Mrs. Ted Bliss (38 page)

“Ma, sit still. I’ll do the dishes.”

“No, Ellen,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss, “I really wish you wouldn’t.”

So she was crazy, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss in bed that night. What difference did it make, did it make, really? She had been a good wife to her son. Yes, and an excellent mother when you considered that she’d raised her children practically by herself. Her looniness was only a kind of grief, finally, and Mrs. Bliss, whose guilt had passed, once again started to feel her shame. She began to cry so softly that with her hearing aid out she was aware she wept only when the tears wet her cheeks.

They shopped so efficiently the next morning it took just over half the time it usually did for Mrs. Bliss to do her marketing. Dorothy pushed the cart while Ellen went down the aisles selecting various unfamiliarly shaped cans of strange foodstuffs—raw, unprocessed organics, pulps of queer fruits, minced game, oddball packets of herbs, Oriental chowders. They would have been through in even less time if Ellen hadn’t stopped to read all the labels, occasionally pausing before familiar, popular brands, and reading those labels, too, clucking her tongue in contempt at the high sodium and fat levels listed on them. In the produce section she fairly squealed in approval and surprise whenever she came across the exotic vegetables and fruits of distant third-world countries.

“At least it won’t take us long at the checkout,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss.

“Why’s that, Ma?”

“They don’t make coupons for this stuff.”

On the way back Ellen was insistent about paying for both their bus fares. It was her treat, she said, and wouldn’t take no for an answer.

“You know, Ma,” Ellen said when they were putting away what Mrs. Bliss couldn’t quite bring herself to think of as groceries, “there’s really no point in you going out in this heat.”

“No? What should I do, ask the neighbors to do my shopping?”

“You could call up and have it delivered. I’m sure in a community where over half the people are retired the stores offer all kinds of services.”

“Sure,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss, “and you know what they’d charge? An arm and a leg.”

“What are you saving it for, Ma? Your golden years?”

This was some Ellen, this Ellen. Daughter-in-law or no daughter-in-law, and mother of her grandchildren (one of whom, Janet, off in India watching the tigers churn themselves into butter, she hadn’t seen in years) or no mother of her grandchildren, she was a perfect bully of a woman. She had an answer and a remark for everything. No wonder she’d done so well for herself in retail shoes. Which brought up a small point Mrs. Bliss had wanted to ask about for years but the woman made her so angry, she always forgot. Now, while the iron was hot, she decided to strike.

“Your chiropractor?”

“What about him?”

“Isn’t he a special sort of chiropractor?”

“Holistic,” Ellen said.

“Yes, holistic,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss, “that’s right.”

“What about him?” Ellen said still more defensively.

“I forget, ain’t that where the mind and the body are the same thing?”

“He treats the whole person. What about it?”

“Nothing. I was just wondering why you always wear earth shoes.”

“They’re not earth shoes, Ma. They’re customized. You can’t get them without a prescription.”

“They’re flat like earth shoes.”

“They’re not earth shoes.”

“I see,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss. “How come I never see you in high heels? Not at the biggest affairs.”

“High heels are very bad for you. They ruin your posture; they can throw out your back.”

“Aha!” said Mrs. Ted Bliss.

“What are you talking about?”

“You
sell
high heels! You make practically your whole living selling high heels! And all those prizes and trips? You can’t tell me those are from carpet slippers. I see what they get for high heels. The markup’s all in high heels. Ask yourself, Ellen, how many people’s backs have you thrown out in your time?”

“Caveat emptor,” Ellen said primly.

It was an absurd conversation and Mrs. Bliss knew it. Nor did she feel particularly proud of having bested her daughter-in-law. It was no way to treat a guest, let alone a close relative. Plus Ellen was one of the gang. It was no way to treat one of the gang, and Mrs. Bliss’s triumph fell hollow in her heart. Yet hadn’t she been asking for it since the moment she came into her house? And what about the tsimmes with the groceries? Or paying her mother-in-law’s bus fare like she was the last of the big-time spenders? Or that what-are-you-saving-it-for crack? When she must have known one of the things she was saving it for was Ellen’s children—the scarce Janet and garageless Barry.

Still, none of that was an excuse. The woman got on her nerves? Big deal. Grin and bear it.

