, and the sanctity of life," explains Robert Hendriks, spokesman for the Jehovah's Witnesses United States Branch.
But as the novel coronavirus spread, it became clear to the church that the best way to now honor those sacred principles of caring for your fellow man and the sanctity of life was to ... stay home.
The J ehovah's Witnesses are not knocking on doors now. They stopped back in March.
During this downtime, Hendriks has been thinking about what it means to show love, to be a part of a community. His faith teaches him that face-to-face interactions are important; in the Bible, Jesus travels from town to town. "But if they had cellphones and Zoom back then, they would have used those, too," he says.
"Our love hasn't abated because our knocking has gone silent."
Helena Klumpp heard a knock at the door.
Waiting on her porch was an older man who said he was running for her local town council. Could he count on her vote?
Klumpp was incredulous. "Are you actually going door-to-door during the pandemic?" the Virginia attorney says she asked him. The candidate seemed confused and offended, which made his solicitation even more outrageous. He was ferrying germs around the neighborhood and he didn't seem to understand why someone would disapprove of that choice.
"The worst part is, you really question the judgment of a politician who would voluntarily go door-to-door right now," Klumpp says.
But, no, actually. The worst part is this: She'd already voted for the door knocker, long before she knew he was the kind of person to go around knocking willy-nilly on doors, via the mail-in ballot her jurisdiction had made available specifically to avoid person-to-person contact.
She told the offended man she'd already voted and didn't need a flier. And then he left. And moved along to her neighbor's house. And knocked.
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Previously:
• 04/15/20: Don't wave away frivolous pleasures. Those are also 'essential' in hard times
• 03/20/20: Pandemic, panic and toilet paper mathematics
• 01/13/20: Meghan Markle just flipped the princess fantasy on its big crowned head
• 01/08/20: In court, powerful men have a lot to gain by looking helpless
• 10/18/19: Does Mayor Pete sound assertive or ... shrill?
This time, it's not just female candidates beset by archetypes and associations
• 09/18/19: The messiness and meaning of Caroline Calloway
• 08/29/19: Andrew Luck, ultimate male?
• 08/12/19: Epstein did not deserve to keep his 'allegedlys'
• 08/02/19: The Dems' 2020 'Wife Guys'
• 01/09/19: R. Kelly, Kevin Spacey, Louis CK: How pretending to be bad boys helped them get away with being bad men