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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
In this excerpt from "Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath," Plath's marriage begins to unravel.
Feb 18, 2003 | June - Early July, 1962
Court Green
It is the black husk of another life that blows through her: the cold planetary blank of the crawl space, lightless beneath her mother's cellar; the flaking of dead stars into her eye as she bashes her head against the edge of the concrete foundation. It is the Morris climbing the lane and pulling into the courtyard after midnight, headlights sweeping the darkened windows of the bedroom and extinguishing as her husband turns their car into the stable. It is the crush of the tires on the cobblestones she hears from their bed.
The fifteenth of June. Sylvia climbs the stairs in her dirty canvas work pants, wet through the knees from a morning of scrubbing floors, carrying Nicholas on her hip and a tin of baking soda with a spoon balanced in a cracked teacup in her other hand. Minutes ago she was wearing a beekeeper's veil, the whole contraption, all new. The cloud of cheesecloth spread out before her over the picture-frame brim of the straw hat beneath, giving her a dreamer's view of the low mist of wood smoke curling about the ankles of the apple trees. As never before, she saw her world through a veil --- she'd eschewed even a hat at her simple wedding. Their sixth anniversary is tomorrow.
It is the new queen who is the bride today. The bee man is still in the orchard searching for her, pumping his bellows in a hazy landscape of fern and meadow grass and purple-tufted thistles. The bees grow sleepy as he checks the brood combs with his smoker, puffing the nurses and the workers to the edges of the frames, looking for the sleek auburn body of the young queen. When he finds her he'll mark her with a drop of nail polish, a little red drop on her back. She'll take her bride flight, chased by the drones; then she'll never leave the hive again. Like a bridesmaid in attendance, Sylvia painted the hand-me-down beehive herself, a green gabled house positioned under the semaphoring trees.
Upstairs, Ted sits on a chair in their bedroom, his hair dusted yellow with pollen, his forearms and collar sticky with propolis, his fingertips green-stained from mowing the lawn. He was up first thing, bringing the baby to Sylvia in the bed before she even awoke, then off to the Taw at dawnlight with his tackle in his old army rucksack. He's been outside all morning as she's been in, scouring the house until the bee man arrived. The bee man brought the swarm humming furiously inside a vibrating box.
Ted is holding ice cubes wrapped in a tea towel to his purpling lips. His forehead is lurid, lumpy and hot, his eyes swollen almost totally shut. When he shifts his weight in the chair, dead bees fall out of his loose cotton shirt and skitter crisply on their velvet over the grey floorboards. They stung him six times, swarming his head. They chased him as he ran, the bee man pumping his smoker uselessly, trying to mask the banana scent of fear.
"We smell of smoke," Sylvia says quietly as she sits down on the edge of the bed beside Ted's chair, propping Nicholas into a sitting position among the pillows. Nicholas sucks his fat hands and a large wooden bead.
The yeasty aroma of burnt twine and peanut shells drifts from their clothes and their hair. Sylvia scans her husband's mottled, darkening face. He looks wretched, a miserable Cyclopean monster. The curtains exhale behind them at the open windows.
"I thought you said they didn't like white," Ted mumbles, his mouth swollen, his voice pulpy and slow.
"That's what the rector told me. He said they're attracted to black. But you didn't put on the hat. Did you think you could keep them away with that napkin?"
"Not a napkin. My handkerchief," he answers gloomily.
"Even so."
They listen as Nicholas smacks his toy. Sylvia opens the tin of baking soda with the edge of the spoon and knocks a few clumps of powder into the cup. She leans forward toward the bedside table, pours a bit of water from the drinking glass there into the cup.
"Where's Frieda?" Ted asks.
"Feeding her babies downstairs," Sylvia answers, stirring the baking soda and water into a paste. They can just hear Frieda from the playroom, the rise and fall of her toddler prattle mimicking with disquieting accuracy the fawning neighborly emptiness and bitter private remonstrances of adult conversation.
"What did the bee man say?" Ted asks.
"Not to run," Sylvia answers.
"It's too late for that now, isn't it," he responds wearily, his words thick.
"I'm sorry," she says, giving him a weak smile. "I was just trying to cheer you up."
"What did he say for the stings?" Ted asks, unamused by Sylvia's risk at humor.
She holds up the cup. "Baking soda and water paste."
Ted sighs, pressing the ice pack lower, to his chin and jaw. "All right then. Shall I keep the ice on?"
"Yes, for a moment more." She continues to stir the paste, the solids of which continuously separate from the liquid and settle in a silty clog at the bottom of the cup.
"Did the dentist give you any painkillers?" Sylvia asks as she stirs.
"What?" Ted replies, his voice muffled and distracted.
"For your bad teeth. Did he give you anything yesterday in London, a prescription?"
Ted looks at her. She can't gauge his expression; his face and his eyes are too swollen. His countenance is unreadable.
"No," he finally answers.
