The Mermaid Chair by Sue Monk Kidd

Author:Sue Monk Kidd [Kidd, Sue Monk]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2005-12-09T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER Twenty-two

I turned the golf cart into Kat’s driveway the next morning, angling past the MERMAID XING sign, feeling unaccountably lighthearted, unclouded, emancipated, something bordering on frivolous. This after twisting around half the night in the sheets in guilt and alarm at what I’d done.

After Hugh had left yesterday, I’d sat beside the slave cemetery for an hour or more, until the paralysis wore off and the paroxysms of terror began. What have I done?

I’d called him last night, twice. He hadn’t answered even though he’d had plenty of time to get back home. I hadn’t known why I was calling, or what I would say if he answered. Probably I would have repeated a long litany of I’m sorry, I’m sorry. What I’d done seemed impossible to me, completely disorienting. Like I’d amputated something—not a mere digit on my hand but my marriage, the symbiosis that had sustained me. My life had been beautifully contained within Hugh’s, like one of those Russian nesting dolls, encompassed in wifeness, in a cocoon of domesticity. And I’d demolished it. For what?

I’d sat on the edge of the bed remembering odd bits and pieces of things. The time when Dee was small and Hugh had sung the Humpty Dumpty song to her while balancing an egg on the edge of the table, how he’d let it go, demonstrating Humpty’s great fall. She’d loved it so much that he’d killed off the entire carton, then afterward gotten down on the floor and cleaned up the whole mess. I’d thought of the silly game he played every Christmas—I Bet I Can Wear Every Present I Open. I don’t mean sport shirts and slippers but fishing rods and steak knives. My part in this was to challenge him by buying one thing a human being seemingly could not wear. Last year it had been a cappuccino machine. Within two minutes he’d strapped it onto himself like a backpack using a couple of bungee cords. “Voilà,” he’d said.

What if there were no more Hugh in my life? No more of these small antics, the moments we’d pieced together to form a history?

But were these habits of love—or love itself?

I forced myself to consider how irritating he could be: the way he dried the insides of his ears with the hem of his undershirt, that maddening puffing sound he made, the toothbrush tapping, the walking around in nothing but socks and oxford shirts buttoned to his neck, the pulling open of drawers and cabinets and never closing them. Worse, the tiresome overanalyzing, the incessant rightness, the entitlement he felt when it came to us—that tendency of his to be the benevolent puppeteer.

People move on, I’d told myself. They create new histories. Still, the panic had kept roiling until I’d fallen asleep.

This morning I’d wakened to a soft light folding in through the window, and my apprehension was gone, replaced by this strange buoyancy. I’d lain in bed, realizing I’d been dreaming. The dream had faded, except for one rapturous fragment still spinning at the edge of my awareness.

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