Belzhar

by Meg Wolitzer

  “Everyone,” she continues, looking around at all of us, “has something to say. But not everyone can bear to say it. Your job is to find a way.”

  CHAPTER

  3

  “SO WHAT WAS IT LIKE?” DJ ASKS ME THAT EVENING during study hours. This is a two-hour period when we have to sit in our rooms or in the common room downstairs in our dorms and do homework. I’ve actually decided to use my ugly orange study buddy for the occasion, and to my surprise it’s sort of comfortable to lean against the corduroy surface and rest my human arms on its thick, inanimate-object arms.

  “What was what like?”

  “Special Topics in English, obviously.”

  “It was fine, I guess,” I say. The truth is that Special Topics in English was a little strange. It alternated between being uncomfortable and oddly interesting.

  “You didn’t learn an obscure language?” DJ asks. “Or go through an initiation rite involving essential oils?”

  “Nope.”

  “Maybe those kids in the class the year before last were yanking everybody’s chain,” says DJ. “At the end of the semester, they acted like it was the biggest deal in the world.”

  “It was hardly much of anything. She handed out copies of The Bell Jar.”

  “Sylvia Plath? That’s who you’re reading all semester?” DJ says with light superiority.

  “Yep.”

  “Nice choice for this place.”

  “Exactly,” I say. “I guess she thinks we can learn from it or something.”

  “I read The Bell Jar ages ago,” says DJ. “Well,” she adds in a pleased voice, “it’s probably for the best that I’m not in the class, since it would’ve been tedious to have to read it again.”

  “Oh, and we have to keep a journal,” I add. “We can write whatever we want. But we have to hand it in at the end, and then she keeps it. She swears she isn’t going to read it.”

  “Journals.” DJ snorts. “What a cliché.”

  DJ settles back onto her bed comfortably, clearly happy that Special Topics in English doesn’t seem so great. My first day at The Wooden Barn hasn’t been horrible, but it’s been no better than any of the days I’ve been living for almost a year. The hours have gone by pointlessly; only the difference is that my parents are no longer hovering in my doorway, worrying about me, wondering when I will “snap out of it.”

  I lean against my study buddy and quickly read the first chapter of The Bell Jar, and then the second chapter, even though I’m not supposed to go that far. The book is all about a smart, hyperambitious college student named Esther Greenwood, who wins a magazine contest and gets invited to spend the summer in New York City to work at a fashion magazine with a group of other prizewinning girls. And while she’s living at an old hotel where men aren’t allowed above the first floor, Esther starts to feel really unhappy and peculiar.

  The book takes place back in the 1950s, when the world was different. People wore hats, and went on dates. According to a stapled handout Mrs. Quenell gave us, Sylvia Plath herself had won a contest and worked for a magazine one summer during college. And while she was there she started to feel detached and isolated. Just like Esther, when she got home after that summer she swallowed a lot of sleeping pills and hid in the crawl space under her family’s porch, waiting to die.

  But she didn’t die. Instead, Sylvia Plath went into a coma, and then came to consciousness days later; her family heard her moaning and called an ambulance and saved her life. Then, after being put in a psychiatric hospital and given a lot of regular therapy and also shock therapy—where they attached electrodes to her and turned on the voltage—Sylvia Plath recovered. And so did her character Esther. In real life, the author went on to become a writer, and she had a troubled marriage to another writer, an English poet named Ted Hughes. They had two children, a boy and a girl.

  But when she was thirty years old and living in London, she made another suicide attempt, turning on the gas and putting her head in the oven, just like Marc said in class. This time she succeeded.

  DJ snaps her history book shut and stands up. “I am so done,” she says. “I’m going to go downstairs to see if I can bum a Mint Milano off Hayley Bregman. Want to come?” This is the first vaguely social invitation I’ve received at The Wooden Barn, but I can’t work up any interest. Besides, DJ and I are spending plenty of time together already.

  “Nah,” I tell her. “I should probably write in my journal. Not that I have anything to say.”

