Which may actually have been at the core and source of her sympathies with her gender. It was men these women dressed for. (“I hope this blue isn’t too blue, I’ll die if it clashes with my husband’s brown suit.”) Dorothy had not, beyond the universe of her own family, known all that many men, but even in her family had noticed the tendency of the women to leave the choicest cuts, ripest fruits, even the favorite, most popular flavors of candy sourballs — the reds and purples, the greens and the oranges — for the men. The most comfortable chairs around the dining room table. The coldest water, the hottest soup, the last piece of cake. Her smallest little girl cousins cheerfully shared with their smallest little boy cousins, voluntarily gave up their turns in line. They worked combs through the boys’ hair gently; they scratched their backs.
She was not resentful. Her sympathies were with her sex because that was the way she felt, too.
Indeed, if she resented anyone, it was her employer, Mrs. Dubow, she resented. A resentment that was something beyond and even greater than her fear of the terrifying woman who not only chased her through the confines of a dressmaker’s shop no larger than an ordinary shoe store, clacking her scissors and flicking a yellow measuring tape at her, but shouting at her, too, her mouth full of pins, and calling her names so vile she could only guess at their meaning and be more embarrassed than hurt. Because now she remembered just what it was Mrs. Dubow was supposed to have done to become the first wife in the history of Illinois ever required to pay alimony to the husband. She’d thrown acid in his face! Thrown acid at him, defiling him forever where the tenderest meat went, the sweetest fruits and most delicious candies.
Mrs. Ted Bliss shuddered.
Because there was a trade-off. A covenant almost. Women honored the men who put food on the table, who provided the table on which the food was put, and the men saved them. That was the trade-off. Men saved them. They took them out of awful places like Mrs. Dubow’s and put food on the table and kept all the books. Women owed it to them to be good-looking, they owed it to them that the shade of their dresses did not clash with the shade of their suits, to hold their shapes and do their level best to keep up their reflections in mirrors. It wasn’t vanity, it was duty. And it was what explained her calm when neighbors had marveled at her beauty, her almost invisible aging, the two or three baths she took each day. You needn’t have looked farther when people had complimented her than at the benign smile on Ted’s face (even in that last, malignant year) to see that she had kept up her end of the contract, had proved herself worthy of being saved.
So of course Mrs. Ted Bliss, having been saved once before by a man, and who saw no reason to fiddle with what worked, chose to see a man to save her this time, too, when her children thought she was going crazy.
Her therapist, Holmer Toibb, was not Jewish, and did not live in the Towers. He’d been recommended by Manny’s physician, who thought the lawyer had used the story of a depressed “friend” as a cover for his own bluff despondency. Manny, at sixty-eight, was at a difficult age. A few years into his retirement and the bloom off his freedom, the doctor thought Manny a perfect candidate for the sort of recreational therapeusis in which Toibb specialized, offering options to patients to open up ways that, in the early stages of their declining years, might lead them toward fresh interests in life. Himself in his sixties, Toibb had studied with Greener Hertsheim, practically the founder of recreational therapeusis, after twenty-or-so years still a relatively new branch of psychology whose practitioners eschewed the use of drugs and had no use for tie-ins with psychiatrists. Like a page out of the fifties when doctors of osteopathy faced off with chiropractors and spokesmen for the AMA on all-night radio talk shows, RT, in southern Florida at least, had become a sort of eighties substitute for all the old medical conspiracy theories. Mrs. Bliss, apolitical and passive almost to a fault, couldn’t get enough of controversial call-in shows. She had no position on the Warren Commission findings, didn’t know if she was for or against detente, supply-side economics, any of the hot-button issues of the times, including even the battle between traditional psychiatry and the recreational therapists, yet she ate up polemics, dissent, her radio turned up practically to full volume — she was deaf, yet even at full throttle their voices on the radio came to her as moderate, disciplined, but she was aware of their anger and edge and imagined them shouting — somehow comforted by all that fury, the baleboosteh busyness and passion in their speech. It was how, distracted from thoughts of Ted in the mutual family earth back in, and just under, Chicago, she managed to drift off to sleep.
So she was totally prepared when Toibb undertook to explain the principles of recreational therapeusis to her, and what he proposed (should he accept her as his patient) to do. Indeed, she rather enjoyed having it all explained to her, rather as if, thought Mrs. Bliss, Toibb was a salesman going over the good points in his wares. Faintly, although she was familiar with most of it from the call-in shows, she had the impression, always enjoyable to her, that he was fleshing out the full picture, a fact that (should he accept her as a patient or not) she liked to believe gave her the upper hand.