Mrs. Ted Bliss (40 page)

The man was a pig. How do you come into a person’s home and pee on a seat cover? How do you go into your hostess’s toilet and pee all over, everywhere at once? It was more like an act of vandalism than an old man’s inability to direct his stream. And then what does the pig son of a bitch do? He actually tries to clean up his mess with her guest towels! Her
guest
towels. They were useless to her now. The nerve, the
nerve!
How could she ever set them out again? First thing in the morning she would retrieve them from the hamper and throw them away. She wouldn’t have waited, she’d have done it right then but knew it was worth her life to enter that bathroom again tonight. She could taste it, taste it.

He was her last connection to earth? Then to hell with her last connection to earth! And to hell with Ellen, too. Oh sure, she’d asked if she could help. Nice as pie in the nice-as-pie department. But gone off quick as you can say Jack Robinson the second her mother-in-law had told her out of a deference she’d have used to any guest, “Go, go, darling, I can do it myself.”

And then Mrs. Bliss remembered the phone book the woman had not had the decency to put back where she’d found it. And what were those plane tickets all about? They were supposed to be a threat? She wasn’t having a good time, Ellen? Dorothy was forcing the wrong food down her throat? What did she think this was here, a restaurant?

Ellen missed her dead husband more than Dorothy missed her dead son? Because that’s exactly what the woman thought, that’s what was at the bottom of all her goofy Employee-of-the-Month drive and nutty advice about how other people should live their lives, why she was at once so smug and defensive about Wilcox, at the bottom of why she was not only willing to give up all those free bonus trips to Cancun and London and wherever to retire and move away from Chicago just so she could be closer to her holistic holy man, the Messiah Texas Chiropractor, but even looked forward to it. And if you ask me, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, it was, at bottom, why Ellen was so tolerant and free and easy about allowing her daughter—my granddaughter—Janet, to go shpatziering all over India looking either for her soul or some swell new herbal tea.

Mrs. Bliss was not an impatient woman. Live and let live. Normally, she bent over backward. But something about Ellen…And that open-ended airline ticket planted smack in the middle of the Yellow Pages under the TWA ad like a bookmark. What, she wanted to be begged? Gai gezunterhait!

And now she was really making her sore, because she felt bad about not liking her daughter-in-law better, and wished she did. If for no other reason than that then maybe she could get some sleep and feel fresher, more rested, be better prepared, when the knockdown, drag-out show-down came between them the next morning.

Only that wasn’t the way of it at all.

After she’d dragged herself out of bed, after she’d had her bath, after she’d powdered herself, put on fresh makeup and her favorite cologne (the same kind she’d been using since the days of her great beauty), and dressed in a clean new pants suit and come into the kitchen that morning, Dorothy was met with the smell of fresh coffee. Great, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, she’s making herself an enema.

“Oh, morning there, Ma,” her daughter-in-law greeted her cheerfully. “Good, you’re up. You were sleeping so soundly I didn’t want to wake you. Beautiful day. I’ve taken the liberty of putting up a fresh pot of coffee for our breakfast. What would you like with it, you think? There’s no oranges but I found a can of Crystal Light in the cupboard. How do you want your egg? Boiled? Scrambled? Do you want one slice of toast or two?”

It occurred to Mrs. Bliss actually to rub her eyes, to pinch herself.

“Say, Ma,” Ellen went on, “do you still have that metal detector you were telling me about? If you don’t plan to use it anymore, do you think I could buy it off you?

“You never told me Milt’s a recreational therapeusisist.”

“Oh, sure,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss, “one of the biggest men in south Florida.”

“Really? One of the biggest?”

“I’m here to tell you.”

“He never told me
that,
” Ellen said. “When he called this morning…”

“Junior? Junior Yellin called?”

“You were sleeping,” Ellen said. “He told me not to wake you.”

“What did he want?”

“Well,” she said, “I think he called to apologize. He’s a reformed drunk, you know, and got a little high and wasn’t able to handle it. Anyway, he’s terribly embarrassed about what he did in the bathroom. He asked me to tell you.”

