The Bell Jar (11 page)

               
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 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 knowhow it
came about.

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