Heather Mallick: The great unmasked: you know who you are and so do I

Much of my pandemic life consists of spying on people on the streets, on transit, in shops and offices, in grocery stores and banks, in the lit-up windows of their homes when I wander past on my nightly walk.

Spying is a genre of its own. It’s random. It’s rambling. It’s hardly Dickens walking nighttime London streets to see how the poor live and spill it all out into his doorstopper novels. I am, like everyone, an unofficial secret agent.

It’s more like Harriet the Spy, from Louise Fitzhugh’s classic children’s novel, who scribbles furiously in her notebook (a handwritten column) about people she sees on her spying rounds after school. It is obsessive surveillance.

Harriet was on the subway. “What are you writing?” her friend Sport asked.

“I’m taking notes on all those people who are sitting over there.”

“Why?”

“Aw, Sport” — Harriet was exasperated — “because I’ve seen them and I want to remember them.”

These days I am Harriet the Spying on people in semi-lockdown, in this case the unmasked people of the Toronto subway, because everything is interesting and I’ve seen them and I want to remember them.

There are types.

The Men Who Don’t Mask, a.k.a. Fight Club. They are white guys, mostly thin but sometimes swollen from a diet of beef jerky and cigarettes, in worn leatherette jackets and occasionally cowboy boots, angry men you’d edge away from on the TTC even before all this. They lived hard and rotting into their 30s and 40s. Their faces are hot with rage as they look around the platform, daring someone to pipe up, “Hey, you should wear a mask.”

At which point they will do their “Taxi Driver” thing: “You talking to me? You talking to me?”

Every TTC passenger has to wear a mask, but there is no enforcement and they know it. So they are enforcing their own no-masking by making “I’m violent” faces at other people, who hush up because they aren’t stupid. It must be odd when two Men Who Don’t Mask meet on a streetcar. Everyone’s thinking, Oh get a room, you two.

The Wanderers. They are gentle, elderly, may not speak the language well, and should not have left the house alone that day (that’s me as a tourist) but their long-suffering children had to go to work so policing the relatives went out the window.

Wheee! The Wanderers will go shopping, sans mask. Before the pandemic, it was safe to put Grandma on a flight to see the grandkids and then send her back alone, knowing the other passengers would see her wandering about unable to fathom a gate change, and adopt her. Awww, we’ve all done it.

But you can’t tell a Wanderer to mask. They won’t understand. Worse, they won’t understand that you can’t accompany them unmasked all the way to Finch Station and they will think you heartless. You will think this too and bitterly regret not carrying a stash of masks for errant Wanderers.

The Proud Girl. She is an arrogant middle-class woman walking unmasked through the grocery store like royalty, far above the masked plebs. I dare you, her look says, but not like The Men Who Don’t Mask in that, come on, she won’t punch you in the face.

So you assume she was gagged during a terrible crime and cannot mask because of claustrophobia and night terrors. As the line of carts inches along, you dream up a whole Netflix series of what this woman has endured. Why, it’s amazing she had to courage to even go to Loblaws.

The Women of Mystery have masks around necks, but not on their faces. I cannot fathom this. Possibly they’re evangelicals told by their weird breakaway church out by the airport that accepting COVID-19 brings them closer to god. But that means dead, surely.

The Fumblers wear their masks beneath their noses in a My Nose is My Superpower manner. When I ask them to pull the mask up, they fumble with it unhygienically, and then it falls down again as they tell me about foggy glasses, asthma and their relentless need to sneeze.

The Fumblers haven’t thought this through. The Fumblers mean well. The Fumblers are the worst.

Heather Mallick is a Toronto-based columnist covering current affairs for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: