The Bell Jar (22 page)
It must take a lot of courage to
die like that.
My trouble was I hated the sight
of blood.
I thought I might stay in the
park all night.
The next morning Dodo Conway was
driving my mother and me to Walton, and if I was to run away before it was too
late, now was the time. I looked in my pocketbook and counted out a dollar bill
and seventy-nine cents in dimes and nickels and pennies.
I had no idea how much it would
cost to get to Chicago, and I didn’t dare go to the bank and draw out all my
money, because I thought Doctor Gordon might well have warned the bank clerk to
intercept me if I made any obvious move.
Hitchhiking occurred to me, but
I had no idea which of all the routes out of Boston led to Chicago. It’s easy
enough to find directions on a map, but I had very little knowledge of
directions when I was smack in the middle of somewhere. Every time I wanted to
figure what was east or what was west it seemed to be noon, or cloudy, which
was no help at all, or nighttime, and except for the Big Dipper and
Cassiopeia’s Chair, I was hopeless at stars, a failing which always
disheartened Buddy Willard.
I decided to walk to the bus
terminal and inquire about the fares to Chicago. Then I might go to the bank
and withdraw precisely that amount, which would not cause so much suspicion.
I had just strolled in through
the glass doors of the terminal and was browsing over the rack of colored tour
leaflets and schedules, when I realized that the bank in my home town would be
closed, as it was already mid-afternoon, and I couldn’t get any money out till
the next day.
My appointment at Walton was for
ten o’clock.
At that moment, the loudspeaker
crackled into life and started announcing the stops of a bus getting ready to
leave in the parking lot outside. The voice on the loudspeaker went bockle
bockle, the way they do, so you don’t understand a word, and then, in the
middle of all the static, I heard a familiar name clear as A on the piano in
the middle of all the tuning instruments of an orchestra.
It was a stop two blocks from my
house.
I hurried out into the hot,
dusty, end-of-July afternoon, sweating and sandy-mouthed, as if late for a
difficult interview, and boarded the red bus, whose motor was already running.
I handed my fare to the driver, and
silently, on gloved hinges, the door folded shut at my back.
Doctor
Gordon’s private hospital crowned a grassy rise at the end of
a long, secluded drive that had been whitened with
broken quahog shells. The yellow clapboard walls of the large house, with its
encircling veranda, gleamed in the sun, but no people strolled on the green
dome of the lawn.
As my mother and I approached
the summer heat bore down on us, and a cicada started up, like an aerial
lawnmower, in the heart of a copper beech tree at the back. The sound of the
cicada only served to underline the enormous silence.
A nurse met us at the door.
“Will you wait in the living
room, please. Doctor Gordon will be with you presently.”
What bothered me was that
everything about the house seemed normal, although I knew it must be chock-full
of crazy people. There were no bars on the windows that I could see, and no
wild or disquieting noises. Sunlight measured itself out in regular oblongs on
the shabby, but soft red carpets, and a whiff of fresh -cut grass sweetened the
air.
I paused in the doorway of the
living room.
For a minute I thought it was
the replica of a lounge in a guest house I visited once on an island off the
coast of Maine. The French doors let in a dazzle of white light, a grand piano
filled the far corner of the room, and people in summer clothes were sitting
about at card tables and in the lopsided wicker armchairs one so often finds at
down-at-heel seaside resorts.
Then I realized that none of the
people were moving.
I focused more closely, trying
to pry some clue from their stiff postures. I made out men and women, and boys
and girls who must be as young as I, but there was a uniformity to their faces,
as if they had lain for a long time on a shelf, out of the sunlight, under
siftings of pale, fine dust.
Then I saw that some of the
people were indeed moving, but with such small, birdlike gestures I had not at
first discerned them.
A gray-faced man was counting
out a deck of cards, one, two, three, four I thought he must be seeing if it
was a full pack, but when he had finished counting, he started over again. Next
to him, a fat lady played with a string of wooden beads. She drew all the beads
up to one end of the string. Then click, click, click, she let them fall back on
each other.
At the piano, a young girl
leafed through a few sheets of music, but when she saw me looking at her, she
ducked her head crossly and tore the sheets in half.
My mother touched my arm, and I
followed her into the room.
We sat, without speaking, on a
lumpy sofa that creaked each time one stirred.
Then my gaze slid over the
people to the blaze of green beyond the diaphanous curtains, and I felt as if I
were sitting in the window of an enormous, department store. The figures around
me weren’t people, but shop dummies, painted to resemble people and propped up
in attitudes counterfeiting life.
I
climbed after Doctor Gordon’s dark-jacketed back.
Downstairs, in the hall, I had
tried to ask him what the shock treatment would be like, but when I opened my
mouth no words came out, my eyes only widened and stared at the smiling,
familiar face that floated before me like a plate full of assurances.
