The Bell Jar (29 page)

               
But after a nurse had led me
across the lawn to the gloomy brick building called Caplan, where I would live,
Doctor Nolan didn’t come to see me, a whole lot of strange men came instead.

               
I lay on my bed under the thick
white blanket, and they entered my room, one by one, and introduced themselves.
I couldn’t understand why there should be so many of them, or why they would
want to introduce themselves, and I began to think they were testing me, to see
if I noticed there were too many of them, and I grew wary.

               
Finally, a handsome,
white-haired doctor came in and said he was the director of the hospital. Then
he started talking about the Pilgrims and Indians and who had the land after
them, and what rivers ran nearby, and who had built the first hospital, and how
it had burned down, and who had built the next hospital, until I thought he
must be waiting to see when I would interrupt him and tell him I knew all that
about rivers and Pilgrims was a lot of nonsense.

               
But then I thought some of it
might be true, so I tried to sort out what was likely to be true and what
wasn’t, only before I could do that, he had said good-bye.

               
I waited till I heard the voices
of all the doctors die away. Then I threw back the white blanket and put on my
shoes and walked out into the hall. Nobody stopped me, so I walked round the
corner of my wing of the hall and down another, longer hall, past an open
dining room.

               
A maid in a green uniform was
setting the tables for supper. There were white linen tablecloths and glasses
and paper napkills. I stored the fact that there were real glasses in the
corner of my mind the way a squirrel stores a nut. At the city hospital we had
drunk out of paper cups and had no knives to cut our meat. The meat had always
been so overcooked we could cut it with a fork.

               
Finally I arrived at a big
lounge with shabby furniture and a threadbare rug. A girl with a round pasty
face and short black hair was sitting in an armchair, reading a magazine. She
reminded me of a Girl Scout leader I’d had once. I glanced at her feet, and
sure enough, she wore those flat brown leather shoes with fringed tongues
lapping down over the front that are supposed to be so sporty, and the ends of
the laces were knobbed with little imitation acorns.

               
The girl raised her eyes and
smiled. “I’m Valerie. Who are you?”

               
I pretended I hadn’t heard and
walked out of the lounge to the end of the next wing. On the way, I passed a
waist-high door behind which I saw some nurses.

               
“Where is everybody?”

               
“Out.” The nurse was writing
something over and over on little pieces of adhesive tape. I leaned across the
gate of the door to see what she was writing, and it was E. Greenwood, E.
Greenwood, E. Greenwood, E. Greenwood.

               
“Out where?”

               
“Oh, OT, the gold course,
playing badminton.”

               
I noticed a pile of clothes on a
chair beside the nurse. They were the same clothes the nurse in the first
hospital had been packing into the patent leather case when I broke the mirror.
The nurses began sticking the labels onto the clothes.

               
I walked back to the lounge. I
couldn’t understand what these people were doing, playing badminton and golf.
They mustn’t be really sick at all, to do that.

               
I sat down near Valerie and
observed her carefully. Yes, I thought, she might just as well be in a Girl
Scout camp. She was reading her tatty copy of
Vogue
with intense
interest.

               
“What the hell is she doing
here?” I wondered. “There’s nothing the matter with her.”

“Do
you mind if I smoke?” Doctor Nolan leaned back in the armchair next to my bed.

               
I said no, I liked the smell of
smoke. I thought if Doctor Nolan smoked, she might stay longer. This was the
first time she had come to talk with me. When she left I would simply lapse
into the old blankness.

               
“Tell me about Doctor Gordon,”
Doctor Nolan said suddenly. “Did you like him?”

               
I gave Doctor Nolan a wary look.
I thought the doctors must all be in it together, and that somewhere in this
hospital, in a hidden corner, there reposed a machine exactly like Doctor
Gordon’s, ready to jolt me out of my skin.

               
“No,” I said. “I didn’t like him
at all.”

               
“That’s interesting. Why?”

               
“I didn’t like what he did to
me.”

               
“Did to you?”

               
I told Doctor Nolan about the
machine, and the blue flashes, and the jolting and the noise. While I was
telling her she went very still.

               
“That was a mistake,” she said
then. “It’s not supposed to be like that.”

               
I stared at her.

               
“If it’s done properly,” Doctor
Nolan said, “it’s like going to sleep.”

               
“If anyone does that to me again
I’ll kill myself.”

               
Doctor Nolan said firmly, “You
won’t have any shock treatments here. Or if you do,” she amended, “I’ll tell
you about it beforehand, and I promise you it won’t be anything like what you
had before. Why,” she finished, “some people even
like
them.”

               
After Doctor Nolan had gone I
found a box of matches on the windowsill. It wasn’t an ordinary-size box, but
an extremely tiny box. I opened it and exposed a row of little white sticks
with pink tips. I tried to light one, and it crumpled in my hand.

               
I couldn’t think why Doctor
Nolan would have left me such a stupid thing. Perhaps she wanted to see if I
would give it back. Carefully I stored the toy matches in the hem of my new
wool bathrobe. If Doctor Nolan asked me for the matches, I would say I’d
thought they were made of candy and had eaten them.

