He was her last connection to earth? Then to hell with her last connection to earth! And to hell with Ellen, too. Oh sure, she’d asked if she could help. Nice as pie in the nice-as-pie department. But gone off quick as you can say Jack Robinson the second her mother-in-law had told her out of a deference she’d have used to any guest, “Go, go, darling, I can do it myself.”
And then Mrs. Bliss remembered the phone book the woman had not had the decency to put back where she’d found it. And what were those plane tickets all about? They were supposed to be a threat? She wasn’t having a good time, Ellen? Dorothy was forcing the wrong food down her throat? What did she think this was here, a restaurant?
Ellen missed her dead husband more than Dorothy missed her dead son? Because that’s exactly what the woman thought, that’s what was at the bottom of all her goofy Employee-of-the-Month drive and nutty advice about how other people should live their lives, why she was at once so smug and defensive about Wilcox, at the bottom of why she was not only willing to give up all those free bonus trips to Cancun and London and wherever to retire and move away from Chicago just so she could be closer to her holistic holy man, the Messiah Texas Chiropractor, but even looked forward to it. And if you ask me, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, it was, at bottom, why Ellen was so tolerant and free and easy about allowing her daughter—my granddaughter—Janet, to go shpatziering all over India looking either for her soul or some swell new herbal tea.
Mrs. Bliss was not an impatient woman. Live and let live. Normally, she bent over backward. But something about Ellen…And that open-ended airline ticket planted smack in the middle of the Yellow Pages under the TWA ad like a bookmark. What, she wanted to be begged? Gai gezunterhait!
And now she was really making her sore, because she felt bad about not liking her daughter-in-law better, and wished she did. If for no other reason than that then maybe she could get some sleep and feel fresher, more rested, be better prepared, when the knockdown, drag-out show-down came between them the next morning.
Only that wasn’t the way of it at all.
After she’d dragged herself out of bed, after she’d had her bath, after she’d powdered herself, put on fresh makeup and her favorite cologne (the same kind she’d been using since the days of her great beauty), and dressed in a clean new pants suit and come into the kitchen that morning, Dorothy was met with the smell of fresh coffee. Great, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, she’s making herself an enema.
“Oh, morning there, Ma,” her daughter-in-law greeted her cheerfully. “Good, you’re up. You were sleeping so soundly I didn’t want to wake you. Beautiful day. I’ve taken the liberty of putting up a fresh pot of coffee for our breakfast. What would you like with it, you think? There’s no oranges but I found a can of Crystal Light in the cupboard. How do you want your egg? Boiled? Scrambled? Do you want one slice of toast or two?”
It occurred to Mrs. Bliss actually to rub her eyes, to pinch herself.
“Say, Ma,” Ellen went on, “do you still have that metal detector you were telling me about? If you don’t plan to use it anymore, do you think I could buy it off you?
“You never told me Milt’s a recreational therapeusisist.”
“Oh, sure,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss, “one of the biggest men in south Florida.”
“Really? One of the biggest?”
“I’m here to tell you.”
“He never told me that,” Ellen said. “When he called this morning…”
“Junior? Junior Yellin called?”
“You were sleeping,” Ellen said. “He told me not to wake you.”
“What did he want?”
“Well,” she said, “I think he called to apologize. He’s a reformed drunk, you know, and got a little high and wasn’t able to handle it. Anyway, he’s terribly embarrassed about what he did in the bathroom. He asked me to tell you.”
Dorothy nodded. There was a slightly dismissive expression on her face, as if it didn’t matter, as polite as if she were personally taking the apology. Ellen looked relieved, grateful, as though she were Yellin’s envoy or held his personal power of attorney. Mrs. Bliss watched as her daughter-in-law lay out two place settings. She made no move or offer to help, and was vaguely dismayed to realize that, except for restaurants and airplanes and those infrequent occasions when she was an invited dinner guest, this was one of the first times in years (even at Frank’s seder in Providence she had carried food to the table and helped pass it around) that she was being served. She had to make a conscious effort to keep herself from crying.
