The Bell Jar (Unabridged). Sylvia Plath
my teeth together, and the big white hotel towel I had dragged down with me lay under my head numb as a snowdrift.
I thought it very bad manners for anybody to pound on a bathroom door the way some person was pounding. They could just go around the corner and find another bathroom the way I had done and leave me in peace. But the person kept banging and pleading with me to let them in and I thought I dimly recognized the voice. It sounded a bit like Emily Ann Offenbach.
'Just a minute,' I said then. My words bungled out thick as molasses.
I pulled myself together and slowly rose and flushed the toilet for the tenth time and slopped the bowl clean and rolled up the towel so the vomit stains didn't show very clearly and unlocked the door and stepped out into the hall.
I knew it would be fatal if I looked at Emily Ann or anybody else so I fixed my eyes glassily on a window that swam at the end of the hall and put one foot in front of the other.
The next thing I had a view of was somebody's shoe.
It was a stout shoe of cracked black leather and quite old, with tiny air holes in a scalloped pattern over the toe and a dull polish, and it was pointed at me. It seemed to be placed on a hard green surface that was hurting my right cheekbone.
I kept very still, waiting for a clue that would give me some notion of what to do. A little to the left of the shoe I saw a vague heap of blue cornflowers on a white ground and this made me want to cry. It was the sleeve of my own bathrobe I was looking at, and my left hand lay pale as a cod at the end of it.
'She's all right now.'
The voice came from a cool, rational region far above my head. For a minute I didn't think there was anything strange about it, and then I thought it was strange. It was a man's voice, and no men were allowed to be in our hotel at any time of the night or day.
'How many others are there?' the voice went on.
I listened with interest. The floor seemed wonderfully solid. It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no farther.
'Eleven, I think,' a woman's voice answered. I figured she must belong to the black shoe. 'I think there's eleven more of 'um, but one's missin' so there's oney ten.'
'Well, you get this one to bed and I'll take care of the rest.'
I heard a hollow boomp boomp in my right ear that grew fainter and fainter. Then a door opened in the distance, and there were voices and groans, and the door shut again.
Two hands slid under my armpits and the woman's voice said, 'Come, come, lovey, we'll make it yet,' and I felt myself being half lifted, and slowly the doors began to move by, one by one, until we came to an open door and went in.
The sheet on my bed was folded back, and the woman helped me he down and covered me up to the chin and rested for a minute in the bedside armchair, fanning herself with one plump, pink hand. She wore gilt-rimmed spectacles and a white nurse's cap.
'Who are you?' I asked in a faint voice.
'I'm the hotel nurse.'
'What's the matter with me?'
'Poisoned,' she said briefly. 'Poisoned, the whole lot of you. I never seen anythin' like it. Sick here, sick there, whatever have you young ladies been stuffin' yourselves with?'
'Is everybody else sick too?' I asked with some hope.
'The whole of your lot,' she affirmed with relish. 'Sick as dogs and cryin' for ma.'
The room hovered around me with great gentleness, as if the chairs and the tables and the walls were withholding their weight out of sympathy for my sudden frailty.
'The doctor's given you a ninjection,' the nurse said from the doorway. 'You'll sleep now.'
And the door took her place like a sheet of blank paper, and then a larger sheet of paper took the place of the door, and I drifted toward it and smiled myself to sleep.
Somebody was standing by my pillow with a white cup.
'Drink this,' they said.
I shook my head. The pillow crackled like a wad of straw.
'Drink this and you'll feel better.'
A thick white china cup was lowered under my nose. In the wan light that might have been evening and might have been dawn I contemplated the clear amber liquid. Pads of butter floated on the surface and a faint chickeny aroma fumed up to my nostrils.
My eyes moved tentatively to the skirt behind the cup. 'Betsy,' I said.
'Betsy nothing, it's me.'
I raised my eyes then, and saw Doreen's head silhouetted against the paling window, her blonde hair lit at the tips from behind like a halo of gold. Her face was in shadow, so I couldn't make out her expression, but I felt a sort of expert tenderness flowing from the ends of her fingers. She might have been Betsy or my mother or a fern-scented nurse.
I bent my head and took a sip of the broth. I thought my mouth must be made of sand. I took another sip and then another and another until the cup was empty.
I felt purged and holy and ready for a new life.
Doreen set the cup on the window-sill and lowered herself into the armchair. I noticed that she made no move to take out a cigarette, and as she was a chain-smoker this surprised me.
'Well, you almost died,' she said finally.
'I guess it was all that caviar.'
'Caviar nothing! It was the crabmeat. They did tests on it and it was chock-full of ptomaine.'
I had a vision of the celestially white kitchens on Ladies' Day stretching into infinity. I saw avocado pear after avocado pear being stuffed with crabmeat and mayonnaise and photographed under brilliant lights. I saw the delicate, pink-mottled claw-meat poking seductively through its blanket of mayonnaise and the bland yellow pear cup with its rim of alligator-green cradling the whole mess.
Poison.
'Who did tests?' I thought the doctor might have pumped somebody's stomach and then analyzed what he found in his hotel laboratory.
'Those dodos on Ladies' Day. As soon as you all started keeling over like ninepins somebody called into the office and the office called across to Ladies' Day and they did tests on everything left over from the big lunch. Ha!'
'Ha!' I echoed hollowly. It was good to have Doreen back.
'They sent presents,' she added. 'They're in a big carton out in the hall.'
'How did they get here so fast?'
'Special express delivery, what do you think? They can't afford to have the lot of you running around saying you got poisoned at Ladies' Day. You could sue them for every penny they own if you just knew some smart law man.'
'What are the presents?' I began to feel if it was a good enough present I wouldn't mind about what happened, because I felt so pure as a result.
Nobody's opened the box yet, they're all out flat. I'm supposed to be carting soup into everybody, seeing as I'm the only one on my feet, but I brought you yours first.'
'See what the present is,' I begged. Then I remembered and said, 'I've a present for you as well.'
Doreen went out into the hall. I could hear her rustling around for a minute and then the sound of paper tearing. Finally she came back carrying a thick book with a glossy cover and people's names printed all over it.
'The Thirty Best Short Stories of the Year.' She dropped the book in my lap. 'There's eleven more of them out there in that box. I suppose they thought it'd give you something to read while you were sick.' She paused. 'Where's mine?'
I fished in my pocket-book and handed Doreen the mirror with her name and the daisies on it. Doreen looked at me and I looked at her and we both burst out laughing.
'You can have my soup if you want,' she said. 'They put twelve