The Bell Jar (30 page)

               
Hour after hour I had been
keeping watch by Miss Norris’s bedside, refusing the diversion of OT and walks
and badminton matches and even the weekly movies, which I enjoyed, and which
Miss Norris never went to, simply to brood over the pale, speechless circlet of
her lips.

               
I thought how exciting it would
be if she opened her mouth and spoke, and I rushed out into the hall and
announced this to the nurses. They would praise me for encouraging Miss Norris,
and I would probably be allowed shopping privileges and movie privileges
downtown, and my escape would be assured.

               
But in all my hours of vigil
Miss Norris hadn’t said a word.

               
“Where are you moving to?” I
asked her now.

               
The nurse touched Miss Norris’s
elbow, and Miss Norris jerked into motion like a doll on wheels.

               
“She’s going to Wymark, “ my
nurse told me in a low voice. “I’m afraid Miss Norris isn’t moving up like
you.”

               
I watched Miss Norris lift one
foot, and then the other, over the invisible stile that barred the front
doorsill.

               
“I’ve a surprise for you,” the
nurse said as she installed me in a sunny room in the front wing overlooking
the green golf links. “Somebody you know’s just come today.”

               
“Somebody I know?”

               
The nurse laughed. “Don’t look
at me like that. It’s not a policeman.” Then, as I didn’t say anything, she
added, “She says she’s an old friend of yours. She lives next door. Why don’t
you pay her a visit?”

               
I thought the nurse must be
joking, and that if I knocked on the door next to mine I would hear no answer,
but go in and find Miss Norris, buttoned into her purple, squirrel-collared
coat and lying on the bed, her mouth blooming out of the quiet vase of her body
like a bud of a rose.

               
Still, I went out and knocked on
the neighboring door.

               
“Come in!” called a gay voice.

               
I opened the door a crack and
peered into the room. The big, horsey girl in jodhpurs sitting by the window
glanced up with a broad smile.

               
“Esther!” She sounded out of
breath, as if she had been running a long, long distance and only just come to
a halt. “How nice to see you. They told me you were here.”

               
“Joan?” I said tentatively, then
“Joan!” in confusion and disbelief.

               
Joan beamed, revealing her
large, gleaming, unmistakable teeth.

               
“It’s really me. I thought you’d
be surprised.”

16

               
Joan’s room, with its closet and bureau and table and
chair and
white blanket with the big
blue C on it, was a mirror image of my own. It occurred to me that Joan,
hearing where I was, had engaged a room at the asylum on pretense, simply as a
joke. That would explain why she had told the nurse I was her friend. I had
never known Joan, except at a cool distance.

               
“How did you get here?” I curled
up on Joan’s bed.

               
“I read about you,” Joan said.

               
“What?”

               
“I read about you, and I ran
away.”

               
“How do you mean?” I said
evenly.

               
“Well,” Joan leaned back in the
chintz-flowered asylum armchair, “I had a summer job working for the chapter
head of some fraternity, like the Masons, you know, but not the Masons, and I
felt terrible. I had these bunions, I could hardly walk--in the last days I had
to wear rubber boots to work, instead of shoes, and you can imagine what
that
did to my morale....”

               
I thought either Joan must be
crazy--wearing rubber boots to work--or she must be trying to see how crazy I
was, believing all that. Besides, only old people ever got bunions. I decided
to pretend I thought she was crazy, and that I was only humoring her along.

               
“I always feel lousy without
shoes,” I said with an ambiguous smile. “Did your feet hurt much?”

               
“Terribly. And my boss--he’d
just separated from his wife, he couldn’t come right out and get a divorce,
because that wouldn’t go with this fraternal order--my boss kept buzzing me in
every other minute, and each time I moved my feet hurt like the devil, but the
second I’d sit down at my desk again, buzz went the buzzer, and he’d have
something else he wanted to get off his chest....”

               
“Why didn’t you quit?”

               
“Oh, I did quit, more or less. I
stayed off work on sick leave. I didn’t go out. I didn’t see anyone. I stowed
the telephone in a drawer and never answered it....

               
“Then my doctor sent me to a
psychiatrist at this big hospital. I had an appointment for twelve o’clock, and
I was in an awful state. Finally, at half past twelve, the receptionist came
out and told me the doctor had gone to lunch. She asked me if I wanted to wait,
and I said yes.”

               
“Did he come back?” The story
sounded rather involved for Joan to have made up out of whole cloth, but I led
her on, to see what would come of it.

               
“Oh yes. I was going to kill
myself, mind you. I said ‘If this doctor doesn’t do the trick, that’s the end.’
Well, the receptionist led me down a long hall, and just as we got to the door
she turned to me and said, ‘You don’t mind if there are a few students with the
doctor, will you?’ What could I say? ‘Oh no,’ I said. I walked in and found
nine pairs of eyes fixed on me. Nine! Eighteen separate eyes.