Dorothy nodded. There was a slightly dismissive expression on her face, as if it didn’t matter, as polite as if she were personally taking the apology. Ellen looked relieved, grateful, as though she were Yellin’s envoy or held his personal power of attorney. Mrs. Bliss watched as her daughter-in-law lay out two place settings. She made no move or offer to help, and was vaguely dismayed to realize that, except for restaurants and airplanes and those infrequent occasions when she was an invited dinner guest, this was one of the first times in years (even at Frank’s seder in Providence she had carried food to the table and helped pass it around) that she was being served. She had to make a conscious effort to keep herself from crying.

Meanwhile, Ellen, chirpy and crisp as a housewife in a television commercial, filled both their glasses with Crystal Light (the can could have been two or three years old by now; she kept it in case some child should show up), and spooned the meat from two perfectly boiled eggs into small dessert bowls. She buttered three slices of toast, gave one to Dorothy, kept two for herself, and sat down.

“So,” Ellen said, “do you or don’t you, will you or won’t you?”

“Do I don’t I, will I won’t I what?”

“Still have the metal detector? Will you sell it to me?”

“You want to buy my metal detector? Junior Yellin talked you into this?”

“He’s actually a very interesting man. Not at all like what I remembered.”

“Yeah,” Mrs. Bliss said, “very interesting.” Don’t sell yourself short, she thought, you’re pretty interesting yourself.

“He has this theory about AIDS,” Ellen said.

“Oh?”

“He believes it can be cured if the patient has a hobby that takes his mind off his troubles.”

Mrs. Bliss stared at the woman.

“Of course it has to be caught early enough, while it’s still in the early HIV-positive stage. Once it’s full blown it won’t always work.”

“The man’s close to eighty,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss, and thought she saw her daughter-in-law’s face flush as Ellen dipped a corner of her buttered toast into the bowl and allowed it to troll amid the loose yellow islands of her soft-boiled eggs.

“Oh, Ma,” Ellen said.

Mrs. Bliss knew what she knew. She remembered that airline ticket and was glad she hadn’t permitted herself to complete her thought. That he was old enough to be her father. Well, almost old enough.

“I’m no spring chicken myself, you know,” Ellen said, and provided Mrs. Bliss with an insight into how she had been able to sell all of those shoes. Why, on markdown! On markdown and reduction and discount. Perhaps she had found tiny, almost invisible flaws in the merchandise. Maybe she inflicted them herself and then pointed them out to her customers.

Mrs. Bliss shrugged. She lived and let live. She bent over backward. Because weren’t people amazing? If only they suffered enough, had been put through enough, didn’t they surprise you every time out? Didn’t they just? They could knock you over with a feather. With their resilience, with their infinite capacity to adapt, camouflage, evolving at one end of things by suppressing at another. Now, for example, watching her suck down all that cholesterol, Ellen’s delight in the incriminating joy she took in all the strange forbidden flavors of her leashed hunger.

“No,” Dorothy said, “it isn’t.”

“What isn’t?”

“The magic wand. It isn’t for sale. It isn’t for sale but take it with my blessings.”

“Oh, Ma,” Ellen said, beaming like a young girl.

The thing of it is, she wondered, if push comes to shove, does that louse get to call me Ma, too?

TWELVE

I
t was the only ship-to-shore telegram she’d ever seen.

They were married, Ellen said in the wire, by the captain of the cruise ship himself.

The irony was that Mrs. Bliss got the telegram a few hours before she heard the first reports about Hurricane Andrew that the National Hurricane Center in Coral Gables had spotted 615 miles east miles of Miami growing winds of over 100 miles per hour and picking up speed as it moved toward the Bahamas. The old woman even made a small salacious joke about it.

Oh boy, she thought, Junior and Ellen on the Love Boat. Just married and both so unused to going to bed with anyone they probably started up that wind and those waves by themselves.

It put her in a good mood to think of the two of them together. Which put her in an even better mood.

Because it was a measure, she thought, of cut losses, her emotions in a sort of escrow, the heart in chapter eleven, receivership. Because she would have thought, she thought, she’d have taken it harder. Her widowed daughter-in-law, her dead son’s only wife. The real keeper of the flame when you came right down. The one so nuts about poor dead Marvin her grief made
her
nuts. Whose every New Age pilgrimage to the crackpot chiropractor in Houston had been like a feather in steadfast mourning’s cheerless cap. So her marriage to Junior was really a kind of defection, leaving Mrs. Bliss (according to Ellen’s own figures) high and dry to bear the lion’s share of their leftover bereftness.

