Stanley Elkin - Mrs. Ted Bliss

It was the most amazing thing. There was nothing to do. She was bored in mitten derinnen. That’s life for you, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, a surprise in every box. Deprived of television by the power failure, she wondered what to do with herself. Though she understood she hadn’t been a proper baleboosteh in years, not since Ted was alive, as a matter of fact. She’d always been fastidious about her housekeeping, she liked to think she still was, but here she was in the middle of one of the most disruptive events that could happen to a woman like herself and what was she doing about it? Nothing. Not a damn thing. She knew the storm wasn’t done with her yet and that anything she did now would have to be done over when it was, yet she hadn’t even taken the measures taken by those who’d chosen not to go down with their condominiums. Where were the boards on her windows? Had she disconnected all her major appliances? Where were the provisions the experts had practically begged her to lay in? What equipment did she have on hand? There was nothing, nothing. Now the toilets wouldn’t flush and she had only her pots to piss in.

So she had nothing to do. She was already bored with her emergency and who knew how much longer it would go on?

She forced herself to think about what had happened to Ellen and Junior Yellin, whose cheery wire had indirectly led to Dorothy’s first awareness of the hurricane. She wished them well, alevai, but even as she did so felt a spirit of disclaimer come over her, something like the printing on the back of the ticket a parking garage might have handed Ted in the old days. Management not responsible for damage to automobile or for loss of any contents left therein.

She went up to her big wing chair and turned it toward the wide glass doors that led out to her balcony. She sat down. Here and there through the night pieces of lightning still lit up the sky but she could see that the storm, though not yet over, had moved into a new, perhaps even more treacherous, phase.

Mrs. Bliss, staring as far as she could into the western edges of the hurricane, tried to recall what the earnest young weather mavins had attempted to teach her about hurricanes, but except for the big stuff — wind speeds, the eye, periods of low pressure, storm surges, risen seas, terrific floods — it was all blur, a confetti of information. So maybe, she thought, if she just stared at it hard enough long enough, examining its progress and moods, she might be able to tell for herself where she stood, when she could declare the all clear (always mindful, of course, that it was provisional, merely the eye passing through, a grace period like the thirty days the insurance gives you before canceling your policy), and go out into the street again. To stretch her legs, get some fresh air, collect herself, regroup for the next onslaught.

Brushing up, studying, learning, cramming, burning the midnight oil, articling herself to it until she had the hurricane by heart. Making the adjustment from television to her great glass sliding doors as though the activity were only a shift in camera angles.

Mrs. Ted Bliss observing the winds bash the palm trees. Imagining the noise it made, so much it might have been the sound of a thousand fire trucks, as many police cars. Ambulances. An entire motor pool of disaster and death.

Something riding on all this close coverage and up-to-the-minute.

Her respite, that chance to catch her breath, get her second wind. When she realized: If the power’s back on, if the electric is up. Because how the hell else would she be able not just to make it down those seven floors but to climb back up them again, all those flights of stairs? Or even four of them? Or even three? It was maybe her third or fourth hour into the hurricane, and it was the first time she cried. She felt as if all breath had left her body. Breathless, alone, as though the vacant Towers were only another sort of necropolis. She could have been back in the Chicago boneyard where all her dead relatives were buried.

If Holmer Toibb were alive today, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, I’d breeze through his assignment with flying colors. My self, she’d have explained to him, my self is my interest. Because everything else falls away. Family, friends. Even love falls away. It chips and breaks up like ice. It falls off like a scab.

Oh, I’m not indifferent, she would have told the old therapeusisist, if anything, vice versa. She was highly partisan. Were it in her power she’d have done anything to save them. It wouldn’t even have to have been them. She would have saved anybody, everybody. She meant it, she wasn’t bragging on herself. Still, she had to admit it, she’d have used their salvation to forward her own. So what was the use? Who knows? Maybe she wouldn’t have done such a bang-up job on the assignment. Maybe all her good intentions added up to was a gentleman’s “C.” If it weren’t so late in the day maybe she’d have put her money where her mouth was. Maybe everybody would.

In her dreams the hurricane was even more animated than it was in actuality. She got better reception in her dreams. For one thing it was already light out. She couldn’t judge what time it was but supposed early morning since she saw no sun. Of course that might have been an illusion created by the gloom — some mean average by-product of the practically biblical rain. So God knows when those first few palm trees flew past her seventh-story balcony. It could have been as early as seven or as late as half-past six in the afternoon. Whatever the time, this was the worst Mrs. Bliss had seen yet. The trees flew past so rapidly and on so horizontal a course they could have been wooden torpedoes. She’d have risen from the wing chair, walked to the drapes to shut them to protect herself from the constant necessity of blinking or throwing up her hands like a boxer trying to protect his head if it hadn’t been for her fear that at any moment the wind could shift, pfftt, bam, just like that, and drive one of those palms directly through the sliding glass doors. There was nothing more Mrs. Bliss could do. Tracking the hurricane was fatuous now, quantifying it was. She dreamed she had fallen asleep in her chair, she dreamed that the eye of the hurricane had already passed over.

With this, she dreamed of how very depressed she was, for if its eye had passed over, then not only was the worst yet to come (and hadn’t it — those palm trees whizzing past — already started?) but she had missed out on what was said to be the most exhilarating aspect of a hurricane — the intense feeling of well-being and soft, luxurious fatigue that accompanied an extended period of low pressure. The experts were all agreed on this part, hammering away at their theme, their own disclaimer. You must steel yourself against the soft seduction of the eye’s low pressure, its perfect dust-and pollen-raked sweet room temperature ionized air, as though the same powerful winds that had blown it over and around her had pushed away all shmuts before them like a new beginning of the world. Stay indoors, stay indoors, they warned, drilling its dangers at her like a public service announcement. You couldn’t have paid her, who’d missed so much, to miss this.

And now she had, and woke from her unplanned sleep with a fatigue as sour as a hangover.

Confused, disoriented, she saw that it was still dark but took no comfort from the fact that she had not missed the eye’s wondrous performance.

A beam of fuzzily focused yellowish light, round and wide as if it were coming out the end of a megaphone, played over Mrs. Bliss’s living/dining-room area, frightening her, stiffening her back against the wing chair and forcing her to clutch at its arms like a fugitive flattening himself against a wall.