The Bell Jar

  By the end of supper my mother had convinced me I should study shorthand in the evenings. Then I would be killing two birds with one stone, writing a novel and learning something practical as well. I would also be saving a whole lot of money.

  That same evening, my mother unearthed an old blackboard from the cellar and set it up on the breezeway. Then she stood at the blackboard and scribbled little curlicues in white chalk while I sat in a chair and watched.

  At first I felt hopeful.

  I thought I might learn shorthand in no time, and when the freckled lady in the Scholarships Office asked me why I hadn't worked to earn money in July and August, the way you were supposed to if you were a scholarship girl, I could tell her I had taken a free shorthand course instead, so I could support myself right after college.

  The only thing was, when I tried to picture myself in some job, briskly jotting down line after line of shorthand, my mind went blank. There wasn't one job I felt like doing where you used shorthand. And, as I sat there and watched, the white chalk curlicues blurred into senselessness.

  I told my mother I had a terrible headache, and went to bed.

  An hour later the door inched open, and she crept into the room. I heard the whisper of her clothes as she undressed. She climbed into bed. Then her breathing grew slow and regular.

  In the dim light of the streetlamp that filtered through the drawn blinds, I could see the pin curls on her head glittering like a row of little bayonets.

  I decided I would put off the novel until I had gone to Europe and had a lover, and that I would never learn a word of shorthand. If I never learned shorthand I would never have to use it.

  I thought I would spend the summer reading Finnegans Wake and writing my thesis.

  Then I would be way ahead when college started at the end of September, and able to enjoy my last year instead of swotting away with no makeup and stringy hair, on a diet of coffee and Benzedrine, the way most of the seniors taking honors did, until they finished their thesis.

  Then I thought I might put off college for a year and apprentice myself to a pottery maker.

  Or work my way to Germany and be a waitress, until I was bilingual.

  Then plan after plan started leaping through my head, like a family of scatty rabbits.

  I saw the years of my life spaced along a road in the form of telephone poles, threaded together by wires. I counted one, two, three . . . nineteen telephone poles, and then the wires dangled into space, and try as I would, I couldn't see a single pole beyond the nineteenth.

  The room blued into view, and I wondered where the night had gone. My mother turned from a foggy log into a slumbering, middle-aged woman, her mouth slightly open and a snore raveling from her throat. The piggish noise irritated me, and for a while it seemed to me that the only way to stop it would be to take the column of skin and sinew from which it rose and twist it to silence between my hands.

  I feigned sleep until my mother left for school, but even my eyelids didn't shut out the light. They hung the raw, red screen of their tiny vessels in front of me like a wound. I crawled between the mattress and the padded bedstead and let the mattress fall across me like a tombstone. It felt dark and safe under there, but the mattress was not heavy enough.

  It needed about a ton more weight to make me sleep.

  riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. . . .

  The thick book made an unpleasant dent in my stomach.

  riverrun, past Eve and Adam's . . .

  I thought the small letter at the start might mean that nothing ever really began all new, with a capital, but that it just flowed on from what came before. Eve and Adam's was Adam and Eve, of course, but it probably signified something else as well.

  Maybe it was a pub in Dublin.

  My eyes sank through an alphabet soup of letters to the long word in the middle of the page.

  bababadalgharaghtakarnrninarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!

  I counted the letters. There were exactly a hundred of them. I thought this must be important.

  Why should there be a hundred letters?

  Haltingly, I tried the word aloud.

  It sounded like a heavy wooden object falling downstairs, boomp boomp boomp, step after step. Lifting the pages of the book, I let them fan slowly by my eyes. Words, dimly familiar but twisted all awry, like faces in a funhouse mirror, fled past, leaving no impression on the glassy surface of my brain.

  I squinted at the page.

  The letters grew barbs and rams' horns. I watched them separate, each from the other, and jiggle up and down in a silly way. Then they associated themselves in fantastic, untranslatable shapes, like Arabic or Chinese.

  I decided to junk my thesis.

  I decided to junk the whole honors program and become an ordinary English major. I went to look up the requirements of an ordinary English major at my college.

