Mrs. Ted Bliss

by Stanley Elkin

  “Slow down, slow down,” she pleaded.

  “I’m not even going twenty miles an hour.”

  “There’s children,” she said, “there’s people on blankets.”

  “Relax. You don’t think I see them?”

  “You’re knocking my kishkas.”

  “We’re almost there.”

  “Where?”

  “I’m looking for a spot. Don’t you think I know what I’m doing?”

  If he were looking for a spot, Mrs. Bliss didn’t know how he’d ever find it. God knows where they were. All she could see on her right was open ocean, on her left a bright but bland skyline of beachfront high rises and motels. They bumped along in a sickening no-man’s-land of sand and sun and sky. She didn’t know whether they were still in Miami Beach, or even in Dade County. They might have been in Fort Lauderdale or any, to Dorothy, of the nameless suburbs that had risen beside the coast like a kind of urbanized landfill.

  She wished he would stop the car and then, quite suddenly, he did.

  “We’re there?”

  “Didn’t I tell you?”

  He was bullshitting her, but he’d stopped driving and she forgave him. She climbed down out of the dune buggy and immediately felt less exposed to the sun, her stomach still queasy because they were still squarely on the beach in what was not quite yet the middle of the day.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Yellin said. “You’re thinking how is this spot different from any other spot on the beach.”

  “I am thinking that,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss.

  “It’s got the proper ratio of sunbathers to swimmers. It doesn’t seem to be all played out, worked over by other metal detectives. I like the demographics.”

  “The demographics,” Mrs. Bliss said.

  “Hell yes. Superb demographics. Terrific demographics. Wonderful distribution of yuppies, the recently retired, and old folks. White people, coloreds.”

  “Please,” she said.

  “You think I’m depending on just that two-hundred-dollar gadget I sprang for? Don’t underestimate me, Dorothy. In this business you got to have a dowser’s heart. Let’s set up.”

  Dorothy read to him from the manual as Junior poured out parts from the box holding her metal detector onto a sheet and began to assemble it. He was wonderfully efficient and often went on to the next step while Mrs. Bliss, trying to absorb what she had just read, fell behind. If she lived another eighty-two years, she thought dispiritedly, she’d never get the hang of mechanics. Always she’d believed this was some man/woman thing, but Mrs. Bliss was aware that fresh returns were still coming in from the feminists and the fact was she was more than a little annoyed with herself.

  Junior fit the batteries into Mrs. Bliss’s metal detector and pronounced it ready to go. First, though, he would have to put his own together. At more than twice the price of Mrs. Bliss’s, Yellin’s metal detector seemed at least three times more complicated, and now when she read the directions to him he frequently stopped her and asked her to repeat what she’d read. At other times he grabbed the manual out of her hands, checking to study it himself or maybe to see if she’d read it correctly. Mrs. Bliss, already upset by the brightness of the sun, began to transfer some of the anger she’d been feeling about herself onto Junior. The metal detectors should have been assembled before they’d left. Even if he didn’t do it at home he’d have had plenty of time while she was in her condo changing her clothes. At least to get started. Whose idea was this? It wasn’t hers. He should have taken the responsibility. What did she think she was doing, anyway? Yellin was Ted’s buddy, not hers.

  “All right,” he said at last, “that’s it. Let’s rock and roll.”

  Mrs. Bliss, sick to her stomach, thought he sounded like a fool.

  She was, kayn aynhoreh, a healthy woman. Indeed, the last time she remembered feeling nearly so ill had been the hot day she’d left Holmer Toibb’s office and was spotted by Hector Camerando as she waited for her bus and he’d offered her the ride. She’d been breathless, disoriented. That had been about treasure, too. Her conviction that they would round a corner and come upon Ted’s Buick LeSabre, reborn, gleaming at the curb as the day he must have first seen it in the showroom. When she saw it was Camerando’s Fleetwood Cadillac she couldn’t catch her breath and started to cry. She felt faint and Camerando had drowned her in air-conditioning. He advised, she recalled, not to let things slide, to see a doctor.

