The Bell Jar (34 page)
Whether she knew it or not,
Philomena Guinea was buying my freedom.
“What I hate is the thought of
being under a man’s thumb,” I had told Doctor Nolan. “ A man doesn’t have a
worry in the world, while I’ve got a baby hanging over my head like a big
stick, to keep me in line.”
“Would you act differently if
you didn’t have to worry about a baby?”
“Yes,” I said, “but...” and I
told Doctor Nolan about the married woman lawyer and her Defense of Chastity.
Doctor Nolan waited until I was
finished. Then she burst out laughing. “Propaganda!” she said, and scribbled
the name and address of this doctor on a prescription pad.
I leafed nervously through an
issue of
Baby Talk.
The fat, bright faces of babies beamed up at me,
page after page--bald babies, chocolate-colored babies, Eisenhower-faced
babies, babies rolling over for the first time, babies reaching for rattles,
babies eating their first spoonful of solid food, babies doing all the little
tricky things it takes to grow up, step by step, into an anxious and unsettling
world.
I smelt a mingling of Pablum and
sour milk and salt-cod-stinky diapers and felt sorrowful and tender. How easy
having babies seemed to the women around me! Why was I so unmaternal and apart?
Why couldn’t I dream of devoting myself to baby after fat puling baby like Dodo
Conway?
If I had to wait on a baby all
day, I would go mad.
I looked at the baby in the lap
of the woman opposite. I had no idea how old it was, I never did, with
babies--for all I knew it could talk a blue streak and had twenty teeth behind
its pursed, pink lips. It held its little wobbly head up on its shoulders--it
didn’t seem to have a neck--and observed me with a wise, Platonic expression.
The baby’s mother smiled and
smiled, holding that baby as if it were the first wonder of the world. I
watched the mother and the baby for some clue to their mutual satisfaction, but
before I had discovered anything, the doctor called me in.
“You’d like a fitting,” he said
cheerfully, and I thought with relief that he wasn’t the sort of doctor to ask
awkward questions. I had toyed with the idea of telling him I planned to be
married to a sailor as soon as his ship docked at the Charlestown Navy Yard,
and the reason I didn’t have an engagement ring was because we were too poor,
but at the last moment I rejected that appealing story and simply said “Yes.”
I climbed up on the examination
table, thinking: “I am climbing to freedom, freedom from fear, freedom from
marrying the wrong person, like Buddy Willard, just because of sex, freedom
from the Florence Crittenden Homes where all the poor girls go who should have
been fitted out like me, because they did, they would do anyway,
regardless....”
As I rode back to the asylum
with my box in the plain brown paper wrapper on my lap I might have been Mrs.
Anybody coming back from a day in town with a Schrafft’s cake for her maiden
aunt or a Filene’s Basement hat. Gradually the suspicion that Catholics had
X-ray eyes diminished, and I grew easy. I had done well by my shopping
privileges, I thought.
I was my own woman.
The next step was to find the
proper sort of man.
“I’m
going to be a psychiatrist.”
Joan spoke with her usual
breathy enthusiasm. We were drinking apple cider in the Belsize lounge.
“Oh,” I said dryly, “that’s
nice.”
“I’ve had a long talk with
Doctor Quinn, and she thinks it’s perfectly possible.” Doctor Quinn was Joan’s
psychiatrist, a bright, shrewd, single lady, and I often thought if I had been
assigned to Doctor Quinn I would be still in Caplan or, more probably, Wymark.
Doctor Quinn had an abstract quality that appealed to Joan, but it gave me the
polar chills.
Joan chattered on about Egos and
Ids, and I turned my mind to something else, to the brown, unwrapped package in
my bottom drawer. I never talked about Egos and Ids with Doctor Nolan. I didn’t
know just what I talked about really.
“...I’m going to live out, now.”
I tuned in on Joan then.
“Where?” I demanded, trying to hide my envy.
Doctor Nolan said my college
would take me back for the second semester, on her recommendation and Philomena
Guinea’s scholarship, but as the doctors vetoed my living with my mother in the
interim, I was staying on at the asylum until the winter term began.
Even so, I felt it unfair of
Joan to beat me through the gates.
“Where?” I persisted. “They’re
not letting you live on your own, are they?” Joan had only that week been given
town privileges again.
“Oh no, of course not. I’m
living in Cambridge with Nurse Kennedy. Her roommate’s just got married, and
she needs someone to share the apartment.”
“Cheers.” I raised my apple
cider glass, and we clinked. In spite of my profound reservations, I thought I
would always treasure Joan. It was as if we had been forced together by some
overwhelming circumstance, like war or plague, and shared a world of our own.
“When are you leaving?”
“On the first of the month.”
“Nice.”
Joan grew wistful. “You’ll come
visit me, won’t you, Esther?”
“Of course.”
But I thought, “Not likely.”
“It
hurts,” I said. “Is it supposed to hurt?”
Irwin didn’t say anything. Then
he said, “Sometimes it hurts.”
