Pt 1 of 2
Georgians eating, drinking, touching and throwing caution to the wind
ALPHARETTA, Ga. - The sky was blue, the sun was rising, and as the death toll from the coronavirus continued to soar across much of America, the fountains switched on in Avalon, a development of restaurants and shops in a wealthy corner of suburban Atlanta. It was time for life to resume, Georgia's governor had decided, so a masked worker swept the threshold of Chanel. A clerk brushed off windows at Fab'rik that had been gathering dust. A gardener fluffed pink roses in planters along the sidewalks, where signs on doors said what so many had been waiting to hear.
"Open," read one.
"Welcome back!" read another.
"Yay!!" read another, as a great American experiment got underway in a place promising "the luxury of the modern South" with none of the death.
Versions of this pledge are now being made all over the country as stay-home orders are being lifted, businesses are opening, and millions of Americans now find themselves free to make millions of individual decisions about how to calibrate their sense of civic duty with their pent-up desires for the old routines and indulgences of life.
In this grand gamble, Georgia has gone first, with Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, dismissing public health experts who've warned that opening too soon could cause a catastrophic surge of deaths, placing his faith instead in the residents of Georgia to make up their own minds about what risks and sacrifices they were willing to accept.
"God bless," he'd said as he gave the order to reopen hair salons, nail salons, massage parlors, tattoo shops, restaurants and retailers across the state. That order would be supported in the days ahead with data on an official Georgia website claiming that confirmed cases in the state's hardest-hit counties were in steady decline since the reopening. The claim would turn out to be erroneous, and Kemp would issue an apology, but such details were not on many minds in Avalon, where a middle-age man calibrated his way into a Starbucks, deciding to stand mask-free before a 60-year-old barista nervous on her first day back at work.
"Venti dark with cream and 12 sugars?" he breathed cheerfully, then headed outside into a glorious spring day.
It was all so orderly in these first post-lockdown moments in Avalon, a place that had epitomized the rewards of upward mobility since opening in 2014, a date chiseled into the stone pillar at the entrance. Avalon had a long boulevard with a green central plaza. It had fountains. It had wide sidewalks and trees strung with lights. It had fresh impatiens and sculpted shrubs and music floating out of hidden speakers, a dreamscape of suburban aspiration that was what many middle-class Americans meant when they talked about wanting to restart their lives.
Now there were signs here and there that read "better together, apart." There were green one-way arrows painted on the sidewalks in anticipation of a surge in foot traffic. And soon, the voice of Frank Sinatra was drifting out of the bushes and into the cool morning as the walkers began arriving, resuming their regular loops past the glass-front shops offering a semblance of pre-virus life - new iPhones in the Apple store, new cars in the Tesla dealership, new mauve pillows at West Elm and new white jeans at a store called Free People, which was how people were trying to feel.
"The future is bright," read the words on one window.
"Do not enter if you have a fever or other symptoms of Covid-19," read another, and a woman and her husband breezed past it into Anthropologie.
"You're open!" she said to the clerk.
"Welcome in," the clerk said through a mask as the woman, not in a mask, skipped the hand sanitizer at the front and wandered through the racks, touching a yellow sundress here, a striped sweater there, smelling the lavender candles and after a few minutes, walking outside.
"I just want to feel normal, I guess," she said.
"It's a personal choice," said her husband, mask-free in shorts and a polo. "If you want to stay home, stay home. If you want to go out, you can go out. I'm not in the older population. If I was to get it now, I've got a 90% chance of getting cured. Also, I don't know anybody who's got it."
They strolled hand-in-hand down the sidewalk as "I Love Vegas" played through the speakers, untroubled by the reality that Fulton County, where Avalon is located, had more than 3,600 coronavirus cases and 151 deaths, numbers that were growing even as people began sitting down for a glass of wine at Cru. Most of those cases were in the part of the county closer to Atlanta - the poorer and more heavily African American part - which was not the typical demographic of Avalon, where shoppers tended to be wealthy and white. At a shoe store called Marmi, Debbie McGuiness, a clerk, stared out of the window at the people whose pandemic calibrations seemed so different from her own.
"I live an hour away and was driving in this morning, only me on the road, and I was thinking, 'Am I doing the right thing?' " she said through a mask. "And you see some out there jogging, no mask on. I think their confidence is rising."
Georgians eating, drinking, touching and throwing caution to the wind
