Chapter 5 | 53
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ept meeting at the tree to pick the ripe figs, until one day they sawan egg hatching in a bird’s nest on a branch of the tree, and as theywatched the little bird peck its way out of the egg, they touched thebacks of their hands together, and then the nun didn’t come out topick figs with the Jewish man any more but a mean-faced Catholickitchen-maid came to pick them instead and counted up the figsthe man picked after they were both through to be sure he hadn'tpicked any more than she had, and the man was furious. I thought it was a lovely story, especially the part about the fig-tree in winter under the snow and then the fig-tree in spring withall the green fruit. I felt sorry when I came to the last page. I wantedto crawl in between those black lines of print the way you crawlthrough a fence, and go to sleep under that beautiful big green fig-tree. It seemed to me Buddy Willard and I were like that Jewish manand that nun, although of course we weren't Jewish or Catholic butUnitarian. We had met together under our own imaginary fig-tree,and what we had seen wasn’t a bird coming out of an egg but a babycoming out of a woman, and then something awful happened andwe went our separate ways. As I lay there in my white hotel bed feeling lonely and weak, Ithought of Buddy Willard lying even lonelier and weaker than I wasup in that sanatorium in the Adirondacks, and I felt like a heel of theworst sort. In his letters Buddy kept telling me how he was readingpoems by a poet who was also a doctor and how he'd found outabout some famous dead Russian short story writer who had been adoctor too, so maybe doctors and writers could get along fine afterall. Now this was a very different tune from what Buddy Willard hadbeen singing all the two years we were getting to know each other.I remember the day he smiled at me and said, “Do you know what apoem is, Esther?” “No, what?” I said. “A piece of dust.” And he looked so proud of having thought of this 54 | The Bell Jar that I just stared at his blond hair and his blue eyes and his whiteteeth—he had very long, strong white teeth—and said “I guess so’ It was only in the middle of New York a whole year later that Ifinally thought of an answer to that remark. I spent a lot of time having imaginary conversations with BuddyWillard. He was a couple of years older than I was and veryscientific, so he could always prove things. When I was with him Ihad to work to keep my head above water. These conversations I had in my mind usually repeated thebeginnings of conversations I'd really had with Buddy, only theyfinished with me answering him back quite sharply, instead of justsitting around and saying “I guess so”. Now, lying on my back in bed, I imagined Buddy saying, “Do youknow what a poem is, Esther?” “No, what?” I would say. “A piece of dust.” Then just as he was smiling and starting to look proud, I would say,“So are the cadavers you cut up. So are the people you think you'recuring. They're dust as dust as dust. I reckon a good poem lasts awhole lot longer than a hundred of those people put together” And of course Buddy wouldn’t have any answer to that, becausewhat I said was true. People were made of nothing so much as dust,and I couldn't see that doctoring all that dust was a bit better thanwriting poems people would remember and repeat to themselveswhen they were unhappy or sick and couldn't sleep. My trouble was I took everything Buddy Willard told me as thehonest-to-God truth. I remember the first night he kissed me. Itwas after the Yale Junior Prom. It was strange, the way Buddy had invited me to that Prom. He popped into my house out of the blue one Christmas vacation,wearing a thick white turtleneck sweater and looking so handsomeI could hardly stop staring and said, “I might drop over to see you atcollege some day, all right?” I was flabbergasted. I only saw Buddy at church on Sundays whenwe were both home from college, and then at a distance, and I
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