Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket

by Hilma Wolitzer

  On other nights Howard pulls himself awake for a moment, glares at the clock, at my bedside light, at the pile of magazines, suitable for an invalid, balanced on my chest. “For God’s sake, go to sleep,” he hisses, as if it were a matter of choice.

  Once I complained to my mother about my insomnia. She is old-fashioned and believes in remedies. “Drink milk,” she urged. “Do calisthenics. Open the window.”

  My father, who likes to get a word in edgewise, said, “Forgetting.”

  We never questioned his meaning.

  But I am here alone in this stillness in which I have a dog’s sense of hearing, can hear beds creak, distant telephones, letters whispering down mail slots on every floor.

  Who writes letters at this hour? Who is calling?

  The dead eye of the television set faces me. If I turn it on, I will find old movie stars carrying on business as usual, stranded forever in time with their hairstyles and clothes. There will be a comedy and I will laugh, taking deep breaths. I will grow sleepy, child-sleepy, milk-warm and drifting, with arms heavy and legs that pull me down. Maybe there will be news, even at this hour. Isn’t it daytime in China, midnight in California? Surely there will be bad news and the ominous voice of the commentator to intone it. Ladies and gentlemen, here is some bad news that has just come in … Howard will wake, the children will cry out in their sleep, the old lady downstairs will bang on her ceiling with a broom.

  I walk to the window again and there are other lights on in the complex—two or three.

  At parties we go to, everyone complains of being an insomniac. Women insist they haven’t slept in years. One man walks the room repeating, “Three hours, three hours,” to anyone who will listen. He has a built-in alarm that never allows him to sleep a minute longer. That’s too bad, say the women who never sleep, but they are insincere. Another man suggests it is guilt that won’t let us sleep, but the women unite against him. Guilt? The truly guilty sleep to escape their guilt. Ask the ones with old mothers in nursing homes. Ask the ones whose children wet the beds, the ones whose husbands are listless or lonely. Someone changes the subject. We refill glasses.

  It is not even too hot to sleep. It is a perfect summer night, with a breeze rushing in through the screens. The sheets aren’t sticky and hot.

  Howard is sprawled in wonderful sleep.

  I sit on the floor and place myself in the half-lotus position and clasp my hands behind my head. I draw my breath in deeply and then slowly let it out, lowering my right elbow to the floor. Then the left elbow. There is a carpet smell as I lower my head. It is not unpleasant. I look under the bed and see one of the children’s shoes lying on its side. I crawl there to get it and then I lie on my back, watching the changes in the box spring as Howard shifts his weight. From my position under the bed, I can see under the dresser and the night tables, where there are glints of paper clips and other lost and silvery things. There is a photograph that has fallen from the frame of the large mirror, and I crawl across the floor and reach for it. It is a picture of a group of friends at a party. We are all holding cocktail glasses and cigarettes. The women are sitting upright to make their breasts seem larger, and one of the men has his hand across his wife’s behind.

  We are all going to grow old. The men will have heart attacks, the women will lose the loyalty of tissue in chins and breasts.

  I want to go to the mirror and raise my nightgown and look at myself for reassurance. But I walk into the children’s room instead. Jason sleeps well and is a handsome child, and yet I am filled with sorrow at the sight of him. I see that it is all false—the posters of astronauts, the books to teach him of birds and fishes and flowers. The baby is in her crib, legs and arms opened as if sleep were a lover she welcomes. The Japanese mobile trembles a warning, and I tiptoe out and go into the kitchen.

  I choose soft, quiet foods that will not disturb the silence: raisins, cheese, marshmallows. I put the last marshmallow on the end of a fork and toast it over the gas range.

  I do not believe it, but I tell myself that I will be able to sleep with a full stomach. I take my mother’s advice and drink a glass of milk.

  If I had a dog, if we were allowed to keep pets in the complex, the dog might be a companion when I cannot sleep. I had a dog when I was a child. When it was a few years old, I realized with horror I had established an irrevocable relationship that could only end in death. From this grew the knowledge that death was true of all relationships—friendships, marriage. I began to treat the dog indifferently, even cruelly sometimes, pushing him away when he jumped up to greet me. But it didn’t matter. The dog died and I mourned him anyway. For a long time I kept his dish and a gnawed rubber bone.

