by Sylvia Plath
"Could you please tell me the way to the subway?" I said to the sailor in a loud voice.
"Huh?"
"The subway that goes out to the Deer Island Prison?"
When Mrs. Willard came up I would have to pretend I was only asking the sailor directions, and didn't really know him at all.
"Take your hands off me," I said between my teeth.
"Say, Elly, what's up?"
The woman approached and passed by without a look or a nod, and of course it wasn't Mrs. Willard. Mrs. Willard was at her cottage in the Adirondacks.
I fixed the woman's receding back with a vengeful stare.
"Say, Elly . . ."
"I thought it was somebody I knew," I said. "Some blasted lady from this orphan home in Chicago."
The sailor put his arm around me again.
"You mean you got no mom and dad, Elly?"
"No." I let out a tear that seemed ready. It made a little hot track down my cheek.
"Say, Elly, don't cry. This lady, was she mean to you?"
"She was . . . she was awful!"
The tears came in a rush, then, and while the sailor was holding me and patting them dry with a big, clean, white, linen handkerchief in the shelter of an American elm, I thought what an awful woman that lady in the brown suit had been, and how she, whether she knew it or not, was responsible for my taking the wrong turn here and the wrong path there and for everything bad that happened after that.
"Well, Esther, how do you feel this week?"
Doctor Gordon cradled his pencil like a slim, silver bullet.
"The same."
"The same?" He quirked an eyebrow, as if he didn't believe it.
So I told him again, in the same dull, flat voice, only it was angrier this time, because he seemed so slow to understand, how I hadn't slept for fourteen nights and how I couldn't read or write or swallow very well.
Doctor Gordon seemed unimpressed.
I dug into my pocketbook and found the scraps of my letter to Doreen. I took them out and let them flutter on to Doctor Gordon's immaculate green blotter. They lay there, dumb as daisy petals in a summer meadow.
"What," I said, "do you think of that?"
I thought Doctor Gordon must immediately see how bad the handwriting was, but he only said, "I think I would like to speak to your mother. Do you mind?"
"No." But I didn't like the idea of Doctor Gordon talking to my mother one bit. I thought he might tell her I should be locked up. I picked up every scrap of my letter to Doreen, so Doctor Gordon couldn't piece them together and see I was planning to run away, and walked out of his office without another word.
I watched my mother grow smaller and smaller until she disappeared into the door of Doctor Gordon's office building. Then I watched her grow larger and larger as she came back to the car.
"Well?" I could tell she had been crying.
My mother didn't look at me. She started the car.
Then she said, as we glided under the cool, deep-sea shade of the elms, "Doctor Gordon doesn't think you've improved at all. He thinks you should have some shock treatments at his private hospital in Walton."
I felt a sharp stab of curiosity, as if I had just read a terrible newspaper headline about somebody else.
"Does he mean live there?"
"No," my mother said, and her chin quivered.
I thought she must be lying.
"You tell me the truth," I said, "or I'll never speak to you again."
"Don't I always tell you the truth?" my mother said, and burst into tears.
SUICIDE SAVED FROM 7-STORY LEDGE!
After two hours on a narrow ledge seven stories above a concrete parking lot and gathered crowds, Mr. George Pollucci let himself be helped to safety through a nearby window by Sgt. Will Kilmartin of the Charles Street police force.
I cracked open a peanut from the tencent bag I had bought to feed the pigeons, and ate it. It tasted dead, like a bit of old tree bark.
I brought the newspaper close up to my eyes to get a better view of George Pollucci's face, spotlighted like a three-quarter moon against a vague background of brick and black sky. I felt he had something important to tell me, and whatever it was might just be written on his face.
But the smudgy crags of George Pollucci's features melted away as I peered at them, and resolved themselves into a regular pattern of dark and light and medium-gray dots.
The inky-black newspaper paragraph didn't tell why Mr. Pollucci was on the ledge, or what Sgt. Kilmartin did to him when he finally got him in through the window.