Meanwhile, Ellen, chirpy and crisp as a housewife in a television commercial, filled both their glasses with Crystal Light (the can could have been two or three years old by now; she kept it in case some child should show up), and spooned the meat from two perfectly boiled eggs into small dessert bowls. She buttered three slices of toast, gave one to Dorothy, kept two for herself, and sat down.
“So,” Ellen said, “do you or don’t you, will you or won’t you?”
“Do I don’t I, will I won’t I what?”
“Still have the metal detector? Will you sell it to me?”
“You want to buy my metal detector? Junior Yellin talked you into this?”
“He’s actually a very interesting man. Not at all like what I remembered.”
“Yeah,” Mrs. Bliss said, “very interesting.” Don’t sell yourself short, she thought, you’re pretty interesting yourself.
“He has this theory about AIDS,” Ellen said.
“Oh?”
“He believes it can be cured if the patient has a hobby that takes his mind off his troubles.”
Mrs. Bliss stared at the woman.
“Of course it has to be caught early enough, while it’s still in the early HIV-positive stage. Once it’s full blown it won’t always work.”
“The man’s close to eighty,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss, and thought she saw her daughter-in-law’s face flush as Ellen dipped a corner of her buttered toast into the bowl and allowed it to troll amid the loose yellow islands of her soft-boiled eggs.
“Oh, Ma,” Ellen said.
Mrs. Bliss knew what she knew. She remembered that airline ticket and was glad she hadn’t permitted herself to complete her thought. That he was old enough to be her father. Well, almost old enough.
“I’m no spring chicken myself, you know,” Ellen said, and provided Mrs. Bliss with an insight into how she had been able to sell all of those shoes. Why, on markdown! On markdown and reduction and discount. Perhaps she had found tiny, almost invisible flaws in the merchandise. Maybe she inflicted them herself and then pointed them out to her customers.
Mrs. Bliss shrugged. She lived and let live. She bent over backward. Because weren’t people amazing? If only they suffered enough, had been put through enough, didn’t they surprise you every time out? Didn’t they just? They could knock you over with a feather. With their resilience, with their infinite capacity to adapt, camouflage, evolving at one end of things by suppressing at another. Now, for example, watching her suck down all that cholesterol, Ellen’s delight in the incriminating joy she took in all the strange forbidden flavors of her leashed hunger.
“No,” Dorothy said, “it isn’t.”
“What isn’t?”
“The magic wand. It isn’t for sale. It isn’t for sale but take it with my blessings.”
“Oh, Ma,” Ellen said, beaming like a young girl.
The thing of it is, she wondered, if push comes to shove, does that louse get to call me Ma, too?
TWELVE
It was the only ship-to-shore telegram she’d ever seen.
They were married, Ellen said in the wire, by the captain of the cruise ship himself.
The irony was that Mrs. Bliss got the telegram a few hours before she heard the first reports about Hurricane Andrew that the National Hurricane Center in Coral Gables had spotted 615 miles east miles of Miami growing winds of over 100 miles per hour and picking up speed as it moved toward the Bahamas. The old woman even
made a small salacious joke about it.
Oh boy, she thought, Junior and Ellen on the Love Boat. Just married and both so unused to going to bed with anyone they probably started up that wind and those waves by themselves.
It put her in a good mood to think of the two of them together. Which put her in an even better mood.
Because it was a measure, she thought, of cut losses, her emotions in a sort of escrow, the heart in chapter eleven, receivership. Because she would have thought, she thought, she’d have taken it harder. Her widowed daughter-in-law, her dead son’s only wife. The real keeper of the flame when you came right down. The one so nuts about poor dead Marvin her grief made her nuts. Whose every New Age pilgrimage to the crackpot chiropractor in Houston had been like a feather in steadfast mourning’s cheerless cap. So her marriage to Junior was really a kind of defection, leaving Mrs. Bliss (according to Ellen’s own figures) high and dry to bear the lion’s share of their leftover bereftness.
Yet she did not feel betrayed. If anything, otherwise. Their absurd new matrimony making her smile, convinced that the joke was on one of them, though she didn’t know which.