Mrs. Bliss tried to make it up to her but Ellen hung back coolly, parrying Mrs. Bliss’s attempts to make up with all the quiet, dignified propriety and hurt she could muster. The only way Mrs. Bliss could think to make it up to her was through the dreadful, suspect teas and jams Ellen had brought down from Chicago. She asked Ellen to prepare it and, oh yes, it might be a good idea to heat up one of those nice rice pies Ellen had picked up at the market this morning.

She had to know what Mrs. Bliss was up to, but Ellen was a good sport, so what the hell, forgive and forget. She prepared the tea for her mother-in-law, steeped the herbs briefly, a lick and a promise, really, cut her a small piece of pie.

And then, over their queer high tea, both women dropped their guards, participants in an undeclared spiritual truce and, very gently, started to become friends.

“I barged in on you, didn’t I?” Ellen said.

“Barged in? What? No. Don’t be silly.”

“Intruded on your privacy.”

“Oh, my privacy,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss.

“Some people enjoy being alone.”

“Who? Why?”

“They catch up on their reading, they can go to the movies in the afternoon without feeling guilty, or watch TV till it comes out of their ears. You love playing cards. In a place like this I bet you play all the card games there are, in a place like this. You must like that aspect at least.”

“Oh, cards,” Mrs. Bliss said.

“Oh, privacy? Oh, cards?”

“I’m eighty-two years old.”

“You act younger.”

Mrs. Bliss shrugged.

“The most important thing,” Ellen said ruminantly, seriously, deeply, originally, a message from the sibyl, “is to have your health.”

Meaning Marvin was dead, Janet incommunicado, Barry failing, Ellen on some mystical quest in Houston, Texas, that would not only resolve her pinched nerves, headaches, and swollen ankles but perhaps restore them, too, all of them, to what they were and whom they were and where they were decades earlier, reincarnating them not so much into different or even higher beings as back into their own old, individual, mean, quotidian averages. Meaning I beg your pardon Ma, but how dare you be bored at your age while you still have health, privacy, books, movies, TV coming out of your ears, and access to all the card games there are?

But meaning, Mrs. Bliss supposed, chief above even all those other things, while you still have most of
your
family intact, if not on call then at least available at a moment’s notice—Frank and May, Maxine and George, her grandchildren Judith and James, Donny, even herself and Janet, herself and Barry. And meaning, too, never mind her spirited new Hispanic and Latino friends but the ones in jail, and the ones who’d skipped, and all that crime and excitement unfolding before her very eyes. (People talked, insinuated, implied.) Manny from the building a dear friend, a great loss; Tommy Auveristas, the one that got away; the Kingpin Camerando; Long-timer Chitral; the unresolved mystery of the Buick LeSabre. And Ellen was right. How
dare
she be bored?

But maybe something of disapproval, too, in that long list of overlooked opportunities, perhaps actually accusatory. Not, “You could have gone into retail sales, Ma,” although they both knew she’d have been too old even if she’d applied on the day she’d been widowed, but something, anything, something, even if it were only to volunteer to distribute newspapers and magazines from a cart she pushed three days a week along the corridors and into the rooms of patients in hospitals.

“Down here,” Ellen said, “don’t you at least miss the gang?”

“I miss the
old
gang.”

“The
old
gang.”

“The gang that got away. The gang that died.”

“Oh, Ma,” Ellen said.

“It ain’t all bad,” Mrs. Bliss said. “I got outside interests.”

“That’s good, Ma. That’s swell.”

Mrs. Bliss grinned.

“What?”

She smiled broadly, almost laughed.

“Ma?” Ellen said. “Ma?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Ellen!”

“Tell me,” Ellen said, “I won’t breathe a word.”

Mrs. Bliss shook her head.

“Come on, Ma, tell me.”

“All right,” she said, “but if this ever gets out…”

“I swear. What?”

“I’m pregnant.”

“You’re never!”

“Yeah, I’m pregnant, but I’m thinking of getting an abortion. You think maybe Wilcox…”

“Why would you say something like that to me?”

“Come on, it’s a joke.”

“I could have had a heart attack!”

“I’m sorry, but when I said I had outside interests something tickled my funny bone.”

“I could have had a heart attack.”

“A few weeks ago I went on a treasure hunt.”

“Sure, a treasure hunt. All right, Ma.”

“No, I did. I have one of those metal detectors.”

“Yo ho ho, and a bottle of rum,” Ellen said.

