Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket

by Hilma Wolitzer

  Helen and Jon developed the exclusive closeness of childless couples. After Helen’s father died walking the orbit of his beat, they became even closer, insulated from the world of real families. Jon’s parents and sisters were far away, on the farm in Minnesota he’d left years before. He and Helen had friends, of course, but their only important connection was to each other, a wondrous and scary thing. Once they’d stopped trying so hard to conceive, though, they made love less often, and it became more a matter of mutual comfort than a passionate pursuit.

  When the Depression began, Jon’s salary was cut in half and Helen lost her job, but they told themselves how lucky they were not to have to worry about anyone else during such difficult times. Helen took inordinate pride in her resourcefulness and her capacity for thrift. She made filling soups out of battered produce and scraps of meat, and screwed low-wattage light bulbs into all the lamps and fixtures. Going from door to door, she found various kinds of piecework they could do at home. She typed envelopes and stuffed them with flyers, and they both pasted glitter onto celluloid dolls. The stuff got into everything; it stuck to their fingers and was scattered in the carpets and on their clothing. At night, Helen saw a trace of phosphorescent glitter on the pillows, like a sprinkling of celestial dust. It reminded her of the fairy tales her father had read to her years ago, in which worthy wishes were granted and deprivation was ultimately rewarded. The story she’d loved best was “The Goose Girl,” about a deposed princess who carried around a cambric stained with three drops of her mother’s blood. Helen had always favored the most morbid stories: “The Goose Girl” with its bloody cambric and decapitated talking horse; “The Hardy Tin Soldier” melting away for love and heroism; and, of course, “The Little Match Girl.” But even a happy ending couldn’t dispel the essential melancholy of Grimm and Andersen. The goose girl would lament, “Alas! dear Falada, there thou hangest,” and the horse’s head would answer, “Alas! Queen’s daughter, there thou gangest. If thy mother knew thy fate, her heart would break with grief so great.” Helen wasn’t quite sure what gangest meant, or cambric, for that matter, but her own heart always broke on cue. Had she loved those stories because she was a miserable child? Or had they helped to make her that way?

  When she did become pregnant, after ten years of marriage, she decided never to read those stories to her child. Her child. How remarkable that a living creature could be made accidentally in darkness. That a reprieve could come so long after the end of hope. Helen experienced bliss that seemed dangerous. Jon was as happy as she was, although she knew he’d pretended acceptance of their childlessness out of a kind of gallantry, just as he continued to pretend she was the girl he’d meant to dance with.

  One morning, in Helen’s seventh month of pregnancy, there were a few drops of blood on the sheet, and Dr. Kelly ordered her to bed. He came to examine her at home each week, and it was like being a child again—his minty, medicinal smell in the room, the black leather bag gaping on the dresser top. Sometimes, after he’d listened to her belly with his stethoscope, he would put it to her ears. What a marvelous din! It denied what she had feared most about herself, that she was inferior and unfinished, incapable of this simple biological purpose. She rested, reveling in daydreams, as she used to do in the cedar closet, and willed her body to wait out its sentence. It didn’t, though.

  Two weeks into her eighth month, she woke during the night with her waters flooding the bed. “Oh, Jesus,” Jon said. “It’s too soon!” While he went to fetch Dr. Kelly, their next-door neighbor came into their place in her nightgown. She worked dry blankets under Helen and crooned, “All right, dear. All right, all right.”

  It wasn’t all right at all. Everything was happening so fast: the waters, and then the pain—accelerating, intensifying. The bed itself seemed to writhe. The neighbor crossed Helen’s legs tightly and said, “Don’t push! Lie still!”

  Dr. Kelly came and he hoisted her from the bed, ordering Jon to take her feet and the other woman to carry his bag and throw the doors wide. They struggled down the stairs like barflies with a soused buddy, but they managed to get Helen to the street and into Dr. Kelly’s car.

