‘Sure.’ Myra’s hands were uncomfortably wet and gritty, even sore, from her efforts with the can. Taking a kleenex from her purse, she dabbed at her palms. From the back steps of the house she glanced over at Alison, framed by the greenery around the wading pool. ‘What’s in that can, anyway?’ With a small beech twig, Alison was prodding the stomach of the sleepy cocker puppy. ‘It’s heavy as lead.’
‘Oh,’ Cicely shrugged and gave Millicent a little jounce in her arms, ‘sand from the sandbox and water from the wading pool, I guess.’
*
The interior of the Franklins’ house smelled of varnish and turpentine, and the white-painted walk gave off a surgical light. An upright piano, a few armchairs upholstered in vague pastels, and a mauve sofa stood, desolate as rocks on a prairie, on the bare, freshly-shellacked floor of the living-room. The linoleum in the dining-room, playroom and kitchen, patterned with inordinately large black and white squares, suggested a modernized Dutch painting—bereft, however, of the umber and ocher patinas of polished wood, the pewter and brass highlights, and the benevolent pear and cello shapes which enrich the interiors of a Vermeer.
Cicely opened the icebox and took out a frost-covered can of lemonade concentrate. ‘Do you mind?’ She handed Myra a can-opener. ‘I’ll just run up and change Millicent.’
While Cicely was upstairs, Myra opened the can, poured the contents into an aluminum pitcher, and measured four cans of cold water into the lemonade base, stirring the mixture with a spoon she found in the sink. The sunlight glancing off the white enamel and chrome surfaces of the kitchen appliances made her feel dazed, far off.
‘All set?’ Cicely chirruped from the doorway. Millicent beamed in her arms, dressed in a clean pair of seersucker pants, exactly like the pink ones, only blue.
Carrying the aluminum pitcher of lemonade and four red plastic cups, Myra drifted after Cicely and Millicent toward the little oasis of chairs in the dark shade of the beech tree.
‘Do you want to pour?’ Cicely set Millicent on the lawn and dropped into her canvas chair. Alison wandered over to them from the wading pool, her short, sandy hair slicked back like an otter’s.
‘Oh, I’ll let you do it.’ Myra handed Cicely the pitcher and the cups. With a curious, nerveless languor, she watched Cicely start to pour out the lemonade. The tree leaves, and the sun falling through the leaves in long pencils of light, went out of focus for a moment in a dappled green-and-gold blur. Then a quick flash caught her eye.
Alison had, in plain view, given Millicent a sudden, rough shove, tumbling her to the ground. There was a second of silence, expectant as the brief interval between the flash of lightning and the thunder-crack, and then Millicent howled from the grass.
Cicely placed the pitcher and the cup she was filling on the ground beside her chair, got up, and lifted the sobbing Millicent to her lap. ‘Alison, you’ve made a mistake.’ Cicely’s tone was remarkably cool, Myra thought. ‘You know we don’t hit people in this house.’
Alison, wary, a small foxy creature at bay, stood her ground, her eyes flickering from Myra to Cicely and back again. ‘She wanted to sit in my chair.’
‘We don’t hit people in any case.’ Cicely smoothed Millicent’s hair. When the child’s sobs had quietened, she set Millicent in one of the small wicker chairs and poured her a cup of lemonade. Alison, without a word, stared at Myra while waiting her turn, took the cup Cicely gave her, and returned to her chair. Her steady look made Myra uneasy. She felt the child expected something of her, some sign, some pledge.
The silence deepened, punctuated only by the irregular sound of four people sipping lemonade—the children, loud and unself-conscious, the grownups more discreet. Except for this tenuous noise, the silence surrounded them like a sea, lapping at the solid edges of the afternoon. At any moment, Myra thought, the four of them might become fixed, forever speechless and two-dimensional—waxlike figures in a faded photograph. ‘Has Hiram had any patients yet?’ With an effort she broke the gathered stillness.