The trouble about jumping was that if you didn't pick the right number of stories, you might still be alive when you hit bottom. I thought seven stories must be a safe distance.
I folded the paper and wedged it between the slats of the park bench. It was what my mother called a scandal sheet, full of the local murders and suicides and beatings and robbings, and just about every page had a half-naked lady on it with her breasts surging over the edge of her dress and her legs arranged so you could see to her stocking tops.
I didn't know why I had never bought any of these papers before. They were the only things I could read. The little paragraphs between the pictures ended before the letters had a chance to get cocky and wiggle about. At home, all I ever saw was the Christian Science Monitor, which appeared on the doorstep at five o'clock every day but Sunday and treated suicides and sex crimes and airplane crashes as if they didn't happen.
A big white swan full of little children approached my bench, then turned around a bosky islet covered with ducks and paddled back under the dark arch of the bridge. Everything I looked at seemed bright and extremely tiny.
I saw, as if through the keyhole of a door I couldn't open, myself and my younger brother, knee-high and holding rabbit-eared balloons, climb aboard a swanboat and fight for a seat at the edge, over the peanut-shell-paved water. My mouth tasted of cleanness and peppermint. If we were good at the dentist's, my mother always bought us a swanboat ride.
I circled the Public Garden--over the bridge and under the blue-green monuments, past the American flag flowerbed and the entrance where you could have your picture taken in an orange-and-white striped canvas booth for twenty-five cents--reading the names of the trees.
My favorite tree was the Weeping Scholar Tree. I thought it must come from Japan. They understood things of the spirit in Japan.
They disemboweled themselves when anything went wrong.
I tried to imagine how they would go about it. They must have an extremely sharp knife. No, probably two extremely sharp knives. Then they would sit down, cross-legged, a knife in either hand. Then they would cross their hands and point a knife at each side of their stomach. They would have to be naked, or the knife would get stuck in their clothes.
Then in one quick flash, before they had time to think twice, they would jab the knives in and zip them round, one on the upper crescent and one on the lower crescent, making a full circle. Then their stomach skin would come loose, like a plate, and their insides would fall out, and they would die.
It must take a lot of courage to die like that.
My trouble was I hated the sight of blood.
I thought I might stay in the park all night.
The next morning Dodo Conway was driving my mother and me to Walton, and if I was to run away before it was too late, now was the time. I looked in my pocketbook and counted out a dollar bill and seventy-nine cents in dimes and nickels and pennies.
I had no idea how much it would cost to get to Chicago, and I didn't dare go to the bank and draw out all my money, because I thought Doctor Gordon might well have warned the bank clerk to intercept me if I made any obvious move.
Hitchhiking occurred to me, but I had no idea which of all the routes out of Boston led to Chicago. It's easy enough to find directions on a map, but I had very little knowledge of directions when I was smack in the middle of somewhere. Every time I wanted to figure what was east or what was west it seemed to be noon, or cloudy, w
hich was no help at all, or nighttime, and except for the Big Dipper and Cassiopeia's Chair, I was hopeless at stars, a failing which always disheartened Buddy Willard.
I decided to walk to the bus terminal and inquire about the fares to Chicago. Then I might go to the bank and withdraw precisely that amount, which would not cause so much suspicion.
I had just strolled in through the glass doors of the terminal and was browsing over the rack of colored tour leaflets and schedules, when I realized that the bank in my home town would be closed, as it was already mid-afternoon, and I couldn't get any money out till the next day.
My appointment at Walton was for ten o'clock.
At that moment, the loudspeaker crackled into life and started announcing the stops of a bus getting ready to leave in the parking lot outside. The voice on the loudspeaker went bockle bockle, the way they do, so you don't understand a word, and then, in the middle of all the static, I heard a familiar name clear as A on the piano in the middle of all the tuning instruments of an orchestra.
It was a stop two blocks from my house.
I hurried out into the hot, dusty, end-of-July afternoon, sweating and sandy-mouthed, as if late for a difficult interview, and boarded the red bus, whose motor was already running.
