Stanley Elkin - Mrs. Ted Bliss

Oy, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss. Oy and oy. Oy, oy, a thousand times oy!

How come then, she thought, that such acceptance and coming to terms was so disquieting, so unsettling when everything the complete baleboosteh could hope for was to have all her decks cleared, squared away, every last hospital corner pulled taut and smooth, as if what life had been all about was preparation for some final white-glove inspection? What, she didn’t think in terms of a life in the barracks? But, surely, that’s what so much of hers had been all about. And now it was as if she’d been presented with a statement, some red-tape thing, complicated, governmental, bureaucratic, vaguely whiplashed through interagency (Part A’s uncertain relationship with Part B), like Ted’s Medicare bills almost a year after he died — THIS IS NOT A BILL, THIS IS NOT A BILL, THIS IS NOT A BILL — until one day one arrived inexplicably stamped Paid in Full.

So that if they had pressed her she could almost have told them, “Girls, they tell you time heals all things? Time heals nothing. What, you think you’re unhappy now? You think because your husband is gone this is the worst, the storm that breaks the camel’s back, water in the basement and climbing the stairs, that it’s up over the lip of the threshold and coming in under the door in the hall, that it’s destroyed the linoleum and already lapping the wall-to-wall, licking high up the legs of the dining room chairs, the mahogany sideboard and credenza, that it’s covered the tiles, and slipping down the side of the tub like dirty bathwater, is above the box spring and even with the mattress, is inside the chest of drawers with your things like stockings and underwear left to soak overnight in the bathroom basin.

“Or that the final slap in the face is when the insurance claim comes back marked ‘Sorry, not covered, act of God’?

“You think?

“You think so?

“Or from all that pile-on and pile-on of tsuris, the kids’ bad grades and the death of friends, your own decline, the failure of beauty, of memory, incontinence, shortness of breath, the inability not just to climb steps but to cross the room without pain?

“And that that’s the worst that can happen, one by one, or served up like so many courses at a dinner? Or that that is?

“You think, you think so? Well, all I can say is wait till next year! Because didn’t I already tell you you ain’t seen nothing yet? No, no, no, girls, there’s no such thing as a rock bottom to bottom!”

Though to tell the truth, she wouldn’t have told them a word. They couldn’t have dragged it out of her.

Meanwhile, there was still something on Mrs. Ted Bliss’s plate. Something left over that, though she knew, or thought she knew, to leave well enough alone, she continued to worry like a loose tooth.

It was what that awful woman had said, the secretary, or nurse, or maybe consultant herself, whatever she was who’d answered the phone when she rang Maxine and her head had accidentally dialed the wrong number and put her through to the Greater Miami Recreational Whoosis where Toibb had once had his practice — that he’d been murdered in some high, hush-hush covered-up crime and, more ominously yet, that they still held her records, whatever notes Toibb had written down when she’d spoken to him. She remembered his surprise (remembered it the very second the women mentioned the killing) when he found out she’d known Tommy Auveristas—“Tommy Overeasy” Dr. Toibb had called him — as if he’d discovered both shared some incredibly exotic, important secret that had raised her in his eyes to some new visibility; and recalled now, too, Hector Camerando’s sudden arousal to the bait, that at the time she hadn’t yet known was bait, when she’d asked him if he knew Auveristas, and how the pay dirt she thought she’d hit had suddenly exploded into his audacious assertions, like a stream of wild oaths, of the power and influence he held in south Florida, and that, moments later, had declined into all those favors and markers he’d thrust into her hands and which, for years, he practically begged her to call in, and which, for years, she just couldn’t bring herself to do, seeing it now, suddenly, as out of the blue as Overeasy’s name (that’s how Mrs. Bliss thought of him now, too) had years before let loose all that skyfull of pay dirt like a gusher of crude, uncapped connection, and which only now she had begun to sort out.

