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- [00:08]
Meg Wolitzer
Most days don't require big decisions. We work, eat, sleep, and get ready to do it all again. But then every once in a while, we come to a fork in the road. I'm Meg Wolitzer, and coming up, Selected Shorts brings you fiction about hard choices and profound changes. Choose the right path and stay with us.
- [00:30]
Nicky M. James
Foreign.
- [00:35]
Meg Wolitzer
You're listening to Selected Shorts, where our greatest actors transport us through the magic of fiction, one short story at a time. The only constant is change. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus wrote this millennia ago, and the idea still feels elegant and potent. Heraclitus illustrated his point by adding, no one ever steps into the same river twice. And in our own lives, a lot of change can feel like that, almost imperceptible. Take aging, for instance. We almost can't feel it happening. And then suddenly we wake up and we're 40 or 50 or 80 years old. How did that happen? I'm a grandmother now, but I feel like going up to my toddler and infant grandchildren and saying, just so both of you know, Grandma used to be considered precocious. Sometimes, though, we come to an inflection point, a proverbial fork in the road. Maybe it's unexpected, maybe we sense it coming on. Whatever the case, we're going to have to recognize where we stand and make a choice about which direction to go. The days of slow and gradual are gone. Now change is barreling toward us. Today's stories are about characters who find themselves in a place in which they need to make a choice, something that will affect them for the rest of their lives. In one tale, an ancient being forces humans to contend with the world around them. And in another, two people, each facing their own crises, might make things even stranger for one another. Our first story comes from the speculative fiction legend Ursula K. Le Guin, best known as the author of the earthsea series and the Hanish cycle. In her lifetime, she won every big sci fi and fantasy award, as well as the National Book Award, and there's even a documentary about her. Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin. This story, Direction of the Road, is read by Nicky M. James. She recently appeared on Broadway as Ida B. Wells in the musical Suffs, won a Tony for her role in the Book of Mormon, and has appeared in series including Severance. Just one final note before we hear the story, because I think it'll enhance your enjoyment of the piece. And it's not exactly clear right away. Your narrator isn't human. So listen closely and you will soon figure out who or what is speaking and now let's hear Direction of the Road by Ursula K. Le Guin. Read by Nikki M. James.
- [03:02]
Nicky M. James
Direction of the Road they did not used to be so demanding. They never hurried us into anything more than a gallop, and that was rare. Most of the time it was just a jig, jog, foot pace. And when one of them was on his own feet, it was a real pleasure to approach him. There was time to accomplish the entire act with style. There he'd be, working his legs and arms the way they do, usually looking at the road, but often aside, at the fields or straight at me. And I'd approach him steadily but quite slowly, growing larger all the time, synchronizing the rate of approach and the rate of growth perfectly, so that at the very moment that I'd finished enlarging from a tiny speck to my full size, 60ft. In those days, I was abreast of him and hung above him, loomed, towered, overshadowed him. Yet he would show no fear. Not even the children were afraid of me, though they often kept their eyes on me as I passed by and started to diminish. Sometimes on a hot afternoon, one of the adults would stop me right there at our meeting place, and I would lie down with his back against mine for an hour or more. I didn't mind in the least. I have an excellent hill, good sun, good wind, good view. Why should I mind standing still for an hour or an afternoon? It's only relative stillness. After all. One need only look at the sun to realize how fast one is going, and then one grows continually, especially in the summer. In any case, I was touched by the way they would entrust themselves to me, letting me lean against their little warm backs and falling sound asleep there between my feet. I liked them. They have seldom lent us grace as the birds do, But I really preferred them to the squirrels in those days. The horses used to work for them, and that, too was enjoyable from my point of view. I particularly liked the canter, and I got quite proficient at it. The surging and rhythmical motion accompanied shrinking and growing with a swaying and swooping, almost an illusion of flight. The gallop was less pleasant. It was jerky, pounding. One felt tossed about like a sapling in a gale. And then the slow approach and growth, the moment of looming over and the slow retreat and diminishing all that was lost during the gallop. One had to hurl oneself into it, coppery, cloppity, cloppity. And the man usually too busy riding and the horse too busy running even to look Up. But then it didn't happen often. A horse is mortal, after all, and like all those loose creatures, grows tired easily. So they didn't tire their horses unless there was an urgent need. And they seemed not to have so many urgent needs in those days. It's been a long time since I had a gallop, and to tell the truth, I shouldn't mind having one. There was something invigorating about it. After all, I remember the first motor car I saw. Like most of us, I took it for a mortal, some kind of loose creature new to me. I was a bit startled, for after 132 years I thought I knew all the local fauna. But a new thing is always interesting in a trivial fashion. So I observed this one with attention. I approached it at a fair speed about the rate of a canter, but in a new gait suitable to the ungainly looks of the thing. An uncomfortable, bouncing, rolling, choking, jerking gait. Within two minutes, before I'd grown a foot tall, I