Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket

by Hilma Wolitzer

  Across the aisle an elderly woman, dressed resolutely in black—dress, scarf, stockings, shoes—is asleep. Italian, probably, or maybe Greek. She looks like a billboard for death. Why is it always the women in those places who are assigned the work of perpetual mourning?

  After Beau left her, Sharon had plunged into mourning, too. Not inaccurately, or even unkindly, he predicted a full, formal year of grieving for her. She’d wondered if this was based on his own past experience or whether it was an absolute standard for female behavior in that kind of situation. That’s how naïve she was in those days. But obediently she began to grieve, to start to get it over with. In a few weeks, she was able to think about him again. It wasn’t that grief had become less, but that it had become different, moving up into the intellect, away from the body, from those aching places, the shoulders and the fingertips.

  She is trying to focus on Michael, and it’s his body she thinks of first, or bodies in general, a commuter’s crowd of them in which his appears looking reasonable, if mortal. Cautiously, she imagines him clothed: the singing corduroy of his trousers as he walks, that yellow shirt. Sharon remembers the work of the cartoonist after whom she’d first fashioned herself stylistically, and who undressed everyone in the mind’s eye of his characters. She does that sometimes, too, in life. Not for the sake of humor, though, or even for democracy; there is no democracy anyway. Sharon is tall and the woman Beau went off with is petite, and so on.

  But she is unable to undress Michael now, must keep him protectively, lawfully covered. Instead she considers what has happened, what might happen next. The night before, after she had recovered a little, she called Dick back. Her voice was tremulous and uncertain, but her questions were not. “Why didn’t he call me, too? Did he say, did he actually say that he did it?”

  Dick sighed deeply and Sharon realized that it was very late and that he was probably in bed beside Anna. “We didn’t go into it, Sharon,” he said. “It’s never a good idea, on the telephone. And he was allowed only one brief call, like in the movies. You know how that goes; they always call their mouthpiece.”

  “But why can’t he be released until the arraignment? Isn’t that what usually happens?” She hesitated and her voice fell into a hoarse whisper. “He doesn’t have a record or anything, does he?”

  “No, babe, no. Of course not. It’s just that his timing was lousy for this particular place. There’s been a series of assorted complaints over the past month or so. So they’ve invented a few extra charges to hold him on.”

  “That’s not fair!” she cried.

  “Fair!” Dick said. “Are you kidding? What does fair have to do with anything? Don’t worry, Sharon. Come on. We’ll get them to drop them all. We’ll get the best local counsel. Everything will be okay.”

  “Did he explain that he was only driving through? Did he tell them about his mother?”

  “Yeah, he explained everything. But the locals are still uneasy. And suspicious. They’ve all just buried their mother, and they don’t know our Mikey the way we do.”

  But now Sharon didn’t know him, either. “What kind of complaints?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “You said before—assorted complaints.”

  “Oh. An attempted rape in the Laundromat. Kids talking about a guy who hangs around the schoolyard.”

  “Oh, God, it wasn’t a child, was it?” Sharon has always been sternly moralistic about what adults do to children. She might even have to cast the first stone herself. She remembered a drawing she did for a newspaper decrying inadequate security in city schools, after a child had been molested in a stairwell. Her version of the molester lurked in shadows, a grotesque, subhuman figure.

  But Dick reassured her. “No, no. I told you. A grown woman.” He said it in the condoning way one says “consenting adults,” and he added, “In the parking lot of a supermarket.”

  “She could be lying, couldn’t she? Or hallucinating?”

  “Sure,” Dick said, but his tone was palliative, and the details finally stunned her into silence.

  “Are you okay?” Dick asked. “Listen, do you want me to bring Anna over to spend the rest of the night?”

  And then Anna took the phone and asked a few gentle questions in a sleepy voice.

