With this, she dreamed of how very depressed she was, for if its eye had passed over, then not only was the worst yet to come (and hadn’t it — those palm trees whizzing past — already started?) but she had missed out on what was said to be the most exhilarating aspect of a hurricane — the intense feeling of well-being and soft, luxurious fatigue that accompanied an extended period of low pressure. The experts were all agreed on this part, hammering away at their theme, their own disclaimer. You must steel yourself against the soft seduction of the eye’s low pressure, its perfect dust-and pollen-raked sweet room temperature ionized air, as though the same powerful winds that had blown it over and around her had pushed away all shmuts before them like a new beginning of the world. Stay indoors, stay indoors, they warned, drilling its dangers at her like a public service announcement. You couldn’t have paid her, who’d missed so much, to miss this.
And now she had, and woke from her unplanned sleep with a fatigue as sour as a hangover.
Confused, disoriented, she saw that it was still dark but took no comfort from the fact that she had not missed the eye’s wondrous performance.
A beam of fuzzily focused yellowish light, round and wide as if it were coming out the end of a megaphone, played over Mrs. Bliss’s living/dining-room area, frightening her, stiffening her back against the wing chair and forcing her to clutch at its arms like a fugitive flattening himself against a wall.
“Mrs. Bliss? Mrs. Bliss.”
She thought she could hear someone call her name, but without her hearing aids she couldn’t be sure.
“Mrs. Bliss?”
Furtively, she put her hand into a breast pocket of her pants suit and quietly as she could fumbled for a hearing aid. She didn’t think she’d made any noise but the appliance wasn’t in yet so she couldn’t be sure.
“Mrs. Bliss, are you there?”
“Who’s that, who’s there?”
She hoped it wasn’t Francis Moprado come to murder her for not allowing him to board up her sliding doors.
“It’s me.”
“What do you want, how’d you get in?”
“Passkey.” The security guard walked in front of Mrs. Bliss’s chair. “I come to check you out.”
“Oh, Louise,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss. “I thought you were somebody else.”
“No,” she said, “it’s me. Elaine Munez’s daughter.” She turned the batonlike flashlight on herself for identification.
“I fell asleep,” Mrs. Bliss said. Inexplicably, she felt a need to account for herself, her wanton presence in her condominium in an abandoned building during a hurricane. Idly, she wondered if this were a citable offense, if she could be written up, decided that trying to explain would make too long a story. She wouldn’t fight it.
“Did you see my mother?”
“What?”
“Did you see my mother? I been trying to call since the first reports on my scanner. She don’t answer, Mrs. Bliss.”
“Darling,” said Mrs. Bliss, “the phones aren’t working.”
“Before they ain’t working.”
“People have been leaving the building, Louise. I saw from my balcony. It could have been yesterday. The day before yesterday.”
“She didn’t sign out,” said the security guard. “You got to leave your name with the security guard you go away overnight. I check the books. No Elaine Munez.”
“Well, everyone was in such a hurry.”
“She know the rule.”
“There must have been long lines. Everybody was honking their horns. Does Mother still drive?”
“No.”
“There,” Mrs. Bliss said, “you see? Her driver was giving her the bum’s rush. She probably didn’t have time for the formalities.”
“Not the formalities,” Louise said. She was close to hysteria. “She know how I worry.”
“You’ll see, Mother’s all right. Probably she tried to get a message to you. Everyone was in such a hurry.”
Was she crying? It was too dark to see but it seemed to Mrs. Bliss that the strange girl was crying.
“I come to guard her,” Louise explained. “To protect her from bandits and stranglers.”
“Oh, Louise,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss.
“It isn’t secure,” Louise said, shaking her head desolately. “I’ll tell you something,” she whispered hoarsely. Remarkably, Dorothy could hear every word. She didn’t even have to lean forward, as if there were something in the complicated register of her alarm so insistent it wiped out all silence. “The building ain’t vacant!”
“You checked the sign-out ledger. Did many stay?”
“How hard it would be to sign out and stay behind? It make a good alibi,” she said professionally.
Mrs. Bliss looked toward the mad, improbable woman. Was it possible she knew what she was talking about? And recalled her paranoia in the hall when she’d called out her name like a talisman and stealthily tried all the doorknobs. But somehow her fear had been short-circuited. Sure, she thought, fear falls away, too.
“She could be anywhere,” Louise Munez said desperately. “She could be anywhere on any floor in any building.” Then, like a child, she said, “I want my mother, I want my mother,” and Mrs. Ted Bliss, who wanted her husband and her dead son Marvin, but now not so much, and her other children, too, and the gang, and all the others whom she loved who’d ever lived, but not now not so much, even Junior Yellin, even Ellen, was astonished to realize that the strange girl — she’d met her when she first came to the Towers — was no longer a girl but a woman in her fifties who even at that age was still forever frozen into whatever loony, skewed relationship with her mother had caused their breach and disappointed the mother forever. (Because of all the things that fall away — and everything did, everything, the whole kit and caboodle, even her condo, even the Buick LeSabre, the color of which she no longer remembered — thought Mrs. Bliss, maybe it’s only madness you can hang onto.) And felt something warm, even feverish, take her hand. It was Louise Munez’s hands, covering her own. “Oh,” she said, “I have frighten you.”
“No,” said Mrs. Bliss.
“I will wait with you,” she declared. “I will see you safe through the hurricane.”
Mrs. Bliss removed her hand gently from Louise’s and held her arms open. In the darkness she lifted her left hand to Louise’s head and began to stroke the dry hair.
Because everything else falls away. Family, friends, love fall away. Even madness stilled at last. Until all that’s left is obligation.
A BIOGRAPHY OF STANLEY ELKIN
Stanley Elkin (1930–1995) was an award-winning and critically acclaimed novelist, short story writer, and essayist. He was celebrated for his wit, elegant prose, and poignant fiction that often satirized American culture.
Born in the Bronx, New York, Elkin moved to Chicago at the age of three. Throughout his childhood, he spent his summers with his family in a bungalow community on New Jersey’s Ramapo River. The community provided many families an escape from the city heat, and some of Elkin’s later writing, including The Rabbi of Lud (1987), was influenced by the time he spent there.