T. Boyle - T. C. Boyle Stories

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—

But then she glanced up at the clock. It was quarter to twelve already and he’d be home any minute now. Suddenly all the rage she’d generated over the Frinstell Corporation was gone, extinguished as quickly as it had arisen, and she felt a wild rush of affection for her man, her husband, for Willis — the poor guy, out there in all kinds of weather, working like a man half his age, providing for her and protecting her … and she’d been hard on him at breakfast, she had. What he needed was a nice lunch, she decided, a nice hot lunch. She set the Home Weather Center back in the box as gently as if she were lowering a baby into its crib, and then she wrapped the package up again, retaped the seams, and went to the cupboard. She poured herself a glass of wine from the jug and then fastened on a can of split-pea-and-ham soup — she’d heat that for Willis, and she’d make him a nice egg salad on toast….

Toast. But they were out of bread, weren’t they? There was nothing but that sawdust-and-nut crap he’d tried to pawn off on her for breakfast. She thought about that for a moment and a black cloud seemed to rise up before her. And then, before she knew it, the fury of the morning swept over her again, the tragedy of the TV and the cheat of the Home Weather Center doubling it and redoubling it, and by the time she heard Willis’s key turn in the lock, she was smoldering like Vesuvius.

If she was testy in the morning, if she lashed into him for no reason and jumped down his throat at the slightest provocation, by lunchtime she was inevitably transformed, so that an all-embracing cloud of maternal sweetness wrapped him up as he stepped through the door, and then ushered him out again, half an hour later, with a series of tender lingering hugs, squeezes and back pats. That was the usual scenario, but today was different. Willis sensed it even before he shambled down the hallway to discover her in the kitchen fussing over a can of soup and a box of saltines. He saw that she was still in her nightdress and housecoat, a bad sign, and he recognized the stunned, hurt, put-upon look in her eyes. He just stood there at the kitchen door and waited.