The Bell Jar (15 page)

               
The magazine was printed
somewhere in Maine and full of stenciled poems and descriptive paragraphs
separated from each other by asterisks. On page eleven I found a poem tided
“Florida Dawn.” I skipped down through image after image about watermelon
lights and turtle-green palms and shells fluted like bits of Greek
architecture.

               
“Not bad.” I thought it was
dreadful.

               
“Who wrote it?” Buddy asked with
an odd, pigeony smile.

               
My eye dropped to the name on
the lower right-hand corner of the page. B. S. Willard.

               
“I don’t know.” Then I said, “Of
course I know, Buddy. You wrote it.”

               
Buddy edged over to me.

               
I edged back. I had very little
knowledge about TB, but it seemed to me an extremely sinister disease, the way
it went on so invisibly. I thought Buddy might well be sitting in his own
little murderous aura of TB germs.

               
“Don’t worry,” Buddy laughed.
“I’m not positive.”

               
“Positive?”

               
“You can’t catch anything.”

               
Buddy stopped for a breath, the
way you do in the middle of climbing something very steep.

               
“I want to ask you a question.”
He had a disquieting new habit of boring into my eyes with his look as if
actually bent on piercing my head, the better to analyze what went on inside
it.

               
“I’d thought of asking it by
letter.”

               
I had a fleeting vision of a
pale blue envelope with a Yale crest on the back flap.

               
“But then I decided it would be
better if I waited until you came up, so I could ask you in person.” He paused.
“Well, don’t you want to know what it is?”

               
“What?” I said in a small,
unpromising voice.

               
Buddy sat down beside me. He put
his arm around my waist and brushed the hair from my ear. I didn’t move. Then I
heard him whisper, “How would you like to be Mrs. Buddy Willard?”

               
I had an awful impulse to laugh.

               
I thought how that question
would have bowled me over at any time in my five- or six-year period of adoring
Buddy Willard from a distance.

               
Buddy saw me hesitate.

               
“Oh, I’m in no shape now, I
know,” he said quickly. “I’m still on P.A.S. and I may yet lose a rib or two,
but I’ll be back at med school by next fall. A year from this spring at the
latest...”

               
“I think I should tell you
something, Buddy.”

               
“I know,” Buddy said stiffly.
“You’ve met someone.”

               
“No, it’s not that.”

               
“What is it, then?”

               
“I’m never going to get
married.”

               
“You’re crazy.” Buddy
brightened. “You’ll change your mind.”

               
“No. My mind’s made up.”

               
But Buddy just went on looking
cheerful.

               
“Remember,” I said, “that time
you hitchhiked back to college with me after Skit Night?”

               
“I remember.”

               
“Remember how you asked me where
I like to live best, the country or the city?”

               
“And you said...”

               
“And I said I wanted to live in
the country and in the city both?”

               
Buddy nodded.

               
“And you,” I continued with a
sudden force, “laughed and said I had the perfect setup of a true neurotic and
that that question came from some questionnaire you’d had in psychology class
that week?”

               
Buddy’s smile dimmed.

               
“Well, you were right. I
am
neurotic.
I could never settle down in either the country
or
the city.”

               
“You could live between them,”
Buddy suggested helpfully. “Then you could go to the city sometimes and to the
country sometimes.”

               
“Well, what’s so neurotic about
that?”

               
Buddy didn’t answer.

               
“Well?” I rapped out, thinking,
You can’t coddle these sick people, it’s the worst thing for them, it’ll spoil
them to bits.

               
“Nothing,” Buddy said in a pale,
still voice.

               
“Neurotic, ha!” I let out a
scornful laugh. “If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one
and the same time, then I’m neurotic as hell. I’ll be flying back and forth
between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.”

               
Buddy put his hand on mine.

               
“Let me fly with you.”

I
stood at the top of the ski slope on Mount Pisgah, looking down. I had no
business to be up there. I had never skied before in my life. Still, I thought
I would enjoy the view while I had the chance.

               
At my left, the rope tow
deposited skier after skier on the snowy summit which, packed by much crossing
and recrossing and slightly melted in the noon sun, had hardened to the
consistency and polish of glass. The cold air punished my lungs and sinuses to
a visionary clearness.

               
On every side of me the red and
blue and white jacketed skiers tore away down the blinding slope like fugitive
bits of an American flag. From the foot of the ski run, the imitation log cabin
lodge piped its popular songs into the overhang of silence.

Gazing
down on the jungfrau

From
our chalet for two..
.

               
The lilt and boom threaded by me
like an invisible rivulet in a desert of snow. One careless, superb gesture,
and I would be hurled into motion down the slope toward the small khaki spot in
the sidelines, among the spectators, which was Buddy Willard.

