The Bell Jar

by Sylvia Plath

  "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.

  Whether she knew it or not, Philomena Guinea was buying my freedom.

  "What I hate is the thought of being under a man's thumb," I had told Doctor Nolan. "A man doesn't have a worry in the world, while I've got a baby hanging over my head like a big stick, to keep me in line."

  "Would you act differently if you didn't have to worry about a baby?"

  "Yes," I said, "but . . ." and I told Doctor Nolan about the married woman lawyer and her Defense of Chastity.

  Doctor Nolan waited until I was finished. Then she burst out laughing. "Propaganda!" she said, and scribbled the name and address of this doctor on a prescription pad.

  I leafed nervously through an issue of Baby Talk. The fat, bright faces of babies beamed up at me, page after page--bald babies, chocolate-colored babies, Eisenhower-faced babies, babies rolling over for the first time, babies reaching for rattles, babies eating their first spoonful of solid food, babies doing all the little tricky things it takes to grow up, step by step, into an anxious and unsettling world.

  I smelt a mingling of Pablum and sour milk and salt-cod-stinky diapers and felt sorrowful and tender. How easy having babies seemed to the women around me! Why was I so unmaternal and apart? Why couldn't I dream of devoting myself to baby after fat puling baby like Dodo Conway?

  If I had to wait on a baby all day, I would go mad.

  I looked at the baby in the lap of the woman opposite. I had no idea how old it was, I never did, with babies--for all I knew it could talk a blue streak and had twenty teeth behind its pursed, pink lips. It held its little wobbly head up on its shoulders--it didn't seem to have a neck--and observed me with a wise, Platonic expression.

  The baby's mother smiled and smiled, holding that baby as if it were the first wonder of the world. I watched the mother and the baby for some clue to their mutual satisfaction, but before I had discovered anything, the doctor called me in.

  "You'd like a fitting," he said cheerfully, and I thought with relief that he wasn't the sort of doctor to ask awkward questions. I had toyed with the idea of telling him I planned to be married to a sailor as soon as his ship docked at the Charlestown Navy Yard, and the reason I didn't have an engagement ring was because we were too poor, but at the last moment I rejected that appealing story and simply said "Yes."

  I climbed up on the examination table, thinking: "I am climbing to freedom, freedom from fear, freedom from marrying the wrong person, like Buddy Willard, just because of sex, freedom from the Florence Crittenden Homes where all the poor girls go who should have been fitted out like me, because what they did, they would do anyway, regardless. . . ."

  As I rode back to the asylum with my box in the plain brown paper wrapper on my lap I might have been Mrs. Anybody coming back from a day in town with a Schrafft's cake for her maiden aunt or a Filene's Basement hat. Gradually the suspicion that Catholics had X-ray eyes diminished, and I grew easy. I had done well by my shopping privileges, I thought.

  I was my own woman.

  The next step was to find the proper sort of man.

  19

  "I'm going to be a psychiatrist."

  Joan spoke with her usual breathy enthusiasm. We were drinking apple cider in the Belsize lounge.

  "Oh," I said dryly, "that's nice."

  "I've had a long talk with Doctor Quinn, and she thinks it's perfectly possible." Doctor Quinn was Joan's psychiatrist, a bright, shrewd, single lady, and I often thought if I had been assigned to Doctor Quinn I would be still in Caplan or, more probably, Wymark. Doctor Quinn had an abstract quality that appealed to Joan, but it gave me the polar chills.

  Joan chattered on about Egos and Ids, and I turned my mind to something else, to the brown, unwrapped package in my bottom drawer. I never talked about Egos and Ids with Doctor Nolan. I didn't know just what I talked about really.

  ". . . I'm going to live out, now."

  I tuned in on Joan then. "Where?" I demanded, trying to hide my envy.

  Doctor Nolan said my college would take me back for the second semester, on her recommendation and Philomena Guinea's scholarship, but as the doctors vetoed my living with my mother in the interim, I was staying on at the asylum until the winter term began.

  Even so, I felt it unfair of Joan to beat me through the gates.

  "Where?" I persisted. "They're not letting you live on your own, are they?" Joan had only that week been given town privileges again.

  "Oh no, of course not. I'm living in Cambridge with Nurse Kennedy. Her roommate's just got married, and she needs someone to share the apartment."

  "Cheers." I raised my apple cider glass, and we clinked. In spite of my profound reservations, I thought I would always treasure Joan. It was as if we had been forced together by some overwhelming circumstance, like war or plague, and shared a world of our own. "When are you leaving?"

  "On the first of the month."

  "Nice."

  Joan grew wistful. "You'll come visit me, won't you, Esther?"

  "Of course."

  But I thought, "Not likely."

  "It hurts," I said. "Is it supposed to hurt?"

