She was eating mouldy cheese at the table, and he was reading a book on the couch. Outside it was raining, and their telephone didn't work when it was raining. They'd tried calling the telephone company about this a hundred times, but no one believed them, and of course by the time someone was sent over for repairs, the rain had stopped.
"Your phone's just fine," the repairman always would say, and when they explained the rain, he'd say "Impossible." And present them with a bill for $76.00, and so they stopped worrying about it. The broken telephone became a fact of rainfall as much as getting wet was, and this was what life was. And life was fine.