The Bell Jar (23 page)

               
Sitting in the front seat,
between Dodo and my mother, I felt dumb and subdued. Every time I tried to
concentrate, my mind glided off, like a skater, into a large empty space, and
pirouetted there, absently.

               
“I’m through with that Doctor
Gordon,” I said, after we had left Dodo and her black station wagon behind the
pines. “You can call him up and tell him I’m not coming next week.”

               
My mother smiled. “I knew my
baby wasn’t like that.”

               
I looked at her. “Like what?”

               
“Like those awful people. Those
awful dead people at that hospital.” She paused. “I knew you’d decide to be all
right again.”

STARLET SUCCUMBS AFTER 68-HOUR COMA.

               
I felt in my pocketbook among
the paper scraps and the compact and the peanut shells and the dimes and
nickels and the blue jiffy box containing nineteen Gillette blades, till I
unearthed the snapshot rd had taken that afternoon in the orange-and-white
striped booth.

               
I brought it up next to the
smudgy photograph of the dead girl. It matched, mouth for mouth, nose for nose.
The only difference was the eyes. The eyes in the snap-shot were open, and
those in the newspaper photograph were closed. But I knew if the dead girl’s
eyes were to be thumbed wide, they would look out at me with the same dead,
black, vacant expression as the eyes in the snapshot.

               
I stuffed the snapshot back in
my pocketbook.

               
“I will just sit here in the sun
on this park bench five minutes more by the clock on that building over there,”
I told myself, “and then I will go somewhere and do it.”

               
I summoned my little chorus of
voices.

               
Doesn’t your work interest
you, Esther?

               
You know, Esther, you’ve got the
perfect setup of a true neurotic.

               
You’ll never get anywhere like
that, you’ll never get anywhere like that, you’ll never get anywhere like
 
that.

               
Once on a hot summer night, I had spent an hour
kissing a hairy, ape-shaped law student from Yale because I felt sorry for him,
he was so ugly. When I had finished, he said, “I have you typed, baby. You’ll
be a prude at forty.”

               
“Factitious!” my creative
writing professor at college scrawled on a story of mine called “The Big
Weekend.”

               
I hadn’t known what factitious
meant, so I looked it up in the dictionary.

               
Factitious, artificial, sham.

               
You’ll never get anywhere
like that.

               
I hadn’t slept for twenty-one nights.

               
I thought the most beautiful
thing in the world must be shadow, the million moving shapes and cul-de-sacs of
shadow. There was shadow in bureau drawers and closets and suitcases, and
shadow under houses and trees and stones, and shadow at the back of people’s
eyes and smiles, and shadow, miles and miles and miles of it, on the night side
of the earth.

               
I looked down at the two
flesh-colored Band-Aids forming a cross on the calf of my right leg.

               
That morning I had made a start.

               
I had locked myself in the
bathroom, and run a tub full of warm water, and taken out a Gillette blade.

               
When they asked some old Roman
philosopher or other how he wanted to die, he said he would open his veins in a
warm bath. I thought it would be easy, lying in the tub and seeing the redness
flower from my wrists, flush after flush through the clear water, till I sank
to sleep under a surface gaudy as poppies.

               
But when it came right down to
it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defenseless that I couldn’t do it.
It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn’t in that skin or the thin blue pulse
that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a
whole lot harder to get at.

               
It would take two motions. One
wrist, then the other wrist. Three motions, if you counted changing the razor
from hand to hand. Then I would step into the tub and lie down.

               
I moved in front of the medicine
cabinet. If I looked in the mirror while I did it, it would be like watching
somebody else, in a book or a play.

               
But the person in the mirror was
paralyzed and too stupid to do a thing.

               
Then I thought maybe I ought to
spill a little blood for practice, so I sat on the edge of the tub and crossed
my right ankle over my left knee. Then I lifted my right hand with the razor
and let it drop of its own weight, like a guillotine, onto the calf of my leg.

               
I felt nothing. Then I felt a
small, deep thrill, and a bright seam of red welled up at the lip of the slash.
The blood gathered darkly, like fruit, and rolled down my ankle into the cup of
my black patent leather shoe.

               
I thought of getting into the
tub then, but I realized my dallying had used up the better part of the
morning, and that my mother would probably come home and find me before I was
done.

               
So I bandaged the cut, packed up
my Gillette blades and caught the eleven-thirty bus to Boston.

“Sorry,
baby, there’s no subway to the Deer Island Prison, it’s on a niland.”

               
“No, it’s not on an island, it
used to be on an island, but they filled up the water with dirt and now it
joins on to the mainland.”

               
“There’s no subway.”

               
“I’ve got to get there.”

               
“Hey,” the fat man in the ticket
booth peered at me through the grating, “don’t cry. Who you got there, honey,
some relative?”

