The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath Read Free Book Online

grandmother drove in to bring him home for his Monday off. My
brother and I alternated going with her, and my grandfather always served
Sunday supper to my grandmother and whichever of us was along as if we were
regular club guests. He loved introducing me to special tidbits, and by the age
of nine I had developed a passionate taste for cold vichyssoise and caviar and
anchovy paste.
                    The joke was that at my wedding
my grandfather would see I had all the caviar I could eat. I was a joke because
I never intended to get married, and even if I did, my grandfather couldn’t
have afforded enough caviar unless he robbed the country club kitchen and
carried it off in a suitcase.
                    Under cover of the clinking of
water goblets and silverware and bone china, I paved my plate with chicken
slices. Then I covered the chicken slices with caviar thickly as if I were
spreading peanut butter on a piece of bread. Then I picked up the chicken
slices in my fingers one by one, rolled them so the caviar wouldn’t ooze off
and ate them.
                    I’d discovered, after a lot of
extreme apprehension about what spoons to use, that if you do something incorrect
at table with a certain arrogance, as if you knew perfectly well you were doing
it properly, you can get away with it and nobody will think you are
bad-mannered or poorly brought up. They will think you are original and very
witty.
                    I learned this trick the day Jay
Cee took me to lunch with a famous poet. He wore a horrible, lumpy, speckled
brown tweed jacket and gray pants and a red-and-blue checked open-throated
jersey in a very formal restaurant full of fountains and chandeliers, where all
the other men were dressed in dark suits and immaculate white shirts.
                    This poet ate his salad with his
fingers, leaf by leaf, while talking to me about the antithesis of nature and
art. I couldn’t take my eyes off the pale, stubby white fingers traveling back
and forth from the poet’s salad bowl to the poet’s mouth with one dripping
lettuce leaf after another. Nobody giggled or whispered rude remarks. The poet
made eating salad with your fingers seem to be the only natural and sensible
thing to do.
                    None of our magazine editors or
the Ladies) Day staff members sat anywhere near me, and Betsy seemed
sweet and friendly, she didn’t even seem to like caviar, so I grew more and
more confident. When I finished my first plate of cold chicken and caviar, I
laid out another. Then I tackled the avocado and crabmeat salad.
                    Avocados are my favorite fruit.
Every Sunday my grandfather used to bring me an avocado pear hidden at the
bottom of his briefcase under six soiled shirts and the Sunday comics. He
taught me how to eat avocados by melting grape jelly and french dressing
together in a saucepan and filling the cup of the pear with the garnet sauce. I
felt homesick for that sauce. The crabmeat tasted bland in comparison.
                    “How was the fur show?” I asked
Betsy, when I was no longer worried about competition over my caviar. I scraped
the last few salty black eggs from the dish with my soup spoon and licked it
clean.
                    “It was wonderful,” Betsy
smiled. “They showed us how to make an all-purpose neckerchief out of mink
tails and a gold chain, the sort of chain you can get an exact copy of at
Woolworth’s for a dollar ninety-eight, and Hilda nipped down to the wholesale
fur warehouses right afterward and bought a bunch of mink tails at a big
discount and dropped in at Woolworth’s and then stitched the whole thing
together coming up on the bus.”
                    I peered over at Hilda, who sat
on the other side of Betsy. Sure enough, she was wearing an expensive-looking