The Bell Jar - nubuk.com

they were sitting on the deck of a departing ship, stranding me in the middle of a huge
silence.
I started adding up all the things I couldn't do.
I began with cooking.
My grandmother and my mother were such good cooks that I left everything to
them. They were always trying to teach me one dish or another, but I would just look on
and say, "Yes, yes, I see," while the instructions slid through my head like water, and
then I'd always spoil what I did so nobody would ask me to do it again.
I remember Jody, my best and only girlfriend at college in my freshman year,
making me scrambled eggs at her house one morning. They tasted unusual, and when I
asked her if she had put in anything extra, she said cheese and garlic salt. I asked who
told her to do that, and she said nobody, she just thought it up. But then, she was practical
and a sociology major.
I didn't know shorthand either.
This meant I couldn't get a good job after college. My mother kept telling me
nobody wanted a plain English major. But an English major who knew shorthand was
something else again. Everybody would want her. She would be in demand among all the
up-and-coming young men and she would transcribe letter after thrilling letter.
The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way. I wanted to dictate
my own thrilling letters. Besides, those little shorthand symbols in the book my mother
showed me seemed just as bad as let t equal time and let s equal the total distance.
My list grew longer.
I was a terrible dancer. I couldn't carry a tune. I had no sense of balance, and
when we had to walk down a narrow board with our hands out and a book on our heads
in gym class I always fell over. I couldn't ride a horse or ski, the two things I wanted to
do most, because they cost too much money. I couldn't speak German or read Hebrew or
write Chinese. I didn't even know where most of the old out-of-the-way countries the UN
men in front of me represented fitted in on the map.
For the first time in my life, sitting there in the soundproof heart of the UN
building between Constantin who could play tennis as well as simultaneouly interpret and
the Russian girl who knew so many idioms, I felt dreadfully inadequate. The trouble was,
I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn't thought about it.
The one thing I was good at was winning scholarships and prizes, and that era was
coming to an end.
I felt like a racehorse in a world without racetracks or a champion college
footballer suddenly confronted by Wall Street and a business suit, his days of glory
shrunk to a little gold cup on his mantel with a date engraved on it like the date on a
tombstone.
I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story.
From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned
and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was
a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the
amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another
fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names
and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and
beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out.