Mrs. Ted Bliss (12 page)

She was not resentful. Her sympathies were with her sex because that was the way
she
felt, too.

Indeed, if she resented anyone, it was her employer, Mrs. Dubow, she resented. A resentment that was something beyond and even greater than her fear of the terrifying woman who not only chased her through the confines of a dressmaker’s shop no larger than an ordinary shoe store, clacking her scissors and flicking a yellow measuring tape at her, but shouting at her, too, her mouth full of pins, and calling her names so vile she could only guess at their meaning and be more embarrassed than hurt. Because now she remembered just what it was Mrs. Dubow was supposed to have done to become the first wife in the history of Illinois ever required to pay alimony to the husband. She’d thrown acid in his face! Thrown
acid
at him, defiling him forever where the tenderest meat went, the sweetest fruits and most delicious candies.

Mrs. Ted Bliss shuddered.

Because there was a trade-off. A covenant almost. Women honored the men who put food on the table, who provided the table on which the food was put, and the men saved them. That was the trade-off. Men saved them. They took them out of awful places like Mrs. Dubow’s and put food on the table and kept all the books. Women
owed
it to them to be good-looking, they
owed
it to them that the shade of their dresses did not clash with the shade of their suits, to hold their shapes and do their level best to keep up their reflections in mirrors. It wasn’t vanity, it was duty. And it was what explained her calm when neighbors had marveled at her beauty, her almost invisible aging, the two or three baths she took each day. You needn’t have looked farther when people had complimented her than at the benign smile on Ted’s face (even in that last, malignant year) to see that she had kept up her end of the contract, had proved herself worthy of being saved.

So
of course
Mrs. Ted Bliss, having been saved once before by a man, and who saw no reason to fiddle with what worked, chose to see a man to save her this time, too, when her children thought she was going crazy.

Her therapist, Holmer Toibb, was not Jewish, and did not live in the Towers. He’d been recommended by Manny’s physician, who thought the lawyer had used the story of a depressed “friend” as a cover for his own bluff despondency. Manny, at sixty-eight, was at a difficult age. A few years into his retirement and the bloom off his freedom, the doctor thought Manny a perfect candidate for the sort of recreational therapeusis in which Toibb specialized, offering options to patients to open up ways that, in the early stages of their declining years, might lead them toward fresh interests in life. Himself in his sixties, Toibb had studied with Greener Hertsheim, practically the founder of recreational therapeusis, after twenty-or-so years still a relatively new branch of psychology whose practitioners eschewed the use of drugs and had no use for tie-ins with psychiatrists. Like a page out of the fifties when doctors of osteopathy faced off with chiropractors and spokesmen for the AMA on all-night radio talk shows, RT, in southern Florida at least, had become a sort of eighties substitute for all the old medical conspiracy theories. Mrs. Bliss, apolitical and passive almost to a fault, couldn’t get enough of controversial call-in shows. She had no position on the Warren Commission findings, didn’t know if she was for or against detente, supply-side economics, any of the hot-button issues of the times, including even the battle between traditional psychiatry and the recreational therapists, yet she ate up polemics, dissent, her radio turned up practically to full volume—she was deaf, yet even at full throttle their voices on the radio came to her as moderate, disciplined, but she was aware of their anger and edge and imagined them shouting—somehow comforted by all that fury, the baleboosteh busyness and passion in their speech. It was how, distracted from thoughts of Ted in the mutual family earth back in, and just under, Chicago, she managed to drift off to sleep.

So she was totally prepared when Toibb undertook to explain the principles of recreational therapeusis to her, and what he proposed (should he accept her as his patient) to do. Indeed, she rather enjoyed having it all explained to her, rather as if, thought Mrs. Bliss, Toibb was a salesman going over the good points in his wares. Faintly, although she was familiar with most of it from the call-in shows, she had the impression, always enjoyable to her, that he was fleshing out the full picture, a fact that (should he accept her as a patient or not) she liked to believe gave her the upper hand.

“I don’t want to leave you with a false impression,” Holmer Toibb said.

“No,” Dorothy said.

“You’d have to undergo an evaluation.”

“Of course.”

“A medical evaluation.”

“You’re the doctor,” Dorothy said.

“I’m not a doctor,” Holmer Toibb said. “I’m not even a Ph.D. You have to see a physician, someone to do a work-up on you before I’d consent to treat you.”

