The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath Page B

anything, and it was only much later, when I told a debutante I knew at college about the dinner, that I learned what I had done.
    When we came out of the sunnily lit interior of the Ladies’ Day offices, the streets were gray and fuming with rain. Itwasn’t the nice kind of rain that rinses you clean, but the sort of rain I imagine they must have in Brazil. It flew straight down from the sky in drops the size of coffee saucers and hit the hot sidewalks with a hiss that sent clouds of steam writhing up from the gleaming, dark concrete.
    My secret hope of spending the afternoon alone in Central Park died in the glass eggbeater of Ladies’ Day revolving doors. I found myself spewed out through the warm rain and into the dim, throbbing cave of a cab, together with Betsy and Hilda and Emily Ann Offenbach, a prim little girl with a bun of red hair and a husband and three children in Teaneck, New Jersey.
    The movie was very poor. It starred a nice blond girl who looked like June Allyson but was really somebody else, and a sexy black-haired girl who looked like Elizabeth Taylor but was also somebody else, and two big, broad-shouldered boneheads with names like Rick and Gil.
    It was a football romance and it was in Technicolor.
    I hate Technicolor. Everybody in a Technicolor movie seems to feel obliged to wear a lurid costume in each new scene and to stand around like a clotheshorse with a lot of very green trees or very yellow wheat or very blue ocean rolling away for miles and miles in every direction.
    Most of the action in this picture took place in the football stands, with the two girls waving and cheering in smart suits with orange chrysanthemums the size of cabbages on their lapels, or in a ballroom, where the girls swooped across the floor with their dates, in dresses like something out of Gone With the Wind, and then sneakedoff into the powder room to say nasty intense things to each other.
    Finally I could see the nice girl was going to end up with the nice football hero and the sexy girl was going to end up with nobody, because the man named Gil had only wanted a mistress and not a wife all along and was now packing off to Europe on a single ticket.
    At about this point I began to feel peculiar. I looked round me at all the rows of rapt little heads with the same silver glow on them at the front and the same black shadow on them at the back, and they looked like nothing more or less than a lot of stupid moonbrains.
    I felt in terrible danger of puking. I didn’t know whether it was the awful movie giving me a stomachache or all that caviar I had eaten.
    â€œI’m going back to the hotel,” I whispered to Betsy through the half-dark.
    Betsy was staring at the screen with deadly concentration. “Don’t you feel good?” she whispered, barely moving her lips.
    â€œNo,” I said. “I feel like hell.”
    â€œSo do I, I’ll come back with you.”
    We slipped out of our seats and said Excuse me Excuse me Excuse me down the length of our row, while the people grumbled and hissed and shifted their rain boots and umbrellas to let us pass, and I stepped on as many feet as I could because it took my mind off this enormous desire to puke that was ballooning up in front of me so fast I couldn’t see round it.
    The remains of a tepid rain were still sifting down when we stepped out into the street.
    Betsy looked a fright. The bloom was gone from her cheeks and her drained face floated in front of me, green and sweating. We fell into one of those yellow checkered cabs that are always waiting at the curb when you are trying to decide whether or not you want a taxi, and by the time we reached the hotel I had puked once and Betsy had puked twice.
    The cab driver took the corners with such momentum that we were thrown together first on one side of the back seat and then on the other. Each time one of us felt sick, she would lean over quietly as if she had dropped something and was