Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket

by Hilma Wolitzer

  “I’m concerned with the psychodynamic origin of that kind of obsession.” he persisted.

  Aha, I said to myself. I stood up, smoothing the skirt of my dress. His eyes followed my gesture, lingering, and I thought, so here’s my chance if I want one. Here’s unlicensed desire. Was this where the sex maniac had led me?

  “Oedipal complex, all that jazz,” said the doctor, but his gaze stayed on my hips and his hands became restless on the desk.

  But this wasn’t what I had meant at all, not those clinical hands that tapped, tapped their nervous message. I could see the cool competence in his eyes, the first-class mechanic at home in his element, but it wasn’t what I needed. He had nothing to do with old longings and the adolescent rise and plunge of the heart. He had no remedies for the madness of dreams or the sanity of what was familiar and dear.

  “I once considered a residency in psychiatry,” he said and he laughed nervously and glanced up at his wall of diplomas as if for reassurance.

  Nothing doing, I thought, not a chance. But I laughed back just to show no hard feelings. I walked to the door and the doctor followed. “So long,” I told him in a voice as firm and friendly as a handshake.

  “Keep an eye on those tonsils,” he said, just to change the subject.

  The children and I went out into the meager sunlight. Filthy patches of snow melted into the pavement.

  Home, I thought, home, as if it were my life’s goal to get there. We walked toward the bus stop. Everywhere color was beginning to bleed through the grayness and I felt a little sadness. I had never seen him. Not once crouched in the corner of the laundry room, not once moaning his demands on the basement ramp, not once cutting footprints across the fresh snow in the courtyard. It was as if he had never existed. The winter was almost over and I was willing to wait for summer to come again.

  Pulling the children along, although there was no one waiting for me, I began to run.

  (1970)

  Trophies

  Howard’s father died, moving Howard up one generation and canceling forever his coming attractions of life.

  His father had been a gloomy man given to terrible bulletins of what it was like to be forty or fifty or sixty. Howard has untimely gray hairs and he’s worried about growing old. Promises of pensions, matured insurance policies, and senior citizens’ discounts don’t cheer him at all.

  “Distinguished one minute, extinguished the next,” Howard says.

  I can’t argue with that.

  Sometimes he does exercises in the morning. Slowly, slowly, like Lazarus, he rises into sit-ups, pulling his prospects into shape. He nibbles sunflower seeds, sowing them into furrows under the sofa cushions, and he cannot in good conscience eat eggs anymore. Instead, he eats honey and wheat germ and remarks on the early deaths of famous nutritionists. They die the same ways we do, Howard says, even in car wrecks and floods.

  Now his father was dead of natural causes.

  I helped Howard pack a suitcase so that he could visit his mother in Florida for a few days and prepare her for survival. “Why doesn’t your sister go instead of you?” I asked.

  “You know Marsha and her back. And she’s never been good with death.”

  “Look who’s talking,” I said, but he didn’t seem to hear me.

  “Why are you packing these?” he demanded, pulling out his bathing trunks and the T-shirt with crossed tennis rackets on the pocket.

  “It’s hot down there,” I said. “You’re going to Florida.”

  “I’m not going for fun, you know.” He crammed other things into the suitcase instead: scratchy wool sweaters, dark socks for the sober business of mourning—forcing New York and winter, the gloom of subways and museums, in with his underwear.

  “We’ll keep in touch,” he promised, and the children and I stayed in the airline terminal until the plane lifted him away.

  Back in the apartment again, things weren’t so bad. I made a baked eggplant for supper, something I like that Howard hates. I slept in the middle of the bed, using both pillows. I kept all the lights on, a childhood luxury.

  Still, Howard was everywhere: his fingerprints in wild profusion on the furniture, his Gouda cheese gathering mold in the refrigerator, the memory of his sleeping hand on my hip. All night I was a sentry waiting for morning. The children slept hopefully on the other side of the wall.

