The Bell Jar (33 page)
Miss Huey helped me climb up and
lie down on my back.
“Talk to me,” I said.
Miss Huey began to talk in a
low, soothing voice, smoothing the salve on my temples and fitting the small
electric buttons on either side of my head. “You’ll be perfectly all right, you
won’t feel a thing, just bite down....” And she set something on my tongue and
in panic I bit down, and darkness wiped me out like chalk on a blackboard.
“Esther.”
I woke out of a deep, drenched
sleep, and the first thing I saw was Doctor Nolan’s face swimming in front of
me and saying, “Esther, Esther.”
I rubbed my eyes with an awkward
hand.
Behind Doctor Nolan I could see
the body of a woman wearing a rumpled black-and-white checked robe and flung
out on a cot as if dropped from a great height. But before I could take in any
more, Doctor Nolan led me through a door into fresh, blue-skied air.
All the heat and fear had purged
itself. I felt surprisingly at peace. The bell jar hung, suspended, a few feet
above my head. I was open to the circulating air.
“It was like I told you it would
be, wasn’t it?” said Doctor Nolan, as we walked back to Belsize together
through the crunch of brown leaves.
“Yes.”
“Well, it will always be like
that,” she said firmly. “You will be having shock treatments three times a
week--Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.”
I gulped in a long draught of
air.
“For how long?”
“That depends,” Doctor Nolan
said, “on you and me.”
I
took up the silver knife and cracked off the cap of my egg. Then I put down the
knife and looked at it. I tried to think what I had loved knives for, but my
mind slipped from the noose of the thought and swung, like a bird, in the
center of empty air.
Joan and DeeDee were sitting
side by side on the piano bench, and DeeDee was teaching Joan to play the
bottom half of “Chopsticks” while she played the top.
I thought how sad it was Joan
looked so horsey, with such big teeth and eyes like two gray, goggly pebbles.
Why, she couldn’t even keep a boy like Buddy Willard. And DeeDee’s husband was
obviously living with some mistress or other and turning her sour as an old
fusty cat.
“I’ve
got a let-ter,” Joan chanted, poking her tousled head inside my door.
“Good for you.” I kept my eyes
on my book. Ever since the shock treatments had ended, after a brief series of
five, and I had town privileges, Joan hung about me like a large and breathless
fruitfly--as if the sweetness of recovery were something she could suck up by
mere nearness. They had taken away her physics books and the piles of dusty
spiral pads full of lecture notes that had ringed her room, and she was
confined to grounds again.
“Don’t you want to know who it’s
from?”
Joan edged into the room and sat
down on my bed. I wanted to tell her to get the hell out, she gave me the
creeps, only I couldn’t do it.
“All right.” I stuck my finger
in my place and shut the book. “Who from?”
Joan slipped out a pale blue
envelope from her skirt pocket and waved it teasingly.
“Well, isn’t that a
coincidence!” I said.
“What do you mean, a
coincidence?”
I went over to my bureau, picked
up a pale blue envelope and waved it at Joan like a parting handkerchief. “I
got a letter too. I wonder if they’re the same.”
“He’s better,” Joan said. “He’s
out of the hospital.”
There was a little pause
“Are you going to marry him?”
“No,” I said. “Are you?”
Joan grinned evasively. “I
didn’t like him much, anyway.”
“Oh?”
“No, it was his family I liked.”
“You mean Mr. and Mrs. Willard?”
“Yes.” Joan’s voice slid down my
spine like a draft. “I loved them. They were so nice, so happy, nothing like my
parents. I went over to see them all the time,” she paused, “until you came.”
“I’m sorry.” Then I added, “Why
didn’t you go on seeing them, if you liked them so much?”
“Oh, I couldn’t,” Joan said.
“Not with you dating Buddy. I would have looked...I don’t
know, funny.”
I considered. “I suppose so.”
“Are you,” Joan hesitated, “going
to let him come?”
“I don’t know.”
At first I had thought it would
be awful having Buddy come and visit me at the asylum--he would probably only
come to gloat and hobnob with the other doctors. But then it seemed to me it
would be a step, placing him, renouncing him, in spite of the fact that I had
nobody--telling him there was no simultaneous interpreter, nobody, but that he
was the wrong one, that I had stopped hanging on. “ Are you?”
“Yes,” Joan breathed. “Maybe
he’ll bring his mother. I’m going to ask him to bring his mother....”
“His
mother?”
Joan pouted. “I like Mrs. Willard. Mrs. Willard’s a
wonderful, wonderful woman. She’s been a real mother to me.”
I had a picture of Mrs. Willard,
with her heather-mixture tweeds and her sensible shoes and her wise, maternal
maxims. Mr. Willard was her little boy, and his voice was high and clear, like
a little boy’s. Joan and Mrs. Willard. Joan...and Mrs. Willard...