  I suppose a dog awakened in the middle of the night would not understand. He would probably want to eat and be taken for a walk. And of course Howard is allergic to animal hair. We have a bowl of goldfish in the kitchen. There are two, one with beautiful silver overtones to his scales. There is a plant in their bowl and colored pebbles at the bottom. The fish swim as if they had a destination, around and around and around.

  I shut the kitchen light and go back into the bedroom. I yawn twice, thinking, well, that’s a good sign. Sleep can’t be very far away and the main thing is not to panic. I climb into bed and Howard rolls away to his side.

  God, it’s the silence, the large silence and the small, distant sounds. If I could talk, even shout, I might feel better. “I can’t sleep and life stinks on ice,” I whisper. Silence. I raise my voice slightly. “I can’t sleep and tomorrow, today, I won’t be able to stand anything.” Silence. “Howard, my mother and father didn’t want me to marry you. My mother said that you have bedroom eyes. My father said that you were not ambitious.”

  A song I have not heard in years comes into my head. First I mouth the words. Then I try to whisper the tune. But my voice is throaty and full.

  “Shhhh,” Howard warns in his sleep.

  Oh, think, think. Come up with something else. But the song is stuck there. Doo-bee doo dee-dee, a song I never really liked. I try to overwhelm it with something symphonic. So this is what I’ve come to, I think, and the song leaves my head, like a bird from a tree. Instantly other birds flock in: shopping lists, the 20/20 line on the eye chart, a chain letter to which I never responded. Do not break the chain or evil will befall your house. Continue it and long life and good health will be yours to enjoy and cherish. In eight weeks you will receive 1,120 picture postcards from all over the world.

  Will I?

  Learned men wear copper bracelets. My mother weeps over broken mirrors. Hearts are broken, bones. They crack in the silence of the night.

  Somewhere, in Chicago or St. Louis or Silver Springs, my old lover sleeps on his own side of a king-sized bed. He talks in his sleep and his wife promptly wakes, thin-lipped, alert. In a careful whisper, she questions him. “Who?” she asks. “When? Where?” My lover mumbles something she cannot make out. She plucks gently at the hair on his chest, in shrewd imitation of my style. “Who?” she asks again.

  In Howard’s dream he is in the war again. His eyes roll frantically and his legs brace against the sheets.

  I whisper, “We’re pulling out now, men.”

  His head swivels.

  “For Christ’s sake, keep down.”

  His hands grope at his side, sling a rifle.

  “Aaargh,” I say. “They got me. Die, you bastards!”

  The bed shakes with his terror.

  “Shh,” I say. “It’s only a dream. Only a dream.”

  But he’ll die anyway. In this bed, perhaps.

  Howard in a coffin. Howard in the earth. Good-bye, Howard.

  He sighs, resigned.

  I walk to the foot of the bed and stand in a narrow bar of moonlight. My white nightgown is silver and my arms glow as if they were wet. “Look at this, Howard,” and I grasp the hem of my gown and twirl it around my body. Then I lift myself onto the balls of my feet and turn slowly, catching my reflection in the mirror, spectr
al, lovely.

  I dip, arch and move across the floor in a silent, voluptuous ballet. “Hey, get a load of this,” and I do something marvelously intricate, unlearned. My feet move like small animals. Wow, I think, and Howard flings himself onto his stomach in despair.

  I am breathing hard now and I sit in the rocking chair and think of my lover again. His wife has given up the inquisition, but now she can’t sleep, either. She goes to the window in Chicago or Silver Springs and gazes sullenly at her property, at her pin oaks and her hemlock, at the children’s swings hung in moonlight, at telephone wire stretched into infinity. She pats the curlers on her head and goes into the next room to look at her children.

  Across town, my father walks to the bathroom. “What’s the matter?” my mother asks.

  “Nothing. What do you think?”

  Before he comes back to bed, she is plunged into sleep again.

  Howard, Howard, Howard. Prices are going up. The house is on fire. My lover is dying of something awful.

