Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket

by Hilma Wolitzer

  What a metaphor!

  He advised Howard not to be that notorious slacker, the biological father who drops his seed and runs. Lenny had been right there, rubbing Judy’s back, speaking encouragement, talking and stroking his child into the world.

  I could sense Howard’s excitement.

  Then Judy brought out the photographs. We had seen them before, of course, but it seemed appropriate to see them once again, at that moment. Lenny was careful to hand them to us in proper chronological sequence. Judy, huge, horizontal on the delivery table. Himself, the masked robber of innocence, smiling at her with his eyes. The doctor, glistening with sweat/tears, his hand upward and lost to view.

  Oh, God, what was I doing?

  Judy, grimacing, clenching, contracting, all her agonies reflected in the other faces.

  “See?” Lenny pointed out. “I was in labor, too.” Then, “Here she comes!” he said, handing us the one with the emerging head, a small, bloodied, and determined ball. Judy’s own head was lifted in an effort to watch, and she was smiling.

  Then, triumph! The whole family united at last on this shore. Mortal, tender, exquisite. These were winning photos—there was no denying that. Howard was speechless with emotion.

  “I thought I was dying, that’s all,” my mother said. “You were ripping me to shreds.”

  My father left the room.

  “He can’t stand to hear about it,” my mother whispered. “They feel guilty, you know.”

  “Howard and I are taking a course,” I said.

  “A course! What are they going to teach you—how to scream? You were feet first,” she said accusingly.

  But I wasn’t put off by her. She had lied about everything else most of my life. “God helps those who help themselves,” she used to say. And, “All cats are gray in the dark.” That, about lovemaking!

  Howard and I went to a class where I learned to breathe. We saw films on the development of the embryo and the benefits of nursing. Howard read aloud from a book on prenatal care, and I took a vitamin supplement that came in pink-and-blue capsules.

  I learned to pant, little doglike huffs and puffs for the last stages of labor. I practiced smiling into the bathroom mirror while I panted, in imitation of Judy’s radiant Madonna smile of the last photograph.

  We had decided against delivery room photographs for ourselves. Everything would be recorded perfectly in the darkroom of the heart.

  Howard and I cherished our new vocabulary. Term. I was carrying to full term. Dilation. Presentation. Lactation. Gorgeous words from a loftier language.

  Our lovemaking took on the added excitement of imposed restraint. “Are you all right?” Howard would ask over and over. What a paradox—to be so powerful and fragile at once! Soon we would have to abstain completely for a while and restore our previous virtue.

  We played with names for the baby, from the biblical to the historical to the mythical. Nothing seemed good enough or suitably original.

  We waited. I went for monthly checkups. Other pregnant women in the doctor’s waiting room and I smiled knowingly at one another. We found ourselves in a vast and ancient sorority without the rituals of pledging. Reducing us to girlish dependence, Dr. Marvin Kramer called us by our first names. We called him Dr. Kramer.

  Opening my legs on the examining table while his cheerless nurse laid a sheet across my knees for the sake of discretion, I could just make out the crown of his head, halo-lit by his miner’s lamp. But I could hear his voice as it tunneled through me. “You’re coming along fine, Paulette. Good girl, good girl.”

  Well, if you can’t be good, be careful. That wasn’t one of my mother’s chestnuts. But it could have been. I had been careless anyway, lost forever to the common sense of practical advice. So many future destinies, irrevocably set. It was astonishing.

  “I can hardly move anymore,” I complained to Howard one day. He crawled to a corner of the bed and folded himself to give me the most possible room.

  The gestation of a brooding elephant is almost two years. Mindless hamsters pop out in sixteen days.

  “It will be over soon, Paulie,” Howard said, and he reached across the bed and touched my hair.

  Then what? I wondered.

  “Do the breathing,” Howard suggested.

  “Take gas when the time comes,” my mother said. “Have I ever led you astray?”

  Judy and Lenny came to visit with Roberta, who whined and tap-danced on our coffee table.

  “I’m going on five hundred calories a day,” I said, “as soon as I drop this load.”

