Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket

by Hilma Wolitzer

  He took the towel and began to dry my back.

  “I think I know how you feel,” he said, “but you can’t mother the whole world.”

  “No,” I said. “I guess I can’t, can I?” I turned around and threw myself awkwardly into his arms.

  (1966)

  Waiting for Daddy

  “Tootsie,” my grandmother used to say, “he isn’t coming back.” She said it often, the way one repeats a popular slogan. She seemed very intuitive then, because I hardly asked about my father. Somehow she had read my mind: I believed that he would come back.

  There is something terrific about not knowing your father because it opens up possibilities that just aren’t there with a real mass in your mother’s bed, with a father who hangs his coat in the closet at night as proof of his whereabouts. My inventions of him were generous and he was invariably handsome and misjudged. Oh, how he came back again and again—as salesmen, doctors, soldiers. His voice was the voice of every radio announcer, and I would stare into the orange moon of the radio dial and will him into knowing that I was there, sweet with forgiveness.

  “He’s not coming back,” my grandmother whispered, and her words were followed by a haze of smoke from her Lucky Strike, like the trail after skywriting.

  In those vaporous days we moved often, and I worried that he would be unable to find us, and that even if he could, everything and everyone would be changed beyond the seduction that memory can work. As I grew older I began to question my mother but she seemed to suffer from a loss of time. “He just vanished,” my mother explained. It was a whole era about which I knew nothing, when men did that sort of thing, slipping away with a certain ease that eluded the law and feelings of guilt.

  “You don’t know anything about it,” my grandmother said, and I thought that she was probably right. Yet I wanted to know, and I watched my mother, that blonde, skateless Sonja Henie, sitting in her blue dress on the edge of her bed, perched nervously as if she were on a moving vehicle. Blue was her favorite color and she and my grandmother always spent lots of time assessing other favorites—favorite vocalists, favorite flowers, favorite songs. I wondered: If Russ Columbo is her favorite vocalist, what is his favorite color, and Fred Astaire’s and Leslie Howard’s, and would they all love my mother in her blue dress? And would my father love her, too, if they could begin again somewhere in some other, more favorable, time?

  My mother and my grandmother seemed to have no need for men. They supported us modestly with work they did in the kitchen. Sometimes they typed addresses on envelopes, facing each other at rented typewriters in the style of those twin-piano virtuosos who were so popular in the forties. They did whatever was available—pasting feathers on Kewpie dolls, stuffing circulars into those typed envelopes, or cementing silver-and-gilt hearts to greeting cards. Our wishes speed across the miles, we wish you happiness on your day, God bless your brand-new baby boy. Their kitchen was full of piecework and vague hope for the future.

  Sometimes I made use of the fathers of friends. Not that those selfish girls were really willing to share. But there were times when I sat next to real fathers in movie theaters, with the exquisite texture of a man’s coat brushing my arm. And I listened to the sounds of their voices with the happiness of a dog that has no use for words but is desperately alert to tone and pitch and timbre.

  I began to understand about the injustices in a world where loyal and willing girls were abandoned and others, faithless and disagreeable, were not. Nothing was fair—certainly not the burden of dreams.

  The dreams of my father began to change. They became sad visions of lost men on maritime ships or men huddled in bad neighborhoods, the poor clucks who die in war movies, who get kayoed in minor boxing events. Take that, I thought, and that and that. Oh, I’d punish him, see that he was lonely cuddling some tired woman in a furnished room.

  All the time I kept changing right along with my conclusions. I looked into mirrors and I assessed myself in the way that a soldier assesses his weapons: fair skin, light hair, and the intensity that I felt burning through my pallor. I think that boys saw this as a kind of wildness, something hot and exciting. They pursued me and girls did not.

  My mother and grandmother, who watched the hair-combing, mistook it for vanity. They approved. Vanity in a girl of my age was cute and appealing.

