Mrs. Ted Bliss (37 page)

And she didn’t care to hear any mishegoss about repression, thank you very much. No. If she wanted no part of Junior Yellin right then it was because he embarrassed her. His remark about peeing in the ocean was the least of it. It wasn’t
any
one thing. His plans for a museum, what he’d said to the dealers, all the silly, heartbreaking highwire of which he was not only capable but proud, even the fatuity about the superiority of his metal detector, the baloney about the “spot” he was looking for, his crap about the demographics—all his crap. It was amazing, a revelation. She had perhaps at last met a man (taking nothing away from the natural gifts and bona fides of his manhood) whom she couldn’t entirely trust.

But she was his last connection to earth, the life he’d known before he’d become such a caricature of himself. How could she tell him goodbye and good luck, how could she write him off?

Because, sadly, the truth was that if she was his last connection to earth, he was pretty much hers, as well. Maxine, thank God, lived; Frank, whatever his new, changed circumstances, did. George, Judith, and James; Ellen and Barry; Janet and Donny and all of them, thank God. But there was no getting away from it. She was at an age where distance and separation had been transformed into something more important than memory. Or, if not memory (she was too old to tell herself lies), then at least involvement, hands-on concern, the simple day-to-day of all her maternals and sororals and familials down past the most distant cousin to the last of her mathematically attenuate mishpocheh.

She loved them. In some platonic piece of her heart they loomed larger than nations, than civilization itself. It wasn’t a case of out-of-sight out-of-mind. It was much more complicated. As complicated as distance. She was old. She had her health but she was old, and it would have been as difficult for her, as much of a mental and physical impossibility and strain, to bear down on them, on their collective griefs and individual concerns, with the brute force of her concentration as it would have been for her to catch a rubber pelota in the clawlike cesta at the jai alai to send it flying back at the wall, or run after the rabbit at the dog track.

She still spoke to them regularly on the long distance, but the truth was she spent more time idly chatting with Louise Munez at her high-security kiosk and newsstand than with all her children and grandchildren and relatives combined.

No, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, though she wouldn’t go in with him on his schemes, she couldn’t abandon Yellin. No more than she could have stopped putting through calls to her children, or taking them either. But, face it, she was pulling in her horns almost as deliberately as she was just now taking up her tools and substandard, unbelled, whistleless metal detector and starting off in the direction of the ridiculous dune buggy for the long ride home under the unrelenting sun.

ELEVEN

M
rs. Ted Bliss’s daughter-in-law Ellen had used her two-week vacation from the shoe store to come down to visit from Chicago.

Typical, Mrs. Bliss thought, the woman didn’t even wait to be invited, just picked up the phone one night to announce when she’d be arriving. She wanted, she said, to treat Dorothy to lunch. Were there any particularly good health-food restaurants her mother-in-law had not been to?

“I haven’t been to any,” Dorothy said. “When I eat out, I eat out. I don’t go for a treatment.”

“Oh, Ma,” Ellen said lightly, “what am I going to do with you? Never mind, I’ll ask Wilcox. He’ll know a place.”

Wilcox was Dr. Wilcox, Ellen’s holistic chiropractor. His practice was in Houston, Texas, and three times a year Ellen flew there to be adjusted and to find out what was new in the New Age.

Because the truth was Mrs. Bliss had a blind spot when it came to the question of her problematic daughter-in-law. Though she knew better, she still held something of a grudge against her son’s widow. After all—she knew she was being ridiculous—Marvin had died on the woman’s watch. This was before all the mishegoss of the herbal teas and honey; the wheatless, flourless breads and leaf jams; the baked soybean stand-ins for meat and the vegetable compote dessert substitutes. It was before all the noxious, mysterious beverages she had learned to mix in her blender, before all her long, awful witness of her husband’s horribly drawn-out death. In fairness, though, it was only tit for tat. Because on Ellen’s side, too, wasn’t there the same unspoken accusation? If Marvin had died on his wife’s watch, hadn’t he also died on his mother’s? Of course, neither of them ever mentioned to the other their vague mutual suspicions. Though they screamed at each other plenty and, behind one another’s backs, passed remarks, Ellen finding fault with her mother-in-law’s stolid Russian reluctance to consider other options, or color outside the lines of her character, and Mrs. Bliss resenting her daughter-in-law’s resentment, her unyielding attempts to look for miracles, stubborn as a cultist or orthodox. Did she think Wilcox some magician who could push back the borders of death, protect her with elixirs and potions? (And wasn’t Janet still in India? India, noch! Why not Oz?) That having surrendered poor Marvin to death at the hands of the doctors (who had failed her only after Marvin died), she could so arrange things with her diets and ointments and fancy Houston, Texas, backrubs and spells that no one would ever have to die again.

