The Bell Jar (32 page)

               
The night nurse had come in,
unnoticed, on her soft rubber soles.

               
“No kidding,” she said, “is that
really you?”

               
“No, it’s not me. Joan’s quite
mistaken. It’s somebody else.”

               
“Oh, say it’s you!” DeeDee
cried.

               
But I pretended I didn’t hear
her and turned away.

               
Then Loubelle begged the nurse
to make a fourth at bridge, and I drew up a chair to watch, although I didn’t
know the first thing about bridge, because I hadn’t had time to pick it up at
college, the way all the wealthy girls did.

               
I stared at the flat poker faces
of the kings and jacks and queens and listened to the nurse talking about her
hard life.

               
“You ladies don’t know what it
is, holding down two jobs,” she said. “Nights I’m over here, watching you....”

               
Loubelle giggled. “Oh, we’re
good. We’re the best of the lot, and you know it.”

               
“Oh,
you’re
all right.”
The nurse passed round a packet of spearmint gum, then unfolded a pink strap
from its tinfoil wrapper herself.
“You’re
all right, it’s those boobies
at the state place that worry me off my feet.”

               
“Do you work in both places
then?” I asked with sudden interest.

               
“You bet.” The nurse gave me a
straight look, and I could see she thought I had no business in Belsize at all.
“You wouldn’t like it over there one bit, Lady Jane.”

               
I found it strange that the
nurse should call me Lady Jane when she knew what my name was perfectly well.

               
“Why?” I persisted.

               
“Oh, it’s not a nice place, like
this. This is a regular country club. Over there they’ve got nothing. No OT to
talk of, no walks….”

               
“Why haven’t they got walks?”

               
“Not enough em-ploy-ees.” The
nurse scooped in a trick and Loubelle groaned. “Believe me, ladies, when I
collect enough do-re-mi to buy me a car, I’m clearing out.”

               
“Will you clear out of here,
too?” Joan wanted to know.

               
“You bet. Only private cases
from then on. When I feel like it….”

               
But I’d stopped listening.

               
I felt the nurse had been
instructed to show me my alternatives. Either I got better, or I fell, down,
down, like a burning, then burnt-out star, from Belsize, to Caplan, to Wymark
and finally, after Doctor Nolan and Mrs. Guinea had given me up, to the state
place next door.

               
I gathered my blanket round me
and pushed back my chair.

               
“You cold?” the nurse demanded
rudely.

               
“Yes,” I said, moving off down
the hall. “I’m frozen stiff.”

I
woke warm and placid in my white cocoon. A shaft of pale, wintry sunlight
dazzled the mirror and the glasses on the bureau and the metal doorknobs. From
across the hall came the early-morning clatter of the maids in the kitchen,
preparing the breakfast trays.

               
I heard the nurse knock on the
door next to mine, at the far end of the hall. Mrs. Savage’s sleepy voice
boomed out, and the nurse went in to her with the jingling tray. I thought,
with a mild stir of pleasure, of the steaming blue china coffee pitcher and the
blue china breakfast cup and the fat blue china cream jug with the white
daisies on it.

               
I was beginning to resign
myself.

               
If I was going to fall, I would
hang on to my small comforts, at least, as long as I possibly could.

               
The nurse rapped on my door and,
without waiting for an answer, breezed in.

               
It was a new nurse--they were
always changing--with a lean, sand-colored face and sandy hair, and large
freckles polkadotting her bony nose. For some reason the sight of this nurse
made me sick at heart, and it was only as she strode across the room to snap up
the green blind that I realized part of her strangeness came from being
empty-handed.

               
I opened my mouth to ask for my
breakfast tray, but silenced myself immediately. The nurse would be mistaking
me for somebody else. New nurses often did that. Somebody in Belsize must be
having shock treatments, unknown to me, and the nurse had, quite
understandably, confused me with her.

               
I waited until the nurse had
made her little circuit of my room, patting, straightening, arranging, and
taken the next tray in to Loubelle one door farther down the hall.

               
Then I shoved my feet into my
slippers, dragging my blanket with me, for the morning was bright, but very
cold, and crossed quickly to the kitchen. The pink-uniformed maid was filling a
row of blue china coffee pitchers from a great, battered kettle on the stove.

               
I looked with love at the lineup
of waiting trays--the white paper napkins, folded in their crisp, isosceles
triangles, each under the anchor of its silver fork, the pale domes of
soft-boiled eggs in the blue egg cups, the scalloped glass shells of orange
marmalade. All I had to do was reach out and claim my tray, and the world would
be perfectly normal.

               
“There’s been a mistake,” I told
the maid, leaning over the counter and speaking in a low, confidential tone.
“The new nurse forgot to bring in my breakfast tray today.”

               
I managed a bright smile, to
show there were no hard feelings.

               
“What’s the name?”

               
“Greenwood. Esther Greenwood.”

               
“Greenwood, Greenwood,
Greenwood.” The maid’s warty index finger slid down the list of names of the
patients in Belsize tacked up on the kitchen wall. “Greenwood, no breakfast
today.”

               
I caught the rim of her counter
with both hands.

