The Bell Jar (15 page)

I could hear giggles in the distance till a door shut and cut them off.

There were six beds in the room, and each bed had a woman in it. The women were all sitting up and knitting or riffling through magazines or putting their hair in pin curls and chattering like parrots in a parrot house.

I had thought they would be sleeping, or lying quiet and pale, so I could tiptoe round without any trouble and match the bed numbers to the numbers inked on adhesive tape on the vases, but before I had a chance to get my bearings, a bright, jazzy blonde with a sharp, triangular face beckoned to me.

I approached her, leaving the trolley in the middle of the floor, but then she made an impatient gesture, and I saw she wanted me to bring the trolley too.

I wheeled the trolley over to her bedside with a helpful smile.

“
Hey, where's my larkspur?” A large, flabby lady from across the ward raked me with an eagle eye.

The sharp-faced blonde bent over the trolley. “Here are my yellow roses,” she said, “but they're all mixed up with some lousy iris.”

Other voices joined the voices of the first two women. They sounded cross and loud and full of complaint.

I was opening my mouth to explain that I had thrown a bunch of dead larkspur in the sink, and that some of the vases I had weeded out looked skimpy, there were so few flowers left, so I had joined a few of the bouquets together to fill them
out, when the swinging door flew open and a nurse stalked in to see what the commotion was.

“Listen, nurse, I had this big bunch of larkspur Larry brought last night.”

“She's loused up my yellow roses.”

Unbuttoning the green uniform as I ran, I stuffed it, in passing, into the washbasin with the rubbish of dead flowers. Then I took the deserted side steps down to the street two at a time, without meeting another soul.

“Which way is
the graveyard?”

The Italian in the black leather jacket stopped and pointed down an alley behind the white Methodist church. I remembered the Methodist church. I had been a Methodist for the first nine years of my life, before my father died and we moved and turned Unitarian.

My mother had been a Catholic before she was a Methodist. My grandmother and my grandfather and my Aunt Libby were all still Catholics. My Aunt Libby had broken away from the Catholic Church at the same time my mother did, but then she'd fallen in love with an Italian Catholic, so she'd gone back again.

Lately I had considered going into the Catholic Church myself. I knew that Catholics thought killing yourself was an awful sin. But perhaps, if this was so, they might have a good way to persuade me out of it.

Of course, I didn't believe in life after death or the virgin birth or the Inquisition or the infallibility of that little monkey-faced Pope or anything, but I didn't have to let the
priest see this, I could just concentrate on my sin, and he would help me repent.

The only trouble was, Church, even the Catholic Church, didn't take up the whole of your life. No matter how much you knelt and prayed, you still had to eat three meals a day and have a job and live in the world.

I thought I might see how long you had to be a Catholic before you became a nun, so I asked my mother, thinking she'd know the best way to go about it.

My mother had laughed at me. “Do you think they'll take somebody like you, right off the bat? Why you've got to know all these catechisms and credos and believe in them, lock, stock and barrel. A girl with your sense!”

Still, I imagined myself going to some Boston priest—it would have to be Boston, because I didn't want any priest in my home town to know I'd thought of killing myself. Priests were terrible gossips.

I would be in black, with my dead white face, and I would throw myself at this priest's feet and say, “O Father, help me.”

But that was before people had begun to look at me in a funny way, like those nurses in the hospital.

I was pretty sure the Catholics wouldn't take in any crazy nuns. My Aunt Libby's husband had made a joke once, about a nun that a nunnery sent to Teresa for a checkup. This nun kept hearing harp notes in her ears and a voice saying over and over, “Alleluia!” Only she wasn't sure, on being closely questioned, whether the voice was saying Alleluia or Arizona. The nun had been born in Arizona. I think she ended up in some asylum.

I tugged my black veil down to my chin and strode in through the wrought-iron gates. I thought it odd that in all the time my father had been buried in this graveyard, none of us had ever visited him. My mother hadn't let us come to his funeral because we were only children then, and he had died in the hospital, so the graveyard and even his death had always seemed unreal to me.

I had a great yearning, lately, to pay my father back for all the years of neglect, and start tending his grave. I had always been my father's favorite, and it seemed fitting I should take on a mourning my mother had never bothered with.

