The Bell Jar Read Online Free PDF Page A

you owe me something, don’t you, Lenny?”
                    I thought it odd Frankie should
be reminding Lenny he owed him something in front of us, and we being perfect
strangers, but Frankie stood there saying the same thing over and over until
Lenny dug into his pocket and pulled out a big roll of green bills and peeled
one off and handed it to Frankie. I think it was ten dollars.
                    “Shut up and scram.”
                    For a minute I thought Lenny was
talking to me as well, but then I heard Doreen say, “I won’t come unless Elly
comes.” I had to hand it to her the way she picked up my fake name.
                    “Oh, Elly’ll come, won’t you,
Elly?” Lenny said, giving me a wink.
                    “Sure I’ll come,” I said.
Frankie had wilted away into the night, so I thought I’d string along with
Doreen. I wanted to see as much as I could.
                    I liked looking on at other
people in crucial situations. If there was a road accident or a street fight or
a baby pickled in a laboratory jar for me to look at, I’d stop and look so hard
I never forgot it.
                    I certainly learned a lot of
things I never would have learned otherwise this way, and even when they
surprised me or made me sick I never let on, but pretended that’s the way I
knew things were all the time.

2
     
                    I wouldn’t have missed
Lenny’s place for anything.
                    It was built exactly like the
inside of a ranch, only in the middle of a New York apartment house. He’d had a
few partitions knocked down to make the place broaden out, he said, and then
had them pine-panel the walls and fit up a special pinepaneled bar in the shape
of a horseshoe. I think the floor was pine-paneled, too.
                    Great white bearskins lay about underfoot, and the
only furniture was a lot of low beds covered with Indian rugs. Instead of
pictures hung up on the walls, he had antlers and buffalo horns and a stuffed
rabbit head. Lenny jutted a thumb at the meek little gray muzzle and stiff
jackrabbit ears.
                    “Ran over that in Las Vegas.” He
walked away across the room, his cowboy boots echoing like pistol shots. “
Acoustics,” he said, and grew smaller and smaller until he vanished through a
door in the distance.
                    All at once music started to
come out of the air on every side. Then it stopped, and we heard Lenny’s voice
say “This is your twelve o’clock disc jock, Lenny Shepherd, with a roundup of
the tops in pops. Number Ten in the wagon train this week is none other than
that little yaller-haired gal you been hearin’ so much about lately...the one
an’ only Sunflower!”
     
    I
was born in Kansas, I was bred in Kansas,
    And
when I marry I’ll be wed in Kansas. ..
     
                    “What a card!” Doreen said.
“Isn’t he a card?”
                    “You bet,” I said.
                    “Listen, Elly, do me a favor.”
She seemed to think Elly was who I really was by now.
                    “Sure,” I said.
                    “Stick around, will you? I
wouldn’t have a chance if he tried anything funny. Did you see that muscle?”
Doreen giggled.
                    Lenny popped out of the back
room. “I got twenty grand’s worth of recording equipment in there.” He ambled
over to the bar and set out three glasses and a silver ice bucket and a big
pitcher and began to mix drinks from several different bottles.
     
    ...to
a true-blue gal who promised she would wait--
    She’s
the sunflower of the Sunflower State.
     
                    “Terrific, huh?” Lenny came over, balancing three
glasses. Big