Mrs. Bliss, God bless her, was an old woman now. For a Jew her age she’d been spared a lot. She hadn’t lost anyone close in the Holocaust. Indeed, only very, very distant relatives of relatives, people whose names were vaguely known to her but whom she had never met. It was outrageous that anyone should have gone into Hitler’s ovens, of course, but that she and her family had been spared was, for Dorothy, one of the few proofs she had that there was a God. On the other hand, fair was fair, He didn’t exactly have an exemplary character. Hadn’t He cooked poor Marvin’s goose for him? Didn’t He run His own damn ovens? Hotter than Hitler’s! Leaving a mother’s heart to boil over when He laid His dirty hands on her child. Marvin was lying next to Ted in that old cold, queer Chicago cemetery this very minute. Every time she thought of that it pushed a chill through Dorothy’s system even in the Florida shvitz. Why, it was like a ghost story. Marvin had been in the ground even longer than Ted. In a way, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, that made him not only her husband’s senior but her own as well, and had transformed the boy into a sort of ancestor, a death veteran. And that was another proof there was a God. Such magic, such fooling around in the supernatural.

Still, knock wood, she had to admit that for someone who was almost a very old lady a lot had been spared her. A lot. Not that she was counting her blessings. What, are you kidding? What blessings? All right, the kids, even with their little handful of troubles, and she had what to eat, shelter, places to go, reasonably good health, kayn aynhoreh, even enough money so she didn’t really want for anything, but most people had those things. Except maybe for the good health part, almost everyone in the Towers did.

So why, after she had made that accidental call, did she feel so suddenly fearful and bereft? Why had she had to run to the toilet with the same sort of nervous diarrhea she hadn’t experienced since she had worked in the dress shop for Mrs. Dubow when she was a girl? All right, Toibb, a man she actually knew, had been murdered. But so ill at ease? Come on, she’d lost closer every year, and now, at this time of life, every few months practically. In Chicago, the gang was falling by the wayside all over the place, losing their battles to cancer, to heart attacks, to all the dread whatnot of old age. (Even not so old, Irving’s boy, Jerry, and Golda’s kid, Louis, both dead of AIDS, and though nobody said it out loud, Betty, her distant forty-year-old third- or fourth-remove old maid cousin was thought to be HIV positive.) “I’m telling you,” her sister Etta had said when Dorothy had gone north for their sister Rose’s funeral last year, “it’s getting to be like there was a war.” It was at that funeral, so poorly attended — their death-thinned gang — that Mrs. Bliss decided that enough was enough, and that next time she wouldn’t be in such a hurry to get on an airplane and fly to Chicago to see someone else she loved shoveled into the ground, particularly if such a sad occasion should take place in winter, or summer either for that matter. In spring, maybe. Indian summer. But she’d been living in Florida too long now. She couldn’t take cold weather, or wear herself out in hot, shlepping so many miles, with suitcases, with the formal, constrictive clothing you were expected to wear on such occasions. (People who didn’t live there didn’t understand. They thought you were putting on airs, pretending to make out you were better than other people, finer, but it was a scientific fact that once your system got accustomed to the Miami climate it wasn’t so easy to go back to a harsher one. And anyway, even at her sister Rose’s funeral, so poorly attended, not everyone was dead. Believe me, plenty stayed away just from being fed up with death. No love was lost between Dorothy and Golda. No matter how hard Ted pooh-poohed the idea, Mrs. Bliss was convinced her brother-in-law’s wife cheated at cards. (She’d caught her at it.) Yet, considering she was already in mourning for the fairy, how could she blame Golda for taking a rain check at Rose’s funeral? She didn’t need her as a reference of course, but Golda’s example had been good experience for Dorothy. Besides, to whom was she answerable these days? Her children and grandchildren. If, God forbid, her brothers should die, her surviving sister, but let’s not kid anybody here, she would certainly be taking the weather into account. Beyond the tight half dozen of her two children and four grandchildren there were no guarantees. None. She hadn’t played favorites, she’d been a loyal family member, but she was depleted and you drew the line somewhere or you died. Then what would happen to that tight dozen? So, though she thought she’d never live to see it, she wrote off Ted’s side of the family completely, she wrote off most of her own right down to her great-grandchildren. To tell you the truth, she thought that if anything maybe she was a little late in coming around to this thinking. I mean, just look how poorly attended Rose’s funeral had been.