  My lover is dying, his wife at his side. She is wearing a hat and a coat with a fox collar. She leans over him. “Who?” she persists, and her fierce breath makes the oxygen tent flutter like Saran Wrap.

  “Howard. My lover is dying in St. Louis or Chicago. No one really cares, Howard.”

  Real tears fill my eyes and then roll down my cheeks.

  I climb into bed again. If I had a hobby, something to take my mind away. A dog.

  I yawn, lowering myself carefully to the pillow. Ah, almost there, almost there, I tell myself in encouragement. One minute you’re awake and the next you’re in dreamland.

  I shut my eyes.

  That’s right. Shut your eyes. Here comes the Sandman. Here comes dream dust. Here comes.

  My eyes are shut tight. My hands are clenched.

  I hear something. There is a noise somewhere in the apartment. Maybe I am asleep and only dreaming noise. Maybe I hear the goldfish splashing in their bowl. My eyes open.

  What’s that? What’s that?

  Oh, God.

  The whole damn world sleeps like a baby—the superintendent of our building, the new people on the tenth floor, old boyfriends and their wives, their mothers and fathers, their babies, their dogs. Everyone sleeps.

  All of the bastards at those parties are liars. They sleep, too, cunningly, maybe with their eyes open, for all I know. They dissolve, they give in, they go under—into the blue and perfect wonder of sleep.

  I am the only one here. I am the only one left in the dark world, the only one who cares enough to stay awake the long and awful night.

  (1974)

  Overtime

  Howard’s first wife wouldn’t let him go. Her hold on him wasn’t even sexual—I could have dealt with that. It would have been an all-out war and of course I would have won. There is something final about me, and steadying.

  I wondered why he was attracted to her in the first place. It could only have been her pathos. Reenie is little and thin, with large light freckles everywhere. Her bones used to stab him during the night and he couldn’t sleep. Howard says I am the first woman he can really sleep with, in the literal sense of the word. When he loves me, he says that he feels as if he is embracing the universe, that a big woman is essential to his survival. He feeds me tidbits from his plate at dinner, to support my image and keep up my strength.

  Reenie called up night and day. She left cryptic messages for Howard. She even left messages with Jason, who was only three or four at the time. Jason called her Weeny, insinuating her further into our lives with that nickname. “Weeny needs ten,” he would tell me.

  We gave Reenie plenty of money, although she denied all legal rights to alimony. They were only married seven months and she decided she didn’t deserve alimony after such a short relationship, that you can’t even collect unemployment insurance unless you’ve been on the job for a while. But we were always giving her money anyway—ten here, five there. Ostensibly, they were loans, but Reenie was hard-pressed to repay them.

  I suggested to Howard that we adopt her, that it would be cheaper, taxwise and all, but Howard seemed to really consider the idea, getting that contemplative look in his eye, chewing his dinner in a slow, even rhythm. I imagined Reenie living with us, another bed in the converted dinette where the children sleep.

  I knew intuitively when Reenie was calling. The telephone had a certain insistence to its ring, as if she were willing me to answer it. She wanted to know if Howard remembered a book she used to have, something she was very sentimental about. Could he possibly have taken it by mistake when they split up? Would I just take a look on the shelf while she held on, it has a blue cover. She called to say that she had swollen glands, that she’d been very tired lately and in fluorescent light she could see right through to her bones.

  We sent her ten dollars for the doctor. We sent her five for a new book.

  At night, when the children were in bed, talcum-sweet and overkissed, Howard and I staggered into the living room to talk. This was the best time of the day. We couldn’t afford real analysis, so we did each other instead. I was quite classical in my approach: I went back to my childhood, digging up traumas, but Howard liked to deal with the recent past. He took his old life out like a stamp collection and we looked at it together. Howard talked about his first marriage as if he were just begun then himself, and as if he expected me to feel some regret for the poverty of their relationship. I did. I saw them in their marriage bed, ill-fitting like two parts of different jigsaw puzzles. I listened to Reenie talk him out of sleep, pry him from his dreams with the wrench of her voice. “Is this mole getting darker? Listen, Howard, is this a lump?”

