Stanley Elkin - Mrs. Ted Bliss

Now, of course, it was a different story. Nothing could have forced her out into those elements. She’d already decided not to make a run for it, but her motives had nothing to do with folklore, nothing to do with those legendary old-coot heroics one hears about after a natural disaster. She wasn’t standing her ground. She had drawn no line in the sand. She was not in it to defy authority or deny the looters. Indeed, she’d packed a small suitcase, put clean underwear into it, a couple of changes of clothes, soap, a roll of toilet paper, and had been careful to tuck her good jewelry, her bank passbook, and a fresh sheaf of blank checks into its side pocket. She was ready. Had the city issued orders to evacuate the premises she would almost certainly have complied, waiting only for the bus they’d send to take her to the nearest, cleanest shelter.

So she didn’t understand the motive that had convinced her not to make a run for it. She had no motive. Simply, it was too much trouble.

Now, inside her seventh-floor condominium, she waited for the winds to start howling, the rains to lash her windows, but all that happened was that the light rain had tapered off, faded to a drizzle. It was almost midnight and Mrs. Ted Bliss was overcome by a peculiar letdown, a fizzle of expectation like the diminished rain, and she turned back to her television set for an explanation.

What they had experienced during the last couple of hours, the local weatherman said, had been merely the weather they would have gotten anyway, the normal working out of pressures and fronts wheeling in from Georgia and the Gulf, and had nothing to do with Hurricane Andrew at all. He was a little embarrassed, he said, but he’d been so preoccupied by the hurricane he’d neglected to give the viewers a less exciting forecast. He apologized, and hoped he hadn’t inconvenienced anyone.

If there was lightning, he warned — the storm was expected to strike somewhere in the Miami area between about two and three in the morning — it was advisable to disconnect all major appliances and to avoid using the telephone until the lightning had passed over since it could actually strike either through the ear- or mouthpiece. Mrs. Bliss shuddered, removed her hearing aids, and placed them on the telephone table. She disconnected the television.

Now she was frightened, alarmed, even a little angry at herself for her refusal to pay Francis Moprado his pound of flesh. It seemed inconceivable that she’d be able to sleep. How could she get into a nightgown with a hurricane coming? She’d just have to sit tight with the television on and maybe doze in her armchair. This would make how many nights now she hadn’t been to bed, three, four? Excuse me, she thought, but acts of God took their own sweet time to play themselves out, and Dorothy felt more than a little irritable, as if she were in a game of cards with someone who either didn’t know what he was doing or was deliberately stalling. She didn’t appreciate it in an opponent and she didn’t approve of it in God, and was thinking — it was already after two P.M. and she saw no signs of Andrew — come on if you’re coming, let’s see what you got. She wasn’t daring providence, she was just a little cranky and punchy from the fitful quality of her sleep and the sourness of her body.

She roused herself from her wing chair and shambled into the bedroom. Sitting on the side of the bed and, while the rain had stopped and the lightning not yet started, she tried phoning her children for at least the eighth or ninth time that day. And got the same three tones followed by the same recorded message, female, solicitous, and firm. “We’re sorry,” the voice said, “but due to heavy traffic on all long-distance lines, your call cannot go through just now. Please hang up and try again later.” It was the same woman who advised her that the number she had just dialed was not in service, or not a working number, or that she had failed to dial “1” for long distance. She spoke always in the same prim voice, and Mrs. Ted Bliss would have recognized it anywhere. It was the voice of power and denial.

Of course her children would be trying to call her, too. Practically everyone in Miami would have people to report to — their kids, brothers, sisters, concerned uncles and cousins and friends, and all of those people would have people whose safety they would want to check up on.

She tried to think of others she might call, outlanders in communities so remote it was almost statistically impossible that the lines connecting Miami to these outposts would be tied up. She racked her brains to come up first with a locality where she knew anyone well enough to ask them to get in touch with Frank or Maxine and pass on a message for them not to worry, that their mother was safe. She thought of a couple of such places — the small village in Michigan near their old farm, and the town in Wyoming where the airfield might be from which the plane that had borne their ancestral uncle’s ashes could have taken off. She could come up with the geography but not with any names, and felt a sense of relief, that it was out of her hands, that she’d done all she could.

Buoyed by this odd sense of achievement she permitted herself a reward and lay down on top of the bedspread, breaking one of her own strictest rules. Even in Chicago when her grandchildren were young and, later, in Florida, when Ted was still alive and they came down with their parents to visit, Mrs. Bliss read the riot act to anyone she found on her bed once it had been made. She wouldn’t permit herself to do it and didn’t tolerate it in others. Something in the act, its wild disarray, violated her baleboosteh soul, and Mrs. Bliss lost her temper whenever anyone tried testing her on this point. She still remembered the time Maxine had caught Judith and James playing on their grandmother’s bed and had warned them to get off at once, that this was their grandma’s pet peeve. “Peeve?” she’d shouted. “My pet peeve? It isn’t a peeve. I hate it! I hate it!” Isn’t it strange, Mrs. Bliss thought now, where people drew the line? And, forgiving herself, lay down on top of the brocade bedspread without even bothering to take off her shoes. She swooned into the deepest, most comfortable sleep of her life, snoring evenly, dreamlessly.

When the hurricane woke her it wasn’t its noise, its huge winds, loud and great and uninterrupted as a cataract not so much plunged as actually pushed over a steep precipice, loud, louder than a skyful of sorties laying down a carpet of saturation bombing. It wasn’t its violent thunder locked up in the wind like the sound of unmuffled drums. It wasn’t its mad, wild, tortured, sourceless groans, rasps, screeches, and bestial gutturals — all nature’s shrill, scorched harmonics. Though she heard it, heard all of it even without her hearing aids, as anything would have heard it — the windowpanes, the furniture and appliances, its queer, vibrating falsetto so rapid and filled with enough bump and bounce and friction to raise the temperature in the apartment by a couple of degrees.

Nor even the stinging drafts striking her through the imperfect plumb of her windows and coming in over the threshold of her off-true doors like a high tide.

None of these had roused her.

What had were tremendous bursts of light filling up her room and wiping away shadow and night like the fiercest sun in the fiercest noon. She’d been right to fear the sun, going out beneath its blinding, oscillating toxic fault lines like meat in a microwave. Here, in her blinding, strobic bedroom, lightning seemed to brighten every square inch of darkness, filling up, tightening it, pulling the room’s disparate angles together like a cat’s cradle, exposing everything — her closets, the fluorescent glare off her tile and porcelain in the master bathroom, even patches of dust that had somehow escaped her vacuum cleaner, the damp rags with which she polished the furniture — even the raging winds, and every drop of rain strafing the exterior walls and driven like nails against the window glass.