the bell jar by sylvia plath chapter three a raid on the ladies day banquet table were yellow green avocado pear halves stuffed with crab meat and mayonnaise and platters of rare roast beef and cold chicken and every so often a cut glass bowl heaped with black caviar i hadn't had time to eat any breakfast at the hotel cafeteria that morning except for a cup of oversteered coffee so bitter it made my nose curl i was starving before i came to new york i'd never eaten out in a proper restaurant i don't count howard johnson's where i only had french fries and cheeseburgers and vanilla frappes of people like buddy willard i'm not sure why it is but i love food more than just about anything else no matter how much i eat i never put on weight with one exception i've been the same weight for 10 years my favorite dishes are full of butter and cheese and sour cream in new york we had so many free luncheons of people in the magazine and various visiting celebrities i developed the habit of running my eye down these huge handwritten menus where a tiny side dish of peas cost 50 or 60 cents until i'd picked the richest most expensive dishes and ordered a string of them we were always taken out on expense accounts so i never felt guilty i made a point of eating so fast i never kept the other people waiting who generally ordered only chef's salad and grapefruit juice because they were trying to reduce almost everybody i met in new york was trying to reduce i want to welcome the prettiest smartest bunch of young ladies our staff has yet had the good luck to meet the plump bold master of ceremonies wheeze into his lapel microphone this banquet is just a small sample of the hospitality our food testing kitchens here on ladies day would like to offer an appreciation for your visit a delicate ladylike spatter of applause and we all sat at the enormous linen drape table there were 11 of us girls from the magazine together with most of our supervising editors and the whole staff of the ladies day food testing kitchens and hygienic white smocks neat hairnets and flawless makeup of a uniform peach pie colour there were only 11 of us because doreen was missing they had set her place next to mine for some reason and the chair stayed empty i saved her place card for her a pocket mirror with doreen painted along the top of it and lacy's script and a wreath of frosted daisies around the edge framing the silver hole where her face would show doreen was spending the day with lenny shepard she spent most of her free time with lenny shepard now in the hour before our luncheon at ladies day the big women's magazine that features lush double page spreads of technicolor meals with a different theme in locale each month we have been shown around their endless glossy kitchens and seen how difficult it is to photograph apple piler mode under bright lights because the ice cream keeps melting and has to be propped up from behind of toothpicks and changed every time it starts looking too soppy the sight of all the food stacked in those kitchens made me dizzy it's not that we hadn't enough to eat at home it's just that my grandmother always cooked economy joints and economy meatloafs and had the habit of saying the minute you lifted the first forkful to your mouth i hope you enjoy that it costs 41 cents a pound which always made me feel i was somehow eating pennies instead of a sunday roast while we were standing up behind our chairs listening to the welcome speech i had bowed my head and secretly eyed the position of the bowls of caviar one bowl was set strategically between me and doreen's empty chair i figured the girl across from me couldn't reach it because of the mountainous centerpiece of marzipan fruit and betsy on my right would be too nice to ask me to share with her if i just kept it out of the way my elbow by my bread and butter plate besides another bowl of caviar said a little way to the right of the girl next to betsy and she could eat that my grandfather and i had a standing joke he was the head waiter at a country club near my hometown and every sunday my 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 were along as if he were regular club guests he loved introducing me to special tidbits and by the age of nine i developed a passionate taste for cold vishy sois and caviar and anchovy paste the joke was that at my wedding my grandfather would see i had all the caviar i could eat it 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 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 of caviar thickly as if i was spreading peanut butter and a piece of bread then i picked up the chicken slices of my fingers one by one rolled them so the caviar wouldn't ooze off and ate them i discovered after a lot of extreme apprehension about what spoons to use that if you do something incorrect a table with a certain arrogance as if you knew perfectly well you are doing it properly you can get away with it and nobody will think you're banned managed or poorly brought up they'll think you're original and very witty i learned this trick the day jc 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 through to jersey and a very formal restaurant full of fountains and chandeliers where all the other men were dressed in dark suits and immaculate white shirts the 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 of 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 seemed 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 in 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 in 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 crab meat tasted bland in comparison how was the fair 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 of my soup spoon and licked it clean it was wonderful betsy smiled they showed us how to make an all-purpose neckerchief out of minktails and a gold chain the sort of chain you can get an exact copy of at woolworths for a dollar ninety-eight and hilden nipped down to the wholesale fur warehouses