Mr. Stone glanced at the books for a moment, then told me, “All those writers are dead.”
He was right, of course. This was, after all, 1969 or ’70 and we only read the dead white guys. Would I write in anonymity, I wondered, and have my stories published only after I died?
By then, our library had opened at last. I read every book I could get my hands on. And I had just read a paperback called How to Become an Airline Stewardess by Kathryn Cason. For that special breed of young women with their eyes on the stars—and their hearts set on a jet-paced career with wings! the cover proclaimed. Inside were promises of breakfast in New York, lunch in Bermuda, dinner in Rome, and boyfriends in every city in the world.
“Then I’d like to be an airline stewardess,” I told Mr. Stone.
He shook his head again. “Ann, smart girls do not become airline stewardesses. You should be a teacher or a secretary or make your life nice and easy and get married.”
I don’t know how I replied to his suggestions, but I know that I dismissed them. I didn’t want to be any of those things—teacher, secretary, wife. But unable to name this yearning I had for something different, all I knew was that I wanted to get out of West Warwick. Writers, I thought, needed adventures. Airline stewardesses had adventures. If my ticket out was on a jet, then I would take it. Those adventures would give me ideas for the novels I would write. The next time I went to the library, I checked out How to Become an Airline Stewardess again, and dutifully recorded the qualifications (height! weight!) and the interview tips (don’t wear a turtleneck!) in one of my purple notebooks. I would see the world, I decided. I would run with the bulls and jump naked in fountains in Paris. And then someday, somehow, I would be a writer.
THE BELL JAR seemed to be written just for me. Esther Greenwood wanted to be a writer too. She had won a fashion magazine contest that sent her and eleven other girls to New York City for a month with all their expenses paid and “piles and piles of free bonuses, like ballet tickets and passes to fashion shows and hair stylings at a famous salon . . .” Esther had the same doubts I had. “How could I write about life when I’d never had a love affair or a baby or even seen anybody die?” Esther wonders. She remembers a girl who won a prize for a short story about pygmies in Africa and asks: How could I compete with that sort of thing?
Despite the perfect boyfriend, Buddy, who wants to marry her, Esther doesn’t want to get married. She’s curious about sex, but doubtful about matrimony. She worries that once someone liked her, he would “sink into ordinariness,” that she would find fault after fault with him like she did with Buddy. Esther Greenwood was the first character I met who expressed the very things I worried over as “I Am a Rock” played again and again on my record player. I worried over ordinariness—mine in particular. I worried over the idea of getting married and staying in my hometown forever. I worried over that thing I wanted that no one could help me name or find. No one except Esther. “The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from,” she says to explain why she doesn’t want to get married. “I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.”
Around me, my older cousins got married at our church, Sacred Heart. The brides wore flowing white gowns embellished with tiny pearls and lace, long veils, bouquets of lilies; the grooms wore tuxedos and shiny shoes, boutonnieres and clean-shaven faces. There were bridesmaids, in mauve velvet or pale yellow jersey knit and dyed-to-match shoes, clutching chrysanthemums or daisies; groomsmen in too-tight rented tuxedos, their shirts the color of those dresses. At the reception at the Club 400, whiskey sours flowed from fountains, the Champagne toast was pink and sweet, and we ate ziti, chicken stuffed with rice, green beans amandine, and iceberg lettuce topped with a wedge of tomato.
The couple moved into an apartment, then bought a small house. They had a baby, then another baby. On Sundays they came to our house and visited Mama Rose and ate lasagna and threw barbs at each other. He complained that she never let him have fun. She complained that he didn’t talk to her enough. They stared out at us blankly, their faces as bland as bologna. I remembered Buddy Willard telling Esther that after she had children she wouldn’t want to write poems anymore. Esther compared being married to being brainwashed: “afterward you went about numb as a slave in some private totalitarian state,” she said. I watched my cousins and knew Esther was, once again, right.
And then, there was madness itself. Didn’t I sometimes feel out of control? And other times paralyzed? Like Esther, I worked hard all my life to get A’s, worried over each test and research paper, studied and studied and studied. But wasn’t that need to get those A’s part of what drove her mad? Esther obsessed about the Rosenbergs; I obsessed about Charlie Manson and Richard Speck. If Esther Greenwood with her scholarship to a good college, her adoring boyfriend, her good grades and writing talent, could go mad, then couldn’t anybody? Couldn’t I?