It wasn’t the first time Ellen had visited Dorothy on a moment’s notice, and, though the women didn’t get along well, didn’t for that matter even like each other much, for Marvin’s sake neither wished to call it quits. Mrs. Bliss even had a grudging admiration for her son’s wife. It was, in an odd way, a little like the esteem in which she held men. After her husband died, Ellen had become astonishingly independent. With no Manny in her life to give her widow tips she’d gone on not only to raise two very sweet children but to become a genuinely first-class businesswoman. Salesperson of the Year eleven of the fourteen or fifteen years she’d been with Chandler’s Shoes on Randolph Street (the flagship of the big Chicago chain), she had won giant, bigscreen television sets, state-of-the-art computers, all-expense-paid trips to London and Cancun, grand prizes of every description. One particularly good year they had presented her with five thousand dollars’ worth of company stock.

But then she remembered Providence, the seder at Frank’s. Her son had paid for Ellen’s airplane tickets, for Barry’s. Why had she let him? Mrs. Bliss wasn’t one to wonder what this one or that one did or did not have in the bank, but she knew damn well that her daughter-in-law could afford to buy her own airline tickets, Barry’s, too. Why did she make herself out to be such a chozzer?

Though, of course, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, that wasn’t putting the case accurately. Anyway, Mrs. Bliss didn’t really believe Ellen’s greed had anything to do with money. It was greed of a baser sort. It was oy vay iz mir greed, poor-me greed, the greed of insistent vulnerability and grudge, the pressed, put-upon passion of complaint—a greed that lived by its own jealous counsel and kept its own sharp accounts, bookkeeping loss like an underwriter. It was almost, had Mrs. Bliss understood the complicated laws of the lines of succession, a sort of royalty by remove. Thus Ellen (according to Ellen according to Mrs. Ted Bliss) would always qualify as Marvin’s chief mourner, outranking Maxine who had merely been his little sister and had a good, living, faithful husband, and a beautiful daughter (Judith), and entrepreneurial James; and Frank, the baby of the outfit, but the one who published books and had celebrity and whose son, Donny, was the richest and smartest of the bunch. If she had competition about who had taken the heaviest hit it had to be, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, Mrs. Ted Bliss herself. And Dorothy she’d have written off because though Dorothy had lost her son and her husband, too, at least had had the husband long enough to see most of her children married and to have grandchildren. Also, Ellen’s son, Barry, though a kind and gentle man, was a lightweight, and Janet, her daughter, a lost, almost middle-aged spinster, was in India, searching for her life in a place she’d never been where she could ever conceivably have lost it. These were the reasons she took airfare from Frank, and fought like cats and dogs with Dorothy.

Which she proceeded to do the very day she arrived in Florida.

Dorothy was scrounging around in the cupboards.

“Ma, why are you standing on that chair?”

“I’m looking to see what I can make for supper.”

“Do you want to fall? Is that what you want? To fall and possibly break a hip?”

“Did I fall yesterday? Did I fall once all the years you weren’t around to catch me? I didn’t fall yesterday, and I didn’t fall thirty-five years before yesterday. You know what I do when a lightbulb burns out in the ceiling fixture and the maintenance momzers lay down on the job? I get up on a chair and change it myself!”

“Ma, you’re playing with fire. Get down, I’ll find what you’re looking for. You know,” she said, “if you’d tip the man a few dollars you wouldn’t have to put yourself at risk.”

“Sport,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss, “big sport.” She let herself cautiously down from the chair. “There’s nothing here, not even a can of soup. We’ll go shopping tomorrow. I’ll see what’s in the freezer.”

“Not for me,” her daughter-in-law said.

“There’s lamb chops, there’s chicken. There’s leftover pot roast. There’s some delicious soup I froze.”

“You know that stuff’s poison, don’t you?”

“What’s poison? I don’t make poison.”

“Of course not,” Ellen said. “You’re a wonderful cook. It’s just something Dr. Wilcox told me the last time I was in Houston. Freezer burn breaks down the nutrient molecules in meat and makes dangerous microbes. Fresh meat’s bad enough but leftovers will kill you.”