  “Just go the bullshit route,” DJ says. “That’s what I always do when someone asks me to write something about myself.”

  When she’s gone, I pick up the journal from where it lies on my desk. So far tonight I’ve spent absolutely no time sitting at that desk. Instead, I’ve done all my homework in bed, and my efforts have been really feeble. My grades are not going to be good, but I just can’t bring myself to “try,” like my parents begged me to do before they sent me here.

  “Just try, Jam,” my dad said. “Give it one semester, okay? See how it goes.”

  Far from home now, sitting in this bed with the wind shaking the old windowpanes of my dorm room, and the distant thump of dubstep from the girls across the hall, I lean back against the study buddy and open the journal.

  I’m only going to write a few lines, nothing more. Just go the bullshit route, DJ had said. I’ll write something bland and boring so at least at the end of the semester, when Mrs. Quenell says, “Everybody hand in your journals,” she’ll see that I seemed to have made an effort—even though she’s not going to read what I wrote. I realize that for some reason I don’t want to irritate or disappoint her.

  But I’ve really got nothing to say. The only thing I ever think about is Reeve.

  It’s funny how you can go for a long time in life not needing someone, and then you meet them and you suddenly need them all the time. Reeve and I had met in the first place because we had gym class together. A few years earlier, my school created an alternative to regular gym called “co-ed gym,” which involved a lot of yoga and badminton. So on the first day, in the middle of badminton, this dark-eyed boy showed up, wearing long, wrinkled shorts and a red T-shirt that said Manchester United. Someone whispered that he was one of the new exchange students.

  This English boy didn’t even try during the game, but just let the birdies whip past him. I gave up trying to play too, preferring to observe this person who muttered “Bloody hell” as little plastic things came within inches of his face.

  Then gym class was over, and as the girls and boys headed off into their separate locker rooms, I did something totally out of character. You have to remember that I was one of the quiet, shy, nice girls. I wasn’t someone who went out of her way to make a big impression on anyone.

  But for some reason I said to this boy, “Good strategy.” It took all my nerve even to say something to him as dull as that.

  He looked at me with a squint. “And what strategy was that?”

  “Avoidance.”

  He nodded. “Yeah, it’s basically how I’ve gotten through life so far.”

  We half smiled at each other, and that was the end of it. I saw him around school throughout the week, and I made excuses to talk to him and he made excuses to talk to me.

  “My host family, the Kesmans,” he said one day in the cafeteria, “enjoy singing rounds. Do you know what rounds are?”

  “‘Rounds’?” I said. “Oh, like ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat.’”

  “It’s excruciating. After dinner, we all have to stay at the table, and we sing rounds for hours. Or maybe it only seems like hours. This is the most wholesome family I’ve ever met. Are all American families like this?”

  “No,” I said. “Mine isn’t.”

  “Lucky girl,” said Reeve.

  I was so excited by him, but I told myself to stop it, to not be excited, he’s just a f
riend. Still, I hoped he would become more than that. But really, why would he be interested in me, when there were so many more obvious choices? But I could swear he was interested. I told none of my friends, but just quietly felt what I felt.

  One afternoon our art class was sent off to do landscape drawing, and I was sitting with my pad and charcoal on the hill overlooking the parking lot with the trees in the distance, when Reeve appeared beside me.

  We sat in stillness, shoulder to shoulder, not touching. Our shoulders were so near each other’s, encased in sweaters, but they hadn’t even accidentally banged. I’d only known this boy a couple of weeks then, and I barely knew anything about him. Our entire relationship consisted of smiling, smirking, and saying funny things to each other.

  But I wanted our shoulders to touch. It was as if I thought our shoulders could almost communicate. My shoulder, under the sky-blue wool of a sweater that my grandma Rose had knitted before she died, could have a little conversation with his shoulder, which was under the chocolate-brown wool of a sweater that had probably been purchased in a shop somewhere in London. And if our shoulders managed to touch, I knew I’d feel a thrill beyond anything I’d ever known. Which made me realize that I’d never felt thrilled before.