‘Oh, Hiram’s joined the charity ward in the hospital for the month of August.’ Cicely tilted her cup of lemonade and drained it. ‘Of course, he doesn’t get paid for ward cases, but he’s had four deliveries already this month.’
‘Four!’ A vision of babies in pink and blue bassinets loomed in Myra’s mind—three hundred and sixty-five babies in three hundred and sixty-five bassinets—each baby a perfect replica of the others, all lined up in a ghostly alley of diminishing perspective between two mirrors. ‘Why, that’s about one a day!’
‘That’s about the average for this town. Hiram hasn’t really had any patients of his own yet, any private patients. Still, a woman walked into his office yesterday, out of the blue. She asked for an appointment for today. I don’t know how she heard of Hiram, maybe from the announcement in the paper.’
‘What sort of anesthesia does Hiram use?’ Myra asked suddenly.
‘Well, that depends …’ Cicely’s own frankness demanded that she answer, but she was withdrawing, Myra could tell, into that blithe evasiveness of so many mothers when questioned point-blank about childbirth by childless women.
‘I just meant’, Myra said hastily, ‘there seem to be different schools of thought. I’ve heard some mothers talk about caudal anesthesia. Something that deadens the pain, but still lets you see the baby born …?’
‘Caudal anesthesia.’ Cicely sounded a trifle scornful. ‘That’s what Dr Richter uses in all his cases. That’s why he’s so popular.’
Myra started to laugh, but behind the sheen of her glasses Cicely looked dubious. ‘It only seems so amusing,’ Myra explained, ‘to raise your popularity rating by the kind of anesthesia you use.’ Still, Cicely did not appear to see the joke.
‘Perhaps,’ Myra dropped her voice, with a cautious glance at Alison who was sucking up the dregs of her lemonade, ‘perhaps I’m so interested because I had an experience myself, once, years ago, seeing a baby born.’
Cicely’s eyebrows rose. ‘How ever did you do that? Was it a relative? They don’t let people, you know …’
‘No relative.’ Myra gave Cicely a slight, wry smile. ‘It happened in my … salad days. In college, when I was dating medical students, I went to lectures on sickle-cell anemia, watched them cut up cadavers. Oh, I was a regular Florence Nightingale.’
Alison got up, at this point, and went over to the sandbox just behind Myra’s chair. Millicent was kneeling by the wading pool, swirling a fallen beech leaf in the water.
‘That’s how I got into the hospital to watch a delivery in the charity ward. Camouflaged in a white uniform and a white mask, of course. Actually, it must have been about the time I knew you, when you were a senior and I was a sophomore.’ As she spoke, hearing her own voice, stilted, distant, as on an old record, Myra remembered with sudden clarity the blind, mushroom-colored embryos in the jars of preserving fluid, and the four leather-skinned cadavers, black as burnt turkey, on the dissecting tables. She shuddered, touched by a keen chill in spite of the hot afternoon. ‘This woman had some drug, invented by a man, I suppose, as all those drugs are. It didn’t stop her feeling the pain, but made her forget it right afterwards.’
‘There are lots of drugs like that,’ Cicely said. ‘You forget the pain in a sort of twilight sleep.’
Myra wondered how Cicely could be so calm about forgetting pain. Although erased from the mind’s surface, the pain was there, somewhere, cut indelibly into one’s quick—an empty, doorless, windowless corridor of pain. And then to be deceived by the waters of Lethe into coming back again, in all innocence, to conceive child after child! It was barbarous. It was a fraud dreamed up by men to continue the human race; reason enough for a woman to refuse childbearing altogether. ‘Well,’ Myra said, ‘this woman was yelling a good deal, and moaning. That kind of thing leaves its impression. They had to cut into her, I remember. There seemed to be a great deal of blood …’
From the sandbox Alison’s voice began to rise, now, in a shrill
monologue, but Myra, intent on her own story did not bother to distinguish the child’s words. ‘The third-year man delivering the baby kept saying “I’m going to drop it, I’m going to drop it” in a kind of Biblical chant …’ Myra paused, staring through the red-dark scrim of beech leaves without seeing them, acting out once again her part in the remembered play, a part after which all other parts had somehow dwindled, palled.
