Him Her Him Again the End of Him

ONE I was in high school when I readThe Bell Jarand thought it was about a lucky girl who wins a contest and gets to go to Europe. But what about Sylvia Plath's trying to drown herself? After she strings herself up and before she swallows pills? To tell you the truth, I don't think I looked at that part. To tell you the truth, I must have skipped a lot of parts in that book, maybe even the whole thing, because, let's see, for starters, it takes place in New York. Nevertheless: Sylvia Plath finally did get to go to Europe. She studied at Cambridge University in England, and years after I read her book -- or rather, some of her book -- so did I. While I was there, a collection of Plath's letters to her mother was published, which my mother read and wrote to me about. "Why can't you write letters to me like that?" she asked. "They're so warm and loving." When I finally read the letters, long after I'd left Cambridge, I discovered that my mother was right. Sylvia Plath's letterswerewarm and loving. "Your mother is always right," my grandmother once told me, "although I have never liked the yellow table in her center hall." My grandmother also told me that she -- my grandmother -- believes everyone has a determined number of footsteps to use up in a lifetime, and, therefore, it is foolhardy to exercise since you will only exhaust your quota sooner and die. Let me give you the gist of a typical Plath letter: "My dearest of Mothers, I met the most marvelous man at the Trinity May Ball, where I wore an ice blue gown that was simply divine. Tomorrow, tea with the Queen! I love you!" I, too, had met a pretty marvelous man in England, though none of my letters home mentioned him. Let me give you the gist of one of those letters: "It's so cold here. And if you like the weather, you'llLOVEthe food. Do you remember what I'm supposed to be writing my thesis about? I have to hand a chapter in, but I can't remember what my topic is. I think I wrote the title in a postcard I wrote to you a couple of months ago. The bursar's office says they never received your check." Sylvia Plath and I had one thing in common besides our outfits for socializing with the Queen -- mine being a never-worn, never-to-be-worn drab long skirt; and hers, well, to be honest, I can't actually say if she had an ice blue gown or ever met the Queen. As I told you, I was giving you the gist. In any case, Sylvia and I were alike in that both of us had a habit of shielding our mothers, and in my case, my father, too, from what was really going on in our respective lives. You know, of course, about Sylvia's despair and the conclusive oven thing. Even her mother knows now. But I don't think you know very much about me. An only child, I was born in the suburbs of Philadelphia, a town called Abington. My ancestors were -- no, don't worry. I won't tell youeverything.I'll start when he knocked on my door. The marvelous man was wearing a rugby shirt and jeans and sneakers and he looked boyish, I thought, for someone from another generation. "You don't look twenty-eight," I said. I was twenty-one. "You can count the rings," he said. "You're married?" I said. He laughed. "I meant tree rings," he said. "It was a joke about dendrochronology." "Oh," I said. "I never get dendrochronological jokes." He told me that he'd arrived from New York that morning, that he was going to be a teaching fellow in philosophy, that he'd recently been at Princeton, where he studied with someone famous I pretended to have heard of, that he'd taken a year off to join VISTA and eradicate poverty in Scarsdale (did I really hear him say Scarsdale?), and that a friend of mine had suggested he look me up -- he'd dated one of her roommates, who'd run off to an ashram in India after he broke up with her. She still wrote to him, though the motif, he said, was mainly gastrointestinal. ThoMarx, Patricia is the author of 'Him Her Him Again the End of Him ', published 2008 under ISBN 9780743296243 and ISBN 0743296249.