The Bell Jar (25 page)

               
But each time I would get the
cord so tight I could feel a rushing in my ears and a flush of blood in my face,
my hands would weaken and let go, and I would be all right again.

               
Then I saw that my body had all
sorts of little tricks, such as making my hands go limp at the crucial second,
which would save it, time and again, whereas if I had the whole say, I would be
dead in a flash.

               
I would simply have to ambush it
with whatever sense I had left, or it would trap me in its stupid cage for
fifty years without any sense at all. And when people found out my mind had
gone, as they would have to, sooner or later, in spite of my mother’s guarded
tongue, they would persuade her to put me into an asylum where I could be
cured.

               
Only my case was incurable.

               
I had bought a few paperbacks on
abnormal psychology at the drugstore and compared my symptoms with the symptoms
in the books, and sure enough, my symptoms tallied with the most hopeless
cases.

               
The only thing I could read,
besides the scandal sheets, were those abnormal-psychology books. It was as if
some slim opening had been left, so I could learn all I needed to know about my
case to end it in the proper way.

               
I wondered, after the hanging
fiasco, if I shouldn’t just give it up and turn myself over to the doctors, and
then I remembered Doctor Gordon and his private shock machine. Once I was
locked up they could use that on me all the time.

               
And I thought of how my mother
and brother and friends would visit me, day after day, hoping I would be
better. Then their visits would slacken off, and they would give up hope. They
would grow old. They would forget me.

               
They would be poor, too.

               
They would want me to have the
best of care at first, so they would sink all their money in a private hospital
like Doctor Gordon’s. Finally, when the money was used up, I would be moved to
a state hospital, with hundreds of people like me, in a big cage in the
basement.

               
The more hopeless you were, the
further away they hid you.

Cal
had turned around and was swimming in.

               
As I watched, he dragged himself
slowly out of the neck-deep sea. Against the khaki-colored sand and the green
shore wavelets, his body was bisected for a moment, like a white worm. Then it
crawled completely out of the green and onto the khaki and lost itself among
dozens and dozens of other worms that were wriggling or just lolling about
between the sea and the sky.

               
I paddled my hands in the water
and kicked my feet. The egg-shaped rock didn’t seem to be any nearer than it
had been when Cal and I had looked at it from the shore.

               
Then I saw it would be pointless
to swim as far as the rock, because my body would take that excuse to climb out
and lie in the sun, gathering strength to swim back.

               
The only thing to do was to
drown myself then and there.

               
So I stopped.

               
I brought my hands to my breast,
ducked my head, and dived, using my hands to push the water aside. The water
pressed in on my eardrums and on my heart. I fanned myself down, but before I
knew where I was, the water had spat me up into the SWl, the world was
sparkling all about me like blue and green and yellow semi-precious stones.

               
I dashed the water from my eyes.

               
I was panting, as after a
strenuous exertion, but floating, without effort.

               
I dived, and dived again, and
each time popped up like a cork.

               
The gray rock mocked me, bobbing
on the water easy as a lifebuoy.

               
I knew when I was beaten.

               
I turned back.

The
flowers nodded like bright, knowledgeable children as I trundled them down the
hall.

               
I felt silly in my sage-green
volunteer’s uniform, and superfluous, unlike the white-uniformed doctors and
nurses, or even the brown-uniformed scrubwomen with their mops and their
buckets of grimy water, who passed me without a word.

               
If I had been getting paid, no
matter how little, I could at least count this a proper job, but all I got for
a morning of pushing round magazines and candy and flowers was a free lunch.

               
My mother said the cure for
thinking too much about yourself was helping somebody who was worse off than
you, so Teresa had arranged for me to sign on as a volunteer at our local
hospital. It was difficult to be a volunteer at this hospital, because that’s
what all the Junior League women wanted to do, but luckily for me, a lot of
them were away on vacation.

               
I had hoped they would send me
to a ward with some really gruesome cases, who would see through my numb, dumb
face to how I meant well, and be grateful. But the head of the volunteers, a
society lady at our church, took one look at me and said, “You’re on
maternity.”

               
So I rode the elevator up three
flights to the maternity ward and reported to the head nurse. She gave me the
trolley of flowers. I was supposed to put the right vases at the right beds in
the right rooms.

               
But before I came to the door of
the first room I noticed that a lot of the flowers were droopy and brown at the
edges. I thought it would be discouraging for a woman who’d just had a baby to
see somebody plonk down a big bouquet of dead flowers in front of her, so I
steered the trolley to a washbasin in an alcove in the hall and began to pick
out all the flowers that were dead.

               
Then I picked out all those that
were dying.

               
There was no wastebasket in
sight, so I crumbled the flowers up and laid them in the deep white basin. The
basin felt cold as a tomb. I smiled. This must be how they laid the bodies away
in the hospital morgue. My gesture, in its small way, echoed the larger gesture
of the doctors and nurses.

