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Brittany is a math genius. Santana is used to finding her wife mumbling through long trains of numbers and letters, trying to solve for an alphabet soup of variables. When she was on an aeronautics contract last year, it was v = H0D to focus adjustments for the Hubble scope to see past the edge of new galaxies. When she was tapped to revamp the Netflix algorithm, it was O(n log n). No matter how complex or obscure the equation, there’s always a moment when she blinks and surfaces, smiles brightly at Santana, and says something like, “Thai is the food of the future. It’s already tomorrow there.”
It’s a dreary February afternoon when Santana comes home and Brittany doesn’t smile. She’s building a model for infection rates, exponential spread, R+. Her eyes are wide and watery.
“Baby,” she says. “It’s gonna get really bad.”
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Santana trusts Brittany more than anyone else on the entire planet. They stock up on food and essentials. Masks and hand sanitizer. They brace themselves. Prepare as best they can.
Then the pandemic sweeps through the city, and Santana realizes that nothing could have fully prepared her for this. The sirens that never stop wailing. The hospital ship in the harbor. The terror that grips every day like a vise, the panic that rises every time someone coughs, even over the phone.
She sobs when Broadway goes dark. She just pitched a queer version of West Side Story to the Public. They were in talks to have her direct.
Brittany finds her curled up on the bed, sobbing. Hopelessness is too small a word for how she feels. It’s as if everything good has gone dark along with the theaters.
“I know this is temporary. It isn’t forever. But it feels so fucking endless.”
Brittany rubs her back. She puts her lips against Santana’s ear, kissing it lightly before she speaks.
“It’s really hard right now. It is. But we’re gonna get through this. We can do hard things.” She pauses. “And I don’t even mean that silicone fish strap on.”
Santana snort laughs through her tears.
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Brittany sets up a weekly Zoom call with Kurt and Blaine and Rachel.
She’s the one who sends the invites and reminders. Who always starts the call brightly with a Romper Room style hello to each of them.
In quarantine, Kurt and Blaine have become baking gays.
“Oooh,” Kurt squeals, “You have to meet Pierre!”
“You found a Parisian street hustler with a heart of gold to form a thruple?”
“Oui, oui, mon ami,” Rachel sings.
“Wait - Rachel, your screen is frozen,” Santana says, before she can launch into a mash up of Voulez Vous Couchez Avec Moi. She can see Rachel moving around, fiddling with her tablet. “Or did your face freeze into that fly catching gape?”
“Piere is our sourdough starter,” Blaine says, smiling as Kurt prances over with the jar.
Inevitably, they burst into a “spontaneous” mash up of Spoonful of Sugar / Pour Some Sugar on Me, twirling and playing air guitar in matching chef’s coats.
Brittany whistles and woo-hoos the loudest when they’re done.
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Some days Santana sits at the window with an old Cheerios megaphone.
“No one wants to see your weak chin!”
“Wear a damn mask, you selfish plague badger!”
“¡Tu corazón es tan feo como tu cara, y tu cara parece el culo de un mono!”
“You! Noodle Beard! You should cover that mess up before a confused seagull tries to mate with it!”
Brittany comes up behind her and wraps her arms around Santana’s waist.
“Snix, whatcha doing?”
“My civic duty,” Santana harrumphs, as Brittany gently takes the megaphone out of her hand.
“My turn,” she announces, as she leans out the window.
“Hey!” she shouts. “Are those your lips or is a ferret farting on your face?”
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She calls Abuela once a week.
Pretends to have a question about the right spice mix for habichuelas con dulce.
Smiles as she listens to her rant about long ago neighbors who used allspice, which finishes with abuela pretending to spit on their graves.
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Brittany snuggles Santana awake, then lets her stay in bed as she pulls the covers off herself and starts making breakfast. She comes back with coffee and a cereal mix.
“I call it Lucky Loops. It has some Raisin Bran in there, too, but the Fruit Loops and the marshmallows are the stars.”
Santana takes a few bites. It’s like an extremely sugary trail mix, but it’s not bad.
“Did I hear the phone earlier?”
“It was Evelyn. She’s almost out of food for Francesca, so Lord Tubbington has agreed to share.” Brittany drops her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “I had to pretend she was the Duchess of Fluffonia, and we were sending a tribute, so stick to that story if he asks.”
Santana has to think about which one Evelyn is. Brittany knows every single neighbor in the building. She treats living in the Big Apple like it’s a slightly larger version of a small town. She’s always smiling at people, saying hi in the hallway, small talking in an easy way that leads to completely unexpected pieces of information. Mrs. DeMarco designs jigsaw puzzles for a living. Mr. Jeffers in 4C spent fifteen years as a human cannonball in a traveling circus. She’s endlessly happy to take care of your pets if you’re out of town or having hip surgery, which puts her on a first name basis with Atticus, the beagle mix in 3A, Merle the Persian kitten in 1D, and Barry the goldfish in 2D. And Francesca, the newly noble white fuzzball, who Santana is pretty sure lives in 5B.
