Mrs. Ted Bliss

by Stanley Elkin

  Every hour or so astonishing pictures of Hurricane Andrew were beamed down to Miami Beach from satellites orbiting the earth. Mrs. Bliss watched, hypnotized, as the photographs collected themselves from a blur of vague dots and electronic squiggles and slowly resolved into clear, enhanced portraits of brutal, rushing power.

  Gradually, as hard news started to trickle in (they were talking about a shift in the storm now, how it might miss the Bahamas altogether and then, gaining force, move toward the East Coast, and were even beginning to speak of the storm of the century) the meteorological anecdotes trailed off and they were speculating about momentum, land-fall, and drew thick black lines in Magic Marker, superimposing them on maps as if they were composing best-case/worse-case scenarios, or complicated plays in athletic contests. The wind speeds were stunning, frightful. No one had any idea how many ships might already have been impacted, turned on their sides, spinning like bottles.

  Mrs. Bliss thought of the honeymooners, her heart in her mouth.

  The storm was moving at thirty-one knots now, an incredible speed. Someone gave the equivalent of a knot to a land mile, and Mrs. Bliss got out Manny’s calculator and tried to work out what thirty-one knots was in real space. She got something like sixty-eight miles per hour and knew she’d made a mistake. No catastrophe could come on that fast. The end of the world couldn’t come on that fast.

  Her heart was in her mouth, her fingers were crossed. Her heart was in her mouth and her fingers were crossed for the honeymooners, for anyone out there on that ocean.

  It was very exciting, more exciting than the greyhounds. She bit her tongue and tried to take the thought back. But it was. It was more exciting than the greyhounds. Junior and Ellen racing wind, zigging and zagging through all the choppy minefields of an enemy air, Nature’s mortal fender benders, all its angered give-no-quarters. Was will in this, wondered Mrs. Ted Bliss, indifferent, merciless will like the thing of a thug, a sort of vandalism? Though, finally, she didn’t really believe it, any of it, as she didn’t really believe in God. Only force was in this, a slasher and a burner, making widows and orphans, murdering sons.

  More exciting than the greyhounds. Force merely the mechanical rabbit, a towed, insentient tease. Why waste your time? Nah, nah, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, who, years past, had been on a ship or two herself, who’d wondered during each day’s required safety drill, What, I’m getting off this big ship and going into one of those flimsy, tiny lifeboats? What, in that vast sea?

  So it never even crossed her mind to pray for them. She was for them, for Ellen and Junior; she was behind them one hundred percent, but she wouldn’t pray for them.

  They were lost, the two of them, somewhere behind the lines of Western Union where neither she nor anyone else could get to them. For what it was worth they had her blessing, though she knew as soon as she gave it what it was worth. You laid your life down for people but you had to be close enough so it would do them some good.

  And now (it was August 23; she’d started watching on the twenty-second and fallen asleep in front of the television) they had changed their tune, the weathermen.

  The storm had grazed the Bahamas anyway, leaving four dead, and was on its way to Florida, maybe the Keys, maybe farther up the coast. They had changed their tune and were singing a different song. The hurricane was coming, the hurricane was coming to America. Vicious Andrew was serving and the ball could be in Mrs. Ted Bliss’s court any time now. It was 287 miles from Florida and the boys were into a different mode. They were giving instructions where to stand if the hurricane hit. (It was exactly like those safety drills on the cruises.) And Mrs. Bliss could never keep it straight in her head what you did in a tornado, an earthquake, a hurricane.

  And giving words to the wise about provisions, supplies, laying them in. She didn’t have a flashlight, she didn’t have batteries, matches, candles, cases of mineral water. She didn’t have a portable radio. She didn’t have a first-aid kit, she didn’t have a generator. What she had were Ellen’s cans of minced game, her oddball teas and organic chowders—all Ellen’s reeds and straw. What she had was wild rice for the enemas. What she had was a freezer full of doggy bags of her own leftover, uneaten meals.

