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

“Hello?”
                    “Jay Cee here,” Jay Cee rapped
out with brutal promptitude. “I wondered if you happened to be planning to come
into the office today?”
                    I sank down into the sheets. I
couldn’t understand why Jay Cee thought I’d be coming into the office. We had
these mimeographed schedule cards so we could keep track of all our activities,
and we spent a lot of mornings and afternoons away from the office going to
affairs in town. Of course, some of the affairs were optional.
                    There was quite a pause. Then I
said meekly, “I thought I was going to the fur show.” Of course I hadn’t
thought any such thing, but I couldn’t figure out what else to say.
                    “I told her I thought I was
going to the fur show,” I said to Betsy. “But she told me to come into the
office, she wanted to have a little talk with me, and there was some work to
do.”
                    “Oh-oh!” Betsy said
sympathetically. She must have seen the tears that plopped down into my dessert
dish of meringue and brandy ice cream, because she pushed over her own
untouched dessert and I started absently on that when I’d finished my own. I
felt a bit awkward about the tears, but they were real enough. Jay Cee had said
some terrible things to me.
     
    When
I made my wan entrance into the office at about ten o’clock, Jay Cee stood up
and came round her desk to shut the door, and I sat in the swivel chair in
front of my typewriter table facing her, and she sat in the swivel chair behind
her desk facing me, with the window full of potted plants, shelf after shelf of
them, springing up at her back like a tropical garden.
                    “Doesn’t your work interest you,
Esther?”
                    “Oh, it does, it does,” I said.
“It interests me very much.” I felt like yelling the words, as if that might
make them more convincing, but I controlled myself.
                    All my life I’d told myself
studying and reading and writing and working like mad was what I wanted to do,
and it actually seemed to be true, I did everything well enough and got all
A’s, and by the time I made it to college nobody could stop me.
                    I was college correspondent for
the town Gazette and editor of the literary magazine and secretary of
Honor Board, which deals with academic and social offenses and punishments--a
popular office--and I had a well-known woman poet and professor on the faculty
championing me for graduate school at the biggest universities in the east, and
promises of full scholarships all the way, and now I was apprenticed to the best
editor on an intellectual fashion magazine, and what did I do but balk and balk
like a dull cart horse?
                    “I’m very interested in
everything.” The words fell with a hollow flatness on to Jay Cee’s desk, like
so many wooden nickels.
                    “I’m glad of that,” Jay Cee said
a bit waspishly. “You can learn a lot in this month on the magazine, you know,
if you just roll up your shirtsleeves. The girl who was here before you didn’t
bother with any of the fashion-show stuff. She went straight from this office
on to Time.”
                    “My!” I said, in the same sepulchral tone. “That was
quick!”
                    “Of course, you have another
year at college yet,” Jay Cee went on a little more mildly. “What do you have
in mind after you graduate?”
                    What I always thought I had in
mind was getting some big scholarship to graduate school or a grant to study
all over Europe, and then I thought I’d be a professor and write books of poems
or write books of poems and be an editor of some sort. Usually I had these