ELEVEN

Mrs. 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.”

“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?”

“Me? Really?”

“Oh, I suppose you don’t remember the time you snuck up behind me and tried to feel me up while I was waiting on a customer.”

He didn’t of course, but smiled sly as an old roué, a heroic rogue in a different movie, and politely wondered aloud how far he’d managed to get.

“I thought of telling Ted on you. On you to Ted.”

“I bet you never did,” Junior Yellin said.

“You were already in enough trouble.”

“I thought,” Ellen said, “of telling Marvin.”

“Marvin?” said Mrs. Ted Bliss.

She’d struck a nerve, and a little of Yellin’s guilty handsomeness drained from his face.

“Only he was already in Billings,” Ellen said, the second person there whose mood had cracked.

“Hey,” Junior Yellin said, the last, his mood breaking up, run aground on a sandbar of suddenly uncovered memory, “dinner about ready? I guess I’ll go powder my nose.”

“I think,” Mrs. Bliss whispered when he left the room, “he remembers you.”

“Oh, Ma,” Ellen said, suddenly weeping. “Nothing happened. I swear to you. I swear on Marvin’s life!”

“On Marvin’s life? On his life?

What Mrs. Ted Bliss didn’t know was that in the toilet, Junior Yellin raised the toilet seat and peed wide of his mark, drilling some of his urine around the elasticized hem of her terry-cloth toilet-seat cover. Feeling immensely disconsolate about this awkward turn of events, he wet one of Dorothy’s hand towels under a faucet in the bathroom sink and tried to wipe away (rubbing it furiously, as one might attempt to clear a stain from a freshly starched shirt back from the laundry on which one has just dripped gravy) the evidence of his marked territory.

“By damn,” he muttered, “I am one goofy galoot of a guy.”

The sound of the phrase cheered him a bit, but he was thankful he was a little high. Under the influence, he thought. Get a grip, he thought, you’re seventy-eight. Sooner or later one or the other of them would have to come in to do her business. We all got business. What will it look like if she realizes her dress is DWI due to my carelessness? How many points would that cost him?

Because the way Junior figured, life was a little like one of those games — checkers, Monopoly — where everyone started with the same assets and lost when they went bankrupt.

My life, thought Yellin, my life is like that. More Monopoly than checkers, though. I was always the top hat or the roadster, the wheelbarrow or battleship or dog, never the iron or thimble or shoe. Sure, he thought, big man. Big man’s man. In your dreams! he thought bitterly.

Because he knew there’d always been more smoke than fire to him, to his history. He caused trouble and brought grief down around people’s heads — already he could spot a little flame of yellow piss burning through the water spots he’d made doing his repairs. Oh Christ, he moaned, and wondered if Dorothy’s wasn’t the real reason — that, as Dorothy said, he was in enough trouble already — more women hadn’t told on him. My God, how he hated owning an unearned reputation! Still, if it weren’t unearned he’d have no reputation at all.

Because, sight unseen, he knew there was little of substance to the contemptuous awe folks held him in. Those out there now, vulnerable to charm but nothing more to it than that, silly as girls at a sleepover, simply had no skill at recognizing a flirt when they saw one. He could hardly believe, for example, that he’d ever tried to feel up that old one, Mrs. Ted Bliss. And as for Ellen, the elderly one, why would he ever have put a move on a woman with a husband in the hospital? It would have been too brave, it wasn’t like him.

The whoosie was still damp but he couldn’t stay in there forever. He unlocked the bathroom door and went out.

“Sorry,” he blustered to the ladies already seated at the dining room table, “had to see a man about a dog. Ah,” he said, taking his seat and winking at both of them, “girl, boy, girl. Just the way I like it!”

“On Marvin’s life?” the outraged Mrs. Bliss was still saying, and Junior Yellin had the impression that time had stood still while he had been in the bathroom, that there was something faintly magical in his ability to charm people, but only faintly magical. Otherwise he would have made a greater dent in the world. He’d be high and dry and sitting pretty instead of just dragooned and press-ganged into a skimpy little company of old ladies. Otherwise, he might have followed his heart and had the nerve to propose to that gorgeous Rita de Janeiro kid and married her.

If he’d a better command of the life cycle of liquor he’d have known that he was coming down from the ledges of optimism and gaiety to the flatlands of despair and self-pity. In the event, the quarrel he’d generated between the two women registered like a chatter of drone.

