Stanley Elkin - Mrs. Ted Bliss

Living there all year round was something else altogether. You made a different accommodation, an accommodation, Dorothy understood, which was no accommodation at all but more like surrender, as one’s life in an inner city, say, would be like surrender, a life that couldn’t be budgeted, lived around the times the hooligans were not in the streets, but had to be plunged into daily and at all hours, inescapable as air. Unless you turned yourself into a kind of invalid.

As I have, I have, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, astonished at herself, to realize what she was doing even as she permitted herself to be helped into Junior Yellin’s borrowed dune buggy. This was one of those machines that tended to tip over. She had seen a story about them on “60 Minutes,” how their odd centers of gravity made them dangerous to ride in. With their twin roll bars the machine looked vaguely like a stripped Conestoga. Dorothy at eighty-two and Junior in his late seventies had, between them, to be at least one hundred sixty years old. To anyone who saw them riding in such a young person’s toy they would seem ridiculous.

Yet it was neither her queer appearance (dressed “like a fucking beekeeper”), their ridiculousness, nor the clear and present danger the dune buggy represented that terrified Mrs. Bliss; it was its topless nakedness, its awful exposure to the sun.

She didn’t fear cancer, and after all these years felt herself immune to the danger of a bad burn. It was just that she knew (as a lifetime ago her parents had been anxious at the proximity of Cossacks) that so close to the sun, taking its direct hits as one might take “incoming” in a fierce battle in war, she was in the presence of the enemy. That she was willing to go on with their ludicrous expedition was an indication of just how far she had come, strayed, from her life.

She’d thought there’d be someplace they could go to try out their equipment, imagining something like a driving range or the big empty parking lots and lightly traveled roads where Ted had taken the children when he taught them to drive. Yellin had different ideas and as soon as he could pointed the big clumsy dune buggy toward a long stretch of occupied beach where bathers lay about on blankets taking the sun. (She did not worry about them or project any of her own private fears onto their situations. Indeed, had this actually occurred to her, it would have amounted to an invasion of their privacy, crazy, like someone frightened of elevators warning people away from them in department stores.) It may have been the open car in combination with the vast sandy beach, all that fearful light burning up the sky. Whatever it was, Mrs. Bliss was very nervous, almost carsick.

“Slow down, slow down,” she pleaded.

“I’m not even going twenty miles an hour.”

“There’s children,” she said, “there’s people on blankets.”

“Relax. You don’t think I see them?”

“You’re knocking my kishkas.”

“We’re almost there.”

“Where?”

“I’m looking for a spot. Don’t you think I know what I’m doing?”

If he were looking for a spot, Mrs. Bliss didn’t know how he’d ever find it. God knows where they were. All she could see on her right was open ocean, on her left a bright but bland skyline of beachfront high rises and motels. They bumped along in a sickening no-man’s-land of sand and sun and sky. She didn’t know whether they were still in Miami Beach, or even in Dade County. They might have been in Fort Lauderdale or any, to Dorothy, of the nameless suburbs that had risen beside the coast like a kind of urbanized landfill.

She wished he would stop the car and then, quite suddenly, he did.

“We’re there?”

“Didn’t I tell you?”

He was bullshitting her, but he’d stopped driving and she forgave him. She climbed down out of the dune buggy and immediately felt less exposed to the sun, her stomach still queasy because they were still squarely on the beach in what was not quite yet the middle of the day.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Yellin said. “You’re thinking how is this spot different from any other spot on the beach.”

“I am thinking that,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss.

“It’s got the proper ratio of sunbathers to swimmers. It doesn’t seem to be all played out, worked over by other metal detectives. I like the demographics.”

“The demographics,” Mrs. Bliss said.

“Hell yes. Superb demographics. Terrific demographics. Wonderful distribution of yuppies, the recently retired, and old folks. White people, coloreds.”

“Please,” she said.

“You think I’m depending on just that two-hundred-dollar gadget I sprang for? Don’t underestimate me, Dorothy. In this business you got to have a dowser’s heart. Let’s set up.”

Dorothy read to him from the manual as Junior poured out parts from the box holding her metal detector onto a sheet and began to assemble it. He was wonderfully efficient and often went on to the next step while Mrs. Bliss, trying to absorb what she had just read, fell behind. If she lived another eighty-two years, she thought dispiritedly, she’d never get the hang of mechanics. Always she’d believed this was some man/woman thing, but Mrs. Bliss was aware that fresh returns were still coming in from the feminists and the fact was she was more than a little annoyed with herself.

Junior fit the batteries into Mrs. Bliss’s metal detector and pronounced it ready to go. First, though, he would have to put his own together. At more than twice the price of Mrs. Bliss’s, Yellin’s metal detector seemed at least three times more complicated, and now when she read the directions to him he frequently stopped her and asked her to repeat what she’d read. At other times he grabbed the manual out of her hands, checking to study it himself or maybe to see if she’d read it correctly. Mrs. Bliss, already upset by the brightness of the sun, began to transfer some of the anger she’d been feeling about herself onto Junior. The metal detectors should have been assembled before they’d left. Even if he didn’t do it at home he’d have had plenty of time while she was in her condo changing her clothes. At least to get started. Whose idea was this? It wasn’t hers. He should have taken the responsibility. What did she think she was doing, anyway? Yellin was Ted’s buddy, not hers.

“All right,” he said at last, “that’s it. Let’s rock and roll.”

Mrs. Bliss, sick to her stomach, thought he sounded like a fool.

She was, kayn aynhoreh, a healthy woman. Indeed, the last time she remembered feeling nearly so ill had been the hot day she’d left Holmer Toibb’s office and was spotted by Hector Camerando as she waited for her bus and he’d offered her the ride. She’d been breathless, disoriented. That had been about treasure, too. Her conviction that they would round a corner and come upon Ted’s Buick LeSabre, reborn, gleaming at the curb as the day he must have first seen it in the showroom. When she saw it was Camerando’s Fleetwood Cadillac she couldn’t catch her breath and started to cry. She felt faint and Camerando had drowned her in air-conditioning. He advised, she recalled, not to let things slide, to see a doctor.

Well, she was with one now, wasn’t she? And knew he would fail her. As all doctors ultimately failed all patients. As Toibb before him, as Greener Hertsheim before Toibb, all the way back to the experimental research scientific ones at Billings, and Rabbi Beinfeld, and good old Dr. Myers before all of them. Nobody, she thought, could help anyone really. It was nobody’s fault. Help just wasn’t in the cards. The cards? The deck!

What she did now, she saw, was for herself. Not for auld lang syne, or Ted, or companionship in her old age, and not, finally, because Junior Yellin might wither and die if she rebuffed his attentions and kiddy enthusiasms, but out of her own needs, her own kiddy enthusiasms that until a few moments ago she still believed — in spite of the presence of the shadeless, roofless ruthlessness of the overbearing sun and the distant twitch of a returning interest in interest (fresh interests lay at the heart of recreational therapeusis; she’d known that going in), in spite, too, of her dissipate concentration over the incomprehensible chop suey of the owner’s manual, and her patient rereadings of the most pertinent sections — applied and that she felt, up to that raw moment when Yellin slapped her hands away and pulled, ripped, the owner’s manual from them. As if he were denouncing her, as if he were saying, “ This is the owner’s manual, I am its owner! ”