Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket

by Hilma Wolitzer

  Later, I went downstairs and called Howard at work from a pay phone. “She has to go.”

  “I know that. Don’t you think I know that?”

  “I mean forever.”

  “Well, what do you want me to do?”

  “Nominate her for Miss Subways. Get her deported. I don’t know. Why don’t you find her a husband?”

  “Ha-ha. Should I look in the Yellow Pages?”

  “Well, you married her.”

  “That’s another story,” he said, but I refused to listen.

  “Ask around,” I said, and I hung up.

  At home again, I tried my own hand. “Stand up straight. Give them both barrels.” But the narrow points of her breasts thrust out like drill bits. “No, no, relax.” I let her try on some of my clothes, but they enclosed her like tents. Instead, we worked on makeup and her psychological approach to men. But it all seemed useless. In ten minutes there were smudges under her eyes from the mascara and lipstick on her teeth.

  “Relax,” I told her. “That’s the whole secret,” and she collapsed in a slump as if her spinal cord had been severed.

  That night Howard came home with a man from his office. I’d never seen him before. He wore dark glasses and he had a caustic smile: he was divorced, too, and spoke about getting burned once and never playing with fire again.

  “Oh, terrific,” I whispered to Howard.

  But he shrugged. He had done his share. Now it was up to me. I did the best I could, flaunting my marital joy at this stranger like a bullfighter’s cape. But everything must have seemed bleak to him, through those dark glasses. My dinner was loaded with killer cholesterol, the apartment was overheated and confining, someone was deflating the tires on his car parked two blocks away.

  Of course Reenie didn’t help at all. She pretended to be our eldest child, and ate her French fries with her fingers. There was a huge pink stain on the front of her blouse.

  “I’ll call you,” the man said to her when he left, a phrase torn from memory. We were all surprised that he bothered.

  “You didn’t have to,” Reenie said to Howard later, as if he had brought her a frivolous but thoughtful gift.

  In bed, Howard and I listened for night sounds from the other room, and we were rewarded. In her sleep Reenie called out, and I could feel Howard next to me, poised for flight on the edge of the mattress.

  Dear Abby/Ann Landers/Dr. Rose Franzblau, What should I do? Signed, Miserable.

  Dear Mis, Do you keep up with the national scene? Can you discuss things intelligently with your husband; i.e., name all the cabinet members, the National Book Award nominees, the discoverer of DNA? Have you looked in the mirror lately? Do you make the most of your natural good looks? Go to an art gallery, make an exciting salad for dinner, reline your kitchen shelves with wild floral paper. And good luck!

  The days went by somehow and we began to settle in as if things were fine, as if Reenie belonged on our couch every night, leaving those shallow depressions in the cushions.

  My mother called to offer some advice. “Get rid of her,” she said.

  My father picked up the bedroom extension and listened. I could hear the hiss of his breath.

  “Hello, Dad,” I said.

  “Are you on, Herm?” my mother asked. “Is that you?”

  My father cleared his throat right into the mouthpiece. He was going to offer advice as well, and his style was based on Judge Hardy in the old Mickey Rooney movies. Kindly. Dignified. Judiciously stern. All his days he sat for imaginary Bachrach portraits. In the subway, at the movies. “What I would do …” he said, and then he paused.

  My mother waited. I waited. I tapped my foot on the kitchen tile.

  “What should she do?” my mother insisted. “Should she throw her out the window? Should she stuff her in the incinerator?”

  “I believe I was speaking,” Judge Hardy said.

  “Oh, pardon me,” my mother said. “For living.”

  “What I would do,” he began again, “is seek professional advice.”

  “Thanks, Dad.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Professional advice.” He paced in his chambers.

  “It’s not normal,” my mother said. “It’s not nice.” Her opinion about other things as well—homosexuality, artificial insemination, and the hybridization of plants.

  The next day I lent Reenie twenty dollars and looked through the classified ads for a new apartment for her. “Change your luck,” I advised, like a fortune-teller.

