Struck with inertia, unable to choose anything constructive to do with her summer in the Boston suburbs, Esther is in limbo. Chapter 11 begins with a description of Dr. Gordon's waiting room, and Chapter 12 begins with a description of the waiting room of his private hospital. Esther is waiting, waiting for the verdict, the diagnosis of her life. But who will give the verdict, the diagnosis? Certainly not the suave, handsome doctor, nor can Esther's dutiful but befuddled mother.
"Suppose you try and tell me what you think is wrong," Dr. Gordon asks Esther. But Esther cannot even figure out the question, much less answer it. Esther is suffering from extreme depression and has symptoms of a variety of other mentally ill states. She is not sleeping. She has not washed her hair nor her clothes since returning from New York City, and she is still wearing Betsy's borrowed clothes. She wants Dr. Gordon to be fatherly, and when he is not, she cannot relate to him. She writes to Doreen, then tears the letter into little pieces. Indecision. She goes out with a sailor but tells him that her name is "ElIy" and says that she is an orphan from Chicago. Thus, she wants another identity. When a woman resembling Mrs. Willard walks by, she becomes anxious and paranoid.
On her second trip to Dr. Gordon, he suggests electro-shock treatments on an out-patient basis. He assures Mrs. Greenwood that she'll "have her daughter back" soon. Meanwhile, Esther is reading lurid scandal sheets and is intrigued by the story of a man who almost commits suicide by jumping from the seventh floor of a building; he is finally helped to safety by a policeman.
Esther analyzes in detail the matter of killing oneself by leaping. The seamy sides of life and violence and death fascinate her, partly because all her family ever read was the Christian Science Monitor, a newspaper that Esther claims treated such things as "if they didn't happen." Even when Esther goes to Boston's Public Garden, she analyzes things in the most negative light. She decides that the Weeping Scholar Tree must have come from Japan, and then she goes into a long reverie on the merits of disembowelment. However, she concludes, she hates the sight of blood.