‘… and she goes upstairs in the attic,’ Alison was saying. ‘She gets splinters in her feet.’ Myra checked a sudden impulse to slap the child. Then the words caught her interest. ‘She pokes people’s eyes on the sidewalk. She pulls off their dresses. She gets diarrhoea in the night …’
‘Alison!’ Cicely yelped. ‘You be quiet now! You know better than that.’
‘Just who’s she talking about?’ Myra let her story of the blue baby lapse back, unfinished, into the obscure fathoms of memory from which it had risen. ‘Some neighborhood child?’
‘Oh,’ Cicely said with some irritation, ‘it’s her doll.’
‘Sweetie Pie!’ Alison shouted.
‘And what else does Sweetie Pie do?’ Myra asked, countering Cicely’s move to quiet the child. ‘I used to have a doll myself.’
‘She climbs on the roof.’ Alison jumped into her wicker chair and squatted on the seat, frog-fashion. ‘She knocks down the gutter men.’
‘Gutter men?’
‘The painters took the gutters off the porch roof this morning,’ Cicely explained. ‘Tell Mrs Wardle,’ she ordered Alison in the clear, socially constructive tones of a Unitarian Sunday School teacher, ‘how you helped the painters this morning.’
Alison paused, fingering her bare toes. ‘I packed their things up. One was named Neal. One was named Jocko.’
‘I don’t know what I’m going to do with Mr Grooby,’ Cicely turned to Myra, pointedly leaving Alison out. ‘This morning he came to start painting at six-thirty.’
‘Six-thirty!’ Myra said. ‘Why on earth?’
‘And left at ten-thirty. He’s got a heart condition, so he works all morning and fishes all afternoon. Each morning he’s come earlier and earlier. Eight-thirty was all right, but six-thirty! I don’t know what it’ll be tomorrow.’
‘Sun-up, at that rate,’ Myra said. ‘I guess,’ she added thoughtlessly, ‘you must be kept pretty much occupied just being a mother.’ She hadn’t meant to say ‘just’, which sounded disparaging, but there it was. Lately Myra had started wondering about babies. Young as she was, and happily married, she felt something of a maiden aunt among the children of her relatives and friends. Lately, too, she had taken to tearing off low-hanging leaves or tall grass-heads with a kind of wanton energy, and to twisting her paper napkin into compact pellets at the table, something she hadn’t done since childhood.
‘Morning, noon, and night,’ Cicely said with an air, Myra thought, of noble martyrdom. ‘Morning, noon, and night.’
Myra glanced at her watch. It was close to four-thirty. ‘I guess,’ she said, ‘I ought to be running along now.’ She would be staying on till supper-time, if she wasn’t careful, out of sheer inertia.
‘No need to go,’ Cicely said, but she rose from her chair, idly dusting off the seat of her Bermudas.
Myra tried to think of a good excuse to see her to the gate. It was too early to be preparing dinner, too late to plead last-minute shopping downtown. Her life all at once seemed excessively spacious. ‘I must go, anyway.’
As Myra turned, she noticed a dark blue car pulling up outside the unpainted picket gate that closed the driveway and back yard off from the street. It would be Hiram Franklin, whom Myra had met only once or twice eight years ago at college. Already Cicely and the children were receding from her, behind the glass window of some heartless nonstop express, secure in their rosily-lit, plush compartment, arranging themselves in loving attitudes about the young man of medium height now unlatching the gate. Millicent started, with uneven steps, toward her father. ‘Daddy!’ Alison shouted from the sandbox. Hiram walked toward the women. As he approached, Millicent caught him about the knees, and Hiram bent to pick her up. ‘She’s her daddy’s girl,’ Cicely said.
