The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath Page B

scheme if I hadn’t made that A in the first place. And if
my Class Dean had known how scared and depressed I was, and how I seriously
contemplated desperate remedies such as getting a doctor’s certificate that I
was unfit to study chemistry, the formulas made me dizzy and so on, I’m sure
she wouldn’t have listened to me for a minute, but would have made me take the
course regardless.
                    As it happened, the Faculty
Board passed my petition, and my Class Dean told me later that several of the
professors were touched by it. They took it as a real step in intellectual
maturity.
                    I had to laugh when I thought
about the rest of that year. I went to the chemistry class five times a week
and didn’t miss a single one. Mr. Manzi stood at the bottom of the big, rickety
old amphitheater, making blue flames and red flares and clouds of yellow stuff
by pouring the contents of one test tube into another, and I shut his voice out
of my ears by pretending it was only a mosquito in the distance and sat back
enjoying the bright lights and the colored fires and wrote page after page of
villanelles and sonnets.
                    Mr. Manzi would glance at me now
and then and see me writing, and send up a sweet little appreciative smile. I
guess he thought I was writing down all those formulas not for exam time, like
the other girls, but because his presentation fascinated me so much I couldn’t
help it.

4
     
    I
don’t know just why my successful evasion of chemistry should have floated into my mind there in Jay Cee’s office.
                    All the time she talked to me, I
saw Mr. Manzi standing on thin air in back of Jay Cee’s head, like something
conjured up out of a hat, holding his little wooden ball and the test tube that
billowed a great cloud of yellow smoke the day before Easter vacation and smelt
of rotten eggs and made all the girls and Mr. Manzi laugh..
                    I felt sorry for Mr. Manzi. I
felt like going down to him on my hands and knees and apologizing for being
such an awful liar.
                    Jay Cee handed me a pile of
story manuscripts and spoke to me much more kindly. I spent the rest of the
morning reading the stories and typing out what I thought of them on the pink
Interoffice Memo sheets and sending them into the office of Betsy’s editor to
be read by Betsy the next day. Jay Cee interrupted me now and then to tell me
something practical or a bit of gossip.
                    Jay Cee was going to lunch that
noon with two famous writers, a man and a lady. The man had just sold six short
stories to the New Yorker and six to Jay Cee. This surprised me, as I
didn’t know magazines bought stories in lots of six, and I was staggered by the
thought of the amount of money six stories would probably bring in. Jay Cee
said she had to be very careful at this lunch, because the lady writer wrote
stories too, but she had never had any in the New Yorker and Jay Cee had
only taken one from her in five years. Jay Cee had to flatter the more famous
man at the same time as she was careful not to hurt the less famous lady.
                    When the cherubs in Jay Cee’s
French wall clock waved their wings up and down and put their little gilt
trumpets to their lips and pinged out twelve notes one after the other, Jay Cee
told me I’d done enough work for the day, and to go off to the Ladies’ Day tour
and banquet and to the film premiere, and she would see me bright and early
tomorrow.
                    Then she slipped a suit jacket
over her lilac blouse, pinned a hat of imitation lilacs on the top of her head,
powdered her nose briefly and adjusted her thick spectacles. She looked
terrible, but very wise. As she left the office, she patted my shoulder with
one lilac-gloved