{"id":84,"date":"2021-06-15T13:51:16","date_gmt":"2021-06-15T17:51:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pressbooks.library.ryerson.ca\/thebelljar\/?post_type=chapter&p=84"},"modified":"2022-01-28T11:13:29","modified_gmt":"2022-01-28T16:13:29","slug":"18","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/pressbooks.library.torontomu.ca\/thebelljar\/chapter\/18\/","title":{"raw":"Chapter 18","rendered":"Chapter 18"},"content":{"raw":"\u201cEsther.\u201d\r\n\r\nI woke out of a deep, drenched sleep, and the first thing I saw was Doctor Nolan's face swimming in front of me and saying, \u201cEsther, Esther.\u201d\r\n\r\nI rubbed my eyes with an awkward hand.\r\n\r\nBehind Doctor Nolan I could see the body of a woman wearing a rumpled black-and-white checked robe and flung out on a cot as if dropped from a great height. But before I could take in any more, Doctor Nolan led me through a door into fresh, blue-skied air.\r\n\r\nAll the heat and fear had purged itself. I felt surprisingly at peace. The bell jar hung, suspended, a few feet above my head. I was open to the circulating air.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt was like I told you it would be, wasn't it?\u201d said Doctor Nolan, as we walked back to Belsize together through the crunch of brown leaves.\r\n\r\n\u201cYes.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell it will always be like that,\u201d she said firmly. \u201cYou will be having shock treatments three times a week\u2014Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.\u201d\r\n\r\nI gulped in a long draught of air.\r\n\r\n\u201cFor how long?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThat depends,\u201d Doctor Nolan said, \u201con you and me.\u201d\r\n\r\nI took up the silver knife and cracked off the cap of my egg. Then I put down the knife and looked at it. I tried to think what I had loved knives for, but my mind slipped from the noose of the thought and swung, like a bird, in the centre of empty air.\r\n\r\nJoan and DeeDee were sitting side by side on the piano bench, and DeeDee was teaching Joan to play the bottom half of Chopsticks while she played the top.\r\n\r\nI thought how sad it was Joan looked so horsey, with such big teeth and eyes like two grey, goggly pebbles. Why, she couldn't even keep a boy like Buddy Willard. And DeeDee's husband was obviously living with some mistress or other and turning her sour as an old fusty cat.\r\n\r\n\u201cI've got a let-ter,\u201d Joan chanted, poking her tousled head inside my door.\r\n\r\n\u201cGood for you.\u201d I kept my eyes on my book. Ever since the shock treatments had ended, after a brief series of five, and I had town privileges, Joan hung about me like a large and breathless fruitfly\u2014as if the sweetness of recovery were something she could suck up by mere nearness. They had taken away her physics books and the piles of dusty spiral pads full of lecture notes that had ringed her room, and she was confined to grounds again.\r\n\r\n\u201cDon't you want to know who it's\u00a0from<\/em>?\u201d\r\n\r\nJoan edged into the room and sat down on my bed. I wanted to tell her to get the hell out, she gave me the creeps, only I couldn't do it.\r\n\r\n\u201cAll right.\u201d I stuck my finger in my place and shut the book. \u201cWho from?\u201d\r\n\r\nJoan slipped out a pale blue envelope from her skirt pocket and waved it teasingly.\r\n\r\n\u201cWell isn't that a coincidence!\u201d I said.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat do you mean, a coincidence?\u201d\r\n\r\nI went over to my bureau, picked up a pale blue envelope and waved it at Joan like a parting handkerchief. \u201cI got a letter too. I wonder if they're the same.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHe's better,\u201d Joan said. \u201cHe's out of hospital.\u201d\r\n\r\nThere was a little pause.\r\n\r\n\u201cAre you going to marry him?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo,\u201d I said. \u201cAre you?\u201d\r\n\r\nJoan grinned evasively. \u201cI didn't like him much, anyway.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, it was his family I liked.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYou mean Mr and Mrs Willard?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes,\u201d Joan's voice slid down my spine like a draft. \u201cI loved them. They were so nice, so happy, nothing like my parents. I went over to see them all the time;\u201d she paused, \u201cuntil you came.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI'm sorry.\u201d Then I added, \u201cWhy didn't you go on seeing them, if you liked them so much?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, I couldn't,\u201d Joan said. \u201cNot with you dating Buddy. It would have looked ... I don't\u00a0know<\/em>, funny.\u201d\r\n\r\nI considered. \u201cI suppose so.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAre you,\u201d Joan hesitated, \u201cgoing to let him come?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI don't know.