Stanley Elkin - Mrs. Ted Bliss

She made her reservations on USAir the same day she realized it was already late March and she had better get packing. There was a direct flight to Providence — you had to land in Washington — but no nonstop one, and it turned out it was the only flight going there, so she didn’t even have her choice of a departure time. Mrs. Bliss wasn’t afraid of flying so much as she was of landing in strange cities and having to sit in the plane while it changed crews or took on fuel or boarded new passengers. (Also, she knew about landings, how they were the trickiest part of the whole deal.) But what troubled her most, she thought, was what to take with her. She’d never been to Rhode Island and it was Frank’s first year there so he really wouldn’t be able to tell her. She found an atlas of the United States in the building’s small bookcase in the game room and looked up Providence. It was north of Chicago, north of Pittsburgh, north of New York, and all that stood between it and the rest of cold, icy New England and Canada was a wide but not very high Massachusetts.

Mrs. Bliss had lived in south Florida since the sixties. In another year it would be the nineties. Over that kind of time span a person’s body gets accustomed to the temperature of a particular climate. Take the person out of that climate and set him down in another and she’s like a fish out of water. The blood thins out; the heart, conditioned to operate in one kind of circumstance, has to work twice as hard just to keep up in another. There were people from up North, for example, who couldn’t take the Florida heat. Their skin burned, they ran a high fever. Except on the hottest days, and even then only when she’d been waiting for a bus in the sun or carrying heavy bags of groceries back from Winn-Dixie, Dorothy didn’t even feel it. By the same token she’d noticed that in Chicago or Pittsburgh or Cincinnati on visits, she needed her good wool coat on what everyone else was calling a beautiful, mild spring day.

But who knew from Providence? So for a good two months before she left for that city Mrs. Ted Bliss studied the weather maps and read the long columns of yesterday’s, today’s, and tomorrow’s temperature, the lows and the highs, and prophetically shook her head from side to side whenever she saw the dull gray cross-hatching of fronts and weather.

So, just in case, she packed almost everything, bringing along her heaviest woolen sweaters, scarves, even gloves. Her two big suitcases were too heavy and though she hated to impose on him she called Manny from the building and asked for his help.

“You look like you’re moving for good.”

“I never know what to take, not to take.”

“The summer Rosie died I went back North to see the kids. You don’t think I froze?”

“Here,” she said, “let me help you.”

“That’s all right, I’ll make two trips.”

She should have waited for the van and given the driver a tip a dollar. It was like seeing some once familiar face from television who popped up again after an absence of a few years. She still recognized him, but there was something pinched about his eyes, or his mouth had fallen, or his body had become too small for his frame. Something. As if he were his own older relative. She hated to see him shlep like that.

“You’re going to…?”

“Frank’s.”

For a second the name didn’t register and, even after he smiled, she felt a small stab from a not very interesting wound. Dorothy knew Manny knew Frank had not liked him much. He’d resented his mother’s dependence on the guy after Ted died. It was nothing personal. There was no funny business to it. No one, not Frank, not Dorothy, certainly not Manny, had any crazy ideas. It was a compliment, really. Frank felt bad she was all alone and a stranger had to do for her.

How, she wondered, when she was on the plane and had finished her snack, and returned the tray table to its original upright position and drifted off to sleep as the airline’s inflight shopping catalog with all its mysterious, unfathomable tsatskes, exercise equipment, short-wave radios and miniature television sets, motivational self-help videos, garment bags, and special, impregnable waterproof watches guaranteed to a depth of five thousand feet slipped into her lap, did I get to be so smart?

Though she declined when the hostess asked if she wanted to request a chair to meet her in Providence, she had treated herself to a ride in a wheelchair in the Florida airport even though she’d allowed herself plenty of time to get to the departure gate, and as she dozed it was of this she dreamed. Dreaming of unaccustomed, incredible comfort, dreaming right-of-way like a vehicle in a funeral procession, dreaming alternating unseen skycaps behind her who pushed her in the chair — Junior, Manny, Tommy Auveristas, Marvin, Frank, and Ted — as she sat luxuriously, dispensing wisdom, eating up their attention like a meal.

Despite the pleasure she thought she’d taken in her dream, she woke with a bad taste in her mouth, thinking: The same thing that gives us wisdom gives us plaque.

“How was the trip, Ma?”

“Fine.”

“Make any new friends?”

“I don’t talk so much to strangers anymore.”

“Here,” Frank said, “give me the baggage checks. I’ll have the skycap bring your bags out to the curb.”

To Frank’s surprise, his mother surrendered the claim checks without a word.

Mrs. Bliss was surprised, too. She dismissed any idea of the skycap’s trying to make off with her things.

Something else that surprised her was that in the months since she’d last seen him, Frank had become very religious. He insisted, for example, that she accompany him to synagogue. And not just for the relatively brief Friday evening service but for the long, knockdown, drag-out Saturday morning services, too. Now he and May, his wife, had never been particularly observant. Their son Donny had been bar mitzvahed but the ceremony had taken place in the nondenominational chapel of Frank’s Pittsburgh university. A rabbi from Hillel had presided. The boy had been brilliant, flawlessly whipping through his Torah portion, and doing all of them proud, but Mrs. Bliss knew that afterward he didn’t bother to strap on his phylacteries, not even during the month or so following the bar mitzvah when the flush of his Judaism might still be presumed to be on him. (His grandmother had been impressed with the grace and speed he employed in getting out his thank-you notes, though, blessed as he was with a sort of perfect pitch for gratitude. Each note was bespoke, custom cut to the precise value of the gift. He did not rhapsodize or make grand promises about how a $10 check from a distant cousin would be deposited into his college fund, but would instead fix upon a specific item — film, say; a tape he wanted; a ticket to a Pirates game.)

Both Mrs. Bliss’s sons had been bar mitzvahed, Marvin as well as Frank, but neither could be said to be very religious. When Marvin died it was Ted, not Frank, who rose before dawn every day for a year to get to the shul on time to say Kaddish for their son. When Ted died it was no one. She’d begged Frank, but he refused, a matter of principle he said. So Dorothy, who was as innocent of Hebrew as of French, undertook to say the prayers for her dead husband herself. She read the mourner’s prayers from a small, thin blue handbook the Chicago funeral parlor passed out. It was about the size of the pocket calculator Manny from the building had given her to help balance her checkbook after Ted lost his life. She read the prayers in a soft, transliterated version of the Hebrew, but came to feel she was merely going through the motions, probably doing more harm than good. If Mrs. Ted Bliss were God, Mrs. Bliss thought, she’d never be fooled by someone simply impersonating important prayers. It was useless to try to compensate for her failure by getting up earlier and earlier each morning. God would see through that one with His hands tied behind His back. If there even was a God, if He wasn’t just some courtesy people politely agreed to call on to make themselves nobler to each other than they were.