Mrs. Ted Bliss

by Stanley Elkin

  The place was like nothing she’d ever seen. She knew she hadn’t worn the right clothes, that she didn’t even own the right clothes. What did she know, it was an open house. If she’d known it was supposed to be dress-up she’d have put on the dress she’d worn in court the day she testified. She had a queer sense she should have brought opera glasses.

  “Ah, it’s Mrs. Bliss! How are you, Mrs. Bliss?” called a youthful-looking but silver-haired man who couldn’t have been in more than his early forties or perhaps even his late thirties, immediately withdrawing from an intense conversation in which he seemed to be not merely engaged but completely engrossed. It occurred to Dorothy, who couldn’t remember having met him, that she’d never seen anyone so thoroughly immaculate. So clean, she meant (he might have been some baleboss of the personal), not so much well groomed (though he was well groomed) as buffed, preened, shiny as new shoes. He could have been newly made, something just off an assembly line, or still in its box. He seemed almost to shine, bright, fresh as wet paint. The others, following the direction of his glance, stared openly at her and, when he started to move toward her across the great open spaces of the immense room, simply trailed along after him. Instinctively, Dorothy drew back a few steps.

  As if gauging her alarm the man quite suddenly halted and held up his hand, cautioning the others as if they were on safari and he some white hunter fearful of spooking his prey. “Madam Bliss!” he said, exactly as if it were she who had surprised him.

  Dorothy nodded.

  “Welcome to my home,” he declared, “welcome indeed.” And, reaching forward, took up her hand and bent to kiss it. This had never happened to her before, nor, outside the movies, had she ever seen it happen to anyone else. It even crossed her mind that she was being filmed. (People were beginning to buy those things…those camcorders. Even one of her grandsons had one. He took it with him everywhere.)

  “Oh, don’t,” Dorothy said smiling nervously. “I must look terrible.”

  Bemused, Tommy Auveristas—that’s who it was, she could read his name tag now—looked at her. It was one of those moments when neither person understands what the other person means. No matter what happened between them in the years that would follow, this was a point that would never be straightened out. Auveristas thought Mrs. Bliss was referring to the overpowering smell of cheap perfume coming off her hands and which he would taste for the rest of the evening and on through the better part of the next morning. Oh, he thought, these crazy old people. “No, no,” he said, “you are delicious,” and then, turning not to one of the two servers in the room but to a very beautifully dressed woman in a fine gown, told her to get Mrs. Bliss a drink. “What would you like?” he asked.

  “Do you have diet cola?”

  “I’m sure we must. If we don’t we shall absolutely have to send out for a case.”

  “Oh, no,” said Mrs. Bliss, “I wouldn’t put you to the trouble. I’ll have 7-Up. Your home is very beautiful.”

  “Would you like me to show you around? I will show you around.”

  “I mustn’t take you from your guests. I just came, there’s time, I’m not in any hurry.”

  Mrs. Bliss felt overwhelmed. She could have been the guest of honor or something, the way they treated her. It was, like that kiss on her hand, outside her experience. Or if not outside her experience exactly, then at least outside earned experience, the cost-effective honors of accomplishment. She’d been a bride. She was a mother, she and Ted had married a daughter, bar mitzvahed two sons, buried one of them. She was a widow, she had buried a husband, so it wasn’t as if she’d never been the center of attention. (She had been a witness for the government in a high-profile drug case.) But who’s kidding who? Let’s face it, except for the trial, all those other occasions had been affairs of one sort or the other, even the funerals, may Ted and Marvin rest, bought and paid for. So unless they were exaggerating their interest in her—Tommy Auveristas was polite, even, she thought, sincere—she couldn’t remember feeling so important. It was exciting. But she was overwhelmed. As she hadn’t known what to do with all the attention after Ted’s death, she didn’t know what to do with the solicitude of these strangers.

  Many of them drifted away. New guests were arriving and Tommy Auveristas, excusing himself from Mrs. Bliss as if she were indeed the guest of honor, went off to greet them.

  Ermalina Cervantes came back with her soft drink.

  “Here you go,” she said. “It wasn’t cold enough, I put ice in it. Can you drink it with ice?”

