The Bell Jar (27 page)
“Who is it?”
“Somebody you know.”
“What’s his name.”
“George Bakewell.”
“I don’t know any George
Bakewell.”
“He says he knows you.”
Then the nurse went out, and a
very familiar boy came in and said, “Mind if I sit on the edge of your bed?”
He was wearing a white coat, and
I could see a stethoscope poking out of his pocket. I thought it must be
somebody I knew dressed up as a doctor.
I had meant to cover my legs if
anybody came in, but now I saw it was too late, so I let them stick out, just
as they were, disgusting and ugly.
“That’s me,” I thought. “That’s
what I am.”
“You remember me, don’t you,
Esther?”
I squinted at the boy’s face
through the crack of my good eye. The other eye hadn’t opened yet, but the eye
doctor said it would be all right in a few days.
The boy looked at me as if I
were some exciting new zoo animal and he was about to burst out laughing.
“You remember me, don’t you,
Esther?” He spoke slowly, the way one speaks to a dull child. “I’m George
Bakewell. I go to your church. You dated my roommate once at Amherst.”
I thought I placed the boy’s
face then. It hovered dimly at the rim of memory--the sort of face to which I
would never bother to attach a name.
“What are you doing here?”
“I’m houseman at this hospital.”
How could this George Bakewell
have become a doctor so suddenly? I wondered. He didn’t really know me, either.
He just wanted to see what a girl who was crazy enough to kill herself looked
like.
I turned my face to the wall.
“Get out,” I said. “Get the hell
out and don’t come back.”
“I
want to see a mirror.”
The nurse hummed busily as she
opened one drawer after another, stuffing the new underclothes and blouses and
skirts and pajamas my mother had bought me into the black patent leather
overnight case.
“Why can’t I see a mirror?”
I had been dressed in a sheath,
striped gray and white, like mattress ticking, with a wide, shiny red belt, and
they had propped me up in an armchair.
“Why can’t I?”
“Because you better not.” The
nurse shut the lid of the overnight case with a little snap.
“Why?”
“Because you don’t look very
pretty.”
“Oh, just let me see.”
The nurse sighed and opened the
top bureau drawer. She took out a large mirror in a wooden frame that matched
the wood of the bureau and handed it to me.
At first I didn’t see what the
trouble was. It wasn’t a mirror at all, but a picture.
You couldn’t tell whether the
person in the picture was a man or a woman, because their hair was shaved off
and sprouted in bristly chicken-feather tufts all over their head. One side of
the person’s face was purple, and bulged out in a shapeless way, shading to
green along the edges, and then to a sallow yellow. The person’s mouth was pale
brown, with a rose-colored sore at either corner.
The most startling thing about
the face was its supernatural conglomeration of bright colors.
I smiled.
The mouth in the mirror cracked
into a grin.
A minute after the crash another
nurse ran in. She took one look at the broken mirror, and at me, standing over
the blind, white pieces, and hustled the young nurse out of the room.
“Didn’t I
tell
you,” I
could hear her say.
“But I only...”
“Didn’t I
tell
you!”
I listened with mild interest.
Anybody could drop a mirror. I didn’t see why they should get so stirred up.
The other, older nurse came back
into the room. She stood there, arms folded, staring hard at me.
“Seven years’ bad luck.”
“What?”
“I said,” the nurse raised her
voice, as if speaking to a deaf person,
“seven years’ bad luck.
“
The young nurse returned with a
dustpan and brush and began to sweep up the glittery splinters.
“That’s only a superstition,” I
said then.
“Huh!” The second nurse
addressed herself to the nurse on her hands and knees as if I wasn’t there. “At
you-know-where they’ll take care of
her!”
From
the back window of the ambulance I could see street after familiar street
funneling off into a summery green distance. My mother sat on one side of me,
and my brother on the other.
I had pretended I didn’t know
why they were moving me from the hospital in my home town to a city hospital,
to see what they would say.
“They want you to be in a
special ward,” my mother said. “They don’t have that sort of ward at our
hospital.”
“I liked it where I was.”
My mother’s mouth tightened.
“You should have behaved better, then.”
“What?”
“You shouldn’t have broken that
mirror. Then maybe they’d have let you stay.”
But of course I knew the mirror
had nothing to do with it.
I
sat in bed with the covers up to my neck.
“Why can’t I get up? I’m not
sick.”
“Ward rounds,” the nurse said.
“You can get up after ward rounds.” She shoved the bed curtains back and
revealed a fat young Italian woman in the next bed.
