The Bell Jar (Unabridged). Sylvia Plath
been following him with their eyes, and when he glanced back at them, they burst out laughing.
The laughter should have warned me. It was a kind of low, know-it-all snicker, but the traffic showed signs of moving again, and I knew that if I sat tight, in two seconds I'd be wishing I'd taken this gift of a chance to see something of New York besides what the people on the magazine had planned out for us so carefully.
'How about it, Doreen?' I said.
'How about it, Doreen?' the man said, smiling his big smile. To this day I can't remember what he looked like when he wasn't smiling. I think he must have been smiling the whole time. It must have been natural for him, smiling like that.
'Well, all right,' Doreen said to me. I opened the door, and we stepped out of the cab just as it was edging ahead again and started to walk over to the bar.
There was a terrible shriek of brakes followed by a dull thump-thump.
'Hey you!' Our cabby was craning out of his window with a furious, purple expression. 'Waddaya think you're doin'?'
He had stopped the cab so abruptly that the cab behind bumped smack into him, and we could see the four girls inside waving and struggling and scrambling up off the floor.
The man laughed and left us on the kerb and went back and handed a bill to the driver in the middle of a great honking and some yelling, and then we saw the girls from the magazine moving off in a row, one cab after another, like a wedding party with nothing but bridesmaids.
'Come on, Frankie,' the man said to one of his friends in the group, and a short, scrunty fellow detached himself and came into the bar with us.
He was the type of fellow I can't stand. I'm five feet ten in my stocking feet, and when I am with little men I stoop over a bit and slouch my hips, one up and one down, so I'll look shorter, and I feel gawky and morbid as somebody in a side-show.
For a minute I had a wild hope we might pair off according to size, which would line me up with the man who had spoken to us in the first place, and he cleared a good six feet, but he went ahead with Doreen and didn't give me a second look. I tried to pretend I didn't see Frankie dogging along at my elbow and sat close by Doreen at the table.
It was so dark in the bar I could hardly make out anything except Doreen. With her white hair and white dress she was so white she looked silver. I think she must have reflected the neons over the bar. I felt myself melting into the shadows like the negative of a person I'd never seen before in my life.
'Well, what'll we have?' the man asked with a large smile.
'I think I'll have an Old-Fashioned,' Doreen said to me.
Ordering drinks always floored me. I didn't know whisky from gin and never managed to get anything I really liked the taste of. Buddy Willard and the other college boys I knew were usually too poor to buy hard liquor or they scorned drinking altogether. It's amazing how many college boys don't drink or smoke. I seemed to know them all. The farthest Buddy Willard ever went was buying us a bottle of Dubonnet, which he only did because he was trying to prove he could be æsthetic in spite of being a medical student.
'I'll have a vodka,' I said.
The man looked at me more closely. 'With anything?'
'Just plain,' I said. 'I always have it plain.'
I thought I might make a fool of myself by saying I'd have it with ice or soda or gin or anything. I'd seen a vodka ad once, just a glass full of vodka standing in the middle of a snowdrift in a blue light, and the vodka looked clear and pure as water, so I thought having vodka plain must be all right. My dream was some day ordering a drink and finding out it tasted wonderful.
The waiter came up then, and the man ordered drinks for the four of us. He looked so at home in that citified bar in his ranch outfit I thought he might well be somebody famous.
Doreen wasn't saying a word, she only toyed with her cork place-mat and eventually lit a cigarette, but the man didn't seem to mind. He kept staring at her the way people stare at the great white macaw in the zoo, waiting for it to say something human.
The drinks arrived, and mine looked clear and pure, just like the vodka ad.
'What do you do?' I asked the man, to break the silence shooting up around me on all sides, thick as jungle grass. 'I mean what do you do here in New York?'
Slowly and with what seemed a great effort, the man dragged his eyes away from Doreen's shoulder. 'I'm a disc jockey,' he said. 'You prob'ly must have heard of me. The name's Lenny Shepherd.'
'I know you,' Doreen said suddenly.
'I'm glad about that, honey,' the man said, and burst out laughing. 'That'll come in handy. I'm famous as hell.'
Then Lenny Shepherd gave Frankie a long look.
'Say, where do you come from?' Frankie asked, sitting up with a jerk. 'What's your name?'
'This here's Doreen.' Lenny slid his hand around Doreen's bare arm and gave her a squeeze.
What surprised me was that Doreen didn't let on she noticed what he was doing. She just sat there, dusky as a bleached blonde negress in her white dress and sipped daintily at her drink.
'My name's Elly Higginbottom,' I said. 'I come from Chicago.' After that I felt safer. I didn't want anything I said or did that night to be associated with me and my real name and coming from Boston.
'Well, Elly, what do you say we dance some?'
The thought of dancing with that little runt in his orange suede elevator shoes and mingy T-shirt and droopy blue sports coat made me laugh. If there's anything I look down on, it's a man in a blue outfit. Black or grey, or brown, even. Blue just makes me laugh.
'I'm not in the mood,' I said coldly, turning my back on him and hitching my chair over nearer to Doreen and Lenny.
Those two looked as if they'd known each other for years by now. Doreen was spooning up the hunks of fruit at the bottom of her glass with a spindly silver spoon, and Lenny was grunting each time she lifted the spoon to her mouth, and snapping and pretending to be a dog or something, and trying to get the fruit off the spoon. Doreen giggled and kept spooning up the fruit.
I began to think vodka was my drink at last. It didn't taste like anything, but it went straight down into my stomach like a sword-swallower's sword and made me feel powerful and god-like.
'I better go now,' Frankie said, standing up.
I couldn't see him very clearly, the place was so dim, but for the first time I heard what a high, silly voice he had. Nobody paid him any notice.
'Hey, Lenny, you owe me something. Remember, Lenny, you owe me something, don't you, Lenny?'
I thought it odd Frankie should be reminding Lenny he owed him something in front of us, and we being perfect strangers, but Frankie stood there saying the same thing over and over until Lenny dug into his pocket and pulled out a big roll of green bills and peeled one off and handed it to Frankie. I think it was ten dollars.
'Shut up and scram.'
For a minute I thought Lenny was talking to me as well, but then I heard Doreen say 'I won't come unless Elly comes'. I had to hand it to her the way she picked up my fake name.
'Oh, Elly'll come, won't you, Elly?' Lenny said, giving me a wink.
'Sure I'll come,' I said. Frankie had wilted away into the night, so I thought I'd string along with Doreen. I wanted to see as much as I could.
I liked looking on at other people in crucial situations. If there was a road accident or a street fight or a baby pickled in a laboratory jar for me to look at, I'd stop and look so hard I never forgot it.
I certainly learned a lot of things I never would have learned otherwise this way, and even when they surprised me or made me sick I never let on, but pretended that's the way I knew things were all the time.
Chapter