← Selected Shorts
Selected Shorts
Classics from The New Yorker
01:05:41
Meg Wolitzer presents three stories featured in the anthology A Century of Fiction in the New Yorker. The magazine celebrates its 100th birthday, and this is the second of two programs this season in which we join the party. Robert Coover’s “Going for a Beer” begins with a date and a drink, but you’ll be surprised where it ends up. The reader is SELECTED SHORTS’ late founder and host, Isaiah Sheffer. Cynthia Ozick’s moving story “The Shawl” pulls grace from the worst of circumstances in a powerful reading by Lois Smith. And V.S. Pritchett turns a ladder into a sly symbol of marital discord in our third tale. “The Ladder” is performed by Cynthia Nixon.
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- [00:02]
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- [00:22]
Meg Wolitzer
T Mobile has the best mobile network in the US based on analysis by Ookla of speed test intelligence data 1H2025CT.
- [00:28]
Unknown Speaker
Mobile.Com network substance use disorder and addiction is so isolating. And so as a black woman in recovery, hope must be loud. It grows louder when you ask for help and you're vulnerable. It is the thread that lets you know that no matter what happens, you will be okay.
- [00:51]
Meg Wolitzer
When we learn the power of hope, recovery is possible. Find out how@startwithhope.com brought to you by the National Council for Mental well Being, Shatterproof and the Ad Council.
- [01:09]
Deborah Treisman
The New.
- [01:09]
Meg Wolitzer
Yorker magazine turns 100 this year and on this week's selected Shorts, we've collaborated with this iconic magazine to offer some groundbreaking stories from its new collection, A Century of Fiction. In the New Yorker, we hear Robert Coover's story of an existential bar crawl and a powerful work by Cynthia Ozick, performed by Lois Smith, with commentary by New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Retreatsman. I'm Meg Wolitzer. Stay with us. You're listening to selected Shorts where our greatest actors transport us through the magic of fiction, one short story at a time. This year marks the 100th anniversary of one of the country's most distinguished magazines. It started as a light hearted humor magazine in the roaring twenties, but quickly deepened into a multifaceted reflection of the country. And of course, great fiction was always part of the mix. The magazine recognized this with the publication of A Century of Fiction in the New Yorker. At a live event celebrating the release of the collection, we invited the magazine's longtime fiction editor, Deborah Treisman, to host an evening featuring some of the works in the anthology. Here's Deborah Treisman from the stage at Symphony Space.
- [02:24]
Deborah Treisman
Hi everyone. Thank you. You guys are EAs. Good evening and welcome to Selected Shorts. I'm your host for tonight, Deborah Treisman. I didn't know I was going to have like a shout out from the stage before even coming on stage. I am the fiction editor at the New Yorker and the host of the New Yorker Fiction Podcast, and I am very happy to be here to celebrate the centennial of the New Yorker and more specifically, 100 years of fiction in the New Yorker. So we've just put out an anthology in honor of this anniversary. It's called A Century of Fiction in The New Yorker, 1925-2025. I like you guys. In the course of that century, the New Yorker published more than 13,000 stories. I could only fit 78 of them in this book because if it had been any longer and heavier, we'd have had to register it as a lethal weapon. This was a project that ate up a huge amount of my reading time for almost a year. And so if you sent me a manuscript in 2024, that is why I haven't responded to it yet, and I promise I will get back to you soon. Doing all this reading was time consuming, but it also gave me a vivid sense of the ways in which our ideas about what a short story is or can be have changed over the decades. The New Yorker began its life as a humor magazine, and many of the early stories are what we would now think of as comic sketches, and they might run in our Shouts and murmurs section. But as the years passed, those sketches expanded into plots and narratives that would extend over time and through change that incorporated a wider sense of what was happening in the country, in the world, and explored lives, ideas and language in ever changing ways. So in making selections for the anthology, I had to ask myself a lot of questions about what made a story feel like a landmark in the New Yorker's fiction publishing history. And there were a lot of different answers to that question. Whether it was a story that shocked and scandalized and galvanized readers like Shirley Jackson's the Lottery, or one that captured and made personal important moments in history and humanity, like Cynthia Ozick's the Shawl, or one that allowed readers to imagine experiences that might have nothing in common with their own, such as Sherman Alexie's what you pawn, I shall redeem, or Annie Proulx, Brokeback Mountain. One solid thing I can say about the choices I made for this book was that for every story that's in there, there were 10 more I wanted to include. So tonight we're going to hear a number of different pieces of fiction that the New Yorker published at some point in the last century. There's no way in the course of an evening here to express the full breadth of what we've printed in the magazine, but we gave it a shot. So some of these pieces are classic, some are more contemporary, some are funny, some are more serious. I hope they're all entertaining to listen to.
- [05:36]
Meg Wolitzer
That was Deborah Treisman on stage at Symphony Space. We shared one program of stories derived from that evening. But there's more, and the stories on this, our second show, once again demonstrate the inventiveness and emotional depth of their many authors. We're offering a provocative personal odyssey, a powerful tale about love and sacrifice, and a nuanced slice of family. Our first story is by the late Robert Coover, a prolific author who published over 20 books and was a frequent contributor to the New Yorker. This story, Going for a Beer, was the title work of his collection of short fiction. Coover is often described as postmodernist, a catch all term that generally indicates that if there are rules to a form, they are going to be broken. Going for a Beer is read by Selected Short's late founder and host, Isaiah Sheffer.
