He returned with food piled high on a plate. “Ah, Mrs. Bliss,” he said. “Not knowing your preference in my country’s dishes, I have taken the liberty of choosing for you.”
She accepted the plate from the man. She respected men. They did hard, important work. Not that laundry was a cinch, preparing and serving meals, cleaning the house, raising kids. She and Ted were partners, but she’d been the silent partner. She knew that. It didn’t bother her, it never had. If Ted had been mean to her, or bossed her around…but he wasn’t, he didn’t. As a matter of fact, honest, they’d never had a fight. Her sisters had had terrible fights with their husbands. Rose was divorced and to this day she never saw her without thinking of the awful things that had happened between her sister and Herman. Listen, scoundrel that he was, there were two sides to every story. And everything wasn’t all cream and peaches between Etta and Sam. Still, much as she loved Etta, the woman had a tongue on her. She wasn’t born yesterday. Husbands and wives fought. Cats and dogs. Not her and Ted. Not one time. Not once. Believe it or not. As far as Dorothy was concerned he was, well, he was her hero. Take it or leave it.
What she told Gutterman and Elaine Munez was true. She wasn’t hungry; she had prepared a bite of supper before she came to the party. She wasn’t hungry. What did an old woman need? Juice, a slice of toast with some jelly in the morning, a cup of coffee. Maybe some leftovers for lunch. And if she went out to Wolfie’s or the Rascal House with the gang for the Early Bird Special, perhaps some brisket, maybe some fish. Only this wasn’t any of those things. These things were things she’d never seen before in her life.
Bravely, she smiled at Tommy Auveristas and permitted him to lay a beautiful cloth napkin across her lap and hand her the plate of strange food. He gave her queer forks, an oddly shaped spoon. She didn’t have to look to know that it was sterling, top of the line.
Nodding at her, he encouraged her to dig in.
Mrs. Ted Bliss picked over this drek with her eyes. From her expression, from the way her glance darted from one mysterious item to the next, you’d have thought she was examining different chocolates in a pound box of expensive candy, divining their centers, like a dowser, deciding which to choose first. Meanwhile, Tommy Auveristas explained the food like a waiter in one of those two-star restaurants where you nod and grin but don’t know what the hell the man is talking about.
“Which did you say was the chicken, the green or the blue one?”
“Well, both.”
“I can’t decide,” Dorothy Bliss said.
Auveristas wasn’t born yesterday either. He knew the woman was stalling him, knew the fixed ways of the old, their petrified tastes. It was one of the big items that most annoyed the proud hidalgo about old fart señoras like this one. She was his guest, however, and whatever else he may have been he was a gracious and resourceful host.
“No, no, Dorothy,” he said, snatching her plate and signaling the maid up off her knees to take the food away, “you mustn’t!” he raised his hand against the side of his head in the international language of dummkopf.
The señora didn’t know what had hit her and looked at him with an expression at 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 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.”