THE BELL JAR // sylvia plath

Chapter Eight

MR. WILLARD drove me up to the Adirondacks. It was the day after Christmas and a gray sky bellied over us, fat with snow. I felt overstuffed and dull and disappointed, the way I always do the day after Christmas, as if whatever it was the pine boughs and the candles and the silver and gilt-ribboned presents and the birch-log fires and the Christmas turkey and the carols and the piano promised never came to pass. At Christmas I almost wished I was a Catholic.

First Mr. Willard drove and then I drove. I don't know what we talked about, but as the countryside, already deep under old falls of snow, turned us a bleaker shoulder, and as the fir trees crowded down from the gray hills to the road edge, so darkly green they looked black, I grew gloomier and gloomier. I was tempted to tell Mr. Willard to go ahead alone, I would hitchhike home. But one glance at Mr. Willard's face -- the silver hair in its boyish crewcut, the clear blue eyes, the pink cheeks, all frosted like a sweet wedding cake with the innocent, trusting expression -- and I knew I couldn't do it. I'd have to see the visit through to the end.
At midday the grayness paled a bit, and we parked in an icy turnoff and shared out the tunafish sandwiches and the oatmeal cookies and the apples and the thermos of black coffee Mrs. Willard had packed for our lunch.

Mr. Willard eyed me kindly. Then he cleared his throat and brushed a few last crumbs from his lap. I could tell he was going to say something serious, because he was very shy, and I'd heard him dear his throat in that same way before giving an important economics lecture. "Nelly and I have always wanted a daughter." For one crazy minute I thought, Mr. Willard was going to announce that Mrs. Willard was pregnant and expecting a baby girl. Then he said, "But I don't see how any daughter could be nicer than you."

Mr. Willard must have thought I was crying because I was so glad he wanted to be a father to me. "There, there," he patted my shoulder and cleared his throat once or twice. "I think we understand each other." Then he opened the car door on his side and strolled round to my side, his breath shaping tortuous smoke signals in the gray air. I moved over to the seat he had left and he started the car and we drove on. I'm not sure what I expected of Buddy's sanatorium.

I think I expected a kind of wooden chalet perched up on top of a small mountain, with rosy-cheeked young men and women, all very attractive but with hectic glittering eyes, lying covered with thick blankets on outdoor balconies. "TB is like living with a bomb in your lung," Buddy had written to me at college. "You just lie around very quietly hoping it won't go off."

I found it hard to imagine Buddy lying quietly. His whole philosophy of life was to be up and doing every second. Even when we went to the beach in the summer he never lay down to drowse in the sun the way I did. He ran back and forth or played ball or did a little series of rapid pushups to use the time. Mr. Willard and I waited in the reception room for the end of the afternoon rest cure.
The color scheme of the whole sanatorium seemed to be based on liver. Dark, glowering woodwork, burnt-brown leather chairs, walls that might once have been white but had succumbed under a spreading malady of mold or damp. A mottled brown linoleum sealed off the floor. On a low coffee table, with circular and semicircular stains bitten into the dark veneer, lay a few wilted numbers of Time and Life. I flipped to the middle of the nearest magazine. The face of Eisenhower beamed up at me, bald and blank as the face of a fetus in a bottle.

After a while I became aware of a sly, leaking noise. For a minute I thought the walls had begun to discharge the moisture that must saturate them, but then I saw the noise came from a small fountain in one corner of the room. The fountain spurted a few inches into the air from a rough length of pipe, threw up its hands, collapsed and drowned its ragged dribble in a stone basin of yellowing water. The basin was paved with the white hexagonal tiles one finds in public lavatories.

A buzzer sounded. Doors opened and shut in the distance. Then Buddy came in. "Hello, Dad." Buddy hugged his father, and promptly, with a dreadful brightness, came over to me and held out his hand. I shook it. It felt moist and fat. Mr. Willard and I sat together on a leather couch. Buddy perched opposite us on the edge of a slippery armchair. He kept smiling, as if the corners of his mouth were strung up on invisible wire. The last thing I expected was for Buddy to be fat. All the time I thought of him at the sanatorium I saw shadows carving themselves under his cheekbones and his eyes burning out of almost fleshless sockets.