The Bell Jar (31 page)
“Here, we don’t want you to
break this.”
She unfastened the band of my
watch.
“What’s the matter? What
happened?”
Mrs. Bannister’s face twisted
into a quick smile. “You’ve had a reaction.”
“A reaction?”
“Yes, how do you feel?”
“Funny. Sort of light and airy.”
Mrs. Bannister helped me sit up.
“You’ll be better now. You’ll be
better in no time. Would you like some hot milk?”
“Yes.”
And when Mrs. Bannister held the
cup to my lips, I fanned the hot milk out on my tongue as it went down, tasting
it luxuriously, the way a baby tastes its mother.
“Mrs.
Bannister tells me you had a reaction.” Doctor Nolan seated herself in the
armchair by the window and took out a tiny box of matches. The box looked
exactly like the one I had hidden in the hem of my bathrobe, and for a moment I
wondered if a nurse had discovered it there and given it back to Doctor Nolan
on the quiet.
Doctor Nolan scraped a match on
the side of the box. A hot yellow flame jumped into life, and I watched her
suck it up into the cigarette.
“Mrs. B. says you felt better.”
“I did for a while. Now I’m the
same again.”
“I’ve news for you.”
I waited. Every day now, for I
didn’t know how many days, I had spent the mornings and afternoons and evenings
wrapped up in my white blanket on the deck chair in the alcove, pretending to
read. I had a dim notion that Doctor Nolan was allowing me a certain number of
days and then she would say just what Doctor Gordon had said: “I’m sorry, you
don’t seem to have improved, I think you’d better have some shock
treatments....”
“Well, don’t you want to hear
what it is?”
“What?” I said dully, and braced
myself.
“You’re not to have any more
visitors for a while.”
I stared at Doctor Nolan in
surprise. “Why that’s wonderful.”
“I thought you’d be pleased.”
She smiled.
Then I looked, and Doctor Nolan
looked, at the wastebasket beside my bureau. Out of the wastebasket poked the
bloodred buds of a dozen long-stemmed roses.
That afternoon my mother had
come to visit me.
My mother was only one in a long
stream of visitors--my former employer, the lady Christian Scientist, who
walked on the lawn with me and talked about the mist going up from the earth in
the Bible, and the mist being error, and my whole trouble being that I believed
in the mist, and the minute I stopped believing in it, it would disappear and I
would see I had always been well, and the English teacher I had in high school
who came and tried to teach me how to play Scrabble, because he thought it
might revive my old interest in words, and Philomena Guinea herself, who wasn’t
at all satisfied with what the doctors were doing and kept telling them so.
I hated these visits.
I would be sitting in my alcove
or in my room, and a smiling nurse would pop in and announce one or another of
the visitors. Once they’d even brought the minister of the Unitarian church,
whom I’d never really liked at all. He was terribly nervous the whole time, and
I could tell he thought I was crazy as a loon, because I told him I believed in
hell, and that certain people, like me, had to live in hell before they died,
to make up for missing out on it after death, since they didn’t believe in life
after death, and what each person believed happened to him when he died.
I hated these visits, because I
kept feeling the visitors measuring my fat and stringy hair against what I had
been and what they wanted me to be, and I knew they went away utterly
confounded.
I thought if they left me alone
I might have some peace.
My mother was the worst. She
never scolded me, but kept begging me, with a sorrowful face, to tell her what
she had done wrong. She said she was sure the doctors thought she had done
something wrong because they asked her a lot of questions about my toilet
training, and I had been perfectly trained at a very early age and given her no
trouble whatsoever.
That afternoon my mother had
brought me the roses.
“Save them for my funeral,” I’d
said.
My mother’s face puckered, and
she looked ready to cry.
“But Esther, don’t you remember
what day it is today?”
“No.”
I thought it might be Saint
Valentine’s day.
“It’s your
birth
day.”
And that was when I had dumped
the roses in the wastebasket.
“That was a silly thing for her
to do,” I said to Doctor Nolan.
Doctor Nolan nodded. She seemed
to know what I meant.
“I hate her,” I said, and waited
for the blow to fall.
But Doctor Nolan only smiled at
me as if something had pleased her very, very much, and said, “I suppose you
do.”
“You’re
a lucky girl today.”
The young nurse cleared my breakfast tray away and
left me wrapped in my white blanket like a passenger taking the sea air on the
deck of a ship.
“Why am I lucky?”
“Well, I’m not sure if you’re
supposed to know yet, but today you’re moving to Belsize.” The nurse looked at
me expectantly.
“Belsize,” I said. “I can’t go
there.”
“Why not?”
“I’m not ready. I’m not well
enough.”
“Of course, you’re well enough.