“Ma, nothing happened.

“On his life? His life?

“If something happened, why would I say so? Just to aggravate him? He made a pass, all right? Big deal, he made a pass. He tickled my palm with his finger. Once he blew in my ear when I leaned toward him to listen to a secret he wanted to tell.”

“While Marvin lies dying in a hospital bed.”

I tickled her palm? That was my pass? I blew in her ear? That was? Oh, I am so pathetic. I am pathetic. Not a grand galoot of a guy at all. Just a sorry old asshole. I must cancel Miss de Janeiro’s flowers. I must remember to tie a string around my finger so as not to forget to cancel her flowers.

What he did or didn’t do. As if he weren’t even in the room at all. They’d invited him to supper, not the other way around. The boiled chicken could be boiling over. He hadn’t come there just to be humiliated. He had better set them straight.

“Excuse me,” Yellin said, “but if either of you is thinking of using the little girl’s room, may I suggest you use the other one? I’m afraid I missed and made number one all over the toilet-seat cover. I tried to blot it out with hand towels but I didn’t do such a good job. It’s still pretty damp. Did I really tickle your palm and blow in your ear? Sorry. Maybe I was trying to cheer you up. Dotty, dear, did I really feel you up?”

“Yes.”

“Well,” he said, “you were both beautiful women. I’m sorry, but I guess I’m not much of a boozer. I’m sorry. I think I’ve lost my appetite. Just as well, I have to run an errand. Have to see my florist on a matter of some urgency.

“Oh,” he said as he reached the door, “they say if you rub it with seltzer the stain disappears like magic.”

He disappeared like magic.

That night, after she picked up the empty glasses and cleared the table and washed the dishes — Ellen had offered to help but Mrs. Ted Bliss was still enough of a baleboosteh to do some things by herself and refused her — and Ellen had gone to bed, Mrs. Bliss noticed something out of place on top of the telephone table. It was the directory, which had not been replaced in the little shelf where it should have been. Loose on top of the telephone directory Ellen had failed to put back properly were her airline tickets, spread-eagled to her open-ended return coupon. Without meaning to pry, Mrs. Bliss noticed the price of her ticket. Thinking she’d made a mistake, she checked it again. What had so surprised her was that her daughter-in-law received the same senior citizen’s discount as she did herself!

She must have known, she’d sent birthday greetings to the woman for years. Even, though Marvin was dead, cards on their anniversaries. It was easy, if not to lose track exactly then to fix people in time and suspend them there, your near and dear. Growing old was no picnic and though you made allowances for it in yourself, it hardly seemed possible that others, your children and grandchildren, for example, were susceptible to the same erosions. Yet she must have known, she must have. Hadn’t Ellen herself brought up the subject, and more than once, of what she intended to do and where she intended to move when she retired? And each time, each time, Dorothy had felt uncomfortable hearing such talk, as if, oh yes, as if there were something maybe just a bit disreputable and vulgar about the idea of someone relatively secure and successful in her position throwing it over for the sake of some soft dream. Wasn’t this, in some wild way, connected to her feelings about Frank leaving Pittsburgh and moving to Rhode Island? All right, he said he had his reasons, and maybe, as he’d said, the feelings, his and the university’s, were mutual, but somewhere there’d been an infraction, disorder on both sides. It was the way she’d felt when Ted had told her he had bought the farm in Michigan. Who knows, it may have been the way she’d felt all those years back when her family uprooted itself and came all the way from Russia to America.

“You’ve lived in Chicago all your life,” she’d told her daughter-in-law when Ellen had first introduced the subject. “All your friends are there, your family. You’re no spring chicken anymore, Ellen. Where would you go, what would you do, chase Janet in India? Believe me, darling, if I had it all to do over again and poor Ted was still alive, you think I’d be here today?”

