Free The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath Page A

bringing up my suitcase.”
    â€œThank you thank you thank you. Ha!” he said in a very nasty insinuating tone, and before I could wheel round to see what had come over him he was gone, shutting the door behind him with a rude slam.
    Later, when I told Doreen about his curious behavior, she said, “You ninny, he wanted his tip.”
    I asked how much I should have given and she said a quarter at least and thirty-five cents if the suitcase was too heavy. Now I could have carried that suitcase to my room perfectly well by myself, only the bellhop seemed so eager to do it that I let him. I thought that sort of service came along with what you paid for your hotel room.
    I hate handing over money to people for doing what I could just as easily do myself, it makes me nervous.
    Doreen said ten percent was what you should tip a person, but I somehow never had the right change and I’d have felt awfully silly giving somebody half a dollar and saying, “Fifteen cents of this is a tip for you, please give me thirty-five cents back.”
    The first time I took a taxi in New York I tipped the driver ten cents. The fare was a dollar, so I thought ten cents was exactly right and gave the driver my dime with a little flourish and a smile. But he only held it in the palm of his hand and stared and stared at it, and when I stepped out of the cab, hoping I had not handed him a Canadian dime by mistake, he started yelling, “Lady, I gotta live like you and everybody else,” in a loud voice which scared me so much I broke into a run. Luckily he was stopped at a traffic light or I think he would have driven along beside me yelling in that embarrassing way.
    When I asked Doreen about this she said the tipping percentage might well have risen from ten to fifteen percent since she was last in New York. Either that, or that particular cab driver was an out-and-out-louse.

    I reached for the book the people from Ladies’ Day had sent.
    When I opened it a card fell out. The front of the card showed a poodle in a flowered bedjacket sitting in a poodle basket with a sad face, and the inside of the card showed the poodle lying down in the basket with a little smile, sound asleep under an embroidered sampler that said, “You’ll get well best with lots and lots of rest.” At the bottom of the card somebody had written, “Get well quick! from all of your good friends at Ladies’ Day, ” in lavender ink.
    I flipped through one story after another until finally I came to a story about a fig tree.
    This fig tree grew on a green lawn between the house of a Jewish man and a convent, and the Jewish man and a beautiful dark nun kept meeting at the tree to pick the ripe figs, until one day they saw an egg hatching in a bird’s nest on a branch of the tree, and as they watched the little bird peck its way out of the egg, they touched the backs of their hands together, and then the nun didn’t come out to pick figs with the Jewish man any more but a mean-faced Catholic kitchen maid came to pick them instead and counted up the figs the man picked after they were both through to be sure he hadn’t picked any more than she had, and the man was furious.
    I thought it was a lovely story, especially the part about the fig tree in winter under the snow and then the fig tree in spring with all the green fruit. I felt sorry when I came to the last page. I wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print the way you crawl through a fence, and go to sleep under that beautiful big green fig tree.
    It seemed to me Buddy Willard and I were like that Jewish man and that nun, although of course we weren’t Jewish or Catholic but Unitarian. We had met together under our own imaginary fig tree, and what we had seen wasn’t a bird coming out of an egg but a baby coming out of a woman, and then something awful happened and we went our separate ways.
    As I lay there in my white hotel bed feeling lonely and