  “Oh, thank you. Cold is fine. This is good, I’m really enjoying it. But you know,” Mrs. Bliss said, “they fill up your glass with too much ice in a restaurant, they’re trying to water it down. I don’t let them get away with that. I send it back to the kitchen.”

  “If there’s too much ice…”

  “No, no, it’s perfect. Hits the spot. I was just saying.”

  Ermalina Cervantes smiled at her. She had a beautiful smile, beautiful teeth. Beautiful skin. Mrs. Bliss set great store in pretty skin in a woman. She thought it revealed a lot about a person’s character. It wasn’t so important for a man to have a nice skin. Men had other ways of showing their hearts, but if a woman didn’t have sense enough to take care of her skin (it was the secret behind her own beauty; why people had bragged on her looks almost until she was seventy), then she didn’t really care about anything. The house could fall down around her ears and she’d never notice. She’d send her kids off to school all shlumperdik, shmuts on their faces, holes in their pants. But this was some Ermalina, this Ermalina. Teeth and skin! Butter wouldn’t melt.

  Ermalina Cervantes, nervous under the scrutiny of Mrs. Bliss’s open stare, asked if anything were wrong.

  “Wrong? What could be wrong, sweetheart? It’s a wonderful party. The pop is delicious. I never tasted better. You have a beautiful smile and wonderful teeth, and your skin is your crowning glory.”

  “Oh,” Ermalina Cervantes said, “oh, thank you.”

  “I hope you don’t mind my saying.”

  “No, of course not. Thank you, Mrs. Bliss.”

  “Please, dear. Dorothy.”

  “Dorothy.”

  “That’s better,” she said, “you make me very happy. I’ll tell you, I haven’t been this happy since my husband was alive. Older people like it when younger people use their first names. If you think it’s the opposite you’d be wrong. It shows respect for the person if the person calls the person by her first name than the other way around. Don’t ask me why, it’s a miracle. You’re blushing, am I talking too much? I’m talking too much. I can’t help it. Maybe because everyone’s so nice. You know, if I didn’t know pop don’t make you drunk I’d think I was drunk.”

  A pretty blond named Susan Gutterman came by and Ermalina introduced her to Mrs. Bliss.

  “Susan Gutterman,” Mrs. Bliss said speculatively. “You’re Jewish?”

  “No.”

  “Gutterman is a Jewish name.”

  “My husband is Jewish. He’s from Argentina.”

  “You? What are you?”

  “Oh,” Susan Gutterman said offhandedly, “not much of anything, I guess. I’m a WASP.”

  “A wasp?”

  “A White Anglo-Saxon Protestant,” Susan Gutterman explained.

  “Oh, you’re of mixed blood.”

  “May I bring you something to eat?” Susan Gutterman said.

  “I haven’t finished my pop. We haven’t met but I know who you are,” said Mrs. Bliss, turning to a woman just then passing by. “You’re Carmen Auveristas, Tommy Auveristas’s wife.” Like all the other South Americans at the party she was a knockout, not anything like those stale cutouts and figures with their fancy guitars, big sombreros, spangled suits, and drooping mustaches thicker than paintbrushes that the Decorations Committee was always putting up for the galas on those Good Neighbor nights in the gussied-up game rooms. And not at all like the women who went about all overheated in their coarse, black, heavy mour
ning. Was it any wonder those galas were so poorly attended? They must have been insulted, Mrs. Ted Bliss thought. Portrayed like so many shvartzers. Sure, how would Jews like it?

  “And I know who you are,” Carmen Auveristas said.

  “Your husband’s very nice. Such a gentleman. He kissed my hand. Very continental. Very suave.”

  “Have you met Elaine Munez?” Mrs. Auveristas asked.

  “Your daughter, Louise, let me up. She tried to sell me a paper. Oh,” she told her fellow guest, the cop-and-paper-boy’s mother, “she must have called up my name on her walkie-talkie. That’s how the servant knew to give me my name tag. I was wondering about that.”

  “May I bring you something to eat?” Elaine Munez said flatly.

  “No, thank you,” she said. “I ate some supper before I came. I didn’t know what a spread you put on. Go, dear, it looks delicious. I wish I could eat hot spicy foods, but they give me gas. They burn my kishkas.”