It starts small, with a few cans of cat food on the doorstep. But it builds quickly, like the notes of a melody, as Brittany starts offering to coordinate pharmacy runs and grocery deliveries and setting boxes of fresh fruit and rolls of toilet paper outside people’s doors. Santana organizes the spreadsheet, and starts a Slack channel for people to request help or offer assistance.
The Bartleys in 2A decide to leave the city, head to their vacation home in Wyoming. Brittany talks them into letting the Douglas family use their apartment for a little extra breathing room for their two teenage daughters. Mr. Williams on the first floor heads upstate. Brittany talks him into subletting to an au pair - aka an out of work actress friend of Santana’s - who helps watch quite a few of the kids in the building once the schools close.
Santana flops into bed, after trudging back from the fifth floor to drop off balloons and funfetti cupcakes to help Jimmy Valentine celebrate his eighth birthday tomorrow.
“Thanks for doing that,” Brittany says, her lips against Santana’s neck. “I know you hate him. And everyone else who isn’t me.”
Santana smiles, in spite of everything. “I might hate everyone with the power of a thousand suns. But I love you with the power of a gazillion.”
“That’s not a real number, you know.”
“It is to me.”
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After the third month, Rachel stops mentioning her husband during the Zoom calls.
Six months in, it’s clear the walk in closet in the background is half empty.
His clothes are gone, and so is he.
“A toxic togetherness overdose,” Santana theorizes. Berry 24/7 is a lot. Still, she makes a mental note to throw a slushie all over his fancy suit, if they’re ever allowed to be within six feet of other people again.
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They never used to spend this much time at home.
There are days when it makes Santana feel like a caged animal, like the walls are closing in on her.
Then there are days when she finds herself almost enjoying the time to nest. To finally organize the drawers in the kitchen. To cuddle on the couch and binge watch mindless shows.
There are days when the afternoon stretches out with sweet lady kisses and Brittany’s body draped over hers and it feels luxurious to watch the sun move across the room without having to hurry off to an audition.
They’re still in their first apartment, a one bedroom, which seemed expansive when they moved in and had nothing but dreams and Santana’s diner salary to cover them. They’ve never had time to move. Or the inclination. They’ve worn themselves into the grooves of this place. Their white kitchen cabinets with the creaky doors. Lord Tubbington’s estate, aka their windowsill where his pillow sits in the sunbeam. Their bathroom with the antique tub that takes up two thirds of the space.
Now there are times when Brittany has to be on a conference call about the math for a new predictive index for the Japanese markets at the same time that Santana is giving a voice lesson online and Santana fantasizes about a co-op in Brooklyn Heights. She watches HGTV and imagines gutting a three bedroom fixer upper in the Bronx. All this while simultaneously worrying about how long her residuals and virtual gigs are going to be enough to cover her share of the rent.
She brings up her concerns one night, after they’ve watched Hamilton for the fifth time this month. “Are we going to be okay, if I’m a little short on the rent next month?”
Brittany is busy balancing a circus peanut on her nose, trying to get it to fall into her mouth, so she’s a little distracted as she just announces, “We don’t do that anymore.”
“Really? Does the landlord know?”
Brittany successfully snaps the circus peanut in her mouth, and gives Santana her full attention.
“I bought the building last week.”
“You bought a building?! This building? Our building? How?!”
Brittany shrugs. “Well, Queso Por Dos is in syndication. And I make bank for all my math geniusness. Plus, the stock market is just numbers and wild guesses, and I’m really great at both of those. So we have like, plenty of money. A lot of people are unemployed right now, and I called Andrew to see if I could pay a few months of rent for everyone - and it turns out he’s under water from a bunch of Airbnbs and he said if I had a lot of cash on hand, did I want to buy the building?”
“Did you buy anything else? All of Lima Heights, maybe? A private island in Greece to run a cat rescue on?”
“That is my retirement plan, but no. Just the building. And some shoes. And a cactus.”
“Well, I respect your financial prowess. But, maybe we could talk about it before you make any other major real estate purchases?”
“Sure!” Brittany agrees. “I mean, I would never buy an Airbnb or anything. It’s like, come on. All BnBs have air.”
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Rachel sings a tearful rendition of All By Myself that turns into a wine soaked mash up with You Oughta Know. Santana privately thinks she deserves to be canonized for listening to the whole soggy saga without muting her.
Kurt and Blaine are mother henning so hard, they’re practically clucking with sympathy.
“I never liked him,” Kurt insists.
“He had that thing with his eyes,” Blaine agrees.
“Eat some ice cream,” Brittney suggests.
“Drown your sorrows,” Santana adds.
“Or drown your husband,” Brittany suggests. “In ice cream. It’ll melt away and be the perfect crime.”
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Santana tries not to be bothered about not working.
Especially since Brittany is working so hard. She’s up at all hours, working on the math to model the energy needs of an all solar city.
Santana takes out her frustrations on the housework, scrubbing the kitchen floor within an inch of its life. Snapping the rag that she’s dusting with against the windowsill. She’s like an angry queer Latina version of Donna Reed. She makes spaghetti and meatballs for dinner, violently pounding the ingredients together with her bare hands before rolling them into shape and smacking them against the wax paper.
