Gerald's Game - Stephen King [18]
'I don't see anything, because my eyes are closed,' she said in a trembling, childish voice. She almost opened them, but something told her that was apt to make the situation worse instead of better.
Who was the one, Jessie? Who taught you that you were ugly and worthless? Who picked out Gerald Burlingame as your soulmate and Prince Charming, probably years before you actually met him at that Republican Party mixer? Who decided he wasn't only what you needed but exactly what you deserved?
With a tremendous effort, Jessie swept this voice — all the voices, she fervently hoped — out of her mind. She began the mantra again, this time speaking it aloud.
'One is my toes, all in a row, two is my legs, lovely and long, three is my sex, what's right can't be wrong, four is my hips, curving and sweet, five is my stomach, where I store what I eat.' She couldn't remember the rest of the rhymes (which was probably a mercy; she had a strong suspicion that Nora had whomped them up herself, probably with an eye toward publication in one of the soft and yearning self-help magazines which sat on the coffee-table in her waiting room) 'and so went on without them: 'Six is my breasts, seven's my shoulders, eight's, my neck . . . '
She paused to take a breath and was relieved to find her heartbeat had slowed from a gallop to a fast run.
' . . . nine is my chin, and ten is my eyes. Eyes, open wide!'
She suited the action to the words and the bedroom jumped into bright existence around her, somehow new and — for a moment, at least — almost as delightful as it had been to her when she and Gerald had spent their first summer in this house. Back in 1979, a year which once had the ring of science fiction and now seemed impossibly antique.
Jessie looked at the gray barnboard walls, the high white ceiling with its reflected shimmers from the lake, and the two big windows, one on either side of the bed. The one to her left looked west, giving a view of the deck, the sloping land beyond it, and the heartbreaking bright blue of the lake. The one on her right provided a less romantic vista — the driveway and her gray dowager of a Mercedes, now eight years old and beginning to show the first small speckles of rust along the rocker-panels.
Directly across the room she saw the framed batik butterfly hanging on the wall over the bureau, and remembered with a superstitious lack of surprise that it had been a thirtieth-birthday present from Ruth. She couldn't see the tiny signature stitched in red thread from over here, but she knew it was there: Neary,'83. Another science-fiction year.
Not far from the butterfly (and clashing like mad, although she had never quite summoned enough nerve to point this out to her husband), Gerald's Alpha Gamma Rho beer-stein hung from a chrome peg. Rho wasn't a very bright star in the fraternity universe — the other frat-rats used to call it Alpha Grab A Hoe — but Gerald wore the pin with a perverse sort of pride and kept the stein on the wall and drank the first beer of the summer out of it each year when they came up here in June. It was the sort of ceremony that had sometimes made her wonder, long before today's festivities, if she had been mentally competent when she married Gerald.
Somebody should have put a stop to it, she thought drearily. Somebody really should have, because just look how it turned out.
In the chair on the other side of the bathroom door, she could see the saucy little culotte skirt and the sleeveless blouse she had wore on this unseasonably warm fall day; her bra hung on the bathroom doorknob. And lying across the bedspread and her legs, turning the tiny soft hairs on her upper thighs to golden wires, was a bright band of afternoon sunlight. Not the square of light that lay almost dead center on the bedspread at one o'clock and not the rectangle which lay on it at