Mrs. Ted Bliss

by Stanley Elkin

  “I’ll invite him for supper. We’ll talk about old times.”

  “He wouldn’t remember me.”

  “You’ll remind him.”

  Ellen nodded vaguely in the direction of the kitchen table, toward the uneaten scraps of Mrs. Ted Bliss’s rice pie, the deepish dregs of her unfinished tea.

  “I’ll boil a chicken,” Mrs. Bliss said. “I’ll make some soup. You make the salad, put in some of your organic vegetables.”

  “I wouldn’t mind seeing him again,” Ellen said.

  He didn’t. He didn’t remember her. No more than he had recognized Dorothy the day she had come to his office on Lincoln Road. Even when Mrs. Bliss identified her as Marvin’s wife.

  Well, a lot of water had passed under the bridge he excused. The old gray mare ain’t what he used to be.

  “Isn’t the mare generally a she?” Ellen called down from her high horse. “I’d have thought a butcher would know the difference.”

  “Hey,” Junior said, “touché there. But you know,” he said, “I’m not a butcher anymore. I haven’t been behind a meat counter in years.”

  “No,” Ellen said as Mrs. Bliss poured the wine Junior brought, “Ma says you’ve decided to become a museum director.”

  “It’s still America, sweetheart,” Yellin said and, sensing it might be a long evening, filled his glass to the brim.

  He was not a mean drunk. Indeed, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, he was no longer even much of a wiseass, and reflected that if you both only managed to live long enough your worst enemy could become one of your best friends. The thought made for a kind of nostalgia that inhabited the room like atmosphere, enveloping Mrs. Ted Bliss and, so it seemed to her, Yellin, and perhaps even Ellen herself, though Ellen, Dorothy imagined, had to be coaxed along, rather like someone of two minds in an audience, say, who has been asked to come up on the stage to assist the performer in his act. They finished Junior’s wine and Dorothy, on a roll of good feeling, offered to open a bottle of what had to be at least forty-year-old Scotch whiskey—twelve years in the bottle, twenty-eight or so in a drawer of the big walnut breakfront in the dining room, a gift from one of Ted’s customers when they left Chicago to take up a new life in Florida.

  The women weren’t drinkers and Junior usually drank only to pass out, and so had no clear idea of what it was like to be drunk. They supposed it meant something like “tipsy,” by which they meant lighthearted, frivolous, cute, a condition summed up by the notion of women in films of the thirties and forties, say, forced by far-fetched circumstance into wearing men’s pajamas, several sizes too large for them. This was their collective mood now—an exaggerated comity between them too big for its necessity. They laughed easily, Junior himself joining in as they evoked his old piratical avatars and manifestations like a sort of wild glory.

  “Do you know,” Mrs. Ted Bliss giddily confessed, “there was a time I thought you’d set your cap for me?”

  “Me? Really?”

  “Oh, I suppose you don’t remember the time you snuck up behind me and tried to feel me up while I was waiting on a customer.”

  He didn’t of course, but smiled sly as an old roué, a heroic rogue in a different movie, and politely wondered aloud how far he’d managed to get.

  “I thought of telling Ted on you. On you to Ted.”

  “I bet you never did,” Junior Yellin said.

  “You were already in enough trouble.”

  “I thought,” Ellen said, “of telling Marvin.”

  “Marvin?” said Mrs. Ted Bliss.

  She’d struck a nerve, and a little of Yellin’s guilty handsomeness drained from his face.

  “Only he was already in Billings,” Ellen said, the second person there whose mood had cracked.

  “Hey,” Junior Yellin said, the last, his mood breaking up, run aground on a sandbar of suddenly uncovered memory, “dinner about ready? I guess I’ll go powder my nose.”

  “I think,” Mrs. Bliss whispered when he left the room, “he remembers you.”

  “Oh, Ma,” Ellen said, suddenly weeping. “Nothing happened. I swear to you. I swear on Marvin’s life!”

  “On Marvin’s life? On his life?”