\u201d\r\n\r\nAt first I had thought it would be awful having Buddy come and visit me at the asylum\u2014he would probably only come to gloat and hob-nob with the other doctors. But then it seemed to me it would be a step, placing him, renouncing him, in spite of the fact that I had nobody\u2014telling him there was no simultaneous interpreter, nobody, but that he was the wrong one, that I had stopped hanging on. \u201cAre you?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes,\u201d Joan breathed. \u201cMaybe he'll bring his mother. I'm going to ask him to bring his mother....\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHis\u00a0mother<\/em>?\u201d\r\n\r\nJoan pouted. \u201cI like Mrs Willard. Mrs Willard's a wonderful, wonderful woman. She's been a real mother to me.\u201d\r\n\r\nI had a picture of Mrs Willard, with her heather-mixture tweeds and her sensible shoes and her wise, maternal maxims. Mr Willard was her little boy, and his voice was high and clear, like a little boy's. Joan and Mrs Willard. Joan ... and Mrs Willard...\r\n\r\nI had knocked on DeeDee's door that morning, wanting to borrow some two-part sheet music. I waited a few minutes and then, hearing no answer and thinking DeeDee must be out, and I could pick up the music from her bureau, I pushed the door open and stepped into the room.\r\n\r\nAt Belsize, even at Belsize, the doors had locks, but the patients had no keys. A shut door meant privacy, and was respected, like a locked door. One knocked, and knocked again, then went away. I remembered this as I stood, my eyes half-useless after the brilliance of the hall, in the room's deep, musky dark.\r\n\r\nAs my vision cleared, I saw a shape rise from the bed. Then somebody gave a low giggle. The shape adjusted its hair, and two pale, pebble eyes regarded me through the gloom. DeeDee lay back on the pillows, bare-legged under her green wool dressing-gown, and watched me with a little mocking smile. A cigarette glowed between the fingers of her right hand.\r\n\r\n\u201cI just wanted...\u201d I said.\r\n\r\n\u201cI know,\u201d said DeeDee. \u201cThe music.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHello, Esther,\u201d Joan said then, and her cornhusk voice made me want to puke. \u201cWait for me, Esther, I'll come play the bottom part with you.\u201d\r\n\r\nNow Joan said stoutly, \u201cI never really liked Buddy Willard. He thought he knew everything. He thought he knew everything about women....\u201d\r\n\r\nI looked at Joan. In spite of the creepy feeling, and in spite of my old, ingrained dislike, Joan fascinated me. It was like observing a Martian, or a particularly warty toad. Her thoughts were not my thoughts, nor her feelings my feelings, but we were close enough so that her thoughts and feelings seemed a wry, black image of my own.\r\n\r\nSometimes I wondered if I had made Joan up. Other times I wondered if she would continue to pop in at every crisis of my life to remind me of what I had been, and what I had been through, and carry on her own separate but similar crisis under my nose.\r\n\r\n\u201cI don't see what women see in other women,\u201d I'd told Doctor Nolan in my interview that noon. \u201cWhat does a woman see in a woman that she can't see in a man?\u201d\r\n\r\nDoctor Nolan paused. Then she said, \u201cTenderness.\u201d\r\n\r\nThat shut me up.\r\n\r\n\u201cI like you,\u201d Joan was saying. \u201cI like you better than Buddy.\u201d\r\n\r\nAnd as she stretched out on my bed with a silly smile, I remembered a minor scandal at our college dormitory when a fat, matronly-breasted senior, homely as a grandmother and a pious Religion major, and a tall, gawky freshman with a history of being deserted at an early hour in all sorts of ingenious ways by her blind dates, started seeing too much of each other. They were always together, and once somebody had come upon them embracing, the story went, in the fat girl's room.\r\n\r\n\u201cBut what were they\u00a0doing<\/em>?\u201d I had asked. Whenever I thought about men and men, and women and women, I could never really imagine what they would be actually doing.\r\n\r\n\u201cOh,\u201d the spy had said, \u201cMilly was sitting on the chair and Theodora was lying on the bed, and Milly was stroking Theodora's hair.\u201d\r\n\r\nI was disappointed. I had thought I would have some revelation of specific evil. I wondered if all women did with other women was lie and hug.\r\n\r\nOf course, the famous woman poet at my college lived with another woman\u2014a stumpy old Classical scholar with a cropped Dutch cut. And when I had told the poet I might well get married and have a pack of children some day, she stared at me in horror. \u201cBut what about your\u00a0career<\/em>?\u201d she had cried.\r\n\r\nMy head ached. Why did I attract these weird old women? There was the famous poet, and Philomena Guinea, and Jay Cee, and the Christian Scientist lady and lord knows who, and they all wanted to adopt me in some way, and, for the price of their care and influence, have me resemble them.\r\n\r\n\u201cI like you.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThat's tough, Joan,\u201d I said, picking up my book. \u201cBecause I don't like you. You make me puke, if you want to know.\u201d\r\n\r\nAnd I walked out of the room, leaving Joan lying, lumpy as an old horse, across my bed.