Stanley Elkin - Mrs. Ted Bliss

The trouble was they had no real clout in Florida, no one to whom they could turn in a pinch. Their dad’s doctor hadn’t given him such a terrific run for his money. Diagnosed, dead, and buried in just over a year from a relatively slow-growing tumor. He was the last one they’d turn to. The little details of life were a sort of word-of-mouth thing, a piecemeal networking, but one needed one’s own turf before that kicked in, and the truth was that neither Maxine nor her brother had any. Their only contact was Mrs. Ted Bliss herself, so where did that leave them? High and dry. Nowhere. Between the devil and the deep blue sea.

Meanwhile, during Mrs. Ted Bliss’s sudden appearances in the living room, bearing gifts from her labors in the kitchen — bolts of kishka; sips of soup; little offerings of chopped liver in the making; k’naidlech; defrosted, freezer-burned challah; bites of jarred gefilte fish; ragged flags of boiled chicken skin; strings of overdone brisket — Frank and Maxine, shushing each other, making all the smiling, sudden, guilty moves of people doing ixnay and cheese it to one another, all the high signs and rushed semaphore of lookouts feigning innocence, their meter running out on them, less than nineteen hours to go now, eighteen, eleven or twelve if you counted the seven or eight they’d be asleep, nine or ten if you figured in the couple of hours it would take them to shower and dress, call a taxi to take them to the airport, eight or nine if they were caught up in rush-hour traffic. And no closer to solving their problem than when Maxine first suggested they had one.

“You know what I think?” Frank said.

“What?”

“I think we’re going to have to turn this one over to Manny.”

“Manny’s ‘base,’ Frank. You said so yourself. Nothing but a jailhouse lawyer. Self-important, a know-it-all.”

“He’s the only game in town, Maxine,” Frank said, sighing, resigned.

So that night while Dorothy was going back and forth from the dining room to the kitchen, they put it to Manny and Rosie that they thought Mrs. Bliss ought to be seeing someone with whom she might talk out her problems. Was that possible? Did either of them know of such a person? Someone reliable? He or she didn’t have to be a psychiatrist necessarily, they could be a psychologist, or even a counselor, but someone reliable. Was that possible?

“What, are you kidding me?” Manny wanted to know. “Half the people down here are nutty as fruitcakes. Rosie, am I right or am I right?”

“More like three-fifths,” said his wife.

So that’s how they left it. With Mr. Buttinsky, the eminent shyster, Manny from the building. Charging him not only with the duty of securing a reliable therapist for Mrs. Ted Bliss but with the responsibility of actually getting Dorothy to agree to see one. The children would help out of course, though all four — the Tresslers (Manny and Rosie), Frank and Maxine — agreed it would be unwise to spring their campaign on Mrs. Bliss the very night before her kids were scheduled to go back North. They had time yet. Their window of opportunity wouldn’t slam shut for a while. Tonight should be given over to the feast Mrs. Bliss had been preparing since just after her morning shower. Mrs. Bliss passed out hors d’oeuvres — herring with sour cream on Ritz crackers, chopped chicken liver on little rounds of rye, pupiks of fowl, egg-and-olive salad — and, though Dorothy didn’t drink, cocktails — Scotch and Diet Coke, bourbon and ginger ale.

Then they sat down to a heavy meal.

And then, dealer’s choice, they played cards — gin, poker, Michigan rummy. Dorothy, no matter the game, offering up the same comment over and over: “You call this a hand? This isn’t a hand, it’s a foot!”

It wasn’t until after midnight that the game broke up and Dorothy’s guests left.

“Ma,” said Maxine, forgetting she’d be gone the next day, “what are you doing? Leave it, we’ll do it in the morning.”

“Darling,” her mother said, “go to bed, you look exhausted. It’ll take me two minutes.”

“You’ve been working all day.”

“So what else have I got to do?”

