The Bell Jar (10 page)
“No, what?” I said
“A piece of dust.” And he looked
so proud of having thought of this that I just stared at his blond hair and his
blue eyes and his white teeth--he had very long, strong white teeth--and said,
“I guess so.”
It was only in the middle of New
York a whole year later that I finally thought of an answer to that remark.
I spent a lot of time having
imaginary conversations with Buddy Willard. He was a couple of years older than
I was and very scientific, so he could always prove things. When I was with him
I had to work to keep my head above water.
These conversations I had in my
mind usually repeated the beginnings of conversations I’d really had with
Buddy, only they finished with me answering him back quite sharply, instead of
just sitting around and saying, “I guess so.”
Now, lying on my back in bed, I
imagined Buddy saying, “Do you know what a poem is, Esther?”
“No, what?” I would say.
“A piece of dust. “
Then just as he was smiling and
starting to look proud, I would say,
“So
are the cadavers you cut up. So
are the people you think you’re curing. They’re dust as dust as dust. I reckon
a good poem lasts a whole lot longer than a hundred of those people put
together.”
And of course Buddy wouldn’t
have any answer to that, because what I said was true. People were made of
nothing so much as dust, and I couldn’t see that doctoring all that dust was a
bit better than writing poems people would remember and repeat to themselves
when they were unhappy or sick and couldn’t sleep.
My trouble was I took everything
Buddy Willard told me as the honest-to-God truth. I remember the first night he
kissed me. It was after the Yale Junior Prom.
It was strange, the way Buddy
had invited me to that prom.
He popped into my house out of
the blue one Christmas vacation, wearing a thick white turtleneck sweater and
looking so handsome I could hardly stop staring, and said, “I might drop over
to see you at college some day, all right?”
I was flabbergasted. I only saw
Buddy at church on Sundays when we were both home from college, and then at a
distance, and I couldn’t figure what had put it into his head to run over and
see me--he had run the two miles between our houses for cross-country practice,
he said.
Of course, our mothers were good
friends. They had gone to school together and then both married their
professors and settled down in the same town, but Buddy was always off on a
scholarship at prep school in the fall or earning money by fighting blister
rust in Montana in the summer, so our mothers being old school chums really
didn’t matter a bit.
After this sudden visit I didn’t
hear a word from Buddy until one fine Saturday morning in early March. I was up
in my room at college, studying about Peter the Hermit and Walter the Penniless
for my history exam on the crusades the corning Monday, when the hall phone
rang.
Usually people are supposed to
take turns answering the hall phone, but as I was the only freshman on a floor
with all seniors they made me answer it most of the time. I waited a minute to
see if anybody would beat me to it. Then I figured everybody was probably out
playing squash or away on weekends, so I answered it myself.
“Is that you, Esther?” the girl
on watch downstairs said, and when I said yes, she said, “There’s a man to see
you.”
I was surprised to hear this,
because of all the blind dates I’d had that year not one called me up again for
a second date. I just didn’t have any luck. I hated coming downstairs
sweaty-handed and curious every Saturday night and having some senior introduce
me to her aunt’s best friend’s son and finding some pale, mushroomy fellow with
protruding ears or buck teeth or a bad leg. I didn’t think I deserved it. After
all, I wasn’t crippled in any way, I just studied too hard, I didn’t know when
to stop.
Well, I combed my hair and put
on some more lipstick and took my history book--so I could say I was on my way
to the library if it turned out to be somebody awful--and went down, and there
was Buddy Willard leaning against the mail table in a khaki zipper jacket and
blue dungarees and frayed gray sneakers and grinning up at me.
“I just came over to say hello,”
he said.
I thought it odd he should come
all the way up from Yale even hitchhiking, as he did, to save money, just to
say hello.
“Hello,” I said. “Let’s go out
and sit on the porch.”
I wanted to go out on the porch
because the girl on watch was a nosy senior and eyeing me curiously. She
obviously thought Buddy had made a big mistake.
We sat side by side in two
wicker rocking chairs. The sunlight was clean and windless and almost hot.
“I can’t stay more than a few
minutes,” Buddy said.
“Oh, come on, stay for lunch,” I
said.
“Oh, I can’t do that. I’m up
here for the Sophomore Prom with Joan.”
I felt like a prize idiot.
“How
is
Joan?” I asked
coldly.
Joan Giling came from our home
town and went to our church and was a year ahead of me at college. She was a
big wheel--president of her class and a physics major and the college hockey
champion. She always made me feel squirmy with her starey pebble-colored eyes
and her gleaming tombstone teeth and her breathy voice. She was big as a horse,
too. I began to think Buddy had pretty poor taste.
“Oh, Joan,” he said. “She asked
me up to this dance two months ahead of time and her mother asked my mother if
I would take her, so what could I do?”
