The Bell Jar (7 page)
Botany was fine, because I loved
cutting up leaves and putting them under the microscope and drawing diagrams of
bread mold and the odd, heart-shaped leaf in the sex cycle of the fern, it
seemed so real to me.
The day I went into physics
class it was death.
A short dark man with a high,
lisping voice, named Mr. Manzi, stood in front of the class in a tight blue
suit holding a little wooden ball. He put the ball on a steep grooved slide and
let it run down to the bottom. Then he started talking about let
a
equal
acceleration and let
t
equal time and suddenly he was scribbling letters
and numbers and equals signs all over the blackboard and my mind went dead.
I took the physics book back to
my dormitory. It was a huge book on porous mimeographed paper--four hundred
pages long with no drawings or photographs, only diagrams and formulas--between
brick-red cardboard covers. This book was written by Mr. Manzi to explain
physics to college girls, and if it worked on us he would try to have it
published.
Well, I studied those formulas,
I went to class and watched balls roll down slides and listened to bells ring
and by the end of the semester most of the other girls had failed and I had a
straight A. I heard Mr. Manzi saying to a bunch of the girls who were
complaining that the course was too hard, “No, it can’t be too hard, because
one girl got a straight A.” “Who is it? Tell us,” they said, but he shook his
head and didn’t say anything and gave me a sweet little conspiring smile.
That’s what gave me the idea of
escaping the next semester of chemistry. I may have made a straight A in
physics, but I was panic-struck. Physics made me sick the whole time I learned
it. What I couldn’t stand was this shrinking everything into letters and
numbers. Instead of leaf shapes and enlarged diagrams of the holes the leaves
breathe through and fascinating words like carotene and xanthophyll on the
blackboard, there were these hideous, cramped, scorpion-lettered formulas in
Mr. Manzi’s special red chalk.
I knew chemistry would be worse,
because I’d seen a big chart of the ninety-odd elements hung up in the
chemistry lab, and all the perfectly good words like gold and silver and cobalt
and aluminum were shortened to ugly abbreviations with different decimal
numbers after them. If I had to strain my brain with any more of that stuff I
would go mad. I would fail outright. It was only by a horrible effort of will
that I had dragged myself through the first half of the year.
So I went to my Class Dean with
a clever plan.
My plan was that I needed the
time to take a course in Shakespeare, since I was, after all, an English major.
She knew and I knew perfectly well I would get a straight A again in the
chemistry course, so what was the point of my taking the exams; why couldn’t I
just go to the classes and look on and take it all in and forget about marks or
credits? It was a case of honor among honorable people, and the content meant
more than the form, and marks were really a bit silly anyway, weren’t they,
when you knew you’d always get an A? My plan was strengthened by the fact that
the college had just dropped the second year of required science for the
classes after me anyway, so my class was the last to suffer under the old
ruling.
Mr. Manzi was in perfect
agreement with my plan. I think it flattered him that I enjoyed his classes so
much I would take them for no materialistic reason like credit and an A, but
for the sheer beauty of chemistry itself. I thought it was quite ingenious of
me to suggest sitting in on the chemistry course even after rd changed over to
Shakespeare. It was quite an unnecessary gesture and made it seem I simply
couldn’t bear to give chemistry up.
Of course, I would never have
succeeded with this scheme if I hadn’t made that A in the first place. And if
my Class Dean had known how scared and depressed I was, and how I seriously
contemplated desperate remedies such as getting a doctor’s certificate that I
was unfit to study chemistry, the formulas made me dizzy and so on, I’m sure
she wouldn’t have listened to me for a minute, but would have made me take the
course regardless.
As it happened, the Faculty
Board passed my petition, and my Class Dean told me later that several of the
professors were touched by it. They took it as a real step in intellectual
maturity.
I had to laugh when I thought
about the rest of that year. I went to the chemistry class five times a week
and didn’t miss a single one. Mr. Manzi stood at the bottom of the big, rickety
old amphitheater, making blue flames and red flares and clouds of yellow stuff
by pouring the contents of one test tube into another, and I shut his voice out
of my ears by pretending it was only a mosquito in the distance and sat back
enjoying the bright lights and the colored fires and wrote page after page of
villanelles and sonnets.
Mr. Manzi would glance at me now
and then and see me writing, and send up a sweet little appreciative smile. I
guess he thought I was writing down all those formulas not for exam time, like
the other girls, but because his presentation fascinated me so much I couldn’t
help it.
I
don’t know just why my successful evasion of chemistry should have
floated into my mind there in Jay Cee’s office.
All the time she talked to me, I
saw Mr. Manzi standing on thin air in back of Jay Cee’s head, like something
conjured up out of a hat, holding his little wooden ball and the test tube that
billowed a great cloud of yellow smoke the day before Easter vacation and smelt
of rotten eggs and made all the girls and Mr. Manzi laugh..
I felt sorry for Mr. Manzi. I
felt like going down to him on my hands and knees and apologizing for being
such an awful liar.
Jay Cee handed me a pile of
story manuscripts and spoke to me much more kindly. I spent the rest of the
morning reading the stories and typing out what I thought of them on the pink
Interoffice Memo sheets and sending them into the office of Betsy’s editor to
be read by Betsy the next day. Jay Cee interrupted me now and then to tell me
something practical or a bit of gossip.