I thought that if my father hadn't died, he would have taught me all about insects, which was his specialty at the university. He would also have taught me German and Greek and Latin, which he knew, and perhaps I would be a Lutheran. My father had been a Lutheran in Wisconsin, but they were out of style in New England, so he had become a lapsed Lutheran and then, my mother said, a bitter atheist.

The graveyard disappointed me. It lay at the outskirts of the town, on low ground, like a rubbish dump, and as I walked up and down the gravel paths, I could smell the stagnant salt marshes in the distance.

The old part of the graveyard was all right, with its worn, flat stones and lichen-bitten monuments, but I soon saw my father must be buried in the modern part with dates in the nineteen forties.

The stones in the modern part were crude and cheap, and here and there a grave was rimmed with marble, like an oblong bathtub full of dirt, and rusty metal containers stuck
up about where the person's navel would be, full of plastic flowers.

A fine drizzle started drifting down from the gray sky, and I grew very depressed.

I couldn't find my father anywhere.

Low, shaggy clouds scudded over that part of the horizon where the sea lay, behind the marshes and the beach shanty settlements, and raindrops darkened the black mackintosh I had bought that morning. A clammy dampness sank through to my skin.

I had asked the salesgirl, “Is it water-repellent?”

And she had said, “No raincoat is ever
water-repellent.
It's showerproofed.”

And when I asked her what showerproofed was, she told me I had better buy an umbrella.

But I hadn't enough money for an umbrella. What with bus fare in and out of Boston and peanuts and newspapers and abnormal-psychology books and trips to my old home town by the sea, my New York fund was almost exhausted.

I had decided that when there was no more money in my bank account I would do it, and that morning I'd spent the last of it on the black raincoat.

Then I saw my father's gravestone.

It was crowded right up by another gravestone, head to head, the way people are crowded in a charity ward when there isn't enough space. The stone was of a mottled pink marble, like canned salmon, and all there was on it was my father's name and, under it, two dates, separated by a little dash.

At the foot of the stone I arranged the rainy armful of azaleas I had picked from a bush at the gateway of the graveyard. Then my legs folded under me, and I sat down in the sopping grass. I couldn't understand why I was crying so hard.

Then I remembered that I had never cried for my father's death.

My mother hadn't cried either. She had just smiled and said what a merciful thing it was for him he had died, because if he had lived he would have been crippled and an invalid for life, and he couldn't have stood that, he would rather have died than had that happen.

I laid my face to the smooth face of the marble and howled my loss into the cold salt rain.

I knew just
how to go about it.

The minute the car tires crunched off down the drive and the sound of the motor faded, I jumped out of bed and hurried into my white blouse and green figured skirt and black raincoat. The raincoat felt damp still, from the day before, but that would soon cease to matter.

I went downstairs and picked up a pale blue envelope from the dining room table and scrawled on the back, in large, painstaking letters:
I
am going for a long walk.

I propped the message where my mother would see it the minute she came in.

Then I laughed.

I had forgotten the most important thing.

I ran upstairs and dragged a chair into my mother's closet. Then I climbed up and reached for the small green strongbox
on the top shelf. I could have torn the metal cover off with my bare hands, the lock was so feeble, but I wanted to do things in a calm, orderly way.

I pulled out my mother's upper right-hand bureau drawer and slipped the blue jewelry box from its hiding place under the scented Irish linen handkerchiefs. I unpinned the little key from the dark velvet. Then I unlocked the strongbox and took out the bottle of new pills. There were more than I had hoped.

There were at least fifty.

If I had waited until my mother doled them out to me, night by night, it would have taken me fifty nights to save up enough. And in fifty nights, college would have opened, and my brother would have come back from Germany, and it would be too late.

I pinned the key back in the jewelry box among the clutter of inexpensive chains and rings, put the jewelry box back in the drawer under the handkerchiefs, returned the strongbox to the closet shelf and set the chair on the rug in the exact spot I had dragged it from.

Then I went downstairs and into the kitchen. I turned on the tap and poured myself a tall glass of water. Then I took the glass of water and the bottle of pills and went down into the cellar.

A dim, undersea light filtered through the slits of the cellar windows. Behind the oil burner, a dark gap showed in the wall at about shoulder height and ran back under the breezeway, out of sight. The breezeway had been added to the house after the cellar was dug, and built out over this secret earth-bottomed crevice.

