The Bell Jar - nubuk.com

I hurried out into the hot, dusty, end-of-July afternoon, sweating and sandymouthed,
as if late for a difficult interview, and boarded the red bus, whose motor was
already running.
I handed my fare to the driver, and silently, on gloved hinges, the door folded shut
at my back
Twelve
DOCTOR GORDON'S private hospital crowned a grassy rise at the end of a long,
secluded drive that had been whitened with broken quahog shells. The yellow clapboard
walls of the large house, with its encircling veranda, gleamed in the sun, but no people
strolled on the green dome of the lawn.
As my mother and I approached the summer heat bore down on us, and a cicada
started up, like an aerial lawnmower, in the heart of a copper beech tree at the back. The
sound of the cicada only served to underline the enormous silence.
A nurse met us at the door.
"Will you wait in the living room, please. Doctor Gordon will be with you
presently."
What bothered me was that everything about the house seemed normal, although I
knew it must be chock-full of crazy people. There were no bars on the windows that I
could see, and no wild or disquieting noises. Sunlight measured itself out in regular
oblongs on the shabby, but soft red carpets, and a whiff of fresh-cut grass sweetened the
air.
I paused in the doorway of the living room.
For a minute I thought it was the replica of a lounge in a guest house I visited
once on an island off the coast of Maine. The French doors let in a dazzle of white light, a
grand piano filled the far corner of the room, and people in summer clothes were sitting
about at card tables and in the lopsided wicker armchairs one so often finds at down-atheel
seaside resorts.
Then I realized that none of the people were moving.
I focused more closely, trying to pry some clue from their stiff postures. I made
out men and women, and boys and girls who must be as young as I, but there was a
uniformity to their faces, as if they had lain for a long time on the shelf, out of the
sunlight, under siftings of pale, fine dust.
Then I saw that some of the people were indeed moving, but with such small,
birdlike gestures I had not at first discerned them.
A gray-faced man was counting out a deck of cards, one, two, three, four. . . I
thought he must be seeing if it was a full pack, but when he had finished counting, he
started over again. Next to him, a fat lady played with a string of wooden beads. She
drew all the beads up to one end of the string. Then click, click, click, she let them fall
back on each other.
At the piano, a young girl leafed through a few sheets of music, but when she saw
me looking at her, she ducked her head crossly and tore the sheets in half.
My mother touched my arm, and I followed her into the room.
We sat, without speaking, on a lumpy sofa that creaked each time one stirred.