  What Mrs. Ted Bliss didn’t know was that in the toilet, Junior Yellin raised the toilet seat and peed wide of his mark, drilling some of his urine around the elasticized hem of her terry-cloth toilet-seat cover. Feeling immensely disconsolate about this awkward turn of events, he wet one of Dorothy’s hand towels under a faucet in the bathroom sink and tried to wipe away (rubbing it furiously, as one might attempt to clear a stain from a freshly starched shirt back from the laundry on which one has just dripped gravy) the evidence of his marked territory.

  “By damn,” he muttered, “I am one goofy galoot of a guy.”

  The sound of the phrase cheered him a bit, but he was thankful he was a little high. Under the influence, he thought. Get a grip, he thought, you’re seventy-eight. Sooner or later one or the other of them would have to come in to do her business. We all got business. What will it look like if she realizes her dress is DWI due to my carelessness? How many points would that cost him?

  Because the way Junior figured, life was a little like one of those games—checkers, Monopoly—where everyone started with the same assets and lost when they went bankrupt.

  My life, thought Yellin, my life is like that. More Monopoly than checkers, though. I was always the top hat or the roadster, the wheelbarrow or battleship or dog, never the iron or thimble or shoe. Sure, he thought, big man. Big man’s man. In your dreams! he thought bitterly.

  Because he knew there’d always been more smoke than fire to him, to his history. He caused trouble and brought grief down around people’s heads—already he could spot a little flame of yellow piss burning through the water spots he’d made doing his repairs. Oh Christ, he moaned, and wondered if Dorothy’s wasn’t the real reason—that, as Dorothy said, he was in enough trouble already—more women hadn’t told on him. My God, how he hated owning an unearned reputation! Still, if it weren’t unearned he’d have no reputation at all.

  Because, sight unseen, he knew there was little of substance to the contemptuous awe folks held him in. Those out there now, vulnerable to charm but nothing more to it than that, silly as girls at a sleepover, simply had no skill at recognizing a flirt when they saw one. He could hardly believe, for example, that he’d ever tried to feel up that old one, Mrs. Ted Bliss. And as for Ellen, the elderly one, why would he ever have put a move on a woman with a husband in the hospital? It would have been too brave, it wasn’t like him.

  The whoosie was still damp but he couldn’t stay in there forever. He unlocked the bathroom door and went out.

  “Sorry,” he blustered to the ladies already seated at the dining room table, “had to see a man about a dog. Ah,” he said, taking his seat and winking at both of them, “girl, boy, girl. Just the way I like it!”

  “On Marvin’s life?” the outraged Mrs. Bliss was still saying, and Junior Yellin had the impression that time had stood still while he had been in the bathroom, that there was something faintly magical in his ability to charm people, but only faintly magical. Otherwise he would have made a greater dent in the world. He’d be high and dry and sitting pretty instead of just dragooned and press-ganged into a skimpy little company of old ladies. Otherwise, he might have followed his heart and had the nerve to propose to that gorgeous Rita de Janeiro kid and married her.

  If he’d a better command of the life cycle of liquor he’d have known that he was coming down from the ledges of optimism and gaiety to the flatlands of despair and self-pity. In the event, the quarrel he’d generated between the two women registered like a chatter of drone.

  “Ma, nothing happened.”

  “On his life? His life?”

  “If something happened, why would I say so? Just to aggravate him? He made a pass, all right? Big deal, he made a pass. He tickled my palm with his finger. Once he blew in my ear when I leaned toward him to listen to
a secret he wanted to tell.”

  “While Marvin lies dying in a hospital bed.”

  I tickled her palm? That was my pass? I blew in her ear? That was? Oh, I am so pathetic. I am pathetic. Not a grand galoot of a guy at all. Just a sorry old asshole. I must cancel Miss de Janeiro’s flowers. I must remember to tie a string around my finger so as not to forget to cancel her flowers.

  What he did or didn’t do. As if he weren’t even in the room at all. They’d invited him to supper, not the other way around. The boiled chicken could be boiling over. He hadn’t come there just to be humiliated. He had better set them straight.