I handed my fare to the driver, and silently, on gloved hinges, the door folded shut at my back.
12
Doctor Gordon's private hospital crowned a grassy rise at the end of a long, secluded drive that had been whitened with broken quahog shells. The yellow clapboard walls of the large house, with its encircling veranda, gleamed in the sun, but no people strolled on the green dome of the lawn.
As my mother and I approached the summer heat bore down on us, and a cicada started up, like an aerial lawnmower, in the heart of a copper beech tree at the back. The sound of the cicada only served to underline the enormous silence.
A nurse met us at the door.
"Will you wait in the living room, please. Doctor Gordon will be with you presently."
What bothered me was that everything about the house seemed normal, although I knew it must be chock-full of crazy people. There were no bars on the windows that I could see, and no wild or disquieting noises. Sunlight measured itself out in regular oblongs on the shabby, but soft red carpets, and a whiff of fresh-cut grass sweetened the air.
I paused in the doorway of the living room.
For a minute I throught it was the replica of a lounge in a guest house I visited once on an island off the coast of Maine. The French doors let in a dazzle of white light, a grand piano filled the far corner of the room, and people in summer clothes were sitting about at card tables and in the lopsided wicker armchairs one so often finds at down-at-heel seaside resorts.
Then I realized that none of the people were moving. I focused more closely, trying to pry some clue from their stiff postures. I made out men and women, and boys and girls who must be as young as I, but there was a uniformity to their faces, as if they had lain for a long time on a shelf, out of the sunlight, under siftings of pale, fine dust.
Then I saw that some of the people were indeed moving, but with such small, birdlike gestures I had not at first discerned them.
A gray-faced man was counting out a deck of cards, one, two, three, four. . . . I thought he must be seeing if it was a full pack, but when he had finished counting, he started over again. Next to him, a fat lady played with a string of wooden beads. She drew all the beads up to one end of the string. Then click, click, click, she let them fall back on each other.
At the piano, a young girl leafed through a few sheets of music, but when she saw me looking at her, she ducked her head crossly and tore the sheets in half.
My mother touched my arm, and I followed her into the room.
We sat, without speaking, on a lumpy sofa that creaked each time one stirred.
Then my gaze slid over the people to the blaze of green beyond the diaphanous curtains, and I felt as if I were sitting in the window of an enormous department store. The figures around me weren't people, but shop dummies, painted to resemble people and propped up in attitudes counterfeiting life.
I climbed after Doctor Gordon's dark-jacketed back.
Downstairs, in the hall, I had tried to ask him what the shock treatment would be like, but when I opened my mouth no words came out, my eyes only widened and stared at the smiling, familiar face that floated before me like a plate full of assurances.
At the top of the stairs, the garnet-colored carpet stopped. A plain, brown linoleum, tacked to the floor, took its place, and extended down a corridor lined with shut white doors. As I followed Doctor Gordon, a door opened somewhere in the distance, and I heard a woman shouting.
All at once a nurse popped around the corner of the corridor ahead of us leading a woman in a blue bathrobe with shaggy, waist-length hair. Doctor Gordon stepped back, and I flattened against the wall.
As the woman was dragged by, waving her arms and struggling in the grip of the nurse, she was saying, "I'm going to jump out of the window, I'm going to jump out of the window, I'm going to jump out of the window."
Dumpy and muscular in her smudge-fronted uniform, the wall-eyed nurse wore such thick spectacles that four eyes peered out at me from behind the round, twin panes of glass. I was trying to tell which eyes were the real and which the false eyes, and which of the real eyes was the wall-eye and which the straight eye, when she brought her face up to mine with a large, conspiratorial grin and hissed, as if to reassure me, "She thinks she's going to jump out the window but she can't jump out the window because they're all barred!"
And as Doctor Gordon led me into a bare room at the back of the house, I saw that the windows in that part were indeed barred, and that the room door and the closet door and the drawers of the bureau and everything that opened and shut was fitted with a keyhole so it could be locked up.