If not entirely surprised by Ellen’s decision to marry Junior Yellin (indeed, the surprise was on the other foot so to speak; she could not have anticipated Junior’s proposal), she was at least a little startled by her own reaction to it, or rather by how gracefully, even cheerfully, she first acknowledged, then accepted, then actively embraced the idea. Only briefly, and out of one corner of her mind, did she have this flaring, fleeting synapse when it occurred to her to wonder whether Marvin might be turning over in his grave if he’d heard the news or read the telegram or maybe overheard the actual proposal Yellin had made to Ellen or Ellen to Yellin. This was merely the most vagrant of thoughts, yet in the short transience (that was even less than time) it took to entertain and resolve it, Mrs. Ted Bliss was brushed by what was at once both a conclusion and a conviction: that Marvin had not heard the news, had not been looking over her shoulder to read the telegram nor tapped into whatever solemn exchange had taken place between Junior and Ellen back there on the Love Boat’s high and rising seas.
Marvin was not turning over in his grave, she realized, because, well, because Marvin was dead. These simple, indisputable facts struck like epiphanies: Dead people do not turn over in their graves; the dead have no opinions. Well then, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, if it’s OK with Marvin it’s jake by me, and settled, stunningly, gracefully, even peacefully and, at last, conclusively and decisively into the idea that her son was dead. Settling up. I had the pie; you had the sundae; she had the iced tea. Well, thought Dorothy, that’s that, then. The kid’s dead.
It was this, she knew, that reconciled her to the news in Ellen’s telegram. It was this, however odd it might seem, that had produced such calm, allowed such cheer.
She had an idea! And what so delighted her about her idea was the fact that she knew she was rising to an occasion. She was into her eighties now. People in their eighties will have been called upon to rise to occasions countless numbers of times—all those births and deaths and ceremonies; all those pitched battles of obligation that made up a life, constructed it like a laborious masonry of rough expectations. The rare thing, the sweet and marvelous thing, was to rise to an occasion gratuitously, out of some sheer sense of its Tightness, its dead solid joy, all its, well, nondeductible, not-for-profit giftness.
She would throw a party for the happy couple when they returned from their honeymoon cruise. Her condo wasn’t big enough so she’d host it in the game room of Building One. She’d have to find a date when it was available, of course, but that shouldn’t be difficult. Since there were fewer occupancies in the Towers there was less demand on the facilities these days. Indeed, as the idea for the reception formed in Mrs. Bliss’s mind it became increasingly clear to her that the affair (the concept of the party already beginning to snowball, transmuting itself from simple party to reception to affair; if she didn’t rein herself in at least a little, before she knew it she’d have a full-blown gala on her hands) would have to be catered. This was beyond some one-woman deal. From the first she hadn’t even wanted it to be and, even if she did, she knew she wasn’t up to the task of preparing the game room, let alone all that food, by herself. The more Mrs. Bliss thought about it the less enthusiasm she had. Who would she invite? If she invited her family, whoever was left, the remnants of the old gang in Chicago, her kids in Cincinnati and Providence, all her globe-trotting, scattered grandchildren and great-grandchildren, it would send the wrong signals. This wasn’t intended to be some last hurrah thing. All she’d meant was to introduce the happy couple to each other’s neighbors and some of her Florida friends. Maybe she would even send a special invitation to Wilcox in Houston if for no other reason than to witness the cure he’d wrought.
All right, so the snowball was starting to melt, break up under the heat of her cooled-down second thoughts. But that was all right, too. Now she didn’t have to worry about arranging for game rooms and caterers and all the foofaraw a gala would involve. Not that she was losing her enthusiasm for the idea of doing something for them, just for the overkill of her first hasty impressions. One thing, though. She had better stop planning for the thing (whatever it turned out to be) and do something before all that was left of the snowball was a great puddle.
Commit yourself, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, and decided she would fire off a telegram of her own, offering her congratulations to the bride and groom and announcing her intentions about the party.
Which was easier said than done.
About an hour after she phoned in her message, Western Union called to apologize. They were sorry, the operator told her, but at this point they weren’t accepting nonessential civilian communication between the United States and the cruise ships in that area of the Atlantic. Both telegraphic and all two-way air traffic had been put on hold while the weather emergency was still in effect. If she wished, she could cancel her message or, if she preferred, they’d file it with the rest of their backlog and send it first-priority once the ship was out of harm’s way.
“Harm’s way?”