“No really,” Mrs. Bliss said.

“Sure, Ma.”

“Do you remember Junior Yellin?”

“Junior Yellin, Junior Yellin. Dad’s Junior Yellin?”

“Junior’s his nickname, his real name is Milt.”

“A gonif?”

“Well,” said Mrs. Bliss.

“No, I remember. Very presentable. A good-looking guy but a gonif. You saw Junior Yellin? He’s still alive?”

“He’s in his seventies,” Mrs. Bliss said.

“Gee,” Ellen said, “it’s been years since I even heard his name mentioned. He had an eye for the ladies. He was Dad’s partner in the butcher shop.”

“Yeah, well, now he’s a treasure hunter. He wants to open up a museum. I was supposed to be his partner.”

“You’re kidding! Junior Yellin. He’s still alive?”

“I’m still alive.”

“No, well, I mean, but Junior
Yellin.
He burned the candle at both ends.” Ellen lowered her voice. Dorothy, who had trouble hearing her, was surprised that a woman like Ellen, who wore earth shoes and took enema instructions from some quack in Texas, who wolfed down the kale and the pumpkin and powdered her salads with raw oatmeal, and could throw a hundred dollars’ worth of meat out of her freezer just like that, a woman who sold so many shoes she earned awards that took her all over the world, who went through life at the top of her voice, would ever bother to lower her voice, and was overtaken with a sudden, strange but not entirely off-the-wall idea: that in his salad days Yellin had probably made an entirely serious pass at her young daughter-in-law, as he had once made one at her.

“Would you like to see him?” Mrs. Bliss asked.

“See him? See Junior Yellin?”

“I’ll invite him for supper. We’ll talk about old times.”

“He wouldn’t remember me.”

“You’ll remind him.”

Ellen nodded vaguely in the direction of the kitchen table, toward the uneaten scraps of Mrs. Ted Bliss’s rice pie, the deepish dregs of her unfinished tea.

“I’ll boil a chicken,” Mrs. Bliss said. “I’ll make some soup. You make the salad, put in some of your organic vegetables.”

“I wouldn’t
mind
seeing him again,” Ellen said.

He didn’t. He didn’t remember her. No more than he had recognized Dorothy the day she had come to his office on Lincoln Road. Even when Mrs. Bliss identified her as Marvin’s wife.

Well, a lot of water had passed under the bridge he excused. The old gray mare ain’t what he used to be.

“Isn’t the mare generally a she?” Ellen called down from her high horse. “I’d have thought a butcher would know the difference.”

“Hey,” Junior said, “touché there. But you know,” he said, “I’m not a butcher anymore. I haven’t been behind a meat counter in years.”

“No,” Ellen said as Mrs. Bliss poured the wine Junior brought, “Ma says you’ve decided to become a museum director.”

“It’s still America, sweetheart,” Yellin said and, sensing it might be a long evening, filled his glass to the brim.

He was not a mean drunk. Indeed, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, he was no longer even much of a wiseass, and reflected that if you both only managed to live long enough your worst enemy could become one of your best friends. The thought made for a kind of nostalgia that inhabited the room like atmosphere, enveloping Mrs. Ted Bliss and, so it seemed to her, Yellin, and perhaps even Ellen herself, though Ellen, Dorothy imagined, had to be coaxed along, rather like someone of two minds in an audience, say, who has been asked to come up on the stage to assist the performer in his act. They finished Junior’s wine and Dorothy, on a roll of good feeling, offered to open a bottle of what had to be at least forty-year-old Scotch whiskey—twelve years in the bottle, twenty-eight or so in a drawer of the big walnut breakfront in the dining room, a gift from one of Ted’s customers when they left Chicago to take up a new life in Florida.

The women weren’t drinkers and Junior usually drank only to pass out, and so had no clear idea of what it was like to be drunk. They supposed it meant something like “tipsy,” by which they meant lighthearted, frivolous, cute, a condition summed up by the notion of women in films of the thirties and forties, say, forced by far-fetched circumstance into wearing men’s pajamas, several sizes too large for them. This was their collective mood now—an exaggerated comity between them too big for its necessity. They laughed easily, Junior himself joining in as they evoked his old piratical avatars and manifestations like a sort of wild glory.

“Do you know,” Mrs. Ted Bliss giddily confessed, “there was a time I thought you’d set your cap for me?”