Stanley Elkin - Mrs. Ted Bliss

She felt rested though she couldn’t have slept for more than an hour or so. It was exciting to her, waking up in time for the hurricane, though she couldn’t know yet, of course, if it actually was the hurricane and not just some scout sent out in advance of the party, a tendril of exploratory, devastating weather.

She went back to the television in the living room and, leaning down, plugged it back in. Even after two minutes there was still no picture. What the, wondered Mrs. Ted Bliss, what the, what the. It’s picked a hell of a time to go on the fritz, she thought, who had been watching it for at least three days now taking hurricane instruction, but couldn’t blame anyone but herself because maybe it said somewhere in the manual. She knew where it was, but trying to read it now would be like locking the barn door after the horse had escaped. She knew better, anyway. Hadn’t she scolded everyone who held the refrigerator door open too long, predicting not only that the cold air would escape but that it was a strain on the motor? And warned against running the air-conditioning for more than an hour, or, in the old days, winding watches too tight? So, at least in principle, she knew better. It was terrible that her thoughtlessness had shut her off from the news reports and, remembering the radio in her kitchen, went there to see what she had missed since going to sleep.

But that had broken down, too. She glanced at the electric clock over the kitchen table. It had stopped running. Shocked, in a panic, she realized that the power was out, that what she’d been seeing she’d been seeing only by the light of the thunderbolts, flickering but almost constant, steady as a snowfall.

She wondered if she were the only one who hadn’t left the Towers. She was no martyr, not the type to stay behind to guard her property, not one of those who’d choose to go down with the mountain when Mount St. Helens blew its top, or defy catastrophe — floods, volcanoes, acts of God. Such people bought into a myth of their own rectitude and, she thought, felt better about themselves, throwing up first and secondary and tertiary rings of defense around their being as if they were causes, their own holy terms of survival. She didn’t give a plugged nickel for that sort of magical thinking. Indeed, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, didn’t it go against her own bloodlines? Technically, she, her family, her husband’s, were refugees, and though they hadn’t been driven from Russia by an act of God, they had by politics and an old hostility. So it was rather more a breakdown in history and in her character that she should have remained behind in the driving wind and hard rain while just that afternoon she’d seen so much hustle and bustle, the streets and driveways packed with her neighbors taking their leave with something so like gaiety it could have been a party. How much trouble would it have been for her to flag one of them down? Her suitcase was packed. She could have been out of there at a moment’s notice if it hadn’t been for the time she’d tracked the storm on the television, as tightly wrapped in her fate as someone caught up in a close game of cards. She could give away nothing, nothing, and had to stay the course to see how her hand would play out.

And she had. And had wound up losing all.

She went to the telephone table. And lifting the phone from its cradle found a list of the people who lived in the Towers complex, but the phones were still down of course, and Mrs. Bliss had never felt so forlorn. It was one thing to have lost touch with her daughter in Cincinnati, her son in Providence, but another entirely to be out of contact with all of her neighbors. She wanted some evidence she wasn’t alone in the building. All right, the lines were down. This was troubling enough, but suppose service were restored? So many of the owners had unlisted numbers. Mrs. Bliss shuddered. She hadn’t realized how many wanted to remain anonymous and thought, irrationally, that these would be the most dangerous. Sure, or what were they hiding? I mean, she meant, what were they protecting that made them willing to fork over whatever premium they’d have had to fork over to Southern Bell for the privilege of not being listed in the Miami telephone directory? At the very minimum they had to be deadbeats covering their behinds from creditors and, since the demographics had shifted, from all those to whom they owed services. Either way, thought Mrs. Bliss, they couldn’t be on the strict up-and-up.

I’m getting crazy, she thought, suddenly finding enemies, making them up. She’d never expected not only not just to run with the paranoids but actually pace them. And remembered the call she’d made to the Towers Stores and Francis Moprado. She wondered if he were still in the building and, jarred by the thought he might be, slowly managed to piece its number together by the flashes of electricity in the room and punched Towers Stores up once again, remembering only after it was too late that using the phone during an electrical storm was the worst thing you could do. She thrust it away from her and hoped it had landed where it belonged. It hadn’t and Dorothy, exactly as if a poisonous snake were loose on the carpet and striking at her heels, made a wild zigzag move toward the entrance (perfectly describing the wild arcs and angles of the lightning) to her apartment and pulled open the door.

Think, she thought quickly, don’t lock yourself out and, first pressing the automatic latch on the door, stepped outside her condo and shut the door behind her.

“It’s too dark,” she said in the hallway. “I can’t see my hand in front of my face.”

Because the power was still out of course. Because almost no lightning tumbled over the stunted clearances of the doorways. Because unlike the other buildings in the Towers the architects had made no provision for windows at either end of the long, dark corridor. No sudden bolts illuminated the different ends of the buildings, its distant poles.

With no shapes or dimensions to guide her she felt fear, and quite lost. Mindlessly, as though its sound were the only orientation available to her, she called her name aloud, like someone taking attendance in a schoolroom. Then, feeling her vulnerability, she deliberately began to lurch from side to side all along the walls up and down the length of Tower Number One and, here and there, to knock indiscriminately at the walls and doors.

It was a lesson to her, how soon the old become lost once they’ve slipped their tether. She was trying to get back home. That’s why she rapped at the doors, why, when she got no response, she fumbled in the dark at their hardware. Though how would she hear one if she got it? She’d pulled the appliances from her ears. “Foolish,” she scolded herself, “you wouldn’t recognize panic? Some scared ‘Who’s there?’ ” Even someone’s desperate, alarmed, and rushed elusions, the noise, she meant, of someone else’s danger. (She knew these places, their disparate configurations like the back of her own hand, that she, in their place, wouldn’t even have tried to hide. She lived, she understood, in a sort of corner. Space here was a fiction.) Only then, when she heard no panic or futile scurrying, when she’d raised some dim light of hope, did she try a door to see if it were hers. Again and again she tried but it never was. Then one was, and thinking some looting rapist killer lurked behind it, she turned the doorknob.

No one jumped out at her but this didn’t calm her. He could be lying low, he could be playing possum. Such was Mrs. Bliss’s fear and confusion that though lightning still flashed (diminished in frequency and intensity) and lighted up the place like flares behind clouds it was at least a minute or two before she was sure she was home.

Thinking: It looks familiar. That’s my wing chair, there’s my television.