Jay Cee was going to lunch that
noon with two famous writers, a man and a lady. The man had just sold six short
stories to the
New Yorker
and six to Jay Cee. This surprised me, as I
didn’t know magazines bought stories in lots of six, and I was staggered by the
thought of the amount of money six stories would probably bring in. Jay Cee
said she had to be very careful at this lunch, because the lady writer wrote
stories too, but she had never had any in the
New Yorker
and Jay Cee had
only taken one from her in five years. Jay Cee had to flatter the more famous
man at the same time as she was careful not to hurt the less famous lady.
When the cherubs in Jay Cee’s
French wall clock waved their wings up and down and put their little gilt
trumpets to their lips and pinged out twelve notes one after the other, Jay Cee
told me I’d done enough work for the day, and to go off to the
Ladies’ Day
tour
and banquet and to the film premiere, and she would see me bright and early
tomorrow.
Then she slipped a suit jacket
over her lilac blouse, pinned a hat of imitation lilacs on the top of her head,
powdered her nose briefly and adjusted her thick spectacles. She looked
terrible, but very wise. As she left the office, she patted my shoulder with
one lilac-gloved hand.
“Don’t let the wicked city get
you down.”
I sat quietly in my swivel chair
for a few minutes and thought about Jay Cee. I tried to imagine what it would
be like if I were Be Gee, the famous editor, in an office full of potted rubber
plants and African violets my secretary had to water each morning. I wished I
had a mother like Jay Cee. Then I’d know what to do.
My own mother wasn’t much help.
My mother had taught shorthand and typing to support us ever since my father
died, and secretly she hated it and hated him for dying and leaving no money
because he didn’t trust life insurance salesmen. She was always on to me to
learn shorthand after college, so I’d have a practical skill as well as a
college degree. “Even the apostles were tentmakers,” she’d say. “They had to
live, just the way we do.”
I
dabbled my fingers in the bowl of warm water a
Ladies) Day
waitress set
down in place of my two empty ice cream dishes. Then I wiped each finger
carefully with my linen napkin which was still quite clean. Then I folded the
linen napkin and laid it between my lips and brought my lips down on it
precisely. When I put the napkin back on the table a fuzzy pink lip shape
bloomed right in the middle of it like a tiny heart.
I thought what a long way I had
come.
The first time I saw a
fingerbowl was at the home of my benefactress. It was the custom at my college,
the little freckled lady in the Scholarships Office told me, to write to the
person whose scholarship you had, if they were still alive, and thank them for
it.
I had the scholarship of
Philomena Guinea, a wealthy novelist who went to my college in the early
nineteen hundreds and had her first novel made into a silent film with Bette
Davis as well as a radio serial that was still running, and it turned out she
was alive and lived in a large mansion not far from my grandfather’s country
club.
So I wrote Philomena Guinea a
long letter in coal-black ink on gray paper with the name of the college
embossed on it in red. I wrote what the leaves looked like in autumn when I
bicycled out into the hills, and how wonderful it was to live on a campus
instead of commuting by bus to a city college and having to live at home, and
how all knowledge was opening up before me and perhaps one day I would be able
to write great books the way she did.
I had read one of Mrs. Guinea’s
books in the town library--the college library didn’t stock them for some
reason--and it was crammed from beginning to end with long, suspenseful
questions: “Would Evelyn discern that Gladys knew Roger in her past? wondered
Hector feverishly” and “How could Donald marry her when he learned of the child
Elsie, hidden away with Mrs. Rollmop on the secluded country farm? Griselda
demanded of her bleak, moonlit pillow.” These books earned Philomena Guinea,
who later told me she had been very stupid at college, millions and millions of
dollars.
Mrs. Guinea answered my letter
and invited me to lunch at her home. That was where I saw my first fingerbowl.
The water had a few cherry
blossoms floating in it, and I thought it must be some clear sort of Japanese
after-dinner soup and ate every bit of it, including the crisp little blossoms.
Mrs. Guinea never said anything, and it was only much later, when I told a
debutante I knew at college about the dinner, that I learned what I had done.
When
we came out of the sunnily lit interior of the
Ladies} Day
offices, the
streets were gray and fuming with rain. It wasn’t the nice kind of rain that
rinses. you clean, but the sort of rain I imagine they must have in Brazil. It
flew straight down from the sky in drops the size of coffee saucers and hit the
hot sidewalks with a hiss that sent clouds of steam writhing up from the
gleaming, dark concrete.
My secret hope of spending the
afternoon alone in Central Park died in the glass eggbeater of
Ladies} Day
revolving
doors. I found myself spewed out through the warm rain and into the dim,
throbbing cave of a cab, together with Betsy and Hilda and Emily Ann Offenbach,
a prim little girl with a bun of red hair and a husband and three children in
Teaneck, New Jersey.
The movie was very poor. It
starred a nice blond girl who looked like June Allyson but was really somebody
else, and a sexy black-haired girl who looked like Elizabeth Taylor but was
also somebody else, and two big, broad-shouldered boneheads with names like
Rick and Gil.
It was a football romance and it
was in Technicolor.
I hate Technicolor. Everybody in
a Technicolor movie seems to feel obliged to wear a lurid costume in each new
scene and to stand around like a clotheshorse with a lot of very green trees or
very yellow wheat or very blue ocean rolling away for miles and miles in every
direction.