The Italian woman had a mass of
tight black curls, starting at her forehead, that rose in a mountainous
pompadour and cascaded down her back. Whenever she moved, the huge arrangement
of hair moved with her, as if made of stiff black paper.
The woman looked at me and
giggled. “Why are you here?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “I’m here on
account of my French-Canadian mother-in-law.” She giggled again. “My husband
knows I can’t stand her, and still he said she could come and visit us, and
when she came, my tongue stuck out of my head, I couldn’t stop it. They ran me
into Emergency and then they put me up here,” she lowered her voice, “along
with the nuts.” Then she said, “What’s the matter with you?”
I turned her my full face, with
the bulging purple and green eye. “I tried to kill myself.”
The woman stared at me. Then,
hastily, she snatched up a movie magazine from her bed table and pretended to
be reading.
The swinging door opposite my
bed flew open, and a whole troop of young boys and girls in white coats came
in, with an older, gray-haired man. They were all smiling with bright,
artificial smiles. They grouped themselves at the foot of my bed.
“And how are you feeling this
morning, Miss Greenwood?”
I tried to decide which one of
them had spoken. I hate saying anything to a group of people. When I talk to a
group of people I always have to single out one and talk to him, and all the
while I am talking I feel the others are peering at me and taking unfair
advantage. I also hate people to ask cheerfully how you are when they know
you’re feeling like hell and expect you to say “Fine.”
“I feel lousy.”
“Lousy. Hmm,” somebody said, and
a boy ducked his head with a little smile. Somebody else scribbled something on
a clipboard. Then somebody pulled a straight, solemn face and said, “ And why
do you feel lousy?”
I thought some of the boys and
girls in that bright group might well be friends of Buddy Willard. They would
know I knew him, and they would be curious to see me, and afterward they would
gossip about me among themselves. I wanted to be where nobody I knew could ever
come.
“I can’t sleep...”
They interrupted me. “But the
nurse says you slept last night.” I looked around the crescent of fresh,
strange faces.
“I can’t read.” I raised my
voice. “I can’t eat.” It occurred to me I’d been eating ravenously ever since I
came to.
The people in the group had
turned from me and were murmuring in low voices to each other. Finally, the
gray-haired man stepped out.
“Thank you, Miss Greenwood. You
will be seen by one of the staff doctors presently.”
Then the group moved on to the
bed of the Italian woman.
“And how are you feeling today,
Mrs....” somebody said, and the name sounded long and full of I’s, like Mrs.
Tomolillo.
Mrs. Tomolillo giggled. “Oh, I’m
fine, doctor. I’m just fine.” Then she lowered her voice and whispered
something I couldn’t hear. One or two people in the group glanced in my
direction. Then somebody said, “ All right, Mrs. Tomolillo,” and somebody
stepped out and pulled the bed curtain between us like a white wall.
I
sat on one end of a wooden bench in the grassy square between the four brick
walls of the hospital. My mother, in her purple cartwheel dress, sat at the
other end. She had her head propped in her hand, index finger on her cheek and
thumb under her chin.
Mrs. Tomolillo was sitting with
some dark-haired laughing Italian on the next bench down. Every time my mother
moved, Mrs. Tomolillo imitated her. Now Mrs. Tomolillo was sitting with her
index finger on her cheek and her thumb under her chin, and her head tilted wistfully
to one side.
“Don’t move,” I told my mother
in a low voice. “That woman’s imitating you.”
My mother turned to glance
round, but quick as a wink, Mrs. Tomolillo dropped her fat white hands in her
lap and started talking vigorously to her friends.
“Why no, she’s not,” my mother
said. “She’s not even paying any attention to us.”
But the minute my mother turned
round to me again, Mrs. Tomolillo matched the tips of her fingers together the
way my mother had just done and cast a black, mocking look at me.
The lawn was white with doctors.
All the time my mother and I had
been sitting there, in the narrow cone of sun that shone down between the tall
brick walls, doctors had been coming up to me and introducing themselves. “I’m
Doctor Soandso, I’m Doctor Soandso.”
Some of them looked so young I
knew they couldn’t be proper doctors, and one of them had a queer name that
sounded just like Doctor Syphilis, so I began to look out for suspicious, fake
names, and sure enough, a dark-haired fellow who looked very like Doctor
Gordon, except that he had black skin where Doctor Gordon’s skin was white,
came up and said, “I’m Doctor Pancreas,” and shook my hand.
After introducing themselves,
the doctors all stood within listening distance, only I couldn’t tell my mother
that they were taking down every word we said without their hearing me, so I
leaned over and whispered into her ear.