               
“There must be a mistake. Are
you sure it’s Greenwood?”

               
“Greenwood,” the maid said
decisively as the nurse came in.

               
The nurse looked questioningly
from me to the maid.

               
“Miss Greenwood wanted her
tray,” the maid said, avoiding my eyes.

               
“Oh,” the nurse smiled at me,
“you’ll be getting your tray later on this morning, Miss Greenwood, You...”

               
But I didn’t wait to hear what
the nurse said. I strode blindly out into the hall, not to my room, because
that was where they would come to get me, but to the alcove, greatly inferior
to the alcove at Caplan, but an alcove, nevertheless, in a quiet corner of the
hall, where Joan and Loubelle and DeeDee and Mrs. Savage would not come.

               
I curled up in the far corner of
the alcove with the blanket over my head. It wasn’t the shock treatment that
struck me, so much as the bare-faced treachery of Doctor Nolan. I liked Doctor
Nolan, I loved her, I had given her my trust on a platter and told her
everything, and she had promised, faithfully, to warn me ahead of time if ever
I had to have another shock treatment.

               
If she had told me the night
before I would have lain awake all night, of course, full of dread and
foreboding, but by morning I would have been composed and ready. I would have
gone down the hall between two nurses, past DeeDee and Loubelle and Mrs. Savage
and Joan, with dignity, like a person coolly resigned to execution.

               
The nurse bent over me and
called my name.

               
I pulled away and crouched
farther into the corner. The nurse disappeared. I knew she would return, in a
minute, with two burly men attendants, and they would bear me, howling and
hitting, past the smiling audience now gathered in the lounge.

               
Doctor Nolan put her arm around
me and hugged me like a mother.

               
“You said you’d
tell
me!”
I shouted at her through the dishevelled blanket.

               
“But I
am
telling you,”
Doctor Nolan said. “I’ve come specially early to tell you, and I’m taking you
over myself.”

               
I peered at her through swollen
lids. “Why didn’t you tell me last night?”

               
“I only thought it would keep
you awake. If I’d known...”

               
“You
said
you’d tell me.”

               
“Listen, Esther,” Doctor Nolan
said. “I’m going over with you. I’ll be there the whole time, so everything
will happen right, the way I promised. I’ll be there when you wake up, and I’ll
bring you back again.”

               
I looked at her. She seemed very
upset.

               
I waited a minute. Then I said,
“Promise you’ll be there.”

               
“I promise.”

               
Doctor Nolan took out a white
handkerchief and wiped my face. Then she hooked her arm in my arm, like an old
friend, and helped me up, and we started down the hall. My blanket tangled
about my feet, so I let it drop, but Doctor Nolan didn’t seem to notice. We
passed Joan, coining out of her room, and I gave her a meaning, disdainful
smile, and she ducked back and waited until we had gone by.

               
Then Doctor Nolan unlocked a
door at the end of the hall and led me down a flight of stairs into the
mysterious basement corridors that linked, in an elaborate network of tunnels
and burrows, all the various buildings of the hospital.

               
The walls were bright, white
lavatory tile with bald bulbs set at intervals in the black ceiling. Stretchers
and wheelchairs were beached here and there against the hissing, knocking pipes
that ran and branched in an intricate nervous system along the glittering
walls. I hung on to Doctor Nolan’s arm like death, and every so often she gave
me an encouraging squeeze.

               
Finally, we stopped at a green
door with Electrotherapy printed on it in black letters. I held back, and
Doctor Nolan waited. Then I said, “Let’s get it over with,” and we went in.

               
The only people in the waiting
room besides Doctor Nolan and me were a pallid man in a shabby maroon bathrobe
and his accompanying nurse.

               
“Do you want to sit down?”
Doctor Nolan pointed at a wooden bench, but my legs felt full of heaviness, and
I thought how hard it would be to hoist myself from a sitting position when the
shock treatment people came in.

               
“I’d rather stand.”

               
At last a tall, cadaverous woman
in a white smock entered the room from an inner door. I thought that she would
go up and take the man in the maroon bathrobe, as he was first, so I was
surprised when she came toward me.

               
“Good morning, Doctor Nolan,”
the woman said, putting her arm around my shoulders. “Is this Esther?”

               
“Yes, Miss Huey. Esther, this is
Miss Huey, she’ll take good care of you. I’ve told her about you.”

               
I thought the woman must be
seven feet tall. She bent over me in a kind way, and I could see that her face,
with the buck teeth protruding in the center, had at one time been badly pitted
with acne. It looked like maps of the craters on the moon.

               
“I think we can take you right
away, Esther,” Miss Huey said. “Mr. Anderson won’t mind waiting, will you, Mr.
Anderson?”

               
Mr. Anderson didn’t say a word,
so with Miss Huey’s arm around my shoulder, and Doctor Nolan following, I moved
into the next room.

               
Through the slits of my eyes,
which I didn’t dare open too far, lest the full view strike me dead, I saw the
high bed with its white, drumtight sheet, and the machine behind the bed, and
the masked person--I couldn’t tell whether it was a man or a woman--behind the
machine, and other masked people flanking the bed on both sides.