AS THAT SUMMER came to an end, I hung those beads in my doorway. My parents, ever practical, ever befuddled by my strange desires, refused to remove the door to my room, so I pushed it open and held it that way with a heavy iron doorstop. The beads made a glistening curtain that whispered when I walked through it. They looked exotic, sophisticated, important.
As we always did before school started, my cousin and I took the bus from the bottom of the hill to downtown Providence. Downcity, it was called. The bus cost thirty-five cents and made one stop: at the state mental hospital. Maybe reading The Bell Jar added to my fascination with that place, which looked almost like a college campus with its curving walkways, large leafy trees, and small groupings of brick buildings—except the windows in those buildings had bars on them. I didn’t know then that the hospital where Esther Greenwood went was a private one, surely more lovely than the one I saw outside the bus window. I didn’t know such differences even existed. Onto the bus stepped a handful of patients: a man who mumbled to himself, a blank-eyed woman led by a nurse, a woman with an angry face who periodically shouted obscenities, and—most fascinating to me—a woman with her hair dyed bright red, her lips smeared with hot-pink lipstick, her entire eyelids painted baby blue, her cheeks overly powdered and rouged. She wore multiple shiny necklaces and a Kelly-green dress. I thought she looked like human neon. Someone behind me whispered, “Crazy,” as the woman regally walked down the aisle to an empty seat. I thought of Esther sitting in the Boston Public Garden reading a scandal sheet of stories about murders and robberies and suicides, or sitting all day on a beach in a skirt and high heels fingering a box of razor blades. I thought of myself sobbing over “The Dangling Conversation,” or pacing in the middle of the night, how things felt so enormous to me, so vital. What was the difference between Esther and me? This woman and me?
In Providence, at the department stores Shepard’s and Gladdings, my cousin and I tried on clothes in front of triple mirrors that multiplied our reflections over and over, a strange effect that always fascinated me. We went to Alexander’s for lunch, a restaurant with white tablecloths and Salisbury steak. We felt so grown-up with our shopping bags crowded into the red booth eating our fancy food. In one of those bags was my first-day-of-school outfit: mauve hot pants with a matching vest that came below my knees and a flowered puckered shirt.
Weeks later, in that very outfit, I was walking through Jordan Marsh into the mall when a woman sitting at a table at the entrance stopped me. “Have you ever thought about modeling?” she asked me. I said yes, though I hadn’t thought about it at all. She invited me to sit down with her so she could explain about Marsha Jordan Girls. Marsha Jordan Girls were ambassadors for Jordan Marsh, she said. They modeled the clothes in the Juniors department, worked at VIP events here and in Boston (Boston! The very idea gave me shivers!), and represented the store in dozens of ways throughout the year.
“I want to be a Marsha Jordan Girl,” I said. It felt like my world had just been blown open, like I was handed a new life, not unlike the one of my vague, big dreams. The woman was explaining that Bonne Bell Cosmetics would come and teach us how to put on makeup, and that we would get special uniforms—she slid a glossy photo of a girl in a gray-and-white pinstriped pantsuit toward me—and have our pictures hanging in the Juniors department. I thought of Esther in New York City, getting hairstyles and clothes, going to fancy lunches. Being a Marsha Jordan Girl sounded similar.
Apparently, lots of girls wanted to be Marsha Jordan Girls, but they only needed eight. I filled out the application eagerly, already imagining a picture of me in that pinstriped suit hanging in the Juniors department. I didn’t know that girls had been coming to the store all day to apply, or that I had just had an interview. I only knew that I wanted to be a Marsha Jordan Girl more than anything in the world.
How I longed to know things, to be sophisticated and worldly. My father had traveled the globe when he was in the navy, and his stories inspired me to do the same. He told me about eating stuffed dog in Africa and hundred-year eggs in China; he explained communism and Castro, having lived in both Peking and Guantánamo; he told me to always order name liquor—Heineken, Tanqueray, Johnnie Walker; steak, my father, told me, should always be eaten rare. Yet even all of this advice did not tell me everything I needed to know to leave my working-class upbringing behind.
In The Bell Jar, Esther makes social blunders too. When she first arrives at the Amazon hotel in Manhattan, a bellhop carries her suitcase up to her room, then doesn’t leave. Instead, he shows her the hot and cold water, how to use the radio, what stations are on the dial, before he finally leaves, slamming the door behind him. “You ninny,” her friend Doreen explains later, “he wanted a tip.” At least a quarter, Doreen continues. Esther can’t believe it: “Now I could have carried that suitcase to my room perfectly well by myself, only the bell hop seemed so eager to do it that I let him. I thought that kind of service came along with what you paid for your hotel room.” When my family traveled, we stayed at motels with swimming pools and ice machines and Magic Fingers on the beds: for a dime the bed shimmied beneath you for a full minute. But I intended someday to stay at fancy hotels in big cities, and then I would tip bellhops, and cabdrivers (Esther quickly learns that they get 15 percent of the fare).
When I got home from the mall that afternoon, the phone was already ringing. I was one of sixteen finalists. On Saturday I was to go to the store for a tea. That day was a blur of brownie sundaes, Jordan Marsh executives, and fifteen other smiling girls. Those brownie sundaes were worrisome: a big square brownie, topped with vanilla ice cream, hot fudge, whipped cream, and a cherry, served in a frosty silver goblet. As we ate, the executives and the woman I’d spoken to the other day asked us questions about fashion trends, our favorite subjects in school, and our dreams for the future.
“I want to be a journalist like Barbara Walters,” I said, trying not to smear hot fudge on my face or dribble ice cream down my shirt. How could I not think of the scene in which Esther has lunch with her benefactress, Mrs. Guinea, and saw her first fingerbowl? “The water had some cherry blossoms floating in it, and I thought it must be some clear sort of Japanese after-dinner soup and ate every bit of it, including the crisp little blossoms.” Mrs. Guinea never says anything to Esther, and she muses how it was only later “when I told a debutante I knew at college about the dinner, that I learned what I had done.” What were the rules for eating a brownie sundae? Should I leave the cherry? To be safe, I did.