Down at the Dinghy

Part 2
This was the sort of question Mrs. Snell slipped into as if it were an ermine coat. She
at once let go her teacup. "Well, in the first place," she said, "I wouldn't worry about it.
What I'd do, I'd look around for another--"
"I'm not worried about it," Sandra interrupted.
"I know that, but what I'd do, I'd just get me--"
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. Sandra
and Mrs. Snell were silent. Mrs. Snell put out her cigarette, unhurriedly.
"Sandra . . ."

"Yes, ma'am?" Sandra looked alertly past Mrs. Snell's hat.
"Aren't there any more pickles? I want to bring him a pickle."
"He et 'em," Sandra reported intelligently. "He et 'em before he went to bed last night.
There was only two left."
"Oh. Well, I'll get some when I go to the station. I thought maybe I could lure him out
of that boat." Boo Boo shut the refrigerator door and walked over to look out of the lakefront
window. "Do we need anything else?" she asked, from the window.
"Just bread."
"I left your check on the hall table, Mrs. Snell. Thank you."
"O.K.," said Mrs. Snell. "I hear Lionel's supposeta be runnin' away." She gave a short
laugh.
"Certainly looks that way," Boo Boo said, and slid her hands into her hip pockets.
"At least he don't run very far away," Mrs. Snell said, giving another short laugh.
At the window, Boo Boo changed her position slightly, so that her back wasn't directly
to the two women at the table. "No," she said, and pushed back some hair behind her
ear. She added, purely informatively: "He's been hitting the road regularly since he was
two. But never very hard. I think the farthest he ever got--in the city, at least--was to
the Mall in Central Park. Just a couple of blocks from home. The least far--or nearest--
he ever got was to the front door of our building. He stuck around to say goodbye to his
father."
Both women at the table laughed.
"The Mall's where they all go skatin' in New York," Sandra said very sociably to Mrs.
Snell. "The kids and all."
"Oh!" said Mrs. Snell.
"He was only three. It was just last year," Boo Boo said, taking out a pack of cigarettes
and a folder of matches from a side pocket in her jeans. She lit a cigarette, while the two
women spiritedly watched her. "Big excitement. We had the whole police force out
looking for him."
"They find him?" said Mrs. Snell.
"Sure they found him!" said Sandra with contempt. "Wuddaya think?"
"They found him at a quarter past eleven of night, in the middle of--my God,
February, I think. Not a child in the park. Just muggers, I guess, and an assortment of
roaming degenerates. He was sitting on the floor of the bandstand, rolling a marble
back and forth along a crack. Half-frozen to death and looking--"
"Holy Mackerel!" said Mrs. Snell. "How come he did it? I mean what was he runnin'
away about?"
Boo Boo blew a single, faulty smoke-ring at a pane of glass. "Some child in the park
that afternoon had come up to him with the dreamy misinformation, `You stink, kid.' At
least, that's why we think he did it. I don't know, Mrs. Snell. It's all slightly over my
head."
"How long's he been doin' it?" asked Mrs. Snell. "I mean how long's he been doin' it?"