  She was glued to the television reports. And the thing kept on coming and kept on coming. She stayed glued to the television, the only times she left it were when she went to the bathroom. (She didn’t have a full tub of bathwater for washing the dishes.) Or into the kitchen to eat. (Eating, as she told herself, while she still could, while the stove still worked and her can opener was still driven by electricity.) There was a small radio on one of her countertops, and she listened to it as she waited for her eggs to boil, her coffee to heat up, her bread to toast. The hurricane was on every station but the edge was off. She missed the experts, couldn’t take the news as seriously when it came in from disc jockeys, or supplied grist for call-in talk shows. This was why she brought her food back into the living room/dining room area and sat down to eat it in front of the TV set.

  And now they were showing a video of the damage in the Bahamas. Awful, terrible. Roofs blown off houses, boats overturned. Hurricane Andrew had caught them with their pants down.

  The hurricane would hit the coast of Florida sometime during the early hours of August 24. Maybe it would, maybe it wouldn’t. As advanced as weather forecasting was, they told each other, it was still in its infancy, an inexact science, almost an art form. They had the equipment, their scientific, state-of-the-art tools—their radar and weather balloons and eye-in-the-sky satellites, even their own daring, dashing flying squadrons of “Hurricane Hunters” in modified airborne AWACS with all their glowing jewelry of measurement, finely tuned as astronomers’ lenses and instruments. Yet even the experts acknowledged the final, awful unpredictability of their art, how their knowledge was humbled before all the intricate moving parts of climate. They trotted out the one about the butterfly beating its wings in Africa. They trotted out the moon and the tides. They trotted out God and force. It might or it mightn’t. They hedged their bets and settled for their “best guesstimates.”

  All that could be done, they admitted, was hope for the best and prepare for the worst.

  This wasn’t the first time Mrs. Bliss had waited for a hurricane to happen. There’d been warnings and alerts every few years since the Blisses had first come to Florida. There’d been one in the late fifties, when she and Ted were there as tourists. The management of the ocean-front hotel where they were staying announced during the dinner show—the comedian, Myron Cohen, was entertaining—that a great storm was expected and that everyone should proceed to the children’s huge playroom in the basement of the hotel to wait it out. There was no need to panic, they should make their way downstairs in an orderly fashion. The checks for their dinners had already been taken care of by the hotel. Myron Cohen would be along to join them and kibitz. Everyone applauded. It was one of the things Dorothy and Ted liked best about Miami Beach, the sense of some deep-pocket hospitality it gave off—fresh flowers in the room and a basket of fruit on the table when you checked in, a personal handwritten note from the manager, then, not fifteen minutes later, a follow-up phone call, were they satisfied with the room, did they like their view, would they permit the management to send up a complimentary drink and a small assortment of hors d’oeuvres. Even, months later, another personal note. Did Ted and Dorothy intend to return next year, would they like their old room—he gave the number of the room—again? The hurricane had passed them by that time. Cohen had never been funnier. The camaraderie while they waited for something terrible to happen to them was something to see. And other times, too. And always they had gotten away with murder. The only time anything significant happened was when a hurricane, diminished by bumping into Cuba and scraping along some of the Keys, had grazed on up the coast until it was at last downgraded to a tropical depression. The storm was still powerful enough to produce gale-force winds and over four inches of rain on Mrs. Bliss’s balcony, three iro
n balusters of which had been knocked loose as teeth that had eventually to be pulled and replaced. Their patio furniture, which never completely dried out or lost its strong musky mildew, they gave to Goodwill.

  So though they’d had their share of storm warnings and alerts, nothing had ever really happened. With the fierceness of its weather—its four- and five-foot drifts, its killer ice storms—Chicago presented more risk in a single winter than Florida did in all the years they’d lived there.

  This one could pass her by, too. It would or it wouldn’t. It might or it mightn’t. It could or it couldn’t. It will or it won’t.

  And though it was the middle of the afternoon of August 23, the hurricane was still up in the air, so to speak. The experts were still all over the tube with their special reports, advisories, and up-to-the-minute’s, but something had happened, a subtle change in the programming, as though the Greater Miami area had been somehow politicized, or put under martial law or vague state-of-siege conditions. City, county, and state officials had begun to appear on her screen—governmental agencies, FEMA, even the Coast Guard.

