Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket

by Hilma Wolitzer

  I didn’t get my hair cut and it grew at what seemed to be an accelerated pace. There was nothing more unattractive, I thought, than an old woman with long, scraggly gray hair. I found a purple scrunchie that Abigail or Summer had left at our place and pulled my hair into a makeshift ponytail that made my ears stick out. Howard said he liked the way I looked. I wasn’t the only liar in the family. He put on a CD of Sidney Bechet standards and we slow-danced around the living room for a few laps before collapsing together on the sofa. We’ll get through this, I thought.

  Then Howard told me that he had an ingrown toenail—it was killing him—and he’d made an appointment to see Dr. Perez.

  “Let me see it,” I said. “Maybe I can fix it.” I had been filing my own toenails with a coarse emery board.

  “You’re not a podiatrist,” he said.

  “No,” I said. “But I play one on TV.”

  He was not in a playful mood. His toe wasn’t killing him, exactly—he was given to hyperbole—but it hurt a lot. “Howie, you can’t go,” I said. “The bus will be a hotbed of germs.”

  “I’ll take a cab.”

  “But there may be other patients in the waiting room.” I remembered it as being closet sized, with a few hard chairs jammed up against one another. “And who knows about Perez himself?” I enlisted Ann’s help in trying to deter him, but all of her wheedling and warnings didn’t work, either.

  I don’t know if he took a cab or the bus. I don’t know if the waiting room was empty, as he insisted later, or if he and Dr. Perez both wore masks for the entire visit. All I know is that a little more than a week later Howard began coughing, and it wasn’t one of his extravagant imaginary symptoms. He even tried to suppress it. By the next morning, he was running a fever—not that high, really, but steady. He said he didn’t feel terrible and that his toe was much better. And his sense of smell was intact. You smell pretty good,” he said, when I was probably rank with fear.

  Dr. Ginsberg had been exposed to an infected patient at his office and was quarantining at home. A television droned in the background. “It doesn’t sound too bad,” he said. “He’s in pretty good shape, and it could just be a run-of-the-mill flu.” He paused. “But there’s his age, and this other thing seems to turn on a dime. Tylenol and some Robitussin for now, but watch him, especially his breathing, and let me know.”

  I was a seasoned breath-watcher, so I could see and hear that Howard’s had become labored even before he began to complain about it. And then his fever spiked.

  “Call 911,” Ginsberg said, just as I knew he would.

  When the paramedics came, they put an oxygen mask over Howard’s face as soon as they had him on the gurney, so that all I could see were his wide, frightened eyes. “Get his insurance cards,” I was instructed. “Get his cell phone and a charger. Get him some pajamas.”

  “My glasses,” Howard said through the mask.

  I ran around looking for everything. His charger was under the bed. The only clean pajamas I could find didn’t match. I hardly had a chance to think until after we’d raced down the hall and they were in the elevator and the door had slid shut between us. “Good-bye! I love you!” I called, after the fact.

  The person who answered the phone in the emergency room took Howard’s name and after long minutes a doctor got on. She said that he’d tested negative for Covid-19 but had pneumonia. They were going to keep him overnight for observation, but I should know that he’d been exposed to the virus there and would have to be quarantined once he got home. “Yes, yes, of course,” I said. “Thank you.” He didn’t have it! I was manic with gratitude. I wanted to tell her she was a saint and a genius, and that I worshipped at the shrine of medicine.

  Ann said, “But, Mother, how can they send him home—he has pneumonia.” They called it the old man’s friend. That was before antibiotics, though, wasn’t it, before we were old? I began to deflate as Ann went on. How could he quarantine in our tiny apartment? Where would I sleep? I would need hired help, and that would be hard to come by in a pandemic. By the time we hung up, I was trembling.

  That night Howard called on his cell phone. He was still in the emergency room; I could hear other voices behind his, like a discordant backup group, and beeping heart monitors. He said he felt like crap, but he’d eaten some of the cardboard chicken they’d given him. “Did you have dessert?” I asked—his favorite part of any meal. “Yeah, Jell-O, he said. “Your mother could have been the cook here.”

