The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath Read Free Book Online Page A

scarf of furry tails fastened on one side by a dangling gilt chain.
                    I never really understood Hilda.
She was six feet tall, with huge, slanted green eyes and thick red lips and a
vacant, Slavic expression. She made hats. She was apprenticed to the Fashion
Editor, which set her apart from the more literary ones among us like Doreen
and Betsy and I myself, who all wrote columns, even if some of them were only
about health and beauty. I don’t know if Hilda could read, but she made
startling hats. She went to a special school for making hats in New York and
every day she wore a new hat to work, constructed by her own hands out of bits
of straw or fur or ribbon or veiling in subtle, bizarre shades.
                    “That’s amazing,” I said. “
Amazing.” I missed Doreen. She would have murmured some fine, scalding remark
about Hilda’s miraculous furpiece to cheer me up.
                    I felt very low. I had been
unmasked only that morning by Jay Cee herself and I felt now that all the
uncomfortable suspicions I had about myself were coming true, and I couldn’t
hide the truth much longer. After nineteen years of running after good marks
and prizes and grants of one sort and another, I was letting up, slowing down,
dropping clean out of the race.
                    “Why didn’t you come along to
the fur show with us?” Betsy asked. I had the impression she was
repeating herself, and that she’d asked me the same question a minute ago, only
I couldn’t have been listening. “Did you go off with Doreen?”
                    “No,” I said, “I wanted to go to
the fur show, but Jay Cee called up and made me come into the office.” That
wasn’t quite true about wanting to go to the show, but I tried to convince
myself now that it was true, so I could be really wounded about what Jay Cee
had done.
                    I told Betsy how. I had been
lying in bed that morning planning to go to the fur show. What I didn’t tell
her was that Doreen had come into my room earlier and said, “What do you want
to go to that assy show for, Lenny and I are going to Coney Island, so why
don’t you come along? Lenny can get you a nice fellow, the day’s shot to hell
anyhow with that luncheon and then the film premiere in the afternoon, so
nobody’ll miss us.”
                    For a minute I was tempted. The show certainly did
seem stupid. I have never cared for furs. What I decided to do in the end was
lie in bed as long as I wanted to and then go to Central Park and spend the day
lying in the grass, the longest grass I could find in that bald, duck-ponded
wilderness.
                    I told Doreen I would not go to
the show or the luncheon or the film premiere, but that I would not go to Coney
Island either, I would stay in bed. After Doreen left, I wondered why I
couldn’t go the whole way doing what I should any more. This made me sad and
tired. Then I wondered why I couldn’t go the whole way doing what I shouldn’t,
the way Doreen did, and this made me even sadder and more tired.
                    I didn’t know what time it was,
but I’d heard the girls bustling and calling in the hall and getting ready for
the fur show, and then I’d heard the hall go still, and as I lay on my back in
bed staring up at the blank, white ceiling the stillness seemed to grow bigger
and bigger until I felt my eardrums would burst with it. Then the phone rang.
                    I stared at the phone for a
minute. The receiver shook a bit in its bone-colored cradle, so I could tell it
was really ringing. I thought I might have given my phone number to somebody at
a dance or a party and then forgotten about it. I lifted the receiver and spoke
in a husky, receptive voice.