  In ninth grade, I’d kissed Seth Mandelbaum exactly four times. It was okay, but thrilling is the wrong word. The second time it happened, we’d stood behind the drapes at Jenna Hogarth’s fourteenth birthday party (“It’s Jenna’s Sweet Fourteen!” her mother kept going around saying, annoyingly), and Seth put his hand up my shirt and on my bra and whispered in a serious voice, “You are very womanly.” Which made me crack up. Seth, hurt, had to say, “What’s so funny?” And I had to say, “Nothing.”

  That relationship didn’t really end, but just sort of faded away. Soon it was as if it had never happened at all.

  But Reeve and I were different. I felt so much when I was with him that I had to play it down. There was no touching at all at first; there was barely even much eye contact. Every morning I’d quickly scan the hall, and my laser-beam focus would pick him out from among the dozens of people in the big morning-breath crush at the lockers.

  And the day after art class, where I ended up drawing an impressive likeness of Reeve, and everyone saw that he and I had a real connection, Dana Sapol invited me to her party. I couldn’t believe it, and I was so excited, though I forced myself to act ultra-low-key. Reeve and I would be seeing each other outside of school for the first time, and who knew what would happen.

  The idea of just sitting beside this boy who was visiting for a few months from London, or even being in the same room with him at a party, made me feel like I might pass out and fall down with a loud clunk.

  On Saturday night my parents dropped me off at the Sapols’. Leo was in the car, because he and my mom and dad were going to the mall for pizza and a movie. As we drove through town, I looked out the window at the stores in the shopping center, and I saw the little purple horsey ride that my dad used to take me on when I was little. He’d keep putting quarters into the slot, and I’d ride and ride like it was the most exciting thing in the world.

  But really, I’d never done anything exciting. I’d barely been far away from Crampton, except once to go to Disney World, and every summer to visit my grandparents in Ohio. Reeve was from a whole other place, where they spoke differently, and had different words for things. He’d had experiences I couldn’t even imagine, but wanted to. The world was huge, I thought as I was driven to the party that night. Just unimaginably huge, and sometimes thrilling, and Reeve was part of it.

  “Have a great time, babe,” my mom said as I got out in front of Dana’s McMansion in the rich neighborhood in our town, where the houses are spread far apart. There were white columns out front, and an enormous picture window, but the drapes were closed.

  My parents had no idea about the significance of this evening. They didn’t know this was a different kind of party from the ones I’d gone to before. They imagined that all the kids at Dana Sapol’s house were sitting on the rug playing Bananagrams. And, of course, they didn’t know anything about Reeve, because I’d never mentioned him to them.

  The Sapols’ living room was dark when I walked in, and smelled of cigarettes and pizza and beer and weed. The music was loud and thumpy. I didn’t see Reeve, and I said hi to a few people but didn’t stop to talk. He was the only one I wanted to talk to, so I made my way through the crowd until a British accent drifted out, and I was like a dog who snaps to attention at its master’s voice. Then I followed that voice, and there was Reeve Maxfield in a wrinkled button-down shirt.

  Sometimes it seemed as though he still hadn’t unpacked since he’d arrived in the US. His sleeves were rolled up and he held a grocery bag in one hand, and a beer bottle in the other. He saw me, and abruptly stopped talking to a group of guys right in the middle of a sentence.

  “Finish what you were saying, bro,” said Alex Mowphry, who was holding his beer bottle by its neck and trying to look older than he really was. In sixth grade Alex had projectile-vomited on the bus during our grade’s overnight to Colonial Williamsburg.

  “Nah,” said Reeve, and he put down the beer and headed right toward me. “You’re going to have to imagine what I was about to say.”

  “Douchebag,” muttered Alex.

