With the southeast breeze and new vistas, I tell myself it’s going to get better after lunch. Life goes on.
But it doesn’t get better. It gets worse. Mom refuses to eat. When Dad orders Nick to take over at the wheel so he can talk to her, she locks him out of the cabin. I put on my swim trunks and grab a towel from the stack in the closet. Where the sun is really hitting the deck, I’m dancing a little in my bare feet and perspiring like I’ve just taken a shower. The idea of that cool water sluicing over my body has me humming.
You might already know this about October water in Virginia. It’s never as cold as April water. It comes off the summer and holds on to those warm spots like a girl clings to her date on a roller coaster. Swimming in any kind of water has always meant freedom to me. You’re outside your skin. You’re a fish.
Mom bursts out of the cabin and starts up the ladder just after Dad has gone back to the upper deck. He must have given up. Headed downriver, he’s at the wheel.
“I’m looking for a place to pull in so we can all swim.” He waves at me.
With the rising breeze, Mom’s hair is all over her face and she has to claw it off in order to see. Climbing and yelling at the same time.
“Now do you get it?” She’s yelling at Dad but pointing down at me.
He obviously doesn’t get it. Neither do I.
“What’s the matter, Mom?” I call over the motor, “We’re just going to swim.”
“Red, tell him.”
“Tell him what?” I ask, my hands slick with the sunscreen I’m slathering on like we own the company. An inspired idea to try to appease her, to show her I’m being careful. If I’m not going to grow up to be the perfect son she always wanted, I might as well give her the satisfaction that I heard her advice about ultraviolet rays.
Confused too, Dad raises his eyebrows. He’s clueless. Or else he still thinks if we ignore the bigger issues, they’ll go away. Without waiting for him to pull himself together, Mom plunges ahead.
“No, Daniel, you can’t go swimming. Absolutely not. Misty says your body can’t take that kind of stress. If you swallow water, or go too deep… even just the shock of the temperature change.”
“I swam this summer.”
“That was different. In August the water’s closer to air temperature. You weren’t so far…” There’s no way she can finish that sentence. “In cold water your lungs have to work overtime and that stresses your heart. It means you’re at risk for a heart attack.”
“A heart attack from cancer?”
Mom’s eyes don’t leave my face. “That’s just the point. Misty says they don’t know where the bad cells are.”
“Dad?” My knees are buckling. “Is that true? They could be in my heart?”
He finally speaks, though his face is closed, as if he’s reciting multiplication tables. “Once it’s in your blood, it can go anywhere.”
You would think that would be enough to get them to stop picking at each other.
I wrap up in the biggest towel and leave my bathing suit on, not ready to give up on the possibility of swimming later. With the wrinkled copy of Catcher, which the librarian didn’t charge me for after all because she found three more copies in the box for the Friends of the Library book sale, I climb into Dad’s hammock on the sunny side of the deck. Maybe HC has some advice for someone about to have poisonous chemicals injected into his body.
Dad and Nick decide to fish. Back and forth they joke about catching dinner. Nick’s getting the gear organized while Dad swings the boat into the wind and drops anchor in an inlet lined with reeds. If I weren’t so wiped out, I’d fish with them. It would reinforce Dad’s view of his temporary remedy, one big happy family adventure. He’s not used to being the sad sack, but there’s no point in all of us being miserable. With the sun drilling into my bare skin like acupuncture needles, I keep reading and let the wash of their voices drift in the breeze around me.
Holden’s chapter about the elevator guy coming to collect the five dollars has always bugged me. Why does that girl Sunny let him do that to Holden? She ought to feel grateful. Holden wasn’t mean to her. She didn’t even have to do what she was supposedly paid to do.
That decision by Holden I understand completely. As badly as I want to have sex, I don’t like to think I would do it with a total stranger, totally cold like that, no buildup, no conversation, no relationship. She didn’t know him, didn’t care about him. It would be mechanical, unfeeling. Is he that desperate for company? Mack says none of that matters, it just happens. And that does make sense. Sometimes I can be standing next to a girl in line or watching a movie with a girl in a bathing suit, and I have to excuse myself. It’s embarrassing.
Plus, how awful would it be to not know who else she’s been with recently? Or even just kissed. I mean, you can’t ever be sure, but with someone you know beforehand, like from school or whatever, at least you kind of know who she bums around with. You have a pretty good idea of the last guy she hooked up with.
What’s worse is old Sunny in Holden’s hotel room doesn’t pay any attention at all to how Holden’s feeling. She’s just there angling for money. A lousy five dollars at that. Even as bad off as my parents are with the medical bills and the lawyer’s fees, I have trouble imagining how five dollars could be that important to anyone, even back in the last century or whenever Salinger wrote Catcher. Sunny and the elevator guy just stick it to Holden because they can. Because he’s alone and young. That truly stinks.
The question that keeps bugging me is, could Holden have done something to prevent the whole episode? Is that the reason he tells us every embarrassing detail? The hairy chest who corners him, and his crying when they take the money from his wallet. He didn’t have to tell that part. If he weren’t feeling so depressed about school and having trouble connecting with old friends, he wouldn’t say yes when the elevator guy suggests the girl in the first place. And he sure as hell wouldn’t open the door to her that second time.
Then after all that mess with them in his room he takes a bath. What kind of guy takes a bath? He fabricates the whole movie scene, which is totally silly and really out of character for someone as straight as he’s been before that. I totally understand that it’s meant to be a foil. I can hear Stepford-Hanes suggesting that. Something so off-the-wall he wouldn’t be able to go through with it, to show the real Holden, not the pretend brave king of the city. Reading it this time, the fifth or sixth time, the last three lines really hit me, though. You really worry that he’s serious, that he might be so depressed or scared of facing his parents that he would jump out the window. He totally misses the point about jumping, though. Once you jump, it doesn’t matter who the hell is looking.
From my spot in the hammock I can hear the whole conversation between Nick and Dad on the upper deck. Nick’s telling Dad about his friend Thomas Lynch, who’s failing fifth grade. As if anyone could actually fail fifth grade. It’s mostly book reports and art projects and spelling bees, how hard is that? But Nick has talked to me about Thomas before. A couple of times. His father drinks a lot and when he’s drinking, he hits. Nick’s trying to convince Dad to go and talk to Thomas’s father about AA. Dad says no.
Not “no” because he won’t talk to Mr. Lynch, but “no” because it won’t change anything. Dad’s big thing about AA and making a decision to change your life revolves around Step One of the AA philosophy. You have to acknowledge you have a problem that you can’t solve yourself. We Landons have heard the drill a hundred times.