Stanley Elkin - Mrs. Ted Bliss

It occurred to Mrs. Bliss actually to rub her eyes, to pinch herself.

“Say, Ma,” Ellen went on, “do you still have that metal detector you were telling me about? If you don’t plan to use it anymore, do you think I could buy it off you?

“You never told me Milt’s a recreational therapeusisist.”

“Oh, sure,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss, “one of the biggest men in south Florida.”

“Really? One of the biggest?”

“I’m here to tell you.”

“He never told me that, ” Ellen said. “When he called this morning…”

“Junior? Junior Yellin called?”

“You were sleeping,” Ellen said. “He told me not to wake you.”

“What did he want?”

“Well,” she said, “I think he called to apologize. He’s a reformed drunk, you know, and got a little high and wasn’t able to handle it. Anyway, he’s terribly embarrassed about what he did in the bathroom. He asked me to tell you.”

Dorothy nodded. There was a slightly dismissive expression on her face, as if it didn’t matter, as polite as if she were personally taking the apology. Ellen looked relieved, grateful, as though she were Yellin’s envoy or held his personal power of attorney. Mrs. Bliss watched as her daughter-in-law lay out two place settings. She made no move or offer to help, and was vaguely dismayed to realize that, except for restaurants and airplanes and those infrequent occasions when she was an invited dinner guest, this was one of the first times in years (even at Frank’s seder in Providence she had carried food to the table and helped pass it around) that she was being served. She had to make a conscious effort to keep herself from crying.

Meanwhile, Ellen, chirpy and crisp as a housewife in a television commercial, filled both their glasses with Crystal Light (the can could have been two or three years old by now; she kept it in case some child should show up), and spooned the meat from two perfectly boiled eggs into small dessert bowls. She buttered three slices of toast, gave one to Dorothy, kept two for herself, and sat down.

“So,” Ellen said, “do you or don’t you, will you or won’t you?”

“Do I don’t I, will I won’t I what?”

“Still have the metal detector? Will you sell it to me?”

“You want to buy my metal detector? Junior Yellin talked you into this?”

“He’s actually a very interesting man. Not at all like what I remembered.”

“Yeah,” Mrs. Bliss said, “very interesting.” Don’t sell yourself short, she thought, you’re pretty interesting yourself.

“He has this theory about AIDS,” Ellen said.

“Oh?”

“He believes it can be cured if the patient has a hobby that takes his mind off his troubles.”

Mrs. Bliss stared at the woman.

“Of course it has to be caught early enough, while it’s still in the early HIV-positive stage. Once it’s full blown it won’t always work.”

“The man’s close to eighty,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss, and thought she saw her daughter-in-law’s face flush as Ellen dipped a corner of her buttered toast into the bowl and allowed it to troll amid the loose yellow islands of her soft-boiled eggs.

“Oh, Ma,” Ellen said.

Mrs. Bliss knew what she knew. She remembered that airline ticket and was glad she hadn’t permitted herself to complete her thought. That he was old enough to be her father. Well, almost old enough.

“I’m no spring chicken myself, you know,” Ellen said, and provided Mrs. Bliss with an insight into how she had been able to sell all of those shoes. Why, on markdown! On markdown and reduction and discount. Perhaps she had found tiny, almost invisible flaws in the merchandise. Maybe she inflicted them herself and then pointed them out to her customers.

Mrs. Bliss shrugged. She lived and let live. She bent over backward. Because weren’t people amazing? If only they suffered enough, had been put through enough, didn’t they surprise you every time out? Didn’t they just? They could knock you over with a feather. With their resilience, with their infinite capacity to adapt, camouflage, evolving at one end of things by suppressing at another. Now, for example, watching her suck down all that cholesterol, Ellen’s delight in the incriminating joy she took in all the strange forbidden flavors of her leashed hunger.

“No,” Dorothy said, “it isn’t.”

“What isn’t?”

“The magic wand. It isn’t for sale. It isn’t for sale but take it with my blessings.”

“Oh, Ma,” Ellen said, beaming like a young girl.

The thing of it is, she wondered, if push comes to shove, does that louse get to call me Ma, too?

It was the only ship-to-shore telegram she’d ever seen.

They were married, Ellen said in the wire, by the captain of the cruise ship himself.

The irony was that Mrs. Bliss got the telegram a few hours before she heard the first reports about Hurricane Andrew that the National Hurricane Center in Coral Gables had spotted 615 miles east miles of Miami growing winds of over 100 miles per hour and picking up speed as it moved toward the Bahamas. The old woman even made a small salacious joke about it.

Oh boy, she thought, Junior and Ellen on the Love Boat. Just married and both so unused to going to bed with anyone they probably started up that wind and those waves by themselves.

It put her in a good mood to think of the two of them together. Which put her in an even better mood.

Because it was a measure, she thought, of cut losses, her emotions in a sort of escrow, the heart in chapter eleven, receivership. Because she would have thought, she thought, she’d have taken it harder. Her widowed daughter-in-law, her dead son’s only wife. The real keeper of the flame when you came right down. The one so nuts about poor dead Marvin her grief made her nuts. Whose every New Age pilgrimage to the crackpot chiropractor in Houston had been like a feather in steadfast mourning’s cheerless cap. So her marriage to Junior was really a kind of defection, leaving Mrs. Bliss (according to Ellen’s own figures) high and dry to bear the lion’s share of their leftover bereftness.

Yet she did not feel betrayed. If anything, otherwise. Their absurd new matrimony making her smile, convinced that the joke was on one of them, though she didn’t know which.

If not entirely surprised by Ellen’s decision to marry Junior Yellin (indeed, the surprise was on the other foot so to speak; she could not have anticipated Junior’s proposal), she was at least a little startled by her own reaction to it, or rather by how gracefully, even cheerfully, she first acknowledged, then accepted, then actively embraced the idea. Only briefly, and out of one corner of her mind, did she have this flaring, fleeting synapse when it occurred to her to wonder whether Marvin might be turning over in his grave if he’d heard the news or read the telegram or maybe overheard the actual proposal Yellin had made to Ellen or Ellen to Yellin. This was merely the most vagrant of thoughts, yet in the short transience (that was even less than time) it took to entertain and resolve it, Mrs. Ted Bliss was brushed by what was at once both a conclusion and a conviction: that Marvin had not heard the news, had not been looking over her shoulder to read the telegram nor tapped into whatever solemn exchange had taken place between Junior and Ellen back there on the Love Boat’s high and rising seas.

Marvin was not turning over in his grave, she realized, because, well, because Marvin was dead. These simple, indisputable facts struck like epiphanies: Dead people do not turn over in their graves; the dead have no opinions. Well then, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, if it’s OK with Marvin it’s jake by me, and settled, stunningly, gracefully, even peacefully and, at last, conclusively and decisively into the idea that her son was dead. Settling up. I had the pie; you had the sundae; she had the iced tea. Well, thought Dorothy, that’s that, then. The kid’s dead.