               
“Now, if that receptionist had
told me there were going to be nine people in mat room, I’d have walked out on
me spot. But mere I was, and it was too late to do a thing about it. Well, on
this particular day I happened to be wearing a fur coat....”

               
“In August?”

               
“Oh, it was one of those cold,
wet days, and I thought, my first psychiatrist--you know. Anyway, this
psychiatrist kept eyeing mat fur coat me whole time I talked to him, and I
could just see what he thought of my asking to pay me students cut rate instead
of me full fee. I could see me dollar signs in his eyes. Well, I told him I
don’t know whatall--about me bunions and the telephone in me drawer and how I
wanted to kill myself--and men he asked me to wait outside while he discussed
my case with the others, and when he called me back in, you know what he said?”

               
“What?”

               
“He folded his hands together
and looked at me and said, ‘Miss Gilling, we have decided mat you would benefit
by group therapy.”

               
“Group
therapy?” I
thought I must sound phony as an echo chamber, but Joan didn’t pay any notice.

               
“That’s what he said. Can, you
imagine me wanting to kill myself, and coming round to chat about it with a
whole pack of strangers, and most of them no better man myself....”

               
“That’s crazy.” I was growing
involved in spite of myself. “That’s not even
human.”

               
“That’s just what I said. I went straight home and
wrote that doctor a letter. I wrote him one beautiful letter about how a man
like that had no business setting himself up to help sick people….”

               
“Did you get any answer?”

               
“I don’t know. That was the day
I read about you.”

               
“How do you mean?”

               
“Oh,” Joan said, “about how the
police thought you were dead and all. I’ve got a pile of clippings somewhere.”
She heaved herself up, and I had a strong horsey whiff that made my nostrils
prickle. Joan had been a champion horse-jumper at the annual college gymkhana,
and I wondered if she had been sleeping in a stable.

               
Joan rummaged in her open
suitcase and came up with a fistful of clippings.

               
“Here, have a look.”

               
The first clipping showed a big,
blown-up picture of a girl with black-shadowed eyes and black lips spread in a
grin. I couldn’t imagine where such a tarty picture had been taken until I
noticed the Bloomingdale earrings and the Bloomingdale necklace glinting out of
it with bright, white highlights, like imitation stars.

SCHOLARSHIP GIRL MISSING. MOTHER WORRIED.

               
The article under the picture told how this girl had
disappeared from her home on August 17th, wearing a green skirt and a white
blouse, and had left a note saying she was taking a long walk.
When Miss
Greenwood had not returned by midnight,
it said,
her mother called the
town police.

               
The next clipping showed a picture of my mother and
brother and me grouped together in our backyard and smiling. I couldn’t think
who had taken that picture either, until I saw I was wearing dungarees and
white sneakers and remembered that was what I wore in my spinach-picking
summer, and how Dodo Conway had dropped by and taken some family snaps of the
three of us one hot afternoon.
Mrs. Greenwood asked that this picture be
printed in hopes that it will encourage her daughter to return home.

               
A dark, midnight picture of
about a dozen moon-faced people in a wood. I thought the people at the end of
the row looked queer and unusually short until I realized they were not people,
but dogs.
Bloodhounds used in search for missing girl. Police Sgt. Bill
Hindly says: It doesn’t look good.

               
The last picture showed
policemen lifting a long, limp blanket roll with a featureless cabbage head
into the back of an ambulance. Then it told how my mother had been down in the
cellar, doing the week’s laundry, when she heard faint groans coming from a
disused hole....

               
I laid the clippings on the
white spread of the bed.

               
“You keep them,” Joan said. “You
ought to stick them in a scrapbook.”

               
I folded the clippings and
slipped them in my pocket.

               
“I read about you,” Joan went
on. “Not how they found you, but everything up to that, and I put all my money
together and took the first plane to New York.”

               
“Why New York?”

               
“Oh, I thought it would be
easier to kill myself in New York.”

               
“What did you do?”

               
Joan grinned sheepishly and
stretched out her hands, palm up. Like a miniature mountain range, large,
reddish weals upheaved across the white flesh of her wrists.

               
“How did you do that?” For the
first time it occurred to me Joan and I might have something in common.

               
“I shoved my fists through my
roommate’s window.”

               
“What roommate?”

               
“My old college roommate. She
was working in New York, and I couldn’t think of anyplace else to stay, and
besides, I’d hardly any money left, so I went to stay with her. My parents
found me there--she’d written them I was acting funny--and my father flew
straight down and brought me back.”

               
“But you’re all right now.” I
made it a statement.

               
Joan considered me with her
bright, pebble-gray eyes. “I guess so,” she said. “ Aren’t you?”

I
had fallen asleep after the evening meal.

               
I was awakened by a loud voice.
Mrs.
Bannister, Mrs. Bannister, Mrs. Bannister, Mrs. Bannister.
As I pulled out
of sleep, I found I was beating on the bedpost with my hands and calling. The
sharp, wry figure of Mrs. Bannister, the night nurse, scurried into view.