Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket Read online

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  Fiction

  An Available Man

  Summer Reading

  The Doctor’s Daughter

  Tunnel of Love

  Silver

  In the Palomar Arms

  Hearts

  In the Flesh

  Ending

  Nonfiction

  The Company of Writers: Fiction Workshops and Thoughts on the Writing Life

  Books for Young Readers

  Wish You Were Here

  Toby Lived Here

  Out of Love

  Introducing Shirley Braverman

  Morty

  This was the night Mrs. Bridge concluded that while marriage might be an equitable affair, love itself was not.

  —EVAN S. CONNELL, MRS. BRIDGE

  The author thanks the following magazines, where several of these stories originally appeared in somewhat different form:

  The Saturday Evening Post, New American Review, Esquire, Ms., Prairie Schooner

  CONTENTS

  Foreword by Elizabeth Strout

  Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket

  Waiting for Daddy

  Photographs

  Mrs. X

  Sundays

  Nights

  Overtime

  The Sex Maniac

  Trophies

  Bodies

  Mother

  Love

  The Great Escape

  Acknowledgments

  Foreword by Elizabeth Strout

  Hilma Wolitzer once told an interviewer, “I don’t believe there’s such a thing as ordinary life. I think all life is extraordinary.”

  In these immensely gratifying, poignant, funny, and well-crafted stories, you may find—at first glance—what you think of as ordinary lives, but you will come away recognizing that every person does, in fact, have an extraordinary life. Here you will see women and men who live their daily existence with all the turbulence of the unexpected, starting with the title story, “Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket.” The woman who goes mad will be imprinted indelibly on your brain, her two small boys clinging to her skirt (“Pee-pee,” one of them whispers, before wetting himself), and there is her pocketbook, which, near the end of the story, lies on the counter—empty; it has been left there by the narrator “sneakily, as one leaves a litter of kittens in a vacant lot.” In just a few pages Wolitzer reveals a glimpse of the life of this woman, her two little boys, and the husband who comes to get her. That’s all we will ever know about the woman who went mad in the supermarket. But we enter the story with our own experiences and therefore make it our own. Wolitzer always leaves enough spaces between the lines for us to embrace her work in this way. This is part of her marvelousness as a writer.

  It should be noted that this story was first published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1966. A number of these stories were published in Esquire in the early 1970s, and one in Ms. magazine, as well. All stories take place in a time in history, and Wolitzer captures that time with a breathtaking precision. But it is always—for Wolitzer—about the characters; that they lived during this time informs who they are, but their particularities make them special—extraordinary.

  Wolitzer is largehearted in her work, judging no one. And she is also an exquisite craftswoman. She understands how to render the details so well that we are immediately placed inside the story. In “Bodies,” the protagonist, Sharon, is unexpectedly called to fly across the country to help get her husband out of a wonderfully horrifying situation—not to be gone into here—and on the plane she sits next to a man who has had a few drinks. “He leans back in his seat and faces her intimately, as if they are sharing a bed pillow.” Boom. We are right there with them.

  This is another part of Wolitzer’s wonder as a writer: she will start off in one place and end up in a situation one never would have imagined, and yet it ultimately makes a kind of perfect sense. The story “Overtime” is a dazzling example of this: a man’s ex-wife won’t leave him alone in his current marriage, and his current wife’s response to this is hilarious, and also moving. The ending of this story—not to be given away here—is supreme.

  As are so many of the endings; there is a little bump, and we realize we have landed safely.

  This sense of safety—of being in safe hands—as we read is never to be underestimated. The reader does not have to know of this need, but the writer does. And in these stories, no matter what happens, we have the sense of safety that a great storyteller provides. Wolitzer’s prose is sure-footed as it careens us through the lives of these people. In “The Sex Maniac” the narrator waits anxiously for a spotting of the man said to be a sex maniac. The first two lines read, “Everybody said that there was a sex maniac loose in the complex and I thought—it’s about time. It had been a long asexual winter.” Humor, always riding alongside pathos, is at play in all these stories; it is there in the safety of the narrative voice.