  In high school, I met a boy named Arnie Ford and it wasn’t hard to fall into step with that part of my life. “Baby baby,” Arnie said. “Baby baby,” with a compelling finger-snapping rhythm. I was drawn into the back seat of his father’s green Chevy, and the texture of those seat covers will stay in my head forever.

  Whenever I see teenagers walking, hooked together in that peculiar meshing way—arms looped around waists, necks, shoulders—I remember Arnie, who was first. It seemed strange that I could do all those things with him, discover all those sensations and odors and that new voice that came from the dark pit of my throat (Don’t—oh yes, oh God) and that my mother and grandmother didn’t know. In their world there could be mingling without coupling, kisses without tongues. They sat at the kitchen table earning our living. I walked past them, struck with experience, and they yoo-hooed and advised me to take some milk and cupcakes before I went to sleep.

  Lying in bed, I thought about the slow passage of sperm—the mere chance of it—the rendezvous of sperm and egg like some unlikely event. I fell asleep trying to remember the beginning of myself. Later I awoke, startled, and I could hear my grandmother coughing her cigarette cough in the other room and my mother murmuring to the movie stars in her dreams. Then I remembered Arnie and the way he clicked on the overhead light in the Chevy to check for stains on the seats. I shielded my eyes against the intrusive glare and I didn’t look at him.

  “Okay,” he announced. “All clear,” as if I cared about that car.

  “Shut off the light,” I said, and Arnie laughed. “Hey, do you know I love you?” he said, and he turned the motor over. The smell of the exhaust overwhelmed the odors of our bodies, and then he took me home.

  “What do you and Arnie talk about?” my mother asked once. She knew what we talked about—in her mind’s eye she saw Mickey Rooney and Deanna Durbin movies and balloons of innocent conversation floating over our heads like halos.

  But I don’t remember too many things that Arnie and I actually said to each other beyond the outcries of sexual discovery. We were like two earnest workmen, intent on getting the job done. “I love you,” he said. I remember that because he said it over and over again with liturgical zeal, fogging the windows of the car with his breath. If he said it for my sake, he didn’t have to. Just his presence, the evidence of his shirt, his shoes, his comb, eased a longing I could never describe.

  I told Arnie that my father was dead. It seemed to be a sensible lie at the time and it gave me a chance to consider that possibility. A dead father was a father punished beyond mercy. A dead father evaded my illusions with the cunning of a con man. What more could I do to him? I decided to let him live and I would let Arnie love me up in the dark. I would let my mother and grandmother be the way they wanted to be, too.

  But the weight of judgment and choice became too much for me. My pallor became ghostly, my hands trembled at simple tasks. I thought: if my father were here, he would be my defender and my strength. But there was no one to protect me from my own bad decisions, no one to lead me from the back seats of cars.

  Slowly, in the fixed pattern of my life, the groping and touching of hands and mouths became dogged ritual.

  “Relax, Sandy, oh baby, just relax,” Arnie begged. I could see the silver shadow of perspiration on his forehead. “I love you,” he insisted, but it wasn’t any use.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered.

  “You’re just in a bad mood,” he said hopefully, and he patted my knee and took me home.

  “The lovebirds!” my grandmother cried out when she saw us. A cigarette hung from the corner of her mouth and a small burst of sparks fell to the table.
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br />   Arnie allowed his mouth to move into a little smile. He was not yet used to the ironies of life.

  I sent him home and then I went into the dark retreat of my bedroom and lay across the bed with my clothes on. I could hear the shuffling rustle of cards from the kitchen where my mother and grandmother were playing rummy. I was tired. I won’t think, I said to myself. I won’t think about anything. But I thought of my father and that I would never know him, and my heart banged shut on the knowledge. I thought of my mother and I wanted to blame her, but she never believed she had driven him away. It was the decade, it was the climate, it was their astrological destiny.

  I stood up and went into the kitchen.

  “Knock with four,” my grandmother said.

  “You got me,” my mother answered.

  “Listen,” I said, “did you ever hear from my father?”

  “But he vanished!” my mother cried out.

