The First Time: Esther Greenwood

Aug 19, 2024

*Esther Greenwood, is, of course, the main character of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. I confess, I avoided this slim novel forever – until just last month, because it was, I knew, about an intelligent, troubled young woman, written by an author who took her own life in 1963. I had read her poems, I had read quite a lot about her, but this autobiographical or semi-autobiographical novel? No. And then, recently, there it was in a little free library, and why not? Why not now? Esther – late in the novel, experiences sex for the first time, and thus, I share it here as a part of The First Time Project. The book is, by the way, dated, yet still very fresh, poignant, powerful, immediate, and moving.

..I murmured, “You know, Irwin, I think I ought to tell you, I’m a virgin.”

Irwin laughed and flung me down on the bed.

A few minutes later an exclamation of surprise revealed that Irwin hadn’t really believed me. I thought how lucky it was I had stared practicing birth control during the way, because in my winey state that night I would never have bothered to perform the delicate and necessary operation. I lay, rapt and naked, on Irwin’s rough blanket, waiting for the miraculous change to make itself felt.

But all I felt was sharp, starlingly bad pain.

“It hurts,” I said, “Is it supposed to hurt?”

Irwin didn’t say anything. Then he said, “Sometimes it hurts.”

After a little while Irwin got up and went into the bathroom, and I heard the rushing of shower water. I wasn’t sure if Irwin had done what he planned to do, or if my virginity had obstructed him in some way. I wanted to ask him if I was still a virgin, but I felt too unsettled. A warm liquid was seeping out between my legs. Tentatively, I reached down and touched it.

When I held my hand up to the light streaming in from the bathroom, my fingertips looked black.

“Irwin,” I said nervously, “bring me a towel.”

Irwin strolled back, a bathtowel knotted around his waist, and tossed me a second, smaller towel. I pushed the towel between my legs and pulled it away almost immediately. It was half black with blood.

“I’m bleeding!” I announced, sitting up with a start.

“Oh, that often happens,” Irwin reassured me. “You’ll be all right.”

Then the stories of blood-stained bridal sheets and capsules of red ink bestowed on already deflowered brides floated back to me. I wondered how much I would bleed, and lay down, nursing the towel. It occurred to me that the blood was my answer. I couldn’t possibly be a virgin any more. I smiled into the dark. I felt part of a great tradition.

Surreptitiously, I applied a fresh section of white towel to my wound, thinking that as soon as the bleeding stopped, I would take the late trolley back to the asylum. I wanted to brood over my new condition in perfect peace. But the towel came away black and dripping.

“I … think I better go home,” I said faintly.

“Surely not so soon.”

“Yes, I think I better.”

I asked if I could borrow Irwin’s towel and packed it between my thighs as a bandage. Then I pulled on my sweaty clothes. Irwin offered to drive me home, but I didn’t see how I could let him drive me to the asylum, so I dug in my pocketbook for Joan’s address. Irwin knew the street and went out to start the car. I was too worried to tell him I was still bleeding. I kept hoping every minute that it would stop.

But as Irwin drove me through the barren, snow-banked streets I felt the warm seepage let itself through the dam of the towel and my skirt and on to the car seat.

As we slowed, cruising by house after lit house, I thought how fortunate it was I had not discarded my virginity while living at college or at home, where such concealment would have been impossible.

Joan opened the door with an expression of glad surprise. Irwin kissed my hand and told Joan to take good care of me.

I shut the door and leaned back against it, feeling the blood drain from my face in one spectacular flush.

“Why, Esther,” Joan said, “what on earth’s the matter?”

I wondered when Joan would notice the blood trickling down my legs and oozing, stickily, into each black patent leather shoe. I thought I could be dying from a bullet wound and Joan would still stare through me with her blank eyes, expecting me to ask for a cup of coffee and a sandwich.

“Is that nurse here?”

“No, she’s on night duty at Caplan….”

“Good.” I made a little bitter grin as another soak of blood let itself through the drenched padding and started the tedious journey into my shoes. “I mean … bad.”

