The Bell Jar (7 page)

We sat side by side in two wicker rocking chairs. The sunlight was clean and windless and almost hot.

“I can't stay more than a few minutes,” Buddy said.

“Oh, come on, stay for lunch,” I said.

“Oh, I can't do that. I'm up here for the Sophomore Prom with Joan.”

I felt like a prize idiot.

“How
is
Joan?” I asked coldly.

Joan Giling came from our home town and went to our church and was a year ahead of me at college. She was a big wheel—president of her class and a physics major and the college hockey champion. She always made me feel squirmy
with her starey pebble-colored eyes and her gleaming tombstone teeth and her breathy voice. She was big as a horse, too. I began to think Buddy had pretty poor taste.

“Oh, Joan,” he said. “She asked me up to this dance two months ahead of time and her mother asked my mother if I would take her, so what could I do?”

“Well, why did you say you'd take her if you didn't want to?” I asked meanly.

“Oh, I like Joan. She never cares whether you spend any money on her or not and she enjoys doing things out-of-doors. The last time she came down to Yale for house weekend we went on a bicycle trip to East Rock and she's the only girl I haven't had to push up hills. Joan's all right.”

I went cold with envy. I had never been to Yale, and Yale was the place all the seniors in my house liked to go best on weekends. I decided to expect nothing from Buddy Willard. If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.

“You better go and find Joan then,” I said in a matter-of-fact voice. “I've a date coming any minute and he won't like seeing me sitting around with you.”

“A date?” Buddy looked surprised. “Who is it?”

“It's two,” I said, “Peter the Hermit and Walter the Penniless.”

Buddy didn't say anything, so I said, “Those are their nicknames.”

Then I added, “They're from Dartmouth.”

I guess Buddy never read much history, because his mouth stiffened. He swung up from the wicker rocking chair
and gave it a sharp little unnecessary push. Then he dropped a pale blue envelope with a Yale crest into my lap.

“Here's a letter I meant to leave for you if you weren't in. There's a question in it you can answer by mail. I don't feel like asking you about it right now.”

After Buddy had gone I opened the letter. It was a letter inviting me to the Yale Junior Prom.

I was so surprised I let out a couple of yips and ran into the house shouting, “I'm going I'm going I'm going.” After the bright white sun on the porch it looked pitch dark in there, and I couldn't make out a thing. I found myself hugging the senior on watch. When she heard I was going to the Yale Junior Prom she treated me with amazement and respect.

Oddly enough, things changed in the house after that. The seniors on my floor started speaking to me and every now and then one of them would answer the phone quite spontaneously and nobody made any more nasty loud remarks outside my door about people wasting their golden college days with their noses stuck in a book.

Well, all during the Junior Prom Buddy treated me like a friend or a cousin.

We danced about a mile apart the whole time, until during “Auld Lang Syne” he suddenly rested his chin on the top of my head as if he were very tired. Then in the cold, black, three-o'clock wind we walked very slowly the five miles back to the house where I was sleeping in the living room on a couch that was too short because it only cost fifty cents a night instead of two dollars like most of the other places with proper beds.

I felt dull and flat and full of shattered visions.

I had imagined Buddy would fall in love with me that weekend and that I wouldn't have to worry about what I was doing on any more Saturday nights the rest of the year. Just as we approached the house where I was staying Buddy said, “Let's go up to the chemistry lab.”

I was aghast. The
chemistry
lab?”

“Yes.” Buddy reached for my hand. There's a beautiful view up there behind the chemistry lab.”

And sure enough, there was a sort of hilly place behind the chemistry lab from which you could see the lights of a couple of the houses in New Haven.

I stood pretending to admire them while Buddy got a good footing on the rough soil. While he kissed me I kept my eyes open and tried to memorize the spacing of the house lights so I would never forget them.

Finally Buddy stepped back. “Wow!” he said.

“Wow what?” I said, surprised. It had been a dry, uninspiring little kiss, and I remember thinking it was too bad both our mouths were so chapped from walking five miles in that cold wind.

“Wow, it makes me feel terrific to kiss you.”

I modestly didn't say anything.