  Irwin didn't say anything. Then he said, "Sometimes it hurts."

  I had met Irwin on the steps of the Widener Library. I was standing at th
e top of the long flight, overlooking the red brick buildings that walled the snow-filled quad and preparing to catch the trolley back to the asylum, when a tall young man with a rather ugly and bespectacled, but intelligent face, came up and said, "Could you please tell me the time?"

  I glanced at my watch. "Five past four."

  Then the man shifted his arms around the load of books he was carrying before him like a dinner tray and revealed a bony wrist.

  "Why, you've a watch yourself!"

  The man looked ruefully at his watch. He lifted it and shook it by his ear. "Doesn't work." He smiled engagingly. "Where are you going?"

  I was about to say, "Back to the asylum," but the man looked promising, so I changed my mind. "Home."

  "Would you like some coffee first?"

  I hesitated. I was due at the asylum for supper and I didn't want to be late so close to being signed out of there for good.

  "A very small cup of coffee?"

  I decided to practice my new, normal personality on this man who, in the course of my hesitations, told me his name was Irwin and that he was a very well-paid professor of mathematics, so I said, "All right," and, matching my stride to Irwin's, strolled down the long, ice-encrusted flight at his side.

  It was only after seeing Irwin's study that I decided to seduce him.

  Irwin lived in a murky, comfortable basement apartment in one of the rundown streets of outer Cambridge and drove me there--for a beer, he said--after three cups of bitter coffee in a student cafe. We sat in his study on stuffed brown leather chairs, surrounded by stacks of dusty, incomprehensible books with huge formulas inset artistically on the page like poems.

  While I was sipping my first glass of beer--I have never really cared for cold beer in midwinter, but I accepted the glass to have something solid to hold on to--the doorbell rang.

  Irwin seemed embarrassed. "I think it may be a lady."

  Irwin had a queer, old-world habit of calling women ladies.

  "Fine, fine," I gestured largely. "Bring her in."

  Irwin shook his head. "You would upset her."

  I smiled into my amber cylinder of cold beer.

  The doorbell rang again with a peremptory jab. Irwin sighed and rose to answer it. The minute he disappeared, I whipped into the bathroom and, concealed behind the dirty, aluminum-colored Venetian blind, watched Irwin's monkish face appear in the door crack.

  A large, bosomy Slavic lady in a bulky sweater of natural sheep's wool, purple slacks, high-heeled black overshoes with Persian lamb cuffs and a matching toque, puffed white, inaudible words into the wintry air. Irwin's voice drifted back to me through the chilly hall.

  "I'm sorry, Olga . . . I'm working, Olga . . . no, I don't think so, Olga," all the while the lady's red mouth moved, and the words, translated to white smoke, floated up among the branches of the naked lilac by the door. Then, finally, "Perhaps Olga . . . good-bye, Olga."

  I admired the immense, steppelike expanse of the lady's wool-clad bosom as she retreated a few inches from my eye, down the creaking wooden stair, a sort of Siberian bitterness on her vivid lips.

  "I suppose you have lots and lots of affairs in Cambridge," I told Irwin cheerily, as I struck a snail with a pin in one of Cambridge's determinedly French restaurants.

  "I seem," Irwin admitted with a small, modest smile, "to get on with the ladies."

  I picked up my empty snail shell and drank the herb-green juice. I had no idea if this was proper, but after months of wholesome, dull asylum diet, I was greedy for butter.

  I had called Doctor Nolan from a pay phone at the restaurant and asked for permission to stay overnight in Cambridge with Joan. Of course, I had no idea whether Irwin would invite me back to his apartment after dinner or not, but I thought his dismissal of the Slavic lady--another professor's wife--looked promising.

  I tipped back my head and poured down a glass of Nuits-St.-Georges.

  "You do like wine," Irwin observed.

  "Only Nuits-St.-Georges. I imagine him . . . with the dragon . . ."

  Irwin reached for my hand.

  I felt the first man I slept with must be intelligent, so I would respect him. Irwin was a full professor at twenty-six and had the pale, hairless skin of a boy genius. I also needed somebody quite experienced to make up for my lack of it, and Irwin's ladies reassured me on this head. Then, to be on the safe side, I wanted somebody I didn't know and wouldn't go on knowing--a kind of impersonal, priestlike official, as in the tales of tribal rites.

  By the end of the evening I had no doubts about Irwin whatsoever.

  Ever since I'd learned about the corruption of Buddy Willard my virginity weighed like a millstone around my neck. It had been of such enormous importance to me for so long that my habit was to defend it at all costs. I had been defending it for five years and I was sick of it.

  It was only as Irwin swung me into his arms, back at the apartment, and carried me, wine-dazed and limp, into the pitch-black bedroom, that I murmured, "You know, Irwin, I think I ought to tell you, I'm a virgin."

