Stanley Elkin - Mrs. Ted Bliss

She sat down by the tiny telephone table, found the sheet of useful numbers the condominium complex handed out to all owners, and called Tower Stores, realizing even as she picked up the phone that it was a Sunday, that less than half the staff was on duty on Sundays, that even the lifeguards had Sundays off. On Sundays, in mitten derinnen, it was strictly swimming at your own risk. Gentiles, she figured, showed you no mercy. Therefore, she was actually a little surprised when she got a busy signal. She had to call back three times before the line was free and somebody answered.

“Tower Stores.”

“Tower Stores, this is Mrs. Ted Bliss in Building One.”

“Hey, Mrs. Bliss. Hola, sholem, how are you?”

“Francis?”

“Si.”

“It’s Sunday, I thought you’d be off.”

“They called people in because of the hurricane.”

“You’re in Tower Stores now, not maintenance?”

“No, I still work maintenance. It’s the hurricane, all hands on deck.”

“You think it’s going to hit us?”

“Like a potch in tochis.”

Francis Moprado was an engineer in the Towers complex. Dark as an Aztec, he was a short, almost tiny man of fierce appearance whose amiability had earned him a kind of mascot status among some of the residents. He liked to spike his conversation with Yiddish words and phrases he’d overheard, and often showed up at many of the community seders (where he’d pretend to steal the afikomen) and even at some of the old Friday night services in the game room. At these times he always wore a yarmulke, not the interchangeable plain black almost patent leather-looking beanies most of the men took out of brown cardboard boxes before they entered the converted sanctuary and put back again when they left but his own knit beige beaded skullcap. Everyone knew he was working the room for Hanukkah gelt and tips but went along with Moprado’s bald-faced fawning deferences anyway, reimbursing him generously for favors received, topping him off with gas money for the wear and tear on his car, the rubber he used up when he ran them out to the Fort Lauderdale airport or went out on errands. A taxi would have been cheaper, they agreed, but enjoyed having the patronizing little son of a bitch for a pet. Mrs. Ted Bliss found him a great curiosity, not so much for his blatant ass kissing as his complicated Indian and Hispanic blood. She thought his bland compliance and odd Latino Step’n Fetchit ways an anomaly. Unlike the other Cubans, Central, and South Americans she’d had contact with during her years in Florida, he seemed utterly without machismo, yet she was more fearful of him, of his dangerous smiling mildness, than ever she’d been of all the hidalgos’ aristocratic distance, courtesies, tricks, and airs. Somehow she knew his sharp ugly features hid no sweet and gentle heart. She guessed how much he hated them, yet when she heard his voice she felt reassured, almost lucky. She’d found her man.

“When I went out on my balcony,” said Mrs. Bliss, “I saw big pieces of wood covering a lot of the glass doors and windows. Can I get those?”

“Oy vay,” moaned the Jew hater, “if you’d called ten minutes sooner.”

“I’ve been calling for twenty minutes. The line was busy.”

“Yeah, there’s been a run on the four-by-eights.”

“You’re all out?”

“Well,” Moprado said, “there’s still a couple in back but I wouldn’t feel right selling them to you. Warped. Damaged goods.”

“Oh.”

“Probably I could pound out most of the flaws. It’s just the building would have to charge you the same as if you were getting first quality.”

“How much?” she said.

He quoted an outrageous price, three times, maybe four, the rate she’d have had to pay if a hurricane weren’t on the way.

“That’s steep,” she said. She could almost see the long face he put on for her at the other end of the phone, his helpless shrug, but when he spoke his voice was bright with consideration and possibility.

“Tell me, you got someone to slap them up for you?”

“No.”

“Tell you what,” he said, “I could drop by and give you a hand.” He’d been pretending to look at his watch now. “I can’t tie this phone up much longer. I hate to rush you but there’s probably half a dozen people trying to get through. You ought to decide. The staff’s getting shpilkes down here, it’s got its own tsuris. Their own families to deal with, last-minute stuff. Any minute the Towers will be emptying out like rats jumping a sinking ship.”

Mrs. Bliss didn’t understand why, but she had a sort of vision, a kind of freestanding knowledge like her shot-in-the-dark certainty of Francis Moprado’s hypocritical pantomime of sadness, helplessness, recovery, and urgency. She didn’t so much see as feel, visceral to her as sour stomach, raw as sore throat or tender glands, that whatever was going to happen had already happened. It was aftermath, the solemn embering end of the world. Everywhere, filling the landscape of Mrs. Bliss’s vision were people, in pairs or groups of three, four, but never more than five or six, clumps and clusters of the lost, encrusted in dirt and filth or in some ragged cleanliness like a scour of rough handling, the work of wind and water, say, a fellowship of bunches, of tufts and clumps of survival drifting in place as if they were trying to stamp blood and feeling back into their feet. Great drifts of the milling, great swarms of the solitary.

Moving in and out through the crowd were gangs of profiteers doing a kind of triage among the numbed and needy casualties, sizing them up, pushing their wares, pitching them, selling them four-by-eights, flashlights, batteries, candles, first-aid kits, generators, matches, portable radios, tubfuls of bathwater at a monstrous going rate, whatever the traffic would bear. Gulling the remnant, ripping them off. Disaster profiteers, they gathered about the disparate rabble selling them canned goods like it was going out of style, like, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, like, my God, Ted profiteering on meat and food stamps during the war!

“I don’t want to handlen with you, Mrs.,” Moprado said, “but if you want them up I need at least an hour.”

“Want what up?” Mrs. Bliss said.

“The boards,” he said. “The sooner I get started the quicker you’ll be safe. We’ve got a pretty narrow window of opportunity here. Time and tide. This damn storm’s got bells on….Mrs. Bliss? Mrs. Bliss?”

“I’m sorry,” she told him. “I’ve changed my mind.”

“You’ve changed your mind? You know what the hurricane could do to your place in two shakes of a lamb’s tail? You got any idea?”

“Maybe,” she said. “I think so.”

“I’m not promising there wouldn’t be damage. There’s no guarantees. But if you put up plywood you’ll definitely be cutting your losses. Plus it looks better for the insurance. That you made an effort….Mrs. Bliss?”

“No,” she said, “I’d like to see it. I don’t want to be shut up in a dark box when it happens. I’ve been watching the radar on TV for two days. At least I ought to see it.”

By ten that evening it had begun to rain. Nothing spectacular. Without her hearing aids in she wouldn’t have heard it at all. She might even have gone out on her balcony to see the rain fall into Biscayne Bay had it been coming down a little harder, but now, in the dark, there’d be nothing to see. Sometimes, during a shower, protected from the weather by the overhang, she’d venture outside to watch the rain dimple the water in the bay or lap against the sides of yachts riding at anchor there. At night, after the sun had gone down. It was interesting to her how snug the people aboard those boats must feel, the wet safety of all those bobbing, cradled craft a queer luxury of displacement. She, for example, didn’t feel nearly as secure in her rooted, stock-still condominium, but borrowed her comfort from theirs, tapping into their coze and filled with a light wonder that they didn’t miss it, her faint stealth adding to her contentment. It was like staring into fire licking at a hearth, and she could have remained like that for hours if the consciousness of her ancient body had not intruded.