The Bell Jar (21 page)

               
My mother sighed.

               
Doctor Gordon cost twenty-five
dollars an hour.

 
“Hi there, what’s your name?”

               
“Elly Higginbottom.”

               
The sailor fell into step beside
me, and I smiled.

               
I thought there must be as many
sailors on the Common as there were pigeons. They seemed to come out of a
dun-colored recruiting house on the far side, with blue and white “Join the
Navy” posters stuck up on billboards round it and all over the inner walls.

               
“Where do you come from, Elly?”

               
“Chicago.”

               
I had never been to Chicago, but
I knew one or two boys who went to Chicago University, and it seemed the sort
of place where unconventional, mixed-up people would come from.

               
“You sure are a long way from
home.”

               
The sailor put his arm around my
waist, and for a long time we walked around the Common like that, the sailor
stroking my hip through the green dirndl skirt, and me smiling mysteriously and
trying not to say anything that would show I was from Boston and might at any
moment meet Mrs. Willard, or one of my mother’s other friends, crossing the
Common after tea on Beacon Hill or shopping in Filene’s Basement.

               
I thought if I ever did get to
Chicago, I might change my name to Elly Higginbottom for good. Then nobody
would know I had thrown up a scholarship at a big eastern women’s college and
mucked up a month in New York and refused a perfectly solid medical student for
a husband who would one day be a member of the AMA and earn pots of money.

               
In Chicago, people would take me
for what I was.

               
I would be simple Elly
Higginbottom, the orphan. People would love me for my sweet, quiet nature. They
wouldn’t be after me to read books and write long papers on the twins in James
Joyce. And one day I might just marry a virile, but tender, garage mechanic and
have a big cowy family, like Dodo Conway.

               
If I happened to feel like it.

               
“What do you want to do when you
get out of the Navy?” I asked the sailor suddenly.

               
It was the longest sentence I
had said, and he seemed taken aback. He pushed his white cupcake cap to one
side and scratched his head.

               
“Well, I dunno, Elly,” he said.
“I might just go to college on the G.I. Bill.”

               
I paused. Then I said
suggestively, “You ever thought of opening a garage?”

               
“Nope,” said the sailor. “Never
have.”

               
I peered at him from the comer
of my eye. He didn’t look a day over sixteen.

               
“Do you know how old I am?” I
said accusingly.

               
The sailor grinned at me. “Nope,
and I don’t care either.”

               
It occurred to me that this
sailor was really remarkably handsome. He looked Nordic and virginal. Now I was
simpleminded it seemed I attracted clean, handsome people.

               
“Well, I’m thirty,” I said, and
waited.

               
“Gee, Elly, you don’t look it.”
The sailor squeezed my hip.

               
Then he glanced quickly from
left to right. “Listen, Elly, if we go round to those steps over there, under
the monument, I can kiss you.”

               
At that moment I noticed a brown
figure in sensible flat brown shoes striding across the Common in my direction.
From the distance, I couldn’t make out any features on the dime-sized face, but
I knew it was Mrs. Willard.

               
“Could you please tell me the
way to the subway?” I said to the sailor in a loud voice.

               
“Huh?”

               
“The subway that goes out to the
Deer Island Prison?”

               
When Mrs. Willard came up I
would have to pretend I was only asking the sailor directions, and didn’t
really know him at all.

               
“Take your hands off me,” I said
between my teeth.

               
“Say, Elly, what’s up?”

               
The woman approached and passed
by without a look or a nod, and of course it wasn’t Mrs. Willard. Mrs. Willard
was at her cottage in the Adirondacks.

               
I fixed the woman’s receding
back with a vengeful stare.

               
“Say, Elly...”

               
“I thought it was somebody I
knew,” I said. “Some blasted lady from this orphan home in Chicago.”

               
The sailor put his arm around me
again.

               
“You mean you got no mom and
dad, Elly?”

               
“No.” I let out a tear that
seemed ready. It made a little hot track down my cheek.

               
“Say, Elly, don’t cry. This
lady, was she mean to you?”

               
“She was...she was
awful!”

               
The tears came in a rush, then, and while the sailor
was holding me and patting them dry with a big, clean, white, linen
handkerchief in the shelter of an American elm, I thought what an awful woman
that lady in the brown suit had been, and how she, whether she knew it or not,
was responsible for my taking the wrong turn here and the wrong path there and
for everything bad that happened after that.

“Well,
Esther, how do you feel this week?”

               
Doctor Gordon cradled his pencil
like a slim, silver bullet.

               
“The same.”

               
“The same?” He quirked an
eyebrow, as if he didn’t believe it.

               
So I told him again, in the same
dull, flat voice, only it was angrier this time, because he seemed so slow to
understand, how I hadn’t slept for fourteen nights and how I couldn’t read or
write or swallow very well.

