The Bell Jar Read Free Page A

a prize there and ends up steering New York
like her own private car.
                    Only I wasn’t steering anything,
not even myself. I just bumped from my hotel to work and to parties and from
parties to my hotel and back to work like a numb trolleybus. I guess I should
have been excited the way most of the other girls were, but I couldn’t get
myself to react. (I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a
tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding
hullabaloo. )
     
    There
were twelve of us at the hotel.
                    We had all won a fashion
magazine contest, by writing essays and stories and poems and fashion blurbs,
and as prizes they gave us jobs in New Yorkfor a month, expenses paid,
and piles and piles of free bonuses, like ballet tickets and passes to fashion
shows and hair stylings at a famous expensive salon and chances to meet
successful people in the field of our desire and advice about what to do with
our particular complexions.
                    I still have the makeup kit they
gave me, fitted out for a person with brown eyes and brown hair: an oblong of
brown mascara with a tiny brush, and a round basin of blue eye-shadow just big
enough to dab the tip of your finger in, and three lipsticks ranging from red
to pink, all cased in the same little gilt box with a mirror on one side. I
also have a white plastic sunglasses case with colored shells and sequins and a
green plastic starfish sewed onto it.
                    I realized we kept piling up
these presents because it was as good as free advertising for the firms
involved, but I couldn’t be cynical. I got such a kick out of all those free
gifts showering on to us. For a long time afterward I hid them away, but later,
when I was all right again, I brought them out, and I still have them around
the house. I use the lipsticks now and then, and last week I cut the plastic
starfish off the sunglasses case for the baby to play with.
                    So there were twelve of us at
the hotel, in the same wing on the same floor in single rooms, one after the
other, and it reminded me of my dormitory at college. It wasn’t a proper
hotel--I mean a hotel where there are both men and women mixed about here and
there on the same floor.
                    This hotel--the Amazon--was for
women only, and they were mostly girls my age with wealthy parents who wanted
to be sure their daughters would be living where men couldn’t get at them and
deceive them; and they were all going to posh secretarial schools like Katy
Gibbs, where they had to wear hats and stockings and gloves to class, or they
had just graduated from places like Katy Gibbs and were secretaries to
executives and junior executives and simply hanging around in New York waiting
to get married to some career man or other.
                    These girls looked awfully bored
to me. I saw them on the sunroof, yawning and painting their nails and trying
to keep up their Bermuda tans, and they seemed bored as hell. I talked with one
of them, and she was bored with yachts and bored with flying around in
airplanes and bored with skiing in Switzerland at Christmas and bored with the
men in Brazil.
                    Girls like that make me sick.
I’m so jealous I can’t speak. Nineteen years, and I hadn’t been out of New
England except for this trip to New York. It was my first big chance, but here
I was, sitting back and letting it run through my fingers like so much water.
                    I guess one of my troubles was
Doreen.
                    I’d never known a girl like
Doreen before. Doreen came from a society girls’ college down South and had
bright white hair standing out in a cotton candy fluff round her head and blue
eyes like transparent agate marbles, hard and