A Date with Sally Hayes — The Catcher in the Rye

Holden stays on the date and takes Sally to see the Lunts. She wants to be seen at a fashionable show. He thinks the actors can be good and the lobby talk false. He keeps drifting to Pencey, Jane, and Maurice's punch. Sally shushes him. After the theatre he drinks, talks too loud, and asks her to run away to a cabin in Massachusetts or Vermont, where they would read by a fire. For a moment he means it.

Sally laughs, then gets angry when she sees he is half serious. They are children, she says. The plan is ridiculous. He pushes. She pushes back and defends her friends. The record for Phoebe stays protected under his arm, the one errand that still feels clean. They are already fraying when they head for the skating rink at Rockefeller Center.

He carries Little Shirley Beans through a lobby that cares more about being seen than about the play. The cabin is the first honest thing he says, and it is also the thing Sally cannot use. By the time they reach the rink, romance and the show have both failed to reach him. The argument is already walking with them. The rink is next.