knew it was not a mortal creature, bound or loose or free. It was a making like the carts the horses got hitched to. I thought it very ill made. I didn't expect it to return once it gasped over the west hill, and I heartily hoped it never would, for I disliked the that jerking bounce. But the thing took to a regular schedule, and so perforce did I. Daily at 4 I had to approach it twitching and stuttering out of the west and enlarge, loom, over and diminish. Then at five back I had to come poppeting along like a young jackrabbit for all my 60ft, jigging and jouncing out of the east, until at last I got clear out of sight of the wretched little monster and I could relax and loosen my limbs to the evening wind. There were always two of them inside the machine. A young male holding the wheel, and behind him an old female wrapped in rugs, glowering. If they ever said anything to each other, I never heard it in those days I overheard a good many conversations on the road, but not from the machine. The top of it was open, but it made so much noise that it overrode all voices, even the voice of the song sparrow I had with me that year. The noise was almost as vile as the jouncing. I am of a family of rigid principle and considerable self respect. The Quercia model is break but do not bend, and I have always tried to uphold was not only personal vanity, but family pride, you see, that offended me when I was Forced to jounce and bounce in this fashion by a mere making. The apple trees in the orchard at the foot of the hill did not seem to mind. But then, apples are tame. Their genes have been tampered with for centuries. Besides, they are herd creatures. No orchard tree can really form an opinion of its own. I kept my own opinion to myself. But I was very pleased when the motor car ceased to plague us. All month went by without it, and all month I walked at men and trotted at horses most willingly and even bobbed for a baby on its mother's arm, trying hard but unsuccessfully to keep in focus. Next month, however, September it was, for the swallows had left. A few days earlier, another of the machines appeared, a new one suddenly dragging me and the road and our hill, the orchard, the fields, the farmhouse roof, all jigging and jouncing and racketing along from the east to west. I went faster than a gallop, faster than I had ever gone before. I scarcely had time to loom before I had to shrink right down again. And the next day there came a different one. Yearly, then weekly, daily, they became commoner. They became a major feature of the local order of things. The road was dug up and remettled, widened, finished off. Very smooth and nasty, like a slug's trail. No ruts, pools, rocks, flowers, or shadows on it. There used to be a lot of little loose creatures on the road. Grasshoppers, ants, toads, mice, foxes and so on. Most of them too small to move, for since they couldn't really see one now, the wise creatures took to avoiding the road, and the unwise ones got squashed. I've seen all too many rabbits die in that fashion right at my feet. I am thankful that I am an oak, and that though I may be wind broken or uprooted, honed or sawn, at least I cannot, under any circumstances be squashed. With the presence of many motor cars on the road at once, a new level of skill was required of me as a mere seedling. As soon as I got my head above the weeds, I had to learn the basic trick of going two directions at once. I learned it without thinking about it, under the simple pressure of circumstances. On the first occasion that I was a walker in the east and a horseman facing him in the west, I had to go two directions at once, and. And I did so. It's something we trees master without real effort. I suppose I was nervous, but I succeeded in passing the rider and then shrinking away from him, while at the same time I was still jig jogging towards the walker, and indeed past him, no looming. Back in those days, only when I had quite gotten out of sight of the rider. I was proud of myself, being very young, that at first time I did it. But it sounds more difficult than it really is. Since those days I have done it innumerable times and thought nothing about it. I could do it in my sleep. But have you ever considered the feat accomplished, the skill involved, when a tree enlarges simultaneously, yet at slightly different rates and in slightly different manners, for each one of 40 motor cars facing two opposite directions, while at the same same time diminishing for 40 more who have got their backs to it, meanwhile remembering to loom over each single one at the right moment, and to do this minute after minute, hour after hour, from daybreak till nightfall or long after. For my road had become a busy one. It worked all day long, under almost continual traffic. It worked and I worked. I did not jounce and bounce so much anymore. But I had to run faster and faster, to grow enormously, to loom in a split second, to shrink into nothing, all in a hurry, without time to enjoy the action and without rest, over and over and over. Very few drivers bothered to look at me, not even a seeing glance. They seemed indeed to not see anymore. They merely stared ahead. They seemed to believe that they were going somewhere. Little mirrors were affixed to the front of their cars, at which they glanced to see where they had been. Then they stared ahead again. I had thought that only beetles had this delusion of progress. Beetles are always rushing about and never looking up. I had always had a pretty low opinion of beetles, but at least they let me be. I confess that sometimes, in the blessed nights of darkness, with no moon to sliver my crown and no stars occluding my branches, when I could rest, I would think of seriously escaping my obligation to the general order of things. Of failing to move. No, not seriously. Half seriously. It was my mere weariness. If even a silly 3 year old female pussy willow at the foot of a hill accepted her responsibility and jounced and rolled and accelerated and grew and shrank for each motor car on the road was I an oak to