  At Bellevue she was separated from Jon. The last thing she remembered of that night was his diminishing figure as she was wheeled down a hallway. When she woke, it was another day. Her mouth was sweet with ether and sour with sleep. They told her she’d had a daughter. They said that Jon had been to see her soon after, and that she’d spoken to him, but she didn’t really remember that, either. She missed the baby in a physical way, with an emptiness that was not unlike hunger. Her breasts ached and leaked until a nurse came with a lethal-looking pump and expressed the milk. Helen was assured that the baby was alive, that this very milk would be fed to her soon in the nursery.

  “Now you saw her, Helen,” Dr. Kelly scolded, “just before we sent her down. You said she looked like a little drowned rat.” And the nurse who gave her a sponge bath said, “Turn on your side for me now, Mother.” They promised that she would be taken to the special nursery in the basement for another look as soon as she could tolerate a wheelchair ride. She’d lost a lot of blood, they told her, and she wasn’t even ready yet to dangle her legs.

  An aide propped Helen up for supper and she found herself facing the grieving woman, who sat immobile over her own tray. They looked at each other in the cheerful clamor of silverware. The woman’s eyes returned Helen’s commiseration, like a mirror, and her mouth twitched into a bitter, conspiratorial smile. Helen couldn’t eat her supper. She was almost glad when the babies were brought in again, and the three-sided screen came between her and that knowing gaze.

  That evening, Jon was in the herd of visitors who carried the chill of winter in on their clothes. Helen questioned him about the baby and he said that she was doing well, breathing nicely and taking nourishment. “What did Dr. Kelly say?” she asked. Jon glanced nervously away before he said, “He told me she’s a little fighter, which makes all the difference.” Helen knew that was only a partial truth, that the fate of premature infants was shaky, at best. They were meant to stay inside longer and develop. Their hearts and lungs might be too weak to sustain them, and they had no defenses against the slightest infection. She imagined the special nursery with its tiny, perishable occupants ticking away like homemade bombs.

  “Well, what shall we name her, Helen?” Jon asked.

  They had made up names, and even careers, for the unborn baby during those weeks in bed. They’d drawn up lists, under “Girl” and “Boy,” but now she said, sullenly, “I don’t know, I can’t think about that now.”

  “They need it for the certificate,” Jon said.

  She had a sudden, dreadful image of the small, toppled tombstones in the old churchyard near their house. Some of them were over the graves of infants whose chiseled names and dates could still be read. “I don’t want to name her yet,” she said in a rising voice, and Jon quickly said, “All right, dearest, don’t worry about it,” which only made her feel worse.

  He sat at her bedside, helpless against her mood. He held her hand and she was touched by the familiar sight of his ink-stained fingers. She thought of how he’d apologized for them the night of the dance, explaining that he’d come straight from work, that his hands weren’t actually dirty. He’d worked so hard recently, and had never complained, even when she withdrew into the luxury of her interior life. Yet there were times he’d enraged her with that glance of mournful sympathy he might have learned from her father. Now she felt a swell of love for him at the same time that she felt impatience and a desire for him to go.

  At last visiting hours were over, and Jon was ushered away with the other outsiders. In a while, the babies were brought in for their last feeding of the day. When they were taken out again, the overhead lights went off and a few of the bed lamps were switched on. Some of the women whispered together in the cozy dimness. Others combed their hair. This was the strangest hour, a time in the real world when only children are put to be
d. Helen was very tired, but not sleepy. She couldn’t find a comfortable position under the tight, starched sheets.

  “Goodnight! Goodnight!” the happy mothers called to one another. One by one the lamps were shut off and the only visible light was outside the room at the nurses’ station. The woman in the bed next to Helen’s coughed and someone at the far end giggled. Someone else said, “Shhh!” Soon there was a refrain of slow, even breathing, the counterpoint of snoring. The shadow of the night nurse fell across the threshold as she stood and peered in at them.