- [06:32]
Isaiah Sheffer
Thank you. Don't be too upset. It's only a story. Going for a Beer he finds himself sitting in the neighborhood bar drinking a beer at about the same time that he began to think about going there for one. In fact, he has finished it. Perhaps he'll have a second when, he thinks, as he downs it and asks for a third, there's a young woman sitting not far from him who's not exactly good looking, but good looking enough, and probably good in bed, as indeed she is. Did he finish his beer? Can't remember. What really matters is did he enjoy his orgasm or even have one. This he's wondering on his way home through the foggy night streets from the young woman's apartment, which was full of kewpie dolls, the sort won at carnivals, and they made a date, as he recalls, to go to one where she wins another. She has a knack for it, whereupon they're in her apartment again, taking their clothes off, she excitedly cuddling her new doll in a bed heaped with them. He can't remember when he last slept, and he's no longer sure as he staggers through the night streets still foggy where his own apartment is. Maybe he should take her back to the carnival, he thinks, where she wins another kewpie doll. This is at least their second date, maybe their fourth, and this time they go for a romantic nightcap at the bar where they first met, where a brawny dude starts hassling her. He intervenes and she turns up at his hospital bed bringing him one of her kewpie dolls to keep him company, which is her way of expressing the bond between them, or so he supposes. As he leaves the hospital on crutches, uncertain what part of town he is in or what part of the year, he decides that it's time to call the affair off. She's driving him crazy. But then the brawny dude turns up at their wedding and apologizes for the pounding he gave him. He didn't realize, he says, how serious they were. The guy's wedding present is a gift certificate for two free drinks at the bar where they met and a pair of white satin ribbons for his crutches. During the ceremony, they both carry kewpie dolls that probably have some barely hidden significance, and indeed they do. The child she bears him, his or another's, reminds him, as if he needed reminding, that time is fast moving on. He has responsibilities now, and he decides to check whether he still has the job that he had when he first met her. He does. His absence, if he has been absent, is not remarked on, but he is not congratulated on his marriage either, no doubt because it comes back to him now. Before he met his wife, he was engaged to one of his colleagues, and their co workers had already thrown them an engagement party, so they must resent the money they spent on gifts. It's embarrassing, and the atmosphere is somewhat hostile, but he has a child in kindergarten and another on the way, so what can he do? Well, he still hasn't cashed in the gift certificate, so for one thing, what the hell, he can go for a beer too. In fact, he can afford a third. There's a young woman sitting near him who looks like she's probably good in bed, but she's not his wife, and he has no desire to commit adultery, or so he tells himself as he sits on the edge of her bed with his pants around his ankles. Is he taking them off or putting them on? He's not sure, but now he pulls them on and limps home, having left his beribboned crutches somewhere. On arrival he finds all the kewpie dolls, which were put on a shelf when the babies started coming, now scattered about the apartment, beheaded and with their limbs amputated. One of the babies is crying, so while he warms up a bottle of milk on the stove, he goes into its room to give it a pacifier and and discovers a note from his wife pinned to its pajamas, which says that she has gone off to the hospital to have another baby and she better not find him here when she gets back, because if she does, she'll kill him. He believes her, so he's soon out on the streets again, wondering if he ever gave that bottle to the baby or if it's still boiling away on the stove. He passes the old neighborhood bar and is tempted, but decides that he's had enough trouble for one lifetime and is about to walk on when he is stopped by that hulk who beat him up and who now gives him a cigar because he's just become a father and drags him into the bar for a celebratory drink, or rather, several. He has lost count. The celebrations are already over, however, and the new father, who has married the same woman who threw him out, is crying in his beer about the miseries of married life and congratulating him on being, well, out of it. A lucky man. But he doesn't feel lucky, especially when he sees a young woman sitting near him who looks like she's probably good in bed and decides to suggest that they go to her place. But too late, she's already out the door with the guy who beat him up and stole his wife. So he has another beer, wondering where he's supposed to live now and realizing it's the bartender who so remarks, while offering him another on the house, that life is short and brutal and before he knows it he'll be dead. He's right. After a few more beers and orgasms, some vaguely remembered, most not. One of his sons, now a race car driver and the president of the company he used to work for, comes to visit him on his deathbed and apologizing for arriving so late, I went for a beer, dad. Things happened. He says he's going to miss him, but it's probably for the best. For the best what? He asks. But his son is gone, if he was ever there in the first place. Well, you know life, he says to the nurse who has come to pull the sheet over his face and wheel him away.
- [13:27]
Meg Wolitzer
Isaiah Scheffer performed Robert Coover's Going for a Beer. I'm Meg Wolitzer. This story reminds me of another classic New Yorker piece, John Cheever's the Swimmer. Both turn ordinary moments in life a bar crawl, a swim in a Hamptons pool into bewildering and kaleidoscopic summaries of a life. Writers are drawn to time the way time, unfortunately, is drawn to everyone. And as you heard in Going for a Beer, the writer Robert Coover doesn't play by time's rules, but instead bends them to his will and clearly has a great time doing it, so that right away, as we understand where this is going and at what velocity, we have a great time too. We may not know exactly how big the jumps will be or where they will land the character, but we do know early on in this fast paced tour de force, that we're never going to be bored, and that there will never be a section where we can doze off a little, because if we do, we'll miss too much. Coover's tremendous yet economical peace is made up entirely of life, both the short run and the long run stuff all the drinks and sex and fights and injuries, and then inevitably, the end which the listener barrels toward, not unlike the way we barrel to the end of our own story, which with a little luck will also be very eventful, deeply funny, and never ever boring. Our second story from the New Yorker moves us from the provocatively fantastical to the horribly real. It is by Cynthia Ozick and was read at a celebration of the distinguished literary prize, the Ray Award for the short story. Ozick is herself approaching the century mark, and her prodigious output includes the story collection Dictation and her most recent novel, Antiquities. The story the Shawl, the title work of her collection of that name, depicts an unbearable moment with such intensity and intimacy that language transcends fact. Reader Lois Smith has delivered powerfully for us often, as well as being celebrated for her work on stage and screen, from films ranging from east of Eden, her debut, to the French Dispatch, a Tony Award winner. Her stage work includes the Inheritance.
