The Bell Jar (5 page)
There must be quite a few things
a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them. Whenever I’m sad I’m
going to die, or so nervous I can’t sleep, or in love with somebody I won’t be
seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: “I’ll go take a hot
bath.”
I meditate in the bath. The
water needs to be very hot, so hot you can barely stand putting your foot in
it. Then you lower yourself, inch by inch, till the water’s up to your neck.
I remember the ceiling over
every bathtub I’ve stretched out in. I remember the texture of the ceilings and
the cracks and the colors and the damp spots and the light fixtures. I remember
the tubs, too: the antique griffin-legged tubs, and the modern coffin-shaped
tubs, and the fancy pink marble tubs overlooking indoor lily ponds, and I
remember the shapes and sizes of the water taps and the different sorts of soap
holders.
I never feel so much myself as
when Pm in a hot bath.
I lay in that tub on the
seventeenth floor of this hotel for-women-only, high up over the jazz and push
of New York, for near onto an hour, and I felt myself growing pure again. I
don’t believe in baptism or the waters of Jordan or anything like that, but I
guess I feel about a hot bath the way those religious people feel about holy
water.
I said to myself: “Doreen is
dissolving, Lenny Shepherd is dissolving, Frankie is dissolving, New York is
dissolving, they are all dissolving away and none of them matter any more. I
don’t know them, I have never known them and I am very pure. All that liquor
and those sticky kisses I saw and the dirt that settled on my skin on the way
back is turning into something pure.”
The longer I lay there in the
clear hot water the purer I felt, and when I stepped out at last and wrapped
myself in one of the big, soft white hotel bath towels I felt pure and sweet as
a new baby.
I
don’t know how long I had been asleep when I heard the knocking. I didn’t pay
any attention at first, because the person knocking kept saying, “Elly, Elly,
Elly, let me in,” and I didn’t know any Elly. Then another kind of knock
sounded over the first dull, bumping knock--a sharp tap-tap, and another, much
crisper voice said, “Miss Greenwood, your friend wants you,” and I knew it was
Doreen.
I swung to my feet and balanced
dizzily for a minute in the middle of the dark room. I felt angry with Doreen
for waking me up. All I stood a chance of getting out of that sad night was a
good sleep, and she had to wake me up and spoil it. I thought if I pretended to
be asleep the knocking might go away and leave me in peace, but I waited, and
it didn’t.
“Elly, Elly, Elly,” the first
voice mumbled, while the other voice went on hissing, “Miss Greenwood, Miss
Greenwood, Miss Greenwood,” as if I had a split personality or something.
I opened the door and blinked
out into the bright hall. I had the impression it wasn’t night and it wasn’t
day, but some lurid third interval that had suddenly slipped between them and
would never end.
Doreen was slumped against the
doorjamb. When I came out, she toppled into my arms. I couldn’t see her face
because her head was hanging down on her chest and her stiff blonde hair fell
down from its dark roots like a hula fringe.
I recognized the short, squat,
mustached woman in the black uniform as the night maid who ironed day dresses
and party frocks in a crowded cubicle on our floor. I couldn’t understand how
she came to know Doreen or why she should want to help Doreen wake me up
instead of leading her quietly back to her own room.
Seeing Doreen supported in my
arms and silent except for a few wet hiccups, the woman strode away down the
hall to her cubicle with its ancient Singer sewing machine and white ironing
board. I wanted to run after her and tell her I had nothing to do with Doreen,
because she looked stern and hardworking and moral as an old-style European
immigrant and reminded me of my Austrian grandmother.
“Lemme lie down, lemme lie
down,” Doreen was muttering. “Lemme lie down, lemme lie down.”
I felt if I carried Doreen
across the threshold into my room and helped her onto my bed I would never get
rid of her again.
Her body was warm and soft as a
pile of pillows against my arm where she leaned her weight, and her feet, in
their high, spiked heels, dragged foolishly. She was much too heavy for me to
budge down the long hall.
I decided the only thing to do
was to dump her on the carpet and shut and lock my door and go back to bed.
When Doreen woke up she wouldn’t remember what had happened and would think she
must have passed out in front of my door while I slept, and she would get up of
her own accord and go sensibly back to her room.
I started to lower Doreen gently
onto the green hall carpet, but she gave a low moan and pitched forward out of
my arms. A jet of brown vomit flew from her mouth and spread in a large puddle
at my feet.
Suddenly Doreen grew even
heavier. Her head drooped forward into the puddle, the wisps of her blonde hair
dabbling in it like tree roots in a bog, and I realized she was asleep. I drew
back. I felt half-asleep myself.
I made a decision about Doreen
that night. I decided I would watch her and listen to what she said, but deep
down I would have nothing at all to do with her. Deep down, I would be loyal to
Betsy and her innocent friends. It was Betsy I resembled at heart.
Quietly, I stepped back into my
room and shut the door. On second thought, I didn’t lock it. I couldn’t quite
bring myself to do that.
When I woke up in the dull,
sunless heat the next morning, I dressed and splashed my face with cold water
and put on some lipstick and opened the door slowly. I think I still expected
to see Doreen’s body lying there in the pool of vomit like an ugly, concrete
testimony to my own dirty nature.
There was nobody in the hall.
