Our central image of Esther, at this point, is of a starved girl. She is starved physically because of the results of food poisoning, but, more important, she has been starved psychologically from the beginning of the book. On one hand, she takes in everything about the city, all its myriad images, all its smells, sounds, and sights. But none of this nourishes her. The subway's mouth is "fusty, peanut-smelling"; the "goggle-eyed headlines" stare at her; and the "granite canyons" are "mirage-gray." Esther feels as if she is carrying around a cadaver's head. She concludes that something is wrong with her, but the reader also wonders if there is not something wrong with Esther's world. Is not the city, with all its clamor and excitement, its pollutions and stimulations, a major part of Esther's problem? Esther cannot take all this in, cannot find nourishment and refreshment, so her mind's reaction is to look harder, to try to take in more, to strain to examine all of the new images and evidence. But Esther is constantly led back to death. The city means death to her, a high-tension death like the electrocution of the Rosenbergs. Finally, even Esther's body is poisoned by the city, and she becomes thoroughly sick. In her attempt to recover, she becomes ravenous for chicken soup and other nourishment.
It is at this point, because of her unhappiness with New York, that Esther starts to relate her memories about her romance with Buddy, as well as some of her childhood and college memories, as if to try to figure out how she got to this gray world of Ladies' Day magazine, in a summer that was supposed to be a high point in her life.
One of the keys to these first chapters, to Esther's character, and perhaps even to her mental problems is the fashion theme. Fashion is everything — how a person "looks" is extremely important. Certainly the girls who work for the magazine are programmed into the newest colors and styles. They are to be the example for millions of college girls. They are to dress correctly and be photographed as "endorsing" that "certain look" to all the young, wealthy "in" college girls.