shrink? Noblesse oblige. And I trust I have never dropped an acorn that did not know its duty for 50 or 60 years, then I have upheld the order of things and have done my share in supporting the human creatures illusions that they are going somewhere, and I am not unwilling to do so. But a truly terrible thing has occurred which I wish to protest. I do not mind going two Directions at once. I do not mind growing and shrinking simultaneously. I do not mind moving, even at a disagreeable rate of 60 or 70 miles an hour. I am ready to go on doing all these things until I am felled or bulldozed. They are my job. But I do object passionately to being made eternal. Eternity is none of my business. I am an oak, no more, no less. I have my duty and I do it. I have my pleasures and enjoy them, though they are fewer, since the birds are fewer and the winds foul. But long lived though I may be, impermanence is my right. Mortality is my privilege, and it has been taken away from me. It was taken away from me. On a rainy evening in March last year. Fits and bursts of cars, as usual, filled the rapidly moving road in both directions. I was so busy hurtling along, enlarging, looming, diminishing, and the light was failing so fast that I scarcely noticed what was happening until it happened. One of the drivers of one of the cars evidently felt that his need to go somewhere was exceptionally urgent and so attempted to place his car in front of the car in front of it. The maneuver involves a temporary slanting of the direction of the road and a displacement onto the far side, the side which normally runs the other direction. And may I say that I admire the road very highly for its skill in executing such maneuvers, which must be difficult for an unliving creature, a mere making. Another car, however, happened to be quite near the urgent one and facing it as it changed sides, and the road could not do anything about it being already overcrowded, to avoid impact with the facing car, the urgent car totally violated the direction of the road, swinging it round north, south on its own terms and so forcing me to leap directly at it. I had no choice. I had to move and move fast, 85 miles an hour. I leapt. I loomed enormous, larger than I ever loomed before. And then I hit the car. I lost a considerable piece of bark, and, what's more serious, a fair bit of cambium layer. But as I was 72ft tall and about 9ft in girth at the point of impact, no real harm was done. My branches trembled with the shock enough that last year's robin's nest was dislodged and fell, and I was so shaken that I groaned. It was the only time in my life that I have ever said anything out loud. The motor car screamed horribly. It was smashed by my blow, squashed, in fact, its hinder parts were not much affected, but the forequarters knotted up and curled Together like an old ro. And little bright bits of it flew all about and lay like brittle rain. The driver had no time to say anything. I killed him instantly. It is not this that I protest. I had to kill him. I had no choice, and therefore I have no regret. What I protest, what I cannot endure, is this. As I leapt at him, he saw me. He looked up at last. He saw me as I have never been seen before, not even by a child. Not even in the days when people looked at things. He saw me whole and saw nothing else then or ever. He saw me under the aspect of eternity. He confused me with eternity. And because he died in that moment of false vision, because it can never change, I am caught in it eternally. This is unendurable. I cannot uphold such an illusion if the human creatures will not understand relativity very well. But they must understand relatedness
- [20:00]
Jessica Hecht
if it
- [20:00]
Nicky M. James
is necessary to the order of things. I will kill drivers of cars, though killing is not a duty usually required of Oaks. But it is unjust to require me to play the part not of the killer only, but of death. For I am not death. I am life. I am mortal. If they wish to see death visibly in the world, that is their business, not mine. I will not act eternity for them. Let them not turn to the trees for death, if that is what they want to see. Let them look into one another's eyes and see it there.
- [20:57]
Meg Wolitzer
That was Nicky M. James performing Direction of the Road by Ursula K. Le Guin. I'm Meg Wolitzer. It's fun, isn't it, to imagine a tree so often a supporting player in our human stories? As something capable of agency and endowed with immense power. Not to mention capable of beating a car in a foot race. Le Guin is never one to shy away from the large and the looming. She stares it all in the face, just as the driver of the car in her story does. Looking and truly seeing. And along the way, making us see too. Which is just what she does in all of her fiction. It's no wonder the word visionary often comes to mind when thinking of Ursula K. Le Guin. When we return, the Divorcee, the Rabbi and the Bookstore. I'm Meg Wolitzer. You're listening to selected shorts recorded live and performance at Symphony Space in New York City and at other venues nationwide. Welcome back. This is Selected Shorts, where our greatest actors transport us through the magic of fiction, one short story at a time. I'm Meg Wolitzer. In our program today, we're hearing stories about forks in the road at which characters have to choose which way to go. Our second piece is by writer Helen Shulman. Her novels include this Beautiful Life and Lucky Dogs. And whether she's writing a family drama, a satire or a thriller, Shulman is always playing with big ideas. The story we're about to hear about, finding your center in a constantly changing world, was published in her latest story collection, Fools for Love. Reading it is Jessica Hecht. She's a Broadway regular whose credits include the recent Eureka Day, for which she earned a Tony nomination. She's also recognizable for her many films and TV series, including Breaking Bad and the Boys. And now here's Jessica Hecht performing a slightly abridged version of the Shabbos Goy. By Helen Shulman.