  “Try to sound more maternal,” Howard whispered.

  “Short skirts are coming back,” I said in a threatening voice. “And those skimpy little blouses.”

  “Oh, just breathe,” he begged.

  “I’m sick of breathing,” I said.

  Labor began in the afternoon. It was a dispirited Sunday and we were listening to a melancholy symphony on the radio. Another station, with a Baptist church service, drifted in and out.

  The elevator stopped five times for other passengers on the way down to the lobby of our building. Neighbors smiled at us and looked away, pretending they didn’t know where we were going with my inflated belly and little overnight case. Inside their pockets they counted on their fingers and were satisfied.

  When we came to the hospital, Howard immediately declared to the admitting receptionist that he was a Participating Father and that he was going up with me.

  She laughed out loud and continued to type information on the insurance forms.

  “It’s not too bad so far,” I told Howard, wondering why my mother always exaggerated everything.

  “I’ll be with you,” he promised.

  They made him wait downstairs despite his protests. “We won’t be needing you for a while,” the receptionist told him, and she winked at me.

  “Good-bye,” I said at the elevator. I wished we had decided in favor of pictures, after all. I would have started right there with a record of his poor face as the elevator door closed and the nurse and I went up.

  “Primipara!” she shouted to someone I couldn’t see, as soon as we left the elevator.

  Well, that sounds nice, I thought. Like prima donna or prima ballerina. We went swiftly down a corridor, past little rooms. Other women looked out at me.

  What’s all this? I wondered, everything unlearned in that first bolt of fear.

  I had my own room. A Room of One’s Own, I thought bitterly. But I climbed into the high bed anyway, like a drowsy and obedient child.

  The new doctors who came to examine me all seemed so short. And they smiled as they dug in and announced their findings. “Two fingers,” they said. “Three fingers.”

  Why didn’t they use some medical jargon for what they were doing? It sounded suspiciously like juvenile sex play to me, as if they were only playing doctor.

  It was such a quiet place. There was none of my mother’s famous screaming. Things must have changed, I decided, since her day.

  After a while I was shaved, for collaborating with the enemy, I supposed. More silence. Then a shriek! I sat up, alerted, but it was only some horseplay among the nurses. “What’s going on?” I asked someone who came in and went out again without answering. “Hello?”

  It was lonely. Where was Howard, anyway?

  And then he was there. When had he grown that shadowed jowl? And why were his eyes so dark with sympathy?

  “It’s nothing,” I said severely. “Stop looking like that.”

  Lenny had seemed so splendorous. Howard only looked mournful and terrified. So this was where his life had led him.

  Things didn’t get better. Howard rubbed my back and jerked me from the haven of short dozes with his murmurs, his restless movement. There were noises now from other rooms as well. Voices rose in wails of protest.

  But I had my own troubles. The contractions were coming so damn fast. I was thirsty, but water wasn’t permitted—only the rough swipe of a washcloth acros
s my tongue. I caught it with my teeth and tried to suck on it, cheating.

  There was no discreet examination sheet in this place. Strangers peered at me in full view. They measured, probed, and went away. A nurse sneaked a hypodermic into my thigh when I wasn’t looking.

  “Hey, what’s that?” I demanded. “I’m not supposed to have anything. This is a natural case, you know.”

  “Dr. Kramer is on his way,” she said, evading the issue.

  “Taking his own sweet time,” I snarled.

  Howard seemed shocked by my rudeness and by the abrupt shift of mood.

  “This is getting bad,” I told him. But it wasn’t what he wanted to hear.

  They wheeled me at breakneck speed to the delivery room. Howard ran alongside, a winded trainer trying to keep up with his fighter. “Almost there,” he gasped.

  How would he know? It was miles and miles.

  Despite everything, they strapped me down. “This is barbaric!” I shouted. “Women on farms used to squat in the fields!”

  “Oh, God, that bullshit again,” a nurse said.

  “You trapped me into this,” I told Howard. “I’ll never forgive you. Never!”

  He was wearing a green surgical mask and now he stood as poised and eager as an outfielder waiting for the long ball.