  “He was somewhere,” I persisted. “He had to be somewhere.”

  “Look, he disappeared,” my grandmother said severely. I was a sadistic playmate, bullying her blameless child. “It was different then. He disappeared from the face of the earth.”

  They exchanged pleased smiles. They were in love with the drama of their words. Gone! Vanished! My father’s absence was a religious phenomenon.

  “What did you do with his clothes?” I said.

  They stared at me.

  “What did you do with my father’s clothes?”

  “I don’t remember,” my mother said.

  “I mean did you burn them or did you give them away? Did you sell them?”

  “Sa-ay,” my grandmother began, threatening. She half-rose from her chair.

  But my mother still sat there and there were tears in her eyes. “It was such a long time ago,” she said.

  “It’s all right,” I said. “Forget it.”

  “The styles were different then,” she said, and her brow folded.

  “Sure, how could you remember?” I squeezed her arm.

  “Vests, double-breasted suits,” she said.

  “Yes.” I leaned against the sink and shut my eyes.

  “Do you feel okay?” my grandmother asked.

  I opened my eyes and smiled at them. “Me? I feel great,” I said. I went to the window and looked out at the starless night until I found him. Then I let him go, out of that furnished room, out of that bad neighborhood. I returned him to a decent bed, shooting his seed like comets into the universe.

  (1971)

  Photographs

  We were married in those dark ages before legalized abortion. I know that’s no excuse. There were always illegal abortions. But my social circles were limited and unsophisticated. The doctors in my life were of the old-fashioned, tongue-depressor variety, who probably accepted kickbacks on unnecessary, but lawful, hysterectomies.

  I knew vaguely about worldlier women who flew down to Puerto Rico and other tropical places to have safe, painless surgery and probably even had time to get in a little sun and to dance the carioca. But I had never even been in an airplane. And the stories I knew by heart were of hapless girls in the back rooms of drugstores after hours, whose blood came in fountains; poor butchered girls whose parts were packaged and distributed among the trash cans of the city.

  My mother dreamed of being a grandmother someday. It appeared to be her goal in life. She wanted to wear a gold charm bracelet dangling with symbols that commemorated the births of babies. She wanted an accordion folder of photographs, that first-class ticket to the society of grandmothers.

  I was born late in her life and was an only child, having denied passage to any future brothers and sisters. My mother claimed that a few months after I was born, everything had simply fallen out of her one day. As a young, misinformed girl, I had pictured the worst: a giblet tangle of fallopian tubes, ovaries, and the little pear-shaped uterus lying useless on the bathroom floor. But first I had been born, dropped in agony like an oversized egg from a disconsolate chicken. And, way behind schedule, my mother was impatient for the natural progression of events.

  When I was twenty, my goal was to lie meshed with Howard forever. Sex, which I had discovered like everyone else, in the misery of childhood, had finally advanced to the ultimate stage of partnership. And what a partner I had! I recognized with awe the glorious territory we had discovered together in such blind and blundering exploration.

  Later, lying in bed alone, “in trouble” already, I kept a wad of Kleenex and a flashlight for undercover checking. Nothing. There was probably still a chance that I was mistaken, or that my body was only giving me some punitive suspense. As I had assured Howard, it was my safe time, and our pleasure didn’t have to be deferred for the sake of caution. Of course, he had hardly waited anyway, had barely missed a stroke.

  I checked again, the flashlight locked between my knees. Nothing.

  Howard advised hot baths. He lent me weights to lift. We ran together, forty laps around a school track in a neutral neighborhood, and then collapsed, panting, in the high grass behind it. All the evidence was in.

  “What do you want to do?” he asked.

  “You know,” I said. “What about you?”

  His eyes shifted restlessly, and I imagined my mother’s pride and joy, a slender gelatinous thread riding the sewer currents of Queens.

  “Are you afraid, Paulie?” Howard asked, and I knew then that he was.

  I made him say it anyway. “Of what?” I asked, forcing his glance.

  “Of … I don’t know … of complications.”