A
new woman had moved into the room next to mine.

               
I thought she must be the only
person in the building who was newer than I was, so she wouldn’t know how
really bad I was, the way the rest did. I thought I might go in and make
friends.

               
The woman was lying on her bed
in a purple dress that fastened at the neck with a cameo brooch and reached
midway between her knees and her shoes. She had rusty hair knotted in a
schoolmarmish bun, and thin, silver-rimmed spectacles attached to her breast
pocket with a black elastic.

               
“Hello,” I said
conversationally, sitting down on the edge of the bed. “My name’s Esther,
what’s your name?”

               
The woman didn’t stir, just
stared up at the ceiling. I felt hurt. I thought maybe Valerie or somebody had
told her when she first came in how stupid I was.

               
A nurse popped her head in at
the door.

               
“Oh, there you are,” she said to
me. “Visiting Miss Norris. How nice!” And she disappeared again..

               
I don’t know how long I sat
there, watching the woman in purple and wondering if her pursed pink lips would
open, and if they did open, what they would say.

               
Finally, without speaking or
looking at me, Miss Norris swung her feet in their high, black, buttoned boots
over the other side of the bed and walked out of the room. I thought she might
be trying to get rid of me in a subtle way. Quietly, at a little distance, I
followed her down the hall.

               
Miss Norris reached the door of
the dining room and paused. All the way to the dining room she had walked
precisely, placing her feet in the very center of the cabbage roses that twined
through the pattern of the carpet. She waited a moment and then, one by one,
lifted her feet over the doorsill and into the dining room as though stepping
over an invisible shin-high stile.

               
She sat down at one of the round,
linen-covered tables and unfolded a napkin in her lap.

               
“It’s not supper for an hour
yet,” the cook called out of the kitchen.

               
But Miss Norris didn’t answer.
She just stared straight ahead of her in a polite way.

               
I pulled up a chair opposite her
at the table and unfolded a napkin. We didn’t speak, but sat there, in a close,
sisterly silence, until the gong for supper sounded down the hall.

“Lie
down,” the nurse said. “I’m going to give you another injection.”

               
I rolled over on my stomach on
the bed and hitched up my skirt. Then I pulled down the trousers of my silk
pajamas.

               
“My word, what all have you got
under there?”

               
“Pajamas. So I won’t have to
bother getting in and out of them all the time.”

               
The nurse made a little clucking
noise. Then she said, “Which side?” It was an old joke.

               
I raised my head and glanced
back at my bare buttocks. They were bruised purple and green and blue from past
injections. The left side looked darker than the right.

               
“The right.”

               
“You name it.” The nurse jabbed
the needle in, and I winced, savoring the tiny hurt. Three times each day the
nurses injected me, and about an hour after each injection they gave me a cup
of sugary fruit juice and stood by, watching me drink it.

               
“Lucky you,” Valerie said.
“You’re on insulin.”

               
“Nothing happens.”

               
“Oh, it will. I’ve had it. Tell
me when you get a reaction.”

               
But I never seemed to get any
reaction. I just grew fatter and fatter. Already I filled the new, too-big
clothes my mother had bought, and when I peered down at my plump stomach and my
broad hips I thought it was a good thing Mrs. Guinea hadn’t seen me like this,
because I looked just as if I were going to have a baby.

“Have
you seen my scars?”

               
Valerie pushed aside her black
bang and indicated two pale marks, one on either side of her forehead, as if at
some time she had started to sprout horns, but cut them off.

               
We were walking, just the two of
us, with the Sports Therapist in the asylum gardens. Nowadays I was let out on
walk privileges more and more often. They never let Miss Norris out at all.

               
Valerie said Miss Norris
shouldn’t be in Caplan, but in a building for worse people called Wymark.

               
“Do you know what these scars
are?” Valerie persisted. “No. What are they?”

               
“I’ve had a lobotomy.”

               
I looked at Valerie in awe,
appreciating for the first time her perpetual marble calm. “How do you feel?”

               
“Fine. I’m not angry any more.
Before, I was always angry. I was in Wymark, before, and now I’m in Caplan. I
can go to town, now, or shopping or to a movie, along with a nurse.”

               
“What will you do when you get
out?”

               
“Oh, I’m not leaving,” Valerie
laughed. “I like it here.”

 
“Moving day!”

               
“Why should I be moving?”

               
The nurse went on blithely
opening and shutting my drawers, emptying the closet and folding my belongings
into the black overnight case.

               
I thought they must at last be
moving me to Wymark.

               
“Oh, you’re only moving to the
front of the house,” the nurse said cheerfully. “You’ll like it. There’s lots
more sun.”

               
When we came out into the hall,
I saw that Miss Norris was moving too. A nurse, young and cheerful as my own,
stood in the doorway of Miss Norris’s room, helping Miss Norris into a purple
coat with a scrawny squirrel-fur collar.