The Bell Jar (24 page)
“Say,
lady, you better not sit out here, the tide’s corning in.”
The small boy squatted a few
feet away. He picked up a round purple stone and lobbed it into the water. The
water swallowed it with a resonant plop. Then he scrabbled around, and I heard
the dry stones clank together like money.
He skimmed a flat stone over the
dull green surface, and it skipped seven times before it sliced out of sight.
“Why don’t you go home?” I said.
The boy skipped another, heavier
stone. It sank after the second bounce.
“Don’t want to.”
“Your mother’s looking for you.”
“She is not.” He sounded
worried.
“If you go home, I’ll give you
some candy.”
The boy hitched closer. “What
kind?”
But I knew without looking into
my pocketbook that all I had was peanut shells.
“I’ll give you some money to buy
some candy.”
“Ar
-thur!”
A woman was indeed coming out on the sandbar, slipping
and no doubt cursing to herself, for her lips went up and down between her
clear, peremptory calls.
“Ar
-thur!”
She shaded her eyes with one hand, as if this helped
her discern us through the thickening sea dusk.
I could sense the boy’s interest
dwindle as the pull of his mother increased. He began to pretend he didn’t know
me. He kicked over a few stones, as if searching for something, and edged off.
I shivered.
The stones lay lumpish and cold
under my bare feet. I thought longingly of the black shoes on the beach. A wave
drew back, like a hand, then advanced and touched my foot.
The drench seemed to come off
the sea floor itself, where blind white fish ferried themselves by their own
light through the great polar cold. I saw sharks’ teeth and whales’ earbones
littered about down there like gravestones.
I waited, as if the sea could
make my decision for me.
A second wave collapsed over my
feet, lipped with white froth, and the chill gripped my ankles with a mortal
ache.
My flesh winced, in cowardice,
from such a death.
I picked up my pocketbook and
started back over the cold stones to where my shoes kept their vigil in the
violet light.
“Of
course his mother killed him.”
I looked at the mouth of the boy Jody had wanted me to
meet. His lips were thick and pink and a baby face nestled under the silk of
white-blond hair. His name was Cal, which I thought must be short for
something, but I couldn’t think what it would be short for, unless it was
California.
“How can you be sure she killed
him?” I said.
Cal was supposed to be very
intelligent, and Jody had said over the phone that he was cute and I would like
him. I wondered, if I’d been my old self, if I would have liked him.
It was impossible to tell.
“Well, first she says No no no,
and then she says Yes.”
“But then she says No no again.”
Cal and I lay side by side on an
orange-and-green striped towel on a mucky beach across the swamps from Lynn.
Jody and Mark, the boy she was pinned to, were swimming. Cat hadn’t wanted to
swim, he had wanted to talk, and we were arguing about this play where a young
man finds out he has a brain disease, on account of his father fooling around
with unclean women, and in the end his brain, which has been softening all
along, snaps completely, and his mother is debating whether to kill him or not.
I had a suspicion that my mother
had called Jody and begged her to ask me out, so I wouldn’t sit around in my
room all day with the shades drawn. I didn’t want to go at first, because I
thought Jody would notice the change in me, and that anybody with half an eye
would see I didn’t have a brain in my head.
But all during the drive north,
and then east, Jody had joked and laughed and chattered and not seemed to mind
that I only said, “My” or “Gosh” or “You don’t say.”
We browned hot dogs on the
public grills at the beach, and by watching Jody and Mark and Cal very
carefully I managed to cook my hot dog just the right amount of time and didn’t
burn it or drop it into the fire, the way I was afraid of doing. Then, when
nobody was looking, I buried it in the sand.
After we ate, Jody and Mark ran
down to the water hand-in-hand, and I lay back, staring into the sky, while Cal
went on and on about this play.
The only reason I remembered
this play was because it had a mad person in it, and everything I had ever read
about mad people stuck in my mind, while everything else flew out.
“But it’s the Yes that matters,”
Cal said. “It’s the Yes she’ll come back to in the end.”
I lifted my head and squinted
out at the bright blue plate of the sea--a bright blue plate with a dirty rim.
A big round gray rock, like the upper half of an egg, poked out of the water
about a mile from the stony headland.
“What was she going to kill him
with? I forget.”
I hadn’t forgotten. I remembered
perfectly well, but I wanted to hear what Cal would say.
“Morphia powders.”
“Do you suppose they have
morphia powders in America?”
Cal considered a minute. Then he
said, “I wouldn’t think so. They sound awfully old-fashioned.”