  “Impostor!” I cried.

  “Paulette!” Dr. Kramer called. “How is my big girl?”

  “Just tell me what to do,” Howard said.

  “You’ve already done your part, pal,” Dr. Kramer told him. “Now just hold her hand.”

  I yowled and Howard said, “My love, I’m here!” His eyes were brilliant with tears.

  The whole room shuddered with pain. And I was the center of it, the spotlit star of the universe. Who was trying to be born here, anyway, Moby Dick?

  Oh, all the good, wise things I had done in my life.

  I might have done anything and still come to this.

  In school the teacher rolled down charts on nutrition. We saw the protein groups, the grain groups. Green leafy vegetables. Lack of vitamin C leads to scurvy.

  Liars! The charts ought to show this, the extraordinary violence of this, worse than mob violence, worse than murder. FUCKING LEADS TO THIS! those charts ought to say.

  “A few more pushes and you’ll have your baby,” Dr. Kramer said.

  Ah, who wanted a baby? For once in her whole rotten life, my mother was right. “Dr. Kramer! Marvin! Give me gas!” I screamed.

  But instead he caught the baby, who had shouldered through in the excitement.

  And I had forgotten to smile. I had greeted my child with the face of a madwoman.

  Somewhere else in the room a nurse pressed Howard’s head down between his knees.

  “No pictures. No pictures,” I said.

  (1976)

  Mrs. X

  I am bigger than life. Everything—my hands, feet—a stand-in for the Russian Women’s Decathlon champ, a thing of beauty and power. Everyone is big nowadays, my mother says—her hands and feet like tiny blunt instruments. She used to give me five lamb chops for dinner, scattering the peas and carrots to create an illusion. Everyone eats more nowadays, she sighs. But the spoon chimes against her teeth as she drops her dollop of cottage cheese.

  But say, listen, there is more to me than meets the eye, more than is seen on the wide screen. More than the breasts weighting their hammock or the great head ducking in doorways. Underneath there is a domestic heart with the modest beat of a ladies’ wristwatch. My dreams are so simple they could be laid out on a kitchen table for examination. I stand here at the window behind the coy and frilly curtains in this building in a terrible complex of buildings. I watch as my family take their places in the playground. There is the boy Jason, a rosy nucleus in the sandbox. There are Howard and baby Ann, moving in serene rhythm as he pushes her in a swing. They adorn the playground like three brave flags in bright sweaters I’ve knitted for them. I become excited with pride as if I had knitted them and not just their sweaters.

  Deep in the pocket of my apron is the letter from an anonymous friend.

  My dear, [she advises]

  Watch out for Howard and Mrs. X of B building. You know what I mean. Although I am not what you would refer to as a devout person, I will pray for you anyway.

  Your Anonymous Friend

  Thanks a lot. Wasn’t everything perfect before? Now I must be guarded, breathe softly so as not to miss the innuendos. If Howard volunteers to help with the laundry? If he compares my bleach to hers near the double-duty dryers? Never fear. The management has installed klieg lights at the request of the tenants who wear tight capri pants. Nothing clandestine in the laundry room.

  Oh, get lost, my loyal anonymous friend! You’ve upset the order of my life, scattered the importance of my values. Who cares now if the sirloin-tip roast is well-marbled? Who wants the PTA to take a firm stand on intramurals? Big as I am I can’t lurk in doorways and narrow passages to catch them out.

  But what if I don’t wait and watch but simply lift the window now and jump, waft slowly toward him, eighteen stories, eighteen neighbors to wave to in descent. My mother would shout to me in comfort, Everyone is dying nowadays!

  There he is, my Howard, the best father in the world. Protective as a mother hen. (Jason sits on his lap at the dentist’s so that the father can absorb the pain of the child.)

  I open the window and look down. Howard in the green sweater is standing alone. Both children are together in the sandbox. Cutting across the playground, as if on choreographic cue, comes the woman in the red coat. She is wearing boots of course and they zigzag in neat steps until she is near him. Her hair is long, that much I can see; nothing more without tumbling out.