I lay down on the bed.
The wall-eyed nurse came back. She unclasped my watch and dropped it in her pocket. Then she started tweaking the hairpins from my hair.
Doctor Gordon was unlocking the closet. He dragged out a table on wheels with a machine on it and rolled it behind the head of the bed. The nurse started swabbing my temples with a smelly grease.
As she leaned over to reach the side of my head nearest the wall, her fat breast muffled my face like a cloud or a pillow. A vague, medicinal stench emanated from her flesh.
"Don't worry," the nurse grinned down at me. "Their first time everybody's scared to death."
I tried to smile, but my skin had gone stiff, like parchment.
Doctor Gordon was fitting two metal plates on either side of my head. He buckled them into place with a strap that dented my forehead, and gave me a wire to bite.
I shut my eyes.
There was a brief silence, like an indrawn breath.
Then something bent down and took hold of me and shook me like the end of the world. Whee-ee-ee-ee-ee, it shrilled, through an air crackling with blue light, and with each flash a great jolt drubbed me till I thought my bones would break and the sap fly out of me like a split plant.
I wondered what terrible thing it was that I had done.
I was sitting in a wicker chair, holding a small cocktail glass of tomato juice. The watch had been replaced on my wrist, but it looked odd. Then I realized it had been fastened upside down. I sense the unfamiliar positioning of the hairpins in my hair.
"How do you feel?"
An old metal floor lamp surfaced in my mind. One of the few relics of my father's study, it was surrounded by a copper bell which held the light bulb, and from which a frayed, tiger-colored cord ran down the length of the metal stand to a socket in the wall.
One day I decided to move this lamp from the side of my mother's bed to my desk at the other end of the room. The cord would be long enough, so I didn't unplug it. I closed both hands around the lamp and the fuzzy cord and gripped them tight.
Then something leapt out of the lamp in a blue flash and
shook me till my teeth rattled, and I tried to pull my hands off, but they were stuck, and I screamed, or a scream was torn from my throat, for I didn't recognize it, but heard it soar and quaver in the air like a violently disembodied spirit.
Then my hands jerked free, and I fell back onto my mother's bed. A small hole, blackened as if with pencil lead, pitted the center of my right palm.
"How do you feel?"
"All right."
But I didn't, I felt terrible.
"Which college did you say you went to?"
I said what college it was.
"Ah!" Doctor Gordon's face lighted with a slow, almost tropical smile. "They had a WAC station up there, didn't they, during the war?"
My mother's knuckles were bone-white, as if the skin had worn off them in the hour of waiting. She looked past me to Doctor Gordon, and he must have nodded, or smiled, because her face relaxed.
"A few more shock treatments, Mrs. Greenwood," I heard Doctor Gordon say, "and I think you'll notice a wonderful improvement."
The girl was still sitting on the piano stool, the torn sheet of music splayed at her feet like a dead bird. She stared at me, and I stared back. Her eyes narrowed. She stuck out her tongue.
My mother was following Doctor Gordon to the door. I lingered behind, and when their backs were turned, I rounded on the girl and thumbed both ears at her. She pulled her tongue in, and her face went stony.
I walked out into the sun.
Pantherlike in a dapple of tree shadow, Dodo Conway's black station wagon lay in wait.
The station wagon had been ordered originally by a wealthy society lady, black, without a speck of chrome, and with black leather upholstery, but when it came, it depressed her. It was the dead spit of a hearse, she said, and everybody else thought so too, and nobody would buy it, so the Conways drove it home, cut-price, and saved themselves a couple of hundred dollars.
Sitting in the front seat, between Dodo and my mother, I felt dumb and subdued. Every time I tried to concentrate, my mind glided off, like a skater, into a large empty space, and pirouetted there, absently.
"I'm through with that Doctor Gordon," I said, after we had left Dodo and her black station wagon behind the pines. "You can call him up and tell him I'm not coming next week."
My mother smiled. "I knew my baby wasn't like that."
I looked at her. "Like what?"