               
Doctor Gordon seemed
unimpressed.

               
I dug into my pocketbook and
found the scraps of my letter to Doreen. I took them out and let them flutter
on to Doctor Gordon’s immaculate green blotter. They lay there, dumb as daisy
petals in a summer meadow.

               
“What,” I said, “do you think of
that?”

               
I thought Doctor Gordon must
immediately see how bad the handwriting was, but he only said, “I think I would
like to speak to your mother. Do you mind?”

               
“No.” But I didn’t like the idea
of Doctor Gordon talking to my mother one bit. I thought he might tell her I
should be locked up. I picked up every scrap of my letter to Doreen, s9 Doctor
Gordon couldn’t piece them together and see I was planning to run away, and
walked out of his office without another word.

I
watched my mother grow smaller and smaller until she disappeared into the door
of Doctor Gordon’s office building. Then I watched her grow larger and larger
as she came back to the car.

               
“Well?” I could tell she had
been crying.

               
My mother didn’t look at me. She
started the car.

               
Then she said, as we glided
under the cool, deep-sea shade of the elms, “Doctor Gordon doesn’t think you’ve
improved at all. He thinks you should have some shock treatments at his private
hospital in Walton.”

               
I felt a sharp stab of
curiosity, as if I had just read a terrible newspaper headline about somebody
else.

               
“Does he mean
live
there?”

               
“No,” my mother said, and her
chin quivered.

               
I thought she must be lying.

               
“You tell me the truth,” I said,
“or I’ll never speak to you again.”

               
“Don’t I always tell you the
truth?” my mother said, and burst into tears.

SUICIDE SAVED FROM 7-STORY LEDGE!

         
After
two hours on a narrow ledge seven stories above a concrete parking lot and
gathered crowds, Mr. George Pollucci let himself be helped to safety through a
nearby window by Sgt. Will Kilmartin of the Charles Street police force.

               
I cracked open a peanut from the
ten-cent bag I had bought to feed the pigeons, and ate it. It taste dead, like
a bit of old tree bark.

               
I brought the newspaper close up
to my eyes to get a better view of George Pollucci’s face, spotlighted like a
three-quarter moon against a vague background of brick and black sky. I felt he
had something important to tell me, and whatever it was might just be written
on his face.

               
But the smudgy crags of George
Pollucci’s features melted away as I peered at them, and resolved themselves
into a regular pattern of dark and light and medium-gray dots.

               
The inky-black newspaper
paragraph didn’t tell why Mr. Pollucci was on the ledge, or what Sgt. Kilmartin
did to him when he finally got him in through the window.

               
The trouble about jumping was
that if you didn’t pick the right number of stories, you might still be alive
when you hit bottom. I thought seven stories must be a safe distance.

               
I folded the paper and wedged it
between the slats of the park bench. It was what my mother called a scandal
sheet, full of the local murders and suicides and beatings and robbing, and
just about every page had a half-naked lady on it with her breasts surging over
the edge of her dress and her legs arranged so you could see to her stocking
tops.

               
I didn’t know why I had never
bought any of these papers before. They were the only things I could read. The
little paragraphs between the pictures ended before the letters had a chance to
get cocky and wiggle about. At home, all I ever saw was the
Christian
Science Monitor)
which appeared on the doorstep at five o’clock every day
but Sunday and treated suicides and sex crimes and airplane crashes as if they
didn’t happen.

               
A big white swan full of little
children approached my bench, then turned around a bosky islet covered with
ducks and paddled back under the dark arch of the bridge. Everything I looked
at seemed bright and extremely tiny.

               
I saw, as if through the keyhole
of a door I couldn’t open, myself and my younger brother, knee-high and holding
rabbit-eared balloons, climb aboard a swanboat and fight for a seat at the
edge, over the peanut-shell-paved water. My mouth tasted of cleanness and
peppermint. If we were good at the dentist’s, my mother always bought us a
swanboat ride.

               
I circled the Public
Garden--over the bridge and under the blue-green monuments, past the American
flag flowerbed and the entrance where you could have your picture taken in an
orange-and-white striped canvas booth for twenty-five cents--reading the names
of the trees.

               
My favorite tree was the Weeping
Scholar Tree. I thought it must come from Japan. They understood things of the
spirit in Japan.

               
They disemboweled themselves
when anything went wrong.

               
I tried to imagine how they
would go about it. They must have an extremely sharp knife. No, probably two
extremely sharp knives. Then they would sit down, cross-legged, a knife in
either hand. Then they would cross their hands and point a knife at each side
of their stomach. They would have to be naked, or the knife would get stuck in
their clothes.

               
Then in one quick flash, before
they had time to think twice, they would jab the knives in and zip them round,
one on the upper crescent and one on the lower crescent, making a full circle.
Then their stomach skin would come loose, like a plate, and their insides would
fall out, and they would die.