  Irwin laughed and flung me down on the bed.

  A few minutes later an exclamation of surprise revealed that Irwin hadn't really believed me. I thought how lucky it was I had started practicing birth control during the day, because in my winey state that night I would never have bothered to perform the delicate and necessary operation. I lay, rapt and naked, on Irwin's rough blanket, waiting for the miraculous change to make itself felt.

  But all I felt was sharp, startlingly bad pain.

  "It hurts," I said. "Is it supposed to hurt?"

  Irwin didn't say anything. Then he said, "Sometimes it hurts."

  After a little while Irwin got up and went into the bathroom, and I heard the rushing of shower water. I wasn't sure if Irwin had done what he planned to do, or if my virginity had obstructed him in some way. I wanted to ask him if I was still a virgin, but I felt too unsettled. A warm liquid was seeping out between my legs. Tentatively, I reached down and touched it.

  When I held my hand up to the light streaming in from the bathroom, my fingertips looked black.

  "Irwin," I said nervously, "bring me a towel."

  Irwin strolled back, a bathtowel knotted around his waist, and tossed me a second, smaller towel. I pushed the towel between my legs and pulled it away almost immediately. It was half black with blood.

  "I'm bleeding!" I announced, sitting up with a start.

  "Oh, that often happens," Irwin reassured me. "You'll be all right."

  Then the stories of blood-stained bridal sheets and capsules of red ink bestowed on already deflowered brides floated back to me. I wondered how much I would bleed, and lay down, nursing the towel. It occurred to me that the blood was my answer. I couldn't possibly be a virgin any more. I smiled into the dark. I felt part of a great tradition.

  Surreptitiously, I applied a fresh section of white towel to my wound, thinking that as soon as the bleeding stopped, I would take the late trolley back to the asylum. I wanted to brood over my new condition in perfect peace. But the towel came away black and dripping.

  "I . . . think I better go home," I said faintly.

  "Surely not so soon."

  "Yes, I think I better."

  I asked if I could borrow Irwin's towel and packed it between my thighs as a bandage. Then I pulled on my sweaty clothes. Irwin offered to drive me home, but I didn't see how I could let him drive me to the asylum, so I dug in my pocketbook for Joan's address. Irwin knew the street and went out to start the car. I was too worried to tell him I was still bleeding. I kept hoping every minute that it would stop.

  But as Irwin drove me through the barren, snow-banked streets I felt the warm seepage let itself through the dam of the towel and my skirt and onto the car seat.

  As we slowed, cruising by house after lit house, I thought how fortunate it was I had not discarded my virginity while living at college or at home, where such concealment would have been impossible.

  Joan opened the door with an
expression of glad surprise. Irwin kissed my hand and told Joan to take good care of me.

  I shut the door and leaned back against it, feeling the blood drain from my face in one spectacular flush.

  "Why, Esther," Joan said, "what on earth's the matter?"

  I wondered when Joan would notice the blood trickling down my legs and oozing, stickily, into each black patent leather shoe. I thought I could be dying from a bullet wound and Joan would still stare through me with her blank eyes, expecting me to ask for a cup of coffee and a sandwich.

  "Is that nurse here?"

  "No, she's on night duty at Caplan. . . ."

  "Good." I made a little bitter grin as another soak of blood let itself through the drenched padding and started the tedious journey into my shoes. "I mean . . . bad."

  "You look funny," Joan said.

  "You better get a doctor."

  "Why?"

  "Quick."

  "But . . ."

  Still she hadn't noticed anything.

  I bent down, with a brief grunt, and slipped off one of my winter-cracked black Bloomingdale shoes. I held the shoe up, before Joan's enlarged, pebbly eyes, tilted it, and watched her take in the stream of blood that cascaded onto the beige rug.

  "My God! What is it?"

  "I'm hemorrhaging."

  Joan half led, half dragged me to the sofa and made me lie down. Then she propped some pillows under my blood-stained feet. Then she stood back and demanded, "Who was that man?"

  For one crazy minute I thought Joan would refuse to call a doctor until I confessed the whole story of my evening with Irwin and that after my confession she would still refuse, as a sort of punishment. But then I realized that she honestly took my explanation at face value, that my going to bed with Irwin was utterly incomprehensible to her, and his appearance a mere prick to her pleasure at my arrival.

  "Oh somebody," I said, with a flabby gesture of dismissal. Another pulse of blood released itself and I contracted my stomach muscles in alarm. "Get a towel."

  Joan went out and came back almost immediately with a pile of towels and sheets. Like a prompt nurse, she peeled back my blood-wet clothes, drew a quick breath as she arrived at the original royal red towel, and applied a fresh bandage. I lay, trying to slow the beating of my heart, as every beat pushed forth another gush of blood.