The Bell Jar (14 page)
This seemed a dreary and wasted
life for a girl with fifteen years of straight A’s, but I knew that’s what
marriage was like, because cook and clean and wash was just what Buddy
Willard’s mother did from morning till night, and she was the wife of a
university professor and had been a private school teacher herself.
Once when I visited Buddy I
found Mrs. Willard braiding a rug out of strips of wool from Mr. Willard’s old
suits. She’d spent weeks on that rug, and I had admired the tweedy browns and
greens and blues patterning the braid, but after Mrs. Willard was through,
instead of hanging the rug on the wall the way I would have done, she put it
down in place of her kitchen mat, and in a few days it was soiled and dull and
indistinguishable from any mat you could buy for under a dollar in the five and
ten.
And I knew that in spite of all
the roses and kisses and restaurant dinners a man showered on a woman before he
married her, what he secretly wanted when the wedding service ended was for her
to flatten out underneath his feet like Mrs. Willard’s kitchen mat.
Hadn’t my own mother told me
that as soon as she and my father left Reno on their honeymoon--my father had
been married before, so he needed a divorce--my father said to her, “Whew,
that’s a relief, now we can stop pretending and be ourselves”?--and from that
day on my mother never had a minute’s peace.
I also remembered Buddy Willard
saying in a sinister, knowing way that after I had children I would feel
differently, I wouldn’t want to write poems any more. So I began to think maybe
it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being
brainwashed, and afterward you went about numb as a slave in some. private,
totalitarian state.
As I stared down at Constantin
the way you stare down at a bright, unattainable pebble at the bottom of a deep
well, his eyelids lifted and he looked through me, and his eyes were full of
love. I watched dumbly as a shutter of recognition clicked across the blur of
tenderness and the wide pupils went glossy and depthless as patent leather.
Constantin sat up, yawning.
“What time is it?”
“Three,” I said in a flat voice.
“I better go home. I have to be at work first thing in the morning.”
“I’ll drive you.”
As we sat back to back on our
separate sides of the bed fumbling with our shoes in the horrid cheerful white
light of the bed lamp, I sensed Constantin turn round. “Is your hair always
like that?”
“Like what?”
He didn’t answer but reached
over and put his hand at the root of my hair and ran his fingers out slowly to
the tip ends like a comb. A little electric shock flared through me and I sat
quite still. Ever since I was small I loved feeling somebody comb my hair. It
made me go all sleepy and peaceful.
“Ah, I know what it is,”
Constantin said. “You’ve just washed it.”
And he bent to lace up his
tennis shoes.
An hour later I lay in my hotel
bed, listening to the rain. It didn’t even sound like rain, it sounded like a
tap running. The ache in the middle of my left shin bone came to life, and I
abandoned any hope of sleep before seven, when my radio-alarm clock would rouse
me with its hearty renderings of Sousa.
Every time it rained the old
leg-break seemed to remember itself, and what it remembered was a dull hurt.
Then I thought, “Buddy Willard
made me break that leg.”
Then I thought, “No, I broke it
myself. I broke it on purpose to pay myself back for being such a heel.”
Mr.
Willard drove me up to the Adirondacks.
It was the day after Christmas
and a gray sky bellied over us, fat with snow. I felt overstuffed and dull and
disappointed, the way I always do the day after Christmas, as if whatever it
was the pine boughs and the candles and the silver and gilt-ribboned presents
and the birch-log fires and the Christmas turkey and the carols at the piano
promised never came to pass.
At Christmas I almost wished I was a Catholic.
First Mr. Willard drove and then
I drove. I don’t know what we talked about, but as the countryside, already
deep under old falls of snow, turned us a bleaker shoulder, and as the fir
trees crowded down from the gray hills to the road edge, so darkly green they
looked black, I grew gloomier and gloomier.
I was tempted to tell Mr.
Willard to go ahead alone, I would hitchhike home.
But one glance at Mr. Willard’s
face--the silver hair in its boyish crew cut, the clear blue eyes, the pink
cheeks, all frosted like a sweet wedding case with the innocent, trusting
expression--and I knew I couldn’t do it. I’d have to see the visit through to
the end.
At midday the grayness paled a
bit, and we parked in an icy turnoff and shared out the tunafish sandwiches and
the oatmeal cookies and the apples and the thermos of black coffee Mrs. Willard
had packed for our lunch.
Mr. Willard eyed me kindly. Then
he cleared his throat and brushed a few last crumbs from his lap. I could tell
he was going to say something serious, because he was very shy, and I’d heard
him clear his throat in that same way before giving an important economics
lecture.
“Nelly and I have always wanted
a daughter.”
For one crazy minute I thought,
Mr. Willard was going to announce that Mrs. Willard was pregnant and expecting
a baby girl. Then he said, “But I don’t see how any daughter could be nicer
than you.”
Mr. Willard must have thought I
was crying because I was so glad he wanted to be a father to me. “There,
there,” he patted my shoulder and cleared his throat once or twice. “I think we
understand each other.”
