Free Nine Stories by J. D. Salinger Page B

crazy place." She
gave Mrs. Snell a hostile glance. "It's all right for you, you
live here all year round. You got your social life here and all. You
don't care."
    "I'm
gonna drink this if it kills me," Mrs. Snell said, looking at
the clock over the electric stove.
    "What
would you do if you were in my shoes?" Sandra asked abruptly. "I
mean what would you do? Tella truth."
    This
was the sort of question Mrs. Snell slipped into as if it were an
ermine coat. She at once let go her teacup. "Well, in the first
place," she said, "I wouldn't worry about it. What I'd do,
I'd look around for another--"
    "I'm
not worried about it," Sandra interrupted.
    "I
know that, but what I'd do, I'd just get me--"

    The
swinging door opened from the dining room and Boo Boo Tannenbaum, the
lady of the house, came into the kitchen. She was a small, almost
hipless girl of twenty-five, with styleless, colorless, brittle hair
pushed back behind her ears, which were very large. She was dressed
in knee-length jeans, a black turtleneck pullover, and socks and
loafers. Her joke of a name aside, her general unprettiness aside,
she was-in terms of permanently memorable, immoderately perceptive,
small-area faces-a stunning and final girl. She went directly to the
refrigerator and opened it. As she peered inside, with her legs apart
and her hands on her knees, she whistled, unmelodically, through her
teeth, keeping time with a little uninhibited, pendulum action of her
rear end. Sandra and Mrs. Snell were silent. Mrs. Snell put out her
cigarette, unhurriedly.
    "Sandra
. . ."
    "Yes,
ma'am?" Sandra looked alertly past Mrs. Snell's hat.
    "Aren't
there any more pickles? I want to bring him a pickle."
    "He
et 'em," Sandra reported intelligently. "He et 'em before
he went to bed last night. There was only two left."
    "Oh.
Well, I'll get some when I go to the station. I thought maybe I could
lure him out of that boat." Boo Boo shut the refrigerator door
and walked over to look out of the lake-front window. "Do we
need anything else?" she asked, from the window.
    "Just
bread."
    "I
left your check on the hall table, Mrs. Snell. Thank you."
    "O.K.,"
said Mrs. Snell. "I hear Lionel's supposeta be runnin' away."
She gave a short laugh.
    "Certainly
looks that way," Boo Boo said, and slid her hands into her hip
pockets.
    "At
least he don't run very far away," Mrs. Snell said, giving
another short laugh.
    At
the window, Boo Boo changed her position slightly, so that her back
wasn't directly to the two women at the table. "No," she
said, and pushed back some hair behind her ear. She added, purely
informatively: "He's been hitting the road regularly since he
was two. But never very hard. I think the farthest he ever got--in
the city, at least--was to the Mall in Central Park. Just a couple of
blocks from home. The least far--or nearest--he ever got was to the
front door of our building. He stuck around to say goodbye to his
father."
    Both
women at the table laughed.
    "The
Mall's where they all go skatin' in New York," Sandra said very
sociably to Mrs. Snell. "The kids and all."
    "Oh!"
said Mrs. Snell.
    "He
was only three. It was just last year," Boo Boo said, taking out
a pack of cigarettes and a folder of matches from a side pocket in
her jeans. She lit a cigarette, while the two women spiritedly
watched her. "Big excitement. We had the whole police force out
looking for him."
    "They
find him?" said Mrs. Snell.
    "Sure
they found him!" said Sandra with contempt. "Wuddaya
think?"
    "They
found him at a quarter past eleven of night, in the middle of--my
God, February, I think. Not a child in the park. Just muggers, I
guess, and an assortment of roaming degenerates. He was sitting on
the floor of the bandstand, rolling a marble back and forth along a
crack. Half-frozen to death and looking--"
    "Holy
Mackerel!" said Mrs. Snell. "How come he did it? I mean
what was he runnin' away about?"
    Boo
Boo blew a single, faulty smoke-ring at a pane of glass. "Some
child in the park that