  “Douchebag?” said Reeve, holding a hand to his ear. “Sorry, I’m not familiar with that as a name to call someone. I only know that it’s a device for female hygiene. And I do like hygiene. So I’m assuming it means . . . something nice. We don’t usually call people ‘douchebag’ in the UK.”

  Alex flipped him the finger, but Reeve just laughed. Then he came over to me and said hi. My face went hot; I could feel it even in the warm room. The other guys began to joke with us about how I’d drawn Reeve’s portrait in art class. He and I joked right back. Then he said to me, “Want to go somewhere and talk?”

  “Sure,” I said, and we walked down the hall toward the bedrooms. The first door we opened revealed two people in a tangle on top of a pile of coats. They looked up at us without much interest. I recognized the girl as Lia Feder, who’d been in last year’s Dumb Math with me. She nodded and said, “Hey,” then went back to kissing a boy I’d never seen before, and who maybe Lia hadn’t either.

  We closed the door and kept walking. The next room had a group of kids sitting on the floor playing what seemed to be the early stages of strip poker. They all looked up and snickered.

  Finally Reeve and I were in Dana’s little sister’s bedroom. Courtney Sapol was five, and she and her parents were away for the weekend, leaving Dana here with her sixty closest friends, plus me. Courtney’s bedroom was pink and white, and the bed had a canopy over it. It seemed wrong to sit down on this bed; it seemed like a cliché, as though we were saying, We are a teenaged boy and girl who like each other. And because no parents are on the premises of this suburban teenaged party, it’s time to hook up on a child’s bed.

  But I didn’t want to do that. I was overwhelmed by what I felt for Reeve, and besides, what if he just thought I was “sweet” and “nice,” and he liked my long hair but wasn’t really interested in me?

  I looked around the dim room. The carpeting was spongy and synthetic, and in the darkness I couldn’t even tell what color it was. It’s a weird thing about color, the way darkness just drains it all away. Reeve put down the bag he was carrying.

  “Groceries?” I asked.

  “Yeah, English ones,” he said, and when I peered into the bag I saw a small jar, which I pulled out.

  “‘Tiptree Little Scarlet,’” I read on the label. “Strawberry. It’s a kind of jam?” I asked. Reeve nodded.

  And then I realized: Oh my God. He’s brought the jar of jam because of my name. Of course. It was a present for me, a little in-joke just between the two of us, and I was so touched by it that heat sprang to my face again. I waited for him to tell me
that it was for me, but he was shy.

  “So can I have it?” I asked quietly.

  “Sure. It’s good stuff.”

  But I knew I would never open that jar. Instead it would be a memento of this party, this night. I closed my hand around it and let it fall deep and safe into my purse.

  On the floor by our feet was a large, elaborate dollhouse, one of those insanely expensive ones that the Sapols had had specially designed for their daughter. It resembled their actual house—a miniature McMansion inside a life-size McMansion. The rooms were decorated with fancy doll furniture that you probably had to order from a special catalogue. There were framed paintings that actually had teeny lights that lit up over them if you pulled a little chain. The mother doll’s dressing table had a set of matching silver combs and brushes. The bristles were as tiny as a baby’s eyelashes.

  In the den were clustered all the members of the doll family. Reeve crouched down, and I crouched down beside him. “Here you go,” he said, solemnly handing me a blond wooden mother doll in a retro dress and apron. “This is you.” He picked up the father doll, who wore a suit and tie, fresh from his job. “And this is me,” he added. Together we trotted the male and female dolls around the house, having them make dinner in the granite kitchen and sit together in the den to watch TV.

  “Britain’s Got Talent,” Reeve announced. “That’s what they’re watching.”

  “No, America’s Got Talent,” I insisted.

  “Britain.”

  “America.”

  “Our first fight,” said Reeve.

  Our doll selves were side by side on the couch, and the dolls’ shoulders were touching, which was what I had wanted our real shoulders to do. Reeve dropped the male doll, so I dropped the female one. The two dolls lay side by side, and in the soft, colorless light we turned to each other. I could feel my heart working so hard, but I tried to ignore it.