\r\n\r\nI waited for the doctor, wondering if I should bolt. I knew what I was doing was illegal\u2014in Massachusetts, anyway, because the state was cram-jam full of Catholics\u2014but Doctor Nolan said this doctor was an old friend of hers, and a wise man.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat's your appointment for?\u201d the brisk, white-uniformed receptionist wanted to know, ticking my name off on a notebook list.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat do you mean,\u00a0for<\/em>?\u201d I hadn't thought anybody but the doctor himself would ask me that, and the communal waiting-room was full of other patients waiting for other doctors, most of them pregnant or with babies, and I felt their eyes on my flat, virgin stomach.\r\n\r\nThe receptionist glanced up at me, and I blushed.\r\n\r\n\u201cA fitting, isn't it?\u201d she said kindly. \u201cI only wanted to make sure so I'd know what to charge you. Are you a student?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYe-es.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThat will only be half-price then. Five dollars, instead of ten. Shall I bill you?\u201d\r\n\r\nI was about to give my home address, where I would probably be by the time the bill arrived, but then I thought of my mother opening the bill and seeing what it was for. The only other address I had was the innocuous box number which people used who didn't want to advertise the fact they lived in an asylum. But I thought the receptionist might recognize the box number, so I said, \u201cI better pay now,\u201d and peeled five dollar notes off the roll in my pocketbook.\r\n\r\nThe five dollars was part of what Philomena Guinea had sent me as a sort of get-well present. I wondered what she would think if she knew to what use her money was being put.\r\n\r\nWhether she knew it or not, Philomena Guinea was buying my freedom.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat I hate is the thought of being under a man's thumb,\u201d I had told Doctor Nolan. \u201cA man doesn't have a worry in the world, while I've got a baby hanging over my head like a big stick, to keep me in line.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWould you act differently if you didn\u2019t have to worry about a baby?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes,\u201d I said, \u201cbut...\u201d and I told Doctor Nolan about the married woman lawyer and her Defence of Chastity.\r\n\r\nDoctor Nolan waited until I was finished. Then she burst out laughing. \u201cPropaganda!\u201d she said, and scribbled the name and address of this doctor on a prescription pad.\r\n\r\nI leafed nervously through an issue of\u00a0Baby Talk<\/em>. The fat, bright faces of babies beamed up at me, page after page\u2014bald babies, chocolate-coloured babies, Eisenhower-faced babies, babies rolling over for the first time, babies reaching for rattles, babies eating their first spoonful of solid food, babies doing all the little tricky things it takes to grow up, step by step, into an anxious and unsettling world.\r\n\r\nI smelt a mingling of Pabulum and sour milk and salt-cod-stinky diapers and felt sorrowful and tender. How easy having babies seemed to the women around me! Why was I so unmaternal and apart? Why couldn't I dream of devoting myself to baby after fat puling baby like Dodo Conway?\r\n\r\nIf I had to wait on a baby all day, I would go mad.\r\n\r\nI looked at the baby in the lap of the woman opposite. I had no idea how old it was, I never did, with babies\u2014for all I knew it could talk a blue streak and had twenty teeth behind its pursed, pink lips. It held its little wobbly head up on its shoulders\u2014it didn't seem to have a neck\u2014and observed me with a wise, Platonic expression.\r\n\r\nThe baby's mother smiled and smiled, holding that baby as if it were the first wonder of the world. I watched the mother and the baby for some clue to their mutual satisfaction, but before I had discovered anything, the doctor called me in.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou'd like a fitting,\u201d he said cheerfully, and I thought with relief that he wasn't the sort of doctor to ask awkward questions. I had toyed with the idea of telling him I planned to be married to a sailor as soon as his ship docked at the Charlestown Navy Yard, and the reason I didn't have an engagement ring was because we were too poor, but at the last moment I rejected that appealing story and simply said \u201cYes\u201d.\r\n\r\nI climbed up on the examination table, thinking: \u201cI am climbing to freedom, freedom from fear, freedom from marrying the wrong person, like Buddy Willard, just because of sex, freedom from the Florence Crittenden Homes where all the poor girls go who should have been fitted out like me, because what they did, they would do anyway, regardless...\u201d\r\n\r\nAs I rode back to the asylum with my box in the plain brown paper wrapper on my lap I might have been Mrs Anybody coming back from a day in town with a Schrafft's cake for her maiden aunt or a Filene's Basement hat. Gradually the suspicion that Catholics had X-ray eyes diminished, and I grew easy. I had done well by my shopping privileges, I thought.\r\n\r\nI was my own woman.\r\n\r\nThe next step was to find the proper sort of man.","rendered":"