Then he opened the car door on
his side and strolled round to my side, his breath shaping tortuous smoke
signals in the gray air. I moved over to the seat he had left and he started
the car and we drove on.
I’m not sure what I expected of
Buddy’s sanatorium.
I think I expected a kind of
wooden chalet perched up on top of a small mountain, with rosy-cheeked young
men and women, all very attractive but with hectic glittering eyes, lying
covered with thick blankets on outdoor balconies.
“TB is like living with a bomb
in your lung,” Buddy had written to me at college. “You just lie around very
quietly hoping it won’t go off.”
I found it hard to imagine Buddy
lying quietly. His whole philosophy of life was to be up and doing every
second. Even when we went to the beach in the summer he never lay down to
drowse in the sun the way I did. He ran back and forth or played ball or did a
little series of rapid pushups to use the time.
Mr. Willard and I waited in the
reception room for the end of the afternoon rest cure.
The color scheme of the whole
sanatorium seemed to be based on liver. Dark, glowering woodwork, burnt-brown
leather chairs, walls that might once have been white but had succumbed under a
spreading malady of mold or damp. A mottled brown linoleum sealed off the
floor.
On a low coffee table, with
circular and semicircular stains bitten into the dark veneer, lay a few wilted
numbers of
Time
and
Life.
I flipped to the middle of the nearest
magazine. The face of Eisenhower beamed up at me, bald and blank as the face of
a fetus in a bottle.
After a while I became aware of
a sly, leaking noise. For a minute I thought the walls had begun to discharge
the moisture that must saturate them, but then I saw the noise came from a
small fountain in one corner of the room.
The fountain spurted a few
inches into the air from a rough length of pipe, threw up its hands, collapsed
and drowned its ragged dribble in a stone basin of yellowing water. The basin
was paved with the white hexagonal tiles one finds in public lavatories.
A buzzer sounded. Doors opened
and shut in the distance. Then Buddy came in.
“Hello, Dad.”
Buddy hugged his father, and
promptly, with a dreadful brightness, came over to me and held out his hand. I
shook it. It felt moist and fat.
Mr. Willard and I sat together
on a leather couch. Buddy perched opposite us on the edge of a slippery
armchair. He kept smiling, as if the corners of his mouth were strung up on
invisible wire.
The last thing I expected was
for Buddy to be fat. All the time I thought of him at the sanatorium I saw
shadows carving themselves under his cheekbones and his eyes burning out of
almost fleshless sockets.
But everything concave about
Buddy had suddenly turned convex. A pot belly swelled under the tight white nylon
shirt and his cheeks were round and ruddy as marzipan fruit. Even his laugh
sounded plump.
Buddy’s eyes met mine. “It’s the
eating,” he said. “They stuff us day after day and then just make us lie
around. But I’m allowed out on walk hours now, so don’t worry, I’ll thin down
in a couple of weeks.” He jumped up, smiling like a glad host. “Would you like
to see my room?”
I followed Buddy, and Mr.
Willard followed me, through a pair of swinging doors set with panes of frosted
glass down a dim, liver-colored corridor smelling of floor wax and Lysol and
another vaguer odor, like bruised gardenias.
Buddy threw open a brown door,
and we filed into the narrow room.
A lumpy bed, shrouded by a thin
white spread, pencil-striped with blue, took up most of the space. Next to it
stood a bed table with a pitcher and a water glass and the silver twig of a
thermometer poking up from a jar of pink disinfectant. A second table, covered
with books and papers and off-kilter clay pots--baked and painted, but not
glazed--squeezed itself between the bed foot and the closet door.
“Well,” Mr. Willard breathed,
“it looks comfortable enough.”
Buddy laughed.
“What are these?” I picked up a
clay ashtray in the shape of a lilypad, with the veinings carefully drawn in
yellow on a murky green ground. Buddy didn’t smoke.
“That’s an ashtray,” Buddy said.
“It’s for you.”
I put the tray down. “I don’t
smoke.”
“I know,” Buddy said. “I thought
you might like it, though.”
“Well,” Mr. Willard rubbed one
papery lip against another. “I guess I’ll be getting on. I guess I’ll be
leaving you two young people…”
“Fine, Dad. You be getting on.”
I was surprised. I had thought
Mr. Willard was going to stay the night before driving me back the next day.
“Shall I come too?”
“No, no.” Mr. Willard peeled a
few bills from his wallet and handed them to Buddy. “See that Esther gets a
comfortable seat on the train. She’ll stay a day or so, maybe.”
Buddy escorted his father to the
door.
I felt Mr. Willard had deserted
me. I thought he must have planned it all along, but Buddy said no, his father
simply couldn’t stand the sight of sickness and especially his own son’s
sickness, because he thought all sickness was sickness of the will. Mr. Willard
had never been sick a day in his life.
I sat down on Buddy’s bed. There
simply wasn’t anywhere else to sit.
Buddy rummaged among his papers
in a businesslike way. Then he handed me a thin, gray magazine. “Turn to page
eleven.”