The Bell Jar (12 page)
“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.
What I couldn’t stand was
Buddy’s pretending I was so sexy and he was so pure, when all the time he’d
been having an affair with that tarty waitress and must have felt like laughing
in my face.
“What does your mother think
about this waitress?” I asked Buddy that weekend.
Buddy was amazingly close to his
mother. He was always quoting what she said about the relationship between a
man and a woman, and I knew Mrs. Willard was a real fanatic about virginity for
men and women both; When I first went to her house for supper she gave me a
queer, shrewd, searching look, and I knew she was trying to tell whether I was
a virgin or not.
Just as I thought, Buddy was
embarrassed. “Mother asked me about Gladys,” he admitted.
“Well, what did you say?”
“I said Gladys was free, white
and twenty-one.”
Now I knew Buddy would never
talk to his mother as rudely as that for my sake. He was always saying how his
mother said, “What a man wants is a mate and what a woman wants is infinite
security,” and, “What a man is is an arrow into the future and what a woman is
is the place the arrow shoots off from,” until it made me tired.
Every time I tried to argue,
Buddy would say his mother still got pleasure out of his father and wasn’t that
wonderful for people their age, it must mean she really knew what was what.
Well, I had just decided to
ditch Buddy Willard for once and for all, not because he’d slept with that
waitress but because he didn’t have the honest guts to admit it straight off to
everybody and face up to it as part of his character, when the phone in the
hall rang and somebody said in a little knowing singsong, “It’s for you,
Esther, it’s from Boston.”
I could tell right away something
must be wrong, because Buddy was the only person I knew in Boston, and he never
called me long distance because it was so much more expensive than letters.
Once, when I had a message he wanted me to get almost immediately, he went all
round his entry at medical school asking if anybody was driving up to my
college that weekend, and sure enough, somebody was, so he gave them a note for
me and I got it the same day. He didn’t even have to pay for a stamp.
It was Buddy all right. He told
me that the annual fall chest X-ray showed he had caught TB and he was going
off on a scholarship for medical students who caught TB to a TB place in the
Adirondacks. Then he said I hadn’t written since that last weekend and he hoped
nothing was the matter between us, and would I please try to write him at least
once a week and come to visit him at this TB place in my Christmas vacation?
I had never heard Buddy so
upset. He was very proud of his perfect health and was always telling me it was
psychosomatic when my sinuses blocked up and I couldn’t breathe. I thought this
an odd attitude for a doctor to have and perhaps he should study to be a
psychiatrist instead, but of course I never came right out and said so.
I told Buddy how sorry I was
about the TB and promised to write, but when I hung up I didn’t feel one bit
sorry. I only felt a wonderful relief.
I thought the TB might just be a
punishment for living the kind of double life Buddy lived and feeling so
superior to people. And I thought how convenient it would be now I didn’t have
to announce to everybody at college I had broken off with Buddy and start the
boring business of blind dates all over again.
I simply told everyone that
Buddy had TB and we were practically engaged, and when I stayed in to study on
Saturday nights they were extremely kind to me because they thought I was so
brave, working the way I did just to hide a broken heart.
Of
course, Constantin was much too short, but in his own way he was
handsome, with light brown hair and dark blue eyes and
a lively, challenging expression. He could almost have been an American, he was
so tan and had such good teeth, but I could tell straight away that he wasn’t.
He had what no American man I’ve ever met has had, and that’s intuition.
From the start Constantin
guessed I wasn’t any protégé of Mrs. Willard’s. I raised an eyebrow here and
dropped a dry little laugh there, and pretty soon we were both openly raking
Mrs. Willard over the coals and I thought, “This Constantin won’t mind if I’m
too tall and don’t know enough languages and haven’t been to Europe, he’ll see
through all that stuff to what I really am.”
Constantin drove me to the UN in
his old green convertible with cracked, comfortable brown leather seats and the
top down. He told me his tan came from playing tennis, and when we were sitting
there side by side flying down the streets in the open sun he took my hand and
squeezed it, and I felt happier than I had been since I was about nine and
running along the hot white beaches with my father the summer before he died.
And while Constantin and I sat
in one of those hushed plush auditoriums in the UN, next to a stern muscular
Russian girl with no makeup who was a simultaneous interpreter like Constantin,
I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I was only purely
happy until I was nine years old.
After that--in spite of the Girl
Scouts and the piano lessons and the water-color lessons and the dancing
lessons and the sailing camp, all of which my mother scrimped to give me, and
college, with crewing in the mist before breakfast and blackbottom pies and the
little new firecrackers of ideas going off every day--I had never been really
happy again.
I stared through the Russian
girl in her double-breasted gray suit, rattling off idiom after idiom in her
own unknowable tongue--which Constantin said was the most difficult part,
because the Russians didn’t have the same idioms as our idioms--and I wished
with all my heart I could crawl into her and spend the rest of my life barking
out one idiom after another. It mightn’t make me any happier, but it would be
one more little pebble of efficiency among all the other pebbles.
Then Constantin and the Russian
girl interpreter and the whole bunch of black and white and yellow men arguing
down there behind their labeled microphones seemed to move off at a distance. I
saw their mouths going up and down without a sound, as if they were sitting on
the deck of a departing ship, stranding me in the middle of a huge silence.
I started adding up all the
things I couldn’t do.
I began with cooking.
My grandmother and my mother
were such good cooks that I left everything to them. They were always trying to
teach me one dish or another, but I would just look on and say, “Yes, yes, I
see,” while the instructions slid through my head like water, and then I’d
always spoil what I did so nobody would ask me to do it again.
I remember Jody, my best and
only girlfriend at college in my freshman year, making me scrambled eggs at her
house one morning. They tasted unusual, and when I asked her if she had put in
anything extra, she said cheese and garlic salt. I asked who told her to do
that, and she said nobody, she just thought it up. But then, she was practical
and a sociology major.
I didn’t know shorthand either.
This meant I couldn’t get a good
job after college. My mother kept telling me nobody wanted a plain English
major. But an English major who knew shorthand was something else again.
Everybody would want her. She would be in demand among all the up-and-coming
young men and she would transcribe letter after thrilling letter.
The trouble was, I hated the
idea of serving men in any way. I wanted to dictate my own thrilling letters.
Besides, those little shorthand symbols in the book my mother showed me seemed
just as bad as let
t
equal time and let
s
equal the total
distance.
My list grew longer..
I was a terrible dancer. I
couldn’t carry a tune. I had no sense of balance, and when we had to walk down
a narrow board with our hands out and a book on our heads in gym class I always
fell over. I couldn’t ride a horse or ski, the two things I wanted to do most,
because they cost too much money. I couldn’t speak German or read Hebrew or
write Chinese. I didn’t even know where most of the old out-of-the-way
countries the UN men in front of me represented fitted in on the map.
For the first time in my life,
sitting there in the sound-proof heart of the UN building between Constantin
who could play tennis as well as simultaneously interpret and the Russian girl
who knew so many idioms, I felt dreadfully inadequate. The trouble was, I had
been inadequate all along, I simply hadn’t thought about it.
The one thing I was good at was
winning scholarships and prizes, and that era was coming to an end.
I felt like a racehorse in a
world without racetracks or a champion college footballer suddenly confronted
by Wall Street and a business suit, his days of glory shrunk to a little gold
cup on his mantel with a date engraved on it like the date on a tombstone.
I saw my life branching out
before me like the green fig tree in the story.
From the tip of every branch,
like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a
husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and
another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing
editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another
fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with
queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew
champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite
make out.
I saw myself sitting in the
crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my
mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but
choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide,
the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the
ground at my feet.