No! Sylvia pleads. It wasn’t me! He wouldn’t go to the doctor, he was sure it was cancer and he refused to go—it wasn’t me. I was a good girl. I tried so hard to be good.

But you prattle something too wildly, Aurelia scolds. That diaphragm episode with your McLean psychiatrist, and that French boy at Yale … Your father’s precepts therein you do forget.

Sylvia drops the phone, melting into sobs. She crouches on the floor, hugging her knees, broken down. It’s there, waiting, the flicker at the end of a dark black tunnel, available, if she wants it. Does she want it? No. She can’t be sure. When she was twenty, she mourned for her unlived life: all she would never experience. It seemed so sad, but ultimately a necessary sacrifice. Now the shock is that her children, so priceless, are only so magnetic. After a pivotal point, it’s not about her future or theirs, but about the present and the past polluted into nightmare, from which she could be entirely, obliviously relieved.

The phone rings.

Sylvia’s hand reaches through syrupy time, through the slow yawning gape of dream, for the phone. The chimerical reel immediately snaps free, spinning on its axle, when her hand connects with the black Bakelite receiver. She hears flapping, crisp and rhythmic.

Who is this? asks the operator. She recognizes her own voice: haughty, womanly, resonant. Unflinching and confident, rolling with insinuations.

This is Sylvia Plath, she says.

Behind the back-lit stage scrim that her bedroom wall has become, Professor Thomas crouches, holding a cup to his ear, eavesdropping, an ordnance map in his lap that he masturbates behind as he listens. The paper flaps rhythmically with the jerking of his hand.

That’s right, her voice says to herself. Can you remember that?

Of course, Sylvia answers meekly, without confidence. It’s my name.

Grimacing, his mouth a sagging rictus, Professor Thomas’s face falls away in oozing chunks below his bushy white eyebrows. Old meat falling off the bones. His eyeglasses glint in the light.

It should end here, Sylvia dreams; it should end right here, before the next question. She knows it before the words are formed.

This is the best thing that’s ever happened to you, isn’t it? her self asks her self. This is just what you needed to break free. You’ve never felt more alive—

Professor Thomas is holding out his cup. He offers it to her, spotlit behind the sheer scrim, bobbing in his hand. Here, he grunts, gritting his teeth, his eyes rolling back under thick, blue lids, are you going to be sick?

17. “Magi”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

“Magi”

DECEMBER 17, 1962

LONDON