Stanley Elkin - Mrs. Ted Bliss

“Mrs. Bliss,” Holmer Toibb said.

“I’m not Mrs. Bliss.”

“You’re not?”

“You’re not a doctor, my husband is dead, I’m not a Mrs.”

“Please,” he said, “please Mrs. Bliss, all right, I’ll see you. If you want me to see you I’ll see you.”

That was their first appointment.

“Just out of curiosity, Doctor,” she said, and this time he didn’t correct her, “just out of curiosity, I don’t look healthy?”

“I’m sorry?”

“I look frail? My color is bad?”

“That’s not what I said, Mrs. Bliss.” And this time she didn’t correct him either. “I’ve no expertise in these matters. It’s something else entirely. I don’t treat people if there’s a chemical imbalance. If they’re bipolar personalities, or suffer various mental disorders. I thought you understood that.”

“I was a little worried.”

“Well,” Toibb said, “worried. If you were only worried. Worried’s a good sign.”

“Well, when you said…”

“I have to be sure,” Toibb said. “Only if they’re at loose ends, sixes and sevens. Only if they have the blues or feel genuinely sorry for themselves. Otherwise…” He left the rest of his sentence unfinished.

Mrs. Bliss wasn’t sure either of them understood a single word of what the other was saying, but she felt oddly buoyed, even a little intoxicated by the sense she had that she was adrift in difficult waters. For all the times she had gone on picnics with Ted and the children to the Point on Lake Michigan, or out to the Dunes, for all the summers they’d been to resorts in Michigan City, Indiana, with their Olympic-size pools, or even, for that matter, to the one on the roof of the Towers building in which she lived, Mrs. Bliss had never learned to swim. She had taken lessons from lifeguards in the shallow ends of a dozen pools but without the aid of a life preserver she couldn’t manage even to float. Though water excited her, its mysterious, incongruous clarity and weight, its invisible powers of erosion and incubation — all its wondrous displacements. This was a little like that. The times, for example, Mrs. Bliss, giddy, alarmed, suspended in inner tubes suspended in life jackets, hovered in the deep end weightless in water, her head and body unknown yards and feet above drowning. This conversation was a little like that. She felt at once interested and threatened, its odd cryptic quality vaguely reminiscent of the times her Maxine or her Frank or her Marvin were home on vacation trying to explain to her the deep things they had learned in their colleges.

“…like the collapse of arteries under a heart attack,” Holmer Toibb said. “The heart muscle tries to compensate by prying open collateral vessels. That’s what we’ll work on. It’s what this therapy is all about — a collateralization of interests.”

“What heart attack?” asked Mrs. Bliss, alarmed.

“Oh, no,” Toibb said, “it’s an analogy.”

“You said heart attack.”

“It was only an example.”

There was little history of heart attacks in Mrs. Bliss’s family. What generally got them was cancer, some of the slower neuropathies. (Despite her sealed ear, Mrs. Bliss’s deafness was largely due to a progressive nerve disorder of the inner ear, a sort of auditory glaucoma.) Yet it was heart disease of which she was most frightened. It was her experience that things broke down. Lightbulbs burned out, the most expensive appliances went on the fritz. Washers and dryers, ranges, refrigerators, radios, cars. No matter how carefully one obeyed the directions in the service manuals, everything came fatally flawed. How many times had she sent back improperly prepared fish in restaurants, how many times were her own roasts underdone, the soup too salty? You watered the plants, careful to give them just the right amount, not too much and not too little, moving them from window to window for the best sun, yet leaves yellowed and fell off and the plant died. Because there was poison even in a rose. So how, wondered Mrs. Bliss, could a heart not fail? A muscle, wound and set to ticking even in the womb. How should it endure its first birthday, its tenth, and twentieth? And how, even after you subtracted those two or three years that the man in Immigration tacked on, could it not be winding down after seventy or so had passed? How could a little muscle of tissue and blood, less substantial than the heavy, solid, working metal parts in a courthouse clock, that you couldn’t see, and couldn’t feel until it was already coming apart in your chest, hold up to the wear and tear of just staying alive for more than seventy years of even a happy life? It was like the veiled mystery of the invisible depths between herself and her death in the water of a swimming pool.

He wanted to see her again later that same week, he told her, and sent her home with an assignment but, so far as Dorothy could tell, without starting her in on her therapy.

“Tell me,” Holmer Toibb said the next time she came, “what name is on your mailbox?” It was the first real question he’d ever asked her, and Mrs. Bliss, who thought it was for purposes of billing, which, since this was the third or fourth time they’d seen each other and he still hadn’t started to treat her, she rather resented. In fact, she was still stung by his heart attack remark.

“Mr. and Mrs. Ted Bliss,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss.

“And Ted’s dead…how long?”

“My husband passed away three years ago,” she said primly.

“Three years? He kicked the bucket three years ago?”

“He’s gone, may he rest, three years next month.”

“And does he get much mail at this address since he cashed in his chips, may he rest?”

Mrs. Ted Bliss glared at him.

He didn’t even pretend to acknowledge her anger. “What,” Holmer Toibb said, “he ain’t dead? Come on, Dorothy, it’s been three years, it’s not natural. Well, it is, actually. Many women keep their husband’s name on the box after they’ve lost them. Even more than three years, the rest of their lives. It’s guilt and shame, not respect, and it doesn’t make them happy. You have to make an accommodation. You want to show me your list? Where’s your list? Show me your list. Did you bring it?”

The list Toibb referred to was her assignment — a list of her interests — and though she had brought it and actually been at some pains to compose it, she’d been hurt by this disrespectful man and was determined now not to let him see it. If she’d been bolder or less constrained in the presence of men, she might have ended their conference right then and, scorcher or no scorcher, gone back out in the sun to wait for her bus. But she was practical as well as vulnerable and saw no point in cutting off her nose to spite her face. Also — she knew the type — he’d probably charge for the appointment even if she broke it off before it had properly begun. Who am I fooling, Dorothy thought, how many times have I put Band-Aids on after cutting myself clipping coupons out of the papers? Climb down off your high horse before you break something.

Mrs. Bliss reddened. “I didn’t write one out,” she told him, avoiding his eyes.

“Well, what you remember then.”

Dorothy was glad he’d insisted. She hadn’t been to school since she was a young girl in Russia and, while she still remembered some of those early lessons and even today could picture the primers in which she’d first learned to read and been introduced to the mysteries of the simplest arithmetic and science and historical overviews, or seen on maps a rough version of the world’s geography, education had been the province of the males in her family, and she could still recall her guilty resentment of her younger brothers, Philip and Jake, and how they’d been permitted to take books overnight to study at home while she’d merely been allowed to collect the books of the other girls in the class and put them back on the shelves each afternoon and pass them out again the next morning. She’d never been given anything as important as an “assignment.” Even when Manny taught her to make out her own checks and fill out deposit slips, list the entries and withdrawals in her passbook, even when he’d taught her how to work her solar calculator and balance her checkbook, he’d been right there at her side to help her. He’d never given her one single assignment. It was a little like being a young girl back in Russia.