  When the children were napping, the doorbell rang. An eye loomed back at mine, magnified through the peephole. “Who?”

  “Reenie there?”

  My heart gave tentative leaps, like the first thrusts of life in a pregnancy. I opened the chains and bolts with shaky hands and ran inside. “It’s a man,” I hissed, rebuttoning Reenie’s blouse, combing her hair with my fingers. But it was no use. She still looked neglected and ruined.

  The man burst into the room.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, it’s you!” Reenie said.

  “I told you,” he said. “When I want something, I go after it.”

  “Well, just piss off, Raymond.”

  “It’s you and me, baby,” he said. “All the way.”

  I watched from the doorway. He was a big ox of a man, the kind who invites you to punch him in the belly and then laughs at your broken hand. There was a cartoon character tattooed on his forearm—Yogi Bear or Smokey.

  “Call the police,” Reenie said wearily.

  “The police?”

  “Why fight nature, Reenie?” he asked.

  “That’s right,” I said, winking at him.

  “He’s a lunatic,” she explained. “He’s the one I told you about. From Unemployment.”

  My hope began to ebb. “Well, you could just give him a chance.”

  Jason came in from the bedroom then, barefoot, squinting in the assault of new light. “Stop hollering,” he said.

  “My intentions are honorable,” the lunatic said, crossing his heart. “Cute kid,” he offered, about Jason.

  I reached for that slender thread of hope. “Do you like children?” I asked.

  He leaned on his wit. “Say, I used to be one myself!” He laughed and laughed, wiping tears from his eyes.

  “Reenie, Reenie,” I said. “Introduce me.”

  “He-has-a-prison-record,” she sang in falsetto behind her hand.

  They might have been political protest arrests, for all I knew, or something else that was fashionable. I snapped my fingers. “Honi soit,” I said.

  “Bad checks,” Reenie said. She was relentless.

  I always try to find the good in people and he had nice eyes, hazel with gorgeous yellow flecks. I offered him coffee and he accepted. Reenie sat down finally.

  They were married two weeks later. Howard gave the bride away, which may not be traditional, but it meant a lot to me, for the symbolism. I gave them a silver-plated bread tray and sincere wishes for the future. Raymond had a lead on a job in Chicago and they left in a hailstorm of rice for the airport.

  “That’s that,” I said, never believing it for a moment.

  Two months later, Raymond showed up at the door at three o’clock in the morning. Things didn’t work out, he said, by way of explanation. Reenie was staying in Chicago for a while, to seek new horizons, but she had promised to keep in touch.

  Raymond’s feet hung over the arm of the sofa when I tucked him in. He snored and the sofa springs groaned in rhythm with his dreams.

  He looks through the want ads every day. He takes the garbage to the incinerator and he picks up the mail for us in the morning. My little talks with Howard are expanded into small but amiable group sessions now. Raymond’s stories are interesting, as I might have suspected, from the tattoo and all. He never even knew his real parents or his true history. We sent him to NYU for a battery of aptitude tests and it seems that he might do well in social research or merchandising.

  As for me, I have good d
ays and bad. At the supermarket, I am dazzled by the bounty. In bed, I am a passenger, still ready for cosmic flight. My daily horoscope predicts smooth sailing ahead!

  I worry about Reenie, though. Today there was an airmail letter. She is lonely and her body absorbs only the harmful additives in food. After all, Chicago is not her hometown.

  (1974)

  The Sex Maniac

  Everybody said that there was a sex maniac loose in the complex and I thought—it’s about time. It had been a long asexual winter. The steam heat seemed to dry all of the body’s moistures and shrivel the fantasies of the mind. From the nineteenth floor of Building A, I watched snow fall on the deserted geometry of the playground. The colors of the world were lustless, forbidding. White fell on gray. Gray shadows drew over the white.