Enough things had changed, she wanted her daughter-in-law to stay put, although even as she made her point she recognized the fallacy in her argument. There was nothing to stop her from picking up and moving back to Chicago. All right, the price of condos in the Towers had plunged. She’d never get back what they gave for it, but so what? Even if she took a loss, even if she sold the place under fire-sale conditions, threw in the carpet, the drapes, her furniture and appliances, all the crap she’d accumulated, the manuals, the letters and cards, pictures and scrapbooks, all the carefully rubber-banded documentation and ledgers of her life, how bad could it be? Wouldn’t it, as a matter of fact, be just the thing for her old baleboosteh ways, to clear the decks, make everything neat, one last final spring cleaning of things, the deleavenization of her past? What would she lose? Nothing, zip, gornisht. She could rent a furnished room or even a small studio apartment and live off the proceeds of her red-tag sale. She was eighty-two years old, had her health, but how much longer could she expect to get away with it? Hale and hearty as she was, kayn aynhoreh, how much longer could Mrs. Bliss have left, four, five years? So her estate would drop to maybe seventy-three cents on the dollar when she passed. What difference would it make to her inheritors? They were provided for. Her good husbandry couldn’t really make a difference in their lives, so what was the big deal? What was to stop her from moving back to Chicago? Nothing. Nothing but her failing energies, nothing but her sense of how disruptive and untrue one must be to oneself even to want to make a new life.

“I was thinking,” Ellen had said, “about maybe moving to Texas.”

“To Wilcox?”

“You talk about him as if he was a crackpot. Or as if I was. Think what you think. The man has made a tremendous difference in my life. Marvin might be alive today if…”

“Ellen!”

“Don’t say it, Ma. I know what I know. Doctors!” she said.

All right, she was crazy. Driven nuts by her widowhood. Mrs. Bliss had accepted it before, had let her off the hook because she knew deep down, beneath the long bones of her bullying, Ellen had a good heart. But it was one thing to take that stuff off a grieving woman, another entirely to take it from a fellow senior citizen. Oy, she thought mournfully, brought up short, suddenly breathless. If the wife of her firstborn qualified for the senior citizen discount, how much longer could it be before her surviving children would be old people themselves? And what did that mean to her?

Looking back, clear-headed, she was aware that she was a woman who had not much enjoyed her long life. She had done her duty by it, earned the love and respect of her husband, her children, her family, her friends.

The truth, however, was that she had little to regret. Her mistakes, she felt, were only the general failures — lapses of taste; an inability, perhaps the simple stupidity of a failure to risk. Holding her flaws up in a kinder, much more generous light, it might only have been a lazy disinclination to take pains, like anyone else, not to fiddle with the givens of her character, never daring to color outside the lines, her life nothing if not a struggle to stay within them.

She’d done nothing wrong, she meant, only what was expected. And didn’t reproach herself for her loyalties, had no argument, for example, with her repudiation of Junior Yellin’s ancient crude advances, or thought for a moment she might have wasted her beauty. She was not in the least distressed that she’d ever been anything less than a good, unselfish, loving wife and mother. She would have despaired and been ashamed if she thought that she had, if she’d ever even consented to the soft porn of submitting to anything so mild and innocuous as becoming the recipient of a makeover on national TV. (She had appeared in court once to testify against Alcibiades Chitral, but it had taken a subpoena to get her there.)

No, she had suffered (it was too strong a word even if what she was attempting to come to terms with was the faintly misbegotten shape of her vague disapproval of her life) from a sort of generalized deafness. What did it mean not to hear the accent in which she spoke? Why had she been so stung when Chitral told her in the prison that her people (born sticks-in-the-mud, he’d called them) had a gift for sitting still? Why had she learned to write checks only after her husband had died? Or been so reluctant to exchange her lady’s maid status, helping Mrs. Dubow’s customers dress in the close quarters of those airless old dressing rooms for what would have been a salesclerk’s higher salary up in the front of the store? Why had she kowtowed to men?

Mrs. Bliss was so tired she could barely move. She remembered that when her children were kids, up past their bedtimes and wild, up past their bedtimes, their mood swings fluctuate as white water, gay, crazed, one minute hilarious, the next irritable and quarrelsome as murderers, she’d warned them against overexcitement, threatened they’d become hostage to their overtiredness, would be unable to fall asleep under the weary weight of their crankiness. It wasn’t true, she thought now. Nothing could have been more false. As soon as their heads hit the pillow, as soon as hers did…Yet all of a sudden Mrs. Ted Bliss, who had wiped up the last of the mess Yellin had made in the bathroom (she’d put it off till last), felt her blood boil up in a kind of rage, the old mercurial irritability of her kids’ quarrelsomeness, and she knew she would never calm herself enough to sleep that night and found herself already resenting the hangover she would feel all that next day. The immediate cause had been Junior Yellin’s strong, stenchy pee. It still filled her nostrils. She thought she could taste it.

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?

Загрузка...