- [15:49]
Lois Smith
The Shawl, Stella Cold, Cold, the Coldness of Hell. How they walked on the roads together, Rosa with Magda curled up between sore breasts, Magda wound up in the shawl. Sometimes Stella carried Magda, but she was jealous of Magda, a thin girl of 14, too small within breasts of her own. Stella wanted to be wrapped in a shawl, hidden away, asleep, rocked by the march, a baby around, infant in arms. Magda took Rosa's nipple and Rosa never stopped walking. A walking cradle. There was not enough milk. Sometimes Magda sucked air. Then she screamed. Stella was ravenous. Her knees were tumors on sticks, her elbows chicken bones. Rosa did not feel hunger, she felt light, not like someone walking, but like someone in a faint and entrance, arrested in a fit, someone who is already a floating angel, alert and seeing everything but in the air, not there, not touching the road, as if teetering on the tips of her fingernails. She looked into Magda's face through a gap in the shawl, a squirrel in a nest, safe. No one could reach her inside the little house of the shawl's windings, the face very round, a pocket mirror of a face. But it was not Rose's bleak complexion, dark like cholera. It was another kind of face altogether, eyes blue as air, smooth feathers of hair nearly as Yellow as the star sewn into Rosa's coat. You could think she was one of their babies. Rosa, floating, dreamed of giving Magda away. In one of the villages she could leave the line for a minute and push Magda into the hands of any woman on the side of the road. But if she moved out of line, they might shoot. And even if she fled the line for half a second and pushed the shawl bundle at a stranger, would the woman take it? She might be surprised or afraid. She might drop the shawl and Magda would fall out and strike her head and die. The little round head. Such a good child. She gave up screaming and sucked now only for the taste of the drying nipple itself, the neat grip of the tiny gums, one mite of a tooth tip sticking up in the bottom gum. How shining. An elfin tombstone of white marble gleaming there. Without complaining, Magda relinquished Rose's teats. First the left, then the right. Both were cracked, not a sniff of milk. The duct crevice extinct. A dead volcano, Blind eye, Chill hole. So Magda took the corner of the shawl and milked it instead. She sucked and sucked, flooding the threads with wetness, the shawl's good flavor. Milk of linen. It was a magic shawl. It could nourish an infant. For three days and three nights Magda did not die. She stayed alive, though very quiet. The peculiar smell of cinnamon and almonds lifted out of her mouth. She held her eyes open every moment, forgetting how to blink or nap. And Rosa and sometimes Stella studied their blueness on the road. They raised one burden of a leg after another and studied Magda's face. Arian, stella said in a voice grown as thin as a string. And Rosa thought how Stella gazed at Magda like a young cannibal. And the time that Stella said Arian, it sounded to Rosa as if Stella had really said, let us devour her. But Magda lived to walk. She lived that long. But she did not walk very well, partly because she was only 15 months old and partly because the spindles of her legs could not hold up her fat belly. It was fat with air, full and round. Rosa gave almost all her food to Magda. Stella gave nothing. Stella was ravenous, a growing child herself, but not growing much. Stella did not menstruate. Rosa did not menstruate. Rosa was ravenous, but also not. She learned from Magda how to drink the taste of a finger in one's mouth. They were in a place without pity. All pity was annihilated in Rosa. She looked at Stella's bones without pity. She was sure that Stella was waiting for Magda to die. So she could put her teeth into the little thighs. Rosa knew Magda was going to die very soon. She should have been dead already. But she'd been buried away deep inside the magic shawl, mistaken there for the shivering mound of roses breasts. Rosa clung to the shawl as if it covered only herself. And no one took it away from her. Magda was mute. She never cried. Rosa hid her in the barracks under the shawl. But she knew that one day someone would inform. Or one day someone, not even Stella, would steal Magda to eat her. When Magda began to walk, Rosa knew that Magda was going to die. Very soon. Something would happen. She was afraid to fall asleep. She slept with the weight of her thigh on Magda's back. She was afraid she would smother Magda. Under her thigh. The weight of Rosa was becoming less and less. Rosa and Stella were slowly turning into air. Magda was quiet, but her eyes were horribly alive. Like blue tigers. She watched. Sometimes she laughed. It seemed to laugh. But how could it be? Magda had never seen anyone laugh. Still, Magda laughed at her shawl. When the wind blew its corners, the bad wind with pieces of black in it that made Stella's and Rose's eyes tear. Magda's eyes were always clear and tearless. She watched like a tiger. She guarded her shawl. No one could touch it. Only Rosa could touch it. Stella was not allowed. The shawl was Magda's own baby, her pet, her little sister. She tangled herself up in it and sucked on one of the corners. And when she wanted to be very still, then Stella took the shawl away and made Magda die. Afterwards Stella said, I was cold. And afterwards she was always cold. Always the cold went into her heart. Rosa saw that Stella's heart was cold. Magda flopped onward with her little pencil legs, scribbling this way and that in search of the shawl. The pencils faltered at the barracks opening where the light began. Rosa saw and pursued. But already Magda was in the square outside the barracks. In the jolly light. It was the roll call arena. Every morning Rosa had to conceal Magda under the shawl against a wall of the barracks. And go out and stand in the arena with Stella and hundreds of others, sometimes for hours. And Magda, deserted, was quiet under the shawl, sucking on her corner. Every day. Magda was silent. And so she did not die. Rosa saw that