“Well, why did you say you’d
take her if you didn’t want to?” I asked meanly.
“Oh, I like Joan. She never
cares whether you spend any money on her or not and she enjoys doing things
out-of-doors. The last time she came down to Yale for house weekend we went on
a bicycle trip to East Rock and she’s the only girl I haven’t had to push up
hills. Joan’s an right.”
I went cold with envy. I had
never been to Yale, and Yale was the place an the seniors in my house liked to
go best on weekends. I decided to expect nothing from Buddy Willard. If you
expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.
“You better go and find Joan
then,” I said in a matter-of-fact voice. “I’ve a date corning any minute and he
won’t like seeing me sitting around with you.”
“ A date?” Buddy looked
surprised. “Who is it?”
“It’s two,” I said, “Peter the
Hermit and Walter the Penniless.”
Buddy didn’t say anything, so I
said, “Those are their nicknames.”
Then I added, “They’re from
Dartmouth.”
I guess Buddy never read much
history, because his mouth stiffened. He swung up from the wicker rocking chair
and gave it a sharp little unnecessary push. Then he dropped a pale blue
envelope with a Yale crest into my lap.
“Here’s a letter I meant to
leave for you if you weren’t in. There’s a question in it you can answer by
mail. I don’t feel like asking you about it right now.”
After Buddy had gone I opened
the letter. It was a letter inviting me to the Yale Junior Prom.
I was so surprised I let out a
couple of yips and ran into the house shouting. “I’m going I’m going I’m
going.” After the bright white sun on the porch it looked pitch dark in there,
and I couldn’t make out a thing. I found myself hugging the senior on watch.
When she heard I was going to the Yale Junior Prom she treated me with
amazement and respect.
Oddly enough, things changed in
the house after that. The seniors on my floor started speaking to me and every
now and then one of them would answer the phone quite spontaneously and nobody
made any more nasty loud remarks outside my door about people wasting their
golden college days with their noses stuck in a book.
Well, all during the Junior Prom
Buddy treated me like a friend or a cousin.
We danced about a mile apart the
whole time, until during “ Auld Lang Syne” he suddenly rested his chin on the
top of my head as if he were very tired. Then in the cold, black, three-o’clock
wind we walked very slowly the five miles back to the house where I was
sleeping in the living room on a couch that was too short because it only cost
fifty cents a night instead of two dollars like most of the other places with
proper beds.
I felt dull and flat and full of
shattered visions.
I had imagined Buddy would fall
in love with me that weekend and that I wouldn’t have to worry about what I was
doing on any more Saturday nights the rest of the year. Just as we approached
the house where I was staying Buddy said, “Let’s go up to the chemistry lab.”
I was aghast. “The
chemistry
lab?”
“Yes.” Buddy reached for my
hand. “There’s a beautiful view up there behind the chemistry lab.”
And sure enough, there was a
sort of hilly place behind the chemistry lab from which you could see the
lights of a couple of the houses in New Haven.
I stood pretending to admire
them while Buddy got a good footing on the rough soil. While he kissed me I
kept my eyes open and tried to memorize the spacing of the house lights so I
would never forget them.
Finally Buddy stepped back.
“Wow!” he said.
“Wow what?” I said, surprised.
It had been a dry, uninspiring little kiss, and I remember thinking it was too
bad both our mouths were so chapped from walking five miles in that cold wind.
“Wow, it makes me feel terrific
to kiss you.”
I modestly didn’t say anything.
“I guess you g? out with a’lot
of boys,” Buddy said then.
“Well, I guess I do.” I thought
I must have gone out with a different boy for every week in the year. “Well, I
have to study a lot.”
“So
do I,” I put in
hastily. “I have to keep my scholarship after all.”
“Still, I think I could manage
to see you every third weekend.”
“That’s nice.” I was almost
fainting and dying to get back to college and tell everybody.
Buddy kissed me again in front
of the house steps, and the next fall, when his scholarship to medical school
came through, I went there to see him instead of to Yale and it was there I
found out how he had fooled me all those years and what a hypocrite he was.
I found out on the day we saw
the baby born.
I
had kept begging Buddy to show me some really interesting hospital
sights, so one Friday I cut all my classes and came
down for a long weekend and he gave me the works.
I started out by dressing in a
white coat and sitting on a tall stool in a room with four cadavers, while
Buddy and his friends cut them up. These cadavers were so unhuman-looking they
didn’t bother me a bit. They had stiff, leathery, purple-black skin and they
smelt like old pickle jars.
After that, Buddy took me out
into a hall where they had some big glass bottles full of babies that had died
before they were born. The baby in the first bottle had a large white head bent
over a tiny curled-up body the size of a frog. The baby in the next bottle was
bigger and the baby next to that one was bigger still and the baby in the last
bottle was the size of a normal baby and he seemed to be looking at me and
smiling a little piggy smile.