  And there is wisdom as well. In “Mother” a woman thinks: “The very worst thing, she was certain, was not human misery, but its nakedness, and the naked witness of others.” Wolitzer allows us to be that witness, but with an empathy that rises up quietly from the pages. It does not frighten us, it envelops us. This is true as we drive with Howard and his wife Paulette out to the suburbs on Sundays to view new houses on the market; her husband is depressed and “Paulie” knows this will cheer him, as it does. It is only life, we realize. In all its extraordinariness.

  Hilma Wolitzer published her first piece of work—a poem—at the age of nine. It was in a publication put out by the New York City Department of Sanitation; it was a poem about winter. She has gone on to be the author of fourteen books. As a young girl she thought of herself as a poet, but as she got older she thought of herself as a visual artist. She would sit on the subway and draw the faces of people around her on the stock market pages of the newspaper she was reading. “Everyone’s face was fascinating to me, and I would wonder what their lives were like.” It is this deep, abiding—extraordinary—curiosity that makes her the writer that she is.

  The story “Nights” is a magnificent portrayal of a woman with insomnia. She roams through her apartment, gazes out the window, does all the things that insomniacs do. If you ever have a sleepless night, read this story first—it will make you understand you are not alone in the world. This is what literature does for us; it breaks down these barriers for a moment within which we all live. And if you are in the hands of a master storyteller, you may even have a moment of grace and think to yourself, Thank you, Hilma Wolitzer.

  Thank you.

  Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket

  Even now, saying it aloud, or repeating that sentence to my husband later, I will see that it is meant to amuse, to attract interest, to get attention. Of course, I’m too sophisticated in things psychological (isn’t everyone today?) to think that one goes mad at a moment’s notice. There are insipid beginnings to a nervous breakdown. There’s lonely crying in the bathroom, balanced on the edge of the tub, and in the kitchen, weeping into the dishwater, tears breaking the surface of the suds. There’s forgetting, or wishing to forget, the names of the children, the way to the local bank, the reason for getting up in the morning. There’s loss of vanity—toenails growing long and dirty into prehensile claws, hair uncombed, eyebrows unplucked. Yet something seems very right to me about going mad in a supermarket: those painted oranges, threatening to burst at the navel; formations of cans, armored with labels and prices and weights; cuts of meat, aggressively bloody; and crafty peaches and apples, showing only their glowing perfect faces, hiding the rot and soft spots on their undersides.


  Nevertheless, this woman did not go trundling her cart through the ordered chaos. She stood transfixed, as if caught in some great thought. She was blocking the aisle.

  “Excuse me,” I said tentatively, hesitant and self-protective as only a woman expecting her first child can be. “Pardon me, could I just get through?”

  She turned slowly, and the two small children clinging to her skirt held on and tightened the cloth across her hips. Perhaps for the glory of the retelling, I might say that she was a great beauty, that her beauty was marred (or enhanced) only by her wild expression. In truth, she was pretty in a common sort of way, with conventional hair and eyes and nose. Only what she said then stopped me from clearing my throat and asking again if she would move and let me through.

  She gripped the handle of her empty cart and said, “There is no end to it.” It was spoken so simply and undramatically, but with such honest conviction that for a moment I thought she was referring to the aisle of the supermarket. Perhaps it was blocked ahead of us, and she couldn’t move up farther. But then she said, “I have tried and I have tried, and there is no end to it. Ask Harold. Ask anybody, ask my mother.”

  “Do you feel all right?” I asked. “Can I help you?”

  Her knuckles were white and hard as she clung to the cart. She did not answer.

  I looked around me self-consciously, and then I leaned toward her and said, “Would you like to go home?”

  “You know,” she said severely, “that I can’t go there.”