               
All morning Buddy had been
teaching me now to ski.

               
First, Buddy borrowed skis and
ski poles from a friend of his in the village, and ski boots from a doctor’s
wife whose feet were only one size larger than my own, and a red ski jacket
from a student nurse. His persistence in the face of mulishness was astounding.

               
Then I remembered that at
medical school Buddy had won a prize for persuading the most relatives of dead
people to have their dead ones cut up whether they needed it or not, in the
interests of science. I forget what the prize was, but I could just see Buddy
in his white coat with his stethoscope sticking out of a side pocket like part
of his anatomy, smiling and bowing and talking those numb, dumb relatives into
signing the postmortem papers.

               
Next, Buddy borrowed a car from
his own doctor, who’d had TB himself and was very understanding, and we drove
off as the buzzer for walk hour rasped along the sunless sanatorium corridors.

               
Buddy had never skied before
either, but he said that the elementary principles were quite simple, and as
he’d often watched the ski instructors and their pupils he could teach me all
I’d need to know.

               
For the first half hour I
obediently herringboned up a small slope, pushed off with my poles and coasted
straight down. Buddy seemed pleased with my progress.

               
“That’s fine, Esther,” he
observed, as I negotiated my slope for the twentieth time. “Now let’s try you
on the rope tow.”

               
I stopped in my tracks, flushed
and panting.

               
“But Buddy, I don’t know how to
zigzag yet. All those people coming down from the top know how to zigzag.”

               
“Oh, you need only go halfway.
Then you won’t gain very much momentum.”

               
And Buddy accompanied me to the
rope tow and showed me how to let the rope run through my hands, and then told
me to close my fingers round it and go up.

               
It never occurred to me to say
no.

               
I wrapped my fingers around the
rough, bruising snake of a rope that slithered through them, and went up.

               
But the rope dragged me,
wobbling and balancing, so rapidly I couldn’t hope to dissociate myself from it
halfway. There was a skier in front of me and a skier behind me, and I’d have
been knocked over and stuck full of skis and poles the minute I let go, and I
didn’t want to make trouble, so I hung quietly on.

               
At the top, though, I had second
thoughts.

               
Buddy singled me out, hesitating
there in the red jacket. His arms chopped the air like khaki windmills. Then I
saw he was signaling me to come down a path that had opened in the middle of
the weaving skiers. But as I poised, uneasy, with a dry throat, the smooth
white path from my feet to his feet grew blurred.

               
A skier crossed it from the
left, another crossed it from the right, and Buddy’s arms went on waving feebly
as antennae from the other side of a field swarming with tiny moving
animalcules like germs, or bent, bright exclamation marks.

               
I looked up from that churning
amphitheater to the view beyond it.

               
The great, gray eye of the sky
looked back at me, its mistshrouded sun focusing all the white and silent
distances that poured from every point of the compass, hill after pale hill, to
stall at my feet.

               
The interior voice nagging me
not to be a fool--to save my skin and take off my skis and walk down,
camouflaged by the scrub pines bordering the slope--fled like a disconsolate
mosquito. The thought that I might kill myself formed in my mind coolly as a
tree or a flower.

               
I measured the distance to Buddy
with my eye.

               
His arms were folded, now, and
he seemed of a piece with the split-rail fence behind him--numb, brown and
inconsequential.

               
Edging to the rim of the
hilltop, I dug the spikes of my poles into the snow and pushed myself into a
flight I knew I couldn’t stop by skill or any belated access of will.

               
I aimed straight down.

               
A keen wind that had been hiding
itself struck me full in the mouth and raked the hair back horizontal on my
head. I was descending, but the white sun rose no higher. It hung over the
suspended waves of the hills, an insentient pivot without which the world would
not exist..

               
A small, answering point in my
own body flew toward it. I felt my lungs inflate with the inrush of
scenery--air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, “This is what it is to be
happy.”

               
I plummeted down past the
zigzaggers, the students, the experts, through year after year of doubleness
and smiles and compromise, into my own past.

               
People and trees receded on
either hand like the dark sides of a tunnel as I hurtled on to the still,
bright point at the end of it, the pebble at the bottom of the well, the white
sweet baby cradled in its mother’s belly.

               
My teeth crunched a gravelly
mouthful. Ice water seeped down my throat.

               
Buddy’s face hung over me, near
and huge, like a distracted planet. Other faces showed themselves up in back of
his. Behind them, black dots swarmed on a plane of whiteness. Piece by piece,
as at the strokes of a dull godmother’s wand, the old world sprang back into
position.

               
“You were doing fine,” a
familiar voice informed my ear, “until that man stepped into your path.”