Mrs. Ted Bliss (3 page)

So it was possible, perhaps, that those long soaks in her tub, the two baths she took every day, were not a preening or polishing of self so much as part of a continual scour, a bodily function like the need for food. Not beauty (who knew almost nothing about beauty) but just another step in a long campaign, some Hundred Years War she waged against the dirt on fruits and meats and vegetables, the germs on pennies, the invisible bacterium in the transparent air, building up a sterile field around herself like a wall of hygiene.

She tried to replicate in her personal appearance the same effects she strove for in her habits as a housekeeper. In her long pink widowhood she started to dress in bright polyester pants suits, bright because bright colors seemed to suggest to her the same buffed qualities of her kitchen’s sparkling dishes, mopped floors, scoured sinks and counters, her wiped-down stoves; and polyester because she could clean the suits in the washer and dryer every night before she went to bed. Dorothy had merely meant to simplify her life by filling it with activities that would keep her within the limited confines of her apartment, to live out what remained of her widowhood a respectable baleboosteh life. But her neighbors in the Towers saw only the brightly colored clothes she wore, and the carefully kempt hair she still bothered to dye, and thought of her as a very brave woman, a merry widow; attributing her steady, almost aggressive smile to her friendly outlook and not to the hardness of her hearing, her constant fear that people were saying pleasant things and making soft and friendly jokes she believed only her constant, agreeable, chipper grin and temperament could protect her from ever having to understand.

And now, since Ted’s death and the piecemeal disappearance of her beauty, she had ceased to be their little parlor game and game room conversation piece and had become instead a sort of mascot.

About a week or so after she had buried her husband in the Chicago cemetery where almost all the Blisses had been interred, Dorothy Bliss was approached by a man named Alcibiades Chitral. Señor Chitral was from Venezuela, a newcomer to the United States, a relative newcomer to the Towers complex. He had a proposition for Dorothy. He offered to buy her dead husband’s car. When Mrs. Bliss heard what he was saying she was outraged, furious, and, though she smiled, would, had she not been so preoccupied by grief, have slammed the door in his face. Vulture, she thought, inconsiderate, scavenging vulture! Bang on my nerves, why don’t you? Indeed, she was so chilled by the prospect of a bargain hunter in these terrible circumstances she almost threw up some of the food (she hadn’t had a good bowel movement in a week) with which her friends and relatives had tried to distract her from her loss the whole time she had sat shivah in Chicago. (Even here, in Florida, her neighbors brought platters of delicatessen, bakery, salads, liters of the same diet soft drinks she had purchased with discount coupons. To look at all that food you’d have thought death was a picnic. It was no picnic.) When he divined her state Alcibiades excused himself and offered his card.

“Call me in a few days,” he said. “Or no,” he said, “I see that you won’t. I’ll call you.”

She had not even wanted to take Ted back to Chicago. She was so stunned the day he died she didn’t even call her children to tell them their father was dead, and when she phoned them the next morning she passed on her news so dispassionately it was almost as if it had already been written off (well, he had been so ill all year) or had happened so long ago that she might have been speaking of something so very foreign to all their lives it seemed a mild aberration, a curiosity, like a brief spell of freakish weather.

Dirt was dirt, she told the kids, she could make arrangements to get him buried right here in Miami.

They had to talk her into sending the body home, and then they had to talk her into coming to Chicago.

Her son Frank said he would come for her.

Maxine offered the same deal. “Ma,” she said, “I’ll come down and help you pack. You shouldn’t be by yourself. When we’re through sitting shivah you’ll come to Cincinnati with me. Stay as long as you like. We’ll fly back together.”

She resisted, it was crazy, an extravagance. What was she, a decrepit old lady? She couldn’t pack a suitcase? Anyway, she said, she really didn’t like the idea of shlepping Ted back to Chicago. And she didn’t, it would be like having him die twice. In Chicago he would be so far away from her, she thought, he might as well be dead. When she realized what she’d been thinking she started to laugh. When she heard herself laughing she began to weep.