“Specimens? Needles?”

“Well,” Toibb said, “whatever it takes to give you a clean bill of health.”

Mrs. Bliss looked concerned.

“What?” Toibb said.

“Nothing,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss, “it’s just. You know something, Doctor?”

“I’m not a doctor.”

“What do I call you you’re not a doctor?”

“Holmer. My first name is Holmer.”

“I can’t call you your first name. I won’t call you anything.”

“Suits me,” said Holmer Toibb. “So what were you going to tell me?”

“Oh,” said Dorothy, “Ted, my husband, may he rest, took care of all of the paperwork. Medicare, supplemental, Blue Cross, Blue Shield—all the forms. The year he lost his life even. You know something, I haven’t seen a doctor since. Isn’t that crazy? It ain’t just the forms. I can’t look at them.”

“Here,” Toibb said, “use these. Please don’t cry, Mrs. Bliss.”

She was crying because, in a way, it was the last straw. What was she, stupid? Frank and Maxine had shpilkes to get home, out of Florida, away from her. To ease their consciences they dumped her with Manny from the building. Speaking personally, she liked him. Manny was a nice man. Generous, a lovely neighbor. She needed him and he always tried to be there for her as they said nowadays, but you know what? He was a clown, Manny. He was putting on a show. Perhaps for Mrs. Bliss, or other people in the building, maybe even for God. But a show was a show and anyway every time Manny did something nice for her, every single time, Dorothy felt like someone too poor to buy her own being offered a Thanksgiving turkey. So of course, overwhelmed as she was by the prospect of paperwork, official forms for the government, and the supplemental insurance gonifs, of course she was crying.

“Mrs. Bliss,” Holmer Toibb said.

“I’m not Mrs. Bliss.”

“You’re not?”

“You’re not a doctor, my husband is dead, I’m not a Mrs.”

“Please,” he said, “please Mrs. Bliss, all right, I’ll see you. If you want me to see you I’ll see you.”

That was their first appointment.

“Just out of curiosity, Doctor,” she said, and this time he didn’t correct her, “just out of curiosity, I don’t look healthy?”

“I’m sorry?”

“I look frail? My color is bad?”

“That’s not what I said, Mrs. Bliss.” And this time she didn’t correct him either. “I’ve no expertise in these matters. It’s something else entirely. I don’t treat people if there’s a chemical imbalance. If they’re bipolar personalities, or suffer various mental disorders. I thought you understood that.”

“I was a little worried.”

“Well,” Toibb said, “worried. If you were only worried. Worried’s a good sign.”

“Well, when you said…”

“I have to be sure,” Toibb said. “Only if they’re at loose ends, sixes and sevens. Only if they have the blues or feel genuinely sorry for themselves. Otherwise…” He left the rest of his sentence unfinished.

Mrs. Bliss wasn’t sure either of them understood a single word of what the other was saying, but she felt oddly buoyed, even a little intoxicated by the sense she had that she was adrift in difficult waters. For all the times she had gone on picnics with Ted and the children to the Point on Lake Michigan, or out to the Dunes, for all the summers they’d been to resorts in Michigan City, Indiana, with their Olympic-size pools, or even, for that matter, to the one on the roof of the Towers building in which she lived, Mrs. Bliss had never learned to swim. She had taken lessons from lifeguards in the shallow ends of a dozen pools but without the aid of a life preserver she couldn’t manage even to float. Though water excited her, its mysterious, incongruous clarity and weight, its invisible powers of erosion and incubation—all its wondrous displacements. This was a little like that. The times, for example, Mrs. Bliss, giddy, alarmed, suspended in inner tubes suspended in life jackets, hovered in the deep end weightless in water, her head and body unknown yards and feet above drowning. This conversation was a little like that. She felt at once interested and threatened, its odd cryptic quality vaguely reminiscent of the times her Maxine or her Frank or her Marvin were home on vacation trying to explain to her the deep things they had learned in their colleges.

“…like the collapse of arteries under a heart attack,” Holmer Toibb said. “The heart muscle tries to compensate by prying open collateral vessels. That’s what we’ll work on. It’s what this therapy is all about—a collateralization of interests.”

“What heart attack?” asked Mrs. Bliss, alarmed.

“Oh, no,” Toibb said, “it’s an analogy.”

“You said heart attack.”

“It was only an example.”