  I couldn’t believe we were discussing food. At suppertime, I’d stood at the sink eating a sandwich, something my mother would do during a quarrel with my father, a spin-off of her famous silent treatment. Once, she didn’t speak to him for an entire month, and I was enlisted to go back and forth between them with messages, like a carrier pigeon. Was that why I always talked so much? My throat ached with contained language. When I could, I said, “Hospital food, what do you expect?”

  The next morning I woke up coughing. “Howie,” I said, forgetting for a moment that he wasn’t there. I ran my hand along his side of the bed just to be sure. The sheet was cool and smooth, but I continued speaking to him anyway, like an imbecile, like Bess Houdini. “I don’t feel well,” I whimpered. “What’s going on?” Of course I knew the answer to that even before I sipped some tasteless coffee and tried to smell the odorless jar of Vicks.

  At Dr. Ginsberg’s request, they retested Howard; this time the results were positive, and his oxygen level had worsened. They were going to admit him, although there weren’t any available beds yet on a medical floor. I was advised to stay home, despite the cough and the fever I now had, as long as my breathing was all right; the hospital was a madhouse and there was nothing they could do for me there anyway. I was no longer kneeling at the shrine of medicine.

  Wearing a mask and gloves, I put tied trash bags just outside our apartment door. A masked and gloved stranger picked them up and left mail and the groceries my children had ordered. Sometimes I looked through the peephole just to see the back of another human being receding down the hallway. I dropped my underwear and T-shirts on the bathroom and bedroom floors and let my dirty dishes accumulate in the sink, infractions the sixties hausfrau I had been wouldn’t have abided from her preteen children. I’d had to air out Jason’s reeking room every day, and Ann’s bed had always looked as if she were still in it.

  Howard and I didn’t talk about food anymore. We seemed to have entered a dual delirium. I fretted about losing my keys in the street, although I hadn’t left the apartment for days. When I asked him how he felt, he said, “With my hands,” and I could tell by his flat tone that he wasn’t trying to make a weak joke. Maybe he believed it was a kind of cognitive test: I feel with my hands, I see with my eyes, etc., etc. He handed his phone to a doctor who introduced himself as David Chin. “I’m taking care of your husband,” he said. His voice was young, yet weary. He explained that his main concern was Howard’s oxygen levels, which hadn’t improved. Still, he was hopeful that things would turn around. They had a malaria drug they were going to try. He took my number and promised to keep me informed.

  Dr. Chin called every day at the end of his shift—things were always the same or only a little worse. “He’s holding his own,” was the way he put it, and then Howard would get on to say hello. He sounded like those creepy men who used to pant into the phone and then hang up. “I’m still here,” he said one day. I wasn’t sure if he meant in the hospital or in the world. “Me, too,” I said. Dr. Chin took the phone again to ask if Howard had a living will. I wanted to come to Howard’s defense for not checking off those boxes about final measures. He must have been thinking about the aroma of simmering soup, of quenching his thirst with lemonade on a summer’s day. How could he renounce those simple pleasures with the stroke of a pen? Dr. Chin said, “Don’t be alarmed. It’s just routine.”

  I began to feel better, in small increments. The cough was still deep and wrenching, but less frequent, and my sense of taste and smell had ret
urned, if not my appetite. I turned on the television news and saw the rising numbers of coronavirus cases everywhere, heard the president’s cruel and cloying voice, and then the stock market report, the weather, and even a bit of entertainment news, as if things were normal.

  I went into the bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet. There was that dusty bottle of citrusy cologne, years after I’d decided to simply smell like myself. Nail polish in a palette from the palest pink to the bloodiest red, and Howard’s near empty can of shaving cream, his redundant bottles of antacid tablets. I dumped most of it into the wastebasket. Then I attacked the drawer in the kitchen—the crazy drawer—that was jammed with corroded batteries and takeout menus, with expired coupons and the manuals for appliances we no longer owned. Out, out!

