The Bell Jar (20 page)
There were lots of requirements,
and I didn’t have half of them. One of the requirements was a course in the
eighteenth century. I hated the very idea of the eighteenth century, with all
those smug men writing tight little couplets and being so dead keen on reason.
So I’d skipped it. They let you do that in honors, you were much freer. I had
been so free I’d spent most of my time on Dylan Thomas.
A friend of mine, also in
honors, had managed never to read a word of Shakespeare; but she was a real
expert on the
Four Quartets.
I saw how impossible and embarrassing it would be for
me to try to switch from my free program into the stricter one. So I looked up
the requirements for English majors at the city college where my mother taught.
They were even worse.
You had to know Old English and
the History of the English Language and a representative selection of all that
had been written from Beowulf to the present day.
This surprised me. I had always
looked down on my mother’s college, as it was coed, and filled with people who
couldn’t get scholarships to the big eastern colleges.
Now I saw that the stupidest
person at my mother’s college knew more than I did. I saw they wouldn’t even
let me in through the door, let alone give me a large scholarship like the one
I had at my own college.
I thought I’d better go to work
for a year and think things over. Maybe I could study the eighteenth century in
secret.
But I didn’t know shorthand, so
what could I do?
I could be a waitress or a
typist.
But I couldn’t stand the idea of
being either one.
“You say you want more sleeping pills ?”
“Yes.”
“But the ones I gave you last
week are very strong.”
“They don’t work any more.”
Teresa’s large, dark eyes
regarded me thoughtfully. I could hear the voices of her three children in the
garden under the consulting-room window. My Aunt Libby had married an Italian,
and Teresa was my aunt’s sister-in-law and our family doctor.
I liked Teresa. She had a
gentle, intuitive touch.
I thought it must be because she
was Italian. There was a little pause.
“What seems to be the matter?”
Teresa said then.
“I can’t sleep. I can’t read.” I
tried to speak in a cool, calm way, but the zombie rose up in my throat and
choked me off. I turned my hands palm up.
“I think, “ Teresa tore off a
white slip from her prescription pad and wrote down a name and address, “you’d
better see another doctor I know. He’ll be able to help you more than I can.”
I peered at the writing, but I
couldn’t read it.
“Doctor Gordon,” Teresa said.
“He’s a psychiatrist.”
Doctor
Gordon’s waiting room was hushed and beige.
The walls were beige, and the
carpets were beige, and the upholstered chairs and sofas were beige. There were
no mirrors or pictures, only certificates from different medical schools, with
Doctor Gordon’s name in Latin, hung about the walls. Pale green loopy ferns and
spiked leaves of a much darker green filled the ceramic pots on the end table
and the coffee table and the magazine table.
At first I wondered why the room felt so safe. Then I
realized it was because there were no windows.
The air-conditioning made me
shiver.
I was still wearing Betsy’s
white blouse and dirndl skirt. They drooped a bit now, as I hadn’t washed them
in my three weeks at home. The sweaty cotton gave off a sour but friendly
smell.
I hadn’t washed my hair for
three weeks, either.
I hadn’t slept for seven nights.
My mother told me I must have
slept, it was impossible not to sleep in all that time, but if I slept, it was
with my eyes wide open, for I had followed the green, luminous course of the
second hand and the minute hand and the hour hand of the bedside clock through
their circles and semicircles, every night for seven nights, without missing a
second, or a minute, or an hour.
The reason I hadn’t washed my
clothes or my hair was because it seemed so silly.
I saw the days of the year
stretching ahead like a series of bright, white boxes, and separating one box
from another was sleep, like a black shade. Only for me, the long perspective
of shades that set off one box from the next had suddenly snapped up, and I
could see day after day after day glaring ahead of me like a white, broad,
infinitely desolate avenue.
It seemed silly to wash one day
when I would only have to wash again the next.
It made me tired just to think
of it.
I wanted to do everything once
and for all and be through with it.
Doctor
Gordon twiddled a silver pencil.
“Your mother tells me you are
upset.”
I curled in the cavernous
leather chair and faced Doctor Gordon across an acre of highly polished desk.
Doctor Gordon waited. He tapped
his pencil--tap, tap, tap--across the neat green field of his blotter.
His eyelashes were so long and
thick they looked artificial. Black plastic reeds fringing two green, glacial
pools.
Doctor Gordon’s features were so
perfect he was almost pretty.
I hated him the minute I walked
in through the door.