I had knocked on DeeDee’s door
that morning, wanting to borrow some two-part sheet music. I waited a few
minutes and then, hearing no answer and thinking DeeDee must be out, and I
could pick up the music from her bureau, I pushed the door open and stepped
into the room.
At Belsize, even at Belsize, the
doors had locks, but the patients had no keys. A shut door meant privacy, and
was respected, like a locked door. One knocked, and knocked again, then went
away. I remembered this as I stood, my eyes half-useless after the brilliance
of the hall, in the room’s deep, musky dark.
As my vision cleared, I saw a
shape rise from the bed. Then somebody gave a low giggle. The shape adjusted
its hair, and two pale, pebble eyes regarded me through the gloom. DeeDee lay
back on the pillows, bare-legged under her green wool dressing gown, and
watched me with a little mocking smile. A cigarette glowed between the fingers
of her right hand.
“I just wanted...” I said.
“I know,” said DeeDee. “The
music.”
“Hello, Esther,” Joan said then,
and her cornhusk voice made me want to puke. “Wait for me, Esther, I’ll come
play the bottom part with you.”
Now Joan said stoutly, “I never
really liked Buddy Willard. He thought he knew everything. He thought he knew
everything about women….”
I looked at Joan. In spite of
the creepy feeling, and in spite of my old, ingrained dislike, Joan fascinated
me. It was like observing a Martian, or a particularly warty toad. Her thoughts
were not my thoughts, nor her feelings my feelings, but we were close enough so
that her thoughts and feelings seemed a wry, black image of my own.
Sometimes I wondered if I had
made Joan up. Other times I wondered if she would continue to pop in at every
crisis of my life to remind me of what I had been, and what I had been through,
and carry on her own separate but similar crisis under my nose.
“I don’t see what women see in
other women,” I told Doctor Nolan in my interview that noon. “What does a woman
see in a woman that she can’t see in a man?”
Doctor Nolan paused. Then she
said, “Tenderness.” That shut me up.
“I like you,” Joan was saying.
“I like you better than Buddy.”
And as she stretched out on my
bed with a silly smile, I remembered a minor scandal at our college dormitory
when a fat, matronly-breasted senior, homely as a grandmother and a pious
Religion major, and a tall, gawky freshman with a history of being deserted at
an early hour in all sorts of ingenious ways by her blind dates, started seeing
too much of each other. They were always together, and once somebody had come
upon them embracing, the story went, in the fat girl’s room.
“But what were they
doing?”
I
had asked. Whenever I thought about men and men, and women and women, I could
never really imagine what they would be actually doing.
“Oh,” the spy had said, “Milly
was sitting on the chair and Theodora was lying on the bed, and Milly was
stroking Theodora’s hair.”
I was disappointed. I had
thought I would have some revelation of specific evil. I wondered if all women
did with other women was lie and hug.
Of course, the famous woman poet
at my college lived with another woman--a stumpy old Classical scholar with a
cropped Dutch cut. And when I told the poet I might well get married and have a
pack of children someday, she stared at me in horror. “But what about your
career?”
she had cried.
My head ached. Why did I attract
these weird old women? There was the famous poet, and Philomena Guinea, and Jay
Cee, and the Christian Scientist lady and lord knows who, and they all wanted
to adopt me in some way, and, for the price of their care and influence, have
me resemble them.
“I like you.”
“That’s tough, Joan,” I said,
picking up my book. “Because I don’t like you. You make me puke, if you want to
know.”
And I walked out of the room,
leaving Joan lying, lumpy as an old horse, across my bed.
I
waited for the doctor, wondering if I should bolt. I knew what I was doing was
illegal--in Massachusetts, anyway, because the state was cram-jam full of
Catholics--but Doctor Nolan said this doctor was an old friend of hers, and a
wise man.
“What’s your appointment for?”
the brisk, white-uniformed receptionist wanted to know, ticking my name off on
a notebook list.
“What do you mean,
for?
”
I hadn’t thought anybody but the doctor himself would ask me that, and the
communal waiting room was full of other patients waiting for other doctors,
most of them pregnant or with babies, and I felt their eyes on my flat, virgin
stomach.
The receptionist glanced up at
me, and I blushed.
“A fitting, isn’t it?” she said
kindly. “I only wanted to make sure so I’d know what to charge you. Are you a
student?”
“Ye-es.”
“That will only be half-price
then. Five dollars, instead of ten. Shall I bill you?”
I was about to give my home
address, where I would probably be by the time the bill arrived, but then I
thought of my mother opening the bill and seeing what it was for. The only
other address I had was the innocuous box number which people used who didn’t
want to advertise the fact they lived in an asylum. But I thought the
receptionist might recognize the box number, so I said, “I better pay now,” and
peeled five dollar notes off the roll in my pocketbook.
The five dollars was part of
what Philomena Guinea had sent me as a sort of get-well present. I wondered
what she would think if she knew to what use her money was being put.