\u201cEsther.\u201d<\/p>\n

I woke out of a deep, drenched sleep, and the first thing I saw was Doctor Nolan’s face swimming in front of me and saying, \u201cEsther, Esther.\u201d<\/p>\n

I rubbed my eyes with an awkward hand.<\/p>\n

Behind Doctor Nolan I could see the body of a woman wearing a rumpled black-and-white checked robe and flung out on a cot as if dropped from a great height. But before I could take in any more, Doctor Nolan led me through a door into fresh, blue-skied air.<\/p>\n

All the heat and fear had purged itself. I felt surprisingly at peace. The bell jar hung, suspended, a few feet above my head. I was open to the circulating air.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was like I told you it would be, wasn’t it?\u201d said Doctor Nolan, as we walked back to Belsize together through the crunch of brown leaves.<\/p>\n

\u201cYes.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWell it will always be like that,\u201d she said firmly. \u201cYou will be having shock treatments three times a week\u2014Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.\u201d<\/p>\n

I gulped in a long draught of air.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor how long?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThat depends,\u201d Doctor Nolan said, \u201con you and me.\u201d<\/p>\n

I took up the silver knife and cracked off the cap of my egg. Then I put down the knife and looked at it. I tried to think what I had loved knives for, but my mind slipped from the noose of the thought and swung, like a bird, in the centre of empty air.<\/p>\n

Joan and DeeDee were sitting side by side on the piano bench, and DeeDee was teaching Joan to play the bottom half of Chopsticks while she played the top.<\/p>\n

I thought how sad it was Joan looked so horsey, with such big teeth and eyes like two grey, goggly pebbles. Why, she couldn’t even keep a boy like Buddy Willard. And DeeDee’s husband was obviously living with some mistress or other and turning her sour as an old fusty cat.<\/p>\n

\u201cI’ve got a let-ter,\u201d Joan chanted, poking her tousled head inside my door.<\/p>\n

\u201cGood for you.\u201d I kept my eyes on my book. Ever since the shock treatments had ended, after a brief series of five, and I had town privileges, Joan hung about me like a large and breathless fruitfly\u2014as if the sweetness of recovery were something she could suck up by mere nearness. They had taken away her physics books and the piles of dusty spiral pads full of lecture notes that had ringed her room, and she was confined to grounds again.<\/p>\n

