by Sylvia Plath
"Like those awful people. Those awful dead people at that hospital." She paused. "I knew you'd decide to be all right again."
STARLET SUCCUMBS AFTER 68-HOUR COMA.
I felt in my pocketbook among the paper scraps and the compact and the peanut shells and the dimes and nickels and the blue jiffy box containing nineteen Gillette blades, till I unearthed the snapshot I'd had taken that afternoon in the orange-and-white striped booth.
I brought it up next to the smudgy photograph of the dead girl. It matched, mouth for mouth, nose for nose. The only difference was the eyes. The eyes in the snapshot were open, and those in the newspaper photograph were closed. But I knew if the dead girl's eyes were to be thumbed wide, they would look out at me with the same dead, black, vacant expression as the eyes in the snapshot.
I stuffed the snapshot back in my pocketbook.
"I will just sit here in the sun on this park bench five minutes more by the clock on that building over there," I told myself, "and then I will go somewhere and do it."
I summoned my little chorus of voices.
Doesn't your work interest you, Esther?
You know, Esther, you've got the perfect setup of a true neurotic.
You'll never get anywhere like that, you'll never get anywhere like that, you'll never get anywhere like that.
Once on a hot summer night, I had spent an hour kissing a hairy, ape-shaped law student from Yale because I felt sorry for him, he was so ugly. When I had finished, he said, "I have you typed, baby. You'll be a prude at forty."
"Factitious!" my creative writing professor at college scrawled on a story of mine called "The Big Weekend."
I hadn't known what factitious meant, so I looked it up in the dictionary.
Factitious, artificial, sham.
You'll never get anywhere like that.
I hadn't slept for twenty-one nights.
I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow, the million moving shapes and cul-de-sacs of shadow. There was shadow in bureau drawers and closets and suitcases, and shadow under houses and trees and stones, and shadow at the back of people's eyes and smiles, and shadow, miles and miles and miles of it, on the night side of the earth.
I looked down at the two flesh-colored Band-Aids forming a cross on the calf of my right leg.
That morning I had made a start.
I had locked myself in the bathroom, and run a tub full of warm water, and taken out a Gillette blade.
When they asked some old Roman philosopher or other how he wanted to die, he said he would open his veins in a warm bath. I thought it would be easy, lying in the tub and seeing the redness flower from my wrists, flush after flush through the clear water, till I sank to sleep under a surface gaudy as poppies.
But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defenseless that I couldn't do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn't in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get at.
It would take two motions. One wrist, then the other wrist. Three motions, if you counted changing the razor from hand to hand. Then I would step into the tub and lie down.
I moved in front of the medicine cabinet. If I looked in the mirror while I did it, it would be like watching somebody else, in a book or a play.
But the person in the mirror was paralyzed and too stupid to do a thing.
Then I thought maybe I ought to spill a little blood for practice, so I sat on the edge of the tub and crossed my right ankle over my left knee. Then I lifted my right hand with the razor and let it drop of its own weight, like a guillotine, onto the calf of my leg.
I felt nothing. Then I felt a small, deep thrill, and a bright seam of red welled up at the lip of the slash. The blood gathered darkly, like fruit, and rolled down my ankle into the cup of my black patent leather shoe.
I thought of getting into the tub then, but I realized my dallying had used up the better part of the morning, and that my mother would probably come home and find me before I was done.
So I bandaged the cut, packed up my Gillette blades and caught the eleven-thirty bus to Boston.
"Sorry, baby, there's no subway to the Deer Island Prison, it's on a niland."
"No, it's not on an island, it used to be on an island, but they filled up the water with dirt and now it joins on to the mainland."
"There's no subway."
"I've got to get there."
"Hey," the fat man in the ticket booth peered at me through the grating, "don't cry. Who you got there, honey, some relative?"
People shoved and bumped by me in the artificially lit dark, hurrying after the trains that rumbled in and out of the intestinal tunnels under Scollay Square. I could feel the tears start to spurt from the screwed-up nozzles of my eyes.
