The Bell Jar

by Sylvia Plath

By nine in the morning the fake, country-wet freshness that somehow seeped in overnight evaporated like the tail end of a sweet dream.

Doreen wasn’t saying a word, she only toyed with her cork placemat and eventually lit a cigarette, but the man didn’t seem to mind. He kept staring at her the way people stare at the great white macaw in the zoo, waiting for it to say something human.

I certainly learned a lot of things I never would have learned otherwise this way, and even when they surprised me or made me sick I never let on, but pretended that’s the way I knew things were all the time.

The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence.

“Don’t let the wicked city get you down.”

There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.

It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no farther.

I decided to expect nothing from Buddy Willard. If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.

I felt dull and flat and full of shattered visions.

“You oughtn’t to see this,” Will muttered in my ear. “You’ll never want to have a baby if you do. They oughtn’t to let women watch. It’ll be the end of the human race.”

I thought it sounded just like the sort of drug a man would invent. Here was a woman in terrible pain, obviously feeling every bit of it or she wouldn’t groan like that, and she would go straight home and start another baby, because the drug would make her forget how bad the pain had been, when all the time, in some secret part of her, that long, blind, doorless and windowless corridor of pain was waiting to open up and shut her in again.

After that something in me just froze up.

The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way.

I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

I would catch sight of some flawless man off in the distance, but as soon as he moved closer I immediately saw he wouldn’t do at all.

And I knew that in spite of all the roses and kisses and restaurant dinners a man showered on a woman before he married her, what he secretly wanted when the wedding service ended was for her to flatten out underneath his feet like Mrs. Willard’s kitchen mat.

Buddy put his hand on mine. “Let me fly with you.”

It never occurred to me to say no.

She stared at her reflection in the glossed shop windows as if to make sure, moment by moment, that she continued to exist.

lucky

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.

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

I wondered what terrible thing it was that I had done.

The more hopeless you were, the further away they hid you.

No matter how much you knelt and prayed, you still had to eat three meals a day and have a job and live in the world.

“How are you?” my brother said. I looked my mother in the eye. “The same,” I said.

I knew I should be grateful to Mrs. Guinea, only I couldn’t feel a thing. If Mrs. Guinea had given me a ticket to Europe, or a round-the-world cruise, it wouldn’t have made one scrap of difference to me, because wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.

“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.”

To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.

Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind snow, should numb and cover them. But they were part of me. They were my landscape.

The sun, emerged from its gray shrouds of cloud, shone with a summer brilliance on the untouched slopes.

as if the usual order of the world had shifted slightly, and entered a new phase.

I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.