  “Excuse me,” Yellin said, “but if either of you is thinking of using the little girl’s room, may I suggest you use the other one? I’m afraid I missed and made number one all over the toilet-seat cover. I tried to blot it out with hand towels but I didn’t do such a good job. It’s still pretty damp. Did I really tickle your palm and blow in your ear? Sorry. Maybe I was trying to cheer you up. Dotty, dear, did I really feel you up?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well,” he said, “you were both beautiful women. I’m sorry, but I guess I’m not much of a boozer. I’m sorry. I think I’ve lost my appetite. Just as well, I have to run an errand. Have to see my florist on a matter of some urgency.

  “Oh,” he said as he reached the door, “they say if you rub it with seltzer the stain disappears like magic.”

  He disappeared like magic.

  That night, after she picked up the empty glasses and cleared the table and washed the dishes—Ellen had offered to help but Mrs. Ted Bliss was still enough of a baleboosteh to do some things by herself and refused her—and Ellen had gone to bed, Mrs. Bliss noticed something out of place on top of the telephone table. It was the directory, which had not been replaced in the little shelf where it should have been. Loose on top of the telephone directory Ellen had failed to put back properly were her airline tickets, spread-eagled to her open-ended return coupon. Without meaning to pry, Mrs. Bliss noticed the price of her ticket. Thinking she’d made a mistake, she checked it again. What had so surprised her was that her daughter-in-law received the same senior citizen’s discount as she did herself!

  She must have known, she’d sent birthday greetings to the woman for years. Even, though Marvin was dead, cards on their anniversaries. It was easy, if not to lose track exactly then to fix people in time and suspend them there, your near and dear. Growing old was no picnic and though you made allowances for it in yourself, it hardly seemed possible that others, your children and grandchildren, for example, were susceptible to the same erosions. Yet she must have known, she must have. Hadn’t Ellen herself brought up the subject, and more than once, of what she intended to do and where she intended to move when she retired? And each time, each time, Dorothy had felt uncomfortable hearing such talk, as if, oh yes, as if there were something maybe just a bit disreputable and vulgar about the idea of someone relatively secure and successful in her position throwing it over for the sake of some soft dream. Wasn’t this, in some wild way, connected to her feelings about Frank leaving Pittsburgh and moving to Rhode Island? All right, he said he had his reasons, and maybe, as he’d said, the feelings, his and the university’s, were mutual, but somewhere there’d been an infraction, disorder on both sides. It was the way she’d felt when Ted had told her he had bought the farm in Michigan. Who knows, it may have been the way she’d felt all those years back when her family uprooted itself and came all the way from Russia to America.

  “You’ve lived in Chicago all your life,” she’d told her daughter-in-law when Ellen had first introduced the subject. “All your friends are there, your family. You’re no spring chicken anymore, Ellen. Where would you go, what would you do, chase Janet in India? Believe me, darling, if I had it all to do over again and poor Ted was still alive, you think I’d be here today?”

  Enough things had changed, she wanted her daughter-in-law to stay put, although even as she made her point she recognized the fallacy in her argument. There was nothing to stop her from picking up and moving back to Chicago. All right, the price of condos in the Towers had plunged. She’d never get back what they gave for it, but so what? Even if she took a loss, even if she sold the place under fire-sale conditions, threw in the carpet, the drapes, her furniture and appliances, all the crap she’d accumulated, the manuals, the letters and cards, pictures and scrapbooks, all the carefully rubber-banded documentation and ledgers of her life, how bad could it be? Wouldn’t it, as a matter of fact, be just the thing for her old baleboosteh ways, to clear the decks, make everything neat, one last final spring cleaning of things, the deleavenization of her past? What would she lose? Nothing, zip, gornisht. She could rent a furnished room or even a small studio apartment and live off the proceeds of her red-tag sale. She was eighty-two years old, had her health, but how much longer could she expect to get away with it? Hale and hearty as she was, kayn aynhoreh, how much longer could Mrs. Bliss have left, four, five years? So her estate would drop to maybe seventy-three cents on the dollar when she passed. What difference would it make to her inheritors? They were provided for. Her good husbandry couldn’t really make a difference in their lives, so what was the big deal? What was to stop her from moving back to Chicago? Nothing. Nothing but her failing energies, nothing but her sense of how disruptive and untrue one must be to oneself even to want to make a new life.