  The three women smiled dully and left her to stand by herself. Dorothy didn’t mind. Though she was having a ball, the strain of having to do all the talking was making her tired. She sat down in a big wing chair covered in a bright floral muslin. She was quite comfortable. Vaguely she was reminded of Sundays in Jackson Park when she and Ted and the three children had had picnics in the Japanese Gardens. In the beautiful room many of her pals from the Towers, there, like herself, in the penthouse for the first time, walked about, examining its expensive contents, trying out its furniture, accepting hors d’oeuvres from the caterers, and giggling, loosened up over highballs. Dorothy amused herself by trying to count the guests, keeping two sets of books, three—the Jews, those South Americans she recognized, and those she’d never seen before—but someone was always moving and, when she started over, she’d get all mixed up. It was a little like trying to count the number of musicians in Lawrence Welk’s band on television. The camera never stayed still long enough for her to get in all the trumpet players, trombonists, clarinet players, fiddlers, and whatnot. Sometimes a man with a saxophone would set it down and pick up something else. Then, when you threw in the singers…It could make you dizzy. Still, she was content enough.

  Closing her eyes for a moment and concentrating as hard as she could—she was wearing her hearing aid; this was in the days when she owned only one—she attempted to distinguish between the English and Spanish conversations buzzing around her like flies.

  Tommy Auveristas, kneeling beside her armchair, startled her.

  Quite almost as much as she, bolting up, startled him, causing him to spill a little of the food from the plate he was extending toward her onto the cream Berber carpeting.

  “Son of a bitch!”

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry! It’s my fault,” Mrs. Bliss volunteered. “If we rub it with seltzer it should come out! I’ll go and get some!”

  “No, no, of course not. The maid will see to it. Stay where you are.”

  Mrs. Bliss pushed herself up out of the armchair.

  “Stay where you are!” Auveristas commanded. “I said the girl would see to it. Where is the nincompoop?”

  Seeing he’d frightened Mrs. Bliss half to death, he abruptly modulated. “I’ve offended you. Forgive me, señora. You’re absolutely right. I think you’d be more comfortable someplace else. Here, take my arm. We’ll get out of this woman’s way while she works.” He said something in Spanish to the maid who, on her hands and knees, was picking a reddish sauce out of a trough of sculpted carpet before wiping the stain away with a wet cloth. He led Dorothy to a sofa—one of three—in a distant corner of the room. Seating her there, he asked again that she forgive him for his outburst and promised he’d be right back.

  He returned with food piled high on a plate. “Ah, Mrs. Bliss,” he said. “Not knowing your preference in my country’s dishes, I have taken the liberty of choosing for you.”

  She accepted the plate from the man. She respected men. They did hard, important work. Not that laundry was a cinch, preparing and serving meals, cleaning the house, raising kids. She and Ted were partners, but she’d been the silent partner. She knew that. It didn’t bother her, it never had. If Ted had been mean to her, or bossed her around…but he wasn’t, he didn’t. As a matter of fact, honest, they’d never had a fight. Her sisters had had terrible fights with their husbands. Rose was divorced and to this day she never saw her without thinking of the awful things that had happened between her sister and Herman. Listen, scoundrel that he was, there were two sides to every story. And everything wasn’t all cream and peaches between Etta and Sam. Still, much as she loved Etta, the woman had a tongue on her. She wasn’t born yesterday. Husbands and wives fought. Cats and dogs. Not her and Ted. Not one time. Not once. Believe it or not. As far as Dorothy was concerned he was, well, he was her hero. Take it or leave it.

  What she told Gutterman and Elaine Munez was true. She wasn’t hungry; she had prepared a bite of supper before she came to the party. She wasn’t hungry. What did an old woman need? Juice, a slice of toast with some jelly in the morning, a cup of coffee. Maybe some leftovers for lunch. And if she went out to Wolfie’s or the Rascal House with the gang for the Early Bird Special, perhaps some brisket, maybe some fish. Only this wasn’t any of those things. These things were things she’d never seen before in her life.

  Bravely, she smiled at Tommy Auveristas and permitted him to lay a beautiful cloth napkin across her lap and hand her the plate of strange food. He gave her queer forks, an oddly shaped spoon. She didn’t have to look to know that it was sterling, top of the line.