“I guess you go out with a lot of boys,” Buddy said then.

“Well, I guess I do.” I thought I must have gone out with a different boy for every week in the year.

“Well, I have to study a lot.”

“So do I,” I put in hastily. “I have to keep my scholarship after all.”

“Still, I think I could manage to see you every third weekend.”

“That's nice.” I was almost fainting and dying to get back to college and tell everybody.

Buddy kissed me again in front of the house steps, and the next fall, when his scholarship to medical school came through, I went there to see him instead of to Yale and it was there I found out how he had fooled me all those years and what a hypocrite he was.

I found out on the day we saw the baby born.

I had kept
begging Buddy to show me some really interesting hospital sights, so one Friday I cut all my classes and came down for a long weekend and he gave me the works.

I started out by dressing in a white coat and sitting on a tall stool in a room with four cadavers, while Buddy and his friends cut them up. These cadavers were so unhuman-looking they didn't bother me a bit. They had stiff, leathery, purple-black skin and they smelt like old pickle jars.

After that, Buddy took me out into a hall where they had some big glass bottles full of babies that had died before they were born. The baby in the first bottle had a large white head bent over a tiny curled-up body the size of a frog. The baby in the next bottle was bigger and the baby next to that one was bigger still and the baby in the last bottle was the size of a normal baby and he seemed to be looking at me and smiling a little piggy smile.

I was quite proud of the calm way I stared at all these gruesome things. The only time I jumped was when I leaned
my elbow on Buddy's cadaver's stomach to watch him dissect a lung. After a minute or two I felt this burning sensation in my elbow and it occurred to me the cadaver might just be half alive since it was still warm, so I leapt off my stool with a small exclamation. Then Buddy explained the burning was only from the pickling fluid, and I sat back in my old position.

In the hour before lunch Buddy took me to a lecture on sickle-cell anemia and some other depressing diseases, where they wheeled sick people out onto the platform and asked them questions and then wheeled them off and showed colored slides.

One slide I remember showed a beautiful laughing girl with a black mole on her cheek. ‘Twenty days after that mole appeared the girl was dead,” the doctor said, and everybody went very quiet for a minute and then the bell rang, so I never really found out what the mole was or why the girl died.

In the afternoon we went to see a baby born.

First we found a linen closet in the hospital corridor where Buddy took out a white mask for me to wear and some gauze.

A tall fat medical student, big as Sydney Greenstreet, lounged nearby, watching Buddy wind the gauze round and round my head until my hair was completely covered and only my eyes peered out over the white mask.

The medical student gave an unpleasant little snicker. “At least your mother loves you,” he said.

I was so busy thinking how very fat he was and how unfortunate it must be for a man and especially a young man
to be fat, because what woman could stand leaning over that big stomach to kiss him, that I didn't immediately realize what this student had said to me was an insult. By the time I figured he must consider himself quite a fine fellow and had thought up a cutting remark about how only a mother loves a fat man, he was gone.

Buddy was examining a queer wooden plaque on the wall with a row of holes in it, starting from a hole about the size of a silver dollar and ending with one the size of a dinner plate.

“Fine, fine,” he said to me. “There's somebody about to have a baby this minute.”

At the door of the delivery room stood a thin, stoop-shouldered medical student Buddy knew.

“Hello, Will,” Buddy said. “Who's on the job?”

“I am,” Will said gloomily, and I noticed little drops of sweat beading his high pale forehead. “I am, and it's my first.”

Buddy told me Will was a third-year man and had to deliver eight babies before he could graduate.

Then we noticed a bustle at the far end of the hall and some men in lime-green coats and skull caps and a few nurses came moving toward us in a ragged procession wheeling a trolley with a big white lump on it.

“You oughtn't to see this,” Will muttered in my ear. “You'll never want to have a baby if you do. They oughtn't to let women watch. It'll be the end of the human race.”

Buddy and I laughed, and then Buddy shook Will's hand and we all went into the room.

I was so struck by the sight of the table where they were lifting the woman I didn't say a word. It looked like some awful torture table, with these metal stirrups sticking up in mid-air at one end and all sorts of instruments and wires and tubes I couldn't make out properly at the other.