  After the nurse went back down the hall, Helen sat up and worked her way out of the sheets’ bondage. She turned carefully on the high hospital bed and let her legs hang over the side. She became dizzy and had to sit still for a few moments. Then she slipped down until her feet were shocked by the cold floor. She found her slippers and stepped into them, and she put on her flannel robe. No one, not even the mother of the stillborn baby, stirred. Helen’s bottom hurt and the thick sanitary pad she wore felt clumsy. She walked stiffly, sliding her feet along like someone learning to ice-skate. At the sink she paused and looked at herself in the mirror—an ashen wraith with glints of silver in its tousled hair, as if childbirth had aged her. She peered more closely and saw that it was only the celluloid dolls’ glitter. She whispered “Mother” just to try it out, but it felt strange on her tongue, a foreign food for which she hadn’t yet cultivated a taste. When she came to the doorway she stopped again, spent from so much exertion, and leaned against the frame. The nurses’ station was empty, and there was nobody in the corridor.

  It took a long time to walk the few yards to the stairway. Behind her the phone on the desk rang and rang. In the stairwell, Helen wondered what floor she was on. It didn’t matter. They’d said the nursery was in the basement; she would go down and down until there were no more stairs. I’ve done this before, she thought, at the second or third landing, and then she knew it was school she was thinking of—the empty, echoing stairwell when she’d carried a note from one teacher to another while everyone else was in class. How privileged she’d felt, and free! But once she was punished in front of the whole assembly for talking when the flag was being carried in. She could never remember the joy without the shadow of humiliation. It was the danger of all happiness, and what she had willed to her mortal child. Alas, Queen’s daughter.

  There were two orderlies in the basement corridor, wheeling a squeaking gurney and laughing. Helen waited until they’d turned the corner, and then she shuffled out in the other direction. She smelled something cooking, the strong, beefy odor of institutional soup or gravy. It made her feel hungry and a little sick. She looked through the glass panel of one of the swinging doors that led to the kitchen. It was as brightly lit in there as the delivery room—she remembered that now, the impossible brilliance. She’d tried to say something about the stingy light they suffered at home, and then the mask had come down, dousing her voice and the lights at once.

  In the kitchen, witches’ cauldrons were bubbling on the giant stoves. Three women in hairnets chopped onions and wept, and an angry chef attacked a slab of meat. It was the landscape of nightmares, and here she was in her nightclothes, but awake. Feeling lightheaded, she went past the kitchen and at the corner of the corridor found a sign, its arrow pointing the way to the LABORATORY, X-RAY, and the MORGUE. The nursery had to be somewhere beyond them.

  The locked laboratory door had a glass panel, too. There was no one inside; the feeble light might have been left on for the animals. She could see a few of them crouched in their cages: quivering brown rabbits, white rats squinting suspiciously back at her. She had surely never said that awful thing about the baby. It was only one of Dr. Kelly’s silly bedside jokes. The rats scurried in their limited space and Helen shuddered and moved on.

  There was no one in sight, and she longed to sit for a moment on one of the wooden benches on either side of the door to the X-ray room. But she was afraid that if she sat down, she’d be unable to get up again. Instead she slumped against the black door. It felt cold and solid. Years ago, when she was about thirteen, Helen developed a bad cough that Dr. Kelly’s syrups and tonics couldn’t cure. Her father took her to the clinic of one of the big uptown hospitals to have a picture taken of her chest. It was an unnerving procedure, and she could still recall the anxious darkness, and the icy pressure of the machine against her beginner breasts. After she was dressed, the doctor invited Helen and her father into the consultation room, where a backlit X-ray was hung. Astonished, she saw her own tiny, lurking heart, and the delicate fan of ribs that housed her lungs. With a pointer the doctor showed them a faint shadow he said was a touch of wet pleurisy. Her father was so relieved it wasn’t pneumonia, he grasped the doctor’s hand, making him drop the pointer. Helen should have been relieved, too, but she harbored a silent fury that there could no longer be any secrets. Her father could already read her evil thoughts, and now the last stronghold of privacy had fallen.