“Once they’re sure which direction this fella’s gonna jump,” said the male operator at the other end of the line.
Even more out of hunch than superstition, Mrs. Bliss told Western Union to cancel altogether. She’d call back when the coast was clear.
But maybe it was superstition. It made her nervous (it always had) to fix on a specific date too long before its time. Even when she’d organized Maxine’s wedding she had postponed making the arrangements for as long as she could. Don’t get her wrong, she was crazy about George, she was rooting for their marriage, and it had nothing to do with losing the deposit or anything like that. It was only that Mrs. Bliss felt there was something just a little too cocksure about making long-range plans. Man proposes, God disposes. Something like that.
And now, too, something spooky about that out-of-harm’s-way business. She was familiar with the phrase. It was something they always dragged out in wartime, impending crisis. She didn’t like the sound of it, and though Western Union had been very polite and explained to her about keeping the traffic lanes open between Ellen’s boat and the land, once the United States was dragged into it, everything started to seem much too important and official sounding. The United States?
Mrs. Bliss turned on the television to see if they’d interrupt a program for a special news bulletin. Sure enough, she didn’t have long to wait. They cut away to an expert standing by at the National Hurricane Center and then leapfrogged to another expert at the U.S. Meteorological Survey in Atlanta, Georgia. Both men seemed very excited. Andrew’s winds were gusting from between 100 and 130 miles per hour and had been unofficially clocked as high as 185 miles per hour. If it didn’t veer to the east it was expected to hit the Bahamas with heroic force sometime in the middle of the night. It would be, both the Atlanta and Coral Gables guys agreed, the mother of all hurricanes. Alr
eady, all ships in the area had been instructed to change course in the hope of either outrunning or evading the storm that was moving along at about 25 knots. She didn’t know what a knot was exactly, but the experts couldn’t get over it. Between them they had over fifty-seven years in the weather business and neither could remember a storm packing such high wind velocities to travel at such a speed toward whatever would turn out to be its ultimate destination. Because usually the more furiously a hurricane’s winds revolved about its eye the more moisture it picked up from the sea and the heavier it became. The heavier it was the slower it traveled toward impact. This one, though, this one was a horse of a different color, and may the good Lord have mercy on whatever got in its way!
Mrs. Bliss, hooked, watched all the channels for the latest developments. Again and again she saw the same experts talking to each of the anchors on the major networks. Idly, she wondered if these experts were paid extra for going on the different shows. Officially, she supposed, they were civil servants. Probably, if it happened, they were paid under the table.
Even the local meteorologists were having a field day. They put their Skywatch and Doppler Weather Alert and Skywarn and Instant Color Weather Radar systems into play, all their latest, fancy, up-to-the-minute machinery. Their jackets were off, their collars and ties undone, their sleeves rolled up. Only the civil servants, Mrs. Bliss noticed, shvitzed in their buttoned, inexpensive, dress code suits, but everyone, from the TV meteorologists to the experts at the National Hurricane Center and U.S. Meteorological Survey served up a kind of short course on hurricanes. Vaguely, Mrs. Bliss was reminded of the lectures delivered by the community college professors who used to come to the Towers game rooms to talk about their disciplines.
It was very impressive, lulling, too, in a peculiar way, rather like the gardening, cooking, and home improvement shows she sometimes watched—programs for young homemakers: furniture stripping, interior decoration, foreign cooking. Before she knew it she was as involved in the science of these powerful storm systems as ever she’d been in an actual entertainment show, absorbed in all the interesting bits and pieces—the gossip of tempest. She learned, for example, that hurricanes could be two hundred to three hundred miles in diameter, that they were nurtured by low pressure fronts and rose in the east and moved west (just like the sun, just like the sun! worried Mrs. Ted Bliss) on the trade winds, that an eye of a hurricane was about twenty miles in diameter and traveled counterclockwise from between ten and fifteen miles per hour as the winds blew it along above the sea, sucking up the warm, evaporating ocean. She learned that storm clouds, called walls, surrounded the eye, that it was these that caused the most damage, kicking up dangerous waves, called storm surges, that forced the sea to rise several feet above normal. Especially destructive at high tide, they brought on terrific, murderous floods.
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