“Ma,” said her daughter, “I’ll be on the next plane. Really, Mama, I want to.”

In the end she said that if she couldn’t go by herself she wouldn’t attend her husband’s funeral. Though the idea of that old boneyard sent chills. Maybe Ted really
should
be buried in Florida. The cemeteries were like eighteen-hole golf courses here. She wept when she went to make a withdrawal from her passbook at the savings and loan to get cash to give to the undertakers, and to pay her plane fare at the United ticket counter in the Fort Lauderdale airport, and could not stop weeping while she sat in the lounge waiting for her flight to board, or even for the entire three-hour-and-five-minute nonstop ride to Chicago.

Weeping, inconsolable, not even looking up into the faces of the various strangers who tried to comfort her, the airline hostess who served her her dinner, the captain, who actually left his cabin to come to her seat and ask what was the matter, if there was anything he could do. Looking out the plane window, seeing the perfect green of those eighteen-hole cemeteries, and thinking, oh, oh Ted, oh Ted, oh oh oh. It occurred to her as they flew over Georgia that she had never been on a plane without her husband before. Weeping, inconsolable, it occurred to her that maybe they had put his body in the hold, that the undertakers had checked him through like her luggage.

And she really
didn’t
want to take Ted there. The place was too strange. It was where her mother was buried, her sister, Ted’s twin brothers, cousins from both sides of the family, her uncles and aunts, her oldest son. May
all
of them rest. A plot of ground about the size of a vacant lot where an apartment building had been torn down, a plot of land about the size of the construction site where Building Number Seven was going up.

It had been purchased in 1923 by a rich and distant uncle, a waggish man none of them had ever seen, who had bought up the property and set it aside for whomever of the Bliss family was then living or would come after, and had then made arrangements to have himself cremated and his ashes scattered from a biplane over Wyoming’s Grand Teton mountains in aviation’s earliest days when it wasn’t always a dead-solid certainty that airplanes could even achieve such heights. The waggish uncle’s curious legacy to the Blisses was possibly the single mystery the family had ever been faced with. Yet more than anything else it was this cemetery that not only held them together but distinguished them as a family, like having a common homeland, say, their own little Israel.

You lived, you died. Then you were buried there. Dorothy had not been the first of the Blisses to speak out about breaking the chain. Others had pronounced the idea of the place as too strange, or claimed it sent chills. And had found other means to dispose of themselves. One Bliss had actually chosen to follow in the flight path of the founder, as it were, and put it in his will that his cremains float down through the same patch of Wyoming altitude as had the waggish uncle’s so many years before. Dorothy—this would have been while Ted was being interred—had long since ceased her long, twelve- or thirteen-hundred-mile crying jag. Ceased the moment her flight touched down at O’Hare. The people who met her plane to take her to her sister Etta’s apartment on the North Side and those who came over to Etta’s later that night to embrace Dorothy—just touching her set them off, just offering their condolences did—and came up to her the next day at the chapel where she sat with her children in the first row, all observed her odd detachment. In Chicago, she knew that among themselves the family spoke of how well she was taking it, as well as could be expected. “Under the circumstances,” they added. She couldn’t help herself, she didn’t mean to take it well. She couldn’t help it that at the very moment her husband’s coffin was being lowered into the ground she had looked away for a moment and seen all the other graves where her people—the immediate, extended, nuclear, and almost genealogical family of Blisses—were buried and somehow understood that what had so repelled her about the idea of this place was the holy odor of its solidarity.

