The Bell Jar (9 page)
“They sent presents,” she added.
“They’re in a big carton out in the hall.”
“How did they get here so fast?”
“Special express delivery, what
do you think? They can’t afford to have the lot of you running around saying
you got poisoned at
Ladies’ Day.
You could sue them for every penny they
own if you just knew some smart law man.”
“What are the presents?” I began
to feel if it was a good enough present I wouldn’t mind about what happened,
because I felt so pure as a result.
“Nobody’s opened the box yet,
they’re all out flat. I’m supposed to be carting soup in to everybody, seeing
as I’m the only one on my feet, but I brought you yours first.”
“See what the present is,” I
begged. Then I remembered and said, “I’ve a present for you as well.”
Doreen went out into the hall. I
could hear her rustling around for a minute and then the sound of paper
tearing. Finally she came back carrying a thick book with a glossy cover and
people’s names printed all over it.
“The Thirty Best Short
Stories of the Year.”
She dropped the book in my lap. “There’s eleven more
of them out there in that box. I suppose they thought it’d give you something
to read while you were sick.” She paused. “Where’s mine?”
I fished in my pocketbook and
handed Doreen the mirror with her name and the daisies on it. Doreen looked at
me and I looked at her and we both burst out laughing.
“You can have my soup if you
want,” she said. “They: put twelve soups on the tray by mistake and Lenny and I
stuffed down so many hotdogs while we were waiting for the rain to stop I
couldn’t eat another mouthful.”
“Bring it in,” I said. “I’m
starving.”
At
seven the next morning the telephone rang.
Slowly I swam up from the bottom of a black sleep. I
already had a telegram from Jay Cee stuck in my mirror, telling me not to
bother to come in to work but to rest for a day and get completely well, and
how sorry she was about the bad crabmeat, so I couldn’t imagine who would be
calling.
I reached out and hitched the
receiver onto my pillow so the mouthpiece rested on my collarbone and the
earpiece lay on my shoulder.
“Hello?”
A man’s voice said, “Is that
Miss Esther Greenwood?” I thought I detected a slight foreign accent.
“It certainly is,” I said.
“This is Constantin
Something-or-Other.”
I couldn’t make out the last
name, but it was full of S’s and K’s. I didn’t know any Constantin, but I
hadn’t the heart to say so.
Then I remembered Mrs. Willard
and her simultaneous interpreter.
“Of course, of course!” I cried,
sitting up and clutching the phone to me with both hands.
I’d never have given Mrs.
Willard credit for introducing me to a man named Constantin.
I collected men with interesting
names. I already knew a Socrates. He was tall and ugly and intellectual and the
son of some big Greek movie producer in Hollywood, but also a catholic, which
ruined it for both of us. In addition to Socrates, I knew a White Russian named
Attila at the Boston School of Business Administration.
Gradually I realized that
Constantin was trying to arrange a meeting for us later in the day.
“Would you like to see the UN
this afternoon?”
“I can already see the UN,” I
told him, with a little hysterical giggle.
He seemed nonplussed.
“I can see it from my window.” I
thought perhaps my English was a touch too fast for him.
There was a silence.
Then he said, “Maybe you would
like a bite to eat afterward.”
I detected the vocabulary of
Mrs. Willard and my heart sank. Mrs. Willard always invited you for a bite to
eat. I remembered that this man had been a guest at Mrs. Willard’s house when
he first came to America--Mrs. Willard had one of these arrangements where you
open your house to foreigners and then when you go abroad they open their
houses to you.
I now saw quite clearly that
Mrs. Willard had simply traded her open house in Russia for my bite to eat in
New York.
“Yes, I would like a bite to
eat,” I said stiffly. “What time will you come?”
“I’ll call for you in my car
about two. It’s the Amazon, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Ah, I know where that is.”
For a moment I thought his tone
was laden with special meaning, and then I figured that probably some of the
girls at the Amazon were secretaries at the UN and maybe he had taken one of
them out at one time. I let him hang up first, and then I hung up and lay back
in the pillows, feeling grim.
There I went again, building up
a glamorous picture of a man who would love me passionately the minute he met
me, and all out of a few prosy nothings. A duty tour of the UN and a post-UN
sandwich!
I tried to jack up my morale.
Probably Mrs. Willard’s
simultaneous interpreter would be short and ugly and I would come to look down
on him in the end the way I looked down on Buddy Willard. This thought gave me
a certain satisfaction. Because I did look down on Buddy Willard, and although
everybody still thought I would marry him when he came out of the TB place, I
knew I would never marry him if he were the last man on earth.
Buddy Willard was a hypocrite.
Of course, I didn’t know he was
a hypocrite at first. I thought he was the most wonderful boy I’d ever seen. rd
adored him from a distance for five years before he even looked at me, and then
there was a beautiful time when I still adored him and he started looking at
me, and then just as he was looking at me more and more I discovered quite by
accident what an awful hypocrite he was, and now he wanted me to marry him and
I hated his guts.