               
People shoved and bumped by me
in the artificially lit dark, hurrying after the trains that rumbled in and out
of the intestinal tunnels under Scollay Square. I could feel the tears start to
spurt from the screwed-up nozzles of my eyes.

               
“It’s my
fa
ther.”

               
The fat man consulted a diagram
on the wall of his booth. “Here’s how you do,” he said, “you take a car from
that track over there and get off at Orient Heights and then hop a bus with The
Point on it.” He beamed at me. “It’ll run you straight to the prison gate.”

“Hey
you!” A young fellow in a blue uniform waved from the hut.

               
I waved back and kept on going.

               
“Hey you!”

               
I stopped, and walked slowly
over to the hut that perched like a circular living room on the waste of sands.

               
“Hey, you can’t go any further.
That’s prison property, no trespassers allowed.”

               
“I thought you could go anyplace
along the beach,” I said.
“So
long as you stayed under the tideline.”

               
The fellow thought a minute.

               
Then he said, “Not this beach.”

               
He had a pleasant, fresh face.

               
“You’ve a nice place here,” I
said. “It’s like a little house.”

               
He glanced back into the room,
with its braided rug and chintz curtains. He smiled.

               
“We even got a coffee pot.”

               
“I used to live near here.”

               
“No kidding. I was born and
brought up in this town myself.”

               
I looked across the sands to the
parking lot and the barred gate, and past the barred gate to the narrow road,
lapped by the ocean on both sides, that led out to the one-time island.

               
The red brick buildings of the
prison looked friendly, like the buildings of a seaside college. On a green
hump of lawn to the left, I could see small white spots and slightly larger
pink spots moving about. I asked the guard what they were, and he said, “Them’s
pigs ‘n’ chickens.”

               
I was thinking that if rd had
the sense to go on living in that old town I might just have met this prison
guard in school and married him and had a parcel of kids by now. It would be
nice, living by the sea with piles of little kids and pigs and chickens,
wearing what my grandmother called wash dresses, and sitting about in some
kitchen with bright linoleum and fat arms, drinking pots of coffee.

               
“How do you get into that
prison?”

               
“You get a pass.”

               
“No, how do you get
locked
in?”

               
“Oh,” the guard laughed, “you
steal a car, you rob a store.”

               
“You got any murderers in
there?”

               
“No. Murderers go to a big state
place.”

               
“Who else is in there?”

               
“Well, the first day of winter
we get these old bums out of Boston. They heave a brick through a window” and
then they get picked up and spend the winter out of the cold, with TV and
plenty to eat, and basketball games on the weekend.”

               
“That’s nice.”

               
“Nice if you like it,” said the
guard.

               
I said good-bye and started to
move off, glancing back over my shoulder only once. The guard still stood in
the doorway of his observation booth, and when I turned he lifted his arm in a
salute.

The
log I sat on was lead-heavy and smelled of tar. Under the stout, gray cylinder
of the water tower on its commanding hill, the sandbar curved out into the sea.
At high tide the bar completely submerged itself.

               
I remembered that sandbar well.
It harbored, in the crook of its inner curve, a particular shell that could be
found nowhere else on the beach.

               
The shell was thick, smooth, big
as a thumb joint, and usually white, although sometimes pink or peach-colored.
It resembled a sort of modest conch.

               
“Mummy, that girl’s
still
sitting
there.”

               
I looked up, idly, and saw a
small, sandy child being dragged up from the sea’s edge by a skinny, bird-eyed
woman in red shorts and a red-and-white polka-dot halter.

               
I hadn’t counted on the beach
being overrun with summer people. In the ten years of my absence, fancy blue
and pink and pale green shanties had sprung up on the flat sands of the Point
like a crop of tasteless mushrooms, and the silver airplanes and cigar-shaped
blimps had given way to jets that scoured the rooftops in their loud offrush
from the airport across the bay.

               
I was the only girl on the beach
in a skirt and high heels, and it occurred to me I must stand out. I had
removed my patent leather shoes after a while, for they foundered badly in the
sand. It pleased me to think they would be perched there on the silver log,
pointing out to sea, like a sort of soul-compass, after I was dead.

               
I fingered the box of razors in
my pocketbook.

               
Then I thought how stupid I was.
I had the razors, but no warm bath.

               
I considered renting a room.
There must be a boardinghouse among all those summer places. But I had no
luggage. That would create suspicion. Besides, in a boardinghouse other people
are always wanting to use the bathroom. I’d hardly have time to do it and step
into the tub when somebody would be pounding at the door.

               
The gulls on their wooden stilts
at the tip of the bar miaowed like cats. Then they flapped up, one by one, in
their ash-colored jackets, circling my head and crying.