Every year that I can help it, on my birthday, I read "Franny and Zooey." My need to live for a day a year in masturbatory adolescent malaise is an affliction, a boon, a friend. Just for an afternoon, to be that girl on the couch, with the cat in her lap, sobbing about the burden of …
Every year that I can help it, on my birthday, I read “Franny and Zooey.” My need to live for a day a year in masturbatory adolescent malaise is an affliction, a boon, a friend. Just for an afternoon, to be that girl on the couch, with the cat in her lap, sobbing about the burden of enlightenment…is pure pleasure. To take to the bed of it, instead of bowing at altars, marble or earthen…for just one day. I take Salinger that personally. Not “Catcher in the Rye.” Can’t actually stand that book. No, I’m a Glass family girl.
He died the other day. Salinger. Maybe you heard. And I’m wrecked. He died without responding to one of my letters. Not one. Wouldn’t he choose mine, out of all that he surely got, to respond to? Wouldn’t he see, somehow, psychically, that I was in the sisterhood of his Franny? Wouldn’t he want to somehow shephard me as a writer, a seeker, a girl all grown up but not really? Not when it comes to crying on the couch. I know he got my letters. Twenty-five years of them. Of course he did. The address was clear enough:
Please deliver to: J.D. SALINGER. Cornish, New Hampshire. Postal carrier– you know where he is. Please give him this.
My letters began as thanks in my teens. Then turned to lists of questions. Then grew angry in my twenties. Like a junkie, I needed more. My fix. I even bought that horrible book that girl wrote about her affair with him. Me, a worse slut. That’s when I stopped writing him letters. (I’m sure he was devastated.)
But c’mon! How dare he plant things like the following in my 16 year old brain: “Jesus knew — knew — that we’re carrying the Kingdom of Heaven around with us, inside, where we’re all too god damn stupid and sentimental and unimaginative to look. You have to be a son of God to know that kind of stuff.”
That was stuff only made for the couch and a cat and a bathrobe and the brave.
It plagued me. I didn’t understand. The kingdom of heaven inside me? WHAT? Was he serious? No wonder his tragic hero, Seymour Glass, had to go and kill himself over it. It’s one thing to read it in Ecclesiastes. And quite another to hear from a Jew-Catholic cum Buddhist-Hindu who knew his way around the Yale Bowl. No, he couldn’t be telling me what I thought he was telling me. I mean The Fat Lady? Sure, I got it. The Fat Lady was Jesus. So he said. But I smelled a rat. That’s what Franny wanna-bes do– they smell rats. That’s their problem.
I named my first dog Seymour Glass. He was a husky cross with arctic blue eyes. All that dog could see was the fence he needed to jump. Then he’d get to the other side, look back, and start whining because he couldn’t figure out how to get back home. Didn’t see the Jesus in himself, Salinger might have pointed out. I had to give that dog away. He lived out his life in a dog sledding yard, chained to a doghouse. All winter he was offered freedom in running with a team. But he didn’t like to pull. A real mess that dog. Like Franny. Like me.
I had a silly notion when I was young, that I kept alive until just recently. I believed that being a rebel would set a person free. That’s a myth, turns out.
Here’s where I’ve found freedom:
In solitude.
The unwitnessed life.
Cooking something.
Growing something.
Writing something.
Telling something I love it.
I bet Salinger did those things. And I bet the world will turn his death and chosen epic reclusivity into a reality TV series. WHAT’S IN THE VAULT? Like in that scary joke creepy kids regale in the dark at camp, from top bunks, shining flashlights in their faces. You know the one– where box after box in an abandoned mansion is opened and you think there’s going to be a chopped off finger of a dead bride in it or a key to a mummy’s tomb with a living body trapped inside or twin girl demons covered in pig’s blood or worse: some sort of be-all end-all ANSWER. Like that the kingdom of heaven is inside us or something as dismal and impossible as that.
And instead, there’s just a jelly bean.
I used to want the contents of that box. Bad. But now…I think I’ll be okay with just a jelly bean, if that’s how it goes. Maybe Salinger learned how to turn the prayer of writing into just…the prayer of living.
Good-bye, then, J.D. Hope you were spared my letters. In the end, I’d like to thank you. Like a re-habbed pusher, you knew when to stop. You can’t go around offering addictive shit like that forever. That’s a job for Jesus and the other ones, and you knew it, even when we didn’t.
Yours. Eternally.
Laura
P.S. I wrote your quote into my book, by the way. Finally getting one published, after all these years. I sort of wrote it for you. But then again, you probably knew that already. Should have written you that letter. Just the one that returned to simple thanks. To you, more than most, I hope that you rest…in…peace.
