The house was silent as a tomb. She gazed out the window; the clouds hung low and roiled over the roof, strung out like sausage, like entrails, black with blood and bile. There was a storm watch on, she’d heard that much on the “Morning” show, and again she felt a tug of regret over the TV. She wanted to get up that minute and turn on the news channel, but the news channel was no more — not for her, at any rate. There was the radio — and she experienced a sudden sharp stab of nostalgia for her girlhood and the nights when the whole family would crowd around the big Emerson console and listen to one program after another — but these days she never listened; it just gave her a headache. And with Willis around, who needed another headache?
She thought of the newspaper then and pushed herself up from the table to poke through the living room for it — if there was anything serious, a hurricane or something, they’d have a story on the front page. She was thinking about that, fixating on the newspaper, and she forgot all about the TV, so that when she stepped through the door, the sight of it gave her a shock. She’d swept up the broken glass, feeling chastened and heartbroken, but now the shattered screen accused her all over again. Guiltily, she shuffled through the heap of papers and magazines stuffed under the coffee table, then poked through the bedroom and finally went outside to comb the front lawn. No newspaper. Of all days, Willis must have taken it to work with him. And suddenly, standing there on the hushed and gray lawn in her housecoat and slippers, she was furious again. The son of a bitch. He never thought of her, never. Now she had the whole drizzling black miserable day ahead of her — TV-less, friendless, joyless — and she didn’t even have the consolation of the newspaper.
While she was standing there out front of the house, poking halfheartedly under the bushes and noticing how shabby a job the gardener had done — and he’d hear from her, by god he would — a big brown UPS van glided into the driveway with a gentle sigh of the brakes. The driver was a young man, handsome, broad-shouldered, and for a minute she had a vision of Lester Gaudinet as he was all those many years ago. Lester Gaudinet. And where was he now? God knew if he was even alive still…but how she’d like to see him, wouldn’t that be something?
“Mrs. Willis Blythe?” The man had crossed the lawn and he stood at her elbow now, a parcel tucked under his arm.
“Yes,” she said, and the wind came up and took her hair out of its bun.
The man held out a clipboard to her, pages flapping. “Sign here,” he said, handing her a pen. and she saw a list of names and signatures and the big red X he’d scrawled beside the space for her name.
She took the clipboard from him and smiled up into his sea-green eyes, into Lester’s eyes, and she couldn’t help trying to hold on to the moment. “Rotten day,” she said.
He looked tense, anxious, looked as if he were about to lunge out of the blocks and disappear down a cinder track. “Hurricane weather,” he said. “Supposed to miss us except for some rain later on — that’s what the radio says, anyway.”
She held the clipboard in her hand still and she bent forward to sign the form, but then a thought occurred to her and she straightened up again. “Hurricanes,” she said with a little snort of contempt. “And I suppose it’s called Bill or Fred or something like that — not like in the old days, when they had the sense to name them after women. It’s a shame, isn’t it?”
The UPS man was shuffling his feet on the spongy carpet of the lawn. “Yeah,” he said, “sure — but would you sign, please, ma’am? I’ve got—”
She held up her hand to forestall him. God, he was handsome — the image of Lester. Of course, Lester had the mustache and he was taller and his eyes were prettier, brighter somehow…“I know, I know — you’ve got a million deliveries to make.” She gave him a bright steady look. “It’s women that’re like hurricanes, they used to understand that”—was she flirting with him? Yes, of course she was—“but now it’s Hurricane Tom, Dick or Harry. It just makes you sick, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah,” he said, “I know, but—”
“Okay, okay already, I’m signing.” She inscribed his delivery sheet for him in the neat geometric script she’d mastered in parochial school in another age and then turned her coquette’s smile on him — why not, was she so old it was impossible? Not in this world, not with the things that went on on TV these days. She touched his arm and held it a moment as he handed her the package. “Thank you,” she murmured. “You’re so handsome, do you know that?”
And then he stood there like an oaf, like a schoolboy, and he actually blushed. “Yes, yes,” he stammered, “I mean no, I mean thank you,” and then he was darting across the lawn with his clipboard flapping and the wind took her hair again. “Have a nice day!” she called, but he didn’t hear her.
Inside, she examined the package briefly—The Frinstell Corporation, the label read — and then she went into the sewing room to fetch her scissors. The Frinstell Corporation, she thought, running it over in her mind, and what was this all about? She was forever clipping things out of magazines and sending away for them — once-in-a-lifetime offers and that sort of thing — but Frinstell didn’t ring a bell. It took her a moment, the scissors gleaming dully in the crepuscular light of the kitchen, and then she had the tape slit up the seam and she was digging through the welter of tissue paper stuffed inside. And there — oh yes, of course — there was her genuine U.S.-Weather-Service-Approved Home Weather Center mounted on a genuine polished-walnut veneer plaque — thermometer, barometer and humidity gauge all in one — with a lifetime guarantee.
It was a pretty sort of thing, she thought, holding it up to admire it. Polished brass, good bold figures and hash marks you didn’t need binoculars to read, made in the U.S. of A. It would look nice up on the wall over the fireplace — or maybe in the dining room; the walnut would match the color of the dining set, wouldn’t it? She was on her way into the dining room, the genuine Home Weather Center in hand, when she noticed that the barometer needle was stuck all the way down in the left-hand corner. Pinned. She shook it, patted the glass lens. Nothing. It was stuck fast.
Suddenly she couldn’t help herself — she could feel the rage coming up on her, a rage as inevitable and relentless as the smashing of the sea on the rocks — and how many pills had she swallowed and how many doctors, not to mention husbands, had tried to quell it? The Frinstell Corporation. Cheats and con artists, that’s what they were. You couldn’t get anything anymore that wasn’t a piece of junk and no wonder America was the laughingstock of the world. Not ten seconds out of the box and it was garbage already. She was seething. It was all she could do to keep from smashing it against the wall, stamping it underfoot — dope addicts, hopheads, the factories were full of them — but then she remembered the TV and she held on till the first hot wave of fury passed over her.
All right, she would be rational about it, she would. It had a lifetime guarantee, didn’t it? But what a joke, she thought bitterly, and again she had to restrain herself from flinging the thing into the wall — a glass of wine, that’s what she needed. Yes. To calm her. And then she’d wrap the thing up in the box and send it right back to the bastards — they’d see how fast their own shit came sailing back to them, they’d see whether they could put anything over on her…she’d have Willis down at the post office the minute he came in the door. And she’d be damned if she’d pay postage on it either. Return to Sender, that’s how she’d mark it. Damaged in Transit, Take Your Garbage and—