Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket

by Hilma Wolitzer

  I wonder, do I know anybody with a Xerox machine? I will make a thousand copies of a letter to my anonymous friend.

  Dear Friend,

  What my husband does is his business, and I’ll kill you if you tell lies about him and spread rumors.

  I’ll stick a copy in every mail slot in every building in the complex.

  Howard stands and leans against the refrigerator. I lift the binoculars to my eyes thinking I am due for a miracle, a vision, but I see only him, his edges soft pink, yellow, and orange, and the words “frost free” near his left ear.

  (1969)

  Sundays

  Howard is the beauty in this family. Even the mirrors in our apartment are hung at his eye level. I don’t mind. What’s wrong with a little role reversal, anyway? What’s so bad about a male sex object, for a change? That ability to sprout hair like dark fountains, the flat tapering planes of his buttocks and hips, and oh, those hands, and erections pointing the way to bed like road markers.

  Besides, I have my own good points, not the least of them my disposition. Sunny, radiant, I wake with the same dumb abundance of hope every day. The bed always seems too small to contain both me and that expansion of joy.

  It’s only Thursday or Sunday. It’s only my own flesh, smelling like bread near my rooting nose. Nothing special has happened, for which I am grateful. Anything might happen, for which I am expectant and tremblingly ready.

  On the other hand, Howard is depressed, hiding in the sheets, moaning in his dream. Even without opening my eyes, I can feel the shape of his mood beside me. Then my eyes do open. Ta-da! Another gorgeous day! Just what I expected. The clock hums, electric, containing its impulse to tick, the wallpaper repeats itself around the room, and Howard buries his face in his pillow, refusing to come to terms with the dangers of consciousness.

  My hand is as warm and as heavy as a baby’s head, and I lay it against his neck, palm up. If I let him sleep, he would do it for hours and hours. That’s depression.

  Years ago, my mother woke me with a song about a bird on a windowsill and about sunshine and flowers and the glorious feeling of being alive that had nothing in the world to do with the sad still life of a school lunch and the reluctant walk in brown oxfords, one foot and then the other, for six blocks. It had nothing to do with that waxed ballroom of a gymnasium and the terrible voice of the whistle that demanded agility and grace where there were only clumsy confusion and an enormous desire to be the other girl on the other team, the one leaping in memory toward baskets and dangling ropes.

  I didn’t want to get up, either—at least not until I had grown out of it, grown away from teachers, grown out of that thin body in an undershirt and lisle stockings and garter belt abrasive on sharp hipbones. I would get up when I was good and ready, when it was all over and I could have large breasts and easy friendships.

  Howard blames his depression on real things in his real life because he doesn’t believe in the unconscious. At parties where all the believers talk about the interpretation of dreams, about wish fulfillment and surrogate symbols, Howard covers his mouth with one hand and mutters, “What crap!”

  Is he depressed because his parents didn’t want him to be born, because his mother actually hoisted his father in her arms every morning for a month, hoping to bring on that elusive period? Not a chance!

  Is he sad because his sister was smarter in school, or at least more successful, or because she talked him into stealing a dollar from their mother’s purse and then squealed? Never!

  He is depressed, he says, because it starts to rain when he’s at a ball game and the men pulling the tarpaulin over the infield seem to be covering a mass grave. He is sad, he says, because his boss is a prick and the kid living upstairs roller-skates in the kitchen.

  Ah, Howard. My hand is awake now, buzzing with blood, and it kneads the flesh of his neck and then his back, works down through the warm tunnel of bedclothes until it finds his hand and squeezes hard. “It’s a fabulous day, lover! Hey, kiddo, wake up and I’ll tell you something.”

  Howard opens his eyes, but they are glazed and without focus. “Huh?”

  “Do you know what?” Searching my head for therapeutic news.

  His vision finds the room, the morning light, his whole life. His eyes close again.

  “Howard. It’s Sunday, the day of rest. The paper is outside, thick and juicy, hot off the press. I’ll make waffles and sausages for breakfast. Do you want to go for a drive in the country?”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, will you leave me alone! I want to sleep.”

