The Bell Jar (28 page)
My mother drew back sharply.
“Oh, Esther, I wish you would
cooperate. They say you don’t cooperate. They say you won’t talk to any of the
doctors or make anything in Occupational Therapy....”
“I’ve got to get out of here,” I
told her meaningly. “Then I’d be all right. You got me in here,” I said. “You
get me out.”
I thought if only I could
persuade my mother to get me out of the hospital I could work on her
sympathies, like that boy with brain disease in the play, and convince her what
was the best thing to do.
To my surprise, my mother said,
“ All right, I’ll try to get you out--even if only to a better place. If I try
to get you out,” she laid a hand on my knee, “promise you’ll be good?”
I spun round and glared straight
at Doctor Syphilis, who stood at my elbow taking notes on a tiny, almost
invisible pad. “I promise,” I said in a loud, conspicuous voice.
The
Negro wheeled the food cart into the patients’ dining room. The Psychiatric
Ward at the hospital was very small--just two corridors in an L-shape, lined
with rooms, and an alcove of beds behind the OT shop, where I was, and a little
area with a table and a few seats by a window in the corner of the L, which was
our lounge and dining room.
Usually it was a shrunken old
white man that brought our food, but today it was a Negro. The Negro was with a
woman in blue stiletto heels, and she was telling him what to do. The Negro
kept grinning and chuckling in a silly way.
Then he carried a tray over to
our table with three lidded tin tureens on it, and started banging the tureens
down. The woman left the room, locking the door behind her. All the time the
Negro was banging down the tureens and then the dinted silver and the thick,
white china plates, he gawped at us with big, rolling eyes.
I could tell we were his first
crazy people.
Nobody at the table made a move
to take the lids off the tin tureens, and the nurse stood back to see if any of
us would take the lids off before she came to do it. Usually Mrs. Tomolillo had
taken the lids off and dished out everybody’s food like a little mother, but
then they sent her home, and nobody seemed to want to take her place.
I was starving, so I lifted the
lid off the first bowl.
“That’s very nice of you,
Esther,” the nurse said pleasantly. “Would you like to take some beans and pass
them round to the others?”
I dished myself out a helping of
green string beans and turned to pass the tureen to the enormous red-headed
woman at my right. This was the first time the red-headed woman had been
allowed up to the table. I had seen her once, at the very end of the L-shaped
corridor, standing in front of an open door with bars on the square, inset
windows.
She had been yelling and
laughing in a rude way and slapping her thighs at the passing doctors, and the
white-jacketed attendant who took care of the people in that end of the ward
was leaning against the hall radiator, laughing himself sick.
The red-headed woman snatched
the tureen from me and upended it on her plate. Beans mountained up in front of
her and scattered over onto her lap and onto the floor like stiff, green
straws.
“Oh, Mrs. Mole!” the nurse said
in a sad voice. “I think you better eat in your room today.”
And she returned most of the
beans to the tureen and gave it to the person next to Mrs. Mole and led Mrs.
Mole off. All the way down the hall to her room, Mrs. Mole kept turning round
and making leering faces at us, and ugly, oinking noises.
The Negro had come back and was
starting to collect the empty plates of people who hadn’t dished out any beans
yet.
“We’re not done,” I told him.
“You can just wait.”
“Mah, mah!” The Negro widened
his eyes in mock wonder. He glanced round. The nurse had not yet returned from
locking up Mrs. Mole. The Negro made me an insolent bow. “Miss Mucky-Muck,” he
said under his breath.
I lifted the lid off the second
tureen and uncovered a wedge of macaroni, stone-cold and stuck together in a
gluey paste. The third and last tureen was chock-full of baked beans.
Now I knew perfectly well you
didn’t serve two kinds of beans together at a meal. Beans and carrots, or beans
and peas, maybe, but never beans and beans. The Negro was just trying to see
how much we would take.
The nurse came back, and the
Negro edged off at a distance. I ate as much as I could of the baked beans.
Then I rose from the table, passing round to the side where the nurse couldn’t
see me below the waist, and behind the Negro, who was clearing the dirty
plates. I drew my foot back and gave him a sharp, hard kick on the calf of the
leg.
The Negro leapt away with a yelp
and rolled his eyes at me. “Oh Miz, oh Miz,” he moaned, rubbing his leg. “You
shouldn’t of done that, you shouldn’t, you reely shouldn’t.”
“That’s what
you
get,” I
said, and stared him in the eye.
“Don’t
you want to get up today?”
“No.” I huddled down more deeply
in the bed and pulled the sheet up over my head. Then I lifted a corner of the
sheet and peered out. The nurse was shaking down the thermometer she had just
removed from my mouth.
“You
see,
it’s normal.” I
had looked at the thermometer before she came to collect it, the way I always
did. “You
see,
it’s normal, what do you keep taking it for?”
I wanted to tell her that if
only something were wrong with my body it would be fine, I would rather have
anything wrong with my body than something wrong with my head, but the idea
seemed so involved and wearisome that I didn’t say anything. I only burrowed
down further in the bed.