A few old, rotting fireplace logs blocked the hole mouth. I shoved them back a bit. Then I set the glass of water and the bottle of pills side by side on the flat surface of one of the logs and started to heave myself up.

It took me a good while to heft my body into the gap, but at last, after many tries, I managed it, and crouched at the mouth of the darkness, like a troll.

The earth seemed friendly under my bare feet, but cold. I wondered how long it had been since this particular square of soil had seen the sun.

Then, one after the other, I lugged the heavy, dust-covered logs across the hole mouth. The dark felt thick as velvet. I reached for the glass and bottle, and carefully, on my knees, with bent head, crawled to the farthest wall.

Cobwebs touched my face with the softness of moths. Wrapping my black coat round me like my own sweet shadow, I unscrewed the bottle of pills and started taking them swiftly, between gulps of water, one by one by one.

At first nothing happened, but as I approached the bottom of the bottle, red and blue lights began to flash before my eyes. The bottle slid from my fingers and I lay down.

The silence drew off, baring the pebbles and shells and all the tatty wreckage of my life. Then, at the rim of vision, it gathered itself, and in one sweeping tide, rushed me to sleep.

It was completely
dark.

I felt the darkness, but nothing else, and my head rose, feeling it, like the head of a worm. Someone was moaning. Then a great, hard weight smashed against my cheek like a stone wall and the moaning stopped.

The silence surged back, smoothing itself as black water smooths to its old surface calm over a dropped stone.

A cool wind rushed by. I was being transported at enormous speed down a tunnel into the earth. Then the wind stopped. There was a rumbling, as of many voices, protesting and disagreeing in the distance. Then the voices stopped.

A chisel cracked down on my eye, and a slit of light opened, like a mouth or a wound, till the darkness clamped shut on it again. I tried to roll away from the direction of the light, but hands wrapped round my limbs like mummy hands, and I couldn't move.

I began to think I must be in an underground chamber, lit by blinding lights, and that the chamber was full of people who for some reason were holding me down.

Then the chisel struck again, and the light leapt into my head, and through the thick, warm, furry dark, a voice cried.

“Mother!”

Air breathed and
played over my face.

I felt the shape of a room around me, a big room with open windows. A pillow molded itself under my head, and my body floated, without pressure, between thin sheets.

Then I felt warmth, like a hand on my face. I must be lying in the sun. If I opened my eyes, I would see colors and shapes bending in upon me like nurses.

I opened my eyes.

It was completely dark.

Somebody was breathing beside me.

“I can't see,” I said.

A cheery voice spoke out of the dark. “There are lots of blind people in the world. You'll marry a nice blind man someday.”

The man with
the chisel had come back.

“Why do you bother?” I said. “It's no use.”

“You mustn't talk like that.” His fingers probed at the great, aching boss over my left eye. Then he loosened something, and a ragged gap of light appeared, like the hole in a wall. A man's head peered round the edge of it.

“Can you see me?”

“Yes.”

“Can you see anything else?”

Then I remembered. “I can't see anything.” The gap narrowed and went dark. “I'm blind.”

“Nonsense! Who told you that?”

“The nurse.”

The man snorted. He finished taping the bandage back over my eye. “You are a very lucky girl. Your sight is perfectly intact.”

“Somebody to see
you.”

The nurse beamed and disappeared.

My mother came smiling round the foot of the bed. She was wearing a dress with purple cartwheels on it and she looked awful.

A big tall boy followed her. At first I couldn't make out who it was, because my eye only opened a short way, but then I saw it was my brother.

“They said you wanted to see me.”

My mother perched on the edge of the bed and laid a hand on my leg. She looked loving and reproachful, and I wanted her to go away.

“I didn't think I said anything.”

“They said you called for me.” She seemed ready to cry. Her face puckered up and quivered like a pale jelly.

“How are you?” my brother said.

I looked my mother in the eye.

“The same,” I said.

“You have a
visitor.”

“I don't want a visitor.”

The nurse bustled out and whispered to somebody in the hall. Then she came back. “He'd very much like to see you.”

I looked down at the yellow legs sticking out of the unfamiliar white silk pajamas they had dressed me in. The skin shook flabbily when I moved, as if there wasn't a muscle in it, and it was covered with a short, thick stubble of black hair.

“Who is it?”

“Somebody you know.”

“What's his name.”

