Mrs. Ted Bliss

by Stanley Elkin

  So it was a matter of some irritation to her during those times of the day and those seasons of the year when heavy traffic caused her to affix the bulky backup hearing aid in place, planting it and winding it about her ear like a stethoscope laid flat against a chest, but better safe than sorry. She did it, as she did almost everything else, uncomplainingly, her only objection reflexive—a knowledge of her smudged, ruined character; her heavy sense, that is, of her vanity, which Dorothy had at least privately permitted herself and privately enjoyed at twenty and thirty and forty and fifty and even, to some extent, into her sixties while Ted, olov hasholem, was still living, but which she fully understood to be not only extravagant and uncalled for but more than a little foolish, too, now that she was almost eighty.

  Extravagant or not, foolish or not, she removed them, the good one and the bad one, too, once she was inside the movie theater, preferring the shadowy, muffled, blunted voices of the actors to the shrill, whistling treble of the hearing aids. Most of the dialogue was lost to her. What difference did it make? What could they be saying to each other that she hadn’t heard them say to each other a thousand times before? The handsome boy declared his love for the pretty girl. The pretty girl didn’t know whether to trust him or not. He’d fooled her before. She should trust him. She should settle down and have his kids. Life was too short. It went by like a dream. It’s what Ted always said. And now look at him. He was dead too many years.

  And what troubled Mrs. Ted Bliss, what wounded and astonished when sleep eluded during all those endless nights when thoughts outpaced one another in her insomniac mind, was the fact that now, still alive, she was by so many years her dead husband’s senior.

  He wouldn’t recognize her today. She had been beautiful even into her sixties. A dark, smooth-skinned woman with black hair and fine sweet features on a soft, wide armature of flesh, she had been a very parlor game of a creature, among her neighbors in Building Number One something of a conversation piece, someone, you’d have thought, who must have drunk from the fountain of youth. She had been introduced in the game room for years to guests and visitors from the other buildings that lined Biscayne Bay as an oddity, a sport of nature unscathed by time.

  “Go on, guess how old she is,” more than one of her friends had challenged newcomers while Dorothy, her deep blush invisible to their pale examination, sat meekly by.

  “Dorothy is fifty-nine,” people five and six years older than herself would hazard.

  “Fifty-nine? You think?”

  “I don’t know. Fifty-nine, sixty.”

  Even the year Ted was dying.

  “Sixty-seven!” they shouted, triumphant as people who knew the answer to vexing riddles.

  Even after his cancer had been diagnosed Ted smiled benignly, Dorothy suffering these odd old thrust and parries in an almost luxurious calm, detached from the accomplishment of her graceful, almost invisible aging as if it had been the fruit of someone else’s labors. (And hadn’t it? Except for her long, daily soaks in her tub two and three times a day, she’d never lifted a finger.) Grinning, a cat with a canary in its belly, a reverie of something delicious on its chops.

  “Is she? Is she, Ted? Can it be?”

  Ted winked.

  “Of course not,” Lehmann, whose own wife at sixty-seven was as homely as Dorothy was beautiful, said. “They’re in a witness protection program, the both of them.”

  Several of the men at the table understood Lehmann’s bitterness—many shared it—and laughed. Even Dorothy smiled. “I came to play,” Lehmann said, “deal the cards already. Did I ask to see her driver’s license? I don’t know what they’re up to.”

  “I’ll be sixty-two my next birthday,” Dorothy Bliss said, shaving years from her age. (It was the vanity again, a battle of the wicked prides. It was one thing, though finally a lesser thing, to look young for one’s age, quite another to be the age one looked young for.)

