I had a close encounter with a madwoman the other day.
You’d expect to see a madwoman haunting some suitably
bleak and sinister place: loitering in a hidden alley,
moaning under a bridge, screaming from the parapet of a
burning mansion. My encounter took place in a decidedly less
gothic setting: the CVS Pharmacy at a neighborhood mall in
the relatively affluent West End section of Allentown,
Pennsylvania, less than a mile from home.
I had just completed a brisk winter walk along a rushing
stream; the morning had been bright with sunlight and puffy
clouds. Feeling sufficiently invigorated for a man of
cynical inclinations, I drove back to town and stopped at
the pharmacy to pick up a prescription.
I was puttering around the back of the store,
halfheartedly pondering the purchase of jelly beans while
waiting for my prescription to be filled. As I compared the
different brands of jelly beans for their relative merits, a
twentyish blonde cashier from the front of the store raced
past me and alerted the pharmacy staffers that a woman was
trying to make off with some stolen goods. One of staffers,
another blonde of comparable vintage, left her post and
followed the cashier toward the front of the store. So did
I. The jelly beans could wait.
The thief, a lumpy and radically unkempt woman of
indeterminate age, hadn’t made it to the front door. She
was shuffling down one of the aisles with quick small steps
in an attempt to dodge her pursuers, who now included the
balding store manager and the two determined young blondes.
Though the temperature outside hovered near freezing, the
thief wore no coat or even shoes. Clad in a skimpy doe-brown
top and black stretch slacks, she waddled along in her socks
-- one black, one white. She passed me without acknowledging
my presence, without responding to my gentle suggestion to
put the fruits of her shoplifting back on the shelves.
"You really should put them back," I advised
the woman under my breath. "You might get into
trouble." But her mind loomed beyond the reach of
reason. Like a dreamer, she couldn’t connect the act to
the consequences -- and who was I to intrude upon the
sanctity of her dream-life?
As she passed me in the aisle, a heavy miasma of body
odor enveloped her like an invisible fog and lingered
memorably in her wake. She probably hadn’t seen the inside
of a bathtub since the last election, and I wondered who, if
anyone, was caring for her. I regret to tell you that I have
no memory of her facial features -- possibly because her
face was utterly blank. All I remember is a general
doughiness and lack of focus. She could have been anywhere
from twenty-one to fifty.
The poor waif navigated up one aisle and down the next,
still followed closely by the balding store manager and his
minions. While the manager good-naturedly attempted to gain
her confidence, she looked straight ahead and hissed
profanities in a muffled, unnaturally high-pitched whine
that seemed almost internalized, as if she was trying to
awaken from a nightmare. But this wasn’t the kind of
nightmare anyone awakens from; this was her life.
I wondered whether she was crazy or just mentally
retarded; I guessed she was a combination of both. It seemed
like a double whammy from the gods, this cruel confluence of
mental imbalance and mental insufficiency. Why couldn’t
they have let her be one or the other: slow-witted and
eminently sane like Forrest Gump, or brilliant and disturbed
like Vincent Van Gogh? Not that being brilliant and
disturbed is a state of mind to be envied, but at least you
have something to tell the world, and you believe that the
more enlightened folks might listen. This phantom of the
pharmacy seemed to have scaled her ambitions down to an
absolute minimum: to escape with what she had grabbed from
the shelves.
In a society that prizes productivity, attractiveness and
social skill, the poor thief appeared to be a triple
failure. She couldn’t possibly aid the cause of commerce,
entice a reasonably normal mate with her comeliness, or keep
the conversation rolling at a dinner party. She was a sad
bundle of misfiring neurons. Most of us have no use for
malfunctioning citizens, and we can be as ruthless as
ten-year-old bullies in weeding them out. We tend to
marginalize the merely maladjusted ones by rebuffing their
friendly overtures, or by ridiculing them to undermine the
last remnants of their social status and self-esteem. As for
the more overt cases of ripe insanity and misconduct, we’re
simply inclined to lock them away. We’re afraid they might
harm themselves or us -- especially us -- and
occasionally they justify our suspicions with dangerous and
gruesome acts.
I wonder if some of us also fear that their madness might
be contagious, or that the presence of insanity in our midst
might make us less predisposed to work twelve-hour days. You
don’t see a lot of fully bloomed lunatics or even
eccentrics in the business world; the typical workplace is a
ghetto of militant sanity.