  “No, I’m fine,” Sharon said. “Really.” And she did feel better, not only because there wasn’t a child involved, but because the situation was becoming less real again. Men, other men, did that sort of thing in subway passages, or in dark alleyways. The parking lot of a supermarket seemed foolishly domestic for such an unnatural gesture.

  Yet suddenly she pictured Michael unfolding to his height from the car. He was stopping for cigarettes, probably, on the way to a motel. And she pictured the woman, also, midthirties, darkly pretty, wheeling one of those recalcitrant shopping carts, or juggling too many grocery bags and trying to find the car keys, and thinking of dinner and what to do about her elderly widowed father, and recalling a fleeting lust for her minister, and then seeing Michael.

  Public nudity still surprises Sharon. When she was sixteen, she took a life drawing class. She was late for the first session and arrived after the model was arranged in her pose on the platform. How flagrant her nakedness seemed; she loomed so large Sharon could not fit her onto the newsprint page. Sometimes her feet were missing, sometimes her head. After several poses, the model put on a robe and wandered among the easels smoking a cigarette. Sharon felt embarrassed and apologetic, as if she were witnessing the aftermath of the primal scene. And she knew again the frustration of not knowing anything, with the underlying fear that it was not due to her youth, but to some fatal flaw that would keep her from the world’s mysteries forever. She smoked one of the model’s cigarettes and said pretentious things about form and space. Later the bare breasts stared at her with contempt.

  The plane dips slightly and Sharon presses back against a wave of vertigo. The man in the window seat looks at her inquiringly, and she shakes her head and shuts her eyes.

  Oh, consider passion for a moment! Dick has assured her that Michael’s is not a crime of passion. And once she couldn’t wait to agree with Beau that it all begins in the head and then sends its orders rushing down through the nerves and into the bloodstream, arousing the troops, those mercenaries. But when he told her that the first thing he admired about her was her eyesight, she was bewildered, wanting only to be wanted in more conventional ways. Why not admire her blondeness, which was everywhere, or her buttocks, which were worthy of praise?

  But soon she learned to feel cherished and, covering each eye in turn, read aloud to him the small print of a sign on the other side of the Williamsburg Bridge. Acting further in kind, she told him that his feet pleased her. Vision and stride. An uncommon attraction, but stirringly original.

  All right, she decides, forget passion. It’s really comfort she’s trying to think of in bodily terms, anyway. How each of us starts out bravely alone, lover and beloved at once, and works toward the ultimate collaboration, that other serious presence in the darkness. Is it that she always fails in this connection, or that Michael is hopelessly wounded, inconsolable?

  When the flight attendant comes down the aisle offering newspapers, Sharon takes one. But she cannot concentrate on the headlines, on the larger, shared tragedies of fires, famine, and politics. She reads a small article on an inside page. It says that scientists have discovered that the bones of fat people are especially dense and sturdy. As she reads it, she thinks of Michael and his thinness. She imagines his bones (a murderous urge and a longing), and they are as delicate and as porous as coral, yet unable to resist the loping curve of his posture. His breastbone is an archer’s bow.

  Early that morning, Sharon had awakened abruptly and in a panic. “I can’t, I can’t,” she said, not sure what she meant, but feeling more desperate for distraction than for interpretation. Thought was treacherous. Getting out of bed might require major effort. To delay it she took a magazine from the nightstand and o
pened it at random to an interview with Sartre, by Simone de Beauvoir. He said, “We yield our bodies to everyone, even beyond the realm of sexual relations: by looking, by touching.”

  Tell that to the judge, she thinks now, wishing she could be convinced of it herself. Maybe she will be when she is in her seventies, like Sartre.

  Her seatmate gets up to go to the bathroom. His legs brush over Sharon’s and he murmurs, “Excuse me,” but he winks.

  When he returns, she rises to let him pass.

  “Business or pleasure?” he asks, and she looks at him blankly.

  “In Columbus,” he says.

  “I’m meeting my husband there. Not really there, farther east, on the outskirts. His mother just died,” she adds, and is horrified to realize she is smiling.

