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Canned Tangerines
by J. D. Salinger
So I was supposed to take the pie over for Thanksgiving at my
parents' house. I woke up sweating about how to make pumpkin pie the
night before, I'm that neurotic about baking. Why my mother asked me
to make the pie, I'll never know. She's like that. When I was nine,
she asked me to run down to the corner store and pick up some canned
tangerines. Canned tangerines. I'm serious. But she didn't know
for what. She just wanted them.
So she gives me a fifty dollar bill and off I go. I was
going to ask if my older brother, Seymour, could come with me, but he
was busy reading Sumatran verse. That's Seymour for you. If he
wasn't rounding up all the lost cats in Central Park, he was reading
Sumatran verse. So I went by myself.
I think it was more carrying around the fifty dollar bill
than the canned tangerines, I mean, a little kid doesn't know what to
do with fifty dollars, for chrissakes! See, when you walk down our
street, it's like there's a store every time you look up. There's
Kuppel's Toys, and there's the hardware store, and there's the book
store, and there's Schrafft's right around the corner. Which is where
I go.
I walk in and the lady at the counter says to me, "Hi dear,
are you looking for your parents in here?" And so I say, "No, I'll
be dining alone," and I sit right down at the counter. Now mind
you, it's three in the afternoon and I'm nine years old. And I say
"I'll be dining alone." So the lady raises her eyebrows and she
says, "Honey, whyn't you come back with your mother and she can buy
you some lunch."
That makes me think that *I* can't get lunch there at
Schrafft's, which is a lunch place, for chrissakes, so I make a big
coughing noise and make them think that maybe I've got tuberculosis
or something, and then I pretend to pass out on the floor, but when
the lady gasps, and makes me think that *she's* going to faint, I run
out the door. And when I'm done running, I head for the corner store
to get the tangerines, and I realize that I'll never be able to go
into that Schrafft's again, which maybe isn't so bad, since they won't
serve you lunch even when you have fifty dollars to buy it with.
That's what happens when you give a little kid a fifty dollar
bill to go buy canned tangerines for no reason. And I'm thinking
that night before Thanksgiving that maybe asking someone who's twenty
years old to bake pumpkin pie for the whole family for Thanksgiving
is just the same as making a little kid go get tangerines. There's
just too much that can go wrong.
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(Thanks to Jeffrey Anbinder and Kate McCann)
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