Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket

by Hilma Wolitzer

  I didn’t really love Gene then, either. I was possessive of him, I was manic; I wouldn’t give him up to Bonnie or anyone. But it was hard to concentrate on love, on the energy it required. Fuck love, I thought, and I smiled at my own ingenuity. Ezra smiled back at me.

  “Head down, sweetheart,” I said firmly and he ducked, docile and sweet. The shampoo beaded up and frothed into perfect opals that slid down behind his ears. Maybe they should come up with a new shampoo for kids like Ezra, something potent and authoritative named Fist or Hard-On or War. Instead his scalp was rosy and clean from Breck for Normal or Dry Hair.

  After Ezra’s bath we went into the kitchen and I washed the breakfast dishes while he drew pictures in an old notebook. Only yesterday Gene had left, off to Bonnie’s for good (for bad, I thought), and here I was today busy with ordinary chores. Scouring powder drifted down into the sink like blue snow. I went into the bedroom and dialed Bonnie’s number. They must have been waiting all night for permission or a benediction, because she picked up the phone after the first ring and exhaled loudly into my ear. “Hello. Hello!”

  “Listen,” Gene had said last night. “It’s no good being like this.” He meant crazy, and he wouldn’t dare look at my crazy eyes and my bubbling mouth. “Come to your senses,” he ordered. “Call me when you come to your senses.”

  “Hello,” Bonnie insisted, and I hung up. I was entitled to erratic behavior. Nobody could begrudge me that.

  When Ezra was dressed we went downstairs and walked to the corner. We took the crosstown bus to Dr. Freedman’s office on the East Side. Because this was Ezra’s domain he took over, greeting Arlette, the pretty receptionist, then gathering a lapful of worn and familiar Golden Books. I sat in my overcoat, feeling transient and sad. I picked up a copy of Today’s Health and read a long article on contact dermatitis. God, the world was full of pitfalls. Ezra usually went in accompanied by Arlette for his shots and his five-minute chat with Dr. Freedman, who was psychologically oriented. What did they talk about in there? How did they communicate? Where was the middle ground between Wonderama and the supple thighs of Dr. Freedman’s receptionist? I never asked Ezra. I knew instinctively that you don’t ask a boy what he says to his allergist. In turn Dr. Freedman never accused me of making Ezra wheeze. Today I would have liked a crack at him myself. I would have asked him point-blank, “Which is better for an allergic child, a dust-free broken home and a stepmother young enough to be called Bonnie or a household held together with spit?” Ezra went in, holding hands with Arlette, and I sat and waited like a backstage mother.

  When Ezra was finished we took another bus, uptown this time and into a neighborhood that was no longer expensive. It was considered a dangerous neighborhood, too, where my mother and grandmother lived, and I whistled and sang to warn off muggers and rapists, and the kidnappers of my childhood fantasies.

  “Who? Who is it?” my mother wanted to know. She came into the kitchen, her bleached hair in wet, pinned scrolls against her head. Her fingers were splayed, held in front of her so that the polish would dry safely, yet it seemed as if she were bestowing a blessing. My grandmother had let us in, the smoke of her cigarette churning through her nostrils. “The color is good, Frances. Nice and even.” It was Saturday and they had touched up each other’s hair. They sat down together at the kitchen table, crowned in identical gold. “MMM-wah!” They both made smacking sounds with their lips at Ezra. They would hug him when their nails were dry.

  “Sugar doll,” my mother crooned.

  “Lover man,” said my grandmother. They waved their hands in the air and blew on their nails.

  “Am I drying dark?” my mother asked.

  “No, Frances, no. It’s a good shade. You look wonderful. Some lucky guy should take a look at you.”

  “Oh, Ma,” she said happily. Because my mother didn’t need a man at all. All of her love was played out years ago and she just didn’t have the vigor for the real thing anymore. When the butcher teased her and called her Honeybunch, when a dopey teenager in the building gifted her with a frozen Milky Way, she was satisfied. The fictional sex lives of famous people were as real and gratifying as a warm man under the sheets with her. Real, unreal, it was all the same. She said that my father had reddish hair, yet in his picture it seemed to be dark. My God, I thought, this would make three generations of us.