\u201cDon’t you want to know who it’s\u00a0from<\/em>?\u201d<\/p>\n

Joan edged into the room and sat down on my bed. I wanted to tell her to get the hell out, she gave me the creeps, only I couldn’t do it.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll right.\u201d I stuck my finger in my place and shut the book. \u201cWho from?\u201d<\/p>\n

Joan slipped out a pale blue envelope from her skirt pocket and waved it teasingly.<\/p>\n

\u201cWell isn’t that a coincidence!\u201d I said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat do you mean, a coincidence?\u201d<\/p>\n

I went over to my bureau, picked up a pale blue envelope and waved it at Joan like a parting handkerchief. \u201cI got a letter too. I wonder if they’re the same.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHe’s better,\u201d Joan said. \u201cHe’s out of hospital.\u201d<\/p>\n

There was a little pause.<\/p>\n

\u201cAre you going to marry him?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNo,\u201d I said. \u201cAre you?\u201d<\/p>\n

Joan grinned evasively. \u201cI didn’t like him much, anyway.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOh?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNo, it was his family I liked.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou mean Mr and Mrs Willard?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYes,\u201d Joan’s voice slid down my spine like a draft. \u201cI loved them. They were so nice, so happy, nothing like my parents. I went over to see them all the time;\u201d she paused, \u201cuntil you came.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI’m sorry.\u201d Then I added, \u201cWhy didn’t you go on seeing them, if you liked them so much?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOh, I couldn’t,\u201d Joan said. \u201cNot with you dating Buddy. It would have looked … I don’t\u00a0know<\/em>, funny.\u201d<\/p>\n

I considered. \u201cI suppose so.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAre you,\u201d Joan hesitated, \u201cgoing to let him come?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI don’t know.\u201d<\/p>\n

At first I had thought it would be awful having Buddy come and visit me at the asylum\u2014he would probably only come to gloat and hob-nob with the other doctors. But then it seemed to me it would be a step, placing him, renouncing him, in spite of the fact that I had nobody\u2014telling him there was no simultaneous interpreter, nobody, but that he was the wrong one, that I had stopped hanging on. \u201cAre you?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYes,\u201d Joan breathed. \u201cMaybe he’ll bring his mother. I’m going to ask him to bring his mother….\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHis\u00a0mother<\/em>?\u201d<\/p>\n

Joan pouted. \u201cI like Mrs Willard. Mrs Willard’s a wonderful, wonderful woman. She’s been a real mother to me.\u201d<\/p>\n

I had a picture of Mrs Willard, with her heather-mixture tweeds and her sensible shoes and her wise, maternal maxims. Mr Willard was her little boy, and his voice was high and clear, like a little boy’s. Joan and Mrs Willard. Joan … and Mrs Willard…<\/p>\n

I had knocked on DeeDee’s door that morning, wanting to borrow some two-part sheet music. I waited a few minutes and then, hearing no answer and thinking DeeDee must be out, and I could pick up the music from her bureau, I pushed the door open and stepped into the room.<\/p>\n

At Belsize, even at Belsize, the doors had locks, but the patients had no keys. A shut door meant privacy, and was respected, like a locked door. One knocked, and knocked again, then went away. I remembered this as I stood, my eyes half-useless after the brilliance of the hall, in the room’s deep, musky dark.<\/p>\n

As my vision cleared, I saw a shape rise from the bed. Then somebody gave a low giggle. The shape adjusted its hair, and two pale, pebble eyes regarded me through the gloom. DeeDee lay back on the pillows, bare-legged under her green wool dressing-gown, and watched me with a little mocking smile. A cigarette glowed between the fingers of her right hand.<\/p>\n

\u201cI just wanted…\u201d I said.<\/p>\n

\u201cI know,\u201d said DeeDee. \u201cThe music.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHello, Esther,\u201d Joan said then, and her cornhusk voice made me want to puke. \u201cWait for me, Esther, I’ll come play the bottom part with you.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now Joan said stoutly, \u201cI never really liked Buddy Willard. He thought he knew everything. He thought he knew everything about women….\u201d<\/p>\n

I looked at Joan. In spite of the creepy feeling, and in spite of my old, ingrained dislike, Joan fascinated me. It was like observing a Martian, or a particularly warty toad. Her thoughts were not my thoughts, nor her feelings my feelings, but we were close enough so that her thoughts and feelings seemed a wry, black image of my own.<\/p>\n