"It's my father."
The fat man consulted a diagram on the wall of his booth. "Here's how you do," he said, "you take a car from that track over there and get off at Orient Heights and then hop a bus with The Point on it." He beamed at me. "It'll run you straight to the prison gate."
"Hey you!" A young fellow in a blue uniform waved from the hut.
I waved back and kept on going.
"Hey you!"
I stopped, and walked slowly over to the hut that perched like a circular living room on the waste of sands.
"Hey, you can't go any further. That's prison property, no trespassers allowed."
"I thought you could go anyplace along the beach," I said. "So long as you stayed under the tideline."
The fellow thought a minute.
Then he said, "Not this beach."
He had a pleasant, fresh face.
"You've a nice place here," I said. "It's like a little house."
He glanced back into the room, with its braided rug and chintz curtains. He smiled.
"We even got a coffee pot."
"I used to live near here."
"No kidding. I was born and brought up in this town myself."
I looked across the sands to the parking lot and the barred gate, and past the barred gate to the narrow road, lapped by the ocean on both sides, that led out to the one-time island.
The red brick buildings of the prison looked friendly, like the buildings of a seaside college. On a green hump of lawn to the left, I could see small white spots and slightly larger pink spots moving about. I asked the guard what they were, and he said, "Them's pigs 'n' chickens."
I was thinking that if I'd had the sense to go on living in that old town I might just have met this prison guard in school and married him and had a parcel of kids by now. It would be nice, living by the sea with piles of little kids and pigs and chickens, wearing what my grandmother called wash dresses, and sitting about in some kitchen with bright linoleum and fat arms, drinking pots of coffee.
"How do you get into that prison?"
"You get a pass."
"No, how do you get locked in?"
"Oh," the guard laughed, "you steal a car, you rob a store."
"You got any murderers in there?"
"No. Murderers go to a big state place."
"Who else is in there?"
"Well, the first day of winter we get these old bums out of Boston. They heave a brick through a window, and then they get picked up and spend the winter out of the cold, with TV and plenty to eat, and basketball games on the weekend."
"That's nice."
"Nice if you like it," said the guard.
I said good-bye and started to move off, glancing back over my shoulder only once. The guard still stood in the doorway of his observation booth, and when I turned he lifted his arm in a salute.
The log I sat on was lead-heavy and smelled of tar. Under the stout, gray cylinder of the water tower on its commanding hill, the sandbar curved out into the sea. At high tide the bar completely submerged itself.
I remembered that sandbar well. It harbored, in the crook of its inner curve, a particular shell that could be found
nowhere else on the beach.
The shell was thick, smooth, big as a thumb joint, and usually white, although sometimes pink or peach-colored. It resembled a sort of modest conch.
"Mummy, that girl's still sitting there."
I looked up, idly, and saw a small, sandy child being dragged up from the sea's edge by a skinny, bird-eyed woman in red shorts and a red-and-white polka-dot halter.
I hadn't counted on the beach being overrun with summer people. In the ten years of my absence, fancy blue and pink and pale green shanties had sprung up on the flat sands of the Point like a crop of tasteless mushrooms, and the silver airplanes and cigar-shaped blimps had given way to jets that scoured the rooftops in their loud offrush from the airport across the bay.
I was the only girl on the beach in a skirt and high heels, and it occurred to me I must stand out. I had removed my patent leather shoes after a while, for they foundered badly in the sand. It pleased me to think they would be perched there on the silver log, pointing out to sea, like a sort of soul-compass, after I was dead.
I fingered the box of razors in my pocketbook.
Then I thought how stupid I was. I had the razors, but no warm bath.
I considered renting a room. There must be a boardinghouse among all those summer places. But I had no luggage. That would create suspicion. Besides, in a boardinghouse other people are always wanting to use the bathroom. I'd hardly have time to do it and step into the tub when somebody would be pounding at the door.