  Nodding at her, he encouraged her to dig in.

  Mrs. Ted Bliss picked over this drek with her eyes. From her expression, from the way her glance darted from one mysterious item to the next, you’d have thought she was examining different chocolates in a pound box of expensive candy, divining their centers, like a dowser, deciding which to choose first. Meanwhile, Tommy Auveristas explained the food like a waiter in one of those two-star restaurants where you nod and grin but don’t know what the hell the man is talking about.

  “Which did you say was the chicken, the green or the blue one?”

  “Well, both.”

  “I can’t decide,” Dorothy Bliss said.

  Auveristas wasn’t born yesterday either. He knew the woman was stalling him, knew the fixed ways of the old, their petrified tastes. It was one of the big items that most annoyed the proud hidalgo about old fart señoras like this one. She was his guest, however, and whatever else he may have been he was a gracious and resourceful host.

  “No, no, Dorothy,” he said, snatching her plate and signaling the maid up off her knees to take the food away, “you mustn’t!” he raised his hand against the side of his head in the international language of dummkopf.

  The señora didn’t know what had hit her and looked at him with an expression at once bewildered, curious, and relieved.

  “It isn’t kosher,” he explained, “can you ever forgive me?”

  “Oh, sure,” she said. “Of course.”

  “You are graciousness itself,” Tommy Auveristas said. “May I offer you something else instead? We have grapes. I bet you like grapes.”

  “I do like grapes.”

  He had a bowl of grapes brought to her, wide and deep as the inside of a silk hat.

  He asked if it was difficult to keep kosher, and Dorothy, a little embarrassed, explained that she didn’t, not strictly, keep kosher. Now that the children were grown and her husband was dead she didn’t keep pork in the house—she’d never tasted it—though there was always bacon in her freezer for when the kids came to visit. She never made shellfish, which she loved, and had always eaten in restaurants when Ted was alive, and it didn’t bother her mixing milchik and flayshig. And although she always bought kosher meat for Passover, and kept separate dishes, and was careful to pack away all the bread in the house, even cakes and cookies, even bagels and onion rolls, she was no fanatic, she said, and stowed these away in plastic bags in the freezer u
ntil after the holidays. In her opinion, it was probably an even bigger sin in God’s eyes to waste food than to follow every last rule. Her sisters didn’t agree with her, she said, but all she knew was that she’d had a happier marriage with Ted, may he rest, than her sister Etta with Sam.

  He was easy to talk to, Tommy Auveristas, but maybe she was taking too much of his time. He had other guests after all.

  He shrugged off the idea.

  “You’re sure my soda pop wasn’t spiked?”

  “What?”

  “Oh,” Mrs. Bliss said, “that was someone else, the girl with the skin. Ermalina? We had a discussion about my soft drink.”

  “I see.”

  “What was I going to tell you? Oh, yeah,” she said, “I remember. Chicken.

  “One time, this was when Ted was still alive but we were already living in Miami Beach. And we went to a restaurant, in one of the hotels with the gang to have dinner and see the show. The girls treated the men. (Every week we’d set a percentage of our winnings aside from the card games. In a year we’d have enough to go somewhere nice.) And I remember we all ordered chicken. Everyone in our party. We could have had anything we wanted off the menu but everyone ordered chicken. Twenty people felt like chicken! It was funny. Even the waitress couldn’t stop laughing. She must have thought we were crazy.

  “Now the thing about chicken is that there must be a million ways to prepare it. Boiled chicken, broiled chicken, baked chicken, fried chicken, roast chicken, stewed chicken. Just tonight I learned you could make green chicken, even blue chicken. And the other thing about chicken is that every different way you make it, that’s how different it’s going to taste. Chicken salad. Chicken fricassee.”

  “Chicken pox,” Tommy Auveristas said.

  Mrs. Bliss laughed. It was disgusting but it was one of the funniest things she’d ever heard.

  “Yeah,” she said, “chicken pox!” She couldn’t stop laughing. She was practically choking. Tommy Auveristas offered to get her some water. She waved him off. “It’s all right, something just went down the wrong pipe. Anyway, anyway, everyone ordered their chicken different. I’ll never forget the look on that waitress’s face. She must have thought we were nuts.