  Later, she opened herself gladly to Jon, and then to the baby. Leaning against the door to the X-ray room, she was stirred by the memory of the child inside her, the thrill of its quickening. “Push!” the nurse in the delivery room had said, just as Helen’s neighbor had ordered her not to push when her labor first began. And then her body had made its own willful choice. She could hear herself grunting, those deep animal grunts of colossal effort. You were never supposed to really remember the pain—that’s what all the women she knew had said. They’d told her it was the worst pain in the world, and they said it with a kind of religious fervor. But they promised that she’d forget it afterward, as if it had all taken place in another life. Then why was it coming back to her here in the basement corridor, an echo of the pain and thrusting she’d believed she could not survive? Then she remembered everything that had happened under that dazzling sun: being shackled to the table, the grunts changing to screams, the mask she’d risen to meet as if it were a lover’s mouth. The missing part was still the birth itself—that happened in a long tunnel of dreamless sleep—and the baby. Where was the baby?

  A child was crying somewhere, and Helen’s breasts ran. The crying got louder and closer, and she slid along the wall to one of the benches and sat down. But it wasn’t an infant’s sound—these wails smothered language, and there were footsteps hurrying toward her. There was no place to hide, no time to even stand up. Two people, a man and a woman, half-carrying, half-dragging the shrieking child between them, turned the corner. Helen shrank against the bench in terror of being discovered.

  The child banged his ear with his fist. The parents didn’t seem to notice Helen’s robe and slippers—the man shouted at her, “Where’s the emergency room?” She was unable to answer him, although her mouth worked in spasms. They hurried past her, struggling with their struggling burden, their footsteps and the child’s screams receding as they all disappeared at the next corner. God, she had wet herself! But when she looked down, she saw blood flowering her pink slippers and puddling the floor. She stood and stared in amazement. The child with the earache still screamed in the far distance.

  “Help me,” Helen said. “Help me!” she said, louder. Of course no one responded; she had to get back to the kitchen where there were people. She stood there in confusion before she was able to push off. Then it was as if the walls moved past her, and she walked on a treadmill. She was on fire, she was melting. “Papa,” she whimpered. “Jon!” When she came to the morgue, she knew she had gone in the wrong direction. Her fists were soft against the door and they tingled with pins and needles, as if she had just woken and had to wait for them to wake, too. She thought she heard someone in there, or a radio playing, but she might have been hearing noises inside her own head. She was afraid to look at her slippers now, and she was shivering with cold. “Please,” she said, and turned to follow the drunken, slithery trail of blood. The first of it on and near the bench had already started to darken. It looked like the remains of an accident after the victims have been carted
away.

  She staggered past the bench and went like a moth to the lighted window of the laboratory. The rats looked back at her. She gasped, as she had gasped during the last earthshaking pain of her waking labor. When she’d emerged from the tunnel she saw the glistening blue-pink baby hung by its feet, girdled by the thick, pulsing cord. “Oh!” she had cried. “Oh! It looks like a little drowned rat!” That wasn’t what she’d meant to say. She’d meant words of welcome and consolation for the terrible gift of the world. There thou gangest.

  She fell through the double doors of the kitchen and saw the three women and the chef in a sudden, frozen tableau. She came to once more, somewhere else, with Dr. Kelly looming over her saying, “No! Oh, Christ, damn it!” Then she felt her soul folding end on end on end, like the flag from her father’s coffin, like the wedding sheets in the cedar closet, until it was small enough to slip through the open mouth of the waiting black leather bag.

  (1987)

  Love

  The way it was, I didn’t love anybody. Not even Ezra. I looked down at him in his bath, dispassionate about the soft pink hills of his knees rising from the silvered water.

  I don’t love you, kiddo, I thought, and I poured shampoo into the whorl of hair on top of his head. Maybe I could have loved a more conventional child, aptly named Scott or Michael or Andrew, a boy without Ezra’s wheezing allergies, without his straight and penetrating glance. The average American boy, I thought, drops his eyes when you look at him, and so prepares for the evasiveness he will use when he grows up and screws around.