Franny and Zooey Read Online Free PDF Page A

of it. I'm sick of it. I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody. I'm sick of myself and everybody else that wants to make some kind of a splash." She paused, and suddenly picked up her glass of milk and brought it to her lips. "I knew it," she said, setting it down. "That's something new. My teeth go funny on me. They're chattering. I nearly bit through a glass the day before yesterday. Maybe I'm stark, staring mad and don't know it." The waiter had come forward to serve Lane's frogs' legs and salad, and Franny looked up at him. He, in turn, looked down at her untouched chicken sandwich. He asked if the young lady would perhaps like to change her order. Franny thanked him, and said no. "I'm just very slow," she said. The waiter, who was not a young man, seemed to look for an instant at her pallor and damp brow, then bowed and left.
     
        "You want to use this a second?" Lane said abruptly. He was holding out a folded, white handkerchief. His voice sounded sympathetic, kind, in spite of some perverse attempt to make it sound matter-of-fact.
     
        "Why? Do I need it?"
     
        "You're sweating. Not sweating, but I mean your forehead's perspiring quite a bit."
     
        "It is? How horrible! I'm sorry. . . ." Franny brought her handbag up to table level, opened it, and began to rummage through it. "I have some Kleenex somewhere."
     
        "Use my handkerchief, for God's sake. What the hell's the difference?"
     
        'Wo--I love that handkerchief and I'm not going to get it all perspiry," Franny said. Her handbag was a crowded one. To see better, she began to unload a few things and place them on the tablecloth, just to the left of her untasted sandwich. "Here it is," she said. She used a compact mirror and quickly, lightly blotted her brow with a leaf of Kleenex. "God. I look like a ghost. How can you stand me?"
     
        "What's the book?" Lane asked.
     
    FRANNY literally jumped. She looked down at the disorderly little pile of handbag freight on the tablecloth. "What book?" she said. "This, you mean?" She picked up the little clothbound book and put it back into her handbag. "Just something I brought to look at on the train."
     
        "Let's have a look. What is it?"
     
        Franny didn't seem to hear him. She opened her compact again and took another quick glance into the mirror. "God," she said. Then she cleared everything--compact, billfold, laundry bill, toothbrush, a tin of aspirins, and a gold-plated swizzle stick--back into her handbag. "I don't know why I carry that crazy gold swizzle stick around," she said. "A very corny boy gave it to me when I was a sophomore, for my birthday. He thought it was such a beautiful and inspired gift, and he kept watching my face while I opened the package. I keep trying to throw it away, but I simply can't do it. I'll go to my grave with it." She reflected. "He kept grinning at me and telling me I'd always have good luck if I kept it with me at all times."
     
        Lane had started in on his frogs' legs. "What was the book, anyway? Or is it a goddam secret or something?" he asked.
     
        "The little book in my bag?" Franny said. She watched him disjoint a pair of frogs' legs. Then she took a cigarette from the pack on the table and lit it herself. "Oh, I don't know," she said. "It's something called 'The Way of a Pilgrim.' " She watched Lane eat for a moment. "I got it out of the library. This man that teaches this Religion Survey thing I'm taking this term mentioned it." She dragged on her cigarette.
     
        "I've had it out for weeks. I keep forgetting to return it."
     
        "Who wrote it?"
     
        "I don't know," Franny said casually. "Some Russian peasant, apparently." She went on watching Lane eat his frogs' legs. "He never gives his name. You never know his name the whole time he's telling the story. He just tells you he's a peasant and that he's thirty-three years old and that he's got a