Goodbye, Columbus Read Online Free PDF Page A

Other girls, when they pack in September, at least their mothers help them. Not mine. She’ll be busy sharpening pencils for Julie’s pencil box while I’m carrying my trunk around upstairs. And it’s so obvious why. It’s practically a case study.”
    “Why?”
    “She’s jealous. It’s so corny I’m ashamed to say it. Do you know my mother had the best back-hand in New Jersey? Really, she was the best tennis player in the state, man or woman. You ought to see the pictures of her when she was a girl. She was so healthy-looking. But not chubby or anything. She was soulful, truly. I love her in those pictures. Sometimes I say to her how beautiful the pictures are. I even asked to have one blown up so I could have it at school. We have other things to do with our money, young lady, than spend it on old photographs.’ Money! My father’s up to here with it, but whenever I buy a coat you should hear her. ‘You don’t have to go to Bonwit’s, young lady, Ohrbach’s has the strongest fabrics of any of them.’ Who
wants
a strong fabric! Finally I get what I want, but not till she’s had a chance to aggravate me. Money is a waste for her. She doesn’t even know how to enjoy it. She still thinks we live in Newark.”

    “But you get what you want,” I said.
    “Yes. Him,” and she pointed out to Mr. Patimkin who had just swished his third straight set shot through the basket to the disgruntlement, apparently, of Julie, who stamped so hard at the ground that she raised a little dust storm around her perfect young legs.
    “He’s not too smart but he’s sweet at least. He doesn’t treat my brother the way she treats me. Thank God, for that. Oh, I’m tired of talking about them. Since my freshman year I think every conversation I’ve ever had has always wound up about my parents and how awful it is. It’s universal. The only trouble is they don’t know it.”
    From the way Julie and Mr. Patimkin were laughing now, out on the court, no problem could ever have seemed less universal; but, of course, it was universal for Brenda, more than that, cosmic—it made every cashmere sweater a battle with her mother, and her life, which, I was certain, consisted to a large part of cornering the market on fabrics that felt soft to the skin, took on the quality of a Hundred Years’ War …
    I did not intend to allow myself such unfaithful thoughts, to line up with Mrs. Patimkin while I sat beside Brenda, but I could not shake from my elephant’s brain that she-still thinks-we-live-in-Newark remark. I did not speak, however, fearful that my tone would shatter our post-dinner ease and intimacy. It had been so simple to be intimate with water pounding and securing all our pores, and later, with the sun heating them and drugging our senses, but now, in the shade and the open, cool and clothed on her own grounds, I did not want to voice a word that would lift the cover and reveal that hideous emotion I always felt for her, and is the underside of love. It will not always
stay
the underside—but I am skipping ahead.

    Suddenly, little Julie was upon us. “Want to play?” she said to me. “Daddy’s tired.”
    “C’mon,” Mr. Patimkin called. “Finish for me.”
    I hesitated—I hadn’t held a basketball since high school—but Julie was dragging at my hand, and Brenda said, “Go ahead.”
    Mr. Patimkin tossed the ball towards me while I wasn’t looking and it bounced off my chest, leaving a round dust spot, like the shadow of a moon, on my shirt. I laughed, insanely.
    “Can’t you catch?” Julie said.
    Like her sister, she seemed to have a knack for asking practical, infuriating questions.
    “Yes.”
    “Your turn,” she said. “Daddy’s behind forty-seven to thirty-nine. Two hundred wins.”
    For an instant, as I placed my toes in the little groove that over the years had been nicked into a foul line, I had one of those instantaneous waking dreams that plague me from time to time, and send, my friends tell me,