The Bell Jar (16 page)
People were unfastening my
bindings and collecting my ski poles from where they poked skyward, askew, in
their separate snowbanks. The lodge fence propped itself at my back.
Buddy bent to pull off my boots
and the several pairs of white wool socks that padded them. His plump hand shut
on my left foot, then inched up my ankle, closing and probing, as if feeling
for a concealed weapon.
A dispassionate white sun shone
at the summit of the sky. I wanted to hone myself on it till I grew saintly and
thin and essential as the blade of a knife.
“I’m going up,” I said. “I’m
going to do it again.”
“No, you’re not.”
A queer, satisfied expression
came over Buddy’s face.
“No, you’re not,” he repeated
with a final smile. “Your leg’s broken in two places. You’ll be stuck in a cast
for months.”
“I’m
so glad they)re going to die.”
Hilda arched her cat-lirnbs in a
yawn, buried her head in her arms on the conference table and went back to
sleep. A wisp of bilious green straw perched on her brow like a tropical bird.
Bile green. They were promoting
it for fall, only Hilda, as usual, was half a year ahead of time. Bile green
with black, bile green with white, bile green with nile green, its kissing
cousin.
Fashion blurbs, silver and full
of nothing, sent up their fishy bubbles in my brain. They surfaced with a
hollow pop.
I’m so glad they)re going to
die.
I cursed the luck that had timed my arrival in the
hotel cafeteria to coincide with Hilda’s. After a late night I felt too dull to
think up the excuse that would take me back to my room for the glove, the
handkerchief, the umbrella, the notebook I forgot. My penalty was the long,
dead walk from the frosted glass doors of the Amazon to the strawberry-marble
slab of our entry on Madison Avenue.
Hilda moved like a mannequin the
whole way.
“That’s a lovely hat, did you
make it?”
I half expected Hilda to turn on
me and say, “You sound sick,” but she only extended and then retracted her
swanny neck.
“Yes.”
The night before I’d seen a play
where the heroine was possessed by a dybbuk, and when the dybbuk spoke from her
mouth its voice sounded so cavernous and deep you couldn’t tell whether it was
a man or a woman. Well, Hilda’s voice sounded just like the voice of that
dybbuk.
She stared at her reflection in
the glossed shop windows as if to make sure, moment by moment, that she
continued to exist. The silence between us was so profound I thought part of it
must be my fault.
So I said, “Isn’t it awful about
the Rosenbergs?”
The Rosenbergs were to be
electrocuted late that night.
“Yes!” Hilda said, and at last I
felt I had touched a human string in the cat’s cradle of her heart. It was only
as the two of us waited for the others in the tomblike morning gloom of the
conference room that Hilda amplified that Yes of hers.
“It’s awful such people should
be alive.”
She yawned then, and her pale
orange mouth opened on a large darkness. Fascinated, I stared at the blind cave
behind her face until the two lips met and moved and the dybbuk spoke out of
its hiding place, “I’m so glad they’re going to die.”
“Come
on, give us a smile.”
I sat on the pink velvet
loveseat in Jay Cee’s office, holding a paper rose and facing the magazine
photographer. I was the last of the twelve to have my picture taken. I had
tried concealing myself in the powder room, but it didn’t work. Betsy had spied
my feet under the doors.
I didn’t want my picture taken
because I was going to cry. I didn’t know why I was going to cry, but I knew
that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out
of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of my throat and I’d cry for a week. I
could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is
unsteady and too full.
This was the last round of
photographs before the magazine went to press and we returned to Tulsa or
Biloxi or Teaneck or Coos Bay or wherever we’ve come from, and we were supposed
to be photographed with props to show what we wanted to be.
Betsy held an ear of corn to
show she wanted to be a farmer’s wife, and Hilda held the bald, faceless head
of a hatmaker’s dummy to show she wanted to design hats, and Doreen held a
gold-embroidered sari to show she wanted to be a social worker in India (she
didn’t really, she told me, she only wanted to get her hands on a sari).
When they asked me what I wanted
to be I said I didn’t know.
“Oh, sure you know,” the
photographer said.
“She wants,” said Jay Cee
wittily, “to be everything.”
I said I wanted to be a poet.
Then they scouted about for
something for me to hold.
Jay Cee suggested a book of
poems, but the photographer said no, that was too obvious. It should be
something that showed what inspired the poems. Finally Jay Cee unclipped the
single, long-stemmed paper rose from her latest hat.
The photographer fiddled with
his hot white lights. “Show us how happy it makes you to write a poem.”
I stared through the frieze of
rubber-plant leaves in Jay Cee’s window to the blue sky beyond. A few stagey
cloud puffs were traveling from right to left. I fixed my eyes on the largest
cloud, as if, when it passed out of sight, I might have the good luck to pass
with it.
I felt it was very important to
keep the line of my mouth level.