The gulls on their wooden stilts at the tip of the bar miaowed like cats. Then they flapped up, one by one, in their ash-colored jackets, circling my head and crying.
"Say, lady, you better not sit out here, the tide's coming in."
The small boy squatted a few feet away. He picked up a round purple stone and lobbed it into the water. The water swallowed it with a resonant plop. Then he scrabbled around, and I heard the dry stones clank together like money.
He skimmed a flat stone over the dull green surface, and it skipped seven times before it sliced out of sight.
"Why don't you go home?" I said.
The boy skipped another, heavier stone. It sank after the second bounce.
"Don't want to."
"Your mother's looking for you."
"She is not." He sounded worried.
"If you go home, I'll give you some candy."
The boy hitched closer. "What kind?"
But I knew without looking into my pocketbook that all I had was peanut shells.
"I'll give you some money to buy some candy."
"Ar-thur!"
A woman was indeed coming out on the sandbar, slipping and no doubt cursing to herself, for her lips went up and down between her clear, peremptory calls.
"Ar-thur!"
She shaded her eyes with one hand, as if this helped her discern us through the thickening sea dusk.
I could sense the boy's interest dwindle as the pull of his mother increased. He began to pretend he didn't know me. He kicked over a few stones, as if searching for something, and edged off.
I shivered.
The stones lay lumpish and cold under my bare feet. I thought longingly of the black shoes on the beach. A wave drew back, like a hand, then advanced and touched my foot.
The drench seemed to come off the sea floor itself, where blind white fish ferried themselves by their own light through the great polar cold. I saw sharks' teeth and whales' earbones littered about down there like gravestones.
I waited, as if the sea could make my decision for me.
A second wave collapsed over my feet, lipped with white froth, and the chill gripped my ankles with a mortal ache.
My flesh winced, in cowardice, from such a death.
I picked up my pocketbook and started back over the cold stones to where my shoes kept their vigil in the violet light.
13
"Of course his mother killed him."
I looked at the mouth of the boy Jody had wanted me to meet. His lips were thick and pink and a baby face nestled under the silk of white-blond hair. His name was Cal, which I thought must be short for something, but I couldn't think what it would be short for, unless it was California.
"How can you be sure she killed him?" I said.
Cal was supposed to be very intelligent, and Jody had said over the phone that he was cute and I would like him. I wondered, if I'd been my old self, if I would have liked him.
It was impossible to tell.
"Well, first she says No no no, and then she says Yes."
"But then she says No no again."
Cal and I lay side by side on an orange-and-green striped towel on a mucky beach across the swamps from Lynn. Jody and Mark, the boy she was pinned to, were swimming. Cal hadn't wanted to swim, he had wanted to talk, and we were arguing about this play where a young man finds out he has a brain disease, on account of his father fooling around with unclean women, and in the end his brain, which has been softening all along, snaps completely, and his mother is debating whether to kill him or not.
I had a suspicion that my mother had called Jody and begged her to ask me out, so I wouldn't sit around in my room all day with the shades drawn. I didn't want to go at first, because I thought Jody would notice the change in me, and that anybody with half an eye would see I didn't have a brain in my head.
But all during the drive north, and then east, Jody had joked and laughed and chattered and not seemed to mind that I only said, "My" or "Gosh" or "You don't say."
We browned hot dogs on the public grills at the beach, and by watching Jody and Mark and Cal very carefully I managed to cook my hot dog just the right amount of time and didn't burn it or drop it into the fire, the way I was afraid of doing. Then, when nobody was looking, I buried it in the sand.
After we ate, Jody and Mark ran down to the water hand-in-hand, and I lay back, staring into the sky, while Cal went on and on about this play.
The only reason I remembered this play was because it had a mad person in it, and everything I had ever read about mad people stuck in my mind, while everything else flew out.
"But it's the Yes that matters," Cal said. "It's the Yes she'll come back to in the end."
