The Admiral

J.D. Salinger's description of Boo-Boo Glass, from his Glass Family stories. (collected in Nine Stories, and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour, and Introduction) She's worried about her son. She's Franny's sister Barbara. I love his descriptions in the way that I love Raymond Chandler's. The text is from "Down at the Dingy" in Nine Stories. I think this is her only on-stage appearance in a story. My opinion that is that Dingy isn't his best work because he lets viewpoints we don't really care about chatter before he gets his main characters on stage, but when his lights are on...

 

"The swinging door opened from the dining room and Boo Boo Tannenbaum, the lady of the house, came into the kitchen. She was a small, almost hipless girl of twenty-five, with styleless, colorless, brittle hair pushed back behind her ears, which were very large. She was dressed in knee-length jeans, a black turtleneck pullover, and socks and loafers. Her joke of a name aside, her general unprettiness aside, she was-in terms of permanently memorable, immoderately perceptive, small-area faces-a stunning and final girl. She went directly to the refrigerator and opened it. As she peered inside, with her legs apart and her hands on her knees, she whistled, unmelodically, through her teeth, keeping time with a little uninhibited, pendulum action of her rear end."

 

Permanently memorable, immoderately perceptive. She's a Glass.

 

Later, in that same story:

 

Boo Boo closed the screen door behind her.

She stood on the slight downgrade of her front lawn, with the low,
glaring, late afternoon sun at her back. About two hundred yards ahead
of her, her son Lionel was sitting in the stem seat of his father's
dinghy. Tied, and stripped of its main and jib sails, the dinghy
floated at a perfect right angle away from the far end of the
pier. Fifty feet or so beyond it, a lost or abandoned water ski
floated bottom up, but there were no pleasure boats to be seen on the
lake; just a stern-end view of the county launch on its way over to
Leech's Landing. Boo Boo found it queerly difficult to keep Lionel in
steady focus. The sun, though not especially hot, was nonetheless so
brilliant that it made any fairly distant image--a boy, a boat--seem
almost as wavering and refractional as a stick in water. After a
couple of minutes, Boo Boo let the image go. She peeled down her
cigarette Army style, and then started toward the pier.

It was October, and the pier boards no longer could hit her in the
face with reflected heat. She walked along whistling "Kentucky Babe"
through her teeth. When she reached the end of the pier, she squatted,
her knees audible, at the right edge, and looked down at Lionel. He
was less than an oar's length away from her. He didn't look up.

"Ahoy," Boo Boo said. "Friend. Pirate. Dirty dog. I'm back."  Still
not looking up, Lionel abruptly seemed called upon to demonstrate his
sailing ability. He swung the dead tiller all the way to the right,
then immediately yanked it back in to his side. He kept his eyes
exclusively on the deck of the boat.  "It is I," Boo Boo
said. "Vice-Admiral Tannenbaum. Nee Glass. Come to inspect the
stermaphors."

There was a response.

"You aren't an admiral. You're a lady," Lionel said. His sentences
usually had at least one break of faulty breath control, so that,
often, his emphasized words, instead of rising, sank. Boo Boo not only
listened to his voice, she seemed to watch it.

"Who told you that? Who told you I wasn't an admiral?"

Lionel answered, but inaudibly.

"Who?" said Boo Boo.

"Daddy."

Still in a squatting position, Boo Boo put her left hand through the V
of her legs, touching the pier boards in order to keep her
balance. "Your daddy's a nice fella," she said, "but he's probably the
biggest landlubber I know. It's perfectly true that when I'm in port
I'm a lady--that's true. But my true calling is first, last, and
always the bounding--"

"You aren't an admiral," Lionel said.

"I beg your pardon?"

"You aren't an admiral. You're a lady all the time."

There was a short silence. Lionel filled it by changing the course of
his craft again--his hold on the tiller was a two-armed one. He was
wearing khaki-colored shorts and a clean, white T-shirt with a dye
picture, across the chest, of Jerome the Ostrich playing the
violin. He was quite tanned, and his hair, which was almost exactly
like his mother's in color and quality, was a little sun-bleached on
top.

"Many people think I'm not an admiral," Boo Boo said, watching
him. "Just because I don't shoot my mouth off about it." Keeping her
balance, she took a cigarette and matches out of the side pocket of
her jeans. "I'm almost never tempted to discuss my rank with
people. Especially with little boys who don't even look at me when I
talk to them. I'd be drummed out of the bloomin' service."