Jody and her boyfriend are happy together and that so unnerves Esther that she talks Cal into swimming with her. She wants to swim out to a rock, but Cal thinks that she is crazy and turns back. Esther keeps swimming, saying "I am I am I am." At this point, we learn that Esther tried to hang herself that morning and failed because ceiling beams and light fixtures in the house were unavailable. She returns again to thoughts of the past and to thoughts about her grandmother's house, where there were high ceilings. We also learn in this reverie of Esther's that she has been reading paperbacks about abnormal psychology and thinks that her case parallels the most hopeless cases. She worries about her family's lack of money and now, because she is a hopeless mental case, she fears that she'll end up in a terrible state hospital, hidden away. She tries to drown herself in the sea, but she keeps bobbing to the surface, as if the depths will not take her. She gives up and turns back to join her companions.
At this stage, Esther is unable to do anything right; she can't even kill herself with any of the traditional methods. When Esther's mother gets her a job as a volunteer in a hospital, Esther botches that too. She hopes that she will be assigned to work with some pathetic cases so that she can begin to feel that she herself is lucky — as her mother has moralized. However, Esther is, ironically, put in charge of handing out vases of flowers in the maternity ward. Here again, we see the theme of babies and children, a matter that depresses Esther very much. Esther tries harder at her job (but Esther has always tried harder and, for that reason, she is now mentally ill); and she rearranges the flowers, throwing out the dead ones and making all the vases look more attractive, and she practically starts a riot in the ward. She louses up one woman's yellow roses and throws out another's dead larkspurs. But instead of arguing her point with the women, Esther runs away and discards her green uniform as she goes.