When I was a chronically frustrated and neurotic young
liberal arts graduate -- still living with my parents at
twenty-seven, half-buried in musty books and generally
unemployed, my progress blocked on every front -- I used to
fear that I’d go mad. I wondered how my disorder would
manifest itself: whether I’d simply lurk in malignant
shadowy solitude while the fevers spun bright hallucinations
in my brain, or whether I’d go out in a sudden eruption of
violence and cause my family considerable embarrassment by
gunning down pedestrians from a rooftop. I hoped it wouldn’t
be the latter, and I convinced myself that I’d make a fine
eccentric if I could learn to enjoy my malady. That’s the
secret of all the great eccentrics: be proud of your oddity,
indulge it like a hobby and render it harmless. As it turned
out, a long and stressful career in publishing and
advertising concentrated my faculties wonderfully, and
madness never became an option. I remained a borderline
eccentric but never enjoyed enough leisure to explore the
quirky side-alleys of my mind. I never again entertained the
unwholesome possibility that I might mow down random
pedestrians from a rooftop.
The woman who still haunted the aisles of the CVS
Pharmacy in Allentown appeared to be harmless enough, aside
from her penchant for pocketing store merchandise. At no
time did I think she might take a swipe at the balding store
manager or pull a semi-automatic from her stretch slacks.
She seemed too infantile and withdrawn to be a serious
threat to any of us innocent bystanders.
The store manager evidently felt the same way, because he
started communicating with her in a sympathetic and fatherly
manner. He escorted her around the store with something
approaching tenderness; he gently asked her what she was
hiding and where she got it. He tried to cajole her into
returning to the scene of her crime so she could deposit the
goods where she found them and erase her criminal record. I
admired his tact and sensitivity. For a moment he succeeded
in reaching her; the madwoman’s voice shifted from the
high-pitched nightmare whine to something resembling an
adult woman’s speech. But only for a moment. Within
seconds she was whining again, and the two of them
disappeared around the bend of another aisle.
Suddenly the lumpy figure bolted out the front door,
clutching some small object in her hand; she bounded across
the parking lot and up a grassy slope. This time it wasn’t
the balding store manager and his blonde assistants who
pursued her; it was the Allentown police, who apparently had
been summoned to the site and now chased her on foot. The
madwoman was running toward one of the widest and busiest
streets in the city, and we watched in horror as she charged
blindly across it. I expected to see a flattened carcass
within seconds. So, I imagine, did my fellow observers,
several of whom yelped a collective "Oh no!" as
she sprinted into the two-way traffic.
She survived. The gods had shown some unaccustomed
benevolence: the traffic was unusually light and she made it
to the other side without incident. She was running
remarkably well for a madwoman whose footgear consisted
solely of mismatched socks. She turned a corner and vanished
from sight, with Allentown’s finest still in hot pursuit.
I returned to the jelly beans, compared brands again and
finally made an informed choice. A voice from the pharmacy
counter called my name; my prescription was ready. As I paid
for my pills, I chatted with the young blonde pharmacy
staffer who had now returned to her station. We agreed that
the poor woman needed professional help and wondered if she
had been living on her own all this time. We speculated that
some valiant but misguided family members must have been
trying to care for her.
I asked what the woman had stolen. She had taken nothing,
the pharmacy staffer assured me; the woman had returned her
loot to the shelves. But what about the small object she was
clutching in her hand as she ran out the door? It was a pack
of gum that the store manager had bought her in return for
surrendering her stolen goods. And what was it that she had
attempted to steal in the first place? Deodorant, the girl
told me.
It made perfect sense: the madwoman stank, and she was
determined to get herself some deodorant. She needed it, she
wanted it, and so she grabbed it. I could see nothing crazy
about such simple and flawless logic. Her style was crazy;
her method was crazy; her motivation was absolutely sane.
The pharmacy staffer told me that the madwoman was now in
police custody outside the store, and that the authorities
were about to ship her off to the hospital for a psychiatric
exam. I hadn’t seen the police round her up; I must have
been preoccupied with my jelly beans at the time. As I left
the store, I saw a handful of cops gathered by the
ambulance, interviewing an old woman with flaming red hair.
I wondered if she was the madwoman’s mother. The misfit
with the mismatched socks now lay inside the ambulance, out
of sight and out of harm, ready for her journey to
institutionalization and whatever else awaited her in this
life. I never learned her name.
I thought again about the simple logic that led the
madwoman to this unfortunate predicament. She needed that
deodorant and she went for it. How many of us know exactly
what we want, and how many of us know precisely how to get
it? We’re the sane ones, but our lives bulge with
maddening conflicts and frustrating impediments and
distracting obligations. We stuff our personal environments
with superfluous conveniences and costly clutter; we waste
years wandering down blind alleys; we strive for the
impossible and often succeed in making ourselves
miserable.
If only our needs could be as simple as those of the
madwoman at the CVS Pharmacy. If only we could pare our
lives down to such elegant essentials: we stink, and we get
ourselves some deodorant; we lust, and we find the ideal
mate; we aspire, so we write a book or start a business and
make a name for ourselves. Too bad you almost have to be
crazy to be that sane.