I rolled over onto my stomach
and squinted at the view in the other direction, toward Lynn. A glassy haze
rippled up from the fires in the grills and the heat on the road, and through
the haze, as through a curtain of clear water, I could make out a smudgy
skyline of gas tanks and factory stacks and derricks and bridges.
It looked one hell of a mess.
I rolled onto my back again and
made my voice casual. “If you were going to kill yourself, how would you do
it?”
Cal seemed pleased. “I’ve often
thought of that. I’d blow my brains out with a gun.”
I was disappointed. It was just
like a man to do it with a gun. A fat chance I had of laying my hands on a gun.
And even if I did, I wouldn’t have a clue as to what part of me to shoot at.
I’d already read in the papers
about people who’d tried to shoot themselves, only they ended up shooting an
important nerve and getting paralyzed, or blasting their face off, but being
saved, by surgeons and a sort of miracle, from dying outright.
The risks of a gun seemed great.
“What kind of gun?”
“My father’s shotgun. He keeps
it loaded. I’d just have to walk into his study one day and,” Cal pointed a
finger to his temple and made a comical, screwed-up face, “click!” He widened
his pale gray eyes and looked at me.
“Does your father happen to live
near Boston?” I asked idly.
“Nope. In Clacton-on-Sea. He’s
English.”
Jody and Mark ran up
hand-in-hand, dripping and shaking off water drops like two loving puppies. I
thought there would be too many people, so I stood up and pretended to yawn.
“I guess I’ll go for a swim.”
Being with Jody and Mark and Cal
was beginning to weigh on my nerves, like a dull wooden block on the strings of
a piano. I was afraid that at any moment my control would snap, and I would
start babbling about how I couldn’t read and couldn’t write and how I must be
just about the only person who had stayed awake for a solid month without
dropping dead of exhaustion.
A smoke seemed to be going up
from my nerves like the smoke from the grills and the sun-saturated road. The
whole landscape--beach and headland and sea and rock--quavered in front of my
eyes like a stage backcloth.
I wondered at what point in
space the silly, sham blue of the sky turned black.
“You swim too, Cal.”
Jody gave Cal a playful little
push.
“Ohhh.” Cal hid his face in the
towel. “It’s too cold.”
I started to walk toward the
water.
Somehow, in the broad,
shadowless light of noon, the water looked amiable and welcoming.
I thought drowning must be the
kindest way to die, and burning the worst. Some of those babies in the jars
that Buddy Willard showed me had gills, he said. They went through a stage
where they were just like fish.
A little, rubbishy wavelet, full
of candy wrappers and orange peel and seaweed, folded over my foot.
I heard the sand thud behind me,
and Cal came up.
“Let’s swim to that rock out
there.” I pointed at it.
“Are you crazy? That’s a mile
out.”
“What are you?” I said.
“Chicken?”
Cal took me by the elbow and
jostled me into the water. When we were waist high, he pushed me under. I
surfaced, splashing, my eyes seared with salt. Underneath, the water was green
and semi-opaque as a hunk of quartz.
I started to swim, a modified
dogpaddle, keeping my face toward the rock. Cal did a slow crawl. After a while
he put his head up and treaded water.
“Can’t make it.” He was panting
heavily.
“Okay. You go back.”
I thought I would swim out until
I was too tired to swim back. As I paddled on, my heartbeat boomed like a dull
motor ill my ears.
I am I am I am.
That
morning I had tried to hang myself.
I had taken the silk cord of my
mother’s yellow bathrobe as soon as she left for work, and, in the amber shade
of the bedroom, fashioned it into a knot that slipped up and down on itself. It
took me a long time to do this, because I was poor at knots and had no idea how
to make a proper one.
Then I hunted around for a place
to attach the rope.
The trouble was, our house had
the wrong kind of ceilings. The ceilings were low, white and smoothly
plastered, without a light fixture or a wood beam in sight. I thought with
longing of the house my grandmother had before she sold it to come and live with
us, and then with my Aunt Libby.
My grandmother’s house was built
in the fine, nineteenth-century style, with lofty rooms and sturdy chandelier
brackets and high closets with stout rails across them, and an attic where
nobody ever went, full of trunks and parrot cages and dressmakers’ dummies and
overhead beams thick as a ship’s timbers.
But it was an old house, and
she’d sold it, and I didn’t know anybody else with a house like that.
After a discouraging time of
walking about with the silk cord dangling from my neck like a yellow cat’s tail
and finding no place to fasten it, I sat on the edge of my mother’s bed and
tried pulling the cord tight.