Franny and Zooey

by J.D. Salinger

He was bright as hell, and full of lore, but he wasn’t burdened down with any of the cumbersome luggage of a too formal education.

I can’t be running back and forth forever between grief and high delight.

“That’s the spirit! Make it chicken broth or nothing. That’s putting the ole foot down. If she’s determined to have a nervous breakdown, the least we can do is see that she doesn’t have it in peace.”

She was gone about five minutes. When she returned, she had the particular facial expression that her eldest daughter, Boo Boo, had once described as meaning one of only two things: that she had just talked with one of her sons on the telephone or that she had just had a report, on the best authority, that the bowels of every single human being in the world were scheduled to move with perfect hygienic regularity for a period of one full week.

Although there was nothing markedly peculiar about her gait as she moved through the hall—she neither dallied nor quite hurried—she was nonetheless very peculiarly transformed as she moved. She appeared, vividly, to grow younger with each step. Possibly long halls, plus the aftereffects of tears, plus the ring of a telephone, plus the smell of fresh paint, plus newspapers underfoot—possibly the sum of all these things was equal, for her, to a new doll carriage.

“The cigars are ballast, sweetheart. Sheer ballast. If he didn’t have a cigar to hold on to, his feet would leave the ground. We’d never see our Zooey again.”