  The truth was no one really knew, not Ted, not her sisters. Not her two younger brothers. Certainly not her surviving children. It was as if the time zones she crossed on her ship to America shed entire blocks of months rather than just hours as it forced its way west. Not even Dorothy was certain of her age. It was a new land, a younger country. The same immigration officials who anglicized the difficult Cyrillic names into their frequently arbitrary, occasionally whimsical record books could be bribed into fudging the age of a new arrival. That’s exactly what happened to Dorothy. In order for the daughter to get work under the new child labor laws, Dorothy’s mom had paid the man fifteen dollars to list her kid as two or three years older than her actual age. She always knew that her clock had been pushed forward, that Time owed her, as it were, and somewhere in her twenties, Dorothy called in a marker that, by the time it was cashed, had accumulated a certain interest. The mind does itself favors. She really didn’t know her true age, only that whatever it was was less than the sixteen that had appeared on her documents when she’d first come to this country.

  Because she didn’t have a driver’s license to which Lehmann might have referred. Because she had never learned to drive. As though the same fifteen bucks her mother had offered and the official had taken so she might get her work permit had finessed not just the late childhood and early adolescence that were her due but the obligatory education, too. Most grown-up Americans’ streetish savvy. Paying by check, applying for charge cards, simply subscribing to the damn paper, for God’s sake. As though the eleven or twelve thousand dollars she brought in over the nine or ten years before she hooked up with Ted and that her mother’s initial fifteen-dollar cash investment had cost for that green card, had purchased not merely an exemption from ever having to play like a child when she was of an age to enjoy it but had been a down payment, too, on ultimate, long-term pampering privileges, making a housewife of her, a baleboosteh, lending some spoiled, complacent, and self-forgiving pinkish aura to her life and perceptions, a certain fastidious cast of mind toward herself and her duties. She shopped the specials, she snipped coupons out of the papers for detergents, for canned goods and coffee and liters of diet soft drinks, for paper products and bottles of salad dressing. She spent endless hours (three or four a day) in her kitchen, preparing food, doing the dishes till they sparkled, mopping the floor, scouring the sink, wiping down the stove; yet she had never been a very good cook, only a driven taskmistress, seldom varying her menus and never, not even when she entertained guests, a recipe, obsessive finally, so finicky about the world whenever she was alone in it that she was never (this preceded her deafness) entirely comfortable outside the door to her apartment (where she conceived of the slipcovers on her living room furniture, and perhaps even of the fitted terrycloth cover on the lid of the toilet seat in the bathrooms, as a necessary part of the furniture itself; for her the development of clear, heavy-duty plastic a technological breakthrough, a hinge event in science, up there with Kern cards, washable mah-jongg tiles, lifelong shmutsdread, a first impression she must have taken as a child in Russia, a sense of actual biological trayf, fear of the Gentile, some notion of caste deeper than a Hindu’s, a notion, finally, of order), something stubborn and stolid and profoundly resistant in her Slavic features, her adamant, dumb, and disapproving stance like that of a farm animal or a very picky eater.

  So it was possible, perhaps, that those long soaks in her tub, the two baths she took every day, were not a preening or polishing of self so much as part of a continual scour, a bodily function like the need for food. Not beauty (who knew almost nothing about beauty) but just another step in a long campaign, some Hundred Years War she waged against the dirt on fruits and meats and vegetables, the germs on pennies, the invisible bacterium in the transparent air, building up a sterile field around herself like a wall of hygiene.

  She tried to replicate in her personal appearance the same effects she strove for in her habits as a housekeeper. In her long pink widowhood she started to dress in bright polyester pants suits, bright because bright colors seemed to su
ggest to her the same buffed qualities of her kitchen’s sparkling dishes, mopped floors, scoured sinks and counters, her wiped-down stoves; and polyester because she could clean the suits in the washer and dryer every night before she went to bed. Dorothy had merely meant to simplify her life by filling it with activities that would keep her within the limited confines of her apartment, to live out what remained of her widowhood a respectable baleboosteh life. But her neighbors in the Towers saw only the brightly colored clothes she wore, and the carefully kempt hair she still bothered to dye, and thought of her as a very brave woman, a merry widow; attributing her steady, almost aggressive smile to her friendly outlook and not to the hardness of her hearing, her constant fear that people were saying pleasant things and making soft and friendly jokes she believed only her constant, agreeable, chipper grin and temperament could protect her from ever having to understand.