  My father was long gone, having left us in another neighborhood I could hardly remember. And I could hardly remember him. It was difficult to separate memory from what I had been told by my mother, that unreliable narrator. Was my father light- or dark-haired? He was very tall, she insisted, yet in the picture they seem to be standing eye to eye. They met nine months before I was born. It was at a roller-skating rink and the voice on the loudspeaker called for mixed couples in a waltz number. And from that carefree act of a boy and a girl dancing on wheels to “The Blue Danube,” their chests swelling with the rise of the organ music, came all those unexpected effects. My grandmother, me, an apartment with its domestic trappings and snares. He ran and never came back.

  I thought I would tell them about Gene. I might even have a temper tantrum here in their pink and white kitchen. After all, if blame is to be cast, you can’t go back too far. Had they groomed me to be a discarded woman?

  A shower of soft gray ashes fell into my grandmother’s lap. She gave Ezra a dish of orange Jell-O, scraping the rubbery edges off with a knife. What if they gave me advice? They might say, Don’t be a dope, Sandy. Don’t let him get away with it. It’s all hot pants anyway. Or they might say, Let him go good riddance to bad rubbish come and live with us and on Saturday we will gild your hair and shave your legs.

  Ezra sucked at his Jell-O.

  My mother speculated about how Dean Martin’s and Frank Sinatra’s children really feel about their fathers. I wondered where my father was at that very moment. I wondered if he ever went roller-skating again. I wondered if Gene and Bonnie were undressed together right then and how she observed his body and if she could appreciate it without having witnessed its changes. Bonnie is small and round. She is young and sweet like a babysitter or a nurse or a waitress in a cocktail lounge.

  “I don’t care,” my mother said. “I wish I was Nancy Sinatra.”

  “Ah, you’re a crazy mixed-up kid,” my grandmother told her. She smashed out her cigarette in an El Morocco ashtray.

  They cuddled Ezra. Allergic children need a great deal of cuddling. My mother gave him a quarter. My grandmother gave him thirty-two cents. The pennies kept rolling out of his hands as they kissed him. They sent their love to Gene and they blew kisses from the doorway. Then they went inside to comb each other out. All the way down the stairs I kept silent, daring whoever was waiting, but my defiance must have been felt and we passed through unharmed.

  We stopped at a luncheonette on the way home and we shared a cheese sandwich and a soda. I bought a wooden backscratcher with a hand carved at the end of it, for Ezra. He raked it against my arm and I forced a toothy smile at him. I went into the phone booth and dialed Bonnie’s number. This time Gene answered and I felt a mild vertigo at the sound of his voice. I breathed, my breath like Ezra’s when he is near a shedding dog, “Huh, huh,” my breath said.

  “Oh, I know it’s you,” he said, as kind and righteous as Perry Mason. “Listen, it’s not the end of the world. We have to take care of certain things. We have to talk about them. Are you home now? Will you answer me? For Christ’s sake, Sandy. It’s a weapon, Sandy.”

  “Huh, huh.” I couldn’t stop that damn breathing. I looked back through the glass at Ezra who sat at the counter stroking himself with the backscratcher. His eyes were closed and his lips were open. He was giving himself pleasure. In my ear the operator whispered that my time was up and, obedient, I replaced the receiver.

  When we came to our apartment the phone was ringing. A silent conspiracy existed between Ezra and me. He didn’t run to answer the phone and I didn’t tell him not to. We sat down together in the living room. Ezr
a stroked his backscratcher against the yellow velvet of his chair. It left long track marks in the fabric. “Do you know what Dr. Freedman said?” he asked.

  I sat up, alerted, out of my slouch. “Hmm?” I said, nondirective.

  “He said he loves me.”

  Loves him! What a phony creep! I felt disappointed, sick at heart.

  “Everybody loves you,” I told him.

  The weight of this news made Ezra sigh deeply. “But not everybody knows me,” he said.