- [23:16]
Jessica Hecht
Thank you. The Shabbos Goy we were in Paris all of three weeks, my baby girl and me, when we saw our first bride. Without my cat eye glasses. From afar she appeared even farther away, the world's teeniest bride, like a miniature pony. Upon approach, however, it quickly became clear that she was merely a child, probably only around four or five years old, a wafting meringue with legs. The family that followed were obviously Orthodox Jews, the father's black suit a slim, elegant contrast to her pearly float, his wide brimmed fedora girded by a satin band. But even still, I thought, is she taking communion? Because the little girls in my neighborhood back in Brooklyn often dressed this way, in tears when receiving their initial sacrament. Only when a pudgy older sister followed in an identical halo of tulle and the helium of her own high spirits did I realize that both girls were simply members of a wedding, and that I now lived down the street from a synagogue from which the conventionally proportioned female newlywed was at that moment making her royal exit. The next afternoon it rained, but when I took my daughter out grocery shopping, me in my plastic yellow boots, the human cupcake safe and dry in her snuggly, I spied through the silvery murk, another sylph in white, exiting the sanctuary and entering a convertible parked outside the temple, glumly holding an umbrella over her veiled and golden head. Soon it was about a bride, a day, a never ending pageant of women eagerly entering the world of marriage, one I had painfully but most willingly left behind after the divorce, after I'd picked up the handsomest sperm donor I could find at a bar in Red Hook, after I struggled with nursing the baby while navigating the IRT from Brooklyn College, where I eventually got fired for sleeping with a student up to Columbia where the same transgression inspired no response. After teaching 11 courses a year as an itinerant adjunct professor, finally killed my love of literature and, well, my love of people in general. My old camp friend Maggie asked me to come help her liquidate her English language bookstore. She had married a Parisian, a cute jazz musician she met on her junior year abroad, given birth to four kids, now almost fully grown, and lived her girlish dreams. I had often coveted Maggie's life full of books and music, thin thighs and rich desserts, unpaid bills, and her husband's girlfriends. When one of these femmes became pregnant with twins, that ended some of that ebooks undid the rest. The bookstore, A Moveable Feast, was located in le Marais, the 3rd arrondissement, traditionally the Jewish quarter, now a mixture of the LGBTQ crowd, well heeled artists, and a daily influx of shoppers, much like the Lower east side of Manhattan or Prenzlaurberg in Berlin. Lots of trendy cafes, galleries, and stores with a few remaining kosher bakeries, Falafel and Judaica shops for their rapidly dwindling holdouts. It was tucked away in a little medieval cobblestoned plaza, which hadn't been so great for sales but was big on charm and was as tiny and crammed and disordered as the last several years of Maggie's life and mine. I kept a plastic extra saucer on hand for my daughter to spin in. It was unisex green with little stuffed dolphins affixed to the sides like carousel horses so she wouldn't get any princessy pink ideas, and I'd scattered some fabric books to bite on along the plastic trowel that encircled her and a handful of French Cheerios O'Miel and Unoir for her to chase down. This way I kept her close by my side as I worked. Since I'd last seen Maggie, she had grown very thin. With her red hair tied loosely back and her freckled bony chest. She looked like a Walker Evans, a result, I'm sure, of all those cigarettes and misery. So I often stopped at the boulangerie on my way over to the store in the morning and I laid out an array of treats atop a mobile bookshelf to tempt her. It was only around 11am on this particular day, but it was unusually hot for May global warming. I'd rolled up my sleeves and hiked up my skirt as I sorted and dusted. At some point I tied my curls into a seemingly hilarious top knot using one of the babies cleaner bibs, very I Love Lucy, so I wasn't exactly in full flower when the rabbi actively did not approach me. Instead he stood to the side and surreptitiously sorted through a pile of books. The venerating holy way in which he bellied up to our merch like he was pilfering God's own private wet bar proved that whether it was cool for a rabbi to immerse himself in secular texts or not, he was indeed a reader, not a civilian. May I help you, monsieur? I said. I supposed it would have been kinder to have let him do his thing alone in a lonely way, but I was bored. This was an English language bookstore and that was pretty much all my French nor Merci, madame, he said with a slight bow, caught off guard and purposefully staring now at the fascinating cobblestones beneath us. There was something familiar about him. It occurred to me that I had seen him before, so I asked, do you live on my street? Rue de Tournelle? I thought I spied a little light bulb turn on above his head right then, as if he were an old fashioned cartoon character with a flicker of an idea. Or maybe I've gifted myself the observation in retrospect, hoping that I'd caused a filament to light. Whatever. He continued to glance downward, but he was somehow looking at me through his third eye. I could sense it. My shoal, he said. My street, I said. My game, my curiosity. 