Buddy and I stood together by the window, a few feet away from the woman, where we had a perfect view.

The woman's stomach stuck up so high I couldn't see her face or the upper part of her body at all. She seemed to have nothing but an enormous spider-fat stomach and two little ugly spindly legs propped in the high stirrups, and all the time the baby was being born she never stopped making this unhuman whooing noise.

Later Buddy told me the woman was on a drug that would make her forget she'd had any pain and that when she swore and groaned she really didn't know what she was doing because she was in a kind of twilight sleep.

I thought it sounded just like the sort of drug a man would invent. Here was a woman in terrible pain, obviously feeling every bit of it or she wouldn't groan like that, and she would go straight home and start another baby, because the drug would make her forget how bad the pain had been, when all the time, in some secret part of her, that long, blind, doorless and windowless corridor of pain was waiting to open up and shut her in again.

The head doctor, who was supervising Will, kept saying to the woman, “Push down, Mrs. Tomolillo, push down, that's a good girl, push down,” and finally through the split,
shaven place between her legs, lurid with disinfectant, I saw a dark fuzzy thing appear.

“The baby's head,” Buddy whispered under cover of the woman's groans.

But the baby's head stuck for some reason, and the doctor told Will he'd have to make a cut. I heard the scissors close on the woman's skin like cloth and the blood began to run down—a fierce, bright red. Then all at once the baby seemed to pop out into Will's hands, the color of a blue plum and floured with white stuff and streaked with blood, and Will kept saying, “I'm going to drop it, I'm going to drop it, I'm going to drop it,” in a terrified voice.

“No, you're not,” the doctor said, and took the baby out of Will's hands and started massaging it, and the blue color went away and the baby started to cry in a lorn, croaky voice and I could see it was a boy.

The first thing that baby did was pee in the doctor's face. I told Buddy later I didn't see how that was possible, but he said it was quite possible, though unusual, to see something like that happen.

As soon as the baby was born the people in the room divided up into two groups, the nurses tying a metal dog tag on the baby's wrist and swabbing its eyes with cotton on the end of a stick and wrapping it up and putting it in a canvas-sided cot, while the doctor and Will started sewing up the woman's cut with a needle and a long thread.

I think somebody said, “It's a boy, Mrs. Tomolillo,” but the woman didn't answer or raise her head.

“Well, how was it?” Buddy asked with a satisfied expression as we walked across the green quadrangle to his room.

“Wonderful,” I said. “I could see something like that every day.”

I didn't feel up to asking him if there were any other ways to have babies. For some reason the most important thing to me was actually seeing the baby come out of you yourself and making sure it was yours. I thought if you had to have all that pain anyway you might just as well stay awake.

I had always imagined myself hitching up on to my elbows on the delivery table after it was all over—dead white, of course, with no makeup and from the awful ordeal, but smiling and radiant, with my hair down to my waist, and reaching out for my first little squirmy child and saying its name, whatever it was.

“Why was it all covered with flour?” I asked then, to keep the conversation going, and Buddy told me about the waxy stuff that guarded the baby's skin.

When we were back in Buddy's room, which reminded me of nothing so much as a monk's cell, with its bare walls and bare bed and bare floor and the desk loaded with Gray's
Anatomy
and other thick gruesome books, Buddy lit a candle and uncorked a bottle of Dubonnet. Then we lay down side by side on the bed and Buddy sipped his wine while I read aloud “somewhere I have never travelled” and other poems from a book I'd brought.

Buddy said he figured there must be something in poetry if a girl like me spent all her days over it, so each time we met
I read him some poetry and explained to him what I found in it. It was Buddy's idea. He always arranged our weekends so we'd never regret wasting our time in any way. Buddy's father was a teacher, and I think Buddy could have been a teacher as well, he was always trying to explain things to me and introduce me to new knowledge.

Suddenly, after I finished a poem, he said, “Esther, have you ever seen a man?”

The way he said it I knew he didn't mean a regular man or a man in general, I knew he meant a man naked.

“No,” I said. “Only statues.”

“Well, don't you think you would like to see me?”