  He smiles back. “What does your husband do?”

  Do? He’s in zippers. He pops flies. He shows his choice goods to discriminating shoppers.

  “He’s a social worker,” she says, “with the city’s welfare system.”

  The man continues to smile, not registering her answer. He’s had a second drink, and maybe still another in the john from a flask, and she can see that he has a buzz on. He leans back in his seat and faces her intimately, as if they are sharing a bed pillow. He is wearing the kind of suit she most dislikes, with very large lapels and contrasting piping, and he has exaggerated sideburns. He looks like a member of a barbershop quartet, or like Captain Kangaroo. Yet she understands that he imagines himself attractive to her, sexy.

  She goes through the mind process that removes his offending clothing, a piece at a time. Off with the jacket, with the busy tie. Off with the shiny synthetic shirt that clutches his bull neck in a stranglehold. She drops his trousers and they fall to his ankles, clanking keys and loose change everywhere. Impatiently, she pulls off his stacked-heel shoes, his socks, his plaid boxers, even the chains that protect his slack and hairy chest from evil with amulets from three separate cultures. But when he sits there at last, heavy-eyed with seduction and whiskey, the seat belt strapped across his puckered navel, just above his nodding cock, his body is as absurd to her as his clothing. Quickly, she dresses him again and turns away.

  Michael always undressed without shyness or seduction, a practical business before bath or bed, as if he were unconscious of how well he was made, or of his easy athletic grace. And Sharon resisted what she considers a crude tendency toward voyeurism. He isn’t the first man she’s ever seen, though, and maybe he won’t be the last.

  Once it was her goal in life. Father and grandfather dead before memory, she lived in a household of females: grandmother, aunt, mother, older sister. They undressed openly, too, offering Sharon the various stages of her future, and she was interested, but of course she wasn’t satisfied. Word was out.

  She had seen statues of men at the Brooklyn Museum, budding in marble, bloodless and chaste. Their eyes were absent, too. At the circumcision of a neighbor’s infant when Sharon was four, someone turned her face to the wall at the last minute. “Don’t look,” the woman said, a good beginning for a fairy tale with moral significance if Sharon had not been consistently obedient, had not shielded those 20/20 eyes and counted until it was over. But just before the ritual, she watched closely and saw that the baby’s parts were still wrinkled from passage, and she heard him cry piteously, as if he were intolerably afflicted.

  And she had a male dog for a while during childhood. He was a small mixed breed with a coarse brown coat and an affectionate nature. She called him Prince. She would take him into bed in the morning and stroke his belly and ears, and he would loll, sighing. Once, while she petted him, a thin red tube emerged from that hair-tipped pinch of flesh with the startling clarity of her sister’s first lipstick. Sharon picked him up quickly and roughly and put him on the floor. “Bad dog!” she scolded, uncoached, and Prince growled at her.

  The first naked man she ever saw was a friend’s father, after Sharon slept at their house one night in the summertime. He must have been about thirty-five or forty years old. Sharon opened the door to her friend’s parents’ bedroom in the morning, mistaking it for the door to the bathroom. There was that particularly early stillness, the clockwork pause before life resumes. The mother was asleep, and the father was just getting up. He stood, in profile to Sharon, stretching his arms overhead, and then sat down on the edge of the bed, holding a pair of shorts in one hand. He seemed to be daydreaming.

  He was a depressed man. Years later he committed suicide. In those days, though, he was only eccentric and moody, given to sardonic remarks that were hurtful to others. Sharon was afraid of him in an instinctive way; he had never been cruel to her, had hardly noticed her.

  But in that quick and brilliant moment—she is sure she remembers sunlight in the bedroom—she saw his melancholy in the droop of his genitals, and felt a rush of knowledge and of anguish.

  She hurries from the plane as if she is going to be met by friends or loved ones. Other passengers are greeted and she moves past their pleasured cries and embraces to an exit from the terminal and a taxi.