  Then a woman rattled her cart toward us from the other end of the aisle. “Excuse me,” she called out cheerfully. “Coming through!”

  “Could you go the other way?” I asked her.

  “Why should I go the other way?” she demanded.

  “Because this aisle is blocked,” I answered, grimacing and rolling my eyes. She looked at me suspiciously and turned her cart briskly back in the other direction. A chain of voices began in the back of the store. I heard the last one call, “Mr. A! Mr. A!”

  Then for a few minutes we were alone, the woman and her children and me. We stood in the supermarket as if primed for a television commercial in which the magical product would come winging from the shelves, where brand X would forever stay, unwanted and untried. The manager, Mr. A, came eagerly toward us. He is a kindly fellow, who perhaps could seem even kinder in a small, intimate grocery store. He will sprint off on a given signal and bring back the bread crumbs or the baking soda or the canned crab meat that you can’t seem to find anywhere. He rubbed his hands nervously.

  “How can I bear it?” the woman cried in grief.

  Mr. A looked at her questioningly. “Can I get you some water?” he asked.

  She didn’t answer him, but covered her mouth with her hand, so that all of her anguish was concentrated in her eyes. I began to tremble, and I worried that my concern for her would somehow affect the child I was carrying. Didn’t I worry two aisles back, if, when the time came, I would choose the right baby food, that my milk would flow, that I would be a wise and tranquil mother? All this time the two small children did not release their grip on their mother’s skirt.

  “She’s very ill,” I told Mr. A.

  “Should I call the police?” he asked. The woman began to weep big flowing tears, and I thought then that all the priests and plumbers and policemen of the world could not stay them.

  “No, no,” I said quickly, looking at the children. Bending at the knees, I leaned toward the taller child. “What’s your name?” I asked him. I was close enough to smell his milky breath and to see that his nose was running onto a crusty sore right under it. He turned his face away from mine and didn’t answer. Feeling bolder I took the handbag that was looped over the woman’s wrist, and she didn’t resist me. She seemed not to notice.

  “There must be something, if only I could remember,” she said vaguely. The pocketbook creaked open, as if from long disuse, or like the mouth of a nervous child at the dentist’s. Mr. A peered over my shoulder. There was a sweet hair tonic smell. The pocketbook was empty. We peered into it, unbelieving. It was the saddest thing I had ever seen, that empty pocketbook.

  “Jeez,” Mr. A whispered. But then he brightened. “Say,” he said, “say, if her pocketbook’s empty, then she doesn’t have any car keys. She must have walked here. If she walked here, then she can’t live too far.”

  I looked at him coldly. “Maybe she left them in the car,” I said. “Or maybe she cleaned out her purse somewhere.”

  This deflated him for only a moment. He looked thoughtful, then called to a stock boy who had been staring at us. Mr. A sent him out into the parking lot and told him to look at the ignitions of all the cars.

  “Pee-pee,” said the smaller child suddenly, tugging at his mother’s skirt.

  “Oh,” I said. “He has to go to the bathroom.” I took his fist and tried to detach it from his mother’s skirt. He held fast with the tenacity of a tick in a dog’s coat.

  “Mama, pee-pee,” the child insisted.

  “He only wants his mother to take him,” I told Mr. A, and he nodded as if I were translating from a foreign language. The child stuck his thumb into his mouth and sucked greedily. When the stock boy came back he said that there weren’t any cars with keys in them.

  A small group of women had gathered at the end of the aisle, curiosity drawing them close, fear keeping them distant. “Do any of you know this woman?” I called to them.

  They mumbled among themselves, and then a tall, rawboned woman in a Girl Scout leader uniform walked closer. “I don’t know her—” she began, and from the rear someone called, “Why don’t you look in her pocketbook?”

  “I don’t know her,” the tall woman repeated, “but I know who she is.” She ducked her head and then glanced up guiltily. “Her name is Shirley Lewis. Mrs. Harold Lewis,” she whispered, and then fell back into the crowd of women like a frightened informer.

