Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket

by Hilma Wolitzer

  “It’s in the same family,” Ann said, “and it may be very contagious. You and Dad should be careful.”

  “Well, we’re not kissing anybody.” Not even each other, I didn’t add.

  “You should both stay close to home for now,” Ann said.

  “We don’t go anywhere,” I said, “beside Safeway and the doctor.” I needed a haircut, though, my book club was scheduled to meet soon—we were reading Mrs. Bridge—and Howard wanted to get to the podiatrist to have his toenails clipped as soon as Medicare would allow it. Feet.

  “Order in for now,” Ann advised. “I can set you up with a good food service. And cancel everything else.”

  “Sweetheart,” I said. “Aren’t you being a little extreme?”

  “Mother. I have it on good authority.”

  She probably did. Ann was on the board of two hospitals, with privileged access to several noted specialists.

  “Well, what’s it called? Maybe I’ll ask Ginsberg about it.”

  She sighed. “Ginsberg,” she said.

  She had never exactly called Dr. Ginsberg a quack, but she’d intimated that he wasn’t up to her high standards. I pointed out that Howard and I had survived almost half a century in his care, and that he always returned phone calls, usually the same day. I didn’t say that I was a little bit in love with him, and that her father might be, too.

  “It’s called novel coronavirus,” Ann said.

  “Sounds fictional,” I quipped, but she didn’t laugh.

  “The word ‘novel’ refers to the fact that it’s new, unknown,” she said, “which is what makes it so worrisome.”

  Later, I reported what Ann had told me about the virus to Howard, and he said, “I think she’s becoming a bit of a hypochondriac.”

  “Gee, I wonder where she got that,” I said. How many times had I caught him surreptitiously taking his pulse or his temperature?

  “Ha ha,” he said without a trace of mirth.

  “Maybe we should listen to her. She’s always up on everything, and she’s so well-connected.”

  “Whatever,” Howard said. “But I’m making an appointment with Perez. I can hang from a tree by my toenails.”

  I’ll remember that exchange forever, although I barely registered it at the time. How strange the human mind is.

  When my mother began to lose hers, she tried not to acknowledge it and I was her willing accomplice. “Everyone forgets a few words,” she said after such a long mid-sentence pause on the phone I thought we’d been disconnected. It wasn’t an unreasonable claim. Howard and I already suffered from an occasional folie-à-deux forgetfulness—unable to come up with Ida Lupino’s name while we were watching one of her movies, or what the brussels sprouts on our dinner plates were called. But my mother’s harmless “senior moments” devolved into some bizarre behavior. Either that or my father was the one losing it when he called to report that she’d been chewing on Kleenex or that she’d tipped the handyman in their building a hundred dollars for changing a ceiling lightbulb.

  So I found myself sitting in her Elmhurst living room, with its battling floral patterns of wallpaper and upholstery, smiling falsely while sneaking glances at the Kleenex box on the end table closest to her. Two brazen cockroaches skittered across the middle of the floor in plain view. Usually, she’d be screaming at my father to take off his shoe and kill them, although he invariably missed his target and knocked over a lamp or stubbed his toe in the process. But this time she didn’t seem to notice, and I think he pretended he didn’t, either.

  Yet she looked all right—her housedress was clean and buttoned correctly, and her conversation was ordinary enough. She offered me the requisite repulsive snacks of canned peaches and lime Jell-O. She asked after Howard and the kids, getting everyone’s name right without hesitation. She said, “Your father is driving me crazy”—a familiar refrain—before ticking off a list of his latest crimes: he dropped crumbs everywhere, he loaded the dishwasher with the knives facing up, he added salt to his food without even tasting it. Your father, as if I was the one who had brought him into the family. Then, “Do you like your hair like that, Paulette?” Her customary, sly way of criticizing me, of telling the truth slant. But all of those maddening old habits of hers only elicited a whoosh of relief and even a ripple of affection. I was beginning to relax when she reached over and pulled a Kleenex from the box near her elbow and popped it into her mouth.

  “Stock up on toilet paper and hand sanitizer,” Ann advised. “Fill up your freezer.”