“George Bakewell.”

“I don't know any George Bakewell.”

“He says he knows you.”

Then the nurse went out, and a very familiar boy came in and said, “Mind if I sit on the edge of your bed?”

He was wearing a white coat, and I could see a stethoscope poking out of his pocket. I thought it must be somebody I knew dressed up as a doctor.

I had meant to cover my legs if anybody came in, but now I saw it was too late, so I let them stick out, just as they were, disgusting and ugly.

“That's me,” I thought. “That's what I am.”

“You remember me, don't you, Esther?”

I squinted at the boy's face through the crack of my good eye. The other eye hadn't opened yet, but the eye doctor said it would be all right in a few days.

The boy looked at me as if I were some exciting new zoo animal and he was about to burst out laughing.

“You remember me, don't you, Esther?” He spoke slowly,
the way one speaks to a dull child. “I'm George Bakewell. I go to your church. You dated my roommate once at Amherst.”

I thought I placed the boy's face then. It hovered dimly at the rim of memory—the sort of face to which I would never bother to attach a name.

“What are you doing here?”

“I'm houseman at this hospital.”

How could this George Bakewell have become a doctor so suddenly? I wondered. He didn't really know me, either. He just wanted to see what a girl who was crazy enough to kill herself looked like.

I turned my face to the wall.

“Get out,” I said. “Get the hell out and don't come back.”

“I want to
see a mirror.”

The nurse hummed busily as she opened one drawer after another, stuffing the new underclothes and blouses and skirts and pajamas my mother had bought me into the black patent leather overnight case.

“Why can't I see a mirror?”

I had been dressed in a sheath, striped gray and white, like mattress ticking, with a wide, shiny red belt, and they had propped me up in an armchair.

“Why can't I?”

“Because you better not.” The nurse shut the lid of the overnight case with a little snap.

“Why?”

“Because you don't look very pretty.”

“Oh, just let me see.”

The nurse sighed and opened the top bureau drawer. She took out a large mirror in a wooden frame that matched the wood of the bureau and handed it to me.

At first I didn't see what the trouble was. It wasn't a mirror at all, but a picture.

You couldn't tell whether the person in the picture was a man or a woman, because their hair was shaved off and sprouted in bristly chicken-feather tufts all over their head. One side of the person's face was purple, and bulged out in a shapeless way, shading to green along the edges, and then to a sallow yellow. The person's mouth was pale brown, with a rose-colored sore at either corner.

The most startling thing about the face was its supernatural conglomeration of bright colors.

I smiled.

The mouth in the mirror cracked into a grin.

A minute after the crash another nurse ran in. She took one look at the broken mirror, and at me, standing over the blind, white pieces, and hustled the young nurse out of the room.

“Didn't I
tell
you,” I could hear her say.

“But I only . . .”

“Didn't I
tell
you!”

I listened with mild interest. Anybody could drop a mirror. I didn't see why they should get so stirred up.

The other, older nurse came back into the room. She stood there, arms folded, staring hard at me.

“Seven years' bad luck.”

“What?”

“I said,” the nurse raised her voice, as if speaking to a deaf person,
“seven years' bad luck.
”

The young nurse returned with a dustpan and brush and began to sweep up the glittery splinters.

“That's only a superstition,” I said then.

“Huh!” The second nurse addressed herself to the nurse on her hands and knees as if I wasn't there. “At you-know-where they'll take care of
her!
”

From the back
window of the ambulance I could see street after familiar street funneling off into a summery green distance. My mother sat on one side of me, and my brother on the other.

I had pretended I didn't know why they were moving me from the hospital in my home town to a city hospital, to see what they would say.

“They want you to be in a special ward,” my mother said.

“They don't have that sort of ward at our hospital.”

“I liked it where I was.”

My mother's mouth tightened. “You should have behaved better, then.”

“What?”

“You shouldn't have broken that mirror. Then maybe they'd have let you stay.”

But of course I knew the mirror had nothing to do with it.

I sat in
bed with the covers up to my neck.

“Why can't I get up? I'm not sick.”

“Ward rounds,” the nurse said. “You can get up after ward rounds.” She shoved the bed curtains back and revealed a fat young Italian woman in the next bed.

The Italian woman had a mass of tight black curls, starting at her forehead, that rose in a mountainous pompadour and cascaded down her back. Whenever she moved, the huge arrangement of hair moved with her, as if made of stiff black paper.