  She was always a hypochondriac, and Howard began to be one, too. By the time I met him, he was dying from a thousand diseases. I laughed at all of them.

  “Are you kidding?” I said.

  He was petulant, but hopeful. “How do you know? You’re not a doctor.”

  But I wouldn’t allow him a single internal mystery, and he was cured. The laying on of hands, I called it, covering him with my own healing flesh. “Oh, you don’t know!” he cried, but I did, and he was cured of palpitations, bruises, nosebleeds, fears of castration.

  Yet Reenie stayed on, a dubious legacy. One morning Jason answered the telephone. “Weeny,” he said, narrowing his eyes, waiting for my reaction.

  I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. “Oh?” I said it coolly, raising my eyebrows. “What does she want?”

  She wanted to stay with us for a few days. Some madman was after her. A guy she met at Unemployment, a real psycho.

  “I’ll have to speak to Howard about it,” I told her, but that wasn’t true.

  Jason and I watched a kids’ television program where they demonstrated how to make a Chinese lantern out of newspaper. We tried to make one, following the easy directions, but it fell apart. I decided to speak to Jason instead. “Reenie wants to stay here for a few days.”

  He labored over the lantern, his fingers stiff with paste. “In my bed?”

  “Of course not. On the sofa, in the living room. What do you think?”

  “I hate this stupid lantern!” he cried, ripping it apart.

  The baby was standing in her crib, toes splayed, rattling the bars. “Guess what? Reenie is coming,” I told her, despising my own theatrics.

  That night I gave the news to Howard, carefully, as if I believed it might be fatal. He sighed, but I knew he was secretly pleased. He wanted to know how long she would stay, what time she would need the bathroom in the morning, and if I could possibly make some tapioca pudding, her favorite.

  “Jesus!” I slammed pots and pans around, and Howard shivered with fear and happiness.

  After dinner I called Reenie and told her yes. “Only for a couple of days,” I said severely.

  “Oh, you’re a pal,” she cried.

  Later, she exclaimed over the pudding and threw Howard a knowing look. Was I a fool? But her bones pushed their knobs through her clothin
g. Her nostrils were red and crusty from a lingering cold. Under the table I found the sleek truth of my own thigh, and I grew calm again.

  Of course the living room was closed to us for our nightly consultation. Reenie was there with a stack of magazines, a dish of that damn pudding, and the radio tuned to some distant and static-shot program.

  I drew Howard into the bedroom and shut the door. It was my turn, and I settled into the year I was nine with a minimum of effort. It was a memorable year, because my parents were discussing a possible divorce on the other side of my bedroom wall. How was that for trauma? I was Gloria Vanderbilt, a subject of custody, an object of sympathy. I imagined myself little again, and I invented their conversation. What about the kid? my mother asked. Oh, you’re the one who always wanted a kid, my father answered.

  Next to me, Howard moved restlessly. “It’s a good thing Reenie and I never had any children,” he said.

  “That’s true,” I conceded, and then I tried to continue my story, but Reenie coughed in the other room, two throat-clearing blasts that pinned us to the pillows.

  “What’s that?” Howard asked.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake! You broke my train of thought again!”

  “I only asked.”

  “Forget the whole thing. It’s no use telling you anything anyway.”

  “Go ahead,” he said, rubbing my back in conciliation. “Come on. Start from, ‘Oh, you’re the one who always wanted a kid.’ ”

  “Forget it.”

  “Jesus!” he said. “Just feel this. My pulse is so slow, my blood must be like clay.”

  In the morning Reenie was watching the playground from the shelter of the curtains, like a gangster holed up in a hideout.

  “I’m a wreck,” she said. “I keep thinking that nut is going to come here.”

  “Why should he come here? How could he even know where you are?”

  She didn’t answer. She moved to the sink, where she squeezed fresh orange juice into a glass with her bare hands. I wished Howard could have seen that. The untapped strength of that girl!

  Jason was a traitor. He ran kisses up her freckled arms. “My Weeny!” he cooed. They drank the unstrained juice in sips from the same glass.