  By then, the virus had spread a little. “Annie,” I said, “it’s not here. Some guy went to China, and now it’s in Seattle. It’s in a nursing home there.” Where there were other, more decrepit and less fortunate old people, thousands of miles away. It was in the paper, and on the nightly news. Anderson Cooper seemed calmer than my daughter.

  “Do you want to die, Mom?” she asked.

  “Hmm. Good question.”

  “Stop it,” she said. Then, “Don’t you remember when you promised me that you would never die?”

  She was three or four at the time, and had just had her first intimations of mortality after the death of her goldfish. It was an easy leap from Goldie to me, and she was inconsolable; what else could I say? “I never said that,” I told her, blithely erasing her memory. “I said that I wouldn’t die until you were ready for me to.”

  “I don’t remember that,” she said. “But anyway, I’m not ready. So don’t.” Her voice had thickened a little.

  My poor girl. I didn’t remind her of the message I’d once found scribbled with a marker inside the cover of the board game Sorry. I hope Mommy dies. At first I suspected Jason, who was given to that kind of sentiment in some of his adolescent outbursts, but it was clearly Ann’s writing, down to the incongruous little heart dotting the i. She’d probably written it after a contentious family round of the game; she was never a gracious loser.

  “Okay,” I agreed. “I won’t die yet.”

  Harry Houdini and his wife, Bess, famously made a pact to try and establish contact after one of them died. They came up with secret code words and other private signals and signs. He died first, and she held regular séances on his birthday for a decade, attempting to coax Harry’s spirit into communicating. She failed, of course. My mother got that right—death is great; nobody ever comes back, or sends messages from the other side.

  One night, in bed, just after Howard and I had taken our Ambien and turned off our lamps, I said, “If we made a deathbed pact, like the Houdinis’, what would our secret code be?”

  Howard groaned. “Jesus,” he said. “Let’s just go to sleep.” Death was his least favorite topic, in any context, and especially at bedtime. So I didn’t share my conviction that there was only one mystery left after a lengthy marriage: Which partner would die first? And I had stopped reminding him to check those blank boxes on his living will about heroic measures, about the withholding of food and water. He wasn’t amused when I’d threatened him with an Incomplete.

  The bed creaked now with his restless displeasure. “Why do you always have to talk about everything?” he said. A fair, if rhetorical, question. Why, indeed? Why did I feel compelled, as a small child, during a lull in the chanting at a family seder, to announce loudly that I had a vagina? Why did I tell Howard that I loved him before he had a chance to say it to me first? Did I think that “I love you,” and “I love fucking you” were the same thing?

  “ ‘To sleep, perchance to dream,’ ” I said, relentlessly. Hamlet’s take on dying. “Remember when that idiot hotel in LA put those cards with the quote on our pillows?”

  I could sense Howard smiling in the darkness. “Next to the mints,” he said. Then, after a moment or two, “They called Houdini the Handcuff King.”

  “Sounds kinky,” I said. But I felt sad. Harry and Bess—like the Trumans, like someone’s old uncle and aunt in the Bronx, longing for each other from the grave. “So what would our secret code be?”

  How
ard didn’t answer and I thought he’d fallen asleep. He sometimes did that in the middle of a conversation, a gift I believed was exclusively granted to men. But then he pulled me to him and kissed me deeply. I kissed him back—so hard our teeth collided—and his hand grazed one of my breasts and then the other. How lonely I had been for his touch, for his mouth. We did whatever we could still do to satisfy our resurgent desire, and we stayed in each other’s arms afterward. I was just dozing off when Howard said, “Paulie.”

  “Yes?”

  “That’s my code word,” he said. “Go back to sleep.”

  By early March there were a few cases in New York City. I didn’t need Ann to tell me about them, although she’d already sent us a care package of surgical masks and vinyl gloves. Howard put on a mask and growled, “I’ve got a gun. Give me all your dough.”

  Then, in the middle of a weekday, there was a surprise visit from our son, Jason. He was between jobs—he’d been a bartender, an appliance salesman, and a greeter at a Walmart until they phased the position out. Decades ago, Howard had taken him on as an apprentice at his music studio, but Jason was often late getting in, and he kept screwing up. “I’m sorry, Dad,” he said, finally. “It’s just not my bag.”