right afterward and bought a bunch of minktails at a big discount and dropped in at woolworths and then stitched the whole thing together coming up on the bus i peered over at hildo who sat on the other side of betsy sure enough she was wearing an expensive looking scarf of furry tails fastened on one side by a dangling guilt 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 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 and subtle shades that's amazing i said amazing i miss doreen she would have murmured some fine skeleton remark about hilda's miraculous fair piece to cheer me up i felt very low i had been unmasked only that morning by jc 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 19 years of running after good marks and prizes and grants of one sword or another i was letting up slowing down dropping clean out of the race why didn't you come along to the first 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 of doreen no i said i wanted to go to the first show but jc called up and made me come into the office it 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 jc had done i told betsy how i'd been lying in bid that morning planning to go to the first show what i didn't tell her was that dorina come into my room earlier and said what do you want to go to their assy show for lenny and i go to coney island so why don't you come along then he 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 will miss us for a minute i was tempted the show certainly did seem stupid i've 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 bold 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 anymore 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 don't know what time it was but i'd heard the girls busting and calling in the hall and getting ready for the first 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 and so i found my eardrums would burst off it then the phone rang i stared at the phone for a minute they receive a shooker bit and its bone-coloured 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 hello jc here jc 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 jc thought i'd be coming into the office we had these mimeograph 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 first 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 first show i said to betsy but she told me to come into the office she went to have a little talk with me and there's some work to do 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 jc had said some terrible things to me when i made my one entrance into the office at about 10 o'clock jc 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 a 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 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 offences and punishments a popular office and i had a well-known woman poet and professor in the faculty championing me for graduate school at the biggest universities in the east and promises of full scholarships all the way and i was apprenticed to the best editor on an intellectual fashion magazine and what did i do but bork and bork like a dull cat horse i'm very interested in everything the words fell of hollow flatness onto jc's desk like so many wooden nickels i'm glad of that jc said a bit waspishly you can learn a lot in this month from the magazine you know if you just roll up your shirt sleeves the girl who was here before you didn't bother with any of the fashion show stuff she went straight from this office onto time my i said in the same secular tone that was quick of course you have another year at college yet jc 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 that i thought i'd be a professor and write books of poems or write books or poems and be an editor of some sort usually i had these plans on the tip of my tongue i don't really know i heard myself say i felt a deep shock hearing myself say that because the minute i said it i knew it was true it sounded true and i recognized it the way you recognize some nondescript person that's been hanging around your door for ages and then suddenly comes up and introduces himself as your real father and looks exactly like you so you know he really is your father and the person you thought all your life was your father is a sham i don't really know we'll never get anywhere like that jc paused what languages do you have well i can read a bit of french i guess and i've always wanted to learn german i'd been telling people i'd always wanted to learn german for about five years my mother spoke german during her childhood in america and was stoned for it during the first world war by the children at school my german-speaking father did since i was nine came from some manic depressive hamlet in the black heart of prussia my youngest brother was at that moment on the experiments in international living in berlin and speaking german like a native what i didn't say was that each time i picked up a german dictionary or a german book the very sight of those dense black barbed wire letters made my mind shut like a clam i've always thought i'd like to go into publishing i tried to recover a thread that might lead me back to my old bright salesmanship i guess that i'll do is applying some publishing house you ought to read french and german jc said mercilessly and probably several other languages as well spanish and italian but it's still russian hundreds of girls slide into new york every june thinking they'll be editors you need to offer something more than the run-of-the-mill person you better learn some languages i had in the heart to tell jc there wasn't one scrap of space for my senior year sigil to learn languages in i was taking one of those honours programs that teach you to think independently and except for a course in tolstoy in dostoyevsky and a seminar in advanced poetry composition i would spend my whole time writing on some obscure theme in the works of james joyce i hadn't picked on my theme yet