Stanley Elkin: Mrs. Ted Bliss

She organized her thoughts. She didn’t know how to write checks. Even if she did she wouldn’t know how to keep her accounts. She’d gone to business almost ten years but not since she was a girl, and anyway, back then they gave you wages in a pay envelope that she turned over to her mother. Her husband did everything; she never had to lift a finger. She knew for a fact it was in Ted’s name, did she really owe two hundred dollars on the car?

She couldn’t help it, she was a baleboosteh. She wasn’t so much house proud as efficient. It gave her great satisfaction to know where everything was. There was so much in even the simplest household. It was really astonishing how much there was. Every day the newspaper came, announcements of upcoming events in the building, in the Towers complex. Every day the mail came. (It still came for Ted, and though it broke her heart to read letters from people who hadn’t yet gotten the news, and though she never answered them because to write that he had died to someone who hadn’t heard about it would be like making him just a little more dead than he already was, she never threw any of her husband’s mail away.) She knew which letters of her own to keep (just as she knew what coupons to cut out or which articles to clip from the paper to send her children and grandchildren) and which to throw away.

So as soon as she needed to find the card Alcibiades Chitral had left with her — it was a business card and, because a man had given it to her, she had been certain it was important — she knew where she had put it.

It was in with a stack of current and already expired warranties, instruction manuals, and lists of potentially useful phone numbers and addresses. She called him that evening.

“Are you having your dinner,” she said, “did I take you away from your programs?”

There was a pause at the other end of the connection, and it crossed her mind that though she’d given her name and broadly broached the reason for her call — Ted had died two months ago, it had been maybe seven weeks since Chitral had come to her door — he might not remember her, or she might have hurt his feelings — she’d almost closed the door in his face — and though she’d tried to smile he must have seen how upset she was. Hadn’t she been an immigrant herself one time? She’d felt slights, plenty of them, other people’s warinesses. “It can wait, it can wait,” she said. “Or maybe you changed your mind.”

“No, no,” Alcibiades said suddenly. “Look,” he said, “I have an appointment. I have to go to this meeting. I should be back in two, two and a half hours. If you’re up I could drop by then.”

Dorothy felt herself flush. In two and a half hours it would be about ten o’clock. All of a sudden, just like that, implications of Ted’s death that hadn’t even occurred to her, occurred to her. Who goes to sleep at ten o’clock? Old lonely people. Soured ones. If her husband were alive they’d still be watching television. Or playing cards with neighbors. Or listen, even if he’d just died — well, he had just died, and she was still sitting shivah — the gang would still be there, no one would even be putting on coffee yet. What could happen? She needed to get rid of Ted’s car before she paid the personal property, didn’t she? What could happen? Even only just thinking in these directions was a sin. Blushing over a telephone to a total stranger was an insult to Ted’s memory.

“I still don’t sleep so good,” she told him vaguely. “Two hours don’t bother me.”

She drew a third bath. She dried and powdered herself. She put on the black dress she had worn for the funeral.

This wasn’t funny business. She was too old for funny business. Her funny business days were gone forever. If she was nervous, if she blushed over telephones, if she bathed and powdered and put on fresh makeup, if it suddenly occurred that there were ramifications, if she straightened the chairs and made the lights and plumped the cushions, if she defrosted cake and set out fruit, if she was embarrassed or felt the least bit uncomfortable about her husband, dead two months though it seemed either forever or the day before yesterday (and she couldn’t remember how his voice sounded), it didn’t have the first thing to do with funny business.

She had no education to speak of and her only experience with the world had to do with her family. She had been a salesgirl in a ladies dress shop for maybe ten years more than forty years ago. (For most of those ten not even a salesgirl, more like a lady’s maid. She fetched dresses to the changing rooms in the back of the shop, handed them in to the customers, or helped while they tried them on.) She had dealt only with women, seen them in their bodies’ infinite circumstances, shy, pressed in the crowded quarters of the curtained-off dressing room for intimate opinions. She took care of the family. Ted took care of her. So if she fidgeted now, if she fussed over the fruit and furniture, it was, all over again, the way she’d been when Mrs. Dubow of whom she was terrified (the first woman in Illinois to pay her husband alimony), had pulled her from her duties in the close quarters and sent her out front to deal with the public. Where she was no longer required to give up her reluctant opinions but had actually to force them on others. Whether she held them or not. Volunteering styles (who knew nothing of style), stumping for fashions (or of fashion either), who was not even a good cook, merely one who could be depended upon to get it on the table on time. A baleboosteh manqué who spent twice the time she should have needed to put her condominium in order. Who was uncomfortable dealing with those women in the dress shop some forty-odd years ago let alone a man she was staying up to receive in her home in order to sell him a car.

Dorothy had given up on him and was already turning off lights when Security buzzed from downstairs.

He was almost an hour late. He apologized for having inconvenienced her but he’d been inconvenienced himself. The start of his meeting had been delayed while they waited for stragglers in a hospitality suite at the Hotel Intercontinental. It was inexcusable for people to behave like that, inexcusable, and he hoped Madam would forgive him. And, startling her, he presented her with a bouquet of flowers, which he produced from behind his back. “Oh,” Dorothy said, jumping back, “oh.” Then, realizing how this could have given offense, she tried to regain some composure. “They’re wrapped,” she said.

“Wrapped?” Alcibiades Chitral said.

“In that paper. Like florists use. Like my children send me for Mother’s Day.”

“Yes?”

Then, embarrassed, Dorothy understood that they were not a centerpiece he’d removed from the table in the hotel. “Jewish people,” she explained gently, “Jewish people don’t send flowers to a person if a person dies.”

“Oh,” Alcibiades said, “they don’t?”

“Sometimes they give a few dollars to a person’s charity in honor of the person,” she said.

“I see,” Alcibiades said. “What charity in particular?”

“The cancer fund,” Dorothy said meekly and wiped her eyes.

“Well, that’s a good idea,” he said. “I’ll write a check. But these are for you,” he said. “To make up for my being so late.”

She didn’t know what to say. Of course she had to accept them. If for nothing else then for going to the trouble. What florist was open this time of night? Maybe it was true what people said about the South Americans, not that they had money to burn but that they put it on their backs — the men’s gorgeous bespoke suits, the fantastic glitter of their wives’ gowns and dresses, the fabulous shoes with their sky-high heels they bought at a hundred dollars an inch, their jewelry and diamond watches that any person in their right mind would keep in a locked-up safe-deposit box and not wear on their wrist where a strap could break or a clasp come undone, or any bag boy in a supermarket or stranger on the street could knock you down and hit you over the head for.