  “I was thinking,” Ellen had said, “about maybe moving to Texas.”

  “To Wilcox?”

  “You talk about him as if he was a crackpot. Or as if I was. Think what you think. The man has made a tremendous difference in my life. Marvin might be alive today if…”

  “Ellen!”

  “Don’t say it, Ma. I know what I know. Doctors!” she said.

  All right, she was crazy. Driven nuts by her widowhood. Mrs. Bliss had accepted it before, had let her off the hook because she knew deep down, beneath the long bones of her bullying, Ellen had a good heart. But it was one thing to take that stuff off a grieving woman, another entirely to take it from a fellow senior citizen. Oy, she thought mournfully, brought up short, suddenly breathless. If the wife of her firstborn qualified for the senior citizen discount, how much longer could it be before her surviving children would be old people themselves? And what did that mean to her?

  Looking back, clear-headed, she was aware that she was a woman who had not much enjoyed her long life. She had done her duty by it, earned the love and respect of her husband, her children, her family, her friends.

  The truth, however, was that she had little to regret. Her mistakes, she felt, were only the general failures—lapses of taste; an inability, perhaps the simple stupidity of a failure to risk. Holding her flaws up in a kinder, much more generous light, it might only have been a lazy disinclination to take pains, like anyone else, not to fiddle with the givens of her character, never daring to color outside the lines, her life nothing if not a struggle to stay within them.

  She’d done nothing wrong, she meant, only what was expected. And didn’t reproach herself for her loyalties, had no argument, for example, with her repudiation of Junior Yellin’s ancient crude advances, or thought for a moment she might have wasted her beauty. She was not in the least distressed that she’d ever been anything less than a good, unselfish, loving wife and mother. She would have despaired and been ashamed if she thought that she had, if she’d ever even consented to the soft porn of submitting to anything so mild and innocuous as becoming the recipient of a makeover on national TV. (She had appeared in court once to testify against Alcibiades Chitral, but it had taken a subpoena to get her there.)

  No, she had suffered (it was too strong a word even if what she was attempting to come to terms with was the faintly misbegotten shape of her vague disapproval of her life) from a sort of generalized deafness. What did it mean not to hear the accent in which she spoke? Why had she been so stung when Chitral told her in the prison that her people (born sticks-in-the-mud, he’d called the
m) had a gift for sitting still? Why had she learned to write checks only after her husband had died? Or been so reluctant to exchange her lady’s maid status, helping Mrs. Dubow’s customers dress in the close quarters of those airless old dressing rooms for what would have been a salesclerk’s higher salary up in the front of the store? Why had she kowtowed to men?

  Mrs. Bliss was so tired she could barely move. She remembered that when her children were kids, up past their bedtimes and wild, up past their bedtimes, their mood swings fluctuate as white water, gay, crazed, one minute hilarious, the next irritable and quarrelsome as murderers, she’d warned them against overexcitement, threatened they’d become hostage to their overtiredness, would be unable to fall asleep under the weary weight of their crankiness. It wasn’t true, she thought now. Nothing could have been more false. As soon as their heads hit the pillow, as soon as hers did…Yet all of a sudden Mrs. Ted Bliss, who had wiped up the last of the mess Yellin had made in the bathroom (she’d put it off till last), felt her blood boil up in a kind of rage, the old mercurial irritability of her kids’ quarrelsomeness, and she knew she would never calm herself enough to sleep that night and found herself already resenting the hangover she would feel all that next day. The immediate cause had been Junior Yellin’s strong, stenchy pee. It still filled her nostrils. She thought she could taste it.

  The man was a pig. How do you come into a person’s home and pee on a seat cover? How do you go into your hostess’s toilet and pee all over, everywhere at once? It was more like an act of vandalism than an old man’s inability to direct his stream. And then what does the pig son of a bitch do? He actually tries to clean up his mess with her guest towels! Her guest towels. They were useless to her now. The nerve, the nerve! How could she ever set them out again? First thing in the morning she would retrieve them from the hamper and throw them away. She wouldn’t have waited, she’d have done it right then but knew it was worth her life to enter that bathroom again tonight. She could taste it, taste it.