Don’t worry, they wouldn’t be moving you if you weren’t well enough.”
After the nurse left, I tried to
puzzle out this new move on Doctor Nolan’s part. What was she trying to prove?
I hadn’t changed. Nothing had changed. And Belsize was the best house of all.
From Belsize people went back to work and back to school and back to their
homes.
Joan would be at Belsize. Joan
with her physics books and her golf clubs and her badminton rackets and her
breathy voice. Joan, marking the gulf between me and the nearly well ones. Ever
since Joan left Caplan I’d followed her progress through the asylum grapevine.
Joan had walk privileges, Joan
had shopping privileges, Joan had town privileges. I gathered all my news of
Joan into a little bitter heap, though I received it with surface gladness.
Joan was the beaming double of my old best self, specially designed to follow
and torment me.
Perhaps Joan would be gone when
I got to Belsize.
At least at Belsize I could
forget about shock treatments. At Caplan a lot of the women had shock
treatments. I could tell which ones they were, because they didn’t get their
breakfast trays with the rest of us. They had their shock treatments while we
breakfasted in our rooms, and then they came into the lounge, quiet and extinguished,
led like children by the nurses, and ate their breakfasts there.
Each morning, when I heard the
nurse knock with my tray, an immense relief flooded through me, because I knew
r was out of danger for that day. I didn’t see how Doctor Nolan could tell you
went to sleep during a shock treatment if she’d never had a shock treatment
herself. How did she know the person didn’t just
look
as if he was
asleep, while all the time, inside, he was feeling the blue volts and the
noise?
Piano
music sounded from the end of the hall.
At supper I sat quietly,
listening to the chatter of the Belsize women. They were all fashionably
dressed and carefully made up, and several of them were married. Some of them
had been shopping downtown, and others had been out visiting with friends, and
all during supper they kept tossing back and forth these private jokes.
“I’d call Jack,” a woman named
DeeDee said, “only I’m afraid he wouldn’t be home. I know just where I could
call him, though, and he’d be in, all right.”
The short, spry blonde woman at
my table laughed. “I almost had Doctor Loring where I wanted him today.” She
widened her starey blue eyes like a little doll. “I wouldn’t mind trading old
Percy in for a new model.”
At the opposite end of the room,
Joan was wolfing her Spam and broiled tomato with great appetite. She seemed
perfectly at home among these women and treated me coolly, with a slight sneer,
like a dim and inferior acquaintance.
I had gone to bed right after
supper, but then I heard the piano music and pictured Joan and DeeDee and
Loubelle, the blonde woman, and the rest of them, laughing and gossiping about
me in the living room behind my back. They would be saying how awful it was to
have people like me in Belsize and that I should be in Wymark instead.
I decided to put a lid on their
nasty talk.
Draping my blanket loosely
around my shoulders, like a stole, I wandered down the hall toward the light
and the gay noise.
For the rest of the evening I
listened to DeeDee thump out some of her own songs on the grand piano, while
the other women sat round playing bridge and chatting, just the way they would
in a college dormitory, only most of them were ten years over college age.
One of them, a great, tall,
gray-haired woman with a booming bass voice, named Mrs. Savage, had gone to
Vassar. I could tell right away she was a society woman, because she talked
about nothing but debutantes. It seemed she had two or three daughters, and
that year they were all going to be debutantes, only she had loused up their
debutante party by signing herself into the asylum.
DeeDee had one song she called
“The Milkman” and everybody kept saying she ought to get it published, it would
be a hit. First her hands would clop out a little melody on the keys, like the
hoofbeats of a slow pony, and next another melody came in, like the milkman
whistling, and then the two melodies went on together.
“That’s very nice,” I said in a
conversational voice.
Joan was leaning on one corner
of the piano and leafing through a new issue of some fashion magazine, and
DeeDee smiled up at her as if the two of them shared a secret.
“Oh, Esther,” Joan said then,
holding the magazine, “isn’t this you?”
DeeDee stopped playing. “Let me
see.” She took the magazine, peered at the page Joan pointed to, and then
glanced back at me.
“Oh no,” DeeDee said. “Surely
not.” She looked at the magazine again, then at me. “Never!”
“Oh, but it
is
Esther,
isn’t it, Esther?” Joan said.
Loubelle and Mrs. Savage drifted
over, and pretending I knew what it was all about, I moved to the piano with
them.
The magazine photograph showed a
girl in a strapless evening dress of fuzzy white stuff, grinning fit to split,
with a whole lot of boys bending in around her. The girl was holding a glass
full of a transparent drink and seemed to have her eyes fixed over my shoulder
on something that stood behind me, a little to my left. A faint breath fanned
the back of my neck. I wheeled round.