The Bell Jar (14 page)

“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 I'd 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 boarding-house 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.

“Say, lady, you
better not sit out here, the tide's coming 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. Cal 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 in 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.

But each time I would get the cord so tight I could feel a rushing in my ears and a flush of blood in my face, my hands would weaken and let go, and I would be all right again.

Then I saw that my body had all sorts of little tricks, such as making my hands go limp at the crucial second, which would save it, time and again, whereas if I had the whole say, I would be dead in a flash.

I would simply have to ambush it with whatever sense I had left, or it would trap me in its stupid cage for fifty years without any sense at all. And when people found out my mind had gone, as they would have to, sooner or later, in spite of my mother's guarded tongue, they would persuade her to put me into an asylum where I could be cured.

Only my case was incurable.

I had bought a few paperbacks on abnormal psychology at the drugstore and compared my symptoms with the symptoms in the books, and sure enough, my symptoms tallied with the most hopeless cases.

The only thing I could read, besides the scandal sheets, were those abnormal-psychology books. It was as if some slim opening had been left, so I could learn all I needed to know about my case to end it in the proper way.

I wondered, after the hanging fiasco, if I shouldn't just give it up and turn myself over to the doctors, and then I remembered Doctor Gordon and his private shock machine. Once I was locked up they could use that on me all the time.

And I thought of how my mother and brother and friends would visit me, day after day, hoping I would be better. Then their visits would slacken off, and they would give up hope. They would grow old. They would forget me.

They would be poor, too.

They would want me to have the best of care at first, so they would sink all their money in a private hospital like Doctor Gordon's. Finally, when the money was used up, I would be moved to a state hospital, with hundreds of people like me, in a big cage in the basement.

The more hopeless you were, the further away they hid you.

Cal had turned
around and was swimming in.

As I watched, he dragged himself slowly out of the neck-deep sea. Against the khaki-colored sand and the green shore wavelets, his body was bisected for a moment, like a white worm. Then it crawled completely out of the green and onto the khaki and lost itself among dozens and dozens of other worms that were wriggling or just lolling about between the sea and the sky.

I paddled my hands in the water and kicked my feet. The egg-shaped rock didn't seem to be any nearer than it had been when Cal and I had looked at it from the shore.

Then I saw it would be pointless to swim as far as the rock, because my body would take that excuse to climb out and lie in the sun, gathering strength to swim back.

The only thing to do was to drown myself then and there.

So I stopped.

I brought my hands to my breast, ducked my head, and dived, using my hands to push the water aside. The water pressed in on my eardrums and on my heart. I fanned myself down, but before I knew where I was, the water had spat me up into the sun, the world was sparkling all about me like blue and green and yellow semi-precious stones.

I dashed the water from my eyes.

I was panting, as after a strenuous exertion, but floating, without effort.

I dived, and dived again, and each time popped up like a cork.

The gray rock mocked me, bobbing on the water easy as a lifebuoy.

I knew when I was beaten,

I turned back.

The flowers nodded
like bright, knowledgeable children as I trundled them down the hall.

I felt silly in my sage-green volunteer's uniform, and superfluous, unlike the white-uniformed doctors and nurses, or even the brown-uniformed scrubwomen with their mops and their buckets of grimy water, who passed me without a word.

If I had been getting paid, no matter how little, I could at least count this a proper job, but all I got for a morning of pushing round magazines and candy and flowers was a free lunch.

My mother said the cure for thinking too much about yourself was helping somebody who was worse off than you, so Teresa had arranged for me to sign on as a volunteer at our local hospital. It was difficult to be a volunteer at this hospital, because that's what all the Junior League women wanted to do, but luckily for me, a lot of them were away on vacation.

I had hoped they would send me to a ward with some really gruesome cases, who would see through my numb, dumb face to how I meant well, and be grateful. But the head of the volunteers, a society lady at our church, took one look at me and said, “You're on maternity.”

So I rode the elevator up three flights to the maternity ward and reported to the head nurse. She gave me the trolley of flowers. I was supposed to put the right vases at the right beds in the right rooms.

But before I came to the door of the first room I noticed that a lot of the flowers were droopy and brown at the edges. I thought it would be discouraging for a woman who'd just had a baby to see somebody plonk down a big bouquet of dead flowers in front of her, so I steered the trolley to a washbasin in an alcove in the hall and began to pick out all the flowers that were dead.

Then I picked out all those that were dying.

There was no wastebasket in sight, so I crumbled the flowers up and laid them in the deep white basin. The basin felt cold as a tomb. I smiled. This must be how they laid the bodies away in the hospital morgue. My gesture, in its small way, echoed the larger gesture of the doctors and nurses.

I swung the door of the first room open and walked in, dragging my trolley. A couple of nurses jumped up, and I had a confused impression of shelves and medicine cabinets.

“What do you want?” one of the nurses demanded sternly. I couldn't tell one from the other, they all looked just alike.

“I'm taking the flowers around.”

The nurse who had spoken put a hand on my shoulder and led me out of the room, maneuvering the trolley with her free, expert hand. She flung open the swinging doors of the room next to that one and bowed me in. Then she disappeared.