Chapter 13 Wee Small Hours of the Morning
Wee Small Hours of the Morning
By the time Margaret came home, the house was still and everyone was asleep. Instead of going upstairs right away, she slipped
her shoes off in the foyer and padded to the kitchen in her stocking feet.
She washed the cake carrier and set it upside down in the dish rack to dry, then sat down at the kitchen table. She stared
out the window toward the empty street and the blocky black silhouettes of their neighbor’s hedges and the evenly spaced circles
of light that shone down from the streetlamps onto the sidewalks, thinking about Viv’s comment that every wife hates her husband
at some point.
She had said it so casually, as if occasionally loathing one’s spouse was just an unpleasant but unavoidable consequence of
adulthood, as inescapable as death, taxes, and crow’s-feet.
Was it? Should it be? And how did that happen?
They weren’t living in the Middle Ages, after all. Not one woman in that room had been forced into marriage. Yes, Bitsy had
been facing tough circumstances, but she’d still had choices—to marry, not to marry, to marry later, to marry someone else.
All of them had been given and made a choice, had chosen one particular person from all of humanity as the one.
So what had happened?
How did one go from being the girl in the white dress—giving and receiving promises to eternally love, honor, and cherish—to the wife who shrugs her shoulders and nods her head when a newlywed asks if it’s normal for her to hate her husband?
Surely it wasn’t meant to be that way. Yet here they all were.
Bitsy was starting to wonder if King might be a bit cruel. Charlotte had not one good word to say about Howard. Viv was keeping
secrets from Tony. And Margaret and Walt didn’t talk anymore—just exchanged information about kids, chores, budgets, schedules,
and obligations.
How could things have gone so wrong? For all of them?
Margaret couldn’t understand it, so she wrote about it.
The clack of the typewriter might have woken the family, so she left Sylvia in the closet and got out a notebook and pen.
At first she just spilled her thoughts and questions onto the paper, scribbling impressions of the things she’d read, thought,
heard, witnessed, and experienced, looking for connections that might bring answers. Then she took all that and tried crafting
a scene: a book club meeting with characters who felt familiar but, ultimately, too familiar. Next she wrote about a neighborhood
party where, instead of selling Tupperware or Avon, the exuberant hostess was trying to sell her guests a husband, attempting
to make it funny.
But it wasn’t funny. Just sad. She closed the notebook, put down the pen, and went upstairs. Walt was sound asleep, lying
on his side and curled into himself, fisted hands tucked under his chin, breathing softly, steadily, innocently. Next to him
an alarm clock ticked away seconds of a day that would never come again, casting a greenish glow over the copy of The Old Man and the Sea that was open to the middle and lying face down on the nightstand.
Margaret leaned down and pressed her lips lightly to his forehead.
“I don’t hate you,” she whispered.