The woman looked at me and giggled. “Why are you here?” She didn't wait for an answer. “I'm here on account of my French-Canadian mother-in-law.” She giggled again. “My husband knows I can't stand her, and still he said she could come and visit us, and when she came, my tongue stuck out of my head, I couldn't stop it. They ran me into Emergency and then they put me up here,” she lowered her voice, “along with the nuts.” Then she said, “What's the matter with you?”

I turned her my full face, with the bulging purple and green eye. “I tried to kill myself.”

The woman stared at me. Then, hastily, she snatched up a movie magazine from her bed table and pretended to be reading.

The swinging door opposite my bed flew open, and a whole troop of young boys and girls in white coats came in, with an older, gray-haired man. They were all smiling with bright, artificial smiles. They grouped themselves at the foot of my bed. “And how are you feeling this morning, Miss Greenwood?”

I tried to decide which one of them had spoken. I hate saying anything to a group of people. When I talk to a group
of people I always have to single out one and talk to him, and all the while I am talking I feel the others are peering at me and taking unfair advantage. I also hate people to ask cheerfully how you are when they know you're feeling like hell and expect you to say “Fine.”

“I feel lousy.”

“Lousy. Hmm,” somebody said, and a boy ducked his head with a little smile. Somebody else scribbled something on a clipboard. Then somebody pulled a straight, solemn face and said, “And why do you feel lousy?”

I thought some of the boys and girls in that bright group might well be friends of Buddy Willard. They would know I knew him, and they would be curious to see me, and afterward they would gossip about me among themselves. I wanted to be where nobody I knew could ever come.

“I can't sleep . . .”

They interrupted me. “But the nurse says you slept last night.” I looked around the crescent of fresh, strange faces.

“I can't read.” I raised my voice. “I can't eat.” It occurred to me I'd been eating ravenously ever since I came to.

The people in the group had turned from me and were murmuring in low voices to each other. Finally, the gray-haired man stepped out.

“Thank you, Miss Greenwood. You will be seen by one of the staff doctors presently.”

Then the group moved on to the bed of the Italian woman.

“And how are you feeling today, Mrs. . . .” somebody said, and the name sounded long and full of l's, like Mrs. Tomolillo.

Mrs. Tomolillo giggled. “Oh, I'm fine, doctor. I'm just fine.” Then she lowered her voice and whispered something I couldn't hear. One or two people in the group glanced in my direction. Then somebody said, “All right, Mrs. Tomolillo,” and somebody stepped out and pulled the bed curtain between us like a white wall.

I sat on
one end of a wooden bench in the grassy square between the four brick walls of the hospital. My mother, in her purple cartwheel dress, sat at the other end. She had her head propped in her hand, index finger on her cheek and thumb under her chin.

Mrs. Tomolillo was sitting with some dark-haired laughing Italian on the next bench down. Every time my mother moved, Mrs. Tomolillo imitated her. Now Mrs. Tomolillo was sitting with her index finger on her cheek and her thumb under her chin, and her head tilted wistfully to one side.

“Don't move,” I told my mother in a low voice. “That woman's imitating you.”

My mother turned to glance round, but quick as a wink, Mrs. Tomolillo dropped her fat white hands in her lap and started talking vigorously to her friends.

“Why no, she's not,” my mother said. “She's not even paying any attention to us.”

But the minute my mother turned round to me again, Mrs. Tomolillo matched the tips of her fingers together the way my mother had just done and cast a black, mocking look at me.

The lawn was white with doctors.

All the time my mother and I had been sitting there, in the narrow cone of sun that shone down between the tall brick walls, doctors had been coming up to me and introducing themselves. “I'm Doctor Soandso, I'm Doctor Soandso.”

Some of them looked so young I knew they couldn't be proper doctors, and one of them had a queer name that sounded just like Doctor Syphilis, so I began to look out for suspicious, fake names, and sure enough, a dark-haired fellow who looked very like Doctor Gordon, except that he had black skin where Doctor Gordon's skin was white, came up and said, “I'm Doctor Pancreas,” and shook my hand.

After introducing themselves, the doctors all stood within listening distance, only I couldn't tell my mother that they were taking down every word we said without their hearing me, so I leaned over and whispered into her ear.