The Bell Jar (18 page)
A white flake floated out into
the night, and began its slow descent. I wondered on what street or rooftop it
would come to rest.
I tugged at the bundle again.
The wind made an effort, but
failed, and a batlike shadow sank toward the roof garden of the penthouse
opposite.
Piece by piece, I fed my
wardrobe to the night wind, and flutteringly, like a loved one’s ashes, the
gray scraps were ferried off, to settle here, there, exactly where I would
never know, in the dark heart of New York.
The
face in the mirror looked like a sick Indian.
I dropped the compact into my pocketbook and stared
out of the train window. Like a colossal junkyard, the swamps and back lots of
Connecticut flashed past, one broken-down fragment bearing no relation to
another.
What a hotchpotch the world was!
I glanced down at my unfamiliar
skirt and blouse.
The skirt was a green dirndl
with tiny black, white and electric-blue shapes swarming across it, and it
stuck out like a lampshade. Instead of sleeves, the white eyelet blouse had
frills at the shoulder, floppy as the wings of a new angel.
I’d forgotten to save any day
clothes from the ones I let fly over New York, so Betsy had traded me a blouse
and skirt for my bathrobe with the cornflowers on it.
A wan reflection of myself,
white wings, brown ponytail and all, ghosted over the landscape.
“Pollyanna Cowgirl,” I said out
loud.
A woman in the seat opposite
looked up from her magazine.
I hadn’t, at the last moment,
felt like washing off the two diagonal lines of dried blood that marked my cheeks.
They seemed touching, and rather spectacular, and I thought I would carry them
around with me, like the relic of a dead lover, till they wore off of their own
accord.
Of course, if I smiled or moved
my face much, the blood would flake away in no time, so I kept my face
immobile, and when I had to speak I spoke through my teeth, without disturbing
my lips.
I didn’t really see why people
should look at me.
Plenty of people looked queerer
than I did.
My gray suitcase rode on the
rack over my head, empty except for
The Thirty Best Short Stories of the
Year;
a white plastic sunglasses case and two dozen avocado pears, a
parting present from Doreen.
The pears were unripe, so they
would keep well, and whenever I lifted my suitcase up or down or simply carried
it along, they cannoned from one end to the other with a special little thunder
of their own.
“Root Wan Twenny Ate!” the
conductor bawled.
The domesticated wilderness of
pine, maple and oak rolled to a halt and stuck in the frame of the train window
like a bad picture. My suitcase grumbled and ‘bumped as I negotiated the long
aisle.
I stepped from the
air-conditioned compartment onto the station platform, and the motherly breath
of the suburbs enfolded me. It smelt of lawn sprinklers and station wagons and
tennis rackets and dogs and babies.
A summer calm laid its soothing
hand over everything, like death.
My mother was waiting by the
glove-gray Chevrolet. “Why lovey, what’s happened to your face?”
“Cut myself,” I said briefly,
and crawled into the back seat after my suitcase. I didn’t want her staring at
me the whole way home.
The upholstery felt slippery and
clean.
My mother climbed behind the
wheel and tossed a few letters into my lap, then turned her back.
The car purred into life.
“I think I should tell you right
away,” she said, and I could see bad news in the set of her neck, “you didn’t
make that writing course.”
The air punched out of my
stomach.
All through June the writing
course had stretched before me like a bright, safe bridge over the dull gulf of
the summer. Now I saw it totter and dissolve, and a body in a white blouse and
green skirt plummet into the gap.
Then my mouth shaped itself
sourly.
I had expected it.
I slunk down on the middle of my
spine, my nose level with the rim of the window, and watched the houses of
outer Boston glide by. As the houses grew more familiar, I slunk still lower.
I felt it was very important not
to be recognized.
The gray, padded car roof closed
over my head like the roof of a prison van, and the white, spilling, identical
clapboard houses with their interstices of well-groomed green proceeded past,
one bar after another in a large but escape-proof cage.
I had never spent a summer in
the suburbs before.
The
soprano screak of carriage wheels punished my ear. Sun, seeping through the
blinds, filled the bedroom with a sulphurous light. I didn’t know how long I
had slept, but I felt one big twitch of exhaustion.
The twin bed next to mine was
empty and unmade.
At seven I had heard my mother
get up, slip into her clothes and tiptoe out of the room. Then the buzz of the
orange squeezer sounded from downstairs, and the smell of coffee and bacon
filtered under my door. Then the sink water ran from the tap and dishes clinked
as my mother dried them and put them back in the cupboard.
Then the front door opened and
shut. Then the car door opened and shut, and the motor went broom-broom and,
edging off with a crunch of gravel, faded into the distance.
