The Bell Jar: Chapters 9-12

And in a year...I smiled, seeing a pristine, imaginary manuscript floating in mid-air, with Esther Greenwood typed in the upper-right-hand corner.

I decided I'd surprise Jay Cee and send in a couple of the stories I wrote in this class under a pseudonym.

Woman-haters were like gods: invulnerable and chock-full of power.

In the infinitesimal glow of the stars, the trees and flowers were strewing their cool odors.

Quiet as a burglar in my cornflower-sprigged bathrobe, I crept to the edge of the parapet.

The gray, padded car roof closed over my head like the roof of a prison van, and the white, shining, identical clapboard houses with their interstices of well-groomed green proceeded past, one bar after another in a large but escape-proof cage.

Mrs. Ockenden was a retired nurse who had just married her third husband — the other two died in curious circumstances — and she spent an inordinate amount of time peering from behind the starched white curtains of her windows.

They had a big, rambling house up the street from us, set behind a morbid facade of pine trees, and surrounded by scooters, tricycles, doll carriages, toy fire trucks, baseball bats, badminton nets, croquet wickets, hamster cages and cocker spaniel puppies — the whole sprawling paraphernalia of suburban childhood.

"Hullo, Esther, what's the matter, have you got laryngitis?"

It was a sweltering morning in July, and drops of sweat crawled down her back one by one, like slow insects.

I thought I would spend the summer reading Finnegans Wake and writing my thesis.

But when I took up my pen, my hand made big, jerky letters like those of a child, and the lines sloped down the page from left to right almost diagonally, as if they were loops of string lying on the paper, and someone had come along and blown them askew.

Then my gaze slid over the people to the blaze of green beyond the diaphanous curtains, and I felt as if I were sitting in the window of an enormous department store.

I was trying to tell which eyes were the real eyes and which the false eyes, and which of the real eyes was the wall-eye and which the straight eye, when she brought her face up to mine with a large, conspiratorial grin and hissed, as if to reassure me, "She thinks she's going to jump out the window but she can't jump out the window because they're all barred!"

Every time I tried to concentrate, my mind glided off, like a skater, into a large empty space, and pirouetted there, absently.