  “Aren’t you?” I said. What a mess it could be! I concentrated, forcing terrible mental pictures at him, Daily News headlines, even threw in some war atrocities for good measure.

  He shuddered, receiving my message. I couldn’t help thinking that men whose mothers have established an early habit of guilt in them are probably the easiest.

  “So that’s it,” Howard said, and we were engaged.

  I threw my arms around him, sealing the bond. “It will be wonderful,” I promised. “We’ll have a wonderful life together. We’ll have terrific good luck. I can feel it.”

  He hugged me back, but all I could really feel were the doombeat of his heart and the collapsing walls of his will.

  I planned to go on a diet right after the baby was born. But for now I was growing, stretching my skin to translucency, to an iridescent glow.

  Howard assured me that he loved me this way, statuesque he called it.

  “Petite is going out of style,” my mother said.

  “Ah, beautiful,” Howard murmured in the husky voice of sex, as he burrowed in.

  But I’m nobody’s fool. On Sundays I saw him look through the magazine section of the Times and pause with wistful concentration at those slender models in the brassiere ads.

  There is desire beyond mere lust in that, I thought. He might have looked at girls in centerfolds instead, at the opulent ones who were there to inspire a different and simpler kind of longing. If, in his secret heart, he wanted me to be slim and trim, I would be. The women’s magazines were full of easy formulas I could follow: The Thinking Woman’s Diet, The Drinking Woman’s Diet, The Shrinking Woman’s Diet. It would be a cinch.

  But in the meantime I kept growing while, inside my bulk, the future me stepped daintily, waiting for release.

  The baby grew, too, in its confinement, pulsed and sounded its limits.

  And Howard was madly in love with it. It was a romance he had never experienced before. He had always had women, of course, and they still sought him out. I watched, narrow-eyed, as new ones came up, threatened, and disappeared. But Howard was inviolate. He was a family man now. And I was the monument to his new life.

  “I’m going to diet when this is all over. Become très chic.”

  “No,” he protested. “Don’t.”

  I did a little pirouette. “This stuff is going to fall off like snakeskins.”

  “Don’t lose my favorite parts,” Howard warned. />
  We went to visit other couples who nested in their apartments. Judy and Lenny Miller had a little girl named Roberta. Her toys were always in evidence; a vaporizer was her constant bedside companion.

  Howard and I tiptoed in to admire her. When she was awake she was a fresh kid, the kind who screams whenever she speaks, and who answers civil, friendly questions with, “No, silly,” or, “No, stupid,” a precocious kid who makes nose-picking a public performance.

  But now the steam curled her hair into heartbreaking tendrils. The hiss of the vaporizer and the sweet rush of her breath. We whispered in this shrine, made reverent by the miracle.

  When we tiptoed back to the living room, I thought, Howard doesn’t even feel trapped. He actually wants a baby, wants this whole homely scene for his own. And I hadn’t really trapped him anyway, had I? Isn’t the sperm the true aggressor, those little Weissmullers breaststroking to their destiny? Or is the egg the bully, after all, waiting in ambush, ready to mug the first innocent stray?

  “Who really did this?” I once asked Howard.

  But he thought it was a theological poser. “God, I suppose, if you believe in Him,” he said.

  We sat in the Millers’ living room among the debris and leavings of playtime. Howard rested a proprietary hand on my belly. All conversation came back to the inevitable subject.

  “My doctor said he never saw anything like it,” Judy said. “He had real tears streaming down his face when he held Roberta up.”

  It might have been sweat, I thought. Motherhood could make some women whitewash anything. She talked about the natural childbirth course they had taken, where she had learned to breathe the right way during labor, so that she was able to be a really active member of the delivery team.

  Lenny had been there, too. Now he picked up a bronzed baby shoe and allowed us to observe the wonder of its size in the width of his palm. “It was a beautiful experience,” Lenny said. “Most of the time we’re working against nature in the births of our children. It’s hypocrisy to keep the father outside, a stranger at the gates, so to speak.”