The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath Read Free Book Online

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 première 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 première, 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 myback 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.
    â€œHello?”
    â€œJay 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.
    â€œI 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.”
    â€œOh-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 Gee 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.
    â€œDoesn’t your work interest you, Esther?”
    â€œOh, 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