  “He’ll find himself, Howie,” I predicted, I promised.

  “I don’t think he’s even looking,” Howard said.

  Now Jason might be between marriages, too. I loved his current, second wife, Honey, the antithesis of the evil stepmother to his daughter, Summer. They’d separated before, and I kept hoping they would resolve things and become a couple again. For the time being he was couch surfing with friends on the Lower East Side.

  “Just checking up on you guys,” he said, handing me a bunch of bright green carnations. Was it St. Patrick’s Day already, without a parade?

  “You look like a bum,” Howard told him after they’d hugged. Such a handsome bum, I thought, even in his sixties—we’d all be on Medicare together soon—with his father’s dark eyes, and that stubble. He had been a mere comma under my ribs at our shotgun wedding, and now he filled the doorway. Like a mother in a sitcom, I tousled his hair and made him lunch. Before he left, Howard slipped him a twenty.

  “And you let that moron into the apartment?” Ann shrieked over the phone. “I’ll bet he took the subway there!” No, he took a limousine, a chariot, a flying carpet.

  “Did you wear your masks, at least? Did you wash your hands?”

  “Yes,” I lied. I was getting better and better at it. “Of course we did.”

  It was my friend Ruth’s turn to host our book group, but on the advice of her son Jeffrey, a radiologist, she called everyone to cancel, or at least to change the venue. We were going to have a Zoom meeting, whatever that was, instead of convening at her place. There was much nervous back and forth among the members of the group about this latest development. Everyone had a computer or an iPad, but there was a wide range of technical expertise. It sounded easy enough, though. We’d all receive a link and, at the specified time, we would simply open it and go from there.

  Ours was strictly a women’s group, and the few husbands still around were usually banned from our meetings. Whenever it was my turn, I took my laptop into the living room, where the refreshments were laid out, and Howard skulked off to the bedroom like a grounded teenager, closing the door behind him.

  But the Zoom meeting changed all of that. Enough aloneness! We had to stick together. Ruth, long a widow, would have Jeffrey right beside her to help facilitate things, and I invited Howard to sit next to me on the bed, with the laptop between us. I hit the link and we waited, the way our ancestors must have waited for the flickering Magic Lantern to do its thing. After what seemed like a long time, the screen filled with a notice that our meeting would begin soon. “Well, this is exciting,” I said.

  Mrs. Bridge was my favorite novel, with its brief, brilliant paragraphs like vaudeville blackouts, and characters I would think about wistfully, as if they were old friends with whom I’d lost touch. I loved Mrs. Bridge, even when she exasperated me. She was the product of her circumstances, of her time and place, but I still wanted her to have more insight and more courage, and to make better choices, the way I had once wished for a happier outcome for Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina. When I was very young, I’d read a beloved book over and over again with the stupid hope that it would end differently this time. A few critics had said, when Mrs. Bridge and its sequel, Mr. Bridge, were first published, that they were unkind, even brutal portraits of the author’s parents, whose upper middle class lives in Kansas City bore a strong resemblance to his protagonists’. But I saw both novels as candid observation, leavened by the charity of humor and the imagination. I was gripping my dog-eared, underlined book and looking forward to saying some of all that when our meeting began, if it ever did.

  Suddenly, Ruth’s and Jeffrey’s faces loomed before us, almost as big as life. They were both wearing the kind of masks Ann said you couldn’t buy anymore for love or money. Then one of them seemed to bark, piercingly, and Jeffrey shouted “Mute, Evelyn, mute!” Evelyn Lasky and Mildred, her ancient, incontinent, and yappy Maltese.

  “How?” Evelyn cried. “Oh! Oh! What do I do?” while Mildred barked in frantic unison.

  “Just hit your damn mute button!” Jeffrey commanded through his mask, as muffled and menacing as Darth Vader. “And shut that dog up!” So much for his bedside manner, I thought, but didn’t say. What if I wasn’t muted, either?