today Magda was going to die. And at the same time A fearful joy ran in Rosa's two palms. Her fingers were on fire. She was astonished. Febrile Magda in the sunlight, swaying on her pencil legs, was howling. Ever since the drying up of Rosa's nipples, ever since Magda's last scream on the road, Magda had been devoid of any syllable. Magda was a mute. Rosa believed that something had gone wrong with her vocal cords, with her windpipe, with the cave of her larynx. Magda was defective without a voice. Perhaps she was deaf. There might be something amiss with her intelligence. Magda was dumb. Even the laugh that came when the ash stippled wind made a clown out of Magda's shawl was only the air blown showing of her teeth. Even when the lice, head lice and body lice crazed her so that she became as wild as one of the big rats that plundered the barracks at daybreak looking for carrion. She rubbed and scratched and kicked and bit and rolled without a whimper. But now Magda's mouth was spilling a long, viscous rope of clamor mouth. It was the first noise Magda had ever sent out from her throat since the drying up of Rose's nipples. Again Magda was wavering in the perilous sunlight of the arena, scribbling on such pitiful little bent shins. Rosa saw. She saw that Magda was grieving for the loss of her shawl. She saw that Magda was going to die. A tide of commands hammered in Rosa's nipples. Fetch. Get. Bring. But she did not know which to go after first, Magda or the shawl. If she jumped out into the arena to snatch Magda up, the howling would not stop because Magda would still not have the shawl. But if she ran back into the barracks to find the shawl, and if she found it, and if she came back after Magda, holding it and shaking it, then she would get Magda back. Magda would put the shawl in her mouth and turn dumb again. Rosa entered the dark. It was easy to discover the shawl. Stella was heaped under it, asleep in her thin bones. Rosa tore the shawl free and flew. She could fly. She was only air into the arena. The sun heat murmured of another life of butterflies. In summer the light was placid, mellow. On the other side of the steel fence, far away, there were green meadows speckled with dandelions and deep colored violets. And beyond them, even farther, innocent tiger lilies, tall, lifting their orange bonnets. In the barracks they spoke of flowers, of rain, excrement thick turd braids, and the slow stinking maroon waterfall that slunk down from the upper bunks. The stink mixed with a bitter, fatty floating smoke that greased Rosa's skin. She stood for an instant at the margin of the arena. Sometimes the electricity inside the fence would seem to hum. Even Stella said it was only an imagining. But Rosa heard real sounds in the wire, grainy sad voices. The farther she was from the fence, the more clearly the voices crowded at her. The lamenting voices strummed so convincingly, so passionately it was impossible to suspect them of being phantoms. The voices told her to hold up the shawl high. The voices told her to shake it, to whip with it, to unfurl it like a flag. Rosa lifted, shook, whipped, unfurled, far off, very far, Magdalene'd across her air fed belly reaching out with the rods of her arms. She was high up, elevated, riding someone's shoulders. But the shoulder that carried Magda was not coming toward Rosa and the shawl, it was drifting away. The spect of Magda was moving more and more, more into the smoky distance. Above the shoulder a helmet glinted. The light tapped the helmet and sparkled it into a goblet. Below the helmet a black body like a domino and a pair of black boots hurled themselves in the direction of the electrified fence. The electric voices began to chatter wildly. Ma ma ma ma ma ma ma. They all hummed together. How far Magda was from Rosa now, across a whole square, past a dozen barracks, all the way on the other side. She was no bigger than a moth. All at once Magda was swimming through the air. The whole of Magda traveled through loftiness. She looked like a butterfly touching a silver vine. And the moment Magda's feathered round head and her pencil legs and balloonish belly and zigzag arms spring splash against the fence. The steel voices went mad in their growling, urging Rosa to run and run to the spot where Magda had fallen from her flight against the electrified fence. But of course Rosa did not obey them. She only stood because if she ran they would shoot, and if she tried to pick up the sticks of Magda's body they would shoot. And if she let the wolf screech, ascending now through the ladder of her skeleton but break out, they would shoot. So she took Magda's shawl and filled her own mouth with it, stuffed it in and stuffed it in until she was swallowing up the wolf screech and tasting the cinnamon and almond depth of Magda's saliva, and Rosa drank Magda's shawl until it dried.
- [29:49]
Meg Wolitzer
Lois Smith performed Cynthia Ozick's the Shawl. I'm Meg Wolitzer. The Holocaust is often reflected in terms of its scope, the loss of so many lives. But it takes only one devastating story like this one to stand in for all the others. And in choosing to center it on a mother and child, Ozyk pairs the story down to its most elemental essential inspiration, distinctive elements. This is just a devastating piece of fiction, a short story that retains its enormous power decades after it was first published. When we return, a painful marriage and a comedy of manners all in one. You're listening to selected Shorts recorded live and performance at Symphony Space in New York City and at other venues nationwide.
- [30:34]
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- [30:55]
Meg Wolitzer
T Mobile is the best mobile Network in the US based on analysis by Ookla of Speedtest Intelligence Data 1H2025CT mobile.comNetwork.
- [31:03]
Unknown Speaker
Substance use disorder and addiction is so isolating. And so as a black woman in recovery, hope must be loud. It grows louder when you ask for help and you're vulnerable. It is the thread that lets you know that no matter what happens, you will be okay.