  In the daytime I sat with the other mothers in the playground. The baby slept under cold sweet blankets in her carriage, and I rocked her with an aimless rhythm, like a tic. Jason was in the sandbox, among friends. They poured sand into his cupped hands, and it slid down the front of his nylon snowsuit. All around me my potential friends sat on benches. On the bench facing me there were three women in bright winter coats and scarves. Every once in a while their chattering voices and ripples of laughter came to me on currents of air, like birdsong. I thought I could fall asleep listening to them, feeling as peaceful and drugged as I do when Howard combs my hair.

  I looked up and found our kitchen window nineteen stories up. I marked it with an X the way vacationers mark their hotel rooms on postcards.

  Having a wonderful time. Wish you were here.

  In the laundry room the man from apartment 16J was waiting for his wash to be finished. There was something intimate in our sitting together like that, watching his sheets tangled and thrashing like lovers in the machine. Pajamas, nightgowns, towels mingling, drowning.

  We smiled at each other but we didn’t speak. His wife, I’d heard, was a cold, unsmiling woman. But he looked like a passionate man. You can tell sometimes by the urgency of gestures and by the eyes. His wife works at the DMV and he’s home alone all day because of some on-the-job compensation case. He jammed his laundry, still damp and unfolded, into a pillowcase and he left.

  What part of him was wounded or damaged?

  That night Howard called from Florida. We shouted to each other over the distance of rooftops and highways.

  “How is your mother?” I asked.

  “It’s very sad down here,” he said.

  His mother pulled the phone from his hand.

  “Your husband is your best friend in the world!” she shouted.

  Then Howard was back on the line. “They had two of everything. Place mats. Heating pads. BarcaLoungers.”

  “You were his favorite!” his mother cried to me, currying false indulgence for the dead.

  Of course it wasn’t true. If such things can be measured, I may well have been Howard’s father’s least favorite. He tried to buy me off right before the wedding with two hundred dollars and a bonus trip to the Virgin Islands. Irony wasn’t his strong suit. Did he think my chastity might be restored there?

  Bygones.

  “What can I say?” I said.

  Then Howard spoke. “I’m trying to straighten things out. It could take a few extra days. It’s really sad here.” He kept his voice low, but it sounded sun-nourished, tropical.

  Later the phone rang again and this time it was a breather. I figured it had to be that love-locked man in 16J. The woman he was married to would never submit to ecstasy. Instead, she was the prison matron of his lust, the keys to everything hanging just out of reach below her waist.

  Did 16J know Howard was away? News travels fast in these big buildings.

  “Who is this?” I demanded, but he chose to remain silent, to contain his longings for other days, better times.

  One day the children and I went to visit my mother and father. Everything in their apartment was covered in plastic: lampshades, sofas, chairs. Photographs tucked away in mirror frames and on tables. The specter of death was there and I embraced my father in a wrestler’s hold.

  “How are you!” I cried.

  “Don’t worry about him,” my mother said. “He’s not going anyplace.”

  “I’m in the pink,” my father admitted.

  Back home again, Howard called and I tried to keep things light. “We all miss you,” I said. “We’ve had colds. Jason wanted to
know if your plane crashed.”

  “The kid said that?” Howard asked. He spoke soothing words to Jason. I held the receiver to the baby’s ear, too.

  “It snowed again,” I told Howard.

  He said it was murderously hot in Florida and there were jellyfish in the water. He had to wear his father’s swim trunks.

  “This business could break your heart,” he said.

  16J’s wife came to collect money to combat a terrible disease.

  “Come right in,” I said. “Why don’t you sit down.”

  I went to get my purse, leaving her stone-faced, alone with the children. Did she suspect anything? Had she come to give fair warning? What would she say, this gauleiter of pleasure?

  But she said nothing. After she left the apartment, I looked for messages, for words printed in furniture dust. But there was only my receipt for the donation and a pamphlet telling why I should have given more.

  It’s lonely here, I thought. Quiet as an aftermath. Howard’s presence was fading. Only the Gouda cheese, unspeakable now. I remembered that his mother had never liked me, either. She used to send Howard to the store for Kotex to remind him of her powers. She bought him a meerschaum pipe and a spaniel puppy to divert his course. But I was triumphant anyway.