  What these various spokesmen said often contradicted what others before them had said. Thus, on the one hand, Mrs. Bliss was advised that just sitting tight (particularly if one was within a few blocks of the ocean) was like the piggies in their houses of sticks and straw in the story practically inviting the wolf to huff and puff and blow their doors down, and, on the other, not to try to make a run for it, that the danger of traffic tie-ups on the main streets and northbound thruways could create major gridlock, that folks stalled in their cars would be like fish shot in barrels for the pitiless winds but, that if one were absolutely determined on escape, one had better carpool. (Mrs. Bliss thought wistfully of the Buick LeSabre, recalling the smooth, troublefree rides and trips she and Ted had made in it, endowing it with magical powers like a beast’s in a legend. In her daydream Ted turned the LeSabre’s steering wheel to the left and it soared above gridlock, setting down on straight empty highways in Georgia, Tennessee, eleven miles from Chicago. He tugged it to the right and they were on access roads, coasting alongside big clean motel chains, their vacancy signs flaring like great cheery lights of welcome.)

  They did a job on each other, these municipal, state, and federal spokesmen, a great debate, their raised voices in babble and argument, some great bureaucratic covering of all the bases, particularly, Dorothy guessed, their behinds. They left her, finally, with her options open. She knew from experience, though she didn’t know how she knew it, that no final order, no ultimatum, would be given (offered, granted), that everyone was on his own in this one. (Even in extremis, the woman subsumed in the male principle—the spokesmen, the spokesmen.) Though maybe she did know, she thought, how she knew. These guys, they were like Ted’s doctors, these guys. (Laying out choices for her, the pros and the cons, shtupping them with pros and cons, making them dizzy with alternative, forcing them to choose—chemo or radiation or surgery.) One of the spokesmen, adding insult to injury, pointing out what a gorgeous day it was, not a cloud in the sky, a regular our-blue-heaven out there.

  Which was true. Mrs. Ted Bliss, up to here with the voices on the television, opened her glass doors and walked out onto her small balcony. The day was spectacular, the weather even nicer than the time she went in the limousine to visit Alcibiades Chitral. How could a storm be brewing in weather like this? Which wasn’t like weather at all, really, but as comfortable as the neutral, flawlessly adjusted climate on the ground floor of a department store.

  She stretched. She took in immense drafts of perfect air, almost gagging on its richness after the close, soiled atmosphere of the condo, which she hadn’t left since Friday, the day before she received Ellen’s wire, the day before she took up her vigil in front of the television. She was momentarily dizzy, sent reeling on the sweet truth of the world, and steadied herself on the railing of the balcony, her palms spread over the area where the old balusters had been loosened by the storm. Mrs. Bliss had outgrown most of what few superstitions she may once have indulged, but when she realized where her hands had come down to halt her swoon her breath snagged, caught on an omen.

  She recovered and had started to go back indoors when she became gradually aware of noises, a hubbub. These seemed to rise all about her, sent from the street to where she stood on her balcony on the seventh floor and, at first, it seemed through all the sharp shrills and trebles of her amplified deafness that the noises—she recognized certain voices—might be calling to her—impatient, urgent sirens. But when she looked down she saw great activity in the streets and driveways of the buildings adjoining hers, in the driveway directly below her own.

  She was not so high she could not attach names to the figures making these noises, this frantic bustle, nor so low—at that unlikely moment she was suddenly touched by her dead husband’s middling intentions, the normative measure he’d taken of their lives, meaning neither to distance themselves so greatly above the world that they were carefully buffered from it, nor so close to the earth that they could sink into it, but here, just here, precisely in the heart of the building’s hierarchy, its Goldilocksian mean—to distinguish what they were saying, their furious gestures. Though she well enough understood what they meant. These were the noises of flight, of refugees, the sound her family might have made when it quit Russia and started its journey. Beneath her, men and women stood by their automobiles hollering orders and questions at their wives and husbands who’d not yet quit their condos, barking last-minute details at each other like the flight checks of pilots before they took off. It reminded Dorothy of the times she and Ted were preparing to check out of motels, Ted at the door and Dorothy making one last surveillance of the room, checking drawers, closets, to see if anything had been left behind. She didn’t care how comfortable or unpleasant (she thought of the farm in Michigan) a stay had been, there was always something anxious and a little rushed about every leavetaking, all departure a sort of scorched earth policy.

