Read Online Mrs. Ted Bliss by Stanley Elkin - Free Book Online Page A

once bewildered, curious, and relieved.
    “It isn’t kosher,” he explained, “can you ever forgive me?”
    “Oh, sure,” she said. “Of course.”
    “You are graciousness itself,” Tommy Auveristas said. “May I offer you something else instead? We have grapes. I bet you like grapes.”
    “I do like grapes.”
    He had a bowl of grapes brought to her, wide and deep as the inside of a silk hat.
    He asked if it was difficult to keep kosher, and Dorothy, a little embarrassed, explained that she didn’t, not strictly, keep kosher. Now that the children were grown and her husband was dead she didn’t keep pork in the house—she’d never tasted it—though there was always bacon in her freezer for when the kids came to visit. She never made shellfish, which she loved, and had always eaten in restaurants when Ted was alive, and it didn’t bother her mixing milchik and flayshig. And although she always bought kosher meat for Passover, and kept separate dishes, and was careful to pack away all the bread in the house, even cakes and cookies, even bagels and onion rolls, she was no fanatic, she said, and stowed these away in plastic bags in the freezer until after the holidays. In her opinion, it was probably an even bigger sin in God’s eyes to waste food than to follow every last rule. Her sisters didn’t agree with her, she said, but all she knew was that she’d had a happier marriage with Ted, may he rest, than her sister Etta with Sam.
    He was easy to talk to, Tommy Auveristas, but maybe she was taking too much of his time. He had other guests after all.
    He shrugged off the idea.
    “You’re sure my soda pop wasn’t spiked?”
    “What?”
    “Oh,” Mrs. Bliss said, “that was someone else, the girl with the skin. Ermalina? We had a discussion about my soft drink.”
    “I see.”
    “What was I going to tell you? Oh, yeah,” she said, “I remember. Chicken.
    “One time, this was when Ted was still alive but we were already living in Miami Beach. And we went to a restaurant, in one of the hotels with the gang to have dinner and see the show. The girls treated the men. (Every week we’d set a percentage of our winnings aside from the card games. In a year we’d have enough to go somewhere nice.) And I remember we all ordered chicken. Everyone in our party. We could have had anything we wanted off the menu but everyone ordered chicken. Twenty people felt like chicken! It was funny. Even the waitress couldn’t stop laughing. She must have thought we were crazy.
    “Now the thing about chicken is that there must be a million ways to prepare it. Boiled chicken, broiled chicken, baked chicken, fried chicken, roast chicken, stewed chicken. Just tonight I learned you could make green chicken, even blue chicken. And the other thing about chicken is that every different way you make it, that’s how different it’s going to taste. Chicken salad. Chicken fricassee.”
    “Chicken pox,” Tommy Auveristas said.
    Mrs. Bliss laughed. It was disgusting but it was one of the funniest things she’d ever heard.
    “Yeah,” she said, “chicken pox! ” She couldn’t stop laughing. She was practically choking. Tommy Auveristas offered to get her some water. She waved him off. “It’s all right, something just went down the wrong pipe. Anyway, anyway, everyone ordered their chicken different. I’ll never forget the look on that waitress’s face. She must have thought we were nuts.
    “But you know,” Dorothy said, “when you really stop and think about it, it’s not that much different from eggs.” She stopped and thought about it. “There are all kinds of ways of making eggs, too.
    “Well,” Mrs. Bliss said, “the long and the short is that chicken is a very popular dish. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t like it. We were saying that, and then one of the girls—she’s in this room now—wondered how many chickens she must have made for her family in her life. She thought it had to be about a thousand