At the Ladies' Day banquet, Esther gorges on caviar and chicken slices, avocado and crabmeat salad. We realize here that she does not have "perfect manners" because she tells about the time when she drank from the fingerbowl at her patron's, Mrs. Guinea's, luncheon. Here, where she gorges on caviar, she does so because her grandfather, who works for a country club, has introduced her to caviar and has given her a taste for expensive things. But if Esther seems to think that she knows how to please herself at free banquets, she does not know how to navigate the other areas of high life in New York. And when she becomes almost deathly ill from food poisoning, she does not understand what has happened. We feel full of anxiety about her ambivalence and conflicts, and we wonder if it is the food or her insights that cause Esther to be sick. Since she and Betsy become ill at a Technicolor, football-romance movie, the reader suspects that their illness might be caused by an over-indulgence in not only crabmeat, but in New York life itself.
Thus, Chapter 4 ends with Esther's surviving a serious sickness from which she feels a certain purification. And there are some positive aspects. Esther receives many presents from the magazine, and her appetite returns as soon as Doreen visits her. "I'm starving," Esther says. Indeed, Esther is starved, but she is starved for more than just food. She lacks love, good parental guidance, affection, a meaningful friendship, and a clear sense of direction for her life. At times, she spitefully blames others for her unhappiness or points to the inadequacies and hypocrisies of the 1950s. At other times, Esther, like a Dostoevskian character, blames her own dark, perverse tendencies. She is also, it seems, starved for answers. She does not know why she feels the way she does, and at times, she does not really know how she feels. Basically, Esther is at war with herself; nature pulls her one way, and her social training pulls her another, and her unusual and perceptive insights pull her yet another way. The New York world of whirlwind fashion events and professional engagements is clearly a shock, especially for a studious girl who arrives fresh from her sheltered New England existence. No wonder Esther so easily succumbs to the poisoned city crabmeat.