Yet she did not feel betrayed. If anything, otherwise. Their absurd new matrimony making her smile, convinced that the joke was on one of them, though she didn’t know which.

If not entirely surprised by Ellen’s decision to marry Junior Yellin (indeed, the surprise was on the other foot so to speak; she could not have anticipated Junior’s proposal), she was at least a little startled by her own reaction to it, or rather by how gracefully, even cheerfully, she first acknowledged, then accepted, then actively embraced the idea. Only briefly, and out of one corner of her mind, did she have this flaring, fleeting synapse when it occurred to her to wonder whether Marvin might be turning over in his grave if he’d heard the news or read the telegram or maybe overheard the actual proposal Yellin had made to Ellen or Ellen to Yellin. This was merely the most vagrant of thoughts, yet in the short transience (that was even less than time) it took to entertain and resolve it, Mrs. Ted Bliss was brushed by what was at once both a conclusion and a conviction: that Marvin had
not
heard the news, had
not
been looking over her shoulder to read the telegram nor tapped into whatever solemn exchange had taken place between Junior and Ellen back there on the Love Boat’s high and rising seas.

Marvin was not turning over in his grave, she realized, because, well, because Marvin was dead. These simple, indisputable facts struck like epiphanies: Dead people do not turn over in their graves; the dead have no opinions. Well then, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, if it’s OK with Marvin it’s jake by me, and settled, stunningly, gracefully, even peacefully and, at last, conclusively and decisively into the idea that her son was dead. Settling up. I had the pie; you had the sundae; she had the iced tea. Well, thought Dorothy, that’s that, then. The kid’s dead.

It was this, she knew, that reconciled her to the news in Ellen’s telegram. It was this, however odd it might seem, that had produced such calm, allowed such cheer.

She
had an idea! And what so delighted her about her idea was the fact that she knew she was rising to an occasion. She was into her eighties now. People in their eighties will have been called upon to rise to occasions countless numbers of times—all those births and deaths and ceremonies; all those pitched battles of obligation that made up a life, constructed it like a laborious masonry of rough expectations. The rare thing, the sweet and marvelous thing, was to rise to an occasion gratuitously, out of some sheer sense of its Tightness, its dead solid joy, all its, well, nondeductible, not-for-profit giftness.

She would throw a party for the happy couple when they returned from their honeymoon cruise. Her condo wasn’t big enough so she’d host it in the game room of Building One. She’d have to find a date when it was available, of course, but that shouldn’t be difficult. Since there were fewer occupancies in the Towers there was less demand on the facilities these days. Indeed, as the idea for the reception formed in Mrs. Bliss’s mind it became increasingly clear to her that the affair (the concept of the party already beginning to snowball, transmuting itself from simple party to reception to affair; if she didn’t rein herself in at least a little, before she knew it she’d have a full-blown gala on her hands) would have to be catered. This was beyond some one-woman deal. From the first she hadn’t even wanted it to be and, even if she did, she knew she wasn’t up to the task of preparing the game room, let alone all that food, by herself. The more Mrs. Bliss thought about it the less enthusiasm she had. Who would she invite? If she invited her family, whoever was left, the remnants of the old gang in Chicago, her kids in Cincinnati and Providence, all her globe-trotting, scattered grandchildren and great-grandchildren, it would send the wrong signals. This wasn’t intended to be some last hurrah thing. All she’d meant was to introduce the happy couple to each other’s neighbors and some of her Florida friends. Maybe she would even send a special invitation to Wilcox in Houston if for no other reason than to witness the cure he’d wrought.

All right, so the snowball was starting to melt, break up under the heat of her cooled-down second thoughts. But that was all right, too. Now she didn’t have to worry about arranging for game rooms and caterers and all the foofaraw a gala would involve. Not that she was losing her enthusiasm for the idea of doing something for them, just for the overkill of her first hasty impressions. One thing, though. She had better stop planning for the thing (whatever it turned out to be) and do something before all that was left of the snowball was a great puddle.