42 Rue de Tournelle, I said. His neck long and curved like an egrets, slightly stiffened. No, he said, incredulous. Yeah, I said, impressed by his incredulity. I noticed that the book he had been reading was poetry. Dickinson Paine has an element of blank. It was a poem I tried to turn to while my marriage was disintegrating, but the words had shriveled and flown off the page like ashes. It has no future but itself. I shut the COVID and I returned it to the rack. Not that it matters, but are you Jewish? The rabbi's English was thick, with a Yiddishy French accent, a Semitic patois. No, I said, I'm not. I was used to this routine from the Jews for Jesus thugs who manned the entrance to my subway stop at home, but I didn't mind because it was hot and lonesome and somehow I was perpetually furious. Almost to entertain myself, I said, are you? He looked at me, startled. Not that it matters, I said. I learned later it was something that he was trained not to do. Look me in the eyes that way. His were unearthly blue, an imperial Caribbean hue, the shade of A sun filled swimming pool. They did not belong to the topography of his face, nor to this dank and sweaty French courtyard. In the distance I heard a splash, the entrance of a dive, the sound of my solitude being knifed aside, a cleansing spray of hope atomized up my spine. For a moment I thought we were both going to laugh out loud. The moment passed. I am a superhero, the rabbi said with a raised eyebrow disguised as an Orthodox Jewish. He wiped at his forehead with a broad white hanky. He was young, I saw beneath his beard, quite a bit younger than I was, maybe not yet 30. He had those handsome blue eyes, but his skin was pasty under a lustrous sheen, like a piece of marzipan with a hard sugary glaze. He was wearing so many clothes and the sun was so hot that he looked as though he might pass out. The rabbi smiled weakly. Menorah Man. He said that, but he seemed to waver in the currents of heat that emanated from the pavement as he said it. Sit, Menorah man, I said, gesturing toward a chair. You look dizzy, he protested as he sat but said he did. Eat, I said, and I pointed to all the goodies scary skinny Maggie had turned down. He said, no, no, thank you. But he reached for the gooiest, most chocolatey treat of all, a brioche that oozed molten dark brown lava, some vanilla cream, and the faintest architectural remnants of melted chips. Before he bit in, he asked, is it Kosher Sasha Finkelston? I asked, referencing the landmark Jewish bakery from which the baked goods were locally sourced. It seemed Kosher Sasha Finkelstein, he said, and as if all of his problems were solved, he took a deep, satisfying bite. We couldn't help ourselves, the rabbi and I. We caught each other's gaze and cracked up that eruption of belly laughter. My daughter's eyes widened, startled by the sound. Poor baby. It was new to her. So, Mr. Superhero, any women on your squad? I knew full well that I was flirting, but that is something that I do naturally, without thinking. It's the way I am, just not usually with rabbis. Dreidel Meadle, said the rabbi, chewing thoughtfully. The chocolate was clearly reviving. The color was returning to his cheeks, reflecting the red in his damp side curls. Are you serious? I said. It's a serious business, he said. Acts of human kindness making mitzvahs hard to imagine without the help of a righteous woman. A righteous woman? Who is that? A grown up person of the female gender. One who was good, decent, merciful, virtuous, and kind. Ah, I said, but you have seen right through me. She is my alter ego. He looked skeptical for a moment, which I suppose I deserved. Something has to be done about my karma, I said, more honestly than I meant to. Karma, said the rabbi. Not an innately Jewish concept. But then again, in Judaism there is room. And here he quoted by heart. Hillel saw a skull floating on the water, he said, because you drowned others, they drowned you, and in the end those who drowned you will themselves be drowned. I mean, I need to perform acts of human kindness like you said. It would be better for us. I pointed at my kid, the dusky rose of her cheek, big black eyes, her inky curls, Carmel colored skin so rich I was often tempted to sneak a lick off the brown sugar of her neck. Need, he said, something in him brightening that implies that you would find it beneficial. Yes. I nodded. I was in it for the benefits. My congregation, said the rabbi. We could use some assistance this very weekend in your very building. From a gentile. Again he shook his head at the coincidence. Not that it matters, he and I said in unison. The baby laughed. She clapped her hands, and the rabbi and I laughed too. A few days later the rabbi came again to the bookstore. Maggie and I had almost finished putting the last of the poetry paperbacks in boxes, and we had a little red wagon out front. We replaced them. Thierry, her second eldest and my favorite of all of her offspring, six feet tall now and ludicrously handsome, was to ferry this precious but humble cargo by hand across the bridge to the Ile de la Cite and then over to the Left Bank. Poor kid. Last November he had spent the night of his 18th birthday on a restaurant's tiled