Sometimes I wondered if I had made Joan up. Other times I wondered if she would continue to pop in at every crisis of my life to remind me of what I had been, and what I had been through, and carry on her own separate but similar crisis under my nose.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don’t see what women see in other women,\u201d I’d told Doctor Nolan in my interview that noon. \u201cWhat does a woman see in a woman that she can’t see in a man?\u201d<\/p>\n

Doctor Nolan paused. Then she said, \u201cTenderness.\u201d<\/p>\n

That shut me up.<\/p>\n

\u201cI like you,\u201d Joan was saying. \u201cI like you better than Buddy.\u201d<\/p>\n

And as she stretched out on my bed with a silly smile, I remembered a minor scandal at our college dormitory when a fat, matronly-breasted senior, homely as a grandmother and a pious Religion major, and a tall, gawky freshman with a history of being deserted at an early hour in all sorts of ingenious ways by her blind dates, started seeing too much of each other. They were always together, and once somebody had come upon them embracing, the story went, in the fat girl’s room.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut what were they\u00a0doing<\/em>?\u201d I had asked. Whenever I thought about men and men, and women and women, I could never really imagine what they would be actually doing.<\/p>\n

\u201cOh,\u201d the spy had said, \u201cMilly was sitting on the chair and Theodora was lying on the bed, and Milly was stroking Theodora’s hair.\u201d<\/p>\n

I was disappointed. I had thought I would have some revelation of specific evil. I wondered if all women did with other women was lie and hug.<\/p>\n

Of course, the famous woman poet at my college lived with another woman\u2014a stumpy old Classical scholar with a cropped Dutch cut. And when I had told the poet I might well get married and have a pack of children some day, she stared at me in horror. \u201cBut what about your\u00a0career<\/em>?\u201d she had cried.<\/p>\n

My head ached. Why did I attract these weird old women? There was the famous poet, and Philomena Guinea, and Jay Cee, and the Christian Scientist lady and lord knows who, and they all wanted to adopt me in some way, and, for the price of their care and influence, have me resemble them.<\/p>\n

\u201cI like you.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThat’s tough, Joan,\u201d I said, picking up my book. \u201cBecause I don’t like you. You make me puke, if you want to know.\u201d<\/p>\n

And I walked out of the room, leaving Joan lying, lumpy as an old horse, across my bed.<\/p>\n

I waited for the doctor, wondering if I should bolt. I knew what I was doing was illegal\u2014in Massachusetts, anyway, because the state was cram-jam full of Catholics\u2014but Doctor Nolan said this doctor was an old friend of hers, and a wise man.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat’s your appointment for?\u201d the brisk, white-uniformed receptionist wanted to know, ticking my name off on a notebook list.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat do you mean,\u00a0for<\/em>?\u201d I hadn’t thought anybody but the doctor himself would ask me that, and the communal waiting-room was full of other patients waiting for other doctors, most of them pregnant or with babies, and I felt their eyes on my flat, virgin stomach.<\/p>\n

The receptionist glanced up at me, and I blushed.<\/p>\n

\u201cA fitting, isn’t it?\u201d she said kindly. \u201cI only wanted to make sure so I’d know what to charge you. Are you a student?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYe-es.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThat will only be half-price then. Five dollars, instead of ten. Shall I bill you?\u201d<\/p>\n

I was about to give my home address, where I would probably be by the time the bill arrived, but then I thought of my mother opening the bill and seeing what it was for. The only other address I had was the innocuous box number which people used who didn’t want to advertise the fact they lived in an asylum. But I thought the receptionist might recognize the box number, so I said, \u201cI better pay now,\u201d and peeled five dollar notes off the roll in my pocketbook.<\/p>\n

The five dollars was part of what Philomena Guinea had sent me as a sort of get-well present. I wondered what she would think if she knew to what use her money was being put.<\/p>\n