  In a little while he went to sleep and I went back into the living room. I tried to read a book, but tears came to my eyes, magnifying the words, making them run off the page. I went into the bedroom and took off all my clothes. Generous to myself, I lit only a dim, pink-shaded lamp. I stood in front of the mirror. My body is nice, everything holding up well and the skin silky and firm. It is such a familiar body, the mole under the left breast exactly where I remembered it. I looked at myself with loyalty and affection. And yet I had to be honest. Here and there were signs that couldn’t be ignored. Undefined blue shadows behind the knees. The flesh in the midriff came together too easily between my fingers. I looked at it sadly as I might at a favorite dress that had not given full service.

  I lay down on the bed, thinking I could probably seduce him if he were there in that same room, in that same bed, seeing those familiar blurred images through his eyelashes as he turned to me. How could he do without me? How could this happen?

  I jumped up and went into Ezra’s room. He was asleep, his arms out, his breath soft and perfect. I took the backscratcher from the floor near his shoes and went back to my bed. I pulled the long wooden handle along one leg and then the other. Slowly, I scratched at my arms, up and down in that same gentle rhythm. And I willed Gene to the bedside, pulling him there. He came, but I had conjured him up with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders hunched. He wouldn’t look at me or sit in the inviting well of sheets and blankets. Instead, he stood at the window and looked out. “I wish the damn weather would change. It’s always the same.” He picked up a magazine. “Could you wear your hair this way? Do you think you’d like another climate?”

  Here, I said. Over here.

  But he wishes that he had finished graduate school. He wishes that he could stop smoking, that he had been different with his mother and father. His shoulders still hunched, he paces the floor, and it grieves me to watch him. So I roll over, starting on my back, keeping time with his footsteps. I satisfy one place, arouse another, and I know nothing will do any good. Nothing will stop him in the whole world.

  I sat up and pulled the backscratcher across my chest and I saw the pink line of the scratch fade and then rise in the pallor of a welt. It was as if I had pierced through to the heart itself.

  I put on my bathrobe and went to the telephone. Bonnie answered and her voice was tired. “Let me speak to him,” I said, and Gene said, “Hello. Would you just listen for once? Don’t you know I don’t want to hurt you or the kid—God, it’s awful.” And he began to cry.

  I said, “It’s all right. I’ve come to my senses.”

  (1971)

  The Great Escape

  I used to look at Howard first thing in the morning to see if he was awake, too, and if he wanted to get something going before one of the kids crashed into the room and plopped down between us like an Amish bundling board. Lately, though, with the children long grown and gone to their own marriage beds, I found myself glancing over to see if Howard was still alive, holding my breath while I watched for the shallow rise and fall of his, the way I had once watched for a promising rise in the bedclothes.

  Whenever I saw that he was breathing and that the weather waited just behind the blinds to be let in, I felt an irrational surge of happiness. Another day! And then another and another and another. Breakfast, vitamins, bills, argument, blood pressure pills, lunch, doctor, cholesterol medicine, the telephone, supper, TV, sleeping pills, sleep, waking. It seemed as if it would all go on forever in that exquisitely boring and beautiful way. But of course it wouldn’t; everyone knows that.

  There were running death jokes in our family. My father, driving past a cemetery: “Everybody’s dying to get in.” My mother: “Death must be great—nobody ever comes back.” Howard’s mother: “When one of us dies, I’m going to Florida.” That would have been funny except that she actually meant it. Now, none of them was laughing or ever coming back.

  Howard’s father, who had no apparent sense of humor, was the first to go, quickly, of a blood clot that stopped his heart like a bullet. This sent Howard right to the precipice without fair warning. Next! He seemed to be summoned as if he’d been waiting his turn at the deli counter. He even told me that his number was up, extending the metaphor.

  He wasn’t next, though. His pushy mother cut the line and went second, succumbing to kidney failure after a short, spirited stint as the Merry Widow of Boca Raton. Then my parents sailed off into the abyss, felled in tandem by dementia and a series of strokes. We’d had our own health scares—Howard’s enlarged prostate, a lump in my breast. Several of our friends beat us to it anyway, in a kind of social massacre, while, in what seemed like only a few long afternoons, he and I turned seventy and then eighty and then nearly ninety.