floor, listening to terrorists with machine guns massacring patrons in the cafe next door. For weeks Maggie wouldn't let him out of her sight, but now they were hovering around a new normal. Today his destination was Shakespeare and Company, one of the last English language bookshops in Paris to endure. It was a place where print lived wild and free, as it once had done, at a movable feast, and writers and readers still roamed. The bookstore was run by a young couple, so lovely and kissed by God, they needed to do one more thing to improve their karma. But that did not appear to stop them. They offered to purchase Maggie's remaining stock. The rabbi was wiping his face with a hanky. Is it that hot out? I asked. This morning had felt cooler. Some hoodlums, they spit on me as I cross Rue de Rivoli, he said, looking both embarrassed and upset. Who I said. Oh my God, I said. I picked up my bottle of Evian. Would you like to use this to wash up? Paris is getting worse and worse for us. I've soaped my face three times already, he said, but I still feel it on my skin. It wasn't like I was stupid. I knew things sucked for the Jews in France. I had eyes. I saw the swastikas painted on the show in memorial when I took the baby to the Ile St. Louis for ice cream. I'd seen that video. 10 hours of walking in Paris as a Jew, which followed a middle aged man wearing jeans, a sweater, and a yarmulke, traversing multiple arrondissements in one day while being cursed at, kicked and shoved by random people as he passed. But now it was my very own rabbi being hurt. Nervously he picked up a volume off the top of the pile. He could not control his hands, and in an effort to change the subject, I supposed, he offered to buy it. I have the original at home, he said. I'm curious about the translation. Anna Akhmatova's 20 poems, converted into English by the poet Jane Kenyon. When I used to read, she was one of my sad favorites, I said. The rabbi stared at me with his kind blue eyes. Used to? It is too painful and annoying now, I said. All that useless truth and beauty. Useless for me. Literature has the power to heal. He sighed here heavily, I supposed at the burden of a statement somewhat blasphemous. It was Kenyon who wrote about her dog. Sometimes the sound of his breathing saves my life. When I first read that poem, I ran out and adopted a puppy, I said. Like the husband, he didn't last long. What is the price? No, don't be silly, I said. Please, I insist. Take it as our gift. You'll have to let me know if Kenyon does justice to the Russian. I will, said the rabbi, looking again at his book. Ah, but for that third eye. Now, about Friday night. He took a deep breath. This spiel of his would take stamina. Elvis Presley, he said, which wasn't where I expected him to stop. Martin Scorsese, American Christians who at one point in time generously executed the services you are about to perform. According to the rules of Jewish law, it is possible for a non Jew to complete certain tasks which Jews are forbidden to perform on the Sabbath, having to do with labor, using electricity, handling money, I am told. When Al Gore and Joseph Lieberman were in the American Senate, Lieberman, who is Shomu Shabbos, would sleep on his couch in his office before Saturday votes, and Gore would turn the lights off for him. Even the President of the United States here. The rabbi could not wring the pride out of his gentle voice. President Obama did such charitable acts as a young man with loving kindness in his heart. I could never have requested this of you outright. A Jew may only accept the work of a non Jew if it is in his or her own free will and for his and her own gain. But you volunteered. Yes, indeed. Out of regret and existential fear. Or maybe just ennui. Clearly I was ready to volunteer for anything. He reached into his pocket for his handkerchief once more and wiped away at that indelible hateful spittle. That next week, he said, a man and a woman were to be married in the rabbi's shul, and the bride's American relatives had rented a flat in my very building through the same website that I had Paris Oo la la. As with many apartments in Paris, the outer door to the building was unlocked only by pressing a series of numbers on a matrix that then buzzed one inside. The lock itself was electric, as were the light switches I turned on by my footfalls. As I ascended each stairwell landing, I could safely usher the wedding guests into the interior lobby. Friday dusk through Saturday nightfall until three stars are visible, the rabbi said. After that, my services would no longer be necessary. Although they had arrived earlier in the week, I did not meet the Grinbaums until Friday night, around 11pm they hollered up to me from the street as they could not use the phone or the outside intercom. I leaned out the window in my T shirt and sweatpants and waved. They thanked me so profusely when I came down the steps, my baby wide awake and ready to rock, and fussed over her so slightly satisfyingly that I practically swooned from all the attention. For so long, only Maggie had admired her. They had Shabbos dinner at their relatives that very night and stayed out late talking. We picked this place because it was walking distance from my cousins, the mother said. We didn't even think about the door code, and then she stifled a pretty yawn. My cue. So I pushed the wooden