Stanley Elkin - Mrs. Ted Bliss

“I was thinking,” Ellen had said, “about maybe moving to Texas.”

“To Wilcox?”

“You talk about him as if he was a crackpot. Or as if I was. Think what you think. The man has made a tremendous difference in my life. Marvin might be alive today if…”

“Ellen!”

“Don’t say it, Ma. I know what I know. Doctors! ” she said.

All right, she was crazy. Driven nuts by her widowhood. Mrs. Bliss had accepted it before, had let her off the hook because she knew deep down, beneath the long bones of her bullying, Ellen had a good heart. But it was one thing to take that stuff off a grieving woman, another entirely to take it from a fellow senior citizen. Oy, she thought mournfully, brought up short, suddenly breathless. If the wife of her firstborn qualified for the senior citizen discount, how much longer could it be before her surviving children would be old people themselves? And what did that mean to her?

Looking back, clear-headed, she was aware that she was a woman who had not much enjoyed her long life. She had done her duty by it, earned the love and respect of her husband, her children, her family, her friends.

The truth, however, was that she had little to regret. Her mistakes, she felt, were only the general failures — lapses of taste; an inability, perhaps the simple stupidity of a failure to risk. Holding her flaws up in a kinder, much more generous light, it might only have been a lazy disinclination to take pains, like anyone else, not to fiddle with the givens of her character, never daring to color outside the lines, her life nothing if not a struggle to stay within them.

She’d done nothing wrong, she meant, only what was expected. And didn’t reproach herself for her loyalties, had no argument, for example, with her repudiation of Junior Yellin’s ancient crude advances, or thought for a moment she might have wasted her beauty. She was not in the least distressed that she’d ever been anything less than a good, unselfish, loving wife and mother. She would have despaired and been ashamed if she thought that she had, if she’d ever even consented to the soft porn of submitting to anything so mild and innocuous as becoming the recipient of a makeover on national TV. (She had appeared in court once to testify against Alcibiades Chitral, but it had taken a subpoena to get her there.)

No, she had suffered (it was too strong a word even if what she was attempting to come to terms with was the faintly misbegotten shape of her vague disapproval of her life) from a sort of generalized deafness. What did it mean not to hear the accent in which she spoke? Why had she been so stung when Chitral told her in the prison that her people (born sticks-in-the-mud, he’d called them) had a gift for sitting still? Why had she learned to write checks only after her husband had died? Or been so reluctant to exchange her lady’s maid status, helping Mrs. Dubow’s customers dress in the close quarters of those airless old dressing rooms for what would have been a salesclerk’s higher salary up in the front of the store? Why had she kowtowed to men?

Mrs. Bliss was so tired she could barely move. She remembered that when her children were kids, up past their bedtimes and wild, up past their bedtimes, their mood swings fluctuate as white water, gay, crazed, one minute hilarious, the next irritable and quarrelsome as murderers, she’d warned them against overexcitement, threatened they’d become hostage to their overtiredness, would be unable to fall asleep under the weary weight of their crankiness. It wasn’t true, she thought now. Nothing could have been more false. As soon as their heads hit the pillow, as soon as hers did…Yet all of a sudden Mrs. Ted Bliss, who had wiped up the last of the mess Yellin had made in the bathroom (she’d put it off till last), felt her blood boil up in a kind of rage, the old mercurial irritability of her kids’ quarrelsomeness, and she knew she would never calm herself enough to sleep that night and found herself already resenting the hangover she would feel all that next day. The immediate cause had been Junior Yellin’s strong, stenchy pee. It still filled her nostrils. She thought she could taste it.

The man was a pig. How do you come into a person’s home and pee on a seat cover? How do you go into your hostess’s toilet and pee all over, everywhere at once? It was more like an act of vandalism than an old man’s inability to direct his stream. And then what does the pig son of a bitch do? He actually tries to clean up his mess with her guest towels! Her guest towels. They were useless to her now. The nerve, the nerve! How could she ever set them out again? First thing in the morning she would retrieve them from the hamper and throw them away. She wouldn’t have waited, she’d have done it right then but knew it was worth her life to enter that bathroom again tonight. She could taste it, taste it.

He was her last connection to earth? Then to hell with her last connection to earth! And to hell with Ellen, too. Oh sure, she’d asked if she could help. Nice as pie in the nice-as-pie department. But gone off quick as you can say Jack Robinson the second her mother-in-law had told her out of a deference she’d have used to any guest, “Go, go, darling, I can do it myself.”

And then Mrs. Bliss remembered the phone book the woman had not had the decency to put back where she’d found it. And what were those plane tickets all about? They were supposed to be a threat? She wasn’t having a good time, Ellen? Dorothy was forcing the wrong food down her throat? What did she think this was here, a restaurant?

Ellen missed her dead husband more than Dorothy missed her dead son? Because that’s exactly what the woman thought, that’s what was at the bottom of all her goofy Employee-of-the-Month drive and nutty advice about how other people should live their lives, why she was at once so smug and defensive about Wilcox, at the bottom of why she was not only willing to give up all those free bonus trips to Cancun and London and wherever to retire and move away from Chicago just so she could be closer to her holistic holy man, the Messiah Texas Chiropractor, but even looked forward to it. And if you ask me, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, it was, at bottom, why Ellen was so tolerant and free and easy about allowing her daughter — my granddaughter — Janet, to go shpatziering all over India looking either for her soul or some swell new herbal tea.

Mrs. Bliss was not an impatient woman. Live and let live. Normally, she bent over backward. But something about Ellen…And that open-ended airline ticket planted smack in the middle of the Yellow Pages under the TWA ad like a bookmark. What, she wanted to be begged? Gai gezunterhait!

And now she was really making her sore, because she felt bad about not liking her daughter-in-law better, and wished she did. If for no other reason than that then maybe she could get some sleep and feel fresher, more rested, be better prepared, when the knockdown, drag-out show-down came between them the next morning.

Only that wasn’t the way of it at all.

After she’d dragged herself out of bed, after she’d had her bath, after she’d powdered herself, put on fresh makeup and her favorite cologne (the same kind she’d been using since the days of her great beauty), and dressed in a clean new pants suit and come into the kitchen that morning, Dorothy was met with the smell of fresh coffee. Great, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, she’s making herself an enema.

“Oh, morning there, Ma,” her daughter-in-law greeted her cheerfully. “Good, you’re up. You were sleeping so soundly I didn’t want to wake you. Beautiful day. I’ve taken the liberty of putting up a fresh pot of coffee for our breakfast. What would you like with it, you think? There’s no oranges but I found a can of Crystal Light in the cupboard. How do you want your egg? Boiled? Scrambled? Do you want one slice of toast or two?”