The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

r?" Joan said.

Loubelle and Mrs. Savage drifted over, and pretending I knew what it was all about, I moved to the piano with them.

The magazine photograph showed a girl in a strapless evening dress of fuzzy white stuff, grinning fit to split, with a whole lot of boys bending in around her. The girl was holding a glass full of a transparent drink and seemed to have her eyes fixed over my shoulder on something that stood behind me, a little to my left. A faint breath fanned the back of my neck. I wheeled round.

The night nurse had come in, unnoticed, on her soft rubber soles.

"No kidding," she said, "is that really you?"

"No, it's not me. Joan's quite mistaken. It's somebody else."

"Oh, say it's you!" DeeDee cried.

But I pretended I didn't hear her and turned away.

Then Loubelle begged the nurse to make a fourth at bridge, and I drew up a chair to watch, although I didn't know the first thing about bridge, because I hadn't had time to pick it up at college, the way all the wealthy girls did.

I stared at the flat poker faces of the kings and jacks and queens and listened to the nurse talking about her hard life.

"You ladies don't know what it is, holding down two jobs," she said. "Nights I'm over here, watching you. . . ."

Loubelle giggled. "Oh, we're good. We're the best of the lot, and you know it."

"Oh, you're all right." The nurse passed round a packet of spearmint gum, then unfolded a pink strap from its tinfoil wrapper herself. "You're all right, it's those boobies at the state place that worry me off my feet."

"Do you work in both places then?" I asked with sudden interest.

"You bet." The nurse gave me a straight look, and I could see she thought I had no business in Belsize at all. "You wouldn't like it over there one bit, Lady Jane."

I found it strange that the nurse should call me Lady Jane when she knew what my name was perfectly well.

"Why?" I persisted.

"Oh, it's not a nice place, like this. This is a regular country club. Over there they've got nothing. No OT to talk of, no walks. . . ."

"Why haven't they got walks?"

"Not enough em-ploy-ees." The nurse scooped in a trick and Loubelle groaned. "Believe me, ladies, when I collect enough do-re-mi to buy me a car, I'm clearing out."

"Will you clear out of here, too?" Joan wanted to know.

"You bet. Only private cases from then on. When I feel like it. . . ."

But I'd stopped listening.

I felt the nurse had been instructed to show me my alternatives. Either I got better, or I fell, down, down, like a burning, then burnt-out star, from Belsize, to Caplan, to Wymark and finally, after Doctor Nolan and Mrs. Guinea had given me up, to the state place next door.

I gathered my blanket round me and pushed back my chair.

"You cold?" the nurse demanded rudely.

"Yes," I said, moving off down the hall. "I'm frozen stiff."

I woke warm and placid in my white cocoon. A shaft of pale, wintry sunlight dazzled the mirror and the glasses on the bureau and the metal doorknobs. From across the hall came the early-morning clatter of the maids in the kitchen, preparing the breakfast trays.

I heard the nurse knock on the door next to mine, at the far end of the hall. Mrs. Savage's sleepy voice boomed out, and the nurse went in to her with the jingling tray. I thought, with a mild stir of pleasure, of the steaming blue china coffee pitcher and the blue china breakfast cup and the fat blue china cream jug with the white daisies on it.

I was beginning to resign myself.

If I was going to fall, I would hang on to my small comforts, at least, as long as I possibly could.

The nurse rapped on my door and, without waiting for an answer, breezed in.

It was a new nurse--they were always changing--with a lean, sand-colored face and sandy hair, and large freckles polka-dotting her bony nose. For some reason the sight of this nurse made me sick at heart, and it was only as she strode across the room to snap up the green blind that I realized part of her strangeness came from being empty-handed.

I opened my mouth to ask for my breakfast tray, but silenced myself immediately. The nurse would be mistaking me for somebody else. New nurses often did that. Somebody in Belsize must be having shock treatments, unknown to me, and the nurse had, quite understandably, confused me with her.

I waited until the nurse had made her little circuit of my room, patting, straightening, arranging, and taken the next tray in to Loubelle one door farther down the hall.

Then I shoved my feet into my slippers, dragging my blanket with me, for the morning was bright, but very cold, and crossed quickly to the kitchen. The pink-uniformed maid was filling a row of blue china coffee pitchers from a great, battered kettle on the stove.

I looked with love at the lineup of waiting trays--the white paper napkins, folded in their crisp, isosceles triangles, each under the anchor of its silver fork, the pale domes of soft-boiled eggs in the blue egg cups, the scalloped glass shells of orange marmalade. All I had to do was reach out and claim my tray, and the world would be perfectly normal.

"There's been a mistake," I told the maid, leaning over the counter and speaking in a low, confidential tone. "The new nurse forgot to bring in my breakfast tray today."

I managed a bright smile, to show there were no hard feelings.

"What's the name?"

"Greenwood. Esther Greenwood."