  There were lots of requirements, and I didn't have half of them. One of the requirements was a course in the eighteenth century. I hated the very idea of the eighteenth century, with all those smug men writing tight little couplets and being so dead keen on reason. So I'd skipped it. They let you do that in honors, you were much freer. I had been so free I'd spent most of my time on Dylan Thomas.

  A friend of mine, also in honors, had managed never to read a word of Shakespeare; but she was a real expert on the Four Quartets,

  I saw how impossible and embarrassing it would be for me to try to switch from my free program into the stricter one. So I looked up the requirements for English majors at the city college where my mother taught.

  They were even worse.

  You had to know Old English and the History of the English Language and a representative selection of all that had been written from Beowulf to the present day.

  This surprised me. I had always looked down on my mother's college, as it was coed, and filled with people who couldn't get scholarships to the big eastern colleges.

  Now I saw that the stupidest person at my mother's college knew more than I did. I saw they wouldn't even let me in through the door, let alone give me a large scholarship like the one I had at my own college.

  I thought I'd better go to work for a year and think things over. Maybe I could study the eighteenth century in secret.

  But I didn't know shorthand, so what could I do?

  I could be a waitress or a typist.

  But I couldn't stand the idea of being either one.

  "You say you want more sleeping pills?"

  "Yes."

  "But the ones I gave you last week are very strong."

  "They don't work any more."

  Teresa's large, dark eyes regarded me thoughtfully. I could hear the voices of her three children in the garden under the consulting-room window. My Aunt Libby had married an Italian, and Teresa was my aunt's sister-in-law and our family doctor.

  I liked Teresa. She had a gentle, intuitive touch.

  I thought it must be because she was Italian.

  There was a little pause.

  "What seems to be the matter?" Teresa said then.

  "I can't sleep. I can't read." I tried to speak in a cool, calm way, but the zombie rose up in my throat and choked me off. I turned my hands palm up.

  "I think," Teresa tore off a white slip from her prescription pad and wrote down a name and address, "you'd better see another doctor I know. He'll be able to help you more than I can."

  I peered at the writing, but I couldn't read it.

  "Doctor Gordon," Teresa said. "He's a psychiatrist."

  11

  Doctor Gordon's waiting room was hushed and beige.

  The walls were beige, and the carpets were beige, and the upholstered chairs and sofas were beige. There were no mirrors or pictures, only certificates from different medical schools, with Doctor Gordon's name in Latin, hung about the walls. P
ale green loopy ferns and spiked leaves of a much darker green filled the ceramic pots on the end table and the coffee table and the magazine table.

  At first I wondered why the room felt so safe. Then I realized it was because there were no windows.

  The air-conditioning made me shiver.

  I was still wearing Betsy's white blouse and dirndl skirt. They drooped a bit now, as I hadn't washed them in my three weeks at home. The sweaty cotton gave off a sour but friendly smell.

  I hadn't washed my hair for three weeks, either.

  I hadn't slept for seven nights.

  My mother told me I must have slept, it was impossible not to sleep in all that time, but if I slept, it was with my eyes wide open, for I had followed the green, luminous course of the second hand and the minute hand and the hour hand of the bedside clock through their circles and semicircles, every night for seven nights, without missing a second, or a minute, or an hour.

  The reason I hadn't washed my clothes or my hair was because it seemed so silly.

  I saw the days of the year stretching ahead like a series of bright, white boxes, and separating one box from another was sleep, like a black shade. Only for me, the long perspective of shades that set off one box from the next had suddenly snapped up, and I could see day after day after day glaring ahead of me like a white, broad, infinitely desolate avenue.

  It seemed silly to wash one day when I would only have to wash again the next.

  It made me tired just to think of it.

  I wanted to do everything once and for all and be through with it.

  Doctor Gordon twiddled a silver pencil.

  "Your mother tells me you are upset."

  I curled in the cavernous leather chair and faced Doctor Gordon across an acre of highly polished desk.

  Doctor Gordon waited. He tapped his pencil--tap, tap, tap--across the neat green field of his blotter.

  His eyelashes were so long and thick they looked artificial. Black plastic reeds fringing two green, glacial pools.

  Doctor Gordon's features were so perfect he was almost pretty.

  I hated him the minute I walked in through the door.

  I had imagined a kind, ugly, intuitive man looking up and saying "Ah!" in an encouraging way, as if he could see something I couldn't, and then I would find words to tell him how I was so scared, as if I were being stuffed farther and farther into a black, airless sack with no way out.

