Waiting to Exhale by Terry McMillan Read Free Book Online Page B

this whole house, that would indicate that black people lived here. She jumped over the rug, and the tiles made her feet cold, but Bernadine didn't feel like putting on her slippers. She headed for the bathroom.
    Once in there, she stood stock-still and looked at herself in the wide mirror behind the two sinks. Sunlight poured down over her from the skylight. Her eyes were puffy, her lips were chapped, and four red splotches had formed on her left cheek. She looked terrible. She turned around to face the mirror on the linen closet door and, for no apparent reason, lifted up her nightgown. Her breasts had shrunk. They didn't look the way they did before the kids. They were thin and almost flat; her nipples were on the verge of pointing downward. The contour of her body was a short soft curve, her skin a dull brown, except for the beige stretch marks on her hips and belly. Bernadine felt old. She looked old. Older than thirty-six. She got closer to the mirror, so close that when she breathed, two small circles of fog formed. She studied her face. Bernadine knew she'd never been pretty, and she reconfirmed it now. She stepped backward and stopped. Her eyes grazed up and down her body once more, because she was trying to imagine if anybody might still think of her as attractive, since right this minute she was ugly. She let go of her nightgown until she felt the hem hit her knees. She said, "Cheese." Her teeth looked yellow, although it had been 106 days since she'd quit smoking. But damn, that was what she needed right now. A cigarette. A cigarette would help her believe this. A cigarette would help her understand that her life had just been revised. A cigarette would help her decide exactly what to do next. How to proceed. She already knew she would no longer have a husband. Then she thought about that. Not have a husband? She sat down on the toilet and put her face in her lap. It seemed as if she'd always had a husband. Now all she knew was that she was going to be a thirty-six-year-old divorced mother of two. Which meant she was going to be single. "Single?" Her face sprang up, as if she'd just remembered something she'd forgotten.
    "You son of a bitch!" she said, and jumped up from the toilet to look at herself again. Who's gonna want me? How am I supposed to start over, when in fact I'm not starting over? This is the middle of my damn life! And I've got two kids! Bernadine opened the medicine cabinet and looked at a row of prescription bottles. She was looking for an X for Xanax. When she found the bottle, she opened the top and popped two of them dry. She'd never taken two before. They were dissolving on her tongue when she realized she should take them with water. She turned on the faucet, placed her palms on her side of the vanity and stared at the gold-and-black speckles on the cultured marble. She pushed all her weight on her hands and felt her shoulders drop. I hadn't planned for this, she thought. Never even anticipated what I'd do if my marriage didn't last. It was supposed to last. She filled a Dixie cup with water, swallowed it like a shot, threw the cup in the trash, then felt even more enraged for having been this presumptuous. She wanted to punish herself for being so damn naive, but all she could do right now was kick the hell out of the mirror on the door. A spiderweb spread across the silver surface and made her body look as though it had cracked into hundreds of broken pieces.
    "A pack of Kools, please," she said to the man behind the counter at the Circle K.
    "You ain't got nothin' smaller?" he asked, trying to give her back the hundred-dollar bill she had handed him.
    "I don't know," she said, and didn't bother to look. He was staring at her rather strangely, because although he saw crazies up here from time to time, this one looked sane, except why was her hair in them Shirley Temple-looking curls, like she just took out her rollers and didn't comb it? And why was she wearing a bathrobe and fancy bedroom