The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath Page A

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 première, 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 hand.
    â€œDon’t let the wicked city get you down.”
    I sat quietly in my swivel chair for a few minutes and thought about Jay Cee. I tried to imagine what it would be like if I were Ee Gee, the famous editor, in an office full of potted rubber plants and African violets my secretary had to water each morning. I wished I had a mother like Jay Cee. Then I’d know what to do.
    My own mother wasn’t much help. My mother had taught shorthand and typing to support us ever since my father died, and secretly she hated it and hated him for dying and leaving no money because he didn’t trust life insurance salesmen. She was always on to me to learn shorthand after college, so I’d have a practical skill as well as a college degree. “Even the apostles were tentmakers,” she’d say. “They had to live, just the way we do.”
    I dabbled my fingers in the bowl of warm water a Ladies’ Day waitress set down in place of my two empty ice cream dishes. Then I wiped each finger carefully with my linen napkin which was still quite clean. Then I folded the linen napkin and laid it between my lips and brought my lips down on it precisely. When I put the napkin back on the table a fuzzy pink lip shape bloomed right in the middle of it like a tiny heart.
    I thought what a long way I had come.
    The first time I saw a fingerbowl was at the home of my benefactress. It was the custom at my college, the little freckled lady in the Scholarships Office told me, to write to the person whose scholarship you had, if they were still alive, and thank them for it.
    I had the scholarship of Philomena Guinea, a wealthy novelist who went to my college in the early nineteen hundreds and had her first novel made into a silent film with Bette Davis as well as a radio serial that was still running, and it turned out she was alive and lived in a large mansion not far from my grandfather’s country club.
    So I wrote Philomena Guinea a long letter in coal-black ink on gray paper with the name of the college embossed on it in red. I wrote what the leaves looked like in autumn when I bicycled out into the hills, and how wonderful it was to live on a campus instead of commuting by bus to a city college and having to live at home, and how all knowledge was opening up before me and perhaps one day I would be able to write great books the way she did.
    I had read one of Mrs. Guinea’s books in the town library—the college library didn’t stock them for some reason—and it was crammed from beginning to end with long, suspenseful questions: “Would Evelyn discern that Gladys knew Roger in her past? wondered Hector feverishly” and “How could Donald marry her when he learned of the child Elsie, hidden away with Mrs. Rollmop on the secluded country farm? Griselda demanded of her bleak, moonlit pillow.” These books earned Philomena Guinea, who later told me she had been very stupid at college, millions and millions of dollars.
    Mrs. Guinea answered my letter and invited me to lunch at her home. That was where I saw my first fingerbowl.
    The water had a few cherry blossoms floating in it, and I thought it must be some clear sort of Japanese after-dinner soup and ate every bit of it, including the crisp little blossoms. Mrs. Guinea never said