Stanley Elkin - Mrs. Ted Bliss

Mrs. Bliss was satisfied that whoever cleaned the place didn’t do a bad job, and if the pervasive smell of Pinesol bounced off the tile like the odors in a high school — the room smelled exactly like the lavatory in Maxine’s old high school back in Chicago — at least the toilet seats were clean, and there was plenty of toilet paper, even extra rolls if it should happen to run out, and Mrs. Bliss had the place to herself. She locked herself into a stall and quite comfortably peed. She even managed to move her bowels, and felt a certain pride in the civilized ways the government used her tax dollars. When she was done she washed up at one of the sinks and stepped outside.

Chitral was talking to an extremely well-groomed prisoner dressed in clean, just-pressed pants, a fresh white shirt, and loafers that practically sparkled. He introduced Mrs. Bliss.

“You’re Mrs. Ted Bliss? Really? I’m pleased to meet you. Al speaks of you often.”

The prisoner moved off.

“You’re sure you don’t want to grab something in the cafeteria? It’s right here,” Chitral said. “It’s a good place to talk.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Bliss, “if I’m not keeping you.”

“No, of course not,” he said, “I’m one of the prison mailmen. I’ve already done my rounds. There’s nothing on my plate until lockup, and that’s not for another seven hours.”

She selected fruit salad in Jell-O, some buttered toast, and a tall glass of iced coffee. Abashed, Chitral admitted that it was the end of the month and that he hadn’t much money left in his account and permitted her to pay for both of their snacks.

“I feel just awful about this,” he said, “but, to tell you the truth, those roses I sent set me back.”

“I never got roses.”

“What, you never…Are you certain?”

“I’m sent so many flowers I can’t keep track?”

“Not all red this time,” he explained, “a mixed assortment. Yellow roses, white, purple, blue.”

“No. No roses.”

Chitral seemed crestfallen, anguished, but when he spoke, it was in the spare, furious, explosive gasps and outrage of someone who could no longer hold his breath. “Cheats! Liars! Crooks!” Though he was not shouting, Mrs. Bliss touched the controls of her hearing aid. “Now listen to me,” he said, calming down, “were you home when the messenger delivered my note?”

“I was at home but he left it with the girl.”

“The security guard? Louise?”

“You know Louise?”

“I’ve seen her and I know her mother. She’s a very strange girl.”

Mrs. Bliss remembered how frightened she’d made her. “I asked her about the roses. She started to cry. Really,” Mrs. Bliss said, “she’s very honest. She wouldn’t steal the roses.”

“No,” Chitral said, all anger gone out of him, “you’re probably right. This place,” he said suddenly, “this place with its civility, with all its spic-and-span toilets and you-could-eat-off-the-floor amenities, with all its flying lessons, music rooms, and bridge tournaments, you forget where you are, you really do. You forget where you are and who you’re with. Of course you never got my roses. After passing through the hands of all the brokers, go-betweens, skimmers, and middlemen around this place, what’d be left? The stems and thorns? Jesus,” he moaned, “seventy-five bucks! Who’d I think I was dealing with? Some greenhouse established 1857? Everyone takes out his percentage of the roses. I’m sick about it. Just sick.”

Later, when she had time to think about it, Dorothy had to wonder (though she knew she’d never know) if he’d gone to all this trouble and shlepped her all that way just to get her to buy him lunch and take her for the hundred dollars she’d insisted on pressing on him.

In the cafeteria there, she looked at him in wonder.

“What?”

“Nothing,” Mrs. Bliss said, “it’s just that, well…”

“What?”

“You hear about ‘country clubs.’ Just today the driver who brought me said this place is a country club.”

“What’s he know about it?”

“Well, he’s a criminal, too, ” she said in his defense. “I mean he has a record, he was arrested. He had a trial, and when the jury found him guilty someone sentenced and sent him here.

“Anyway, it isn’t at all what I expected. It’s just that you hear about these places, and everyone says that we’re soft on crime and about coddling the criminals. It’s on all the talk shows. I’m pretty old,” she said. “Not that I know it all or anything, but I’ve lived long enough to know at least a thing or two, and what I’m saying is that when you hear all this stuff — soft-on-crime this and country-club that, it’s a little like the jingles I used to hear for laundry powder on the radio. After a while you don’t believe it anymore and think that someone is just trying to sell you something.”

“And?”

“And? And so naturally I’m a little farmisht, mixed up. It’s not like in the movies, it’s not like on TV. Out where I was waiting for you? Before that nice man, the guard — what was his name, Bill? — came up, I thought I heard a band playing, and when I looked around to see where the music was coming from I saw these people blowing in trumpets and banging on drums, the last of them marching and turning the corner at the other side of the building. I mean, they were prisoners, too, right?”

“They play in the prison marching band.”

“A prison marching band! Alevai! Kayn aynhoreh!”

“What?”

“I mean that’s wonderful. I mean if you got to be here for a hundred years, then I’m pleased it’s a country club and you got a prison marching band. I mean it’s exactly like you said to me, ‘At least you got a nice day to be outside.’ ”

“Outside?”

“Well, no, not outside, I don’t mean outside. In a place like this, I mean.”

“You like it.”

“In my wildest dreams I wouldn’t have imagined such a spotless toilet,” Mrs. Bliss said. “I wouldn’t have imagined Jell-O molds, or an airplane, or everybody’s nice clothes.”

“So you feel a little better about that subpoena.”

“Well, yes,” she said. “Yes, I do.” This was after she had bought his lunch but before she pressed her check for a hundred dollars into his hand when the driver came by to take her home. “It’s only a little later than the middle of the afternoon,” she said, “and you’ve already delivered your letters and have the rest of the day off. In a little while you’ll probably have even more privileges. You’ll work your way up to a trustee like the driver.”

“I’m already a trustee,” Alcibiades Chitral said. “Everybody’s a trustee. They make us trustees when we get here, right after they delouse us and give us our nice uniforms.”

“Everybody’s a trustee?”

“Every kidnapping, tax cheating, counterfeiting, serial killing mother’s son of us. Everyone starts off with his pieces intact. It’s like checkers or a game of Monopoly. You lose by attrition. So sure, everybody’s a trustee. This place. This place is some place this place. It’s the clowns with the longest time who get the wear and the tear. Sure, we’re all trustees. Only it’s not like the Towers, Mrs. Bliss. It’s a retirement community in reverse. Oh, yeah,” Chitral said bitterly. “I’m through for the day. I start at nine and knock off at two. Only, you know what my job was the year I came? I stuck in the video, started it, and rewound the tape when it was through. Your limo driver is here a couple of months, maybe. Tops, a couple of months, and he’s off the grounds more than he’s on them. Sometimes the warden sends him to Tallahassee, gives him chits for meals and a motel, a few bucks walking-around money, and has him bring back fresh rolls the next day. All the leisure’s up front, my dear Mrs. Bliss, and the cons who made that toilet of yours shine so, pull K.P. and do the lifting, are all old men who work around the clock and have been here thirty years.