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

chickens. But she was way off. Way off. I didn’t want to embarrass her so I kept my mouth shut, but later, after we got home, I took a pencil and worked it out. Figure you make chicken twice a week. Say I’ve been making it for 53 years. It’s probably more. I must have helped my mother make it when I was a girl, but say 53 years. If there are 52 weeks and 365 days in a year, that’s 104 chickens a year. You times 104 by 53 years, you get 5,512 chickens. I didn’t do that in my head. I worked it out on a gin rummy score sheet when we got home. I never forgot the number, though. When I told Ted, you know what he said? He said ‘I knew she was wrong. She had to be. I moved more chicken than anything else in the store.’ Ted was a butcher. He had a meat market on Fifty-third Street.”
    “Which one is she?” Tommy whispered.
    “Is who?”
    “The dope who thought she made only about a thousand chickens.”
    “I don’t want to embarrass her.”
    “No,” he said, “go on. I won’t tell a soul. You have my word of honor.”
    “Maybe they ate out more than we did,” Mrs. Bliss said, “maybe she hasn’t been cooking as long.”
    “Still…” Tommy Auveristas said. “You can tell me. Come on.”
    “Well,” Mrs. Ted Bliss, who hadn’t laughed so hard in years, said slyly, “if you promise not to tell.” Auveristas crossed his heart. Mrs. Bliss took a moment to evaluate this pledge, shrugged, and indicated he lean toward her. “It’s that one,” she said softly, “Arlene Brodky.”
    “Arlene Brodky?”
    “Shh,” Mrs. Bliss warned, a finger to her lips.
    The gesture made her feel positively girlish. It was as if forty-odd years had poured out of her life and she was back in Chicago again, in the dress shop, gossiping with the real salesgirls about the customers, their loony employer, passing confidences among themselves like notes between schoolmates. Frivolous, silly, almost young.
    She had come to see the penthouse. She couldn’t have articulated it for you, but it was simply that interest in artifact, some instinctive baleboosteh tropism in Mrs. Ted Bliss that drew her to all the tamed arrangements of human domesticities. She had never expected to enjoy herself.
    Maybe it was the end of her mourning. Ted had been dead more than three years. She’d still been in her forties when Marvin died, and she’d never stopped mourning him. Perhaps thirty years of grief was enough. Maybe thirty years stamped its quitclaim on even the obligated life, and permitted you to burn the mortgage papers. Was she being disloyal? He’d be forty-six, Marvin. Had she been a better mother than a wife? She hoped she had loved everyone the same, the living and the dead, her children, her husband, her parents whom God himself had compelled her to honor and, by extension, her sisters and brothers, her relations and friends, the thirty years dredging up from the bottom of her particular sea all the sunken, heavy deadweight of her overwhelmed, overburdened heart.
    Still, it was one thing not to keep kosher (or not strictly kosher), and another entirely to have caught herself actually flirting. She could have bitten her tongue.
    Dorothy was not, of course, a particularly modern woman. She had been alive at the time others of her sex had petitioned the franchise from dubious, reluctant males and, though she’d been too young to rally for this or any other cause, the truth was she’d have been content to leave it to others—to other women as well as to other men—to pick the federal government, or even vote on the local, parochial issues of daily life. She had never, for example, attended a P.T.A. meeting when her children were young or, for that matter, spoken up at any of the frequent Towers Condominium Owners Association meetings. On the other hand, neither did she possess any of the vast scorn reserves some women called upon to heap calumny on those of their sisters they perceived as, well, too openly pushy about their