- [31:23]
Meg Wolitzer
When we learn the power of hope, recovery is possible. Find out how at Start with Hope, brought to you by the National Council for Mental well Being, Shatterproof and the AD Council. 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. Variety is the spice of life. Yeah, yeah, you've heard that one before. But really, truly, you could hardly encounter a better example than the three stories on this show, which have in common only that they appeared in the New Yorker. And they are only three of many examples of how rich and complex short fiction is. And we can prove it. Just go to our website selectedshorts.org, and to catch up with earlier programs, hear backstage interviews and meet our writers and their multifarious works. And that's also where you'll find our podcast as well as in all the usual places. Our final story is by VS Pritchett, a British novelist, critic and short story writer whose many works and nearly a century of writing included the collections you, make youe Own Life and A Careless widow. New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman commented on this story and Pritchett's appeal.
- [32:55]
Deborah Treisman
Eudora Welty called Pritchett one of the great pleasure givers in our language. Any Pritchett story, she said, is all a bit alight and busy at once, like a well going fire. He published stories in the New Yorker from 1949 to 1989. This one was the first to appear in the magazine, but that pleasure giving skill was already there.
- [33:15]
Meg Wolitzer
That was Deborah Treisman speaking from the stage at Symphony Space. Reading the latter is Cynthia Nixon. She's best known for her work on Sex and the City and the recent sequel series and Just like that. But a long stage career includes the Heidi Chronicles and Wit.
- [33:39]
Cynthia Nixon
The Ladder we had the builders in at the time, my father says in his accuracy way, if he ever mentions his second marriage, the one that so quickly went wrong. And he says, clearing a small apology from his throat, as though preparing to say something immodest, we happen to be without stairs. It is true. I remember that summer. I was 15 years old. I came home from Ms. Compton's school at the end of the term, and when I got to our place in Devonshire, not only had my mother gone, but the stairs had gone too. There was no staircase in the house. We lived in an old crab colored cottage with long windows under the eaves that looked like eyes half closed against the sun. Now when I got out of the car I saw scaffolding over the front door and two heaps of sand and mortar on the crazy paving which my father asked me not to tread in because it would make work for Janie. This was the name he called his second wife. I went inside. Imagine my astonishment. The little hall had vanished, the ceiling had gone, you could see up to the roof. The wall on one side had been stripped to the brick and and on the other side hung a long curtain of builder's sheets. Where are the stairs? I said. What have you done with the stairs? I was at the laughing age. A mild trim voice spoke above our heads. Oh, I know that laugh, the voice said sweetly and archly. There was Ms. Richards, or I should say my father's second wife, standing behind a builder's rope on what used to be the landing, which now stuck out precariously without banisters like the portion of a ship's deck. The floor appeared to have been sawed off. She used to be my father's secretary before the divorce, and I had often seen her in my father's office, but now she had changed her fair Hair was now fluffed out, and she wore a fussed and shiny brown dress that was quite unsuitable for the country. I remember how odd they both looked, she up above and my father down below, and both apologizing to me. The builders had taken the old staircase out two days before, they said, and had promised to put the new one in against the far wall of the room, behind the dust sheets, before I got back from school. But they had not kept their promise. We go up by the ladder, said my father, cutting his wife short. He pointed. At that moment his wife was stepping to the end of the landing, where a short ladder with a post to hold onto at the top, as one stepped onto the first rung sloped to the ground. It's horrible, called my stepmother. My father and I watched her come down. She came to the post and turned round, not sure whether she ought to come down the ladder frontward or backward. Backward, Called my father. No, the other hand on the post. My stepmother blushed fondly and gave him a look of fear. She put one foot on the top rung and then took her foot back and put the other one there and then pouted. It was only 8ft to the ground. I remembered her as a quick and practical woman at the office. She was now, I was sure, playing at being weak and dependent. My hands, she said a moment later, looking at the dust on her hands as she grasped the top rung. My father and I stopped where we were and watched her. She put one leg out too high, as if artlessly she were showing us the leg first, and she was. She was a plain woman, and her legs, she used to say, were her nicest thing. This was the only coquetry she had. She looked like one of those insects that try the air around them with their feet feelers before they move. I was surprised that my father, who had always been formally attentive to my mother, especially when he was angry, and had almost bowed to me when he met me at the station and helped me in and out of the car, did not go to help her. I saw an expression of obstinacy on his face. You're at the bottom, he said at last. Only two more steps. Oh dear, said my stepmother, getting off the last rung onto the floor, and she turned with her small chin raised, offering us her helplessness for admiration. She came to me and kissed me and said, doesn't she look lovely? You are growing into a woman. Nonsense, said my father, and in fear of being a woman and yet pleased by what she said, I took my father's arm. Is this what we have to do? Is this how we get to bed? I said. It's only until Monday, father said. The both of them looked ashamed, as though by having the stairs removed they had done something foolish. My father tried to conceal this by an air of modest importance. They seemed a very modest couple. Both of them looked shorter to me since their marriage. I was rather shocked by this. She seemed to have made him shorter. I had always thought of my father as a dark, vain, terse man, very logical and never giving in to anyone. He seemed much less important now that his secretary was in the house. It is easy, I said, and I went to the ladder and was up it. In a moment mind called my stepmother, but in a moment I was down again, laughing. While I was coming down, I heard my stepmother say quietly to my father, what legs she is growing my legs and my laugh. I did not think that my father's secretary had the right to say anything about me. She was not my mother. After this my father took me around the house. I looked behind me once or twice as I walked. On one of my shoes was some of the sand he had warned me about. I don't know how it got on my shoe. It was rather funny seeing this one sandy footmark making work for Janey wherever I went. My father took me through the dust curtain into the dining room and then to the far wall where the staircase was going to be. Why have you done it? I asked. He and I were alone. The house has wanted it for years, he said. It ought to have been done years ago. I did not say anything when my mother was there. She was always complaining about the house, saying it was poky, barbarous. I can hear her voice