A New Year’s Eve when I was in college. I had worked that night. I’m not sure what time the restaurant0
finally closed but it was certainly past 1:30 am. After a celebratory drink I headed out with my fellow
waiters to hunt for taxis home. It was a very cold night and in case you’ve never been out and about on
New Years Eve in New York City, there usually are not many taxis to be found. We headed into the
Village from Chelsea and I ended up catching the F train from West 4th Street by myself. No one else
lived out in Park Slope so I was on my own. I was fine; the cars were packed with revelers. Couples,
friends all in the same boat as I. I settled into a seat and took out my old beaten up copy of “Catcher in
the Rye”. I had never read it in high school. Not in my Catholic girls school. We read “A Tree Grows in
Brooklyn” instead. “A Separate Peace”. “East of Eden”. And I wasn’t reading it in college either. I was
reading it because the boy I was dating (if you could call his unreliability and ambivalence actually
dating) had sat up one night reading me passages aloud. How had I missed this book, in the canon of
great novels to be read? How could I have possibly missed out on Holden Caulfield? I fell in love with
Holden Caulfield. He was exactly the kind of boy I would have fallen for, exactly the kind I did fall for.
With twenty years of perspective I can now see this boy I was so crazy about was trying really really hard
to be a Holden Caulfield. But he’d never be able to muster up that charm. His heart wasn’t big enough.
It wasn’t in the right place. Truth be told he was kind of a phony. But that battered little paperback book
with the crimson cover changed my life. I was attending Hunter College, proudly paying the six hundred
and seventy dollars per semester in cash. I went from not being sure exactly what I wanted to do with
my life to remembering I could write. I didn’t think about what a hard choice it would be; I just knew it
was what I needed to do. I had written my way through elementary school. In high school I wrote long
drawn out romantic stories on legal pads with my friend Nicole. We always got the boys we were crazy
about in the end. We ended up in fabulous beach houses in California.

That night on the subway I was nearing the very end, where Holden meets his sister at the Natural
History Museum. I had tears in my eyes and found myself having to hold back from all out crying right
there on the subway on New Years Eve. Maybe it was because I’d travelled up and down those museum
steps so many times in my life or because my teens were difficult years. My father became very ill when
I was fifteen and passed away six months after his first of many stays in the hospital. My mother
became seriously depressed. I was on my own in the world. Those wounds may not have been open
anymore but a nasty scar tissue remained. What I must have known then and stands today is that
Salinger understood grief. How its roots grow silently deep and twist into knots that get stuck in your
heart and cloud the entire world with their presence.

That night on the subway, I couldn’t wait to talk to my not-really-a-boyfriend, but he was in Michigan
with his family for the holidays. Later that week when I recounted the scene with Phoebe at the museum
and the carousel he said, “Who’s Phoebe?” “Who’s Phoebe?” I replied “Holden’s sister. The museum.
The carousel.” I exclaimed in disbelief. “Oh yeah.” He replied. Humph, had I been wise to my own
ambivalence at that moment I might have ended it then and there.

By then I was almost through “Nine Stories” for the second time. I already had a copy because a coworker
who was an actor from Jupiter, Florida said he imagined my childhood was like the young girls in
“Just Before the War With the Eskimos”. Really my childhood was quite different, perhaps it was being
raised downtown in Greenwich Village in the seventies as opposed to the upper east side in the nineteen
fifties. I can say with certainty that no one I knew took tennis lessons or had a maid. On the other hand
there was always that friend who never had a subway token, let alone taxi fare, and there were always
girls around like Ginny, who treated you poorly until they had a reason not too, and it was usually
because you happened to know a boy they thought was something else.

After I reread “Nine Stories” I moved on to Seymour, Fanny and Zooey; the Glass family. I wanted
brothers like Zooey and Buddy, who wrote each other long missives about writing and loss. Just as they
plotted without success to banish Mrs. Glass’s old kimono of many pockets, I wished for a bright eccentric
gaggle of siblings to help me pull my mother out of bed. I loved them. I loved them so much it hurt. It
was an unrequited love. That’s all it could be. There were no interviews to dig up, or workshops to get
on waiting lists for. JD Salinger was unavailable; the sandwich board of advice to young writers folded up
and locked away. Maybe he had none to give. Who knew?

I moved on to Carver, Oates, Walker, O’Connor, Fitzgerald, Dubus, Angelou, and Updike. At work we
passed around copies of “Lonesome Dove” by Larry McMurtry and William Kennedy’s Ironweed Trilogy. I
read and read and read. So much of the advice I read by the writers themselves or their mentors though
well intentioned, missed my personal mark and other times it was just plain snobby and cold. I suppose I
was looking for permission to join their ranks but I’d end up dizzy, feeling like to succeed you had to
write everyday with your feet while in headstand, a typewriter suspended from the ceiling. But when my
mind would wander to Holden, he just was. He was so pure and simple. Holden told his story. Salinger
recorded it seamlessly.

I can see that now. I can also see the gift in the silence of J.D. Salinger. Maybe the gift was
unintentional. Maybe he was a deeply inconsiderate and troubled man. Chances are I’ll never know. I
do know he was accused of loving his characters too much. Any mother who writes knows that is just
impossible, in fact it’s absurd. But all I’ve got is his cup of silence to bring along with his amazing work.
And I’d drink that any day of the week, rather than Hemingway’s whiskey, rather than be fed the egos of
the Iowa grads who tsk tsk a city university education. His silence ultimately left us with his work; those
four beautiful books, to have and to hold. And it is always about the work isn’t it, your own work, your
own stories – maybe that’s what he was trying to say. Maybe he was trying to say don’t fall for those
phonies; there are a lot of them out there. You can trust me. All you really need is quiet.