  Well, she was with one now, wasn’t she? And knew he would fail her. As all doctors ultimately failed all patients. As Toibb before him, as Greener Hertsheim before Toibb, all the way back to the experimental research scientific ones at Billings, and Rabbi Beinfeld, and good old Dr. Myers before all of them. Nobody, she thought, could help anyone really. It was nobody’s fault. Help just wasn’t in the cards. The cards? The deck!

  What she did now, she saw, was for herself. Not for auld lang syne, or Ted, or companionship in her old age, and not, finally, because Junior Yellin might wither and die if she rebuffed his attentions and kiddy enthusiasms, but out of her own needs, her own kiddy enthusiasms that until a few moments ago she still believed—in spite of the presence of the shadeless, roofless ruthlessness of the overbearing sun and the distant twitch of a returning interest in interest (fresh interests lay at the heart of recreational therapeusis; she’d known that going in), in spite, too, of her dissipate concentration over the incomprehensible chop suey of the owner’s manual, and her patient rereadings of the most pertinent sections—applied and that she felt, up to that raw moment when Yellin slapped her hands away and pulled, ripped, the owner’s manual from them. As if he were denouncing her, as if he were saying, “This is the owner’s manual, I am its owner!”

  So the shoe was on the other foot. What, he was doing her a favor? Leading her into direct sunlight, dragging her beneath its spooky field as if under some cruel astrological influence. She no longer cared that he was too used to his character, or that he’d always had partners, projecting her anger where if properly belonged—Rage to Bliss to Yellin like a double-play on her husband’s radio.

  The more she thought about it the madder she got. The nerve of that guy! Snatching the book away like I’m not even here, like I’m invisible. To hell with him. To hell with him!

  And gathering up her metal detector, her trowel and shovel and hoe, and taking her fine paleontologist’s brush made off down the beach on her own, passing by groups of discrete populations—couples from the hotels stretched out on bath towels; women older than Dorothy on beach chairs of bright woven plastic, indifferent as stylites, their skin dark as scabs; men, the ancient retired, chilly in suits and ties; girls in thong bathing suits, their teenage admirers trailing behind them like packs of wild dogs; kids, overexcited, wild in the surf, their parents frantically waving their arms like coaches in Little League; waiters, kitchen help, and housekeepers on smoke breaks; small clans of picnickers handing off contraband sandwiches, contraband beer; lovers kneading lotions and sunblock into one another’s flesh like a sort of sexual first aid. Mrs. Ted Bliss, like some fussy fisherman, as inconspicuously as she could moving past these people toward a yellow patch of empty beach, for all her stealth reminded that she must appear at least as idiosyncratic (though not nearly so fashionable) as the girls in the thong bikini bathing suits, at least as idiosyncratic (though, again, not nearly so fashionable) as the superannuated gentlemen in their tight shoes, suits, and ties—a little old “fucking beekeeper” lady and her electric broom.

  Somewhere in a narrow clearing between low and high tides she set up shop, took a last look at the directions to see how one turned on the machine, flicked its toggle switch, and opened the store.

  “What are you doing?” a little girl of eight or nine asked about ten minutes after she started.

  “Looking for buried treasure, sweetheart,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss.

  “Did you find any?”

  “So far,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss, “they’re not biting.”
/>   “Oh,” said the kid, “may I try?”

  “Be my guest,” Mrs. Bliss said.

  “Really? No fooling?”

  Mrs. Bliss handed the metal detector to the little girl.

  “What do I do?”

  “Make little half circles.”

  “Like this?”

  “Looks good to me.”

  “This is fun,” the child said in a few minutes without really meaning it.

  “Take your time, darling.”

  Mrs. Bliss watched the little girl, self-consciously comparing her to her own children when they were her age, to her grandchildren, their children, her sisters and brothers at that age, ultimately to what she could remember of herself when she had been nine. Drawing a blank here, recalling as through the vague narcotic muffle and babble of an interrupted dream only the interest she’d had in detail, the remarkable sum of unrelated parts, a sort of silly wonder and flawed attention. She was sorry she didn’t have an orange in her purse, or candy, or gum to give the kid, anything, really, to keep up her flagging interest. Suddenly, inspired, she reached into her change purse, found a quarter, put it back, and took a dollar out of her billfold.

