The Bell Jar (19 page)

               
“My sentiments exactly.” My
voice sounded strange and hollow in my ears.

               
“Come anyway. Take some other
course.”

               
The notion of studying German or
abnormal psychology flitted through my head. After all, I’d saved nearly the
whole of my New York salary, so I could just about afford it.

               
But the hollow voice said, “You
better count me out.”

               
“Well,” Jody began, “there’s
this other girl who wanted to come in with us if anybody dropped out....”

               
“Fine. Ask her.”

               
The minute I hung up I knew I
should have said I would come. One more morning listening to Dodo Conway’s baby
carriage would drive me crazy. And I made a point of never living in the same
house with my mother for more than a week.

               
I reached for the receiver.

               
My hand advanced a few inches,
then retreated and fell limp. I forced it toward the receiver again, but again
it stopped short, as if it had collided with a pane of glass.

               
I wandered into the dining room.

               
Propped on the table I found a
long, businesslike letter from the summer school and a thin blue letter on
leftover Yale stationery, addressed to me in Buddy Willard’s lucid hand.

               
I slit open the summer school
letter with a knife.

               
Since I wasn’t accepted for the
writing course, it said, I could choose some other course instead, but I should
call in to the Admissions Office that same morning, or it would be too late to
register, the courses were almost full.

               
I dialed the Admissions Office
and listened to the zombie voice leave a message that Miss Esther Greenwood was
canceling all arrangements to come to summer school.

               
Then I opened Buddy Willard’s
letter.

               
Buddy wrote that he was probably
falling in love with a nurse who also had TB, but his mother had rented a
cottage in the Adirondacks for the month of July, and if I came along with her,
he might well find his feeling for the nurse was a mere infatuation.

               
I snatched up a pencil and
crossed out Buddy’s message. Then I turned the letter paper over and on the
opposite side wrote that I was engaged to a simultaneous interpreter and never
wanted to see Buddy again as I did not want to give my children a hypocrite for
a father.

               
I stuck the letter back in the
envelope, Scotch-taped it together, and readdressed it to Buddy, without
putting on a new stamp. I thought the message was worth a good three cents.

               
Then I decided I would spend the
summer writing a novel.

               
That would fix a lot of people.

               
I strolled into the kitchen,
dropped a raw egg into a teacup of raw hamburger, mixed it up and ate it. Then
I set up the card table on the screened breezeway between the house and the
garage.

               
A great wallowing bush of mock
orange shut off the view of the street in front, the house wall and the garage
wall took care of either side, and a clump of birches and a box hedge protected
me from Mrs. Ockenden at the back.

               
I counted out three hundred and
fifty sheets of corrasable bond from my mother’s stock in the hall closet,
secreted away under a pile of old felt hats and clothes brushes and woolen
scarves.

               
Back on the breezeway, I fed the
first, virgin sheet into my old portable and rolled it up.

               
From another, distanced mind, I
saw myself sitting on the breezeway, surrounded by two white clapboard walls, a
mock orange bush and a clump of birches and a box hedge, small as a doll in a
doll’s house.

               
A feeling of tenderness filled
my heart. My heroine would be myself, only in disguise. She would be called
Elaine. Elaine. I counted the letters on my fingers. There were six letters in
Esther, too. It seemed a lucky thing.

     
Elaine sat
on the breezeway in an old yellow nightgown of her mother’s waiting for
something to happen. It was a sweltering morning in July, and drops of sweat
crawled down her back, one by one, like slow insects.

               
I leaned back and read what I
had written.

               
It seemed lively enough, and I
was quite proud of the bit about the drops of sweat like insects, only I had
the dim impression I’d probably read it somewhere else a long time ago.

               
I sat like that for about an
hour, trying to think what would come next, and in my mind, the barefoot doll
in her mother’s old yellow nightgown sat and stared into space as well.

               
“Why, honey, don’t you want to
get dressed?”

               
My mother took care never to
tell me to do anything. She would only reason with me sweetly, like one
intelligent, mature person with another.

               
“It’s almost three in the
afternoon.”

               
“I’m writing a novel,” I said.
“I haven’t got time to change out of this and change into that.”

               
I lay on the couch on the
breezeway and shut my eyes. I could hear my mother clearing the typewriter and
the papers from the card table and laying out the silver for supper, but I
didn’t move.

     
Inertia
oozed like molasses through Elaine’s limbs. That’s what it must feel like to
have malaria, she thought.

               
At that rate, I’d be lucky if I
wrote a page a day.

               
Then I knew what the trouble
was.

