It happened to me for the first time mid-morning today. I was headed west on the subway to a dental appointment, sitting near one of the doors. The car was almost empty, only four of us, and I was the only one wearing a mask. A couple of stops along, one of the others got up and stood by the door, ready to get out.

“Fuck you still wearing one of those for?” the guy asked me in a low needling voice, not meeting my eyes when he spoke. Then he turned and looked at my mask, a big bearded white guy with a jolly, unintelligent face.

“Why do you care?” I answered. 

But we’d arrived at his stop and the doors opened, and all he did was give me the finger behind his back as he left.

I’ve read online about other peoples’ responses to being needled about their masks. One woman said she always answers, “Because I love you,” which she claims shuts everyone up. Another said she replies, “Because I’ve got Covid,” and lowers her mask to cough in the needler’s face. Frankly that sounds to me like the fantasy of someone wishing she had the nerve, but whatever gets you through. 

I was actually a little surprised at my own response, then realized it probably came from reading an article in this week’s New Yorker, a piece by the novelist and essayist Darryl Pinckney about writer Elizabeth Hardwick (above), who was his creative writing teacher at Barnard College during the 1970s. Pinckney, who is Black and gay, visited Hardwick for years, reading essays she suggested and writing poetry she didn’t think was any good. Sometimes he acted as her part-time secretary, forwarding her mail when she was out of town. They got to know each other well. 

What I was probably thinking about, in answering the bearded white guy, was three paragraphs toward the end of Pinckney’s article, which seems to be an excerpt from a memoir he’s going to publish in October.

“A few weeks later, Elizabeth and I went to see Balanchine’s ‘Vienna Waltzes.’ There were audible gasps in the audience. The next day, I heard from a friend at Random House that an editor went into another editor’s office to tell her what she had seen at the ballet: Lizzie Hardwick, this old white Southern woman, with a Black boy in his twenties. The editor had been tempted to take her aside and ask her, What did she think she was doing?

“I should have kept my mouth shut, but the moral high ground, a mountain meadow of attention, beckoned. Elizabeth and I were not insulted in the same way. She threatened to make a phone call to the editor in question, but it was not difficult to get her to drop it. She confessed that she worried the doormen who didn’t know us well might think we were having an affair. A white youth would have made her a predator; a Black youth announced a breakdown of identity.

“She was a white woman of distinction and I the mugger on an episode of ‘Hill Street Blues;’ she had position and I none. Yet the vulnerability was hers, not mine. What she said was Henry James’s expression, ‘social death,’ had a real meaning for Elizabeth.”

Reading that, I thought, Why did she care? 

Pinckney gives the answer: Hardwick was afraid that the gossip about their non-existent affair would lead to social death, to her being cut by society, laughed at, looked down on. Would that really have happened? I wonder how many people would have taken gossip like that very seriously in the 1970s: how many beyond Hardwick herself. They certainly wouldn’t today. Who cares if a young man and an older woman take in a ballet together? They might draw attention, but everyone wants attention these days.

Yet of course people still worry about suffering social death by gossip. There’s real death, too: the tragedy of young people committing suicide because of online meanness. But I’m an alien. I can’t help thinking, Why do people care so much about what others think? In today’s case, why did Bearded White Guy care if I was wearing a mask? I know there’s a generic answer to that question, that to some segments of our increasingly segmented society, to bearded trucker-type guys in particular, masks symbolize people who want to take away their freedom. A more individual response from this particular Bearded Guy would have been interesting to hear. Maybe he didn’t have one. Maybe all he could do was give me the finger. 

When I was very young and shy, my Aunt Margaret said to me one day, “Why do you assume people are looking at you all the time? They’re not paying any attention to you at all. People mostly think about themselves.”

This struck me deeply, and in the years since, I’ve found it to be broadly true. Then there’s the fact that when people are actually paying attention to me—I mean, people I don’t know, or barely know—I find that whatever they comments they make are quite often a backhanded description of themselves. As a writer, I can use what one character says about another to show her own personality and preoccupations. “She’s so obvious. I mean, look at the way she sucks for attention, trying to sound so intelligent. I would never be that obvious.” It’s certainly true the editor who ran around Random House gossiping about Hardwick and Pinckney was revealing more about herself than she was about them. 

I may be completely wrong on this. The gossip may indeed have hurt Hardwick’s reputation. When I get bad reviews of my work (or my new sweater), people might be hitting the nail on the head. Maybe my books miss bestsellerdom because when I’m writing them, I don’t really care what people are going to think. I don’t worry about critics, and spend no time at all trying to anticipate readers’ responses. I write what I’ve set out to write to the best of my ability. Yet it might be true that writers who care more about the response to their work harvest a larger public. Hardwick had an enviable career. And she cared deeply what people thought, at least according to what Pinckney says.

The subway was more crowded on the way home from my dental appointment. More people wore masks, although we were still in the minority. To answer Bearded Guy’s question, I wear a mask because the pandemic is still underway and masks cut down the risk of infection. The risk would be cut further if everyone wore a mask, including him. Why don’t people seem to care about that anymore?

I’m not sure I can answer that one, either.