THE BELL JAR // sylvia plath

Chapter Six

I had KEPT BEGGING Buddy to show me some really interesting hospital sights, so one Friday I cut all my classes and came down for a long weekend and he gave me the works. I started out by dressing in a white coat and sitting on a tall stool in a room with four cadavers, while Buddy and his friends cut them up. These cadavers were so unhuman-looking they didn't bother me a bit. They had stiff, leathery, purple-black skin and they smelt like old pickle jars.

After that, Buddy took me out into the hall where they had some big glass bottles full of babies that had died before they were born. The baby in the first bottle had a large white head bent over a tiny curled-up body the size of a frog. The baby in the next bottle was bigger and the baby next to that one was bigger still and the baby in the last bottle was the size of a normal baby and he seemed to be looking at me and smiling a little piggy smile. I was quite proud of the calm way I stared at all these gruesome things. The only time I jumped was when I leaned my elbow on Buddy's cadaver's somach to watch him

dissect a lung. After a minute or two I felt this burning sensation in my elbow and it occurred to me the cadaver might just be half alive since it was still warm, so I leapt off my stool with a small exclamation. Then Buddy explained the burning was only from the pickling fluid, and I sat back in my old position. In the hour before lunch Buddy took me to a lecture on sickle-cell anemia and some other depressing diseases, where they wheeled sick people out onto the platform and asked them questions and then wheeled them off and showed colored slides.

One slide I remember showed a beautiful laughing girl with a black mole on her cheek. "Twenty days after that mole appeared the girl was dead," the doctor said, and everybody went very quiet for a minute and then the bell rang, so I never really found out what the mole was or why the girl died. In the afternoon we went to see a baby born.

First we found a linen closet in the hospital corridor where Buddy took out a white mask for me to wear and some gauze.
A tall fat medical student, big as Sydney Greenstreet, lounged nearby, watching Buddy wind the gauze round and round my head until my hair was completely covered and only my eyes peered out over the white mask. The medical student gave an unpleasant little snicker. "At least your mother loves you," he said. I was so busy thinking how very fat he was and how unfortunate it must be for a man and especially a young man to be fat, because what woman could stand leaning over that big stomach to kiss him, that I didn't immediately realize what this student had said to me was an insult. By the time I figured he must consider himself quite a fine fellow and had thought up a cutting remark about how only a mother loves a fat man, he was gone.

Buddy was examining a queer wooden plaque on the wall with a row of holes in it, starting from a hole about the size of a silver dollar and ending with one the size of a dinner plate. "Fine, fine," he said to me. "There's somebody about to have a baby this minute." At the door of the delivery room stood a thin, stoop-shouldered medical student Buddy knew. "Hello, Will," Buddy said. "Who's on the job?"

"I am," Will said gloomily, and I noticed little drops of sweat beading his high pale forehead. "I am, and it's my first." Buddy told me Will was a third-year man and had to deliver eight babies before he could graduate. Then he noticed a bustle at the far end of the hall and some men in lime-green coats and skull caps and a few nurses came moving toward us in a ragged procession wheeling a trolley with a big white lump on it. "You oughtn't to see this," Will muttered in my ear. "You'll never want to have a baby if you do. They oughtn't to let women watch. It'll be the end of the human race." Buddy and I laughed, and then Buddy shook Will's hand and we all went into the room. I was so struck by the sight of the table where they were lifting the woman I didn't say a word. It looked like some awful torture table, with these metal stirrups sticking up in mid-air at one end and all sorts of instruments and wires and tubes I couldn't make out properly at the other.