  “Here,” said Mrs. Bliss.

  The look on the little girl’s face changed from the curiosity and enthusiasm she’d shown when she’d initiated their conversation to that of suspicion, almost alarm.

  “It’s your treasure,” Mrs. Bliss started to explain, but before she was sure the words were out of her mouth or, if they were, whether the child had heard or understood them, the kid dropped the metal detector’s long handle down on the sand and ran off.

  “What was that all about?” said Junior Yellin, coming up to her.

  “Oh,” Dorothy said, “oh.”

  “What’s up? What’s wrong?”

  “I scared her. I tried to give her a dollar.” Mrs. Bliss was almost in tears.

  “You scared her? You tried to give her a dollar? To hell with her. She can go to hell.”

  “She thinks I’m a witch out of some fairy story,” Mrs. Bliss said.

  “Let her go screw herself she thinks you’re a witch. She’s a son of a bitch. So what did you find?” She was thinking about the little girl. She didn’t understand what he meant. “Hey,” Junior said, “she threw it on the ground. What does she think, it’s a toy? It’s an advanced piece of machinery, it isn’t a toy.”

  “It’s a toy,” Mrs. Ted Bliss said.

  Yellin looked around to see if anyone were watching. “Look,” he said, “look inside.” He was wearing a sort of creel. He raised its lid. Inside, dark at the bottom, Mrs. Bliss saw that he carried a kind of loose, unset metal jewelry.

  “You found these?”

  “Shh. Yes. And more, but people were getting curious so I kicked sand over the area and came to look for you. I took coordinates. I could find the spot again anytime I wanted to.”

  She’d forgotten the little girl. “What do you think it is?” she asked.

  “A battle, what else?”

  “A battle?”

  “A battle, a shoot-out, a fistfight with guns.”

  “On the beach?”

  “On the beach? The beach? Dorothy, darling, this is the hallowed ground of drug lords. Just look at these shell casings, will you; look at all these bullets. I don’t know my ass from a hole in the ground, millimeter and NRA-wise, but I’m telling you, kid, this stuff has all the markings of Uzis, AK-forty-sevens, rubber landing craft on moonless nights. Cocaine-wise, it must have been the Bay of bloody Pigs. I was a butcher, I know.”

  “It’s ammunition?” Mrs. Bliss asked nervously.

  “It ain’t arrowheads.”

  “But what do you do with it?”

  “What, are you kidding me? We could open a smuggler’s museum. We don’t have enough yet. Anyone can see it’s just the tip of the iceberg, but we can always come back. I mean, I know where the mother lode is. Hell, Dorothy, there must be a couple hundred dozen mother lodes up and down all these beaches. And let’s say I bring some of my Land Rover chums in on this. And you’ve got an in with the DEA guys. Working together with our friends downtown and if we put in a little research on the mainframe, we should be able to establish the like provenance of these drug wars, the circa and circumstances. I mean, face it, what’s a tourist do with his time after he’s checked out South Beach and been to Little Havana? He wants the big picture on the culture his next stop has to be the Dope Runner’s Museum. What do you say? I’m offering you the ground floor. What do you say, what do you think?”

  What she said was nothing. What she thought was that he was crazy. Yet a part of her couldn’t help but admire him. Even to stand in awe of his nutty energy. Who, she wondered, was the true baleboosteh? Not Dorothy, who could not remember when she had given up clipping coupons out of her newspapers and junk mail, or ceased to bother with all the heavy hospital corners of slipcovers, blue water in the toilet bowl. Not Dorothy, who often as not these days let a pot of coffee stand overnight and warmed it up the next day. Not Dorothy, who no longer always bothered to bring back to her condominium the doggy bags and uneaten rolls from restaurants but who, when she did, let the rolls stand out on the kitchen table and warmed them in the toaster oven the next morning to eat with her breakfast, just as she put the contents of the doggy bag not into her freezer but in the refrigerator so she could make her next meal out of the merely day-old leftovers.

