I flipped back and forth through the local news channels, looking for the butterfly woman, and then, after a well-groomed news anchor wrapped up a report on a community charity drive, the camera panned to a weather map and “staff meteorologist Sylvia Mathews.”
Dressed in a tailored suit, a microphone clipped to her lapel, she spoke the evening sponsor’s motto with a slight stutter: “N-nothing’s too tough for McDuff Hardware.” A computer-generated jet stream appeared on the screen behind her, a curving line of little flashing white arrows. Wagging a pointer at a cold front, she reeled off temperature highs and lows too quickly, as though afraid she might be contradicted. “We might see some strong activity here,” she announced.
Yesterday she’d mentioned that hardly anyone paid attention to a weather report. Certainly I’d never appreciated the special effects: various states on the map changed color, depending on warmer or colder weather; cloud patterns lurched from west to east; and little icons—a smiling sun, a frowning raincloud—flashed off and on. Sylvia dwarfed it all, standing before the sweep of the globe, yet she was also just a tiny figure on the TV screen, stuck in a little box, stiff shouldered and awkwardly tapping her pointer.
“There’s only a slight chance of showers tomorrow,” she predicted, and the doubt in her voice made me imagine rain clouds, lightning, storms.
The camera panned in for a close-up and I leaned in, my face inches from the screen. Tiny crackles of electricity rose from the surface, and for a moment her face matched mine.
“C’mon,” I whispered, “relax a little.”
“May your weather always be happy,” she said, her forced smile signing off. The camera cut to a predictably burly sportscaster, who promised high school basketball scores right after the station break.
“Chance of,” “might”—those hedgings reminded me of the ambiguous language of the daily horoscope. I didn’t know much about meteorology, but I’d learned something from those days when I’d been addicted to the stars’ and planets’ equivocal pronouncements. Interpretation was the point, not precision. Whether she liked it or not, Sylvia was more than a talking head in front of that overexcited weather map—she was the interpreter of a high tech oracle.
“And that’s it for tonight’s news,” the anchor declared. While the credits rolled down the screen I looked up the station’s number and reached for the phone, hoping I’d catch Sylvia before she left.
The receptionist put me on hold and I fought a growing urge to hang up. What right did I have to call, anyway?
“Hello, who is this?” she asked, the question faintly laced with lingering hesitation from her weather roundup.
“Hi, this is, um, Michael Kirby. The man you met in the park yesterday?”
“It’s you. You called,” she said, in a flat voice hiding too much for me to read.
“I watched your weather report. I think I might have an idea about this … dilemma of yours. Could we meet sometime, maybe talk?”
Through the receiver came the television crew’s faraway chatter and I waited, unsure of her reply. We were strangers, after all. But I wanted to believe we’d already begun to seek out each other’s strangeness.