  Now I imagined a thousand and one Floridian nights, the air conditioner humming in orchestral collusion with her voice, her voice buying time. She had an armory of ammunition, steamer trunks stuffed with Howard’s childhood. In my head I canceled the air conditioner; she fanned him with a palm leaf instead, a cool maternal zephyr on his burnished head.

  “So, where was I?” she asks.

  Howard’s hair lifts lightly in the breeze. His eyes shut. Her voice shuffles into his sleep, into mine.

  In the middle of the night I heard footsteps in the hallway outside the apartment. Then, an eloquent silence. I tiptoed to the door, pressed my ear against it.

  “Who’s there?” I whispered. “Is it you?”

  But no one answered. Deferred passion could drive a man crazy. He would probably want klieg lights to match the intensity of his craving, and a million weird variations on the usual stuff. His sheets in the washing machine were green, I remembered. Small scattered flowers on a limitless green field.

  I went back to bed and let my blood settle. Maybe it was my motherhood he coveted. There are men like that, childless themselves, who long for the affirmation of new life around them. Between a woman’s thighs they can either be coming or going, just delivered into the world or willing to leave it in one exquisite leap of desire.

  Spring threatened, and my mother said, “He’s taking his sweet time about coming home.”

  “Things are bad there,” I said. “You know Florida.”

  “I know one thing,” she said darkly.

  I called Howard, but no one answered. I let the phone ring fifty times. They were walking together under palm trees, their faces dappled with sunlight and shadow. Later, they would go marketing, just enough for the two of them. Then they would rest on the BarcaLoungers.

  The man in 16J paced restlessly in his apartment, a convertible studio with a gloomy exposure. The incinerator door clanged. Children’s voices rose from the playground. I played a hundred games of solitaire, but I never won. Later, I found the ten of hearts under the mattress in the baby’s crib.

  The next day I called Howard again. His mother answered the phone. They were just going to have lunch. I could hear dishes clatter, water running.

  “What’s up?” Howard asked. He wondered why I was calling before the rates changed.

  “There’s this man,” I said.

  “Who? What? I can’t hear you, wait a minute.” The background noises subsided.

  “A madman!” I screamed at a splintering pitch. Then softly, “I’m afraid he’s fallen in love.”

  “What!” Howard shouted. “Has he touched you? My God, did you let him?”

  “It hasn’t come to that,” I said. “Not yet.”

  The plane circled for two hours before it came down. Howard looked like a movie star, tanned and radiant. The children wriggled to get to him. He carried a cardboard box under his arm. Souvenirs, I thought. Presents. A miniature crate of marzipan oranges. A baby alligator for Jason.

  When we were in the car, Howard opened the box. There were no presents. There were just some things of his father’s that his mother wanted him to have. Shoe trees. A weathered golf cap. An old street map of Chinatown and the Bowery. It was a grab bag of history, her final weapon.

  Oh, it had seemed so easy. The car was stuck in an endless ribbon of traffic. My hand rested on Howard’s knee, and the children were asleep in the back seat. I would have settled for just this, all of us stopped in time.

  But Howard sighed. “A man has to live,” he said.

  (1975)

  Bodies

  Michael and Sharon Fortune are too young to have ever seen Lenny Bruce in performance, but they have vintage editions of Bruce’s records, on which he denies vulgarity in anything sexual. There are no dirty words. And there are no dirty acts, except for the insidious ones of social injustice.

  At the end of one record there’s something about a flasher, a man who opens his raincoat and displays a bunch of lilacs instead of a penis. Like the trick of a gentle magician, Sharon thought the first time she heard it, and the visual image has stayed with her. Because she is an artist, all words convert finally into pictures; even her dreams are a silent, colorful banner of visual events.

  Michael interviews elderly welfare applicants, and Sharon believes he is a vessel for language, a Steinberg cartoon figure composed of the hard-luck stories of strangers and his own urgent, unspoken words.