door aside and we entered the second stairwell, ladies first. At the ground floor landing, when I took a first magic step, a dim little light switched on, automatically illuminating just the next stretch of staircase, and instead of cursing the darkness, I was suddenly grateful for the short sightedness. Who cared about the long term? I could see enough of where I was going, not really wanting to know more. As I climbed those steep stairs, I thought that Perhaps the move to France, however temporary, had been a smart one. I was helping Maggie. I was assisting this nice family. I was doing good. The following Thursday the caretaker at the synagogue fell ill with appendicitis and the rabbi stopped by the store. I was deep in the stacks in the basement, boxing up the anthologies. The rabbi came down the steep steps carefully to ask me how it had all gone. They were so lovely, those grin bombs. I said I'd do it again in a heartbeat. It's warm down here, said the rabbi. Reminds me of this sanctuary without the fans. Too bad the caretaker won't be there tomorrow night to turn them on. Maybe I can do it, I said, transformed into a person who with purpose. Bebe, he repeated, delighted, I suppose, by my growing French vocabulary. At this my daughter lifted her arms to him and the rabbi automatically boosted her out of the playpen that I'd fashioned from dictionaries and a beat up wooden desk I'd laid down fort like on its side. I guess he was an old pro at picking up babies. He had already had three of his own at home. He pressed his lips to her forehead and I watched her relax in his arms, returning his kisses to his chin. It's been a long time since anyone but Maggie Rye have held her, I said. Sometimes it is necessary to reteach a thing, its loveliness, he recited. Kinol, I said. St. Francis and the sow. Are you even allowed to like a poem like that? It's so Catholic. The rabbi shrugged. It speaks to me, he said. The words suddenly came back and I recited too. To put a hand on its brow of the flower and retell it in words and in touch. It is lovely. We like the same things, he said, bewildered, and then, with one arm around my daughter, he put his other hand shyly to my brow, I suppose to remind me that I too was lovely. At that moment of supreme pleasure and recognition, I found my way into his and baby's embrace by wriggling myself inside, and then, as preposterous and natural both into the path of each other's lips. When eventually we shyly parted, he whispered heartrending words of apology, but I waved them off. No need. I was glad for it all and not sorry one little bit. After that. The rabbi came to me at the end of the day, several times a week, to instruct me on the congregation's needs during Shabbos, if anyone needed groceries or medical supplies, I was their dreidel medal. As I could handle money when payments for my deeds was involved, it came to me in advance so that it felt like a gift instead of labor. But all of it felt to me like a gift. The payment, the work, the blessing of being able to help make a mitzvah for someone else, supporting the rabbi, being in his company. There in my apartment before evening services, the baby napping in the pack and paper play by my bed, the afternoon courtyard light streaming into the bedroom, he would read to me out loud from the Russian poets Savetseva, Mandelstam, and Pushkin in English and then in Russian, his grandmother's native tongue. When you're drunk it's so much fun. Your stories don't make sense. And early fall has strung the elms with yellow flags. Akhmatova wrote this for the Italian painter Modigliani when they were lovers in Paris, their spouses out of sight and out of mind. Reading together this way was so intimate. I suppose in a sense we too were having an affair. I mean, I had made a couple of passes at him, but it was a no go. I married, he'd whispered in my hair, but it didn't really matter. Sex, I could get anywhere. I have a good wife, he said, but we married so young. And in the fading white jet stream trail of his sentence I imagined her as a baby bride herself, like the child I first saw in Rue de Tournelle, someone beyond envy. Finally, when there was nothing at the store left to box, to sell or give away, Maggie and I decided to throw a goodbye party. I wore a long white lacy dress I'd found during the sold. I put my daughter in a Sky Boo tutu. Maggie rocked a short skirt and a plunging neckline and stilts for heels. Her 20 some years abroad had taught her well. She looked startlingly good for someone who felt so awful, and she wisely began drinking at 11 in the morning. Soon she was dancing on that downstairs desk in those pretty red soled Louboutins she'd purchased at Barnes. When she gave up on paying rent, we brought the desk and the rest of the furniture out into the courtyard. Francois, Maggie's ex, even wandered over in the afternoon and ended up playing the piano until 2am the baby and I talked and sang and drank and if I kissed a baby and a famously sexy British writer with the initials J.D. who was to know or to care. At around 3 in the morning, Francois wisely took it upon himself to walk Maggie home. She was trashed and crying. For Maggie, there was no tomorrow. The store was gone. She and the youngest of the four kids were flying out the next day to stay, spend the rest of the summer in the States at her family's home in Michigan. I'd been