Stanley Elkin - Mrs. Ted Bliss

“Ma, why are you standing on that chair?”

“I’m looking to see what I can make for supper.”

“Do you want to fall? Is that what you want? To fall and possibly break a hip?”

“Did I fall yesterday? Did I fall once all the years you weren’t around to catch me? I didn’t fall yesterday, and I didn’t fall thirty-five years before yesterday. You know what I do when a lightbulb burns out in the ceiling fixture and the maintenance momzers lay down on the job? I get up on a chair and change it myself!”

“Ma, you’re playing with fire. Get down, I’ll find what you’re looking for. You know,” she said, “if you’d tip the man a few dollars you wouldn’t have to put yourself at risk.”

“Sport,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss, “big sport.” She let herself cautiously down from the chair. “There’s nothing here, not even a can of soup. We’ll go shopping tomorrow. I’ll see what’s in the freezer.”

“Not for me,” her daughter-in-law said.

“There’s lamb chops, there’s chicken. There’s leftover pot roast. There’s some delicious soup I froze.”

“You know that stuff’s poison, don’t you?”

“What’s poison? I don’t make poison.”

“Of course not,” Ellen said. “You’re a wonderful cook. It’s just something Dr. Wilcox told me the last time I was in Houston. Freezer burn breaks down the nutrient molecules in meat and makes dangerous microbes. Fresh meat’s bad enough but leftovers will kill you.”

“You have a freezer. You freeze food.”

“I threw it out when I heard. I threw out over a hundred dollars’ worth of meat. Just like that I got rid of it.”

Mrs. Bliss glared at her crazy daughter-in-law. “Your father-in-law was a butcher. You fed your family years on free meat.”

“Yes,” she said coolly, “I know.”

“You’ve got something to say, say it.”

“I’ve got nothing to say,” Ellen said diffidently.

She needed this? She didn’t need this. She’d lived alone too long ever to have to bicker with people again. (And wasn’t that one of the chief purposes of retirement, even of leaving the places you’d lived most of your life, the people you’d lived with?) So the signs and prospects for the vacation didn’t look so hot. Indeed, one of the first things Ellen had said after she kissed Mrs. Bliss and was inside the door was that she’d left her return ticket open-ended.

“What, I’m on trial, Ellen?”

“Ma,” she’d said pointedly, “I think we both are.”

This was a Tuesday. Mrs. Bliss knew she’d have to stay over a Saturday night to qualify for the discount. This meant the shortest she’d be staying was, what, five nights. What would she do with her? Just the problem of feeding her seemed insurmountable. There was nothing in the house. Ellen wouldn’t eat anything from the freezer, and she’d already alerted Mrs. Bliss to her thing about the health restaurants. Drek! Reeds and straw!

“Milchiks?” Dorothy suggested.

“Dairy, Ma?” Ellen said. “Are you trying to kill yourself?”

“With what? A whitefish? An egg? A slice of cheese and fruit?”

That first night Ellen prepared a salad for the two of them. Mrs. Bliss was out of kale, haricot beans, eggplant, and pumpkin, so she improvised with tomato, lettuce, some cucumber, and onion. She found a box of dry, uncooked oatmeal and sprinkled a liberal handful over both their plates.

Mrs. Bliss tried, but could barely get down a single mouthful. She was wiping bits of oatmeal from the corners of her lips with a paper napkin while Ellen studied her narrowly.

“Ma?”

“What?”

“I’m not trying to upset you,” she said.

Instantly, Mrs. Ted Bliss was overcome by a sense of shame and guilt. She crumpled the napkin and laid it in her lap.

“It’s all right,” Dorothy said. “I should have remembered about your special dietary needs and laid in what you like. But you know, sweetheart, it’s harder than keeping kosher shopping for somebody so frum about what she eats. Tomorrow,” she promised, “tomorrow we’ll go shopping. First thing in the morning, before it gets hot.”

“Fine, Ma, whatever,” her daughter-in-law said, “but you know,” she said, “I really don’t mean to upset you, I don’t. Everyone’s entitled to live their life as they please. That goes without saying, but what I’m suggesting is for your own good. May I ask you something personal, Ma?”

Something personal? She wanted to ask her something personal? An eighty-two-year-old widow? This would be good, this would be very, very good. Mrs. Bliss’s guilt disappeared as if it had never existed.

“Sure,” she said, “as personal as you please. Think up your most personal question and ask away. Go ahead, shoot.”

“Have you ever had a high colonic rice enema?”

“A what?”

“Coffee beans, then. Wilcox thinks highly of coffee bean enemas, too.”

“Ahh, Wilcox. ”

“I could give you one. Wilcox showed me, I know what I’m doing.”

Wonderful, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss. Now she knew what they could do together while her daughter-in-law was there waiting out her stay-over-Saturday discount. They could give each other enemas. First Ellen could give her a coffee bean enema, then they’d trade off and Dorothy could give her daughter-in-law a lovely rice enema. Coffee beans, rice. It was six of one, half a dozen of the other. Tomorrow, tomorrow they would lay in provisions.

“No enemas,” Mrs. Bliss said.

“Ma, I see how you eat. I don’t think you know how they can clean out your system.”

“No enemas. Enemas are out, no enemas.”

“All right, all right,” Ellen said, “don’t get so excited. It’s been a long day. I had to eat that airplane food. Would you object very much if I took one? I brought my own enema bag of course. There’s a box of wild rice in my suitcase.”

It was at least half a minute before Mrs. Bliss could answer. “Use the guest bathroom,” she pronounced austerely. “There’s two cans of deodorant spray in the linen cabinet. One is Mint, the other is Floral Bouquet. Please use the mint before you give yourself the enema and the floral bouquet afterward. Yeah, it’s been a long day for me, too. When I finish the dishes I think I’ll go to bed.”

“Ma, sit still. I’ll do the dishes.”

“No, Ellen,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss, “I really wish you wouldn’t.”

So she was crazy, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss in bed that night. What difference did it make, did it make, really? She had been a good wife to her son. Yes, and an excellent mother when you considered that she’d raised her children practically by herself. Her looniness was only a kind of grief, finally, and Mrs. Bliss, whose guilt had passed, once again started to feel her shame. She began to cry so softly that with her hearing aid out she was aware she wept only when the tears wet her cheeks.

They shopped so efficiently the next morning it took just over half the time it usually did for Mrs. Bliss to do her marketing. Dorothy pushed the cart while Ellen went down the aisles selecting various unfamiliarly shaped cans of strange foodstuffs — raw, unprocessed organics, pulps of queer fruits, minced game, oddball packets of herbs, Oriental chowders. They would have been through in even less time if Ellen hadn’t stopped to read all the labels, occasionally pausing before familiar, popular brands, and reading those labels, too, clucking her tongue in contempt at the high sodium and fat levels listed on them. In the produce section she fairly squealed in approval and surprise whenever she came across the exotic vegetables and fruits of distant third-world countries.

“At least it won’t take us long at the checkout,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss.