Potential Curveball

As we work our way through J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories, a pattern has begun to emerge where Salinger sets us up to be suspicious of characters and then leaves us to decide if that character will change our mind. In the beginning of the story “Down at the Dinghy”, Sandra and Mrs. Snell are talking about the little boy who lives in the vacation house that they work at. They claim that “it drives ya loony, the way that kid goes pussyfootin’ all around the house. Ya can’t hear him, ya know. I mean nobody can hear him, ya know” (75). According to Sandra, the little boy is always lurking around the corner or under the table. She feels like she can’t say anything for fear that he may hear and tell on her. It’s torture for her when “ya gotta weigh every work ya say and all” (75). Even as Mrs. Snell tries to talk her through it and mentions that the boy will turn out alright because he’s a good looking kid, Sandra just snarls and mentions that the boy will have a nose just like his father.

Initially, although I could see that having a nose like his father wasn’t a good thing in Sandra’s mind, I was unaware of the anti semitic implications of her statement. Once we found out that the family was Jewish, it seemed as though Sandra’s statement wasn’t so innocent afterall. By saying Lionel, the little boy, will have a nose like his father’s, she is implying that he will grow up Jewish (obviously) and therefore be a greedy jew, apparently like his father. Sandra’s anti semitism is also seen when Lionel repeats a phrase to his mother that he overheard Sandra say. According to Lionel, Sandra called the father of the house a “big--sloppy--kike” (86). The word “kike” is an ethnic slur for Jewish people and, although Lionel is unaware of the darkness behind the word, (he even believes that she is saying “kite” instead of “kike”), his mother, Booboo, does, and it worries her that her son now knows such words like that.

But, I suppose, fortunately, for Booboo, Lionel is unaware of the meaning of the word and mistakes it for the word “kite”. In this situation, Booboo is faced with a difficult problem: should she explain the true meaning behind the word, or should she leave it alone? In Salinger’s account, Booboo plays along with the “kite” interpretation, seemingly trying to save some of her son’s innocence. She keeps Lionel in an innocent faze of his life, refraining from explaining to him the true meaning behind the word and opening up to him the anti semitic world around them. In this way, by the end of the story, our minds have been twisted in knots. As stated before, Salinger leads us to believe that there is something wrong with Lionel and his family by showing us the conversation between Sandra and Mrs. Snell. In “A Perfect Day for Bananafish”, Salinger did a similar thing with the conversation between Muriel and her mother over Seymour. In that story, Seymour turned out to be a little different from others, although not dangerous as we were led to expect. Interestingly enough, Seymour is seen as strange because he feels more comfortable settling into a child-like personality instead of adjusting to the adult world. In “Down at the Dinghy”, Lionel is seen as a problem child because he runs off and doesn’t listen to anyone, except his mother from time to time. The way she can get him to listen is when she adapts to his mindset. She plays the game with him because she knows that he doesn’t understand the adult world. Although, in Seymour’s case, being in this child-like state made him seem different and dangerous, whereas Lionel’s mother is seen as understanding and almost heroic. (I suppose this is a mother-son relationship so it’s a different case from Seymour’s).

Because of this, even with Salinger’s initial manipulation of our perspective, we can see that Lionel and his mother aren’t so bad and that Sandra just doesn’t understand. In fact, this actually reflects badly on Sandra’s character, allowing us to sympathize with Lionel and his mother. It’s almost as if Salinger was trying to trick us and make “Down at the Dinghy” seem similar to the first story in his collection Nine Stories. I’m not sure if this was Salinger’s plan all along, throwing us a curveball and all, but if so, it worked very well.