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

garage.
    It was as if she were a greenhorn. She felt besmirched, humiliated, ridden out of town on a rail. In the old days her mother had bribed an immigration official fifteen dollars and he had changed the age on Dorothy’s papers. Her alien status had never been a problem for her. There had never been a time when she felt awkward, or that she had had to hold her tongue. The years in the dress shop when she’d been more like a lady’s maid than a salesgirl, and had attempted (and sometimes actually seemed) to hide in changing rooms narrower and less than half the length and width of her husband’s cordoned-off parking space in the garage hadn’t been nearly so degrading. Even in the presence of the terrifying Mrs. Dubow, who somehow managed not only to speak to Dorothy with her mouth full of pins but even to shout at her and come after her (at least five times in the almost ten years she had worked for the deranged woman), brandishing scissors and cracking her tailor’s yellow measuring tape at Dorothy’s cowering figure as if it were a whip, she hadn’t felt the woman’s dislike so much as her pure animal rage. The next week there was likely to be an additional six or seven dollars in her pay envelope.
    It may have been nothing more than the glib way in which the two DEA men had addressed her (or addressing Manny but really speaking through him to Dorothy), but she had never felt so uncitizened, so abandoned, so bereft of appeal. Her protests would have meant nothing to them.
    Dorothy had never experienced anti-Semitism. During all the years Ted had owned his meat market, or even after he’d sold it, bought a fifty-unit apartment building in a declining neighborhood on Chicago’s North Side and become not only its landlord but, with Dorothy’s assistance, went around collecting the rent money on the first Monday of every month, she hadn’t sensed even its trace. Neither from Polack nor shvartzer. Goyim liked her. Everyone liked her, and although there were people she disliked—some of Ted’s customers when they had the butcher shop, several of her husband’s four-flusher tenants in the North Side apartment building—she herself had always felt personally admired.
    Now she wasn’t so sure. The agents had spoken in front of her as if she were the subject of gossip. From some superior plane of snobbery like a sort of wiseguy American Yiddish, they added insult to injury.
    And now the continued presence of her late husband’s car seemed like nothing so much as an assault, a kind of smear campaign. She found herself averting her eyes from the blighted automobile whenever she went down to the garage with neighbors who’d offered to drive her to her hair appointment, or take her shopping, or invited her out to restaurants.
    Actually her odd fame—she’d become a human interest story; a reporter from the Herald had written her up in a column; the host of a radio talk show wanted her as a guest—had leant her a swift cachet in the building, and people with whom she had barely exchanged a few sentences invited her to their condos for dinner. In the days and weeks following the trial Mrs. Bliss found herself accepting more of these invitations than she declined if for no other reason than that she genuinely enjoyed visiting other people’s condos in the Towers. With the exception of the penthouses, there were essentially only three basic floor plans. She got a kick out of seeing what people had done with their places and regretted only that Ted wasn’t there to see them with her.
    It was peculiar, really, Mrs. Bliss thought, that she should be interested in such matters. She was, of course, house proud. Yet the fixtures and furniture in her apartment were not only pretty much what she had brought down to Florida with her from Chicago but many of her things were pieces they’d had from the time they were first married. Massive bedroom and dining room suites that looked as if they had been carved from the same