               
I swung the door of the first
room open and walked in, dragging my trolley. A couple of nurses jumped up, and
I had a confused impression of shelves and medicine cabinets.

               
“What do you want?” one of the
nurses demanded sternly. I couldn’t tell one from the other, they all looked
just alike.

               
“I’m taking the flowers around.”

               
The nurse who had spoken put a
hand on my shoulder and led me out of the room, maneuvering the trolley with
her free, expert hand. She flung open the swinging doors of the room next to
that one and bowed me in. Then she disappeared.

               
I could hear giggles in the
distance till a door shut and cut them off.

               
There were six beds in the room,
and each bed had a woman in it. The women were all sitting up and knitting or
riffling through magazines or putting their hair in pin curls and chattering
like parrots in a parrot house.

               
I had thought they would be
sleeping, or lying quiet and pale, so I could tiptoe round without any trouble
and match the bed numbers to the numbers inked on adhesive tape on the vases,
but before I had a chance to get my bearings, a bright, jazzy blonde with a
sharp, triangular face beckoned to me.

               
I approached her, leaving the
trolley in the middle of the floor, but then she made an impatient gesture, and
I saw she wanted me to bring the trolley too.

               
I wheeled the trolley over to
her bedside with a helpful smile.

               
“Hey, where’s my larkspur?” A
large, flabby lady from across the ward raked me with an eagle eye.

               
The sharp-faced blonde bent over
the trolley. “Here are my yellow roses,” she said, “but they’re all mixed up
with some lousy iris.”

               
Other voices joined the voices
of the first two women. They sounded cross and loud and full of complaint.

               
I was opening my mouth to
explain that I had thrown a bunch of dead larkspur in the sink, and that some
of the vases I had weeded out looked skimpy, there were so few flowers left, so
I had joined a few of the bouquets together to fill them out, when the swinging
door flew open and a nurse stalked in to see what the commotion was.

               
“Listen, nurse, I had this big
bunch of larkspur Larry brought last night.”

               
“She’s loused up my yellow
roses.”

               
Unbuttoning the green uniform as
I ran, I stuffed it, in passing, into the washbasin with the rubbish of dead flowers.
Then I took the deserted side steps down to the street two at a time, without
meeting another soul.

“Which
way is the graveyard?”

               
The Italian in the black leather
jacket stopped and pointed down an alley behind the white Methodist church. I
remembered the Methodist church. I had been a Methodist for the first nine
years of my life, before my father died and we moved and turned Unitarian.

               
My mother had been a Catholic
before she was a Methodist. My grandmother and my grandfather and my Aunt Libby
were all still Catholics. My Aunt Libby had broken away from the Catholic
Church at the same time my mother did, but then she’d fallen in love with an
Italian Catholic, so she’d gone back again.

               
Lately I had considered going
into the Catholic Church myself. I knew that Catholics thought killing yourself
was an awful sin. But perhaps, if this was so, they might have a good way to
persuade me out of it.

               
Of course, I didn’t believe in
life after death or the virgin birth or the Inquisition or the infallibility of
that little monkey-faced Pope or anything, but I didn’t have to let the priest
see this, I could just concentrate on my sin, and he would help me repent.

               
The only trouble was, Church,
even the Catholic Church, didn’t take up the whole of your life. No matter how
much you knelt and prayed, you still had to eat three meals a day and have a
job and live in the world.

               
I thought I might see how long
you had to be a Catholic before you became a nun, so I asked my mother,
thinking she’d know the best way to go about it.

               
My mother had laughed at me. “Do
you think they’ll take somebody like you, right off the bat? Why you’ve got to
know all these catechisms and credos and believe in them, lock, stock and
barrel. A girl with your sense!”

               
Still, I imagined myself going
to some Boston priest--it would have to be Boston, because I didn’t want any
priest in my home town to know I’d thought of killing myself. Priests were
terrible gossips.

               
I would be in black, with my
dead white face, and I would throw myself at this priest’s feet and say, “0
Father, help me.”

               
But that was before people had
begun to look at me in a funny way, like those nurses in the hospital.

               
I was pretty sure the Catholics
wouldn’t take in any crazy nuns. My Aunt Libby’s husband had made a joke once,
about a nun that a nunnery sent to Teresa for a checkup. This nun kept hearing
harp notes in her ears and a voice saying over and over, “Alleluia!” Only she
wasn’t sure, on being closely questioned, whether the voice was saying Alleluia
or Arizona. The nun had been born in Arizona. I think she ended up in some
asylum.

               
I tugged my black veil down to
my chin and strode in through the wrought-iron gates. I thought it odd that in
all the time my father had been buried in this graveyard, none of us had ever
visited him. My mother hadn’t let us come to his funeral because we were only
children then, and he had died in the hospital, so the graveyard and even his
death had always seemed unreal to me.

               
I had a great yearning, lately,
to pay my father back for all the years of neglect, and start tending his
grave. I had always been my father’s favorite, and it seemed fitting I should
take on a mourning my mother had never bothered with.