“You look funny,” Joan said.

“You better get a doctor.”

“Why?”

“Quick.”

“But…”

Still she hadn’t noticed anything.

I bent down, with a brief grunt, and slipped off one of my winter-cracked black Bloomingdale shoes. I held the shoe up, before Joan’s enlarged, pebbly eyes, tilted it, and watched her take in the stream of blood that cascaded on to the beige rug.

“My God! What is it?”

“I’m hæmorrhaging.”

Joan half-led, half-dragged me to the sofa and made me lie down. Then she propped some pillows under my blood-stained feet. Then she stood back and demanded, “Who was that man?”

For one crazy minute I thought Joan would refuse to call a doctor until I confessed the whole story of my evening with Irwin and that after my confession she would still refuse, as a sort of punishment. But then I realized that she honestly took my explanation at face value, that my going to bed with Irwin was utterly incomprehensible to her, and his appearance a mere prick to her pleasure at my arrival.

“Oh somebody,” I said, with a flabby gesture of dismissal. Another pulse of blood released itself and I contracted my stomach muscles in alarm. “Get a towel.”

Joan went out and came back almost immediately with a pile of towels and sheets. Like a prompt nurse, she peeled back my blood-wet clothes, drew a quick breath as she arrived at the original royal red towel, and applied a fresh bandage. I lay, trying to slow the beating of my heart, as every beat pushed forth another gush of blood.

I remembered a worrisome course in the Victorian novel where woman after woman died, palely and nobly, in torrents of blood, after a difficult childbirth. Perhaps Irwin had injured me in some awful, obscure way, and all the while I lay there on Joan’s sofa I was really dying.

Joan pulled up an Indian hassock and began to dial down the long list of Cambridge doctors. The first number didn’t answer. Joan began to explain my case to the second number, which did answer, but then broke off and said “I see” and hung up.

“What’s the trouble?”

“He’ll only come for regular customers or emergencies. It’s Sunday.”

I tried to lift my arm and look at my watch, but my hand was a rock at my side and wouldn’t budge. Sunday—the doctor’s paradise! Doctors at country clubs, doctors at the seaside, doctors with mistresses, doctors with wives, doctors in church, doctors in yachts, doctors everywhere resolutely being people, not doctors.

“For God’s sake,” I said, “tell them I’m an emergency.”

The third number didn’t answer and, at the fourth, the party hung up the minute Joan mentioned it was about a period. Joan began to cry.

“Look, Joan,” I said painstakingly, “call up the local hospital. Tell them it’s an emergency. They’ll have to take me.”

Joan brightened and dialled a fifth number. The Emergency Service promised her a staff doctor would attend to me if I could come in to the ward. Then Joan called a taxi.

Joan insisted on riding with me. I clasped my fresh padding of towels with a sort of desperation as the cabby, impressed by the address Joan gave him, cut corner after corner in the dawn-pale streets and drew up with a great squeal of tyres at the Emergency Ward entrance.

I left Joan to pay the driver and hurried into the empty, glaringly lit room. A nurse bustled out from behind a white screen. In a few swift words, I managed to tell her the truth about my predicament before Joan came in the door, blinking and wide-eyed as a myopic owl.

The Emergency Ward doctor strolled out then, and I climbed, with the nurse’s help, on to the examining table. The nurse whispered to the doctor, and the doctor nodded and began unpacking the bloody towelling. I felt his fingers start to probe, and Joan stood, rigid as a soldier, at my side, holding my hand, for my sake or hers I couldn’t tell.

“Ouch!” I winced at a particularly bad jab.

The doctor whistled.

“You’re one in a million.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean it’s one in a million it happens to like this.”

The doctor spoke in a low, curt voice to the nurse, and she hurried to a side table and brought back some rolls of gauze and silver instruments. “I can see,” the doctor bent down, “exactly where the trouble is coming from.”

“But can you fix it?”

The doctor laughed. “Oh, I can fix it, all right.”