  We had been together for such a long time that all of our grievances had been set aside, if not completely forgotten. Every once in a while, out of nowhere, I would remember his infidelities with a startling sting. And he must have still harbored resentment about what he’d called my “martyrdom,” my “too-muchness,” which, in truth, was only my largesse, my gregarious, forgiving nature.

  But the business of being old took up most of our time and concentration. A schedule for our various pills and tonics was stuck by a magnet to the refrigerator, where we used to hang the children’s drawings, then the grandchildren’s. And our bodies let us down as we lurched toward oblivion. My statuesque figure had given way to random bulges, as if my curves had been rearranged by an inept or sadistic sculptor. “Good padding against a hip fracture,” Dr. Ginsberg said in dubious consolation. Then there was the matter of my heart. There was nothing really wrong with it, but I was often uncomfortably aware of its beating, like the meter ticking in a taxi stuck in traffic.

  Howard, who had once been so gorgeous and in such hot demand, was grizzled and paunchy and gray. He couldn’t quite believe what had happened to him, and he avoided mirrors and what he perceived as the pitying glances of strangers. I didn’t tell him that I still had images of his younger self in the strongbox of my brain, of both of us at the beginning, when we couldn’t keep our hands off each other. My nostalgia would be cold comfort for his sense of loss. I wondered if he remembered us, too, but I was too afraid, or shy, to ask.

  I often said that we were lucky to still be alive, but he had to know I was lying. This hurt and that. “What?” one of us yelled to the other from the next room. “What is it now?” The little flash fires of frustration and anger. We’d both become relief maps of keratoses, skin tags, and suspicious-looking moles. “What’s this thing on my back, Paulie?” Howard would say, yanking up his shirt while I searched for my reading glasses. “It’s nothing,” I’d tell him. “I have a million of those.” Cheerleader and competitor at once. And I finally understood why my father, in his dotage, kept going on about his feet.

  The children telephoned, Ann far more regularly than Jason, of course. She was the good, attentive child, the one with keys to our apartment—“just in case”—and with our super’s and Dr. Ginsberg’s numbers on her speed dial. “Mom,” she would say without so much as the preface of a hello. “Are you okay? Is Dad?” As if she had heard we’d been in a terrible car accident, when neither of us even drove anymore.

  Then she would relay a spate of news—world news first, in a flurry of headlines: the latest chaos at the White House, a terrorist attack in London or Boston or Beirut, another police shooting of an unarmed Black man, and did I know that someone famous had just died? Howard and I read the
Times every day and watched CNN after supper, but Ann seemed to hear about everything first. I think she received bulletins on her watch or somewhere. Personal news usually followed, from the mundane––she thought she was getting a cold, and her brother had asked to borrow money again, for weed probably––to the spectacular: She’d made partner at her law firm! Her daughter Abigail was three months pregnant! Ann and Bradley were going to be grandparents. When I broke this latest to Howard he burst into tears. I put my arms around him and wept, too. And then we laughed together. How joyful we were, and how astounded that we had come to this.

  Ann and I conspired on a daily basis about possible baby names, as if we’d have a say on the subject. It was going to be a boy; what would sound euphonious with Leff-Bernstein, Abigail and her husband, Greg’s, conjoined last names? Jeremy? Dominic? Leo? Howard wondered if the baby might be named for him—after he was dead, that is, in the Jewish tradition. “Shut up,” I told him. Why did he always have to spoil things?

  I offered to host a baby shower and Ann agreed, although she insisted, in her amiably bossy way, that it would be held at her spacious SoHo loft instead of my junior four in Washington Heights, and that she would choose the theme and the caterer and cover all of the expenses. Which left me as no more than an honorary hostess, but I didn’t argue with any of it. At a certain point, you have to accept the shift in the balance of power between you and your children. And it was just so good to have something to look forward to.

  Then one wintry day Ann called very early in the morning. Howard and I were still eating breakfast. “Listen, Mom,” she said. “There’s something going around, a virus.”

  “I read something about that in the Times. I hope it’s not like SARS or that other one … MERS?” When had these dire uppercase acronyms slipped into our vocabulary? With AIDS, I remembered.