The Bell Jar: Chapters 5-8

"I can already see the UN," I told him, with a little hysterical giggle. He seemed nonplussed. "I can see it from my window." I thought perhaps my English was a touch too fast for him.

I knew I would never marry him if he were the last man on earth. Buddy Willard was a hypocrite. Of course, I didn't know he was a hypocrite at first.

Either that, or that particular cabdriver was an out-and-out louse.

He popped into my house out of the blue one Christmas vacation, wearing a thick white turtleneck sweater and looking so handsome I could hardly stop staring, and said, "I might drop over to see you at college some day, all right?" I was flabbergasted.

In the hour before lunch Buddy took me to a lecture on sickle-cell anemia and some other depressing diseases, where they wheeled sick people out onto the platform and asked them questions and then wheeled them off and showed colored slides.

"Well, how was it?" Buddy asked with a satisfied expression as we walked across the green quadrangle to his room.

He was very proud of his perfect health and was always telling me it was psychosomatic when my sinuses blocked up and I couldn't breathe.

A faint milky light diffused from the street lights or the half moon or the cars or the stars, I couldn't tell what, but apart from holding my hand Constantin showed no desire to seduce me whatsoever.

So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state.

He had a disquieting new habit of boring into my eyes with his look as if actually bent on piercing my head, the better to analyze what went on inside it.

"And you," I continued with sudden force, "laughed and said I had the perfect setup of a true neurotic and that that question came from some questionnaire you'd had in psychology class that week?"

I rapped out, thinking, You can't coddle these sick people, it's the worst thing for them, it'll spoil them to bits.

His arms were folded, now, and he seemed of a piece with the split-rail fence behind him — numb, brown and inconsequential.

I plummeted down past the zigzaggers, the students, the experts, through year after year of doubleness and smiles and compromise, into my own past.

A dispassionate white sun shone at the summit of the sky.