Maxine and Frank fell in after their mother, clearing the dining room table of cups and saucers, emptying Manny’s ashtrays, picking up the jelly glasses, the liquor in most of them untasted, adulterate in the melted ice and soda pop. Frank sat down with the poker chips, sorting them according to their values and depositing the bright, primary colors into their caddy like coins into slots. Afterward, he scooped up the cards and tamped them into smooth decks.

Mrs. Ted Bliss scraped food from plates, then rinsed the dishes and cutlery and scrubbed down her pots and pans before placing everything in the dishwasher.

Maxine and Frank sat at their mother’s kitchen table, watching her through half-shut eyes.

“You know,” she was saying, “neither of them are big eaters, but I think Manny loved the soup. It wasn’t too salty, was it?”

“Of course not, Ma, it was delicious.”

“It wasn’t too salty?”

“It was perfect,” Frank said.

“Because nowadays, with their hearts, people are very finicky about the salt they take into their systems. You ask me, soup without salt tastes like pishechts.”

“Pishechts is salty,” Frank said.

“All in all,” Mrs. Bliss said, “I think it went very well. I think everyone had a good time. I know speaking for myself, having you here, I don’t think I’ve been so happy since your father was alive.”

She looked as if she were about to cry.

They needn’t have worried. Not two days later, Manny reported she hadn’t needed much convincing after all. It was no big deal. He’d not only arranged an appointment for her, she’d already had her first meeting with the therapist, someone, he said, with whom she was evidently very pleased.

“You know what she told me?” Manny said. “She said, ‘Manny, I think I made a very good impression.’ ”

“Oh,” said Maxine, “her therapist’s a man.”

Mrs. Ted Bliss was not without sympathy for the women’s movement. Indeed, if you’d asked, she’d probably have said she was many times more comfortable in the presence of women than in the presence of men. She had an instinctive sympathy with women and, though she’d never have admitted it, she secretly preferred her sisters to her brothers, her aunts to her uncles, her daughter to her son. (Marvin, her dead son, she loved in the abstract above all of them, though that was probably because of the wide swath of grief and loss his death had caused, all the trouble and rough, unfinished business his passing had left in its wake — his fatherless child; Ellen, her hysteric, fierce, New-Age daughter-in-law in whom Marvin’s death had loosed queer forces and a hatred of doctors so profound that when her children were young and ill, she so deprived them of medical attention that they might as well have been sick in an age not only before science but prior to the application of any remedial intervention — forest herbs and leaves and roots and barks and grasses, sacrifices, prayers and spells, and left them to cope with their diseases and fevers and pains by throwing themselves onto the mercy of their own helpless bodies.) Ted was merely an exception. And if she had loved her husband almost beyond reason it had more to do with reciprocity than with romance. Quite simply, he had saved her, had given the unschooled young woman with her immigrant’s fudged age a reason to leave Mrs. Dubow. It was as if his proposal and Dorothy’s acceptance had suddenly lifted the shy young salesgirl’s mysterious indenture and released her from the terror of her ten-year bondage. Terror not only of her employer but, even after a decade, of the customers’ shining, perfumed, and profound nudity, rich, lush, and overwhelming in the small, oppressive dressing closets, fearful of all their lavish, fecund, human ripeness, steamy and vegetal as a tropical rain forest. Dorothy was still more lady’s maid and dresser than clerk, and had become a kind of confidante to women who wouldn’t even talk to her, beyond their few curt instructions—“Button this, hold that”—let alone solicit opinions from her or offer up secrets; privy to their measurements, to the ways they examined their reflections, studying blemishes or lifting their necks and turning their heads back over their shoulders to catch glimpses of their behinds in the wide glass triptych of mirrors. These confidences struck like deals between the ladies and the bewildered, untutored maid, done and done, and signed and sealed by the unschooled young girl barely literate in English but who could by now read numbers well enough on the nickels, dimes, quarters, and fifty-cent pieces slipped to her by women, the secret of whose fragile disappointments in their female bodies she not only well enough understood but by accepting their coins was positively sworn to protect. Terrified, or, at the least, made terribly aware and uncomfortable by the awful burden of what she perceived to be a sort of collective letdown and discouragement in their even, enhanced appearance in their new gowns and dresses.