  Wait, I shout, don’t do anything, and I run to the children’s room and look through the chaos of the toy box until I find them, those binoculars that their other grandfather, that cheap voyeur, bought for Jason. Wait, wait! I call again, and when I go to the window and bring them into focus, they are standing there and her foot is pointed outward as if she is threatening to go. Howard’s hands are in his pockets, where they belong. They are haloed together in the rainbow nimbus of the rotten binoculars. Her hand touches his arm, but I can’t see his face.

  Mrs. X, I say, go away. Leave town. Everything was hunky-dory. What can you know about someone else’s marriage? The sloppy intimacy of it. Can you pit “fashionable and lean” against “ample and familiar”? Could boots and false eyelashes win out over this apron? Purple lilies on a blue field. You wouldn’t have a chance. We only need an extra bedroom, and we’re on the management’s list for a five, with terrace.

  Don’t complicate my life, I shout, and the woman on the twentieth floor shakes out her mop and dust-curl stars fall on my head.

  He moves and places his hand on her waist. Gracefully (I’ll give her that), she turns her head and lowers her chin; one might guess that they are going to dance a tango. Slow, slow, quick, quick. Begin! One, two, and she breaks away from him.

  Run, run, I yell. He isn’t worth it. I’m going to kill him anyway. I’m going to kill him in the place you both go—if I only knew where it is. The community basement room is just for New Year’s parties and Girl Scout meetings and Civil Defense. The Tenants’ Committee would never approve of that. So where do you go and why do you go, and looking through the binoculars I see him catch up, and linking arms they disappear at the concrete corner of Building C.

  Murderer! I yell. Help, police, and my voice goes up like a helium balloon. The children are left alone in the Sinai Desert of the sandbox, in this mad city.

  It isn’t fair because it shouldn’t be me so big and wounded on the receiving end. Listen, I made compromises when I saw him for the first time in all his rumpled charm. And I let it pass when he saw me and said all those needless things about white valleys and Rubens when a simple “ooh” would have been just right.

  Then I look again and here he comes, my Howard, like a victor from battle, and I have to give
him credit, he goes right to the children.

  So that’s how it is, and I let the elevator make its silent climb, nineteen stories, while I rub my hands together and make plans.

  But then he comes through the doorway with his beautiful and powerful weapons: the baby Ann collapsed on his shoulder, her overall leg pulled up over a chapped knee; Jason with a blood-freezing hold on his father’s leg. And he himself with ruddy cheeks from the outdoors, in a green sweater, in trousers. The idiot eyes of the binoculars bang against my breast.

  Howard lets me look at a pained profile and I wait. For a moment I think: here is the evidence around my neck like a weighty chain, as if the binoculars had captured forever that action, that blurred vision, and I could have shown him what I saw.

  Howard taps his finger on the Formica counter. “I have to quit smoking,” he says.

  “What?”

  “I have to quit smoking. There’s no kidding myself. It’s killing me. I can’t run one block.”

  “Why don’t you just cut down?”

  “Because that’s horseshit. But the minute I think about giving it up, I change my mind. I don’t want to do it.”

  “You can do it, Howard.”

  “Ah, who wants to? You have to die from something anyway.”

  “Listen. You can do it, Howard. I’ll buy you lots of stuff to chew on, stuff you haven’t had in years, like Black Jack gum and Jujubes.”

  “Yeah?” He is dreamy but interested.

  Jason pulls away from his father and comes to me. “Mommy,” he says. “My mommy.” He pats my arm.

  “Howard, you can give up smoking!” I think I’m shouting. I can’t help it, like a fool I feel so happy.

  “Well, maybe,” he concedes. “With God’s help,” he adds, because he is cautious.

  “I’ll help you,” I cry. “I’ll even go on a diet.”

  Howard looks at me for the first time. He smiles. “You don’t have to do that.”

  “No, no, I want to. It’s the least I can do.”

  I am thrilled with the idea of a joint effort. It is like the camaraderie at a block party in the Bronx on V-J Day. The war is over. We are going to live forever.