I had met Irwin on the steps of
the Widener Library. I was standing at the top of the long flight, overlooking
the red brick buildings that walled the snow-filled quad and preparing to catch
the trolley back to the asylum, when a tall young man with a rather ugly and
bespectacled, but intelligent face, came up and said, “Could you please tell me
the time?”
I glanced at my watch. “Five
past four.”
Then the man shifted his arms
around the load of books he was carrying before him like a dinner tray and
revealed a bony wrist.
“Why, you’ve a watch yourself!”
The man looked ruefully at his
watch. He lifted it and shook it by his ear. “Doesn’t work.” He smiled
engagingly. “Where are you going?”
I was about to say, “Back to the
asylum,” but the man looked promising, so I changed my mind. “Home.”
“Would you like some coffee
first?”
I hesitated. I was due at the
asylum for supper and I didn’t want to be late so close to being signed out of
there for good.
“A very
small
cup of
coffee?”
I decided to practice my new,
normal personality on this man who, in the course of my hesitations, told me
his name was Irwin and that he was a very well-paid professor of mathematics,
so I said, “ All right,” and, matching my stride to Irwin’s, strolled down the
long, ice-encrusted flight at his side.
It was only after seeing Irwin’s
study that I decided to seduce him.
Irwin lived in a murky,
comfortable basement apartment in one of the rundown streets of outer Cambridge
and drove me there--for a beer, he said--after three cups of bitter coffee in a
student cafe. We sat in his study on stuffed brown leather chairs, surrounded
by stacks of dusty, incomprehensible books with huge formulas inset
artistically on the page like poems.
While I was sipping my first
glass of beer--I have never really cared for cold beer in midwinter, but I
accepted the glass to have something solid to hold on to--the doorbell rang.
Irwin seemed embarrassed. “I
think it may be a lady.”
Irwin had a queer, old-world
habit of calling women ladies. “Fine, fine,” I gestured largely. “Bring her
in.”
Irwin shook his head. “You would
upset her.”
I smiled into my amber cylinder
of cold beer.
The doorbell rang again with a
peremptory jab. Irwin sighed and rose to answer it. The minute he disappeared,
I whipped into the bathroom and, concealed behind the dirty, aluminum-colored
Venetian blind, watched Irwin’s monkish face appear in the door crack.
A large, bosomy Slavic lady in a
bulky sweater of natural sheep’s wool, purple slacks, high-heeled black
over-shoes with Persian lamb cuffs and a matching toque, puffed white,
inaudible words into the wintry air. Irwin’s voice drifted back to me through
the chilly hall.
“I’m sorry, Olga...I’m working,
Olga...no, I don’t think so, Olga,” all the while the lady’s red mouth moved,
and the words, translated to white smoke, floated up among the branches of the
naked lilac by the door. Then, finally, “Perhaps, Olga...good-bye, Olga.”
I admired the immense,
steppelike expanse of the lady’s wood-clad bosom as she retreated a few inches
from my eye, down the creaking wooden stair, a sort of Siberian bitterness on
her vivid lips.
“I
suppose you have lots and lots of affairs in Cambridge,” I told Irwin cheerily,
as I struck a snail with a pin in one of Cambridge’s determinedly French
restaurants.
“I seem,” Irwin admitted with a
small, modest smile, “to get on with the ladies.”
I picked up my empty snail shell
and drank the herb-green juice. I had no idea if this was proper, but after
months of wholesome, dull asylum diet, I was greedy for butter.
I had called Doctor Nolan from a
pay phone at the restaurant and asked for permission to stay overnight in
Cambridge with Joan. Of course, I had no idea whether Irwin would invite me
back to his apartment after dinner or not, but I thought his dismissal of the
Slavic lady--another professor’s wife--looked promising.
I tipped back my head and poured
down a glass of Nuits-St.-Georges.
“You do like wine,” Irwin
observed. “Only Nuits-St.-Georges. I imagine him...with the dragon…”
Irwin reached for my hand.
I felt the first man I slept
with must be intelligent, so I would respect him. Irwin was a full professor at
twenty-six and had the pale, hairless skin of a boy genius. I also needed
somebody quite experienced to make up for my lack of it, and Irwin’s ladies
reassured me on this head. Then, to be on the safe side, I wanted somebody I
didn’t know and wouldn’t go on knowing--a kind of impersonal, priestlike
official, as in the tales of tribal rites.
By the end of the evening I had
no doubts about Irwin whatsoever.
Ever since I’d learned about the
corruption of Buddy Willard my virginity weighed like a millstone around my
neck. It had been of such enormous importance to me for so long that my habit
was to defend it at all costs. I had been defending it for five years and I was
sick of it.
It was only as Irwin swung me
into his arms, back at the apartment, and carried me, wine-dazed and limp, into
the pitchblack bedroom, that I murmured, “You know, Irwin, I think I ought to
tell you, I’m a virgin.”
Irwin laughed and flung me down
on the bed.
A few minutes later an
exclamation of surprise revealed that Irwin hadn’t really believed me. I
thought how lucky it was I had started practicing birth control during the day,
because in my winey state that night I would never have bothered to perform the
delicate and necessary operation. I lay, rapt and naked, on Irwin’s rough
blanket, waiting for the miraculous change to make itself felt.