Excitement for sale

By STEPHEN WILDER
Suppose a salesman knocked at your door and said: I'm selling happiness—any kind your heart desires. Every shape, size or description—and the price is right. Would you know instantly the thing you wanted above all else? Maybe you'd better think it over in advance. The salesman might turn up any day.
He was a mood-merchant, a happiness-huckster, peddling dreams from door to door.
Mary-Jean closed the cover of the current Woman's Home Journal with a little sigh and walked into the kitchen to put a light under the stew she was cooking for supper. One thing about Tom, she thought—Tom was her husband—there was no problem with leftovers because Tom liked stew.
But there ought to be a law, Mary-Jean thought, against such magazines as Woman's Home Journal . She sighed again, remembering the many stories she had read to pass the afternoon hours, as if, despite the careful pattern and routine of the household chores, killing time was still the most important function of the housewife.
There ought to be a law, all right. The heroine in the first story Mary-Jean had read went off to Caracas, Venezuela, in search of petroleum with her husband. The heroine of the second story was an Army nurse stationed in divided, exotic, intrigue-filled Berlin. The heroine of the third, Mary-Jean thought dreamily, had spent a memorable summer with the son of a fabulously wealthy Oriental potentate in Shalimar, Kashmir.
Mary-Jean went upstairs to take her daily shower, still thinking of Shalimar, Kashmir. The Vale of a Thousand Delights, it was called. Do I have one? thought Mary-Jean. Just one genuine delight like the girls in those stories? Oh, there's Tom: Tom's good natured, but an accountant. An accountant. She shuddered slightly as she got ready for her shower. And Tommy, Jr., aged seven. But Tommy, Jr., showed every sign of being a normal, everyday boy who would grow up into a normal, workaday man like his father.
Sighing again, Mary-Jean stripped before her mirror for the daily scrutiny preparatory to showering. I'm only twenty-eight, she thought. No sags in the wrong places. No excess fat and no gawky bones sticking out, either. But let's face it, Mary-Jean, you're no raving beauty. You're just a normal, plain, supposedly well-adjusted housewife who—