  “Sleep? Sweetheart, you’ll sleep enough when you’re dead.”

  I see that idea roll behind his eyelids. Death. What next?

  The children whisper like lovers in the other bedroom.

  “Come on, sleepyhead, get up. We’ll visit model homes. We’ll look in the paper for some new ones.” I pat him on the buttocks, a loving but fraternal gesture, a manager sending his favorite man into the game.

  Why am I so happy? It must be the triumph of the human spirit over genetics and environment. I know the same bad things Howard knows. I have my ups and downs, traumas, ecstasies. Maybe this happiness is only a dirty trick, another of life’s big come-ons. I might end up the kind who can’t ride on escalators or sit in chairs that don’t have arms. Who knows?

  But in the meantime I sing as I whip up waffle batter, while Howard drops pages of the Times like leaves from a deciduous tree.

  I sing songs from the forties, thinking there’s nothing in this life like your own nostalgia. I sing “Hut-Sut Rawlson on the Riller-ah.” I sing “Life is like a mardi-gras, funiculi funicula!” The waffles stick to the iron. “Don’t sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me,” I warn Howard, willing the waffle and coffee smells into the living room where he sits like an inmate in the wintry garden of a small sanatorium.

  “Breakfast is ready!” I have the healthy bellow of a short-order cook.

  He shuffles in, still convalescing from his childhood.

  The children come in, too, his jewels, his treasures. Daddy! They climb his legs to reach the table, to scratch themselves on his morning beard, and he runs his hands over them, a blind man trying to memorize their bones. The teakettle sings, the sun crashes in through the window, and my heart will not be swindled.

  “What’s the matter, Howie? If something is bothering you, talk about it.”

  He smiles, that calculated half-smile, and I think that we hardly talk about anything that matters.

  I waited all my life to become a woman, damn it, to sit in a kitchen and say grown-up things to the man facing me, words that would float like vapor over the heads of the children. Don’t I remember that language from my own green days, code words in Yiddish and pig Latin, and a secret but clearly sexual jargon that made my mother laugh and filled me with a dark and turbulent longing and rage?

  Ix-nay, the id-kay.

  Now I want to talk over the heads of my children, in the modern language of the cinema. There are thousands of words they wouldn’t understand and would never remember, except for the rhythm and the mystery.

  Fellatio, Howard. Vasectomy.

  He rattles the Real Estate section and slowly turns the pages.

  “Well, did you find a development for us? Find one with a really inspired name this time.”

  I try so hard to encourage him. Looking at model homes has become a standard treatment for Howard’s depression. For some reason we believe the long drive out of the city, the ordered march through unlived-in rooms, restores him. Not that we want to live in the suburbs. How we laugh and poke one another at the roped-off bedrooms hung in velvet drapery, the rubber chickens roosting in warm refrigerators. The thing is, places like that confirm our belief in our own choices. We’re safe here in the city, in our tower among towers. Flyspecks, so to speak, in the population.

  On other days, we’ve gone to Crestwood Estates, Seaside Manor (miles from any sea), to Tall Oaks and Sweet Pines, to Châteaux Pr
intemps, and Chalets-on-the-Sound.

  But the pickings are slim now. All the worthwhile land has been gobbled up by speculators, and those tall oaks and sweet pines fallen to bulldozers. There are hardly any developments left for our sad Sundays. The smart money is in garden apartments and condominiums, cities without skylines. Maybe later, when we are older, we’ll visit the Happy Haven and the Golden Years Retreat, to purge whatever comes with mortality and the final vision.

  But now Howard is trying. “Here’s one,” he says. “Doncastle Greens. Only fifty minutes from the heart of Manhattan. Live like a king on a commoner’s budget.”

  “Let me see!” I rush to his side, ready for conspiracy. “Hey, listen to this. Come on down today and choose either a twenty-one-inch color TV or a deluxe dishwasher, as a bonus, absolutely free! Howie, what do you choose?”