  He was first seen in the laundry room of Building D, but it was not clear just how he had presented himself. Was his attack verbal, physical, visual? The police came and they wrote down in their notebooks the varying stories of the housewives. He was next seen near the incinerators on the sixth floor of our building. He was seen twice by elderly widows whose thin shrieks seemed to pierce the skull. There had been an invasion of those widows lately as if old men were dying off in job lots. The widows marched behind the moving men, fluttering, birdlike. Their sons and daughters were there to supervise, looking sleek and modern next to the belongings—chairs with curved legs, massive headboards of marriage beds trembling on the backs of the movers. The widows smiled shyly as if their survival embarrassed them.

  Now two of them had encountered a sex maniac. Help, they had shrilled. Help and help and he had been frightened off by their cries. I wondered where he waited now in ambush and if I would meet him on a loveless February night.

  There were plenty of men in my life that winter, not one of them a sex maniac. The children developed coughs that made them sound like seals barking, and the health plan sent a doctor. He was thin, mustachioed, and bowed with the grind of house calls. Bad boys in bad neighborhoods slashed his tires and snapped his aerial in two. Angry children bit his fingers as he pried open the hinges of their jaws. I clasped a flower pin to the bosom of my best housedress, the children jumped on the bed intoning nursery rhymes, but the doctor snapped his bag shut with the finality of the last word. His mustache narrow and mean, he looked just like the doctors of my childhood. We trailed after him to the door but he didn’t turn around. Never mind. There were policemen to ask us leading questions. There was the usual parade of repairmen and plumbers.

  There was the delivery boy from the market. His name is Earl. We coaxed him into the apartment. Just put it down there, Earl. Just wait a minute while I get my purse, Earl. Is it still as cold out there? we asked. Is it going to snow again? Do you think the price level index will rise? Will I meet the man of my dreams? Will I take a long voyage? But he was a boy without vision or imagination. He counted out the change and hurried to leave.

  That night I said to Howard, “Love has left this land.” When the children were tucked in behind veils of steam from the vaporizer, he tried to disprove it. He put his arms around me in that chorus of coughing and whispering radiators. But the atmosphere was more medicinal than romantic and the lovemaking was only ritual. It was no one’s fault. It was the fault of the atmosphere, the barometric pressure, the wind velocity. We consoled each other in the winter night.

  The next day the whole complex was thrumming with excitement. The sex maniac had been seen by a very reliable source. The superintendent’s wife came from a mining area in Pennsylvania, a place not noted for frivolity. She had gazed at a constant landscape and she had known men who had suffocated in sealed mines. Her word was to be honored; she had no more imagination than the grocer’s boy. After the police were finished, the women of the building fell on her with questions. Did he just—you know—show himself? Did he touch her? What did he say?

  She answered with humorless patience. Contrary to rumor, he was a slight man, not very tall, and young, like her own son. But not really like her own son, she was quick to add. He had said terrible, filthy things to her in a funny, quiet way, as if he were praying, and I saw him in my mind’s eye, reedy and pallid, saying his string of obscenities like a litany in a reverent and quaking voice.

  I wondered who he was, after all, and why he had chosen us. Had he known instinctively that we needed him, that winter had chilled us in our hearts and our beds?

  But the superintendent’s wife said that he hadn’t touched at all, only longed to touch, promised, threatened to touch.

  Ahhh, cried the women. Ahhh. The old widows ran to the locksmith for new bolts and chains.

  The men in the building began to do the laundry for their wives. They went in groups with their friends. Did the sound of their voices diminishing in the elevators remind the super’s wife of men going down to the mines?

  Did you see him? the wives asked later, and, flinging the laundry bags down, some of the husbands laughed and said, yes, he asked for you, he told me to give you this and this, and the wives shrieked with joy.

  Howard ruined our clothes, mixing dark and white things, using too much bleach. But when he came back from the laundry room it was as if he had returned from a crusade.

  “Have you heard anything?” I asked, and he smiled and said, “You don’t need a sex maniac.”

  But you were, I thought. Your eyes and your hands used to be wild and your breath came in desperate gulps. You used to mumble your own tender obscenities against my skin and tell me that I drove you crazy. I looked at Howard, his hand poised now on the rim of the laundry basket, and I knew that I was being unfair. But whose love is not unfair? When is it ever reasonable?

