Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth Read Free Book Online Page A

“
Center,
Ronald Patimkin, Millburn High School, 6‘4”, 217 pounds.” And there was another picture of Brenda on a horse, and next to that, a velvet mounting board with ribbons and medals clipped to it: Essex County Horse Show 1949, Union County Horse Show 1950, Garden State Fair 1952, Morristown Horse Show 1953, and so on—all for Brenda, for jumping and running or galloping or whatever else young girls receive ribbons for. In the entire house I had’nt seen one picture of Mr. Patimkin.

    The rest of the basement, back of the wide pine-paneled room, was gray cement walls and linoleum floor and contained innumerable electrical appliances, including a freezer big enough to house a family of Eskimos. Beside the freezer, incongruosly, was a tall old refrigerator; its ancient presence was a reminder to me of the Patimkin roots in Newark. This same refrigerator had once stood in the kitchen of an apartment in some four-family house, probably in the same neighborhood where I had lived all my life, first with my parents and then, when the two of them went wheezing off to Arizona, with my aunt and uncle. After Pearl Harbor the refrigerator had made the move up to Short Hills; Patimkin Kitchen and Bathroom Sinks had gone to war: no new barracks was complete until it had a squad of Patimkin sinks lined up in its latrine.

    I opened the door of the old refrigerator; it was not empty. No longer did it hold butter, eggs, herring in cream sauce, ginger ale, tuna fish salad, an occasional corsage—rather it was heaped with fruit, shelves swelled with it, every color, every texture, and hidden within, every kind of pit. There were greengage plums, black plums, red plums, apricots, nectarines, peaches, long horns of grapes, black, yellow, red, and cherries, cherries flowing out of boxes and staining everything scarlet. And there were melons—cantaloupes and honeydews—and on the top shelf, half of a huge watermelon, a thin sheet of wax paper clinging to its bare red face like a wet lip. Oh Patimkin! Fruit grew in their refrigerator and sporting goods dropped from their trees!
    I grabbed a handful of cherries and then a nectarine, and I bit right down to its pit.
    “You better wash that or you’ll get diarrhea.”
    Julie was standing behind me in the pine-paneled room. She was wearing
her
Bermudas and
her
white polo shirt which was unlike Brenda’s only in that it had a little dietary history of its own.
    “What?” I said.
    “They’re not washed yet,” Julie said, and in such a way that it seemed to place the refrigerator itself out-of-bounds, if only for me.

    “That’s all right,” I said, and devoured the nectarine and put the pit in my pocket and stepped out of the refrigerator room, all in one second. I still didn’t know what to do with the cherries. “I was just looking around,” I said.
    Julie didn’t answer.
    “Where’s Ron going?” I asked, dropping the cherries into my pocket, among my keys and change.
    “Milwaukee.”
    “For long?”
    “To see Harriet. They’re in love.”
    We looked at each other for longer than I could bear. “Harriet?” I asked. “Yes.”
    Julie was looking at me as though she were trying to look behind me, and then I realized that I was standing with my hands out of sight. I brought them around to the front, and, I swear it, she did peek to see if they were empty.
    We confronted one another again; she seemed to have a threat in her face.
    Then she spoke. “Want to play ping-pong?”
    “God, yes,” I said, and made for the table with two long, bounding steps. “You can serve.”
    Julie smiled and we began to play.
    I have no excuses to offer for what happened next. I began to win and I liked it.
    “Can I take that one over?” Julie said. “I hurt my finger yesterday and it just hurt when I served.”
    “No.”
    I continued to win.
    “That wasn’t fair, Neil. My shoelace came untied. Can I take it—”

    “No.”
    We played, I ferociously.
    “Neil, you leaned over