  She gives the driver the name of the motel and sits back.

  “Well, hello, hello!” he says, and bending one sunburned and tattooed arm onto the ledge of his open window, he pulls away from the curb with the tires screeching.

  In the past, Sharon had been mildly annoyed by this kind of silly attention from men, the construction-worker syndrome of whistles, catcalls, and general showing off. It was a kind of harmless, universal foreplay. But now it seems like such Stone Age behavior, one step beyond chest-thumping. She feels much worse than annoyed––imposed upon. Who asked for this?

  The cab driver sings, leans on the horn needlessly, and watches Sharon in the rearview mirror so that he has to brake sharply for a squirrel that decides to cross the road. “Fucker,” he mutters, and goes forward again, but more slowly this time, his spirit tamed.

  The motel is the same one Michael had gone to, after, and where he was arrested. Dick had made reservations for himself and her there, but it is not a thoughtless choice. The rented Ford is still parked there, and the place is clean and convenient to the jail where Michael is being held. Early tomorrow, she and Dick will go there together for the only visitation permitted before arraignment.

  The motel manager’s face gives nothing away when she claims her reservation. Behind him, a door opens briefly and she can see a living room and two small children watching television before it closes again. She signs the registration slip and has an urge to ask to see the one Michael must have signed the day before. How does a man feel after such an act? Frightened? Exhilarated? So deeply affected perhaps that his handwriting is irrevocably altered. And there is the keener fantasy that it will be another man’s signature altogether, one of those wonderful minor news stories about mistaken identity. Families of men killed in the war and sent home in sealed coffins must suffer that possibility over and over again.

  But she asks for nothing but the key to her room and the one to the car.

  The room is shabbily genteel and telescopically smaller than the one depicted on the postcards for sale in the motel office. There are twin beds with green covers, and matching drapes that transform the last of an Ohio sunset into a Martian luminescence.

  Dick’s flight won’t be in until seven thirty, and he has instructed her to stay put, not to drive to the airport to meet him; he will come directly to the motel and they can go out for dinner and talk about the next day.

  There are almost two hours ahead during which she will be alone in this place and she contemplates them with increasing nervousness. She rejects the idea of smoking pot, losing confidence in its shamanistic powers to thwart loneliness. She knows intuitively that this is a dangerous time of day when, for some people, blood sugar plummets, and fatigue is a marauder. If records were to be checked, she is sure there would be a disproportionate number of suicides, automobile accidents, and violent crimes committed just before dusk. Brooders begin to gather evid
ence for their brooding. Insomniacs think of scary darkness, depressives of death.

  Sharon opens the drapes and her room faces a small swimming pool surrounded by a locked cyclone fence. A few children run crazily around it, shrieking and hurling scraps of paper at one another that blow back into their own faces. She wonders what Michael is doing at this moment and thinks how awkward it will be to see him in that place, with this new knowledge between them. She feels that changes are taking place inside her, as mysterious and involuntary as metabolism and circulation. What if she experiences a complete failure of love, even of charity? She closes the drapes, making the room green again, and lies down on the bed nearest the window. Now she regrets not having brought along something to read, even the complimentary magazine from the seat pocket in the plane.

  On the night table next to her, a pictorial breakfast menu from the motel’s coffee shop is propped against an ashtray. Glorified color photos of eggs and sausage, of waffles and pancakes, looking more like Oldenburg sculptures of food than like real food, are advertised at irregular prices, as if they had been marked down: $1.79 for The Sunrise Special, $2.05 for Old Macdonald’s Choice. She reads a printed message from the maid thanking her for being such a wonderful guest, and it is hand signed in a childishly broad scrawl: Sincerely, Wanda.

  Sharon looks at her watch and then holds it to her ear to confirm its function. With her splendid vision she can read the sign on the back of the door at least eight feet from the bed. Checkout time, she learns, is at 11:00 A.M., and there is a map showing the locations of the laundry room and the ice machine.