  But Howard chooses silence, will not be cajoled so easily, so early in his depression.

  I hide the dishes under a veil of suds and we all get dressed. The children are too young to care where we are going, as long as they can ride in the car, the baby steering crazily in her car seat and Jason contemplating the landscape and the faces of other small boys poised at the windows of other cars.

  The car radio sputters news and music and frantic advice. It is understood that Howard will drive there and I will drive back.

  He sits forward, bent over the wheel, as if visibility is poor and the traffic hazardous. In fact, it’s a marvelous, clear day and the traffic is moving without hesitation past all the exits; past the green signs and the abandoned wrecks like modern sculpture at roadside; past dead dogs, their brilliant innards squeezed out onto the divider.

  Jason points, always astounded at the first corpse, but we are past it before he can speak. It occurs to me that everywhere here there are families holding dangling leashes and collars, walking through the yards of their neighborhoods, calling, “Lucky! Lucky!” and then listening for that answering bark that will never come. Poor Lucky, deader than a doornail, flatter than a bath mat.

  I watch Howard, that elegant nose so often seen in profile, that wavy hoodlum’s hair, and his ear, unspeakably vulnerable, waxen and convoluted.

  And then we are there. Doncastle Greens is a new one for us. The builder obviously dreamed of moats and grazing sheep. Model No. I, the Shropshire, recalls at once gloomy castles and thatched cottages, Richard III and Miss Marple. Other cars are already parked under the colored banners when we pull in.

  The first step is always the brochure, wonderfully new and smelly with printer’s ink. The motif is British, of course, and there are taprooms and libraries as opposed to the dens and funrooms of Crestwood Estates, les salons et les chambres de Châteaux Printemps.

  Quelle savvy!

  The builder’s agent is young and balding, busy sticking little flags into promised lots on a huge map behind his desk. He calls us folks. “Good to see you, folks!” Every once in a while he rubs his hands together as if selling homes makes one cold. During his spiel I try to catch Howard’s eye, but Howard pretends to be listening. What an actor!

  We move in a slow line through Model I, behind an elderly couple. I know we’ve seen them before, at Tall Oaks perhaps, but there are no greetings exchanged. They’ll never buy, of course, and I wonder about their motives, which are probably more devious than ours.

  Some of the people, I can see, are really buyers. One wife holds her husband’s hand as if they are entering consecrated premises.

  I poke Howard, just below the heart, a bully’s semaphore. I can talk without moving my lips. “White brocade couch on bowlegs,” I mutter. “Definitely velvet carpeting.” I wait, but Howard is grudging.

  “Plastic-covered lampshades,” he offers, finally.

  I urge him on. “Crossed rifles over the fireplace. Thriving fake dracaena in the entrance.” I snicker, roll my eyes, do a little soft-shoe.

  But Howard isn’t playing. He is leaning against the braided ropes that keep us from muddying the floor of the drawing room, and he looks like a man at the prow of a ship.

  “Howard?” Tentative. Nervous.

  “You know, kiddo, it’s not really that bad,” he says.

  “Do you mean the house?”

  Howard doesn’t answer. The older man takes a tape measure from his pocket and lays it against the dark molding. Then he writes something into a little black notebook.

  The buyers breathe on our necks, staring at their future. “Oh, Ronnie,” she says, an exhalation like the first chords of a hymn. I would not be surprised if she kneels now or makes some other religious gesture.

  “One of these days,” Howard says, “pow, one of us will be knocked on the head in that crazy city. Raped. Strangled.”

  “Howie …”

  “And do we have adequate bookshelves? You know I have no room for my books.”

  The oak bookshelves before us hold all the volumes, A through Z, of the American Household Encyclopedia.

  The old man measures the doorframe and writes again in his book. Perhaps he will turn around soon and measure us, recording his findings in a feathery hand.

  Jason and another boy discover each other and stare like mirrors. What would happen if we took the wrong one home, bathed him and gave him Frosted Flakes, kissed him and left the night-light on until he forgot everything else and adjusted? The baby draws on her pacifier and dreamily pets my hair.