I lifted my head and squinted out at the bright blue plate of the sea--a bright blue plate with a dirty rim. A big round gray rock, like the upper half of an egg, poked out of the water about a mile from the stony headland.
"What was she going to kill him with? I forget."
I hadn't forgotten. I remembered perfectly well, but I wanted to hear what Cal would say.
"Morphia powders."
"Do you suppose they have morphia powders in America?"
Cal considered a minute. Then he said, "I wouldn't think so. They sound awfully old-fashioned."
I rolled over onto my stomach and squinted at the view in the other direction, toward Lynn. A glassy haze rippled up from the fires in the grills and the heat on the road, and through the haze, as through a curtain of clear water, I could make out a smudgy skyline of gas tanks and factory stacks and derricks and bridges.
It looked one hell of a mess.
I rolled onto my back again and made my voice casual. "If you were going to kill yourself, how would you do it?"
Cal seemed pleased. "I've often thought of that. I'd blow my brains out with a gun."
I was disappointed. It was just like a man to do it with a gun. A fat chance I had of laying my hands on a gun. And even if I did, I wouldn't have a clue as to what part of me to shoot at.
I'd already read in the papers about people who'd tried to shoot themselves, only they ended up shooting an important nerve and getting paralyzed, or blasting their face off, but being saved, by surgeons and a sort of miracle, from dying outright.
The risks of a gun seemed great.
"What kind of gun?"
"My father's shotgun. He keeps it loaded. I'd just have to walk into his study one day and," Cal pointed a finger to his temple and made a comical, screwed-up face, "click!
" He widened his pale gray eyes and looked at me.
"Does your father happen to live near Boston?" I asked idly.
"Nope. In Clacton-on-Sea. He's English."
Jody and Mark ran up hand-in-hand, dripping and shaking off water drops like two loving puppies. I thought there would be too many people, so I stood up and pretended to yawn.
"I guess I'll go for a swim."
Being with Jody and Mark and Cal was beginning to weigh on my nerves, like a dull wooden block on the strings of a piano. I was afraid that at any moment my control would snap, and I would start babbling about how I couldn't read and couldn't write and how I must be just about the only person who had stayed awake for a solid month without dropping dead of exhaustion.
A smoke seemed to be going up from my nerves like the smoke from the grills and the sun-saturated road. The whole landscape--beach and headland and sea and rock--quavered in front of my eyes like a stage backcloth.
I wondered at what point in space the silly, sham blue of the sky turned black.
"You swim too, Cal."
Jody gave Cal a playful little push.
"Ohhh." Cal hid his face in the towel. "It's too cold."
I started to walk toward the water.
Somehow, in the broad, shadowless light of noon, the water looked amiable and welcoming.
I thought drowning must be the kindest way to die, and burning the worst. Some of those babies in the jars that Buddy Willard showed me had gills, he said. They went through a stage where they were just like fish.
A little, rubbishy wavelet, full of candy wrappers and orange peel and seaweed, folded over my foot.
I heard the sand thud behind me, and Cal came up.
"Let's swim to that rock out there." I pointed at it.
"Are you crazy? That's a mile out."
"What are you?" I said. "Chicken?"
Cal took me by the elbow and jostled me into the water. When we were waist high, he pushed me under. I surfaced, splashing, my eyes seared with salt. Underneath, the water was green and semi-opaque as a hunk of quartz.
I started to swim, a modified dogpaddle, keeping my face toward the rock. Cal did a slow crawl. After a while he put his head up and treaded water.
"Can't make it." He was panting heavily.
"Okay. You go back."
I thought I would swim out until I was too tired to swim back. As I paddled on, my heartbeat boomed like a dull motor in my ears.
I am I am I am.
That morning I had tried to hang myself.
I had taken the silk cord of my mother's yellow bathrobe as soon as she left for work, and, in the amber shade of the bedroom, fashioned it into a knot that slipped up and down on itself. It took me a long time to do this, because I was poor at knots and had no idea how to make a proper one.