now saying barbarous as if it were the name of some terrifying and savage queen. And my father had always refused to alter anything. Barbarous. I used to think of that word as my mother's name. Does Janie like it? I asked. My father hardened at this grand question. He seemed to be saying, what has it got to do with Janie? But what he said was, and he spoke with amusement, with a look of quiet scorn. She liked it as it was. I did too. I said. I then saw. But no, I did not really understand this at the time. It is something I understand now that I am older, that my father was not altering the house for Janie's sake. She hated the whole place because my mother had been there, but was too tired by her earlier life in his office. Fifteen years of it, too unsure of herself to say anything. It was an act of amends to my mother. He was punishing Janie by getting in builders and making everyone uncomfortable and miserable. He was creating an emotional scene with himself. He was annoying Janie with what my mother had so maddeningly wanted. And he would not give her. After my father had shown me the house, I said I would go and see Janie getting lunch ready. I shouldn't do that, he said. It will delay her. Lunch is just ready, or it should be. He looked at his watch. We went to the sitting room, and while we waited, I sat in the green chair. And he asked me questions about school. And we went on to talk about the holidays. But when I answered, I could see he was not listening to me. But trying to catch sounds of Janie moving in the kitchen. Occasionally there were sounds. Something gave an explosive fizz in a hot pan and a saucepan lid fell. This made a loud noise and the lid spun a long time on the stove stone floor. The sound stopped our talk. Janie is not used to the kitchen, said my father. I smiled very close to my lips. I did not want my father to see it. But he looked at me and he smiled by accident, too. There was a sudden understanding between us. I will go and see, I said. He raised his hand to stop me, but I went. It was natural. For 15 years, Janie had been my father's secretary. She had worked in an office. I remember when I went there when I was young. She used to come into the room with an earnest and hushed air, Leaning her head a little sideways and turning three quarter face toward my father at his desk, Leaning forward, forward to guess at what he wanted. I admired the great knowledge she had of his affairs. The way she carried letters, how quickly she picked up the telephone when it rang. The authority of her voice, her strength had been that she was impersonal. She had lost that in her marriage. After 15 years, a life had ended. She was resting. But Janie had not lost her office behavior. That she now kept for the kitchen. The moment I went to the kitchen, I saw her walking to the stove. Where the saucepans were throbbing too hard. She was walking exactly as she had walked toward my father at his desk. The stove had taken my father's. She went up to it with impersonal inquiry, as if to anticipate what it wanted. She seemed baffled because it could not speak. When one of the saucepans boiled over, she ran to it and lifted it off suddenly and too high. In her telephone movement, the water spilled at once on the table beside the stove were basins and pans she was using, and she had them all spread out in an orderly way, like typing. She went from one to the other with the careful look of inquiry she used to give to the things she was filing. It was not a method suitable to a kitchen. When I came in, she put down the pan she was holding and stopped everything, as she would have done in the office, to talk to me about what she was doing. She was very nice about my hair, which I had had cut. It made me look older and I liked it better. But blue smoke rose behind her as we talked. She did not notice it. No. It was not the way to cook a meal. I went back to my father. I didn't want to be in the way, I said. Extraordinary, he said, looking at his watch. I must just go and hurry Janey up. He was astonished that a woman so brisk in an office should be so languid, independent in a house. She's just bringing it in, I said. The potatoes are ready. They're on the table. I saw them on the table, he said. Getting cold on the kitchen table, I said. That doesn't prevent them getting cold, he said. My father was a sister sarcastic man. I walked about the room humming. My father's exasperation did not last. It gave way to a new thing in his voice, resignation. We will wait, if you do not mind, he said to me. Janie is slow. I looked at my father. He had changed. His rough black hair was clipped closer at the ears and he had that too young look that middle aged men sometimes have. For by certain lines it can be seen that they are not as young as their faces. Marks like minutes on the face of a clock showed at the corners of his eyes, his nose, his mouth. He was much thinner. His face had hardened. He had often been angry and sarcastic, sulking and abrupt when my mother was with us. But I had never seen him before as he was now, blank faced, ironical and set in impatient boredom. After he spoke, he had actually been hissing a tune privately through his teeth at the corner of his mouth. At this moment Janey came in, smiling too much and said lunch was ready. Oh, I laughed when we got into the dining room. It is like. It is like France. France, they said together, smiling at me. Like when we all went to France before the war. And you took the car, I said. What on earth are you talking about? Said my father, looking embarrassed. You were only five before the war. I remember every bit of it. You and Mummy on the boat. Yes, yes, said my Stepmother with melancholy importance. I got the tickets for you all. My father looked as though he were going to hit me. Then he gave a tolerant laugh across the table to my stepmother. I remember perfectly well, she said. I'm afraid I couldn't get the peas to boil. Oh, I've forgotten the potatoes. She looked as though she were going to cry. I went to get them. When I came back, I could see that she had been crying. She was one of those very fair women, and even two or three tears brought a pinkness to her nose. My father had said something to her sharply, for his face was shut and hard. And she was leaning over the dishes, a spoon in her hand to conceal a wound. After lunch I took my suitcase and went up the ladder. It was not easy to go up carrying a suitcase, but I enjoyed it. I wish we could always have a ladder in the house. It was like being on a ship. I stood at the top, thinking of my mother leaning on the rail of the ship with her new husband going to America. I was glad she had gone, because sometimes I. She sent me lovely things. And she had promised me that I should go to America, too. Then I went to my room and I unpacked my case at the bottom. When I took my pajamas out, they were the last thing. There was the photograph of my mother face downward, where it had been lying all the term. I forgot to say that I had been in trouble the last week of school. I don't know why. I was longing to be home. I felt I had to do something. One afternoon I went into the rooms in our passage when no one was there. And I put the snap of Kitty's father into Mary's room. I took it out of the frame and I put Mary's brother into Olga's. And I took Maeve's mother and put her into the silver frame where Jessie's mother was. Maeve cried and reported me to Ms. Compton. It was only a joke, I said. A joke in very poor taste. Ms. Compton said to me in her voice, how would you like it if anyone took the photograph of your mother? I haven't got