I didn't know what to say. My mother and my grandmother had started hinting around to me a lot lately about what a fine, clean boy Buddy Willard was, coming from such a fine, clean family, and how everybody at church thought he was a model person, so kind to his parents and to older people, as well as so athletic and so handsome and so intelligent.

All I'd heard about, really, was how fine and clean Buddy was and how he was the kind of person a girl should stay fine and clean for. So I didn't really see the harm in anything Buddy would think up to do.

“Well, all right, I guess so,” I said.

I stared at Buddy while he unzipped his chino pants and took them off and laid them on a chair and then took off his underpants that were made of something like nylon fishnet.

“They're cool,” he explained, “and my mother says they wash easily.”

Then he just stood there in front of me and I kept on staring at him. The only thing I could think of was turkey neck and turkey gizzards and I felt very depressed.

Buddy seemed hurt I didn't say anything. “I think you ought to get used to me like this,” he said. “Now let me see you.”

But undressing in front of Buddy suddenly appealed to me about as much as having my Posture Picture taken at college, where you have to stand naked in front of a camera, knowing all the time that a picture of you stark naked, both full view and side view, is going into the college gym files to be marked A B C or D depending on how straight you are.

“Oh, some other time,” I said.

“All right.”

Buddy got dressed again.

Then we kissed and hugged a while and I felt a little better. I drank the rest of the Dubonnet and sat cross-legged at the end of Buddy's bed and asked for a comb. I began to comb my hair down over my face so Buddy couldn't see it. Suddenly I said, “Have you ever had an affair with anyone, Buddy?”

I don't know what made me say it, the words just popped out of my mouth. I never thought for one minute that Buddy Willard would have an affair with anyone. I expected him to say, “No, I have been saving myself for when I get married to somebody pure and a virgin like you.”

But Buddy didn't say anything, he just turned pink.

“Well, have you?”

“What do you mean, an affair?” Buddy asked then in a hollow voice.

“You know, have you ever gone to bed with anyone?” I
kept rhythmically combing the hair down over the side of my face nearest to Buddy, and I could feel the little electric filaments clinging to my hot cheeks and I wanted to shout, “Stop, stop, don't tell me, don't say anything.” But I didn't, I just kept still.

“Well, yes, I have,” Buddy said finally.

I almost fell over. From the first night Buddy Willard kissed me and said I must go out with a lot of boys, he made me feel I was much more sexy and experienced than he was and that everything he did like hugging and kissing and petting was simply what I made him feel like doing out of the blue, he couldn't help it and didn't know how it came about.

Now I saw he had only been pretending all this time to be so innocent.

“Tell me about it.” I combed my hair slowly over and over, feeling the teeth of the comb dig into my cheek at every stroke. “Who was it?”

Buddy seemed relieved I wasn't angry. He even seemed relieved to have somebody to tell about how he was seduced.

Of course, somebody had seduced Buddy, Buddy hadn't started it and it wasn't really his fault. It was this waitress at the hotel he worked at as a busboy the last summer at Cape Cod. Buddy had noticed her staring at him queerly and shoving her breasts up against him in the confusion of the kitchen, so finally one day he asked her what the trouble was and she looked him straight in the eye and said, “I want you.”

“Served up with parsley?” Buddy had laughed innocently.

“No,” she had said. “Some night.”

And that's how Buddy had lost his pureness and his virginity.

At first I thought he must have slept with the waitress only the once, but when I asked how many times, just to make sure, he said he couldn't remember but a couple of times a week for the rest of the summer. I multiplied three by ten and got thirty, which seemed beyond all reason.

After that something in me just froze up.

Back at college I started asking a senior here and a senior there what they would do if a boy they knew suddenly told them he'd slept thirty times with some slutty waitress one summer, smack in the middle of knowing them. But these seniors said most boys were like that and you couldn't honestly accuse them of anything until you were at least pinned or engaged to be married.

Actually, it wasn't the idea of Buddy sleeping with somebody that bothered me. I mean I'd read about all sorts of people sleeping with each other, and if it had been any other boy I would merely have asked him the most interesting details, and maybe gone out and slept with somebody myself just to even things up, and then thought no more about it.