               
I needed experience.

               
How could I write about life
when I’d never had a love affair or a baby or even seen anybody die? A girl I
knew had just won a prize for a short story about her adventures among the
pygmies in Africa. How could I compete with that sort of thing?

               
By the end of supper my mother
had convinced me I should study shorthand in the evenings. Then I would be
killing two birds with one stone, writing a novel and learning something
practical as well. I would also be saving a whole lot of money.

               
That same evening, my mother
unearthed an old blackboard from the cellar and set it up on the breezeway.
Then she stood at the blackboard and scribbled little curlicues in white chalk
while I sat in a chair and watched.

               
At first I felt hopeful.

               
I thought I might learn
shorthand in no time, and when the freckled lady in the Scholarships Office
asked me why I hadn’t worked to earn money in July and August, the way you were
supposed to if you were a scholarship girl, I could tell her I had taken a free
shorthand course instead, so I could support myself right after college.

               
The only thing was, when I tried
to picture myself in some job, briskly jotting down line after line of
shorthand, my mind went blank. There wasn’t one job I felt like doing where you
used shorthand. And, as I sat there and watched, the white chalk curlicues
blurred into senselessness.

               
I told my mother I had a
terrible headache, and went to bed.

               
An hour later the door inched
open, and she crept into the room. I heard the whisper of her clothes as she
undressed. She climbed into bed. Then her breathing grew slow and regular.

               
In the dim light of the streetlamp
that filtered through the drawn blinds, I could see the pin curls on her head
glittering like a row of little bayonets.

               
I decided I would put off the
novel until I had gone to Europe and had a lover, and that I would never learn
a word of shorthand. If I never learned shorthand I would never have to use it.

               
I thought I would spend the
summer reading
Finnegans Wake
and writing my thesis.

               
Then I would be way ahead when
college started at the end of September, and able to enjoy my last year instead
of swotting away with no makeup and stringy hair, on a diet of coffee and
Benzedrine, the way most of the seniors taking honors did, until they finished
their thesis.

               
Then I thought I might put off
college for a year and apprentice myself to a pottery maker.

               
Or work my way to Germany and be
a waitress, until I was bilingual.

               
Then plan after plan started
leaping through my head, like a family of scatty rabbits.

               
I saw the years of my life
spaced along a road in the form of telephone poles, threaded together by wires.
I counted one, two, three...nineteen telephone poles, and then the wires
dangled into space, and try as I would, I couldn’t see a single pole beyond the
nineteenth.

               
The room blued into view, and I
wondered where the night had gone. My mother turned from a foggy log into a
slumbering, middle-aged woman, her mouth slightly open and a snore raveling
from her throat. The piggish noise irritated me, and for a while it seemed to
me that the only way to stop it would be to take the column of skin and sinew
from which it rose and twist it to silence between my hands.

               
I feigned sleep until my mother
left for school, but even my eyelids didn’t shut out the light. They hung the
raw, red screen of their tiny vessels in front of me like a wound. I crawled
between the mattress and the padded bedstead and let the mattress fall across
me like a tombstone. It felt dark and safe under there, but the mattress was
not heavy enough.

               
It needed about a ton more
weight to make me sleep.

     
riverrun,
past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a
commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs....

               
The thick book made an
unpleasant dent in my stomach.

     
riverrun,
past Eve and Adam’s...

               
I thought the small letter at
the start might mean that nothing ever really began all new, with a capital,
but that it just flowed on from what came before. Eve and Adam’s was Adam and
Eve, of course, but it probably signified something else as well.

               
Maybe it was a pub in Dublin.

               
My eyes sank through an alphabet
soup of letters to the long word in the middle of the page.

     
bababadalgharaghtakarnrninarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!

               
I counted the letters. There
were exactly a hundred of them. I thought this must be important.

               
Why should there be a hundred
letters?

               
Haltingly, I tried the word
aloud.

               
It sounded like a heavy wooden
object falling downstairs, boomp boomp boomp, step after step. Lifting the
pages of the book, I let them fan slowly by my eyes. Words, dimly familiar but
twisted all awry, like faces in a funhouse mirror, fled past, leaving no
impression on the glassy surface of my brain.

               
I squinted at the page.

               
The letters grew barbs and rams’
horns. I watched them separate, each from the other, and jiggle up and down in
a silly way. Then they associated themselves in fantastic, untranslatable
shapes, like Arabic or Chinese.

               
I decided to junk my thesis.

               
I decided to junk the whole
honors program and become an ordinary English major. I went to look up the
requirements of an ordinary English major at my college.