The Mermaid Chair Read Online Free PDF Page B
Author: Sue Monk Kidd
wandered by my booth, his eyes lit on my “Kissing Geese” box.
It was an odd creation, but in a way it was my favorite.
I’d painted the inside with a Victorian living-room scene—
English rose wallpaper and fringed floor lamps—then placed a velvet dollhouse sofa in the box with two plastic geese glued onto the cushions, positioned so they appeared to be in the midst of a beak-to-beak kiss.
I’d been inspired by a newspaper story about a wild goose that had dropped out of the flock during migration to stay with his mate, who’d been injured in a mall parking lot. A store clerk had taken the hurt bird to a refuge, but her mate had wandered around the parking lot for over a week, honking forlornly, until the clerk took him to the refuge, too. The article said they’d been given a “room” together.
The news clipping was decoupaged around the outside of the box, and I’d attached a bicycle horn to the top, the kind with the red ball that sounds like a honking goose. Only about half the people who’d seen the box had actually squeezed the horn.
I’d imagined that this said something about them. That they were more playful than the average person, less reserved.
Hugh bent over the box and read the article while I waited to see what he would do. He honked the horn twice.
“How much do you want for it?” he asked.
I paused, working up the courage to say twenty-five dollars.
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s u e m o n k k i d d
“Would forty be enough?” he said, reaching for his wallet.
I hesitated again, bowled over that anyone would pay that much for kissing geese.
“Fifty?” he said.
I kept my face straight. “Okay, fifty.”
We went out that same night. Four months later we were married. For years he kept the “Kissing Geese” box on his dresser, then moved it to a bookshelf in his study. A couple of years ago, I found him at his desk meticulously regluing all the pieces.
He confessed once that he paid all that money just to get me to go out with him, but the truth was, he loved the box, and his honking the horn really had said something about him, hinting at a side of Hugh few people saw. They always thought about his prodigious intellect, the ability he had to dissect and anatomize, but he loved to have fun and often instigated the most unexpected things: We could go out and celebrate Mexican Independence Day, or would you prefer to go to the Mattress Races? We’d spent a Saturday afternoon at a contest in which people attached wheels onto beds and raced through downtown Atlanta.
People also rarely noticed how deeply and thoroughly he felt things. He still cried whenever a patient took his own life, and he grew sad at times over the dark, excruciating corners people backed themselves into.
Last fall, while putting away the laundry, I came upon Hugh’s jewelry case in the back of his underwear drawer. Maybe I shouldn’t have, but I sat on the bed and went through it. It held all of Dee’s baby teeth, tiny and yellowed like popcorn kernels, and several drawings she’d done on his prescription pad.
There was his father’s Pearl Harbor pin, his grandfather’s pocket-t h e m e r m a i d c h a i r
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watch, the four pairs of cuff links I’d bought him for various anniversaries. I slipped the rubber band off a small bundle of papers and found a creased photograph of me on our honeymoon in the Blue Ridge Mountains, posing in front of the cabin we’d rented. The rest were cards and little love notes I’d sent him over the years. He’d kept them all.
He was the first one of us to say I love you. Two weeks after we met, before we’d even made love. We were in a diner near the Emory campus, eating breakfast in a booth by the window. He said, “I hardly know anything about you, but I love you,” and from that moment his commitment had been unyielding. Even now he rarely went a day without telling me.
In the beginning I’d felt so hungry for him, a ravenous kind of wanting that remained until Dee was born.
It was an odd creation, but in a way it was my favorite.
I’d painted the inside with a Victorian living-room scene—
English rose wallpaper and fringed floor lamps—then placed a velvet dollhouse sofa in the box with two plastic geese glued onto the cushions, positioned so they appeared to be in the midst of a beak-to-beak kiss.
I’d been inspired by a newspaper story about a wild goose that had dropped out of the flock during migration to stay with his mate, who’d been injured in a mall parking lot. A store clerk had taken the hurt bird to a refuge, but her mate had wandered around the parking lot for over a week, honking forlornly, until the clerk took him to the refuge, too. The article said they’d been given a “room” together.
The news clipping was decoupaged around the outside of the box, and I’d attached a bicycle horn to the top, the kind with the red ball that sounds like a honking goose. Only about half the people who’d seen the box had actually squeezed the horn.
I’d imagined that this said something about them. That they were more playful than the average person, less reserved.
Hugh bent over the box and read the article while I waited to see what he would do. He honked the horn twice.
“How much do you want for it?” he asked.
I paused, working up the courage to say twenty-five dollars.
24
s u e m o n k k i d d
“Would forty be enough?” he said, reaching for his wallet.
I hesitated again, bowled over that anyone would pay that much for kissing geese.
“Fifty?” he said.
I kept my face straight. “Okay, fifty.”
We went out that same night. Four months later we were married. For years he kept the “Kissing Geese” box on his dresser, then moved it to a bookshelf in his study. A couple of years ago, I found him at his desk meticulously regluing all the pieces.
He confessed once that he paid all that money just to get me to go out with him, but the truth was, he loved the box, and his honking the horn really had said something about him, hinting at a side of Hugh few people saw. They always thought about his prodigious intellect, the ability he had to dissect and anatomize, but he loved to have fun and often instigated the most unexpected things: We could go out and celebrate Mexican Independence Day, or would you prefer to go to the Mattress Races? We’d spent a Saturday afternoon at a contest in which people attached wheels onto beds and raced through downtown Atlanta.
People also rarely noticed how deeply and thoroughly he felt things. He still cried whenever a patient took his own life, and he grew sad at times over the dark, excruciating corners people backed themselves into.
Last fall, while putting away the laundry, I came upon Hugh’s jewelry case in the back of his underwear drawer. Maybe I shouldn’t have, but I sat on the bed and went through it. It held all of Dee’s baby teeth, tiny and yellowed like popcorn kernels, and several drawings she’d done on his prescription pad.
There was his father’s Pearl Harbor pin, his grandfather’s pocket-t h e m e r m a i d c h a i r
25
watch, the four pairs of cuff links I’d bought him for various anniversaries. I slipped the rubber band off a small bundle of papers and found a creased photograph of me on our honeymoon in the Blue Ridge Mountains, posing in front of the cabin we’d rented. The rest were cards and little love notes I’d sent him over the years. He’d kept them all.
He was the first one of us to say I love you. Two weeks after we met, before we’d even made love. We were in a diner near the Emory campus, eating breakfast in a booth by the window. He said, “I hardly know anything about you, but I love you,” and from that moment his commitment had been unyielding. Even now he rarely went a day without telling me.
In the beginning I’d felt so hungry for him, a ravenous kind of wanting that remained until Dee was born.