  So if there were a new baleboss in town, unlikely as it seemed, it had to be old Junior who baked the bread. How different was the way he plotted his campaigns from the way Dorothy had once planned meals for her family? Peculiarly, not that she gave him any credit for it, this made him seem all the more male in her eyes. Driven, she meant, unable or unwilling to let anything go, his hold on life greedy with strength. (She knew, for example, that even after discounting the two or three-year seniority she held over him he was bound to outlive her, to outlive everyone with whom he had struggled for edge over the course of his life.)

  “But what did you come up with? Never mind,” he said, glancing at her tools, “those ain’t even got dust on them. I could eat off your trowel.” He picked up her metal detector. “Is it turned on? Are you sure you even know how to work this?”

  “I flip the toggle switch. I make little half circles.”

  “Well,” Yellin said, “maybe you hit a dry hole here. But that’s hard to buy into. I mean this place is a billion years old, you had to come across something. Beer tabs, bottle caps. The key from a sardine can. A tin of old condoms, for Christ’s sake.”

  He spoke as if she’d let him down. Surprisingly, she was not at all surprised.

  “No,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss coolly, “no beer tabs, no bottle caps. None of that other stuff either.” She wanted to tell him she had found gold—what do you call them?—doubloons, silver spoons, forks, shining jewels set in precious metal rings. That she held her tongue was a tribute to the great age she knew he would live to be, a lonely old man surviving his children and grandchildren, surviving everyone he had ever known or taken advantage of. She did not wish to add her sarcasm to the weight of his possible regrets.

  “It could be defective, I suppose,” Yellin said. “Let me take it out for a spin.”

  Dorothy Bliss shrugged and Junior, reactivating the machine he had just switched off so as not to drain its batteries, began going over what seemed to Mrs. Bliss exactly the same ground she and the little girl had previously covered.

  “We already did over th—”

  “Quiet,” he said, “I think I’ve got something. Hand me that shovel.” He scratched furiously at the packed sand as if he’d hit pay dirt. “See” he said, “see?”

  “Have you found something? Is something there?”

  “My God,” Yellin said, “it’s sending out signals like a sinking ship. Give me a hand, will you? Use the hoe, get the trowel. Yes, right, good girl, bring the brush.”

  Mrs. Ted Bliss, excited, in the sand, on her knees, beside him, lea
ned into her effort. Breathlessly, she pulled sand from the hole he was digging as if she were bailing the beach. But for the pressure she felt along her arms and in her chest (and her fury), it might have been more than a half century earlier on the shore of Lake Michigan with her children and nephews and nieces, Mrs. Bliss dispensing pail-and-shovel lessons, overseeing pretend burials. The thought brought her up short. She dropped her hoe. (Marvin was dead, some of his cousins; not buried to the neck in Lake Michigan sand but in that cold Chicago boneyard, even their nostrils clogged with dirt, covered by death shmuts.)

  “No,” Yellin said, “don’t let up. Why are you stopping?”

  Mrs. Bliss shrugged. “What’s the use?” she said.

  “What’s that, philosophy? The use is we’re onto something here. Christ, Dorothy, this is hot work.”

  Yellin stopped just long enough to wipe his face and neck with a handkerchief, then quickly resumed. “Listen to that. Your metal detector’s beeping away to beat the band. The sound wasn’t nearly as loud at my dig.”

  What was he talking about? What beeping? What sound?

  “What beeping?” she said. “What sound?”

  He stopped digging.

  “What beeping? What sound? You don’t hear it?”

  “No,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss.

  “Jeez, Dorothy, don’t you have your hearing aid in?”

  “Sure I do,” she said.

  “You see?” Yellin said. “You see what happens you don’t go for the upscale model? Where are your bells and whistles? On my device there’s even a light that flashes when you’re over something. The bigger the find, the brighter the light. That’s the sort of thing you need.”