  And now, since Ted’s death and the piecemeal disappearance of her beauty, she had ceased to be their little parlor game and game room conversation piece and had become instead a sort of mascot.

  About a week or so after she had buried her husband in the Chicago cemetery where almost all the Blisses had been interred, Dorothy Bliss was approached by a man named Alcibiades Chitral. Señor Chitral was from Venezuela, a newcomer to the United States, a relative newcomer to the Towers complex. He had a proposition for Dorothy. He offered to buy her dead husband’s car. When Mrs. Bliss heard what he was saying she was outraged, furious, and, though she smiled, would, had she not been so preoccupied by grief, have slammed the door in his face. Vulture, she thought, inconsiderate, scavenging vulture! Bang on my nerves, why don’t you? Indeed, she was so chilled by the prospect of a bargain hunter in these terrible circumstances she almost threw up some of the food (she hadn’t had a good bowel movement in a week) with which her friends and relatives had tried to distract her from her loss the whole time she had sat shivah in Chicago. (Even here, in Florida, her neighbors brought platters of delicatessen, bakery, salads, liters of the same diet soft drinks she had purchased with discount coupons. To look at all that food you’d have thought death was a picnic. It was no picnic.) When he divined her state Alcibiades excused himself and offered his card.

  “Call me in a few days,” he said. “Or no,” he said, “I see that you won’t. I’ll call you.”

  She had not even wanted to take Ted back to Chicago. She was so stunned the day he died she didn’t even call her children to tell them their father was dead, and when she phoned them the next morning she passed on her news so dispassionately it was almost as if it had already been written off (well, he had been so ill all year) or had happened so long ago that she might have been speaking of something so very foreign to all their lives it seemed a mild aberration, a curiosity, like a brief spell of freakish weather.

  Dirt was dirt, she told the kids, she could make arrangements to get him buried right here in Miami.

  They had to talk her into sending the body home, and then they had to talk her into coming to Chicago.

  Her son Frank said he would come for her.

  Maxine offered the same deal. “Ma,” she said, “I’ll come down and help you pack. You shouldn’t be by yourself. When we’re through sitting shivah you’ll come to Cincinnati with me. Stay as long as you like. We’ll fly back together.”

  She resisted, it was crazy, an extravagance. What was she, a decrepit old lady? She couldn’t pack a suitcase? Anyway, she said, she really didn’t like the idea of shlepping Ted back to Chicago. And she didn’t, it would be like having him die twice. In Chicago he would be so far away from her, she thought, he might as well be dead. When she realized what she’d been thinking she started to laugh. When she heard herself laughing she began to weep.

  “Ma,” said her daughter, “I’ll be on the next plane. Really, Mama, I want to.”

  In the end she said that if she couldn’t go by herself she wouldn’t attend her husband’s funeral. Though the idea of that old boneyard sent chills. Maybe Ted really should be buried in Florida. The cemeteries were like eighteen-hole golf courses here. She wept when she went to make a withdrawal from her passbook at the savings and loan to get cash to give to the undertakers, and to pay her plane fare at the United ticket counter in the Fort Lauderdale airport, and could not stop weeping while she sat in the lounge waiting for her flight to board, or even for the entire three-hour-and-five-minute nonstop ride to Chicago.

  Weeping, inconsolable, not even looking up into the faces of the various strangers who tried to comfort her, the airline hostess who served her her dinner, the captain, who actually left his cabin to come to her seat and ask what was the matter, if there was anything he could do. Looking out the plane window, seeing the perfect green of those eighteen-hole cemeteries, and thinking, oh, oh Ted, oh Ted, oh oh oh. It occurred to her as they flew over Georgia that she had never been on a plane without her husband before. Weeping, inconsolable, it occurred to her that maybe they had put his body in the hold, that the undertakers had checked him through like her luggage.