  Then he would lean back in his chair and match the tips of his fingers together in a little steeple and tell me why I couldn't sleep and why I couldn't read and why I couldn't eat and why everything people did seemed so silly, because they only died in the end.

  And then, I thought, he would help me, step by step, to be myself again.

  But Doctor Gordon wasn't like that at all. He was young and good-looking, and I could see right away he was conceited.

  Doctor Gordon had a photograph on his desk, in a silver frame, that half faced him and half faced my leather chair. It was a family photograph, and it showed a beautiful dark-haired woman, who could have been Doctor Gordon's sister, smiling out over the heads of two blond children.

  I think one child was a boy and one was a girl, but it may have been that both children were boys or that both were girls, it is hard to tell when children are so small. I think there was also a dog in the picture, toward the bottom--a kind of airedale or a golden retriever--but it may have only been the pattern in the woman's skirt.

  For some reason the photograph made me furious.

  I didn't see why it should be turned half toward me unless Doctor Gordon was trying to show me right away that he was married to some glamorous woman and I'd better not get any funny ideas.

  Then I thought, how could this Doctor Gordon help me anyway, with a beautiful wife and beautiful children and a beautiful dog haloing him like the angels on a Christmas card?

  "Suppose you try and tell me what you think is wrong."

  I turned the words over suspiciously, like round, sea-polished pebbles that might suddenly put out a claw and change into something else.

  What did I think was wrong?

  That made it sound as if nothing was really wrong, I only thought it was wrong.

  In a dull, flat voice--to show I was not beguiled by his good looks or his family photograph--I told Doctor Gordon about not sleeping and not eating and not reading. I didn't tell him about the handwriting, which bothered me most of all.

  That morning I had tried to write a letter to Doreen, down in West Virginia, asking whether I could come and live with her and maybe get a job at her college waiting on table or something.

  But when I took up my pen, my hand made big, jerky letters like those of a child, and the lines sloped down the page from left to right almost diagonally, as if they were loops of string lying on the paper, and someone had come along and blown them askew.

  I knew I couldn't send a letter like that, so I tore it up in little pieces and put them in my pocketbook, next to my all-purpose compact, in case the psychiatrist asked to see them.

  But of course Doctor Gordon didn't ask to see them, as I hadn't mentioned them, and I began to feel pleased at my cleverness. I thought I only need tell him what I wanted to, and that I could control the picture he had of me by hiding this and revealing that, all the while he thought he was so smart.

  The whole time I was talking, Doctor Gordon bent his head as if he were praying, and the only noise apart from the dull, flat voice was the tap, tap, tap of Doctor Gordon's pencil at the same point on the green blotter, like a stalled walking stick.

  When I had finished, Doctor Gordon lifted his head.

  "Where did you say you went to college?"

  Baffled, I told him. I didn't see where college fitted in.

  "Ah!" Doctor Gordon leaned back in his chair, staring into the air over my shoulder with a reminiscent smile.

  I thought he was going to tell me his diagnosis, and that perhaps I had judged him too hastily and too unkindly. But he only said, "I remember your college well. I was up there, during the war. They had a WAC station, didn't they? Or was it WAVES?"

  I said I didn't know.

  "Yes, a WAC station, I remember now. I was doctor for the lot, before I was sent overseas. My, they were a pretty bunch of girls."

  Doctor Gordon laughed.

  Then, in one smooth move, he rose to his feet and strolled toward me round the corner of his desk. I wasn't sure what he meant to do, so I stood up as well.

  Doctor Gordon reached for the hand that hung at my right side and shook it.

  "See you next week, then."

  The full, bosomy elms made a tunnel of shade over the yellow and red brick fronts along Commonwealth Avenue, and a trolley car was threading itself toward Boston down its slim, silver track. I waited for the trolley to pass, then crossed to the gray Chevrolet at the opposite curb.

  I could see my mother's face, anxious and sallow as a slice of lemon, peering up at me through the windshield.

  "Well, what did he say?"

  I pulled the car door shut. It didn't catch. I pushed it out and drew it in again with a dull slam.

  "He said he'll see me next week."

  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 w
aist, 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 corner 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 simple-minded 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.