"Greenwood, Greenwood, Greenwood." The maid's warty index finger slid down the list of names of the patients in Belsize tacked up on the kitchen wall. "Greenwood, no breakfast today."

I caught the rim of her counter with both hands.

"There must be a mistake. Are you sure it's Greenwood?"

"Greenwood," the maid said decisively as the nurse came in.

The nurse looked questioningly from me to the maid.

"Miss Greenwood wanted her tray," the maid said, avoiding my eyes.

"Oh," the nurse smiled at me, "you'll be getting your tray later on this morning, Miss Greenwood, You . . ."

But I didn't wait to hear what the nurse said. I strode blindly out into the hall, not to my room, because that was where they would come to get me, but to the alcove, greatly inferior to the alcove at Caplan, but an alcove, nevertheless, in a quiet corner of the hall, where Joan and Loubelle and DeeDee and Mrs. Savage would not come.

I curled up in the far corner of the alcove with the blanket over my head. It wasn't the shock treatment that struck me, so much as the bare-faced treachery of Doctor Nolan. I liked Doctor Nolan, I loved her, I had given her my trust on a platter and told her everything, and she had promised, faithfully, to warn me ahead of time if ever I had to have another shock treatment.

If she had told me the night before I would have lain awake all night, of course, full of dread and foreboding, but by morning I would have been composed and ready. I would have gone down the hall between two nurses, past DeeDee and Loubelle and Mrs. Savage and Joan, with dignity, like a person coolly resigned to execution.

The nurse bent over me and called my name.

I pulled away and crouched farther into the corner. The nurse disappeared. I knew she would return, in a minute, with two burly men attendants, and they would bear me, howling and hitting, past the smiling audience now gathered in the lounge.

Doctor Nolan put her arm around me and hugged me like a mother.

"You said you'd tell me!" I shouted at her through the dishevelled blanket.

"But I am telling you," Doctor Nolan said. "I've come specially early to tell you, and I'm taking you over myself."

I peered at her through swollen lids. "Why didn't you tell me last night?"

"I only thought it would keep you awake. If I'd known . . ."

"You said you'd tell me."

"Listen, Esther," Doctor Nolan said. "I'm going over with you. I'll be there the whole time, so everything will happen right, the way I promised. I'll be there when you wake up, and I'll bring you back again."

I looked at her. She seemed very upset.

I waited a minute. Then I said, "Promise you'll be there."

"I promise."

Doctor Nolan took out a white handkerchief and wiped my face. Then she hooked her arm in my arm, like an old friend, and helped me up, and we started down the hall. My blanket tangled about my feet, so I let it drop, but Doctor Nolan didn't seem to notice. We passed Joan, coming out of her room, and I gave her a meaning, disdainful smile, and she ducked back and waited until we had gone by.

Then Doctor Nolan unlocked a door at the end of the hall and led me down a flight of stairs into the mysterious basement corridors that linked, in an elaborate network of tunnels and burrows, all the various buildings of the hospital.

The walls were bright, white lavatory tile with bald bulbs set at intervals in the black ceiling. Stretchers and wheelchairs were beached here and there against the hissing, knocking pipes that ran and branched in an intricate nervous system along the glittering walls. I hung on to Doctor Nolan's arm like death, and every so often she gave me an encouraging squeeze.

Finally, we stopped at a green door with Electrotherapy printed on it in black letters. I held back, and Doctor Nolan waited. Then I said, "Let's get it over with," and we went in.

The only people in the waiting room besides Doctor Nolan and me were a pallid man in a shabby maroon bathrobe and his accompanying nurse.

"Do you want to sit down?" Doctor Nolan pointed at a wooden bench, but my legs felt full of heaviness, and I thought how hard it would be to hoist myself from a sitting position when the shock treatment people came in.

"I'd rather stand."

At last a tall, cadaverous woman in a white smock entered the room from an inner door. I thought that she would go up and take the man in the maroon bathrobe, as he was first, so I was surprised when she came toward me.

"Good morning, Doctor Nolan," the woman said, putting her arm around my shoulders. "Is this Esther?"

"Yes, Miss Huey. Esther, this is Miss Huey, she'll take good care of you. I've told her about you."

I thought the woman must be seven feet tall. She bent over me in a kind way, and I could see that her face, with the buck teeth protruding in the center, had at one time been badly pitted with acne. It looked like maps of the craters on the moon.

"I think we can take you right away, Esther," Miss Huey said. "Mr. Anderson won't mind waiting, will you, Mr. Anderson?"

Mr. Anderson didn't say a word, so with Miss Huey's arm around my shoulder, and Doctor Nolan following, I moved into the next room.

Through the slits of my eyes, which I didn't dare open too far, lest the full view strike me dead, I saw the high bed with its white, drumtight sheet, and the machine behind the bed, and the masked person--I couldn't tell whether it was a man or a woman--behind the machine, and other masked people flanking the bed on both sides.

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.





18


"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. It 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, a