invited, but I declined. The good people at Shakespeare and Company had offered me a job as events coordinator, but I wasn't sure if there was enough for me in Paris to stay on without my best friend. I had one week left on my sublet, so the clock was ticking. But isn't it always ticking, ticking, ticking until it's stops? Look, just as time isn't inside clocks, love isn't inside bodies. I quoted Yehuda Amechai to myself as I watched Maggie and Francois stumble together down the cobblestones. Most of the crowd was gone now, the wine bottles and plastic cups out in the garbage bins, the trays of food long devoured. Both JD And Terry, Maggie's boy, with cougar lust in his eyes, offered to walk the baby and me home. JD Even drunkenly proposed to put us up for a time in London. Or was it Capri? But Paris in the summer, even with all the Titan security, is an all night party, and I was sober enough and thus sensible enough for me, at any rate, to send them both on their way with kisses on both cheeks. The baby was sound asleep in the snugly as we turned onto Rue de Tournelle, which was gray and empty and puddled. Parisian streets were always puddled. Rainwater, urine, wine. The entrance to the shoal was locked and blind to the street up ahead, across the street was the heavy wooden door of my building on the other side. My side was a religious man I knew. It's so late, I said. I was worried about you getting home, the rabbi said. But then I saw you, brand new in your white dress, like one of our own brides. His voice flooded with relief, but it was also somber. I've come to tell you that my family and I are leaving. My uncle found us a congregation near him in Miami Beach. There is no safety here for the children. I nodded. Children come first. They threw garbage at Rachel on the street with the baby in the carriage. My older boy was teased and tormented on the metro. There was a bomb threat at the school. One of his teachers was stabbed as he was walking home. His eyes were so sad. The world was a cracked plate. At any moment it might shatter completely. The baby stirred against my chest. The rabbi put his open palm on her head, almost as if he were giving her a blessing. Hope is a thing with feathers, the rabbi said. Dickinson again, and then we kissed for the second and last time, and before I had a chance to beg or thank him or even punch him in the nose. He walked away in the direction of Place des Vosges, toward his home and his apartment, I assumed, but I didn't even know where that masked man lived. The baby and I crossed over to our building. I entered the door code, but I must have forgotten the numerical sequence, so I tried again and then again, scrambling the numbers up. For a minute, it seemed, while I fumbled, I thought, now that I am nobler, almost a righteous woman, what is next for us? The sky grayed and pinked, and in the clear light of day it was my baby and me alone again. But in Paris. Beautiful, anti Semitic, terrorist ridden, xenophobic Paris. On the other side of the river, there was a bookstore, and in that bookstore there were books and work if I wanted them. With a whoosh, the numbers came Back to me. 5, 4, 3, 2 1. Duh. I plugged them in and the door opened. End of story.
- [56:19]
Meg Wolitzer
That was Jessica Hecht reading the Shabbos Goy By Helen Shulman I'm Meg Wallitzer. I know, I know. There's a version of this story in which the divorce, say, and the rabbi get together and open their own Yiddish, English, French bookstore. But that's a rom com, and Shulman's version, full of people navigating messy, difficult situations, is more true to real life. In my own writing, when my characters face hard decisions, I have to try and stay a writer and not become a parent. What I mean is that I have to keep myself from bursting in and pushing for the choice I would have made in the same circumstance. Instead, I have to know who the character is and through that knowledge, understand what they would do. I've had readers write me letters saying that they were annoyed with one of my characters because of certain choices she made, though it can be hard to hear that. Maybe it just means I was doing my job. And the next time you reach your next fork in the road, keep our stories in mind. Maybe you feel required to make a brash, wild decision, like the oak tree from our Le Guin tale at the top of the Hour. Or maybe you take a somewhat more measured approach, as does the narrator from Schulman's story. Whether your choice signals a wild departure or a way forward that's a bit closer to where you've been, remember that change is a constant, and the best thing we can do is embrace it. I'm Meg Wolitzer. Thanks for joining me for Selected shorts. Selected Shorts is produced by Jennifer Brennan and Sarah Montague. Our team includes Matthew Love, Drew Richardson, Mary Shimpkin, Vivienne Woodward, and Magdalene Robleski. The readings are recorded by Myles B. Smith. Our programs, presented at the Getty center in Los Angeles, are recorded by Phil Richards. Our mix engineer for this episode was Joe Pleurde. Our theme music is David Peterson's that's the Deal, performed by the Deardorf Petersen Group. Selected Shorts is supported by the Dungannon Foundation. This program is also made possible with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature. Selected Shorts is produced and distributed by Symphony Symphony Space.