The worst part of it was I
couldn’t come straight out and tell him what I thought of him, because he
caught TB before I could do that, and now I had to humor him along till he got
well again and could take the unvarnished truth.
I decided not to go down to the
cafeteria for breakfast. It would only mean getting dressed, and what was the
point of getting dressed if you were staying in bed for the morning? I could
have called down and asked for a breakfast tray in my room, I guess, but then I
would have to tip the person who brought it up and I never knew how much to
tip. I’d had some very unsettling experiences trying to tip people in New York.
When I first arrived at the
Amazon a dwarfish, bald man in a bellhop’s uniform carried my suitcase up in
the elevator and unlocked my room for me. Of course I rushed immediately to the
window and looked out to see what the view was. After a while I was aware of
this bellhop turning on the hot and cold taps in my washbowl and saying “This
is the hot and this is the cold” and switching on the radio and telling me the
names of all the New York stations and I began to get uneasy, so I kept my back
to him and said firmly, “Thank you for bringing up my suitcase.”
“Thank you thank you thank you.
Ha!” he said in a very nasty insinuating tone, and before I could wheel round
to see what had come over him he was gone, shutting the door behind him with a
rude slam.
Later, when I told Doreen about
his curious behavior, she said, “You ninny, he wanted his tip.”
I asked how much I should have
given and she said a quarter at least and thirty-five cents if the suitcase was
too heavy. Now I could have carried that suitcase to my room perfectly well by
myself, only the bellhop seemed so eager to do it that I let him. I thought
that sort of service came along with what you paid for your hotel room.
I hate handing over money to
people for doing what I could
just
as easily do myself, it makes me
nervous.
Doreen said ten percent was what
you should tip a person, but I somehow never had the right change and I’d have
felt awfully silly giving somebody half a dollar and saying, “Fifteen cents of
this is a tip for you, please give me thirty-five cents back.”
The first time I took a taxi in
New York I tipped the driver ten cents. The fare was a dollar, so I thought ten
cents was exactly right and gave the driver my dime with a little flourish and
a smile. But he only held it in the palm of his hand and stared and stared at
it, and when I stepped out of the cab, hoping I had not handed him a Canadian
dime by mistake, he started yelling, “Lady, I gotta live like you and everybody
else,” in a loud voice which scared me so much I broke into a run. Luckily he
was stopped at a traffic light or I think he would have driven along beside me
yelling in that embarrassing way.
When I asked Doreen about this
she said the tipping percentage might well have risen from ten to fifteen
percent since she was last in New York. Either that, or that particular
cabdriver was an out-and-out-louse.
I
reached for the book the people from
Ladies’ Day
had sent.
When I opened it a card fell
out. The front of the card showed a poodle in a flowered bedjacket sitting in a
poodle basket with a sad face, and the inside of the card showed the poodle
lying down in the basket with a little smile, sound asleep under an embroidered
sampler that said, “You’ll get well best with lots and lots of rest.” At the
bottom of the card somebody had written, “Get well quick! from all of your good
friends at
Ladies’ Day,”
in lavender ink.
I flipped through one story
after another until finally I came to a story about a fig tree.
This fig tree grew on a green
lawn between the house of a Jewish man and a convent, and the Jewish man and a
beautiful dark nun kept meeting at the tree to pick the ripe figs, until one
day they saw an egg hatching in a bird’s nest on a branch of the tree, and as
they watched the little bird peck its way out of the egg, they touched the backs
of their hands together, and then the nun didn’t come out to pick figs with the
Jewish man any more but a mean-faced Catholic kitchen maid came to pick them
instead and counted up the figs the man picked after they were both through to
be sure he hadn’t picked any more than she had, and the man was furious.
I thought it was a lovely story,
especially the part about the fig tree in winter under the snow and then the
fig tree in spring with all the green fruit. I felt sorry when I came to the
last page. I wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print the way you
crawl through a fence, and go to sleep under that beautiful big green fig tree.
It seemed to me Buddy Willard
and I were like that Jewish man and that nun, although of course we weren’t
Jewish or Catholic but Unitarian. We had met together under our own imaginary
fig tree, and what we had seen wasn’t a bird coming out of an egg but a baby
coming out of a woman, and then something awful happened and we went our
separate ways.
As I lay there in my white hotel
bed feeling lonely and weak, I thought I was up in that sanatorium in the
Adirondacks, and I felt like a heel of the worst sort. In his letters Buddy
kept telling me how he was reading poems by a poet who was also a doctor and
how he’d found out about some famous dead Russian short-story writer who had
been a doctor too, so maybe doctors and writers could get along fine after all.
Now this was a very different
tune from what Buddy Willard had been singing all the two years we were getting
to know each other. I remember the day he smiled at me and said, “Do you know
what a poem is, Esther?”