Hilma Wolitzer on Life, Death and Marriedness
When my mother was 40 or so and hitting her stride as a magazine writer, she discovered the short stories of Hilma Wolitzer. My mother had nailed the slickly neutral voice of Good Housekeeping and Woman’s Day, but she longed to write as herself, an educated wife and mother both amused and hemmed in by the mores of her time. Wolitzer proved it could be done. In supermarket aisles, double beds and suburban model homes, she set scenes that melded humor with longing. Her piquant voice evoked an entire world of marriedness — compromises, betrayals, stolen moments of joy.
Wolitzer’s newest collection, Today a Woman Went Mad at the Supermarket, consists mostly of stories from the 60s and 70s (we’ll get to the dazzling exception). My mother must have read at least a few of them, and I wish I could call her to share the most delicious lines. “The Sex Maniac” begins with a blast of wit after her own lusty heart: “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.” In less than ten pages of fairly large print, Wolitzer reveals the intersecting libidos of a teenage delivery boy, a self-important pediatrician holding forth about the Oedipus complex, and an unsavory superintendent who, in the guise of gathering intelligence, “pushed against my left nipple as if he were ringing a doorbell.”
Nipple: dirtiest word in the English language, according to Jacqueline Susann, who refused to use it in Valley of the Dolls and other steamy bestsellers of Wolitzer’s early writing years. Back then women weren’t supposed to speak frankly about bodily desires and incursions, as Wolitzer does with a quiet exuberance that suggests old friends sharing secrets across a kitchen table. What wonderful company she is.
As a teenager perusing my mother’s books, I may have dabbled in early Wolitzer. My mother had already introduced me to Shirley Jackson, Katherine Mansfield and Eudora Welty; I trusted her taste and took pride in my sophistication as a reader. But Wolitzer was over over my head. Or should I say “over my heart?” Story after story mines the ever-shifting space between a man and a woman, the here-and now and the unknowable future. As far as I could tell, nothing happened. And yet everything did.
I ask the same question of all first-person writing, be it poetry, memoir or fiction: “Who is this character called ‘I?’” I want to know whose mind I’m inhabiting for a while. I don’t have to like that person, only to believe in the thorny reality of him or her. Paulette, who narrates most of these stories, inspires both belief and affection over the course of her long marriage to a fallible but thoroughly decent guy named Howard. A mensch, we will learn.
We meet Paulette first as a harried young wife with a grocery cart and a soft spot for another shopper on the brink of sanity. While Howard makes a tenderly fleeting appearance, the story looks at Paulette’s position in the world — what it is she owes to a woman like herself in every way but luck. The final story, written in 2020, unveils a newly vulnerable Paulette. She and Howard, oldsters married for a lifetime, have become a world of shared joy and sorrow. They’ve grown into themselves and each other. Paulette seems to revel in here husband’s sense of humor. He must see the podiatrist, he says, because “I can hang from a tree by my toenails.”
These two have been lucky. Until now. At this point some of you may want to stop reading.
Hilma and Morty Wolitzer, a clinical psychologist, had been married 68 years when they both fell ill with Covid in the first wave of the pandemic. Morty died. Hilma wrote a new story, intriguingly titled “The Great Escape,” both as a tribute to her late husband and a recommitment to writing. She begins, “I used to look at Howard first thing in the morning to see if he was awake, too, and if he wanted to get something going before one of the kids crashed into the room and plopped down between us like an Amish bundling board.”
Who is Paulette, this woman called “I?” A widow who can’t help but wonder if her husband caught Covid from his podiatrist. Who could not be with him as he took his last breath, and still talks to him, hoping he’ll tell her to shut up. She is everyone who lost someone to Covid — including Hilma Wolitzer herself, grieving and yet at the top of her game in her 90s. On every one of this book’s 179 pages, there’s a sentence any writer would be proud to have written, not so much for the words themselves as for the feeling that gives them life.
