J.D. Salinger

The fact that J. D. Salinger died one year to the day after his whilom apostle John Updike is, in fact, only a coincidence. It is a fact as meaningless as any in this random universe, a universe that both described with attentive devotion. When Updike died I posted a brief passage from his work. For Salinger I can do no less.

It is a morning in 1957. Zooey Glass is taking a leisurely bath, trying to figure out how he might help his younger sister Franny, who is apparently having a nervous breakdown. Twenty-year-old Franny is the youngest of seven, but their mother Bessie has already buried two of her children. Seymour, the oldest and the star of the family, committed suicide, while Waker died in World War Two. She doesn't exactly wear her sorrow lightly, but obviously at some point she decided that nothing was going to throw her, but that she wasn't going to make a big show of that decision. Here Salinger describes her entrance in the story "Zooey."

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The door opened, and Mrs. Glass, a medium-stout woman in a hairnet, sidled into the bathroom. Her age, under any circumstance, was fiercely indeterminate, but never more so than when she was wearing a hairnet. Her entrances into rooms were usually verbal as well as physical. “I don't know how you can stay in the tub the way you do.” She closed the door behind her instantly, as someone does who has been waging a long, long war on behalf of her progeny against post-bath drafts. “It isn't even healthy,” she said. “Do you know how long you've been in that tub? Exactly forty-five—”
“Don't tell me! Just don't tell me, Bessie.”
“What do you mean, don't tell you?”
“Just what I said. Leave me the goddam illusion you haven't been out there counting the minutes I've—”
“Nobody's been counting any minutes, young man,” Mrs. Glass said. She was already very busy. She had brought into the bathroom a small, oblong package wrapped in white paper and tied with gold tinsel. It appeared to contain an object roughly the size of the Hope diamond or an irrigation attachment. Mrs. Glass narrowed her eyes at it and picked at the tinsel with her fingers. When the knot didn't give, she applied her teeth to it.
She was wearing her usual at-home vesture—what her son Buddy (who was a writer, and consequently, as Kafka, no less, has told us, not a nice man) called her pre-notification-of-death uniform. It consisted mostly of a hoary midnight-blue kimono. She almost invariably wore it throughout the apartment during the day. With its many occultish-looking folds, it also served as the repository for the paraphernalia of a very heavy cigarette smoker and an amateur handyman; two oversized pockets had been added at the hips, and they usually contained two or three packs of cigarettes, several match folders, a screwdriver, a claw-end hammer, a Boy Scout knife that had once belonged to one of her sons, and an enamel faucet handle or two, plus an assortment of screws, nails, hinges, and ball-bearing casters—all of which made Mrs. Glass chink faintly as she moved about in her large apartment.