  Everyone else has passed us and Howard is still in the same doorway. I pull on his sleeve. “The baby is getting heavy.”

  He takes her from me and she nuzzles his cheek with her perfect head.

  We proceed slowly to the master bathroom, the one with the dual vanities and a magazine rack embossed with a Colonial eagle.

  “Howie, will you look at this. His and hers.”

  He doesn’t answer.

  We go into the bedroom itself, where ghosts of dead queens rest on the carved bed. “Mortgages. Cesspools. Community living.” I face him across the bed and hiss the words at him, but he doesn’t even wince. He looks sleepy and relaxed. I walk around the bed and put my arm through his. “Maybe we ought to join Marriage Encounter, after all. Maybe we look in the wrong places for our happiness, Howard.”

  He pats my hand, solicitous but distracted. I walk behind him now, a tourist following a guide. At ye olde breakfast nooke, I want to sit him down and explain that I am terrified of change, that the city is my hideout and my freedom, that one of us might take a lover, or worse.

  But I am silent in the pantry, in the wine cellar and the vestibule, and we are finished with the tour of the house, evicted before occupation. We stand under the fluttering banners and watch the serious buyers reenter the builder’s trailer. Howard shifts the baby from arm to arm as if she interferes with his concentration. Finally, he passes her to me without speaking. He puts his hands into his pockets and he has that dreaming look on his face.

  “I’ll drive back,” I say, as if this weren’t preordained.

  There is more traffic now, and halfway home we slow to observe the remains of an accident. Some car has jumped the guardrail and there is a fine icing of shattered glass on the road.

  “Do you see?” I say, not sure of my meaning.

  But Howard is asleep, his head tilted against the headrest. At home, I can see that he’s coming out of it. He is interested in dinner, in the children’s bath. He stands behind me at the sink and he has an erection.

  Later, in bed again, I get on top, for the artificial respiration I must give. His mouth opens to receive my tongue, a communion wafer. I rise above him, astonished by the luminosity of my skin in the half-light.

  Howard smiles up at me, suffused with pleasure, yes, with happiness, his ghosts mugged and banished from this room.

  “Are you happy?” I must know, restorer of faith, giver of life. “Are you happy?”

  And even as I wait for his answer, my own ghosts enter, stand solemn at the foot of the bed, thin girls in undershirts, jealous and watchful, whispering in some gr
own-up language I can never understand.

  (1974)

  Nights

  What men must learn is that there are some women in this world who are never satisfied, who move through their homes with the restlessness of dayworkers. Even their blood seems restless, rising and falling so that they are alternately pale or flushed, and suffer from dizzy spells and capricious moods. I am one of these women.

  Sometimes Howard will ask, “What’s the matter with you?” or “What do you want?” But he knows that these are only mind mutterings. I want nothing. I want everything. I am given to looking through windows like a sentinel, fumbling through the mail as if for secret messages, picking up the telephone with renewed expectancy.

  Hello, hello—but it is always someone I know.

  Staring out through the bedroom window in the middle of the night, I wish that everyone else in the complex would wake, too, that lights would go on with the easy magic of stars in a Disney sky. I look at Howard, who is asleep, and I can see his eyes moving under those thin lids as he follows his dreams. I lean toward him, look more closely, and see his nostrils flare with his breath.

  “Howard? Howard, I can’t sleep.”

  He sighs deeply and his hands open at his sides as if in supplication, but he continues to sleep.

  In the next room, the children are asleep.

  Across the city, my mother and father sleep on high twin beds, like sister and brother. There is always a night-light, as decorous as a firefly, burning in their hallway, so that my father can find his way to the bathroom. There is a picture of me on the dresser in their bedroom, and another of the children. My father sleeps with his socks on, even in the summer. My mother keeps a handkerchief tied to the strap of her nightgown.

  Do they dream of each other?

  Does Howard dream of me?

  If I ever sleep, I will have baroque dreams that would have challenged Freud, dreams that could be sold to the movies.

  But I cannot sleep.