  Perhaps whatever I needed was outside the confines of the building, farther than the outer edges of the complex where I could see the grocer’s boy on his bicycle turning in concentric circles toward our building. Artfully, he raised the front wheel as he rode on the rear one, and then the bicycle became level again like a prancing pony. “Whoa,” I said against the windowpane, and then I waited for him to come up.

  His ears were red from the cold wind. He snuffled and put the bag of groceries on the kitchen counter. He is the sort of boy who won’t meet your eyes. His own, half-lidded and guarded, seemed to look at my feet. And because I didn’t want him to go yet and didn’t know what else to do, I said, “Have you heard about the sex maniac, Earl?”

  The red of his ears flamed to his face and I thought he would be consumed by his own heat. He answered from the depths of his throat in a voice that might have been silent for weeks.

  “Whaaa?” he asked.

  There was no way to retreat. “The sex maniac,” I said. “He stays in the complex. He molests women. You know.”

  Perhaps he did. But if he didn’t, then a match had been set to his brain. His eyes opened wide, as if a startling idea had suddenly occurred to him. Sex maniac, he was thinking, and I watched his face change as the pictures rolled inside his head. Sex maniac! A grocery bag slid across the counter and into the bowl of the sink. But he stood there, his hand paused at the pocket of his vinyl jacket. Half-nude housewives lay in stairwells pleading for their release. Please don’t, they begged. For God’s sake, have mercy. His lips were moving, shaping melodies.

  I pulled on the sleeve of his jacket. “Listen, did you bring the chow-chow?” I asked. “Look Earl, the oranges are all in the sink.”

  Slowly the light dimmed in his face. He looked at me with new recognition. “I always take good care of you, don’t I?” he asked.

  “Yes, you do,” I assured him. “You’re a very reliable person.”

  “What does this here guy do?”

  “Who?”

  “The whatchamacallit—the maniac.”

  I began to put the oranges back into the bag. “Oh gosh, I don’t know. I never saw him. Who knows? Rumors build up. You know how they snowball.”

  “Yeah,” he said, dreamy, distant.

  “Well, so long,” I said. I pressed th
e money into his relaxed hand.

  “Yeah,” he said again.

  I guided him down the hallway and out through the door.

  That evening the superintendent came to fix the leaking faucet in the bathtub. “Keeping to yourself?” he asked as he knelt on the bathroom tile.

  I was surprised. He usually avoided conversation. “More or less,” I said cautiously.

  “You women better stick close to home,” he advised.

  “Oh, I do, I do,” I said.

  “You know what that guy said to the missus? You know the kind of language he used?” His eyes were a cruel and burning blue. He unscrewed a washer and let it fall with a clank into the tub. He raised his hand. “Do you know what I’ll do if I catch that guy? Whop! Whop!” His hand became a honed razor, a machete, a cleaver. “Whop! Whop!”

  I blinked, feeling slightly faint. I sat down on the edge of the closed toilet seat.

  The superintendent replaced the washer and stood up. “You ever see him?” he asked.

  I shook my head.

  His long horny forefinger shot out and pushed against my left nipple as if he were ringing a doorbell. “Maybe he don’t go for a big woman,” he said, and lumbered through the doorway.

  I sat there for a few minutes and then I went into the kitchen to start supper.

  Several days went by and gradually people stopped talking about the sex maniac. He seemed to have abandoned the complex. It was as if he hadn’t been potent enough to penetrate the icy crusts of our hearts. Poor harmless thing, I thought, but at least he had tried.

  The children’s coughs abated and I took them to the doctor’s office for a final checkup. He examined them and scribbled something on their health records. “Did they ever catch that fellow?” he asked suddenly.

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “Did he actually attempt assault?” the doctor asked. I must have seemed surprised because he poked at his mustache and said, “I’ve always had an interest in crimes of a sexual nature.”

  I dropped my eyes.