Myra waited, the smile stiffening on her face as it did when she had to hold still for a photographer. Hiram looked very young to be an obstetrician. His eyes, a hard, clear blue, bordered by black lashes, gave him a slightly glacial expression.
‘Myra Smith Wardle, Hiram,’ Cicely said. ‘An old college friend you should remember.’
Hiram Franklin nodded at Myra. ‘Whom I should remember, but do not, unfortunately.’ His words were less an apology for forgetfulness than a firm denial of any prior acquaintance.
‘I’m just going.’ Cicely’s alliance with Hiram, powerful and immediate, shut out everything else. Some women were like that with their husbands, Myra thought—overly possessive, not wishing to share them, even for a moment. The Franklins would be wanting to talk about family matters, about the woman who had made the office appointment out of the blue for that afternoon. ‘Bye now.’
‘Bye, Myra. Thanks for coming.’ Cicely made no move to accompany Myra to the gate. ‘Bring Timothy over sometime.’
‘I will,’ Myra called back from halfway across the lawn. ‘If I can ever wean Timothy from the chisel.’
At last the bunched shrubbery at the corner of the house shut out the Franklins’ family portrait of togetherness. Myra felt the late afternoon heat wearing into the crown of her head and into her back. Then she heard footsteps thudding behind her.
‘Where’s your car?’ Alison stood on the ragged grass-strip between sidewalk and the street, detached, wilfully or for some other reason, from the family group in the yard.
‘I don’t have one. Not with me.’ Myra paused. The street and sidewalk were deserted. With an odd sense of entering into a conspiracy with the child, she bent toward Alison and dropped her voice to a whisper. ‘Alison,’ she said, ‘what do you do to Sweetie Pie when she is very bad?’
Alison scuffed her bare heel in the weed-grown grass and looked up at Myra with a strange, almost shy, little smile. ‘I hit her.’ She hesitated, waiting for Myra’s response.
‘Fine,’ Myra said. ‘You hit her. What else?’
‘I throw her up in the sky,’ Alison said, her voice taking on a faster rhythm. ‘I knock her down. I spank her and spank her. I bang her eyes in.’
Myra straightened. A dull ache started at the base of her spine, as if a bone, once broken and mended, were throbbing into hurt again. ‘Good,’ she said, wondering why she felt at such a loss. ‘Good,’ she repeated, with little heart, ‘You keep on doing that.’
Myra left Alison standing in the grass and began to walk up the long, sun-dazzled street toward the bus stop. She turned only once, and saw the child, small as a doll in the distance, still watching her. But her own hands hung listless and empty at her sides, like hands of wax, and she did not wave.
About the Author
Sylvia Plath (1932–63) was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and studied at Smith College. In 1955 she went to Cambridge University on a Fulbright scholarship, where she met and later married Ted Hughes. She published one collection of poems in her lifetime, The Colossus (1960), and a novel, The Bell Jar (1963). Her Collected Poems, which contains her poetry written from 1956 until her death, was published in 1981 and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.
By the Same Author
poetry
THE COLOSSUS
ARIEL
WINTER TREES
CROSSING THE WATER
Edited by Ted Hughes
COLLECTED POEMS
SELECTED POEMS
fiction
THE BELL JAR
for children
THE BED BOOK
THE IT-DOESN’T-MATTER SUIT
biography
LETTERS HOME: CORRESPONDENCE 1950–1963
Edited by Aurelia Schober Plath
THE JOURNALS OF SYLVIA PLATH 1950–1962
Edited by Karen V.
Kukil
Copyright
First published in 1977
by Faber and Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
This ebook edition first published in 2013
All rights reserved
© Sylvia Plath, 1952, 1953, 1954, 1955, 1956, 1957, 1960, 1961, 1962, 1963
Introduction and this collection © Ted Hughes, 1977, 1979
The right of Sylvia Plath to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–30914–6
Sylvia Plath, Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: And Other Prose Writings
(Series: # )
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