“Give us a smile.”
At last, obediently, like the
mouth of a ventriloquist’s dummy, my own mouth started to quirk up.
“Hey,” the photographer
protested, with sudden foreboding, “you look like you’re going to cry.”
I couldn’t stop.
I buried my face in the pink
velvet facade of Jay Cee’s loveseat and with immense relief the salt tears and
miserable noises that had been prowling around in me all morning burst out into
the room.
When I lifted my head, the
photographer had vanished. Jay Cee had vanished as well. I felt limp and
betrayed, like the skin shed by a terrible animal. It was a relief to be free
of the animal, but it seemed to have taken my spirit with it, and everything
else it could lay its paws on.
I fumbled in my pocketbook for
the gilt compact with the mascara and the mascara brush and the eyeshadow and
the three lipsticks and the side mirror. The face that peered back at me seemed
to be peering from the grating of a prison cell after a prolonged beating. It
looked bruised and puffy and all the wrong colors. It was a face that needed
soap and water and Christian tolerance.
I started to paint it with small
heart.
Jay Cee breezed back after a
decent interval with an armful of manuscripts.
“These’ll amuse you,” she said.
“Have a good read.”
Every morning a snowy avalanche
of manuscripts swelled the dust-gray piles in the office of the Fiction Editor.
Secretly, in studies and attics and schoolrooms all over America, people must
be writing. Say someone or other finished a manuscript every minute; in five
minutes that would be five manuscripts stacked on the Fiction Editor’s desk.
Within the hour there would be sixty, crowding each other onto the floor. And
in a year...
I smiled, seeing a pristine,
imaginary manuscript floating in mid-air, with Esther Greenwood typed in the
upper-right-hand corner. After my month on the magazine I’d applied for a
summer school course with a famous writer where you sent in the manuscript of a
story and he read it and said whether you were good enough to be admitted into
his class.
Of course, it was a very small
class, and I had sent in my story a long time ago and hadn’t heard from the
writer yet, but I was sure I’d find the letter of acceptance waiting on the
mail table at home.
I decided I’d surprise Jay Cee
and send in a couple of the stories I wrote in this class under a pseudonym.
Then one day the Fiction Editor would come in to Jay Cee personally and plop
the stories down on her desk and say, “Here’s something a cut above the usual,”
and Jay Cee would agree and accept them and ask the author to lunch and it
would be me.
“Honestly,”
Doreen said, “this one’ll be different.”
“Tell me about him,” I said
stonily.
“He’s from Peru.”
“They’re squat,” I said.
“They’re ugly as Aztecs.”
“No, no, no, sweetie, I’ve
already met him.”
We were sitting on my bed in a
mess of dirty cotton dresses and laddered nylons and gray underwear, and for
ten minutes Doreen had been trying to persuade me to go to a country club dance
with a friend of somebody Lenny knew which, she insisted, was a very different
thing from a friend of Lenny’s, but as I was catching the eight o’clock train
home the next morning I felt I should make some attempt to pack.
I also had a dim idea that if I
walked the streets of New York by myself all night something of the city’s
mystery and magnificence might rub off on to me at last.
But I gave it up.
It was becoming more and more
difficult for me to decide to do anything in those last days. And when I
eventually
did
decide to do something, such as packing a suitcase, I
only dragged all my grubby, expensive clothes out of the bureau and the closet
and spread them on the chairs and the bed and the floor and then sat and stared
at them, utterly perplexed. They seemed to have a separate, mulish identity of
their own that refused to be washed and folded and stowed.
“It’s these clothes,” I told
Doreen. “I just can’t face these clothes when I come back.”
“That’s easy.”
And in her beautiful, one-track
way, Doreen started to snatch up slips and stockings and the elaborate
strapless bra, full of steel springs--a free gift from the Primrose Corset
Company, which rd never had the courage to wear--and finally, one by one, the
sad array of queerly cut forty-dollar dresses....
“Hey, leave that one out. I’m
wearing it.”
Doreen extricated a black scrap
from her bundle and dropped it in my lap. Then, snowballing the rest of the
clothes into one soft, conglomerate mass, she stuffed them out of sight under
the bed.
Doreen
knocked on the green door with the gold knob.
Scuffling and a man’s laugh, cut
short, sounded from inside. Then a tall boy in shirtsleeves and a blond crew
cut inched the door open and peered out.
“Baby!” he roared.
Doreen disappeared in his arms.
I thought it must be the person Lenny knew.
I stood quietly in the doorway
in my black sheath and my black stole with the fringe, yellower than ever, but
expecting less. “I am an observer,” I told myself, as I watched Doreen being
handed into the room by the blond boy to another man, who was also tall, but
dark, with slightly longer hair. This man was wearing an immaculate white suit,
a pale blue shirt and a yellow satin tie with a bright stickpin.