There was little history of heart attacks in Mrs. Bliss’s family. What generally got them was cancer, some of the slower neuropathies. (Despite her sealed ear, Mrs. Bliss’s deafness was largely due to a progressive nerve disorder of the inner ear, a sort of auditory glaucoma.) Yet it was heart disease of which she was most frightened. It was her experience that things broke down. Lightbulbs burned out, the most expensive appliances went on the fritz. Washers and dryers, ranges, refrigerators, radios, cars. No matter how carefully one obeyed the directions in the service manuals, everything came fatally flawed. How many times had she sent back improperly prepared fish in restaurants, how many times were her own roasts underdone, the soup too salty? You watered the plants, careful to give them just the right amount, not too much and not too little, moving them from window to window for the best sun, yet leaves yellowed and fell off and the plant died. Because there was poison even in a rose. So how, wondered Mrs. Bliss, could a heart not fail? A muscle, wound and set to ticking even in the womb. How should it endure its first birthday, its tenth, and twentieth? And how, even after you subtracted those two or three years that the man in Immigration tacked on, could it not be winding down after seventy or so had passed? How could a little muscle of tissue and blood, less substantial than the heavy, solid, working metal parts in a courthouse clock, that you couldn’t see, and couldn’t feel until it was already coming apart in your chest, hold up to the wear and tear of just staying alive for more than seventy years of even a happy life? It was like the veiled mystery of the invisible depths between herself and her death in the water of a swimming pool.

He wanted to see her again later that same week, he told her, and sent her home with an assignment but, so far as Dorothy could tell, without starting her in on her therapy.

“Tell me,” Holmer Toibb said the next time she came, “what name is on your mailbox?” It was the first real question he’d ever asked her, and Mrs. Bliss, who thought it was for purposes of billing, which, since this was the third or fourth time they’d seen each other and he still hadn’t started to treat her, she rather resented. In fact, she was still stung by his heart attack remark.

“Mr. and Mrs. Ted Bliss,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss.

“And Ted’s dead…how long?”

“My husband passed away three years ago,” she said primly.

“Three
years?
He kicked the bucket three years ago?”

“He’s gone, may he rest, three years next month.”

“And does he get much mail at this address since he cashed in his chips, may he rest?”

Mrs. Ted Bliss glared at him.

He didn’t even pretend to acknowledge her anger. “What,” Holmer Toibb said, “he
ain’t
dead? Come on, Dorothy, it’s been three years, it’s not natural. Well, it is, actually. Many women keep their husband’s name on the box after they’ve lost them. Even more than three years, the rest of their lives. It’s guilt and shame, not respect, and it doesn’t make them happy. You have to make an accommodation. You want to show me your list? Where’s your list? Show me your list. Did you bring it?”

The list Toibb referred to was her assignment—a list of her interests—and though she had brought it and actually been at some pains to compose it, she’d been hurt by this disrespectful man and was determined now not to let him see it. If she’d been bolder or less constrained in the presence of men, she might have ended their conference right then and, scorcher or no scorcher, gone back out in the sun to wait for her bus. But she was practical as well as vulnerable and saw no point in cutting off her nose to spite her face. Also—she knew the type—he’d probably charge for the appointment even if she broke it off before it had properly begun. Who am I fooling, Dorothy thought, how many times have I put Band-Aids on after cutting myself clipping coupons out of the papers? Climb down off your high horse before you break something.

Mrs. Bliss reddened. “I didn’t write one out,” she told him, avoiding his eyes.

“Well, what you remember then.”

Dorothy was glad he’d insisted. She hadn’t been to school since she was a young girl in Russia and, while she still remembered some of those early lessons and even today could picture the primers in which she’d first learned to read and been introduced to the mysteries of the simplest arithmetic and science and historical overviews, or seen on maps a rough version of the world’s geography, education had been the province of the males in her family, and she could still recall her guilty resentment of her younger brothers, Philip and Jake, and how they’d been permitted to take books overnight to study at home while she’d merely been allowed to collect the books of the other girls in the class and put them back on the shelves each afternoon and pass them out again the next morning. She’d never been given anything as important as an “assignment.” Even when Manny taught her to make out her own checks and fill out deposit slips, list the entries and withdrawals in her passbook, even when he’d taught her how to work her solar calculator and balance her checkbook, he’d been right there at her side to help her. He’d never given her one single assignment. It was a little like being a young girl back in Russia.