Today a woman went mad in the supermarket.
Hilma Wolitzer.
Bloomsbury. 2021. 179 pp.
ISBN 978 1 52664 080 2.
The woman who has a very public breakdown in this story seems stuck in the supermarket 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 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 tried, and there is no end to it. Ask Harold. Ask anybody, ask my mother."
The woman gets more and more distressed, and other people, including the store manager, get involved. Eventually, the woman's husband turns up, grabs her arm and bundles her off, and the narrator finds her empty pocketbook on top of her own in her empty trolley.
It is characteristic of Wolitzer's warmth and perception that we understand the feelings of both women in this story, and she captures the narrator's own confusion, helplessness and distress: "When my husband came home from work, I was sitting in the bathtub and weeping."
This story, which is the first of 13 short stories in this book, was first published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1966 when Wolitzer was 36. Many others were published in the '60s and '70s, but the final story, written now when she is in her 90s, is right up-to-date in its Covid-based theme. Several of the best stories are vignettes of moments in the lives of Paulette (Paulie) and Howard, as told with clear-eyed humor by Paulie. This couple is as oddly assorted in character as are most ordinary couples, and Paulie's view of their lives is like that of the fictional Mrs. Bridges, who is quoted in the preface to the book: "While marriage might be an equitable affair, love itself was not."
"We were married," Paulie tells us "in those dark ages before legalized abortion," when doctors were "of the old-fashioned tongue-depressor variety." After exploring sex with Howard, Paulie discovers she is "in trouble":
"What do you want to do?" he asked.
"You know," I said. "What about you?"
Howard prevaricates but...
He shuddered, receiving my message. I couldn't help thinking that men whose mothers have established an early habit of guilt in them are probably the easiest.
"So that's it," Howard said, and we were engaged.
I threw my arms around him, sealing the bond. "It will be wonderful," I promised. "We'll have a wonderful life together. We'll have terrific good luck. I can feel it.
He hugged me back, but all I could really feel were the drumbeat of his heart and the collapsing walls of his will.
Paulie takes us though her experiences with arrogant doctors; the joys, indignities, and agonies of childbirth ("FUCKING LEADS TO THIS! Those charts ought to say"); shared problems, like her insomnia and Howard's depression (which she alleviates by driving them to visit open-houses on real-estate developments where they can imagine living with dual bathroom vanities labelled "his" and "hers"); the compromises of ordinary married life; and infidelities.
In one story a sex-maniac is reported to be loose in the building complex: "It's about time," thinks Paulie, adding "It had been a long asexual winter."
In her final story, "The Great Escape," Paulie and Howard are elderly, as Paulie puts it: "in what seemed like only a few long afternoons, he and I turned seventy, and then eighty and then nearly ninety." She remembers her own "statuesque figure" which has given way to "random bulges" her doctor describes as "Good padding against hip fracture." Howard, "who had once been so gorgeous and in such demand, was grizzled and paunchy and gray." They share family jokes about death and "Several of our friends beat us to it," says Paulie. The good thing, she notes, is "We have been together for such a long time that all our grievances have been set aside."
Then Covid-19 intervenes. Paulie, however, is still optimistic: "It's still going on—I mean the pandemic and the rest of life," and she has clearly kept up with new technologies and imagines Zoom séances with the departed.
Paulie's intelligent, upbeat character, like that of the other narrators in this book, makes it a delight. Her stories are recognizably of the time they were written, yet they are timeless. She captures the extraordinary aspects of life in the daily routines we take as ordinary, and her strong-minded characters are realistic in their frankness about sex, their optimism, and their humor.
The Foreword to the book outlines some of the stories so thoroughly, you hardly need to read them, which would be a pity because you would miss Wolitzer's sly wit and the warmth and ease with which she draws you into the lives of her characters. You might suspect, too, that the Foreword was written by a good friend, it praises her so fulsomely. Wolitzer's work, however, has been widely published, and she has received many awards for it. She is little known outside America, but for those who are not already familiar with her work, this collection of her stories is a fine introduction to it.
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