Then, through the sheet, I felt
a slight, annoying pressure on my leg. I peeped out. The nurse had set her tray
of thermometers on my bed while she turned her back and took the pulse of the
person who lay next to me, in Mrs. Tomolillo’s place.
A heavy naughtiness pricked
through my veins, irritating and attractive as the hurt of a loose tooth. I
yawned and stirred, as if about to turn over, and edged my foot under the box.
“Oh!” The nurse’s cry sounded
like a cry for help, and another nurse came running. “Look what you’ve done!”
I poked my head out of the
covers and stared over the edge of the bed. Around the overturned enamel tray,
a star of thermometer shards glittered, and balls of mercury trembled like
celestial dew.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It was an
accident.”
The second nurse fixed me with a
baleful eye. “You did it on purpose. I
saw
you.”
Then she hurried off, and almost
immediately two attendants came and wheeled me, bed and all, down to Mrs.
Mole’s old room, but not before I had scooped up a ball of mercury.
Soon after they had locked the
door, I could see the Negro’s face, a molasses-colored moon, risen at the
window grating, but I pretended not to notice.
I opened my fingers a crack,
like a child With a secret, and smiled at the silver globe cupped in my palm.
If I dropped it, it would break into a million little replicas of itself, and
if I pushed them near each other, they would fuse, without a crack, into one
whole again.
I smiled and smiled at the small
silver ball.
I couldn’t imagine what they had
done with Mrs. Mole.
Philomena
Guinea’s black Cadillac eased through the tight, five
o’clock traffic like a ceremonial car. Soon it would
cross one of the brief bridges that arched the Charles, and I would, without
thinking, open the door and plunge out through the stream of traffic to the
rail of the bridge. One jump, and the water would be over my head.
Idly I twisted a Kleenex to
small, pill-sized pellets between my fingers and watched my chance. I sat in
the middle of the back seat of the Cadillac, my mother on one side of me, and
my brother on the other, both leaning slightly forward, like diagonal bars, one
across each car door.
In front of me I could see the
Spam-colored expanse of the chauffeur’s neck, sandwiched between a blue cap and
the shoulders of a blue jacket and, next to him, like a frail, exotic bird, the
silver hair and emerald-feathered hat of Philomena Guinea, the famous novelist.
I wasn’t quite sure why Mrs.
Guinea had turned up. All I knew was that she had interested herself in my case
and that at one time, at the peak of her career, she had been in an asylum as
well.
My mother said that Mrs. Guinea
had sent her a telegram from the Bahamas, where she read about me in a Boston
paper. Mrs. Guinea had telegrammed, “Is there a boy in the case?”
If there was a boy in the case,
Mrs. Guinea couldn’t, of course, have anything to do with it.
But my mother had telegrammed
back, “No, it is Esther’s writing. She thinks she will never write again.”
So Mrs. Guinea had flown back to
Boston and taken me out of the cramped city hospital ward, and now she was
driving me to a private hospital that had grounds and golf courses and gardens,
like a country club, where she would pay for me, as if I had a scholarship,
until the doctors she knew of there had made me well.
My mother told me I should be
grateful. She said I had used up almost all her money and if it weren’t for
Mrs. Guinea she didn’t know where I’d be. I knew where I’d be though. I’d be in
the big state hospital in the country, cheek by jowl to this private place.
I knew I should be grateful to
Mrs. Guinea, only I couldn’t feel a thing. If Mrs. Guinea had given me a ticket
to Europe, or a round-the-world cruise, it wouldn’t have made one scrap of
difference to me, because wherever I sat--on the deck of a ship or at a street
cafe in Paris or Bangkok--I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar,
stewing in my own sour air.
Blue sky opened its dome above
the river, and the river was dotted with sails. I readied myself, but
immediately my mother and my brother each laid one hand on a door handle. The
tires hummed briefly over the grill of the bridge. Water, sails, blue sky and
suspended gulls flashed by like an improbable postcard, and we were across.
I sank back in the gray, plush
seat and closed my eyes. The air of the bell jar wadded round me and I couldn’t
stir.
I
had my own room again.
It reminded me of the room in
Doctor Gordon’s hospital--a bed, a bureau, a closet, a table and chair. A
window with a screen, but no bars. My room was on the first floor, and the
window, a short distance above the pine-needle-padded ground, overlooked a
wooded yard ringed by a red brick wall. If I jumped I wouldn’t even bruise my
knees. The inner surface of the tall wall seemed smooth as glass.
The journey over the bridge had
unnerved me.
I had missed a perfectly good
chance. The river water passed me by like an untouched drink. I suspected that
even if my mother and brother had not been there I would have made no move to
jump.
When I enrolled in the main
building of the hospital, a slim young woman had come and introduced herself.
“My name is Doctor Nolan. I am to be Esther’s doctor.”
I was surprised to have a woman.
I didn’t think they had woman psychiatrists. This woman was a cross between
Myrna Lay and my mother. She wore a white blouse and a full skirt gathered at
the waist by a wide leather belt, and stylish, crescent-shaped spectacles.