because i hadn't got around to reading finnegan's wake but my professor was very excited about my thesis and i promised to give me some leads on images about twins i'll see what i can do i told jc i probably might just fit in one of those double-barreled accelerated courses in elementary german they've rigged up i thought at the time i might actually do this i had a way of persuading my class dean to let me do regular things she regarded me as a sort of interesting experiment at college i had to take a required course in physics and chemistry i had already taken a course in botany and done very well i never answered one test question wrong the whole year and for a while i toyed with the idea of being a botanist and studying the wild grasses in africa or the south american rainforests because you can win big grants and study offbeat things like that in queer areas much more easily than winning grants to study art in italy or english in england there's not so much competition botany was fine because i loved cutting up leaves and putting them under the microscope and drawing diagrams of bread mold and the odd heart-shaped leaf in the sex cycle of the fern it seemed so real to me the day i went into physics class it was deaf a short dark man of a high lisping voice named mr manzi stood in front of the class in a tight blue suit holding a little wooden ball he put the ball on a steep groove slide and let it run down to the bottom then he started talking about let a equal acceleration and let t equal time and suddenly he was scribbling letters and numbers and equal signs all over the blackboard and my mind went dead i took the physics book back to my dormitory it was a huge book on porous memeographed paper 400 pages long with no drawings or photographs only diagrams and formulas between brick red cardboard covers this book was written by mr manzy to explain physics to college girls and if it worked on us he would try to have it published well i studied those formulas i went to class and watched bulls roll down slides and listen to belle's ring and by the end of the semester most of the other girls had failed and i had a straight a i heard mr manzie saying to a bunch of the girls who were complaining about the course was too hard no it can't be too hard because one girl got a straight a who was it tell us they said but he shook his head and didn't say anything and gave me a sweet little conspiring smile that's what gave me the idea of escaping the next semester of chemistry i may have made a straight a in physics but i was panic struck physics made me sick the whole time i learned it what i couldn't stand with the shrinking everything into letters and numbers instead of leaf shapes and in large diagrams of the holes the leaves breathe through and fascinating words like carotene and xanthophyll on the blackboard there were these hideous cramped scorpion-linted formulas in mr manzi's special red chalk i knew chemistry would be worse because i'd seen a big chart of the 90-yard elements hung up in the chemistry lab and all the perfectly good words like gold and silver and cobalt and aluminum were shortened to ugly abbreviations of different decimal numbers after them if i had to strain my brain if any more of that stuff i would go mad i would fail outright it was only by a horrible effort of will that i had dragged myself through the first half of the year so i went to my class dean with a clever plan my plan was that i needed the time to take a course in shakespeare since i was after all an english major she knew and i knew perfectly well i would get a straight a again in the chemistry course so what was the point of my taking the exams why couldn't i just go to the classes and look on and take it all in and forget about marks or credits it was a case of honor among honorable people and the content meant more than the form and marks were really a bit silly anyway weren't they when you knew you'd always get an a my plan was strengthened by the fact that the college had just dropped the second year of required science for the classes after me anyway so my class is allowed to suffer under the old ruling mr manzy was in perfect agreement with my plan i think it flattered him that i enjoyed his classes so much i take them for no materialistic reason like credit and an a before the sheer beauty of chemistry itself i thought it was quite ingenious of me to suggest sitting in on the chemistry course even after i changed over to shakespeare it was quite an unnecessary gesture and made it seem like i simply couldn't bear to give chemistry up of course i would never have succeeded with the scheme if i hadn't made that a in the first place and if my class dean had known how scared and depressed i was and how i seriously contemplated desperate remedies such as getting a doctor's certificate that i was unfit to study chemistry the formulas may be dizzy and so on i'm sure she wouldn't have listened to me for a minute but would have made me take the course regardless as it happened the faculty board passed my petition and my class dean told me later that several of the professors were touched by it they took it as a real step in intellectual maturity i had to laugh when i thought about the rest of that year i went to the chemistry class five times a week and didn't miss a single one mr manzy stood at the bottom of the big rickety old amphitheater making blue flames and red flares and clouds of yellow stuff by pouring the contents of one test tube into another and i shut his voice out of my ears by pretending it was only mosquito in the distance and sat back enjoying the bright colours and the coloured fires and wrote page after page of villanelles and sonnets mr manziel would glance at me now and then and see me writing and send up a sweet little appreciative smile i guess he thought i was writing down all those formulas not for exam time like the other girls but because his presentation fascinated me so much i couldn't help it