The Bell Jar (8 page)

               
Most of the action in this
picture took place in the football stands, with the two girls waving and
cheering in smart suits with orange chrysanthemums the size of cabbages on their
lapels, or in a ballroom, where the girls swooped across the floor with their
dates, in dresses like something out of
Gone With the Wind,
and then
sneaked off into the powder room to say nasty intense things to each other.

               
Finally I could see the nice
girl was going to end up with the nice football hero and the sexy girl was
going to end up with nobody, because the man named Gil had only wanted a
mistress and not a wife all along and was now packing off to Europe on a single
ticket.

               
At about this point I began to
feel peculiar. I looked round me at all the rows of rapt little heads with the
same silver glow on them at the front and the same black shadow on them at the
back, and they looked like nothing more or less than a lot of stupid
moonbrains.

               
I felt in terrible danger of
puking. I didn’t know whether it was the awful movie giving me a stomachache or
all that caviar I had eaten.

               
“I’m going back to the hotel,” I
whispered to Betsy through the half-dark.

               
Betsy was staring at the screen
with deadly concentration. “Don’t you fee good?” she whispered, barely moving
her lips.

               
“No,” I said. ‘I feel like
hell.”

               
“So
do I, I’ll come back
with you.”

               
We slipped out of our seats and
said Excuse me Excuse me Excuse me down the length of our row, while the people
grumbled and hissed and shifted their rain boots and umbrellas to let us pass,
and I stepped on as many feet as I could because it took my mind off this
enormous desire to puke that was ballooning up in front of me so fast I
couldn’t see round it.

               
The remains of a tepid rain were
still sifting down when we stepped out into the street.

               
Betsy looked a fright. The bloom
was gone from her cheeks and her drained face floated in front of me, green and
sweating. We fell into one of those yellow checkered cabs that are always
waiting at the curb when you are trying to decide whether or not you want a
taxi, and by the time we reached the hotel I had puked once and Betsy had puked
twice.

               
The cab driver took the corners
with such momentum that we were thrown together first on one side of the back
seat and then on the other. Each time one of us felt sick, she would lean over
quietly as if she had dropped something and was picking it up off the floor,
and the other one would hum a little and pretend to be looking out the window.

               
The cab driver seemed to know
what we were doing, even so.

               
“Hey,” he protested, driving
through a light that had just turned red, “you can’t do that in my cab, you
better get out and do it in the street.”

               
But we didn’t say anything, and
I guess he figured we were almost at the hotel so he didn’t make us get out
until we pulled up in front of the main entrance.

               
We didn’t dare wait to add up
the fare. We stuffed a pile of silver into the cabby’s hand and dropped a
couple of Kleenexes to cover the mess on the floor, and ran in through the
lobby and on to the empty elevator. Luckily for us it was a quiet time of day.
Betsy was sick again in the elevator and I held her head, and then I was sick
and she held mine.

               
Usually after a good puke you
feel better right away. We hugged each other and then said good-bye and went
off to opposite ends of the hall to lie down in our own rooms. There is nothing
like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.

               
But the minute I’d shut the door
behind me and undressed and dragged myself on to the bed, I felt worse than
ever. I felt I just had to go to the toilet. I struggled into my white bathrobe
with the blue cornflowers on it and staggered down to the bathroom.

               
Betsy was already there. I could
hear her groaning behind the door, so I hurried on around the corner to the
bathroom in the next wing. I thought I would die, it was so far.

               
I sat on the toilet and leaned
my head over the edge of the washbowl and I thought I was losing my guts and my
dinner both. The sickness rolled through me in great waves. After each wave it
would fade away and leave me limp as a wet leaf and shivering all over and then
I would feel it rising up in me again, and the glittering white torture-chamber
tiles under my feet and over my head and on all four sides closed in and
squeezed me to pieces.

               
I don’t know how long I kept at
it. I let the cold water in the bowl go on running loudly with the stopper out,
so anybody who came by would think I was washing my clothes, and then when I
felt reasonably safe I stretched out on the floor and lay quite still.

               
It didn’t seem to be summer any
more. I could feel the winter shaking my bones and banging my teeth together,
and the big white hotel towel I had dragged down with me lay under my head numb
as a snowdrift.

I
thought it very bad manners for anyone to pound on a bathroom door the way some
person was pounding. They could just go around the corner and find another
bathroom the way I had done and leave me in peace. But the person kept banging
and pleading with me to let them in and I thought I dimly recognized the voice.
It sounded a bit like Emily Ann Offenbach.

               
“Just a minute,” I said then. My
words bungled out thick as molasses.

               
I pulled myself together and
slowly rose and flushed the toilet for the tenth time and slopped the bowl
clean and rolled up the towel so the vomit stains didn’t show very clearly and
unlocked the door and stepped out into the hall.

               
I knew it would be fatal if I
looked at Emily Ann or anybody else so I fixed my eyes glassily on a window
that swam at the end of the hall and put one foot in front of the other.