The carpet stretched from one end of the hall to the other, clean and eternally
verdant except for a faint, irregular dark stain before my door as if somebody
had by accident spilled a glass of water there, but dabbed it dry again.
Arrayed
on the
Ladies’ Day
banquet table
were yellow-green avo
cado pear halves stuffed with crabmeat and mayonnaise,
and platters of rare roast beef and cold chicken, and every so often a
cut-glass bowl heaped with black caviar. I hadn’t had time to eat any breakfast
at the hotel cafeteria that morning, except for a cup of overstewed coffee so
bitter it made my nose curl, and I was starving.
Before I came to New York I’d
never eaten out in a proper restaurant. I don’t count Howard Johnson’s, where I
only had french fries and cheeseburgers and vanilla frappes with people like
Buddy Willard. I’m not sure why it is, but I love food more than just about
anything else. No matter how much I eat, I never put on weight. With one
exception I’ve been the same weight for ten years.
My favorite dishes are full of
butter and cheese and sour cream. In New York we had so many free luncheons
with people on the magazine and various visiting celebrities I developed the
habit of running my eye down those huge handwritten menus, where a tiny side
dish of peas cost fifty or sixty cents, Until I’d picked the richest, most
expensive dishes and ordered a string of them.
We were always taken out on
expense accounts, so I never felt guilty. I made a point of eating so fast I
never kept the other people waiting who generally ordered only chef’s salad and
grapefruit juice because they were trying to reduce. Almost everybody I met in
New York was trying to reduce.
“I want to welcome the
prettiest, smartest bunch of young ladies our staff has yet had the good luck
to meet,” the plump, bald master-of-ceremonies wheezed into his lapel
microphone. “This banquet is just a small sample of the hospitality our Food
Testing Kitchens here on
Ladies’ Day
would like to offer in appreciation
for your visit.”
A delicate, ladylike spatter of
applause, and we all sat down at the enormous linen-draped table.
There were eleven of us girls
from the magazine, together with most of our supervising editors, and the whole
staff of the
Ladies’ Day
Food Testing Kitchens in hygienic white smocks,
neat hairnets and flawless makeup of a uniform peach-pie color.
There were only eleven of us,
because Doreen was missing. They had set her place next to mine for some reason,
and the chair stayed empty. I saved her placecard for her--a pocket mirror with
“Doreen” painted along the top of it in lacy script and a wreath of frosted
daisies around the edge, framing the silver hole where her face would show.
Doreen was spending the day with
Lenny Shepherd. She spent most of her free time with Lenny Shepherd now.
In the hour before our luncheon
at
Ladies’ Day--
the
big women’s magazine that features lush
double-page spreads of Technicolor meals, with a different theme and locale
each month--we had been shown around the endless glossy kitchens and seen how
difficult it is to photograph apple pie a la mode under bright lights because
the ice cream keeps melting and has to be propped up from behind with
toothpicks and changed every time it starts looking too soppy.
The sight of all the food
stacked in those kitchens made me dizzy. It’s not that we hadn’t enough to eat
at home, it’s just that my grandmother always cooked economy joints and economy
meat loafs and had the habit of saying, the minute you lifted the first forkful
to your mouth, “I hope you enjoy that, it cost forty-one cents a pound,” which
always made me feel I was somehow eating pennies instead of Sunday roast.
While we were standing up behind
our chairs listening to the welcome speech, I had bowed my head and secretly
eyed the position of the bowls of caviar. One bowl was set strategically
between me and Doreen’s empty chair.
I figured the girl across from
me couldn’t reach it because of the mountainous centerpiece of marzipan fruit
and Betsy, on my right, would be too nice to ask me to share it with her if I
just kept it out of the way at my elbow by my bread-and-butter plate. Besides,
another bowl of caviar sat a little way to the right of the girl next to Betsy,
and she could eat that.
My grandfather and I had a
standing joke. He was the head waiter at a country club near my home town, and
every Sunday my grandmother drove in to bring him home for his Monday off. My
brother and I alternated going with her, and my grandfather always served
Sunday supper to my grandmother and whichever of us was along as if we were
regular club guests. He loved introducing me to special tidbits, and by the age
of nine I had developed a passionate taste for cold vichyssoise and caviar and
anchovy paste.
The joke was that at my wedding
my grandfather would see I had all the caviar I could eat. I was a joke because
I never intended to get married, and even if I did, my grandfather couldn’t
have afforded enough caviar unless he robbed the country club kitchen and
carried it off in a suitcase.
Under cover of the clinking of
water goblets and silverware and bone china, I paved my plate with chicken
slices. Then I covered the chicken slices with caviar thickly as if I were
spreading peanut butter on a piece of bread. Then I picked up the chicken
slices in my fingers one by one, rolled them so the caviar wouldn’t ooze off
and ate them.
I’d discovered, after a lot of
extreme apprehension about what spoons to use, that if you do something incorrect
at table with a certain arrogance, as if you knew perfectly well you were doing
it properly, you can get away with it and nobody will think you are
bad-mannered or poorly brought up. They will think you are original and very
witty.
I learned this trick the day Jay
Cee took me to lunch with a famous poet. He wore a horrible, lumpy, speckled
brown tweed jacket and gray pants and a red-and-blue checked open-throated
jersey in a very formal restaurant full of fountains and chandeliers, where all
the other men were dressed in dark suits and immaculate white shirts.