  “But where does she live?” I asked irritably.

  “Oh-oh, pee-pee,” sighed the little boy, and a stream of urine, tentatively begun, ran down his leg.

  “Never rush into anything,” his mother stated. And then, nostalgically, “How nice it was to be the children!”

  “Where? Where?” I snapped at the tall woman. I knew that I was vying with Mr. A. We were playing detective, savior, twenty questions, God. Who would win this terrible contest and solve the mystery and set things right again? I had a good lead. All-powerful, matriarchal, replete with swollen belly.

  The woman came forward again. She mumbled an address and stepped back into the group of women. Mr. A scribbled the information in a little notebook and went to the telephone in his office. One point for Mr. A.

  “Where is Harold?” I asked slyly when Mr. A had gone. Shirley Lewis looked at me with real interest. “Ha, ha,” she said, and smirked, as if I had said something vulgar but worth noting. The little boy stood, straddling his puddle, miserable with his public act. I looked into my shopping cart and saw that the frozen things had begun to sweat and thaw. I was very tired. My legs were singing with fatigue. I wanted to sit down. I wanted to go home and take a bath. The woman was tiresome, the game was tedious, the supermarket was boring.

  “We sat at the table,” Shirley Lewis began. “My grandmother brought in the soup. It was so heavy, her hands trembled. Uncle Al brought everybody in the car. He had a Pontiac.”

  Mr. A came back. He was smiling. The game was over. “Her husband is home! He was sleeping; he didn’t even know she was out.”

  “Ahhh,” moaned the crowd of women, like a Greek chorus.

  Soon, the husband came. He had the car, after all. The children rushed from their mother to him. Fair-weather friends, I thought. He was tall and burly. He was wearing workman’s clothes, and his shoes were untied. There were sleep creases down the side of one cheek. He ignored everyone else, although we looked eagerly to him as we might to the comedy relief in a melodrama. Incredibly, he scolded the small boy for wetting his pants. To his wife, he
said, “What’s the matter with you?” and he grabbed her arm. She went with him, and then it was all over. Several women broke away from the crowd and went to the window. They watched Harold and Shirley and the children get into the car.

  I looked dully into my shopping cart. It was impossible to remember the other things I had wanted to buy. Shirley Lewis’s pocketbook lay gaping on top of my own. I wondered if it would ever be returned to her. I thought that we would not be hearing from her or her husband. Harold hadn’t said thank you to anyone. I imagined, giddily, an engraved card coming in the mail: “Mr. Harold Lewis and family thank you for the kindness extended to Mrs. Lewis in her time of need.”

  Mr. A was extremely gracious. He guided me to an unopened checkout counter and personally rang up the few items in my cart. “Some fun,” he said, clucking his tongue. “You were swell.” He was the master detective congratulating the cop on the beat. His munificence knew no bounds. He offered to take my package to the car.

  “No, no,” I said, yawning in his face. I left the pocketbook on his counter, sneakily, as one leaves a litter of kittens in a vacant lot.

  “Good-bye,” some of the women called to me. I had proved myself after all, and someday they would ask me to join committees and protest groups and the PTA. I went home. My matriarchal stature had changed to a pregnant waddle. When my husband came home from work, I was sitting in the bathtub and weeping.

  “What—what is it?” he cried, primed for catastrophe.

  “Everything,” I said, gesturing at the swelling that rose above the water level. “Everything. The human condition. The world.”

  His face relaxed slightly, and he waited for me to go on.

  I rose, the water spiraling from my belly. “A woman went mad in the supermarket today.”

  He managed to look both compassionate and questioning. “What did you do?”

  I waved the towel as if it were a banner, a piece of evidence. “There was nothing I could do. Nothing at all. I mean, I tried, but there was simply no way that I could help her.”