Free The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

leather and quite old, with tiny air holes in a scalloped pattern over
the toe and a dull polish, and it was pointed at me. It seemed to be placed on
a hard green surface that was hurting my right cheekbone.
                    I kept very still, waiting for a
clue that would give me some notion of what to do. A little to the left of the
shoe I saw a vague heap of blue cornflowers on a white ground and this made me
want to cry. It was the sleeve of my own bathrobe I was looking at, and my left
hand lay pale as a cod at the end of it.
                    “She’s all right now.”
                    The voice came from a cool,
rational region far above my head. For a minute I didn’t think there was
anything strange about it, and then I thought it was strange. It was a man’s voice,
and no men were allowed to be in our hotel at any time of the night or day.
                    “How many others are there?” the
voice went on.
                    I listened with interest. The
floor seemed wonderfully solid. It was comforting to know I had fallen and
could fall no farther.
                    “Eleven, I think,” a woman’s
voice answered. I figured she must belong to the black shoe. “I think there’s
eleven more of ‘um, but one’s missin’ so there’s oney ten.”
                    “Well, you get this one to bed
and I’ll take care of the rest.”
                    I heard a hollow boomp boomp in
my right ear that grew fainter and fainter. Then a door opened in the distance,
and there were voices and groans, and the door shut again.
                    Two hands slid under my armpits
and the woman’s voice said, “Come, come, lovey, we’ll make it yet,” and I felt
myself being half lifted, and slowly the doors began to move by, one by one,
until we came to an open door and went in.
                    The sheet on my bed was folded
back, and the woman helped me lie down and covered me up to the chin and rested
for a minute in the bedside armchair, fanning herself with one plump, pink
hand. She wore gilt-rimmed spectacles and a white nurse’s cap.
                    “Who are you?” I asked in a
faint voice.
                    “I’m the hotel nurse.”
                    “What’s the matter with me?”
                    “Poisoned,” she said briefly.
“Poisoned, the whole lot of you. I never seen anythin’ like it. Sick here, sick
there, whatever have you young ladies been stuffin’ yourselves with?”
                    “Is everybody else sick too?” I
asked with some hope.
                    “The whole of your lot,” she
affirmed with relish. “Sick as dogs and cryin’ for ma.”
                    The room hovered around me with
great gentleness, as if the chairs and the tables and the walls were
withholding their weight out of sympathy for my sudden frailty.
                    “The doctor’s given you an
injection,” the nurse said from the doorway. “You’ll sleep now.”
                    And the door took her place like
a sheet of blank paper, and then a larger sheet of paper took the place of the
door, and I drifted toward it and smiled myself to sleep.
     
    Somebody
was standing by my pillow with a white cup.
                    “Drink this,” they said.
                    I shook my head. The pillow
crackled like a wad of straw.
                    “Drink this and you’ll feel
better.”
                    A thick white china cup was
lowered under my nose. In the wan light that might have been evening and might
have been dawn I contemplated the clear amber liquid. Pads of butter floated on
the surface and a faint chickeny aroma fumed