The
next thing I had a view of was somebody’s shoe.

               
It was a stout shoe of cracked
black leather and quite old, with tiny air holes in a scalloped pattern over
the toe and a dull polish, and it was pointed at me. It seemed to be placed on
a hard green surface that was hurting my right cheekbone.

               
I kept very still, waiting for a
clue that would give me some notion of what to do. A little to the left of the
shoe I saw a vague heap of blue cornflowers on a white ground and this made me
want to cry. It was the sleeve of my own bathrobe I was looking at, and my left
hand lay pale as a cod at the end of it.

               
“She’s all right now.”

               
The voice came from a cool,
rational region far above my head. For a minute I didn’t think there was
anything strange about it, and then I thought it was strange. It was a man’s voice,
and no men were allowed to be in our hotel at any time of the night or day.

               
“How many others are there?” the
voice went on.

               
I listened with interest. The
floor seemed wonderfully solid. It was comforting to know I had fallen and
could fall no farther.

               
“Eleven, I think,” a woman’s
voice answered. I figured she must belong to the black shoe. “I think there’s
eleven more of ‘um, but one’s missin’ so there’s oney ten.”

               
“Well, you get this one to bed
and I’ll take care of the rest.”

               
I heard a hollow boomp boomp in
my right ear that grew fainter and fainter. Then a door opened in the distance,
and there were voices and groans, and the door shut again.

               
Two hands slid under my armpits
and the woman’s voice said, “Come, come, lovey, we’ll make it yet,” and I felt
myself being half lifted, and slowly the doors began to move by, one by one,
until we came to an open door and went in.

               
The sheet on my bed was folded
back, and the woman helped me lie down and covered me up to the chin and rested
for a minute in the bedside armchair, fanning herself with one plump, pink
hand. She wore gilt-rimmed spectacles and a white nurse’s cap.

               
“Who are you?” I asked in a
faint voice.

               
“I’m the hotel nurse.”

               
“What’s the matter with me?”

               
“Poisoned,” she said briefly.
“Poisoned, the whole lot of you. I never seen anythin’ like it. Sick here, sick
there, whatever have you young ladies been stuffin’ yourselves with?”

               
“Is everybody else sick too?” I
asked with some hope.

               
“The whole of your lot,” she
affirmed with relish. “Sick as dogs and cryin’ for ma.”

               
The room hovered around me with
great gentleness, as if the chairs and the tables and the walls were
withholding their weight out of sympathy for my sudden frailty.

               
“The doctor’s given you an
injection,” the nurse said from the doorway. “You’ll sleep now.”

               
And the door took her place like
a sheet of blank paper, and then a larger sheet of paper took the place of the
door, and I drifted toward it and smiled myself to sleep.

Somebody
was standing by my pillow with a white cup.

               
“Drink this,” they said.

               
I shook my head. The pillow
crackled like a wad of straw.

               
“Drink this and you’ll feel
better.”

               
A thick white china cup was
lowered under my nose. In the wan light that might have been evening and might
have been dawn I contemplated the clear amber liquid. Pads of butter floated on
the surface and a faint chickeny aroma fumed up to my nostrils.

               
My eyes moved tentatively to the
skirt behind the cup. “Betsy,” I said.

               
“Betsy nothing, it’s me.”

               
I raised my eyes then, and saw
Doreen’s head silhouetted against the paling window, her blonde hair lit at the
tips from behind like a halo of gold. Her face was in shadow, so I couldn’t
make out her expression, but I felt a sort of expert tenderness flowing from
the ends of her fingers. She might have been Betsy or my mother or a
fern-scented nurse.

               
I bent my head and took a sip of
the broth. I thought my mouth must be made of sand. I took another sip and then
another and another until the cup was empty.

               
I felt purged and holy and ready
for a new life.

               
Doreen set the cup on the
windowsill and lowered herself into the armchair. I noticed that she made no
move to take out a cigarette, and as she was a chain smoker this surprised me.

               
“Well, you almost died, “ she
said finally.

               
“I guess it was all that
caviar.”

               
“Caviar nothing! It was the
crabmeat. They did tests on it and it was chock-full of ptomaine.”

               
I had a vision of the
celestially white kitchens of
Ladies’ Day
stretching into infinity. I
saw avocado pear after avocado pear being stuffed with crabmeat and mayonnaise
and photographed under brilliant lights. I saw the delicate, pink-mottled claw
meat poking seductively through its blanket of mayonnaise and the bland yellow
pear cup with its rim of alligator-green cradling the whole mess.

               
Poison.

               
“Who did tests?” I thought the
doctor might have pumped somebody’s stomach and then analyzed what he found in
his hotel laboratory.

               
“Those dodos on
Ladies’ Day.
As
soon as you all started keeling over like ninepins somebody called into the
office and the office called across to
Ladies’ Day
and they did tests on
everything left over from the big lunch. Ha!”

               
“Ha!” I echoed hollowly. It was
good to have Doreen back.