"Mother," the girl interrupted, "I just told you. "He drove? Muriel, you gave me your word of." Are you all right, Muriel? Tell me the truth." "I told your father you'd probably call last night. I can hear you beautifully," said the girl. "Why haven't you called me? I've been worried to-" This is the hottest day they've had in Florida in-" The girl increased the angle between the receiver and her ear. "I tried to get you last night and the night before. Why haven't you phoned? Are you all right?" The girl turned the receiver slightly away from her ear. "Thank you," said the girl, and made room on the night table for the ashtray.Ī woman's voice came through. "Hello," she said, keeping the fingers of her left hand outstretched and away from her white silk dressing gown, which was all that she was wearing, except mules her rings were in the bathroom. She sat down on one of the made-up twin beds and it was the fifth or sixth ring picked up the phone. With her dry hand, she picked up a congested ashtray from the window seat and carried it with her over to the night table, on which the phone stood. She then replaced the cap on the bottle of lacquer and, standing up, passed her left the wet hand back and forth through the air. With her little lacquer brush, while the phone was ringing, she went over the nail of her little finger, accentuating the line of the moon. She looked as if her phone had been ringing continually ever since she had reached puberty. She was a girl who for a ringing phone dropped exactly nothing. When the operator finally rang her room, she was sitting on the window seat and had almost finished putting lacquer on the nails of her left hand.
She tweezed out two freshly surfaced hairs in her mole. She took the spot out of the skirt of her beige suit.
She read an article in a women's pocket-size magazine, called "Sex is Fun-or Hell." She washed her comb and brush. He takes a gun from his suitcase, sits on the other bed, and fires a bullet through his temple.There were ninety-seven New York advertising men in the hotel, and, the way they were monopolizing the long-distance lines, the girl in 507 had to wait from noon till almost two-thirty to get her call through. Seymour makes it to his hotel room, where Muriel is asleep on one of the twin beds. In the elevator, he accuses an adult woman of looking at his feet. Once they've parted ways, Seymour plods along back to the hotel. Seymour then kisses her foot and says it's time to go back. Sybil, playing along, exclaims that she's seen a bananafish with six bananas in its mouth. Then they're too fat to get back out again and they die.
They're normal little fish, he says, until they swim into a banana hole and gorge themselves on bananas. The two of them head into the ocean together, and Seymour explains to Sybil all about bananafish. Seymour is obviously wonderful with children he jokes around with Sybil, and she's clearly enamored with him. Sybil runs to a deserted part of the beach to find Seymour, with whom she's apparently struck up a friendship during her stay at the hotel. Carpenter lets the little girl run off to play. "See more glass," the girl keeps repeating, though her mother has no idea what that means. The second scene takes place on the beach outside the hotel, where a little girl named Sybil Carpenter waits while her mother puts sun block on her back. But Muriel doesn't seem to be taking the issue very seriously at all. Muriel's mother is scared for her daughter and wants her to come home. He's mentally unstable, and seemingly incapable of functioning normally in a social environment. It seems that, since getting back from the war (WWII), Seymour just hasn't been the same. Muriel is on the phone with her mother, discussing Seymour. The first scene features Muriel Glass, a young woman who has been married for five years to Seymour Glass. "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" takes place at a resort hotel in Florida in 1948.