Whether she knew it or not, Philomena Guinea was buying my freedom.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat I hate is the thought of being under a man’s thumb,\u201d I had told Doctor Nolan. \u201cA man doesn’t have a worry in the world, while I’ve got a baby hanging over my head like a big stick, to keep me in line.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWould you act differently if you didn\u2019t have to worry about a baby?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYes,\u201d I said, \u201cbut…\u201d and I told Doctor Nolan about the married woman lawyer and her Defence of Chastity.<\/p>\n

Doctor Nolan waited until I was finished. Then she burst out laughing. \u201cPropaganda!\u201d she said, and scribbled the name and address of this doctor on a prescription pad.<\/p>\n

I leafed nervously through an issue of\u00a0Baby Talk<\/em>. The fat, bright faces of babies beamed up at me, page after page\u2014bald babies, chocolate-coloured babies, Eisenhower-faced babies, babies rolling over for the first time, babies reaching for rattles, babies eating their first spoonful of solid food, babies doing all the little tricky things it takes to grow up, step by step, into an anxious and unsettling world.<\/p>\n

I smelt a mingling of Pabulum and sour milk and salt-cod-stinky diapers and felt sorrowful and tender. How easy having babies seemed to the women around me! Why was I so unmaternal and apart? Why couldn’t I dream of devoting myself to baby after fat puling baby like Dodo Conway?<\/p>\n

If I had to wait on a baby all day, I would go mad.<\/p>\n

I looked at the baby in the lap of the woman opposite. I had no idea how old it was, I never did, with babies\u2014for all I knew it could talk a blue streak and had twenty teeth behind its pursed, pink lips. It held its little wobbly head up on its shoulders\u2014it didn’t seem to have a neck\u2014and observed me with a wise, Platonic expression.<\/p>\n

The baby’s mother smiled and smiled, holding that baby as if it were the first wonder of the world. I watched the mother and the baby for some clue to their mutual satisfaction, but before I had discovered anything, the doctor called me in.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou’d like a fitting,\u201d he said cheerfully, and I thought with relief that he wasn’t the sort of doctor to ask awkward questions. I had toyed with the idea of telling him I planned to be married to a sailor as soon as his ship docked at the Charlestown Navy Yard, and the reason I didn’t have an engagement ring was because we were too poor, but at the last moment I rejected that appealing story and simply said \u201cYes\u201d.<\/p>\n

I climbed up on the examination table, thinking: \u201cI am climbing to freedom, freedom from fear, freedom from marrying the wrong person, like Buddy Willard, just because of sex, freedom from the Florence Crittenden Homes where all the poor girls go who should have been fitted out like me, because what they did, they would do anyway, regardless…\u201d<\/p>\n

As I rode back to the asylum with my box in the plain brown paper wrapper on my lap I might have been Mrs Anybody coming back from a day in town with a Schrafft’s cake for her maiden aunt or a Filene’s Basement hat. Gradually the suspicion that Catholics had X-ray eyes diminished, and I grew easy. I had done well by my shopping privileges, I thought.<\/p>\n

I was my own woman.<\/p>\n

The next step was to find the proper sort of man.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":299,"menu_order":18,"template":"","meta":{"pb_show_title":"on","pb_short_title":"","pb_subtitle":"","pb_authors":[],"pb_section_license":""},"chapter-type":[48],"contributor":[],"license":[],"class_list":["post-84","chapter","type-chapter","status-publish","hentry","chapter-type-numberless"],"part":3,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.library.torontomu.ca\/thebelljar\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/84","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.library.torontomu.ca\/thebelljar\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.library.torontomu.ca\/thebelljar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/chapter"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.library.torontomu.ca\/thebelljar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/299"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.library.torontomu.ca\/thebelljar\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/84\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":153,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.library.torontomu.ca\/thebelljar\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/84\/revisions\/153"}],"part":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.library.torontomu.ca\/thebelljar\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/parts\/3"}],"metadata":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.library.torontomu.ca\/thebelljar\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/84\/metadata\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.library.torontomu.ca\/thebelljar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=84"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"chapter-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.library.torontomu.ca\/thebelljar\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapter-type?post=84"},{"taxonomy":"contributor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.library.torontomu.ca\/thebelljar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/contributor?post=84"},{"taxonomy":"license","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.library.torontomu.ca\/thebelljar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/license?post=84"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}