I had imagined a kind, ugly,
intuitive man looking up and saying “Ah!” in an encouraging way, as if he could
see something I couldn’t, and then I would find words to tell him how I was so
scared, as if I were being stuffed farther and farther into a black, airless
sack with no way out.
Then he would lean back in his
chair and match the tips of his fingers together in a little steeple and tell
me why I couldn’t sleep and why I couldn’t read and why I couldn’t eat and why
everything people did seemed so silly, because they only died in the end.
And then, I thought, he would
help me, step by step, to be myself again.
But Doctor Gordon wasn’t like
that at all. He was young and good-looking, and I could see right away he was
conceited.
Doctor Gordon had a photograph
on his desk, in a silver frame, that half faced him and half faced my leather
chair. It was a family photograph, and it showed a beautiful dark-haired woman,
who could have been Doctor Gordon’s sister, smiling out over the heads of two
blond children.
I think one child was a boy and
one was a girl, but it may have been that both children were boys or that both
were girls, it is hard to tell when children are so small. I think there was
also a dog in the picture, toward the bottom--a kind of airedale or a golden
retriever--but it may have only been the pattern in the woman’s skirt.
For some reason the photograph
made me furious.
I didn’t see why it should be
turned half toward me unless Doctor Gordon was trying to show me right away
that he was married to some glamorous woman and I’d better not get any funny
ideas.
Then I thought, how could this
Doctor Gordon help me anyway, with a beautiful wife and beautiful children and
a beautiful dog haloing him like the angels on a Christmas card?
“Suppose you try and tell me
what you think is wrong.”
I turned the words over
suspiciously, like round, sea-polished pebbles that might suddenly put out a
claw and change into something else.
What did I
think
was wrong?
That made it sound as if nothing
was
really
wrong, I only
thought
it was wrong.
In a dull, fiat voice--to show I
was not beguiled by his good looks or his family photograph--I told Doctor
Gordon about not sleeping and not eating and not reading. I didn’t tell him
about the handwriting, which bothered me most of all.
That morning I had tried to
write a letter to Doreen, down in West Virginia, asking whether I could come
and live with her and maybe get a job at her college waiting on table or something.
But when I took up my pen, my
hand made big, jerky letters like those of a child, and the lines sloped down
the page from left to right almost diagonally, as if they were loops of string
lying on the paper, and someone had come along and blown them askew.
I knew I couldn’t send a letter
like that, so I tore it up in little pieces and put them in my pocketbook, next
to my all-purpose compact, in case the psychiatrist asked to see them.
But of course Doctor Gordon
didn’t ask to see them, as I hadn’t mentioned them, and I began to feel pleased
at my cleverness. I thought I only need tell him what I wanted to, and that I
could control the picture he had of me by hiding this and revealing that, all
the while he thought he was so smart.
The whole time I was talking,
Doctor Gordon bent his head as if he were praying, and the only noise apart
from the dull, flat voice was the tap, tap, tap of Doctor Gordon’s pencil at
the same point on the green blotter, like a stalled walking stick.
When I had finished, Doctor
Gordon lifted his head.
“Where did you say you went to
college?”
Baffled, I told him. I didn’t
see where college fitted in.
“Ah!” Doctor Gordon leaned back
in his chair, staring into the air over my shoulder with a reminiscent smile.
I thought he was going to tell
me his diagnosis, and that perhaps I had judged him too hastily and too
unkindly. But he only said, “I remember your college well. I was up there,
during the war. They had a WAC station, didn’t they? Or was it WAVES?”
I said I didn’t know.
“Yes, a WAC station, I remember
now. I was doctor for the lot, before I was sent overseas. My, they were a
pretty bunch of girls.”
Doctor Gordon laughed.
Then, in one smooth move, he
rose to his feet and strolled toward me round the corner of his desk. I wasn’t
sure what he meant to do, so I stood up as well.
Doctor Gordon reached for the
hand that hung at my right side and shook it.
“See you next week, then.”
The full, bosomy elms made a
tunnel of shade over the yellow and red brick fronts along. Commonwealth
Avenue, and a trolley car was threading itself toward Boston down its slim,
silver track. I waited for the trolley to pass, then crossed to the gray
Chevrolet at the opposite curb.
I could see my mother’s face,
anxious and sallow as a slice of lemon, peering up at me through the
windshield.
“Well, what did he say?”
I pulled the car door shut. It
didn’t catch. I pushed it out and drew it in again with a dull slam.
“He said he’ll see me next
week.”