Read The Bell Jar for Free Online Page B

anything else. No matter how much I eat, I never put on weight. With one
exception I’ve been the same weight for ten years.
                    My favorite dishes are full of
butter and cheese and sour cream. In New York we had so many free luncheons
with people on the magazine and various visiting celebrities I developed the
habit of running my eye down those huge handwritten menus, where a tiny side
dish of peas cost fifty or sixty cents, Until I’d picked the richest, most
expensive dishes and ordered a string of them.
                    We were always taken out on
expense accounts, so I never felt guilty. I made a point of eating so fast I
never kept the other people waiting who generally ordered only chef’s salad and
grapefruit juice because they were trying to reduce. Almost everybody I met in
New York was trying to reduce.
                    “I want to welcome the
prettiest, smartest bunch of young ladies our staff has yet had the good luck
to meet,” the plump, bald master-of-ceremonies wheezed into his lapel
microphone. “This banquet is just a small sample of the hospitality our Food
Testing Kitchens here on Ladies’ Day would like to offer in appreciation
for your visit.”
                    A delicate, ladylike spatter of
applause, and we all sat down at the enormous linen-draped table.
                    There were eleven of us girls
from the magazine, together with most of our supervising editors, and the whole
staff of the Ladies’ Day Food Testing Kitchens in hygienic white smocks,
neat hairnets and flawless makeup of a uniform peach-pie color.
                    There were only eleven of us,
because Doreen was missing. They had set her place next to mine for some reason,
and the chair stayed empty. I saved her placecard for her--a pocket mirror with
“Doreen” painted along the top of it in lacy script and a wreath of frosted
daisies around the edge, framing the silver hole where her face would show.
                    Doreen was spending the day with
Lenny Shepherd. She spent most of her free time with Lenny Shepherd now.
                    In the hour before our luncheon
at Ladies’ Day-- thebig women’s magazine that features lush
double-page spreads of Technicolor meals, with a different theme and locale
each month--we had been shown around the endless glossy kitchens and seen how
difficult it is to photograph apple pie a la mode under bright lights because
the ice cream keeps melting and has to be propped up from behind with
toothpicks and changed every time it starts looking too soppy.
                    The sight of all the food
stacked in those kitchens made me dizzy. It’s not that we hadn’t enough to eat
at home, it’s just that my grandmother always cooked economy joints and economy
meat loafs and had the habit of saying, the minute you lifted the first forkful
to your mouth, “I hope you enjoy that, it cost forty-one cents a pound,” which
always made me feel I was somehow eating pennies instead of Sunday roast.
                    While we were standing up behind
our chairs listening to the welcome speech, I had bowed my head and secretly
eyed the position of the bowls of caviar. One bowl was set strategically
between me and Doreen’s empty chair.
                    I figured the girl across from
me couldn’t reach it because of the mountainous centerpiece of marzipan fruit
and Betsy, on my right, would be too nice to ask me to share it with her if I
just kept it out of the way at my elbow by my bread-and-butter plate. Besides,
another bowl of caviar sat a little way to the right of the girl next to Betsy,
and she could eat that.
                    My grandfather and I had a
standing joke. He was the head waiter at a country club near my home town, and
every Sunday my