  Then, the faces of all the other women in our book group popped up, each in a separate little frame, like the celebrities on Hollywood Squares. Some of the women’s mouths were moving soundlessly. Only Evelyn’s frame was empty until she whizzed by, calling “Mildred! Stay! Come!”

  “Everyone else, unmute!” Jeffrey ordered, and soon there was a cacophony of voices, a chorus of confusion and dismay. And someone’s cell phone chirped and chirped.

  “So this is what I’ve been missing all these years,” Howard said.

  Then Ruth was in the center of the screen again, sans Jeffrey, holding up her copy of Mrs. Bridge and wiggling it. “Settle down, people,” she said, like the middle school teacher she had once been. “Now, who would like to begin?”

  I raised my hand and leaned eagerly forward—the way I had in AP English—just as the connection was broken and everyone grew silent and disappeared.

  The sirens woke me again from a disturbing dream. Out of the frying pan … Howard was still asleep next to me, still breathing. Everything had changed in just a couple of weeks. There were so many new cases in the city and not only in nursing homes. I remembered telling Ann that I wouldn’t be caught dead in one of those places.

  Novel coronavirus, Covid-19—like the devil, it had alternate names. A neighbor informed me, through her barely cracked door, that someone on the floor below us had it, and there were rumors about the super’s wife. Howard stayed home most of the time, pacing the apartment for exercise like a hamster on a wheel. I only ventured out for a few essentials at a small bodega rather than the more treacherously populated supermarket, and to pick up the mail and empty our trash. I wore a mask and gloves like almost everyone else I saw in the street. We all looked like aliens, like expressionless robots. One afternoon, I saw a barefaced young man coming toward me and I said, “Excuse me, but don’t you have a mask?”

  “Cunt!” he shouted, and he lunged at me with a raised fist before sauntering off. Why do you always have to talk about everything? My heart rioted for minutes afterward.

  Upstairs, the phone rang and rang. An automated voice offered a terrific deal on automobile insurance. I just had to press “one” to reach an agent. Another told me that my Amazon account had been hacked and that I owed $1,046. A sweet-sounding boy pretended to be my grandson who needed Target gift cards sent immediately to bail him out of jail. I guess they all figured we were trapped at home and had nothing else to do, which was largely true.

  But there also were legitimate, welcome calls, fro
m both children, a couple of the grandkids, and our daughter-in-law, Honey. She was taking Jason back in, for the duration, anyway; she didn’t want him to be among strangers in a plague.

  “Darling,” I said. “That sounds almost biblical.”

  “I guess I’m just a sucker, like you,” she said, which felt absurdly like a compliment.

  Rosa, who had been our weekly housecleaner for years, phoned to say she wouldn’t be coming in for a while, or working for any of her other regulars. She was afraid of bringing something bad home to her disabled husband and his elderly mother, who lived with them. How would they get by without Rosa’s income? I put some money in an envelope and mailed it to her, the way my mother used to send a crisp ten-dollar bill to Jason and Ann on each of their birthdays. I dragged the vacuum cleaner out of the hall closet. It seemed to draw back, like an obstinate leashed dog. I was embarrassed to realize I’d forgotten how to turn it on.

  Houdini—that escape artist, the Handcuff King—was a great magician, but also a pragmatist. He knew that his tricks were just that, not anything mystical or otherworldly. So why did he and Bess ever devise that ridiculous pact? Maybe terror makes believers of us all.

  Howard hated wearing a mask. He claimed that it impeded his breathing and, perversely, his vision. At the same time, he’d become more of a germaphobe, not touching the mail or the newspaper until they’d lain around the apartment for hours, and then washing his hands raw. Every few days he developed a new imaginary symptom, usually shortly after he’d first heard about it. One evening I found him sniffing an almost full bag of garbage—coffee grounds and onion peels—as if he were inhaling the scent of roses. “I think I’ve lost my sense of smell,” he said. I opened an old jar of Vicks VapoRub and held it under his nose, and he recoiled, relieving us both.

  I’d taken to reading aloud again, which used to annoy him, especially if he was trying to read at the same time. Now, he seemed to find it soothing, maybe because I chose poems by Lucille Clifton and Billy Collins that tended to remind us of ourselves.