The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath Page A

doctor and Will
started sewing up the woman’s cut with a needle and a long thread.
                    I think somebody said, “It’s a
boy, Mrs. Tomolillo,” but the woman didn’t answer or raise her head.
                    “Well, how was it?” Buddy asked
with a satisfied expression as we walked across the green quadrangle to his
room.
                    “Wonderful,” I said. “I could
see something like that every day.”
                    I didn’t feel up to asking him
if there were any other ways to have babies. For some reason the most important
thing to me was actually seeing the baby come out of you yourself and making
sure it was yours. I thought if you had to have all that pain anyway you might
just as well stay awake.
                    I had always imagined myself
hitching up on to my elbows on the delivery table after it was all over--dead
white, of course, with no makeup and from the awful ordeal, but smiling and
radiant, with my hair down to my waist, and reaching out for my first little
squirmy child and saying its name, whatever it was.
                    “Why was it all covered with
flour?” I asked then, to keep the conversation going, and Buddy told me about
the waxy stuff that guarded the baby’s skin.
                    When we were back in Buddy’s
room, which reminded me of nothing so much as a monk’s cell, with its bare
walls and bare bed and bare floor and the desk loaded with Gray’s Anatomy and
other thick gruesome books, Buddy lit a candle and uncorked a bottle of
Dubonnet. Then we lay down side by side on the bed and Buddy sipped his wine
while I read aloud “somewhere I have never travelled” and other poems from a
book I’d brought.
                    Buddy said he figured there must
be something in poetry if a girl like me spent all her days over it, so each
time we met I read him some poetry and explained to him what I found in it. It
was Buddy’s idea. He always arranged our weekends so we’d never regret wasting
our time in any way. Buddy’s father was a teacher, and I think Buddy could have
been a teacher as well, he was always trying to explain things to me and
introduce me to new knowledge.
                    Suddenly, after I finished a
poem, he said, “Esther, have you ever seen a man?”
                    The way he said it I knew he
didn’t mean a regular man or a man in general, I knew he meant a man naked.
                    “No,” I said. “Only statues.”
                    “Well, don’t you think you would
like to see me?”
                    I didn’t know what to say. My
mother and my grandmother had started hinting around to me a lot lately about
what a fine, clean boy Buddy Willard was, coming from such a fine, clean
family, and how everybody at church thought he was a model person, so kind to
his parents and to older people, as well as so athletic and so handsome and so
intelligent.
                    All I’d heard about, really, was
how fine and clean Buddy was and how he was the kind of person a girl should
stay fine and clean for. So I didn’t really see the harm in anything Buddy
would think up to do.
                    “Well, all right, I guess so,” I
said.
                    I stared at Buddy while he
unzipped his chino pants and took them off and laid them on a chair and then
took off his underpants that were made of something like nylon fishnet.
                    “They’re cool,” he explained,
“and my mother says they wash easily.”
                    Then he just stood there in
front of me and I kept on staring at him. The only thing I could think of was
turkey neck and turkey gizzards and I felt very