The Bell Jar Part 12

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 think was wrong? was wrong?

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

In a dull, fiat 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 pa.s.s, 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 winds.h.i.+eld.

"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 waist, 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 Bas.e.m.e.nt.

I thought if I ever did get to Chicago, I might change my name to Elly Higginbottom for good. Then n.o.body would know I had thrown up a scholars.h.i.+p 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 comer 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 simpleminded 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.

"Could you please tell me the way to the subway?" I said to the sailor in a loud voice.

"Huh?"

"The subway that goes out to the Deer Island Prison?"

When Mrs. Willard came up I would have to pretend I was only asking the sailor directions, and didn't really know him at all.

"Take your hands off me," I said between my teeth.

"Say, Elly, what's up?"

The woman approached and pa.s.sed by without a look or a nod, and of course it wasn't Mrs. Willard. Mrs. Willard was at her cottage in the Adirondacks.

I fixed the woman's receding back with a vengeful stare.

"Say, Elly..."

"I thought it was somebody I knew," I said. "Some blasted lady from this orphan home in Chicago."

The sailor put his arm around me again.

"You mean you got no mom and dad, Elly?"

"No." I let out a tear that seemed ready. It made a little hot track down my cheek.

"Say, Elly, don't cry. This lady, was she mean to you?"

"She was...she was awful!" awful!"

The tears came in a rush, then, and while the sailor was holding me and patting them dry with a big, clean, white, linen handkerchief in the shelter of an American elm, I thought what an awful woman that lady in the brown suit had been, and how she, whether she knew it or not, was responsible for my taking the wrong turn here and the wrong path there and for everything bad that happened after that. The tears came in a rush, then, and while the sailor was holding me and patting them dry with a big, clean, white, linen handkerchief in the shelter of an American elm, I thought what an awful woman that lady in the brown suit had been, and how she, whether she knew it or not, was responsible for my taking the wrong turn here and the wrong path there and for everything bad that happened after that.

"Well, Esther, how do you feel this week?"

Doctor Gordon cradled his pencil like a slim, silver bullet.

"The same."

"The same?" He quirked an eyebrow, as if he didn't believe it.

So I told him again, in the same dull, flat voice, only it was angrier this time, because he seemed so slow to understand, how I hadn't slept for fourteen nights and how I couldn't read or write or swallow very well.

Doctor Gordon seemed unimpressed.

I dug into my pocketbook and found the sc.r.a.ps of my letter to Doreen. I took them out and let them flutter on to Doctor Gordon's immaculate green blotter. They lay there, dumb as daisy petals in a summer meadow.

"What," I said, "do you think of that?"

I thought Doctor Gordon must immediately see how bad the handwriting was, but he only said, "I think I would like to speak to your mother. Do you mind?"

"No." But I didn't like the idea of Doctor Gordon talking to my mother one bit. I thought he might tell her I should be locked up. I picked up every sc.r.a.p of my letter to Doreen, s9 Doctor Gordon couldn't piece them together and see I was planning to run away, and walked out of his office without another word.

I watched my mother grow smaller and smaller until she disappeared into the door of Doctor Gordon's office building. Then I watched her grow larger and larger as she came back to the car.

"Well?" I could tell she had been crying.

My mother didn't look at me. She started the car.

Then she said, as we glided under the cool, deep-sea shade of the elms, "Doctor Gordon doesn't think you've improved at all. He thinks you should have some shock treatments at his private hospital in Walton."

I felt a sharp stab of curiosity, as if I had just read a terrible newspaper headline about somebody else.

"Does he mean live live there?" there?"

"No," my mother said, and her chin quivered.

I thought she must be lying.

"You tell me the truth," I said, "or I'll never speak to you again."

"Don't I always tell you the truth?" my mother said, and burst into tears.

SUICIDE SAVED FROM 7-STORY LEDGE!.

After two hours on a narrow ledge seven stories above a concrete parking lot and gathered crowds, Mr. George Pollucci let himself be helped to safety through a nearby window by Sgt. Will Kilmartin of the Charles Street police force.

I cracked open a peanut from the ten-cent bag I had bought to feed the pigeons, and ate it. It taste dead, like a bit of old tree bark.

I brought the newspaper close up to my eyes to get a better view of George Pollucci's face, spotlighted like a three-quarter moon against a vague background of brick and black sky. I felt he had something important to tell me, and whatever it was might just be written on his face.

But the smudgy crags of George Pollucci's features melted away as I peered at them, and resolved themselves into a regular pattern of dark and light and medium-gray dots.

The inky-black newspaper paragraph didn't tell why Mr. Pollucci was on the ledge, or what Sgt. Kilmartin did to him when he finally got him in through the window.