Mrs. Ted Bliss

by Stanley Elkin

  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.

  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 i
t 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.

  “Mrs. Bliss? Mrs. Bliss.”

  She thought she could hear someone call her name, but without her hearing aids she couldn’t be sure.

  “Mrs. Bliss?”

  Furtively, she put her hand into a breast pocket of her pants suit and quietly as she could fumbled for a hearing aid. She didn’t think she’d made any noise but the appliance wasn’t in yet so she couldn’t be sure.

  “Mrs. Bliss, are you there?”

  “Who’s that, who’s there?”

  She hoped it wasn’t Francis Moprado come to murder her for not allowing him to board up her sliding doors.

  “It’s me.”

  “What do you want, how’d you get in?”

  “Passkey.” The security guard walked in front of Mrs. Bliss’s chair. “I come to check you out.”

  “Oh, Louise,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss. “I thought you were somebody else.”

  “No,” she said, “it’s me. Elaine Munez’s daughter.” She turned the batonlike flashlight on herself for identification.

  “I fell asleep,” Mrs. Bliss said. Inexplicably, she felt a need to account for herself, her wanton presence in her condominium in an abandoned building during a hurricane. Idly, she wondered if this were a citable offense, if she could be written up, decided that trying to explain would make too long a story. She wouldn’t fight it.

  “Did you see my mother?”

  “What?”

  “Did you see my mother? I been trying to call since the first reports on my scanner. She don’t answer, Mrs. Bliss.”

  “Darling,” said Mrs. Bliss, “the phones aren’t working.”

  “Before they ain’t working.”

  “People have been leaving the building, Louise. I saw from my balcony. It could have been yesterday. The day before yesterday.”

  “She didn’t sign out,” said the security guard. “You got to leave your name with the security guard you go away overnight. I check the books. No Elaine Munez.”

  “Well, everyone was in such a hurry.”

  “She know the rule.”

  “There must have been long lines. Everybody was honking their horns. Does Mother still drive?”

  “No.”

  “There,” Mrs. Bliss said, “you see? Her driver was giving her the bum’s rush. She probably didn’t have time for the formalities.”

  “Not the formalities,” Louise said. She was close to hysteria. “She know how I worry.”

  “You’ll see, Mother’s all right. Probably she tried to get a message to you. Everyone was in such a hurry.”

  Was she crying? It was too dark to see but it seemed to Mrs. Bliss that the strange girl was crying.

  “I come to guard her,” Louise explained. “To protect her from bandits and stranglers.”

  “Oh, Louise,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss.

  “It isn’t secure,” Louise said, shaking her head desolately. “I’ll tell you something,” she whispered hoarsely. Remarkably, Dorothy could hear every word. She didn’t even have to lean forward, as if there were something in the complicated register of her alarm so insistent it wiped out all silence. “The building ain’t vacant!”

  “You checked the sign-out ledger. Did many stay?”

  “How hard it would be to sign out and stay behind? It make a good alibi,” she said professionally.

  Mrs. Bliss looked toward the mad, improbable woman. Was it possible she knew what she was talking about? And recalled her paranoia in the hall when she’d called out her name like a talisman and stealthily tried all the doorknobs. But somehow her fear had been short-circuited. Sure, she thought, fear falls away, too.

  “She could be anywhere,” Louise Munez said desperately. “She could be anywhere on any floor in any building.” Then, like a child, she said, “I want my mother, I want my mother,” and Mrs. Ted Bliss, who wanted her husband and her dead son Marvin, but now not so much, and her other children, too, and the gang, and all the others whom she loved who’d ever lived, but not now not so much, even Junior Yellin, even Ellen, was astonished to realize that the strange girl—she’d met her when she first came to the Towers—was no longer a girl but a woman in her fifties who even at that age was still forever frozen into whatever loony, skewed relationship with her mother had caused their breach and disappointed the mother forever. (Because of all the things that fall away—and everything did, everything, the whole kit and caboodle, even her condo, even the Buick LeSabre, the color of which she no longer remembered—thought Mrs. Bliss, maybe it’s only madness you can hang onto.) And felt something warm, even feverish, take her hand. It was Louise Munez’s hands, covering her own. “Oh,” she said, “I have frighten you.”

  “No,” said Mrs. Bliss.

  “I will wait with you,” she declared. “I will see you safe through the hurricane.”

  Mrs. Bliss removed her hand gently from Louise’s and held her arms open. In the darkness she lifted her left hand to Louise’s head and began to stroke the dry hair.

  Because everything else falls away. Family, friends, love fall away. Even madness stilled at last. Until all that’s left is obligation.

  A BIOGRAPHY OF STANLEY ELKIN

  Stanley Elkin (1930–1995) was an award-winning and critically acclaimed novelist, short story writer, and essayist. He was celebrated for his wit, elegant prose, and poignant fiction that often satirized American culture.

  Born in the Bronx, New York, Elkin moved to Chicago at the age of three. Throughout his childhood, he spent his summers with his family in a bungalow community on New Jersey’s Ramapo River. The commu
nity provided many families an escape from the city heat, and some of Elkin’s later writing, including The Rabbi of Lud (1987), was influenced by the time he spent there.

  Elkin attended undergraduate and graduate school at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he received his bachelor’s degree in English in 1952 and his PhD in 1961. His dissertation centered around William Faulkner, whose writing style Elkin admitted echoing unintentionally until the 1961 completion of his short story “On a Field, Rampant,” which was included in the book Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers (1966). Elkin would later say that story marked the creation of his personal writing style. While in school, Elkin participated in radio dramas on the campus radio station, a hobby that would later inform his novel The Dick Gibson Show (1971), which was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1972.

  In 1953, he married Joan Jacobson, with whom he would have three children. Elkin’s postgraduate studies were interrupted in 1955 when he was drafted to the U.S. Army. He served at Fort Lee in Virginia until 1957 and then returned to Illinois to resume his education. In 1960, Elkin began teaching in the English department at Washington University in St. Louis, where he would remain for the rest of his career.

  Elkin’s novels were universally hailed by critics. His second novel, A Bad Man (1967), established Elkin as “one of the flashiest and most exciting comic talents in view,” according to the New York Times Book Review. Despite his diagnosis with multiple sclerosis in 1972, Elkin continued to write regularly, even incorporating the disease into his novel The Franchiser (1976), which was released to great acclaim. Elkin won his first National Book Critics Circle Award with George Mills (1982), an achievement he repeated with Mrs. Ted Bliss (1995). His string of critical successes continued throughout his career. He was a National Book Award finalist two more times with Searches and Seizures (1974) and The MacGuffin (1991), and a PEN Faulkner finalist with Van Gogh’s Room at Arles (1994). Elkin was also the recipient of the Longview Foundation Award, the Paris Review Humor Prize, Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellowships, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities, and the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, as well as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.