Stanley Elkin - Mrs. Ted Bliss

Though she had a secret fear that she lived with constantly: Suppose one of them should die before their next mitzvah? How could she make it up to them for all the birthdays, anniversaries, and whatnot they would never live to enjoy? How could she even calculate what she owed them? And it occurred to Dorothy that that’s what wills were for, the very idea of inheritance — not to leave your money so that it could be divided up after you died, or pay grief bribes to the survivors. No, not at all. It was to participate, after you died, in their celebrations, to live on in their accomplishments and special occasions. Maybe that was what death and the afterlife were all about. Didn’t a person make a list of the presents they received, of who sent this and who sent that, just so they could write a thank-you note afterward? People never threw those lists away, they kept them always. Dorothy did. To this day she could tell you, just from referring to her papers, who had given them a particular tablecloth or bedspread or pair of candlesticks, whatever, when they were married. Maybe all immortality came down to was the lists you got put down on when you gave away a present.

But was this a reason to go to Camerando? To put together in her old old age enough cash to go on some last big spending spree so that, over and above what she provided for them in her will, she could make one last grand gesture presenting them, not just her children, their husbands, their wives, their children, their husbands, their wives, and so on and so forth, but the entire family, her sisters and brothers, Ted’s, their loved ones, all that extended mishpocheh, with some unlooked for, even uncalled for, auf tzuluchan gift. On the occasion of what? Celebrating what? Why, there wouldn’t even be a list they could mark it down on! How, she wondered, would she even fix on a figure what to send? If she gave Frank, say, x number of dollars, it wouldn’t be hard to fix on the sum that would be proper to give to Maxine, but after that it got trickier. After a certain point love and blood didn’t come in easily discernible fractions, and after another it couldn’t be understood not even if you had all the decimal places in the world to work with!

So her children, who were pretty well fixed and already had enough money, were out, and the grandkids who were all of them making their way, even poor Barry (but she wouldn’t play favorites), were.

This was the problem with holding what Mrs. Bliss didn’t even know was called a “marker,” though she well enough understood that someone like Camerando would expect her to call it in. It wasn’t transferable, and it wasn’t negotiable. It was like holding onto frequent flier miles when you couldn’t make up your mind where to go and weren’t sure if you were up to the trip even if you had a destination.

She obsessed on it, and almost felt like going back to Toibb, her recreational therapeusisist, to see what she should do. Maybe she could spend Camerando’s money on some new interests. Though unless someone like Toibb told her what that might be, she had no new interests. The hard thing, the really rock-bottom tragic thing, was she had no old interests either. She supposed she was in her early seventies now, give or take those two or three irrecoverable, unretrievable years of Mrs. Bliss’s life her mother had so shamelessly given up to the immigration official. Years, she now understood, she might have used to better advantage, planting incipient interests, resources she could, in this twilight, or dusk, or full dark night of her life, have drawn upon now — learned to drive, perhaps, or read better books so she could use a library card, or gotten more out of the papers, reading the editorials even, the columns…anything, really, kept a diary, or written her thoughts down in letters.

She didn’t get such a kick out of cards anymore, and nothing, not the cruises (though she was scheduled to go on one next month and had already paid her nonrefundable deposit), not food, not the Saturday night entertainments in the game room, not movies, not television, was of much interest anymore.

The truth of it — she should bite her tongue — was that even her family, although it would kill them to hear it, no longer interested her so much. As, at bottom, though it didn’t bother her, didn’t cause her to turn a hair, or lose a moment’s sleep over it, she was sure she no longer was of much interest to them either.

Maybe this was why the whole family — her, Frank, Maxine, even the kids, Barry, James, Donald, Judy — were practically burning up the long distance these days, keeping in touch, wig-wagging their desperate messages of furious reassurance, that all was well, the weather fine — that they loved one another and couldn’t wait till the next time they would be together.

She was too old to feel guilty, and supposed herself too near death to count the pennies.

Once or twice she genuinely contemplated suicide. What stayed her hand was the fact that she wasn’t much interested in death either.

And another time, because she was practically going batty from boredom, she went to an unfamiliar restaurant and ate a pork chop. She rather liked the flavor but didn’t think, as it had taken her seventy-four years (give or take) to eat the first, that she would ever order another.

On still another occasion she forced herself to ride the bus not only into downtown Miami (which she hadn’t seen since the night Alcibiades Chitral bought Ted’s car), but on through the Cuban and even black neighborhoods. She didn’t get off, not even when it came to the end of the line. She paid the driver for her return fare and transferred at the big new mall downtown, where she’d never been and did not explore now, and waited for the bus that would take her back to the Towers.

It was a week after her marathon bus ride (she hadn’t peed the whole time she’d been on her expedition, and had had to hold it in all day, not such a big deal because even on long car trips, no matter how Ted might laugh and tease her, she couldn’t bring herself to go, or do anything more than make a show of going into the Ladies, not even at the cleanest rest stops or the biggest, most modem, up-to-date Shell stations; what could she do, she couldn’t help it, she couldn’t force herself to squat over a strange toilet) when Mrs. Ted Bliss found herself by the little telephone table in a corner of her living/dining room area dialing her daughter in Cincinnati. You can imagine her surprise when a woman not Maxine picked up at the other end and said she’d reached the offices of the Greater Miami Recreational Therapeusis Research and Consultants. She hadn’t called the number in years. How, she wondered, had she still remembered it?

“Greater Miami Recreational Therapeusis Research and Consultants,” the woman said. “How may I help you?”

“Maxine?” Mrs. Bliss said.

“I think you have the wrong number,” the woman said.

“Oh, I know,” said Mrs. Bliss. “I can’t understand it.”

“You probably just made a mistake dialing.”

“No,” said Mrs. Bliss. “ I was his patient a few years ago. He didn’t have such a big operation back then.”

“Who?”

“Dr. Toibb. He didn’t have such a big operation. Consultants, secretaries to answer the phones, maybe nurses on call. You’re still on Lincoln Road?”

“Yes.”

What a piece of work is the mind, thought Mrs. Bliss. How many years had it been? Four, five? This was the trouble living in a climate where there weren’t any seasons. You were without landmarks to mark the time — record snowfalls, ice storms, heat waves. Her landmarks were all written down in her little black date book, so she never missed anyone she sent a birthday or anniversary card. (She sent out, she supposed, more than a hundred a year. Nieces and nephews she sent, grandnieces, grandnephews, cousins of all degrees she sent, mishpocheh. And though she made a check by the names of those who didn’t send her back, she wasn’t small-minded, the next year she sent a card, anyway. In Mrs. Bliss’s mind, who couldn’t read Hebrew, or, now she was a widow, go often to services, it was a way of keeping up her Judaism, the collective mazel and yontif, all the high holiday greetings of celebratory Jewish life.) But to hold some since-several-years used number in her head without any black book, this was something extraordinary. It wasn’t, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, accidental. It was bashert, maybe even psychiatric. And hadn’t she, it couldn’t be more than a couple of months ago, been thinking of Toibb?