A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

And then he signed it “Love,” because you always did that at the end of a letter.

And then he put his name, “Bruce,” because you always did that too, at the end of a letter. Or at the end of your life.

Mrs. Stevens, downstairs in the kitchen, stopped what she was doing and glanced up at the ceiling when she heard the sharp crack the chair made as it turned over directly above her head. Why was it boys his age, she thought, were so awkward and clumsy about everything they did? Then she went back to paring vegetables again.

But aren’t you always awkward and clumsy, when you try to leave life before your time?

Too Nice a Day to Die

Then she went back to where the cushions were, and quite simply and unstudiedly she lay down there, resting the back of her head on them.

There were no symptoms yet. To take her mind off it, she pulled a cigarette out of the package and lit it. Then, as was invariably the case whenever she smoked one, she took no more than two or three slow, thoughtful draws before putting it down on the ashtray and not going back to it again.

She thought of home. “Back home” she always called it whenever she thought of it. But there was no one there to go back to any more. Her mother had died since she’d left. Her father and she had never been very close. He had a housekeeper now, she understood. In any case, she had an idea he much preferred the unfettered company of his cronies to having her back with him again. Her sister was married and had a houseful of kids (three by actual count, but they seemed to fill the place to spilling over point), Her brother was doing his military hitch in West Germany, and he wasn’t much more than a kid anyway.

No, there was no one for her to go to, anywhere.

It was beginning now. This was it. She wasn’t drowsy yet, but she had entered that lulled state just preceding drowsiness. There was a slight hum in her ears, as if a tiny mosquito were jazzing around outside her head. It was too much effort to go ahead thinking things out any longer. She wouldn’t beg the masked faces in the crowd for a friendly look any more. She wouldn’t hope for the slot in the letterbox to show white any more. She wouldn’t wish for the telephone to ring any more. Let the world have its wakefulness — she’d have her sleep. She turned her face to one side, pressed her cheek against the cushions. Her eyes drooped closed. She reached for the soaked cloth, to put it across them, so that they would stay that way.

Then she heard the bell ringing. First she thought it was part of the symptoms. It was like a railroad-crossing signal-bell, far down a distant track, warning when a train is coming. She contorted her body to try to get away from it, and found herself sitting up dazedly, propped backward on her hands. Consciousness peeled all the way back to its outermost limits like the tattered paper opening up on some circus-hoop that has just been jumped through.

It burst into sudden, crashing clarity then. It was right in the room with her. It was over there in the corner. It was the bell on the telephone.

She managed to get up onto her feet. The room swirled about her, then steadied itself. She felt like being sick for a moment. She wanted to breathe, even more than she did just to live, as though they were two separate processes and one could go on without the other. She threw the two windows open one after the other. The fresh air suddenly swept into her stagnant mind tingling like pine-needles in a stuffy place. She remembered to close off the key under the gas-burner in the kitchen-alcove.

It had never stopped ringing all this while. She stood by it, stood looking at it. Finally, to end the nerve-rack of waiting for it to stop by itself, she picked it up.

The voice was that of a woman. It was slightly accented, but more in sentence-arrangement than in actual pronunciation.

“Hello? It is Schultz’ Delicatessen, yes?”

In a lifeless monotone Laurel Hammond repeated the question word for word, just changing it to the negative. “It is not Schultz’ Delicatessen, no.”

The voice, hard to convince, now repeated the repetition in turn. “It is not Schultz’ Delicatessen?”

“I said no, it is not.”

The voice made one last try, as if hoping persistence alone might yet result in righting the error. “This is not Exmount 3-8448?”

“This is Exmount 3-8844,” Laurel said, with a touch of asperity now at being held there so long.

Unarguably refuted at last, the voice became properly contrite. “I must have put the finger in the slot the wrong way around. I’m sorry, I hope you weren’t asleep.”

“I wasn’t, yet,” Laurel said briefly. And even if I had been, she thought, it wouldn’t have been the kind you could have awakened me from.

Still coughing a little, but more from previous reflex now than present impetus, she hung up.