At the top of the stairs, the
garnet-colored carpet stopped. A plain, brown linoleum, tacked to the floor,
took its place, and extended down a corridor lined with shut white doors. As I
followed Doctor Gordon, a door opened somewhere in the distance, and I heard a
woman shouting.
All at once a nurse popped
around the corner of the corridor ahead of us leading a woman in a blue
bathrobe with shaggy, waist-length hair. Doctor Gordon stepped back, and I
flattened against the wall.
As the woman was dragged by,
waving her arms and struggling in the grip of the nurse, she was saying, “I’m
going to jump out of the window, I’m going to jump out of the window, I’m going
to jump out of the window.”
Dumpy and muscular in her
smudge-fronted uniform, the wall-eyed nurse wore such thick spectacles that
four eyes peered out at me from behind the round, twin panes of glass. I was
trying to tell which eyes were the real and which the false eyes, and which of
the real eyes was the wall-eye and which the straight eye, when she brought her
face up to mine with a large, conspiratorial grin and hissed, as if to reassure
me, “She thinks she’s going to jump out the window but she can’t jump out the
window because they’re all barred!”
And as Doctor Gordon led me into
a bare room at the back of the house, I saw that the windows in that part were
indeed barred, and that the room door and the closet door and the drawers of
the bureau and everything that opened and shut was fitted with a keyhole so it
could be locked up.
I lay down on the bed.
The wall-eyed nurse came back.
She unclasped my watch and dropped it in her pocket. Then she started tweaking
the hairpins from my hair.
Doctor Gordon was unlocking the
closet. He dragged out a table on wheels with a machine on it and rolled it
behind the head of the bed. The nurse started swabbing my temples with a smelly
grease.
As she leaned over to reach the
side of my head nearest the wall, her fat breast muffled my face like a cloud
or a pillow. A vague, medicinal stench emanated from her flesh.
“Don’t worry,” the nurse grinned
down at me. “Their first time everybody’s scared to death.”
I tried to smile, but my skin
had gone stiff, like parchment.
Doctor Gordon was fitting two
metal plates on either side of my head. He buckled them into place with a strap
that dented my forehead, and gave me a wire to bite.
I shut my eyes.
There was a brief silence, like
an indrawn breath.
Then something bent down and
took hold of me and shook me like the end of the world. Whee-ee-ee-ee-ee, it
shrilled, through an air crackling with blue light, and with each flash a great
jolt drubbed me till I thought my bones would break and the sap fly out of me
like a split plant.
I wondered what terrible thing
it was that I had done.
I
was sitting in a wicker chair, holding a small cocktail glass of tomato juice.
The watch had been replaced on my wrist, but it looked odd. Then I realized it
had been fastened upside down. I sense the unfamiliar positioning of the
hairpins in my hair.
“How do you feel?”
An old metal floor lamp surfaced
in my mind. One of the few relics of my father’s study, it was surrounded by a
copper bell which held the light bulb, and from which a frayed, tiger-colored
cord ran down the length of the metal stand to a socket in the wall.
One day I decided to move this
lamp from the side of my mother’s bed to my desk at the other end of the room.
The cord would be long enough, so I didn’t unplug it. I closed both hands
around the lamp and the fuzzy cord and gripped them tight.
Then something leapt out of the
lamp in a blue flash and shook me till my teeth rattled, and I tried to pull my
hands off, but they were stuck, and I screamed, or a scream was torn from my
throat, for I didn’t recognize it, but heard it soar and quaver in the air like
a violently disembodied spirit.
Then my hands jerked free, and I
fell back onto my mother’s bed. A small hole, blackened as if with pencil lead,
pitted the center of my right palm.
“How do you feel?”
“All right.”
But I didn’t, I felt terrible.
“Which college did you say you
went to?”
I said what college it was.
“Ah!” Doctor Gordon’s face
lighted with a slow, almost tropical smile. “They had a WAC station up there,
didn’t they, during the war?”
My
mother’s knuckles were bone-white, as if the skin had worn off them in the hour
of waiting. She looked past me to Doctor Gordon, and he must have nodded, or
smiled, because her face relaxed.
“A few more shock treatments,
Mrs. Greenwood,” I heard Doctor Gordon say, “and I think you’ll notice a
wonderful improvement.”
The girl was still sitting on
the piano stool, the torn sheet of music splayed at her feet like a dead bird.
She stared at me, and I stared back. Her eyes narrowed. She stuck out her
tongue.
My mother was following Doctor
Gordon to the door. I lingered behind, and when their backs were turned, I
rounded on the girl and thumbed both ears at her. She pulled her tongue in, and
her face went stony.
I walked out into the sun.
Pantherlike in a dapple of tree
shadow, Dodo Conway’s black station wagon lay in wait.
The station wagon had been
ordered originally by a wealthy society lady, black, without a speck of chrome,
and with black leather upholstery, but when it came, it depressed her. It was
the dead spit of a hearse, she said, and everybody else thought so too, and
nobody would buy it, so the Conways drove it home, cut-price, and saved
themselves a couple of hundred dollars.