I’m such a shit, Maxine thought, pretending to change the subject, deliberately averting my eyes whenever she tries to show me this stuff, but glad of Mother’s miserliness, even, God help me, dependent on it.
“You know,” Manny was saying, “when your dad, olov hasholem, passed away I don’t think your mother had made out more than three dozen checks in her whole life. Is this true, Dorothy?”
“I never needed,” Mrs. Bliss said defensively. “Whatever I needed — for the house, for the kids — he gave me. If I needed…needed? If I wanted, he gave me. My every whim — mah-jongg, the beauty parlor, kaluki, the show.”
“Ma,” Maxine said, “Daddy kept you on an allowance?”
“He didn’t keep me on an allowance. All I had to do was ask. What? It’s so much fun to make out a check? It’s such a delight? Ted paid all the bills. Once in a while, if he ran out of checks, he gave me cash and I went downtown to the post office and they made out money orders to the gas and electric. He didn’t keep me on an allowance. All I ever had to do was ask. I didn’t even have to specify.”
“Ma, I’m teasing,” Maxine said.
“Of course,” Mrs. Ted Bliss said, “once Ted died I had to learn. Manny taught me.”
“Taught her,” Manny said modestly, “I showed her. I merely reminded her.”
“I write large,” Mrs. Bliss said. “The hardest part was leaving enough room to write the figures out in longhand. And fitting the numbers into the little box.”
“All she needed was practice. She caught right on,” Manny said.
“Not with the stubs,” Mrs. Bliss said. “ ‘Balancing my check book,’ ” she said formally, looking at Manny. “It was like doing homework for school. Farmer Brown buys a blue dress on sale at Burdines for eighteen dollars and ninety-five cents. He has five hundred and eleven dollars and seven cents on the stub.”
“His previous balance,” Manny said.
“Yeah,” Dorothy said. “His previous balance.”
“Don’t worry,” Manny reassured, winking at them. “I went over it with her.”
“Not now,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss.
“No,” Manny said, “not for a long time.”
“Not since he showed me how to work the computer.”
“Ma, you have a computer?”
“She means a calculator. I picked one up on Lincoln Road at Eckerd’s for under five bucks.”
“It works on the sunshine. Isn’t that something? You never have to buy batteries for it.”
“Solar energy,” Manny said.
“Solar energy,” Mrs. Bliss said. “It’s lucky I live in Florida.”
Frank didn’t know how much more of this he could take. What was it, a routine they’d worked out? Even Maxine was starting to feel resentful.
“He wrote out the hard numbers for me in spelling on a little card I keep in the checkbook. Two. Ninety. Nineteen. Forty. Forty-four. Other hard numbers. Eighty with a ‘g.’ ”
“Five bucks?” Frank said to Manny.
“Sorry?”
“The calculator. Five bucks?”
“Under five bucks.”
“Here,” her son said, and pushed a five-dollar bill into Manny’s hand. What was wrong with Frank? She had to live with these people. What did they think? Why didn’t they think? Did they think that when one was off in Cincinnati and the other in Pittsburgh her life here stopped, that she lived in the freezer like a pot roast waiting for the next time one of them decided to visit or they spoke on the telephone? They were dear children and she loved them. There was nothing either of them did or could do that would stop that, but please, give me a break, my darlings, Mother doesn’t stand on the shelf in a jar when you’re not around to help me, to take me out on the town, or let me look at my grandsons. I have my errands. I go to my various organizations and play cards, ten percent of the winnings to charity off the top. We gave ORT a check for more than six hundred dollars this year. How do they think I get to these places? Do they think I fly? I don’t fly. I depend on Manny from the building. On Manny and on people like him. Even when the game is right here, in a building in the Towers, and the men walk along to escort the women, not just me, any widow, at night, in the dark, to the game, to protect us because security can’t leave their post, so no one should jump out at us from behind the bushes to steal our pocketbooks or, God forbid, worse comes to worse. I know. What am I, stupid? What could Manny or five more just like him do in a real emergency? Nothing. Gomisht. It’s just the idea. Like when Marvin — olov hasholem, olov hasholem — he couldn’t have been much older than Maxine’s James is now and wouldn’t lay down his head, never mind sleep, unless I left on a light in the room so if the apartment on Fifty-third caught on fire he could find his slippers and wouldn’t have to walk barefoot on the floor in a burning building. Kids are afraid of the craziest things. Oh, Marvin, Marvin! At least you had the sense to be afraid. That wasn’t so crazy even if there never was a fire. When the time came and you got sick you burned up plenty, anyway. We’re not so stupid after all. Older than James and so much younger than your mother is now, I’m also afraid of the dark, of danger and horror from the bushes. Isn’t it strange? When Ted was still alive I’d go anywhere by myself. Even after his cancer was diagnosed and he was laying in the hospital I’d wait alone outside for the bus after visiting hours were over and never thought twice about it. Who knows, maybe worry cancels out fear, maybe just being anxious about something makes you a little braver.
God, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, please don’t let him make a scene, just let him put the five dollars into his pocket as if everybody understood all along it was a legitimate debt. Don’t let anyone get up on his high horse, please God. Good. Good for you, Manny, she thought, when Manny accepted the money, you’re a mensh.
“I’m sorry,” said Manny, “I don’t have any change.”
Maxine looked down at the carpet and prayed her brother wouldn’t tell the man he could keep it or make some other smart remark, like it was for his trouble or something.
Frank wondered why he could be such a prick sometimes and was immensely relieved when Manny didn’t make a fuss. He’d seen the awful look on his mother’s face when he’d forced the money into the old man’s hand. It was too late to undo what he’d done. Maybe it would be all right, though. Maybe it was enough that he should be seen playing Asshole to the other’s mere Big Shot.
Manny bit his lower lip and, preparing to rise, leaned forward in Mrs. Bliss’s furniture.
“Well, guess I better be moseying along,” said Manny from the building.
“There’s coffee, there’s cake,” Dorothy said.
“Muchas gracias, but Rosie’ll wonder what’s happened to me.”
“Do what you have to,” Dorothy said, not so much resigned as quite suddenly disappointed and saddened by the heavy load of face-saving in the room, all that decorous schmear and behavior. Why couldn’t people talk and behave without having to think about it or count to ten? Why couldn’t it be like it used to be, why wasn’t Marvin alive, why wasn’t Ted? Why wasn’t what was left of the gang — the real gang, not the bunch down here with which she had to make do, the real gang, the blood gang, her sister Etta, her sister Rose, the boys (grandfathers now), her younger brother Philip, her younger brother Jake; Ted’s deceased brothers, her twin in-laws, Irving and Sam, their wives, Joyce, the impossible Golda, their children, grown-ups themselves, Nathan and Jerry, Bobby, Louis and Sheila, Eli and Ceil; all her dead uncles, her dead uncle Oliver, her dead uncle Ben; Cousin Arthur, Cousin Oscar, Cousin Charles, Cousin Joan, Cousins Mary and Joe, Cousins Zelda and Frances and Betty and Gen; Evelyn, Sylvia, David, Lou and Susan, Diane and Lynne, Cousin Bud — all that ancient network of relation, all that closed circle of vital consanguinity, and all the broken connection in the great Chicago boneyard, too, shtupped in the loam of family, a drowned mulch of death and ancestry, an awful farm of felled Blisses and Plotkins and Fishkins, all of them, the rest of that resting (may they rest, may they rest, may they rest) lineage and descended descent; the real gang, down here? At ease in their tummel and boosted noise. Shouting, openly quarreling, accusing, promoting their voluble challenges, presenting all their up-front, you-can’t-get-away-with-thats in their pokered and pinochled, kaluki’d, gin- and Michigan-rummy’d bluster (and on one famous, furious occasion, Sam, her brother-in-law, so distracted by rage he actually stormed out of his own house, vowing that until Golda received an apology from the entire family he would never sit down to play a game of cards with them again) for, on a good day, a good day, at most a two- or three-dollar pot.