Mrs. Ted Bliss

by Stanley Elkin

  “When I went out on my balcony,” said Mrs. Bliss, “I saw big pieces of wood covering a lot of the glass doors and windows. Can I get those?”

  “Oy vay,” moaned the Jew hater, “if you’d called ten minutes sooner.”

  “I’ve been calling for twenty minutes. The line was busy.”

  “Yeah, there’s been a run on the four-by-eights.”

  “You’re all out?”

  “Well,” Moprado said, “there’s still a couple in back but I wouldn’t feel right selling them to you. Warped. Damaged goods.”

  “Oh.”

  “Probably I could pound out most of the flaws. It’s just the building would have to charge you the same as if you were getting first quality.”

  “How much?” she said.

  He quoted an outrageous price, three times, maybe four, the rate she’d have had to pay if a hurricane weren’t on the way.

  “That’s steep,” she said. She could almost see the long face he put on for her at the other end of the phone, his helpless shrug, but when he spoke his voice was bright with consideration and possibility.

  “Tell me, you got someone to slap them up for you?”

  “No.”

  “Tell you what,” he said, “I could drop by and give you a hand.” He’d been pretending to look at his watch now. “I can’t tie this phone up much longer. I hate to rush you but there’s probably half a dozen people trying to get through. You ought to decide. The staff’s getting shpilkes down here, it’s got its own tsuris. Their own families to deal with, last-minute stuff. Any minute the Towers will be emptying out like rats jumping a sinking ship.”

  Mrs. Bliss didn’t understand why, but she had a sort of vision, a kind of freestanding knowledge like her shot-in-the-dark certainty of Francis Moprado’s hypocritical pantomime of sadness, helplessness, recovery, and urgency. She didn’t so much see as feel, visceral to her as sour stomach, raw as sore throat or tender glands, that whatever was going to happen had already happened. It was aftermath, the solemn embering end of the world. Everywhere, filling the landscape of Mrs. Bliss’s vision were people, in pairs or groups of three, four, but never more than five or six, clumps and clusters of the lost, encrusted in dirt and filth or in some ragged cleanliness like a scour of rough handling, the work of wind and water, say, a fellowship of bunches, of tufts and clumps of survival drifting in place as if they were trying to stamp blood and feeling back into their feet. Great drifts of the milling, great swarms of the solitary.

  Moving in and out through the crowd were gangs of profiteers doing a kind of triage among the numbed and needy casualties, sizing them up, pushing their wares, pitching them, selling them four-by-eights, flashlights, batteries, candles, first-aid kits, generators, matches, portable radios, tubfuls of bathwater at a monstrous going rate, whatever the traffic would bear. Gulling the remnant, ripping them off. Disaster profiteers, they gathered about the disparate rabble selling them canned goods like it was going out of style, like, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, like, my God, Ted profiteering on meat and food stamps during the war!

  “I don’t want to handlen with you, Mrs.,” Moprado said, “but if you want them up I need at least an hour.”

  “Want what up?” Mrs. Bliss said.

  “The boards,” he said. “The sooner I get started the quicker you’ll be safe. We’ve got a pretty narrow window of opportunity here. Time and tide. This damn storm’s got bells on….Mrs. Bliss? Mrs. Bliss?”

  “I’m sorry,” she told him. “I’ve changed my mind.”

  “You’ve changed your mind? You know what the hurricane could do to your place in two shakes of a lamb’s tail? You got any idea?”

  “Maybe,” she said. “I think so.”

  “I’m not promising there wouldn’t be damage. There’s no guarantees. But if you put up plywood you’ll definitely be cutting your losses. Plus it looks better for the insurance. That you made an effort….Mrs. Bliss?”

  “No,” she said, “I’d like to see it. I don’t want to be shut up in a dark box when it happens. I’ve been watching the radar on TV for two days. At least I ought to see it.”

  By ten that evening it had begun to rain. Nothing spectacular. Without her hearing aids in she wouldn’t have heard it at all. She might even have gone out on her balcony to see the rain fall into Biscayne Bay had it been coming down a little harder, but now, in the dark, there’d be nothing to see. Sometimes, during a shower, protected from the weather by the overhang, she’d venture outside to watch the rain dimple the water in the bay or lap against the sides of yachts riding at anchor there. At night, after the sun had gone down. It was interesting to her how snug the people aboard those boats must feel, the wet safety of all those bobbing, cradled craft a queer luxury of displacement. She, for example, didn’t feel nearly as secure in her rooted, stock-still condominium, but borrowed her comfort from theirs, tapping into their coze and filled with a light wonder that they didn’t miss it, her faint stealth adding to her contentment. It was like staring into fire licking at a hearth, and she could have remained like that for hours if the consciousness of her ancient body had not intruded.

  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 afte
r 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.

  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, bu
t 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.