Back in Florida, where a sort of extended, informal shivah (perpetuated by her friends and neighbors in the Towers) continued to roll on, people came from far and wide throughout the complex to offer their condolences. Dorothy would have preferred that they all stop talking about it. Didn’t they understand how exhausting it was to be both a widow
and
a baleboosteh? To have to deal with all the soups and salads, fruit and delicatessen and
more
salads, cookies and cakes and all the other drek she had to find enough jars and baggies and tinfoil and just plain space in the freezer for…How, with her grief, which wouldn’t go away and which, like the tears, she could handle only in public among strangers she would never see again, people who’d never known Ted, or else only in the privacy of her bed where she couldn’t sleep for the sound of her own sobbing. In two years she would see her doctor, who would prescribe sleeping pills to knock her out and on which she would become dependent, a sixty-nine- or seventy-year-old junkie Jewish lady, making her old, piecemeal beginning to break down her gorgeous looks, a fabulous beauty into her sixties, gone frail and plain before her time, a candidate for death by heartbreak, quite literally draining her (she was constantly thirsty, and would rise two or three times a night to take a glass of water) and making the tasks in which, while her husband lived, she had once taken a certain pleasure (the dishes and floors, the sink, wiping down the stove) now seem almost Herculean, too much for her strength. (And now she had the living room to contend with, too, heavy furniture to move in order to vacuum the rug, using attachments she’d rarely bothered with before just to suck crumbs from the sofa and chairs, even an ottoman, from which she now removed the slipcovers every evening in time for her guests and replaced again in the mornings. Cleaning the bathrooms, too, now, wiping stains from beneath the rims of the toilets with a special brush, rubbing off stuck brown tracks of actual turd, flushing them until they disappeared into a whirlpool of blue water, fifty cents off with the coupon.) She didn’t know, maybe she
was
brave.

Gradually the visits became less and less frequent and then, about two months after Ted’s death, Dorothy received a notice that her personal property taxes were about to come due. When she saw how high they were (her husband had always taken care of such things), she was stunned. They wanted almost two hundred dollars just for the automobile. She couldn’t understand. They didn’t owe on the car. Ted had paid cash for it. She looked and looked but there was no telephone number on the bill that she could call. She took a bus down to City Hall. They sent her from this office to that office. What with the long lines, it took at least two hours before she found a person she could talk to who didn’t chase her to another department. She told her story for maybe the tenth time. She had received this bill. Here, Miss, you can look. They owned the car outright. If he had it Ted always paid cash, even for big-ticket items—their bedroom suite, the sofa, their dining room table and chairs. Even for their condominium. Though he had a couple—they had sent them to him in the mail—he never used his credit cards. Only for gas, he liked paying for gasoline with his Shell credit card. He wrote down how many gallons he put into the tank, he could keep track of his mileage. Dorothy heard how she spoke to this perfect stranger and realized that it was maybe the first time since he’d died that she’d really talked about Ted, that it wasn’t just people telling her how sorry they were and if there was anything they could do and Dorothy sighing back at them, thank you, but there really wasn’t. She thought she might start in again with the tears. But she didn’t.

She organized her thoughts. She didn’t know how to write checks. Even if she did she wouldn’t know how to keep her accounts. She’d gone to business almost ten years but not since she was a girl, and anyway, back then they gave you wages in a pay envelope that she turned over to her mother. Her husband did everything; she never had to lift a finger. She knew for a fact it was in Ted’s name, did she really owe two hundred dollars on the car?

She couldn’t help it, she was a baleboosteh. She wasn’t so much house proud as efficient. It gave her great satisfaction to know where everything was. There was so much in even the simplest household. It was really astonishing how much there was. Every day the newspaper came, announcements of upcoming events in the building, in the Towers complex. Every day the mail came. (It still came for Ted, and though it broke her heart to read letters from people who hadn’t yet gotten the news, and though she never answered them because to write that he had died to someone who hadn’t heard about it would be like making him just a little more dead than he already was, she never threw any of her husband’s mail away.) She knew which letters of her own to keep (just as she knew what coupons to cut out or which articles to clip from the paper to send her children and grandchildren) and which to throw away.

So as soon as she needed to find the card Alcibiades Chitral had left with her—it was a business card and, because a man had given it to her, she had been certain it was important—she knew where she had put it.

It was in with a stack of current and already expired warranties, instruction manuals, and lists of potentially useful phone numbers and addresses. She called him that evening.

“Are you having your dinner,” she said, “did I take you away from your programs?”