Free The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath Page B

weak, I thought I was up in that sanatorium in the Adirondacks, and I felt like a heel of the worst sort. In his letters Buddy kept telling me how he was reading poems by a poet who was also a doctor and how he’d found out about some famous dead Russian short-story writer who had been a doctor too, so maybe doctors and writers could get along fine after all.
    Now this was a very different tune from what Buddy Willard had been singing all the two years we were getting to know each other. I remember the day he smiled at me and said, “Do you know what a poem is, Esther?”
    â€œNo, what?” I said.
    â€œA piece of dust.” And he looked so proud of having thought of this that I just stared at his blond hair and his blue eyes and his white teeth—he had very long, strong white teeth—and said, “I guess so.”
    It was only in the middle of New York a whole year later that I finally thought of an answer to that remark.
    I spent a lot of time having imaginary conversations with Buddy Willard. He was a couple of years older than I was and very scientific, so he could always prove things. When I was with him I had to work to keep my head above water.
    These conversations I had in my mind usually repeated the beginnings of conversations I’d really had with Buddy, only they finished with me answering him back quite sharply, instead of just sitting around and saying, “I guess so.”
    Now, lying on my back in bed, I imagined Buddy saying, “Do you know what a poem is, Esther?”
    â€œNo, what?” I would say.
    â€œA piece of dust.”
    Then just as he was smiling and starting to look proud, I would say, “So are the cadavers you cut up. So are the people you think you’re curing. They’re dust as dust as dust. I reckon a good poem lasts a whole lot longer than a hundred of those people put together.”
    And of course Buddy wouldn’t have any answer to that, because what I said was true. People were made of nothing so much as dust, and I couldn’t see that doctoring all that dust was a bit better than writing poems people would remember and repeat to themselves when they were unhappy or sick and couldn’t sleep.
    My trouble was I took everything Buddy Willard told me as the honest-to-God truth. I remember the first night he kissed me. It was after the Yale Junior Prom.
    It was strange, the way Buddy had invited me to that prom.
    He popped into my house out of the blue one Christmas vacation, wearing a thick white turtleneck sweater and looking so handsome I could hardly stop staring, and said, “I might drop over to see you at college someday, all right?”
    I was flabbergasted. I only saw Buddy at church on Sundays when we were both home from college, and then at a distance, and I couldn’t figure what had put it into his head to run over and see me—he had run the two miles between our houses for cross-country practice, he said.
    Of course, our mothers were good friends. They had gone to school together and then both married their professors and settled down in the same town, but Buddy was always off on a scholarship at prep school in the fall or earning money by fighting blister rust in Montana in the summer, so our mothers being old school chums really didn’t matter a bit.
    After this sudden visit I didn’t hear a word from Buddy until one fine Saturday morning in early March. I was up in my room at college, studying about Peter the Hermit and Walter the Penniless for my history exam on the crusades the coming Monday, when the hall phone rang.
    Usually people are supposed to take turns answering the hall phone, but as I was the only freshman on a floor with all seniors they made me answer it most of the time. I waited a minute to see if anybody would beat me to it. Then I figured everybody was probably out playing squash or away on weekends, so I answered it myself.
    â€œIs that you, Esther?” the girl on watch