My mother was teaching shorthand
and typing to a lot of city college girls and wouldn’t be home till the middle
of the afternoon.
The carriage wheels screaked
past again. Somebody seemed to be wheeling a baby back and forth under my
window.
I slipped out of bed and onto
the rug, and quietly, on my hands and knees, crawled over to see who it was.
Ours was a small, white
clapboard house set in the middle of a small green lawn on the corner of two
peaceful suburban streets, but in spite of the little maple trees planted at
intervals around our property, anybody passing along the sidewalk could glance
up at the second story windows and see just what was going on.
This was brought home to me by
our next-door neighbor, a spiteful woman named Mrs. Ockenden.
Mrs. Ockenden was a retired
nurse who had just married her third husband--the other two died in curious
circumstances--and she spent an inordinate amount of time peering from behind
the starched white curtains of her windows.
She had called my mother up
twice about me--once to report that I had been sitting in front of the house
for an hour under the streetlight and kissing somebody in a blue Plymouth, and
once to say that I had better pull the blinds down in my room, because she had
seen me half-naked getting ready for bed one night when she happened to be out
walking her Scotch terrier.
With great care, I raised my
eyes to the level of the windowsill.
A woman not five feet tall, with
a grotesque, protruding stomach, was wheeling an old black baby carriage down
the street. Two or three small children of various sizes, all pale, with smudgy
faces and bare smudgy knees, wobbled along in the shadow of her skirts.
A serene, almost religious smile
lit up the woman’s face. Her head tilted happily back, like a sparrow egg
perched on a duck egg, she smiled into the sun.
I knew the woman well.
It was Dodo Conway.
Dodo Conway was a Catholic who
had gone to Barnard and then married an architect who had gone to Columbia and
was also a Catholic. They had a big, rambling house up the street from us, set
behind a morbid façade of pine trees, and surrounded by scooters, tricycles,
doll carriages, toy fire trucks, baseball bats, badminton nets, croquet
wickets, hamster cages and cocker spaniel puppies--the whole sprawling
paraphernalia of suburban childhood.
Dodo interested me in spite of
myself. Her house was unlike all the others in our neighborhood in its size (it
was much bigger) and its color (the second story was constructed of dark brown
clapboard and the first of gray Stucco, studded with gray and purple golfball-shaped
stones), and the pine trees completely screened it from view, which was
considered unsociable in our community of adjoining lawns and friendly,
waist-high hedges.
Dodo raised her six
children--and would no doubt raise her seventh--on Rice Krispies,
peanut-butter-and-marshmallow sandwiches, vanilla ice cream and gallon upon
gallon of Hoods milk. She got a special discount from the local milkman.
Everybody loved Dodo, although
the swelling size of her family was the talk of the neighborhood. The older
people around, like my mother, had two children, and the younger, more
prosperous ones had four, but nobody but Dodo was on the verge of a seventh.
Even six was considered excessive, but then, everybody said, of course Dodo was
a Catholic.
I watched Dodo wheel the
youngest Conway up and down. She seemed to be doing it for my benefit.
Children made me sick.
A floorboard creaked, and I
ducked down again, just as Dodo Conway’s face, by instinct, or some gift of
supernatural hearing, turned on the little pivot of its neck.
I felt her gaze pierce through
the white clapboard and the pink wallpaper roses and uncover me, crouching
there behind the silver pickets of the radiator.
I crawled back into bed and
pulled the sheet over my head. But even that didn’t shut out the light, so I
buried my head under the darkness of the pillow and pretended it was night. I
couldn’t see the point of getting up.
I had nothing to look forward
to.
After a while I heard the
telephone ringing in the downstairs hall. I stuffed the pillow into my ears and
gave myself five minutes. Then I lifted my head from its bolt hole. The ringing
had stopped.
Almost at once it started up
again.
Cursing whatever friend,
relative or stranger had sniffed out my homecoming, I padded barefoot
downstairs. The black instrument on the hall table trilled its hysterical note
over and over, like a nervous bird.
I picked up the receiver.
“Hullo,” I said, in a low,
disguised voice.
“Hullo, Esther, what’s the
matter, have you got laryngitis?”
It was my old friend Jody,
calling from Cambridge.
Jody was working at the Coop
that summer and taking a lunchtime course in sociology. She and two other girls
from my college had rented a big apartment from four Harvard law students, and
I’d been planning to move in with them when my writing course began.
Jody wanted to know when they
could expect me.
“I’m not coming,” I said. “I
didn’t make the course.”
There was a small pause.
“He’s an ass,” Jody said then.
“He doesn’t know a good thing when he sees it.”