one, I said. Well, it was not a lie. Everyone wanted to know why I had an empty frame on my chest of drawers. I had punished my mother by leaving her photograph in my suitcase. But now the punishment was over. I took out her picture and put it in the frame on my chest. And every time I bent up from the drawers, I looked at her and then at myself in the mirror. In the middle of this, my stepmother came in to ask if she could help me. You are getting very pretty, she said. I hated her for admiring me. I do not deny it. I hated her. I thought, there is my mother thousands of miles away, leaving us to this and treating us like dirt. And we are left with Ms. Richards, of all people. That night, after I'd gone to bed, I heard my father and my stepmother having a quarrel. It is perfectly natural for the child to have a photograph of her mother. I turned. My father say a door closed. Someone was wandering about on the landing. When whoever it was had gone, I opened my door and crept out barefoot to listen. Every step I made seemed to start a loud creak in the boards, and I was so concerned with this that I did not notice I had walked to the edge of the landing. The rope was there, but in the dark I could not see it. I knew I was on the edge of the drop into the hall and that with one more step I would have gone through. I went back to my room feeling sick. And then the thought struck me and I could not get it out of my head. All night I dreamed it. I tried not to dream it. I turned on the light, but I dreamed it again. That Ms. Richards fell over the edge of the landing. She hated me for being like my mother. I was very glad when the morning came. The moment I was downstairs, I laughed at myself. It was only 8ft. Anyone could jump it. I worked out how I could jump from the top and land on my feet. I moved the ladder. It was not heavy to lift, to see what. What you would feel like if there was no ladder there and the house was on fire and you had to jump to make amends for my wicked dreams. In the night, I saw myself rescuing Ms. Richards, I should say my stepmother, as flames teased her to the edge. Perhaps if the builders had come as they had promised on the Monday, my stepmother's story would have been different. I am so sorry we are in such a mess, she said to me that morning at breakfast. She had said it many times, as if she thought I regarded the ladder as her failure. It's fun, I said. It's like being on a ship. You keep on saying that, my stepmother said, looking at me in a very worried way, as if trying to work out the hidden meaning of my remark. You've never been on a ship to France, I said when I was a child. Oh, yes, said my stepmother. I hate mess, said my stepmother to both of us. Getting up in a prosaic person emotion looks grotesque, like clothes suddenly become too large. Do Leave us alone, father said. There was a small scene after this. My father did not mean by us, himself and me as she chose to think. He was simply speaking of himself, and he had spoken very mildly. My stepmother marched out of the room. Presently we heard her upstairs. She must have been very upset to have faced going up the ladder. Come on, said my father. I suppose there's nothing for it. I'll get the car out. We will go to the builders. He called up to her that we were going and asked if she'd like to go with us. Oh, it was a terrible holiday when I grew up and was myself married. My father said it was a very difficult summer. You didn't realize you were only a school girl. It was a mistake. And then he corrected himself. I mean that my father was always making himself more correct. It was his chief vanity that he understood his own behavior. I happened, he said. This was the correction to make a very foolish mistake. Whenever he used the phrase I happened, my father's face seemed to dry up and become distant. He was congratulating himself not on the mistake, of course, but on being the first to put his finger on it. I happen to know. I happen to have seen it was this incidental rightness, the footnote of inside knowledge on innumerable minor issues and his fatal wrongness in a large, obstinate, principled way about anything important that I think made my beautiful and dishonest mother leave him. The promptness of his second marriage, perhaps, was to teach her a lesson. I imagine him putting his divorce papers away one evening at his office and realizing when Ms. Richards came in to ask if there was anything more tonight, that here was a woman who was reliable, trained, and like himself, happened to have a lot of inside knowledge. To get out of the house with my father, to be alone with him, my heart came alive. It seemed to me that this house was not my home anymore. If only we could go away, he and I. The country outside seemed to me far more like home than this grotesque divorced house. I stood longing for her not to answer, dreading that she would come down. My father was not a man to beg her to change her mind. He went out to the garage. My fear of her coming made me stay for a moment and then I do not know how, the thought came into my head. I went to the ladder and I lifted it away. It was easy to move a short distance, but it began to swing when I tried to lay it down, and I was afraid it would crash. I could not put it on the floor, so I Turned it over and over against the other wall, out of reach. Breathlessly, I left the house. And then my terrible dreams came back to me. I was frightened. I tried to think of something else, but I could not. I could only see my stepmother on the edge of the landing. I could only hear her giving a scream and going over head first. We got into the town and I felt sick. We arrived at the builders and my father stopped there. Only a girl was in the office. And I heard my father say in his coldest voice, I happen to have an appointment. My father came out and we drove off. He was cross. Where are we going? I said when I saw we were not going home to Longwood. He said, they're working over there. I thought I would faint. I, I. I began. What? My father said. I could not speak. I began to get red and hot. And then I remembered I could pray. It is seven miles to Longwood. Well, I thought, she is over. She is dead by now. I saw visits to the hospital. I saw my trial. She is like you, said the builder, nodding to me. All my life I shall remember his mustache. She is like my wife, said my father. My first wife. I happened to have married twice. He liked puzzling and embarrassing people. Do you happen to know a tea place near here? He asked. Oh, no, I said. I don't feel hungry. But we had tea at Gilling. The river is across the road from the tea shop. And we stood afterward on the bridge. I surprised my father by climbing the parapet. If you jumped, I said to my father, would you hurt? You'd break your legs, said my father, her nicest thing. I shall not describe our drive back to the house. But my father did say, janie will be worried. We've been nearly three hours. I'll put the car in afterward. When we got back, my father jumped out and went down the path. I got out slowly. I could hardly walk down the path. I stopped to listen to the bees. But I could not wait any longer. I went into the house. There was my stepmother standing on the landing above the hall. Her face was dark red. Her eyes were long and violent. Her dress was dusty and her hands were black with dust. She had just finished screaming something at my father and her mouth had stayed open after her scream. I thought I could smell her anger and her fear the moment I came into the house. But it was really the smell of a burnt out saucepan coming from the kitchen.