  Why had we lived this way, burdened by so much domestic clutter? I had been halfway through a literature major at Brooklyn College when I met Howard, and he had been that sexy thing, a jazz musician, his golden saxophone an extension of his golden body. We might have settled in Paris to pursue our artistic dreams instead of setting up house in Queens and then Washington Heights. We might have married other people or no one at all. What a radical idea—obliterating our long, tumultuous history, our indelible children and their children.

  Howard needed the maximum oxygen flow, and Dr. Chin admitted that things looked grim. Ann, who had anguished over not being allowed to visit, told me that she’d been speaking to Dr. Chin, too—behind my back, I thought—and that on the brink of being attached to a ventilator Howard had declined and signed a DNR. “He’d never do that!” I cried. It was a mistake; maybe he didn’t understand what he was doing. But Ann assured me that he’d been fully aware, that his dread of suffering must have overwhelmed his dread of nothingness. “Daddy is being brave,” she said, and we wailed to each other until one of us hung up.

  Like the book club meeting and a bar mitzvah I had recently attended, the baby shower was conducted via Zoom. All of the gifts had been selected from a registry, and when Abigail opened them, she and the guests in their little frames exclaimed over them in counterfeit surprise. She had told me the baby would be named for her grandfather, whom she’d adored, but that no one called a child Howard anymore. Would I mind if she just used his initial? She was thinking of Hunter or Hugo.

  Dr. Chin had left word with Ann that he would be happy to speak with me whenever I was ready. I couldn’t bring myself to call him. I didn’t want to hear about last words or last breaths, and I let the weeks go by. Ann said that if I waited much longer, Dr. Chin might not remember Howard or me. There were so many other patients and their families, those dense pages of obituaries in the Times every Sunday.

  I kept thinking I was beside myself. I knew it was only a figure of speech; Howard would say I was being melodramatic. In reality, I was beside no one—in our bed, on the sofa, or at the kitchen table. And Howard had died without anyone who loved him nearby, had been cremated with no one there to see him off. I hadn’t witnessed any of it and my imagination failed me for once—I couldn’t picture it. His clothes were hanging in the closet, his frayed blue toothbrush was in its holder. It was as if he had merely vanished, like a magician’s assistant falling through a secret trapdoor.

  I wouldn’t let the children into the apartment yet, although I had scrubbed almost every surface with a disinfectant, and I needed their help disposing of Howard’s things. We all met in the street in front of my building, wearing our disguises, and keeping the recommended distance between us—waving and blowing kisses until Jason leapt across the chasm like a caped superhero and clutched me to his heaving chest.

  I left a message for Dr. Chin with his answering service, and he called me back a few hours later. “I don’t know if you’ll remember us—” I began, and he interrupted me. “How could I forget?” he said. “Your husband was my favorite patient.” Did he tell that to all the new widows? Then he said, “Howard was such a sweet guy. He told me all about you, your whole love story, in daily installments.” It didn’t matter whether or not it was true. I had been shown mercy.

  It’s still going on—I mean the pandemic and all the rest of life. I haven’t had a FaceTime visit with a psychic, and I didn’t hold a Zoom séance on Howard’s birthday in October. But I often speak to him. I was hesitant and self-conscious at first, trying out a few possible code words, like his name and my own. Over time, I’ve become my usual garrulous self again, talking and talking about anything and everything, as if I’m goading him into answering me, if only to tell me to be quiet. So far, he hasn’t.

  (2020)

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am deeply indebted to Henry Dunow, Nancy Miller, Elizabeth Strout, Meg Wolitzer, and Nancy Wolitzer for their faith in this book and their invaluable assistance in seeing it to fruition.

  HW

  A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

  Hilma Wolitzer is a recipient of Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and a Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award. She has taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, New York University, Columbia University, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Her first published story appeared when she was thirty-six, and her first novel eight years later. Her many stories and novels have drawn critical praise for illuminating the dark interiors of the American home. She lives in New York City.

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  This electronic edition first published in the United States 2021

  Copyright © Hilma Wolitzer, 2021

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