“You have a freezer. You freeze food.”

“I threw it out when I heard. I threw out over a hundred dollars’ worth of meat. Just like that I got rid of it.”

Mrs. Bliss glared at her crazy daughter-in-law. “Your father-in-law was a butcher. You fed your family years on free meat.”

“Yes,” she said coolly, “I know.”

“You’ve got something to say, say it.”

“I’ve got nothing to say,” Ellen said diffidently.

She needed this? She didn’t need this. She’d lived alone too long ever to have to bicker with people again. (And wasn’t that one of the chief purposes of retirement, even of leaving the places you’d lived most of your life, the people you’d lived with?) So the signs and prospects for the vacation didn’t look so hot. Indeed, one of the first things Ellen had said after she kissed Mrs. Bliss and was inside the door was that she’d left her return ticket open-ended.

“What, I’m on trial, Ellen?”

“Ma,” she’d said pointedly, “I think we both are.”

This was a Tuesday. Mrs. Bliss knew she’d have to stay over a Saturday night to qualify for the discount. This meant the shortest she’d be staying was, what, five nights. What would she do with her? Just the problem of feeding her seemed insurmountable. There was nothing in the house. Ellen wouldn’t eat anything from the freezer, and she’d already alerted Mrs. Bliss to her thing about the health restaurants. Drek! Reeds and straw!

“Milchiks?” Dorothy suggested.

“Dairy, Ma?” Ellen said. “Are you trying to kill yourself?”

“With what? A whitefish? An egg? A slice of cheese and fruit?”

That first night Ellen prepared a salad for the two of them. Mrs. Bliss was out of kale, haricot beans, eggplant, and pumpkin, so she improvised with tomato, lettuce, some cucumber, and onion. She found a box of dry, uncooked oatmeal and sprinkled a liberal handful over both their plates.

Mrs. Bliss tried, but could barely get down a single mouthful. She was wiping bits of oatmeal from the corners of her lips with a paper napkin while Ellen studied her narrowly.

“Ma?”

“What?”

“I’m not trying to upset you,” she said.

Instantly, Mrs. Ted Bliss was overcome by a sense of shame and guilt. She crumpled the napkin and laid it in her lap.

“It’s all right,” Dorothy said. “I should have remembered about your special dietary needs and laid in what you like. But you know, sweetheart, it’s harder than keeping kosher shopping for somebody so frum about what she eats. Tomorrow,” she promised, “tomorrow we’ll go shopping. First thing in the morning, before it gets hot.”

“Fine, Ma, whatever,” her daughter-in-law said, “but you know,” she said, “I really don’t mean to upset you, I don’t. Everyone’s entitled to live their life as they please. That goes without saying, but what I’m suggesting is for your own good. May I ask you something personal, Ma?”

Something personal? She wanted to ask her something personal? An eighty-two-year-old widow? This would be good, this would be very, very good. Mrs. Bliss’s guilt disappeared as if it had never existed.

“Sure,” she said, “as personal as you please. Think up your most personal question and ask away. Go ahead, shoot.”

“Have you ever had a high colonic rice enema?”

“A what?”

“Coffee beans, then. Wilcox thinks highly of coffee bean enemas, too.”

“Ahh,
Wilcox.
”

“I could give you one. Wilcox showed me, I know what I’m doing.”

Wonderful, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss. Now she knew what they could do together while her daughter-in-law was there waiting out her stay-over-Saturday discount. They could give each other enemas. First Ellen could give her a coffee bean enema, then they’d trade off and Dorothy could give her daughter-in-law a lovely rice enema. Coffee beans, rice. It was six of one, half a dozen of the other. Tomorrow, tomorrow they would lay in provisions.

“No enemas,” Mrs. Bliss said.

“Ma, I see how you eat. I don’t think you know how they can clean out your system.”

“No enemas. Enemas are out, no enemas.”

“All right, all right,” Ellen said, “don’t get so excited. It’s been a long day. I had to eat that airplane food. Would you object very much if
I
took one? I brought my own enema bag of course. There’s a box of wild rice in my suitcase.”

It was at least half a minute before Mrs. Bliss could answer. “Use the guest bathroom,” she pronounced austerely. “There’s two cans of deodorant spray in the linen cabinet. One is Mint, the other is Floral Bouquet. Please use the mint before you give yourself the enema and the floral bouquet afterward. Yeah, it’s been a long day for me, too. When I finish the dishes I think I’ll go to bed.”