  And she really didn’t want to take Ted there. The place was too strange. It was where her mother was buried, her sister, Ted’s twin brothers, cousins from both sides of the family, her uncles and aunts, her oldest son. May all of them rest. A plot of ground about the size of a vacant lot where an apartment building had been torn down, a plot of land about the size of the construction site where Building Number Seven was going up.

  It had been purchased in 1923 by a rich and distant uncle, a waggish man none of them had ever seen, who had bought up the property and set it aside for whomever of the Bliss family was then living or would come after, and had then made arrangements to have himself cremated and his ashes scattered from a biplane over Wyoming’s Grand Teton mountains in aviation’s earliest days when it wasn’t always a dead-solid certainty that airplanes could even achieve such heights. The waggish uncle’s curious legacy to the Blisses was possibly the single mystery the family had ever been faced with. Yet more than anything else it was this cemetery that not only held them together but distinguished them as a family, like having a common homeland, say, their own little Israel.

  You lived, you died. Then you were buried there. Dorothy had not been the first of the Blisses to speak out about breaking the chain. Others had pronounced the idea of the place as too strange, or claimed it sent chills. And had found other means to dispose of themselves. One Bliss had actually chosen to follow in the flight path of the founder, as it were, and put it in his will that his cremains float down through the same patch of Wyoming altitude as had the waggish uncle’s so many years before. Dorothy—this would have been while Ted was being interred—had long since ceased her long, twelve- or thirteen-hundred-mile crying jag. Ceased the moment her flight touched down at O’Hare. The people who met her plane to take her to her sister Etta’s apartment on the North Side and those who came over to Etta’s later that night to embrace Dorothy—just touching her set them off, just offering their condolences did—and came up to her the next day at the chapel where she sat with her children in the first row, all observed her odd detachment. In Chicago, she knew that among themselves the family spoke of how well she was taking it, as well as could be expected. “Under the circumstances,” they added. She couldn’t help herself, she didn’t mean to take it well. She couldn’t help it that at the very moment her husband’s coffin was being lowered into the ground she had looked away for a moment and seen all the other graves where her people—the immediate, extended, nuclear, and almost genealogical family of Blisses—were buried and somehow understood that what had so repelled her about the idea of this place was the holy odor of its solidarity.

  Back in Florida, where a sort of extended, informal shivah (perpetuated by her friends and neighbors in the Towers) continued to roll on, people came from far and wide throughout the complex to offer their condolences. Dorothy would have preferred that they all stop talking about it. Didn’t they understand how exhausting it was to be both a widow
and a baleboosteh? To have to deal with all the soups and salads, fruit and delicatessen and more salads, cookies and cakes and all the other drek she had to find enough jars and baggies and tinfoil and just plain space in the freezer for…How, with her grief, which wouldn’t go away and which, like the tears, she could handle only in public among strangers she would never see again, people who’d never known Ted, or else only in the privacy of her bed where she couldn’t sleep for the sound of her own sobbing. In two years she would see her doctor, who would prescribe sleeping pills to knock her out and on which she would become dependent, a sixty-nine- or seventy-year-old junkie Jewish lady, making her old, piecemeal beginning to break down her gorgeous looks, a fabulous beauty into her sixties, gone frail and plain before her time, a candidate for death by heartbreak, quite literally draining her (she was constantly thirsty, and would rise two or three times a night to take a glass of water) and making the tasks in which, while her husband lived, she had once taken a certain pleasure (the dishes and floors, the sink, wiping down the stove) now seem almost Herculean, too much for her strength. (And now she had the living room to contend with, too, heavy furniture to move in order to vacuum the rug, using attachments she’d rarely bothered with before just to suck crumbs from the sofa and chairs, even an ottoman, from which she now removed the slipcovers every evening in time for her guests and replaced again in the mornings. Cleaning the bathrooms, too, now, wiping stains from beneath the rims of the toilets with a special brush, rubbing off stuck brown tracks of actual turd, flushing them until they disappeared into a whirlpool of blue water, fifty cents off with the coupon.) She didn’t know, maybe she was brave.