From the beginning, Sally seems like an odd match for Holden. She is extremely phony. Everything is “marvelous” or “lovely” for Sally, but we get the idea that she doesn’t really feel things the way Holden does. At the intermission, she is mostly concerned with seeing and being seen. Finally she spots George, from Andover, whom, Holden suspects, she probably has met only once. She greets him like a lifelong friend. He is a fellow phony, saying that the Lunts are “absolute angels,” and he is even Sally’s match at name-dropping. Sally and George should ride off together into the future, cocktails at the club in hand.
At the skating rink, Holden makes the mistake of trying to talk with Sally about his passions. But he only confuses and frightens her. She asks him not to shout and says she has no idea what he is talking about. Instead of backing off, Holden soars. He suggests that they borrow a car and take off for a couple of weeks to Massachusetts and Vermont. They could get a cabin. It’s beautiful up there. Maybe they could get married and live there forever.
However serious Holden may or may not be, or whether he would be serious ten minutes later, Sally is not the right girl for this fantasy. She is neither spontaneous nor sensitive. She has little imagination. “You can’t just do something like that,” Sally says. She feels threatened and angry. She tries to placate Holden by suggesting that they think about all this after college. Holden, of course, is aware of the mutability of time. Things will change. The moment will be lost.
The disagreement turns angry, and Holden tells Sally that she gives him “a royal pain in the ass.” Suffice to say that, after this remark, the date is over. Sally says she will get home on her own. Holden leaves her at the skating rink bar.
It finally occurs to Holden that maybe Sally was not the right girl to ask about such a venture. He is right. Sally is a practical girl, ambitious in conventional ways, greedy, a bit of a social climber, who will get what she wants when she wants it, because she always has. We can be sure that, throughout life, Sally will never be caught leaving her kings in the back row.