  And now, here and there on the other Towers buildings, she could make out thick, fortifying strips of tape crisscrossing various windows, or wide plywood planks covering a balcony’s glass doors, transforming the Towers into a kind of crossword puzzle, or even giant, ambiguous, ludicrous games of tic-tac-toe.

  They’re getting out while the getting’s good, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss a little guiltily. They’re making a run for it. They’re doing something, she thought forlornly. They’d heard the same pros and cons she’d heard. She’d seen the same programs. More probably.

  She hadn’t bothered to change her clothes and realized she must have been wearing them since the day of the telegram. The famous, fastidious Mrs. Ted Bliss had let herself go. The baleboosteh was doleful, almost in tears, and let in a tub for herself. She washed carefully, dried herself on her thickest towels, applied powder, light makeup, perfume, and changed into fresh clothes. She thought, I’m nobody’s fool, this isn’t some ritual, it ain’t my bas mitzvah, I’m not committing harakiri. It is what it is, she thought. I stayed by the TV too long and now it’s too late. I’d call but I’d never get a plane out now. They must be booked solid. If, she thought, shrewdly, they’re even flying in this weather. (She was an expert, a forecaster herself now. She meant the weather on its way, the hurricane, or even, knock wood, tropical depression. She was just too slow off the dime, and now it was too late. I’ll just have to wait it out, thought this little piggy.)

  She sat down by the tiny telephone table, found the sheet of useful numbers the condominium complex handed out to all owners, and called Tower Stores, realizing even as she picked up the phone that it was a Sunday, that less than half the staff was on duty on Sundays, that even the lifeguards had Sundays off. On Sundays, in mitten derinnen, it was strictly swimming at your own risk. Gentiles, she figured, showed you no mercy. Therefore, she was actually a little surprised when she got a busy signal. She had to call back three times before the line was free and somebody answered.

 
“Tower Stores.”

  “Tower Stores, this is Mrs. Ted Bliss in Building One.”

  “Hey, Mrs. Bliss. Hola, sholem, how are you?”

  “Francis?”

  “Si.”

  “It’s Sunday, I thought you’d be off.”

  “They called people in because of the hurricane.”

  “You’re in Tower Stores now, not maintenance?”

  “No, I still work maintenance. It’s the hurricane, all hands on deck.”

  “You think it’s going to hit us?”

  “Like a potch in tochis.”

  Francis Moprado was an engineer in the Towers complex. Dark as an Aztec, he was a short, almost tiny man of fierce appearance whose amiability had earned him a kind of mascot status among some of the residents. He liked to spike his conversation with Yiddish words and phrases he’d overheard, and often showed up at many of the community seders (where he’d pretend to steal the afikomen) and even at some of the old Friday night services in the game room. At these times he always wore a yarmulke, not the interchangeable plain black almost patent leather-looking beanies most of the men took out of brown cardboard boxes before they entered the converted sanctuary and put back again when they left but his own knit beige beaded skullcap. Everyone knew he was working the room for Hanukkah gelt and tips but went along with Moprado’s bald-faced fawning deferences anyway, reimbursing him generously for favors received, topping him off with gas money for the wear and tear on his car, the rubber he used up when he ran them out to the Fort Lauderdale airport or went out on errands. A taxi would have been cheaper, they agreed, but enjoyed having the patronizing little son of a bitch for a pet. Mrs. Ted Bliss found him a great curiosity, not so much for his blatant ass kissing as his complicated Indian and Hispanic blood. She thought his bland compliance and odd Latino Step’n Fetchit ways an anomaly. Unlike the other Cubans, Central, and South Americans she’d had contact with during her years in Florida, he seemed utterly without machismo, yet she was more fearful of him, of his dangerous smiling mildness, than ever she’d been of all the hidalgos’ aristocratic distance, courtesies, tricks, and airs. Somehow she knew his sharp ugly features hid no sweet and gentle heart. She guessed how much he hated them, yet when she heard his voice she felt reassured, almost lucky. She’d found her man.