Brittany gives her stormy mood space, right up until Santana puts dinner on the table.
Then she noses a meatball across her plate, Lady and the Tramp style. She beams at Santana, a dot of pasta sauce on her nose.
It feels like the moment the clouds part and the sun breaks through.
Santana smiles back.
Then picks out the longest noodle she can find for them to slurp together.
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Brittany wants her to keep working on her West Side Story idea.
She hasn’t said so outright, but before bed she swans out of the bathroom in her bathrobe, singing her own version of, “I Feel Pretty.”
I feel pretty, oh so pretty!
I feel pretty and witty and bi!
And I pity
Any girl who isn’t me tonight!
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Rachel answers the Zoom call from bed. Her hair’s a mess. She’s smiling in a way that looks slightly crazed.
Santana raises an eyebrow at Brittany, who leans forward to study the screen more carefully.
She has her nose pressed entirely against the camera when they hear Kirk shriek.
“What is that?!”
“It’s a nostril, Blanche. Or did you catch sight of your incipient man bun in the mirror?”
“Number One, you did not just insult my quarantine hair,” his voice pitches up into a near screech. “It was either this or bleached tips, and you know that! Number Two, I was referring to the Lunya bathrobe poking out from underneath the third pillow on the right side of Rachel’s bed.”
“Who are you? The night fashion police?” Rachel mutters, hurriedly shoving the robe out of sight.
“No, we’re the Rainbow Flag Flagging Detective Gaygency,” Santana declares. “And we never forget a bathrobe that Quinn’s been thirst trapping in for weeks.”
“Are you trapped?” Brittany asks, concerned. “Like, under her booty?”
“Will you just shut up, and let us do the big reveal?” Rachel sighs.
The big reveal turns out to be a mash up of It Had to Be You and Closer to Fine, with Quinn swanning out of the actual closet.
Santana rolls her eyes, but she and Brittany join in, harmonizing on the chorus.
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Santana calls Abuela to make sure she got the grocery delivery she arranged.
She recently signed up for facebook so she can watch the livestream of daily Mass. She still dresses up for it, even when she’s watching from the couch.
“Did you know Queso Por Dos has a webpage?” Abuela asks, as if she’s made a novel discovery. “I spent all last week liking all of the posts. And I can share them with my friends.”
Santana feels tears unexpectedly welling up, but she swallows hard instead of letting them out.
“Liar. Since when do you have friends? You always told me friends are for losers who have no family.”
“They are not so much friends as a bunch of bajos I like to make jealous. You understand me.”
“Si. Si,” Santana says fondly. “I do.”
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Some days Santana flops onto the bed and lays there face down.
The pandemic has been raging for almost a year, and she’s hit a wall. Hard.
“It’s all of this,” she tells her wife. “It feels so fucking endless.”
Brittany takes her hand, and Santana lets herself be pulled upright. .
“Come on,” Brittany says, showing Santana some baby tomatoes on her phone screen. “Help me pick some good seeds.” She’s thinking about doing a miniature garden this spring. Window boxes. Maybe some hanging baskets on the fire escape.
This is one of the things she loves best about her wife.
Brittany always plans for sunshine.
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Brittany is on a conference call that’s dragging into its fifth hour. Her eyes are glazing over. It looks like she’s asleep sitting up.
Some math man on the other end of the line is droning on, in a thick German accent.
Brittany has him on speaker, so Santana has clocked the last three times he called her Breanna.
The fourth time, Santana intercedes.
“It’s Brittany, bitch!”
Brittany joins her in making elaborate staticky noises for a full two minutes before they hang up.
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They’re eating dinner as Santana rants about casting for the show, which is back on, in whatever form the Public can figure out. Maybe virtual. Maybe outdoors. But at least it’s going to be something. Kurt and Blaine are revamping the lyrics, if they survive constantly elbowing each other off the piano bench.
“Rachel doesn’t want to audition,” Santana tells her. “She says she’s offer only.”
“You know you want her in the show.”
“Yes, but I also want to complain about it! She used the phrase ‘queer sensibility.’ And she’s wearing so much rainbow merch it looks like a Care Bear threw up in her closet.”
“I bet it did,” Brittany says, seriously. “They’re terrible drunks.”
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Brittany believes in singing to the plants. Every evening she goes out to consult the strawberries to find out if they have any requests.
Tonight, they want to hear “Wildflowers,” and who is Santana to argue with the strawberries.
You belong among the wildflowers
You belong in a boat out at sea
Sail away, kill off the hours
You belong somewhere you feel free.
Their voices rise and fall in harmony, an instinct born of long practice.
Run away, find you a lover
Go away somewhere all bright and new
I have seen no other
Who compares with you.
They sit down and Brittany rests her head on Santana’s shoulder. The sun is setting, casting the buildings and the concrete in a soft orange glow.
Abuela had her second vaccine appointment this month. It feels like there’s finally a light at the end of the tunnel, even if it might still turn out to be a train.
“There were days,” Santana says, “when I had no idea how we were going to make it out of this.”
“We’ll do it,” Brittany replies. “The same way we do everything. Together.”