  He’s only the second lover she’s ever had. The first was a prose poet named Beau Carpenter, and she met Michael on the rebound from that affair. The difference between the two men astounded her. Beau had been so authoritative, and she such a willing follower. She would wait in the wings of their bed for her cue to enter, apprentice to a master in a complicated acrobatic act. Not that Michael was passive. But he always made room for a fair, healthy share of her aggression, and sometimes Sharon was surprised to find herself raucously sexual.

  With Beau, she had affected silence because he required it. After two years of marriage to Michael, she still questions him as if she were the social worker, and he had come to her for aid. He’d had the worst childhood she could imagine. And he spoke about it, when asked, with an almost detached calm. The family had lived in the Midwest. His mother was the breadwinner, a practical nurse who traveled around, staying in other people’s houses to care for newborn infants. His father, once a Linotype operator, was housebound with severe emphysema. The rooms were clogged with his breathing. Michael was their only child, an easy target for his father’s maniacal revenge on the world.

  When Michael was about four or five years old, he told her, his father held his small hands over the open gas jets on the stove until his palms were scorched, until they cooked and blistered, a lesson on the dangers of playing with matches.

  Sharon had cried out in an agony of compassion. “I’d like to kill him!”

  “Too late,” Michael said. “He’s already dead.”

  “Well, what did your mother do about it?”

  “She wasn’t there. I guess she was out on a case.”

  “But she must have seen your hands when she came home.”

  Michael shrugged. “I don’t remember,” he said. “Maybe they were healed by then, I don’t know. She came back every few weeks, dying for sleep, and headed for bed.”

  “Terrible,” Sharon said, and he thought she meant for his mother.

  “Yeah. She used to wake up and she couldn’t remember where she was. She’d forget sometimes if a baby was a boy or a girl until she diapered it again.”

  “You must have hated your father.”

  “Yes.”

  Sharon stared at him. “Michael, why are you smiling?” she asked.

  His mo
ther died suddenly, of a stroke, and Michael flew to Dayton to take care of the funeral. While he was there, he rented a car and then decided to drive it all the way home. When the phone rang that night, she thought it was Michael, sleepless and lonely, calling from a motel room. But it was their lawyer friend Dick Schaffner.

  She was working, finishing the last in a series of political cartoons. She clamped the receiver between her chin and her shoulder and continued to ink the drawing in front of her. Then she said, “What? What?” as if the connection had been broken or her hearing had failed, so that Dick was forced to shout the details at her. As she listened, she scribbled nervous markings all over her drawing, ruining it.

  Dick told her to try to keep things in perspective, that it was pretty complicated, in a legal sense. “And it’s not even supposed to be really sexual, you know,” he said.

  Of course she knew, and felt both tenderness and irritation at his affectionate condescension.

  But despite everything, she clung to the idea that it was sexual, part of the whole damn business of bodies to which all psychic suffering can probably be traced. What else is it if a man takes his prick out in a public place and invites a strange woman to look at it?

  She was alternately cold with shock and blazing with humiliation. She had been this way once before, when Beau left her for that other woman. The analogy was all wrong, but she felt stubbornly logical. This was a kind of jilting, too. She had become as ludicrous as those poor women who wrote desperate letters to advice columnists. It seemed to her that men never wrote to them for counsel in the love department, anymore than they asked anyone for directions.

  Now Sharon is flying to Ohio because she urgently wants to go, and because Dick said that the presence of an attractive, supportive wife is invaluable in cases like this. He added, half-seriously, that if she were pregnant or could muster up a kid or two for the trip, it would even be better. Would she like to rent one of his? His office was going to make travel arrangements for her, and he would follow on a later flight and meet her there.

  Sharon wishes that Dick was beside her now, holding her hand in one of his bear’s paws and shuffling through official papers with the other. Instead, she has the aisle seat next to a man with tortuously styled hair, who is drinking a Scotch sour and staring out the window as if he were communing with Saint-Exupéry. Sharon has refused a drink; in a couple of hours she will be in a motel room where she can smoke one of the joints she has hidden in a cigarette pack, and be soothed.