The Bell Jar
Chapter 19
“I’m going to be a psychiatrist.”
Joan spoke with her usual breathy enthusiasm. We were drinking apple cider in the Belsize lounge.
“Oh,” I said dryly, “that’s nice.”
“I’ve had a long talk with Doctor Quinn, and she thinks it’s perfectly possible.” Doctor Quinn was Joan’s psychiatrist, a bright, shrewd, single lady, and I often thought if I had been assigned to Doctor Quinn I would be still in Caplan or, more probably, Wymark. Doctor Quinn had an abstract quality that appealed to Joan, but it gave me the polar chills.
Joan chattered on about Egos and Ids, and I turned my mind to something else, to the brown, unwrapped package in my bottom drawer. I never talked about Egos and Ids with Doctor Nolan. I didn’t know just what I talked about, really.
“… I’m going to live out, now.”
I tuned in on Joan then. “Where?” I demanded, trying to hide my envy.
Doctor Nolan said my college would take me back for the second semester, on her recommendation and Philomena Guinea’s scholarship, but as the doctors vetoed my living with my mother in the interim, I was staying on at the asylum until the winter term began.
Even so, I felt it unfair of Joan to beat me through the gates.
“Where?” I persisted. “They’re not letting you live on your own, are they?” Joan had only that week been given town privileges again.
“Oh no, of course not. I’m living in Cambridge with Nurse Kennedy. Her room-mate’s just got married, and she needs someone to share the apartment.”
“Cheers.” I raised my apple cider glass, and we clinked. In spite of my profound reservations, I thought I would always treasure Joan. It was as if we had been forced together by some overwhelming circumstance, like war or plague, and shared a world of our own. “When are you leaving?”
“On the first of the month.”
“Nice.”
Joan grew wistful. “You’ll come visit me, won’t you, Esther?”
“Of course.”
But I thought, “Not likely.”
“It hurts,” I said. “Is it supposed to hurt?”
Irwin didn’t say anything. Then he said, “Sometimes it hurts.”
I had met Irwin on the steps of the Widener Library. I was standing at the top of the long flight, overlooking the red brick buildings that walled the snow-filled quad and preparing to catch the trolley back to the asylum, when a tall young man with a rather ugly and bespectacled, but intelligent face, came up and said, “Could you please tell me the time?”
I glanced at my watch. “Five past four.”
Then the man shifted his arms around the load of books he was carrying before him like a dinner tray and revealed a bony wrist.
“Why, you’ve a watch yourself!”
The man looked ruefully at his watch. He lifted it and shook it by his ear. “Doesn’t work.” He smiled engagingly. “Where are you going?”
I was about to say, “Back to the asylum”, but the man looked promising, so I changed my mind. “Home.”
“Would you like some coffee first?”
I hesitated. I was due at the asylum for supper and I didn’t want to be late so close to being signed out of there for good.
“A very small cup