- [61:30]
Unknown Speaker
You moved the ladder. Six hours I've been up here. The telephone has been ringing. Something has burned on the stove. I Might have burned to death. Get me down. Get me down. I might have killed myself. Get me down.
- [61:48]
Cynthia Nixon
She came to the gap where the ladder ought to have been. Don't be silly, Jamie, said my father. I didn't move the ladder. Don't be such a fool. You're still alive.
- [62:02]
Unknown Speaker
Get me down.
- [62:03]
Cynthia Nixon
Janey screamed.
- [62:04]
Unknown Speaker
You liar. You liar. You liar. You did move it.
- [62:09]
Cynthia Nixon
My father lifted the ladder, and as he did so, he said the builder must have been. No one has been, screamed my stepmother.
- [62:17]
Unknown Speaker
I've been alone up here.
- [62:21]
Cynthia Nixon
Daddy isn't a liar, I said, taking my father's arm. Come down, said my father when he had got the ladder in place. I'm holding it. And he went up a step or two toward her.
- [62:34]
Unknown Speaker
No.
- [62:35]
Cynthia Nixon
Shrieked Janie. Now come on, calm yourself, said my father.
- [62:40]
Unknown Speaker
No, no, I tell you.
- [62:43]
Cynthia Nixon
All right, you must stay, said my father, and stepped down. That brought her, of course. I moved the ladder, I said when she had come down. Oh, said Janie, swinging her arm to hit me, but she fainted instead. That night my father came to my room when I was in bed. I had moved my mother's photograph to the bedside table. He was not angry. He was tired out. Why did you do it? He asked. I did not answer. Did you know she was upstairs? He asked. I did not reply. Stop playing with the sheet, he said. Look at me. Did you know she was upstairs? Yes, I said. You little cat, he said. I smiled. It was very wrong, he said. I smiled. Presently, he smiled. I laughed. It is nothing to laugh at, he said, and suddenly he could not help himself, he laughed. The door opened and my stepmother looked in. While we were both shaking with laughter, my father laughed. As he were laughing for the first time in many years. The door closed. He stopped laughing. She might have been killed, he said, severe again. And then he remembered what I had asked him on the bridge at Gilling. I lowered my head. You want it? He said.
- [64:42]
Isaiah Sheffer
No, no, no.
- [64:43]
Cynthia Nixon
I cried, and tears came to my eyes. He put his arm around me. My mother was a cat, they said. A wicked woman, leaving us like that. I longed for my mother. Three days later I went to camp. I apologized to my stepmother, and she forgave me. I never saw her again.
- [65:19]
Meg Wolitzer
Cynthia Nixon Read the latter by VS Pritchett. I'm Meg Wolitzer. There's an ineffable quality to some New Yorker writing, but I'm going to try to voice it anyway, because this Pritchett story is such a good example. Its quiet elegance and ironic humor, its masterful use of a child's perspective to reflect adult woes and weaknesses. And did you notice the way its ostensible subject, a renovation gone wrong, gives way to its real subject, a marriage going wrong. I'm so glad we've included a story by VS Pritchett, a writer who has been dubbed the British Chekhov, which reminds me of Chekhov's writing advice, which you may well know, and which is sometimes called Chekhov's gun. To paraphrase, he famously advised that if you put a gun on stage, at some point it should go off. And in this story we have an example of what we might call Pritchett's ladder, which from the moment it appears, brings with it a warning and eventually a fatality of the marital variety. So that's our show celebrating the length and breadth of writing in the New Yorker, which turned 100 in 2025. An existential bar crawl, a powerful look at both death and unperishable love, and an urbane tale of marital disorder. It's good to know that however absurd or difficult life becomes, somewhere there is a New Yorker writer at the ready. 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 Shimkin, Vivienne Woodward and Magdalene Robleski. The readings are recorded by Myles B. Smith. Our programs presented at the Getty center and Los Angeles are recorded by Phil Richards. 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 Space.
- [67:44]
Unknown Speaker
Substance use disorder and addiction is so isolating. And so as a Black woman in recovery, hope must be loud. It grows louder when you ask for help and you're vulnerable. It is the thread that lets you know that no matter what happens, you will be okay.
- [68:04]
Meg Wolitzer
When we learn the power of hope, recovery is possible. Find out how@startwithhope.com brought to you by the National Council for Mental Wellbeing, Shatterproof.
- [68:13]
Cynthia Nixon
And the AD Council.