← Selected Shorts
Selected Shorts
Generation Gap
00:57:14
On this SELECTED SHORTS, host Meg Wolitzer presents three stories that cross generations. In Justin Torres’ “Trash Kites,” performed by Coleman Domingo, teens find beauty in scarcity. A daughter’s aging parent links her past and present in “The World with My Mother Still in It,” by Kathryn Chetkovich, performed by Phillipa Soo. And a tutor tries to create a bond with her privileged student in “Ancient Rome,” by Kyle McCarthy, performed by Tavi Gevinson.
Loading summary
Transcript41 lines
- [00:00]
Narrator/Reader
I won't let my moderate to severe plaque psoriasis symptoms define me.
- [00:03]
Tremphya Advertisement Voice
Emerge as you in two clinical studies, Trimfaia gusoquumab, taken by injection provided 90% clear skin at 16 weeks in 7 out of 10 adults with moderate to severe plaque psoriasis. In a study, nearly 7 out of 10 patients with 90% clearer skin at 16 weeks were still clearer at 5 years.
- [00:20]
Narrator/Commentator
At 1 year and thereafter, patients and.
- [00:21]
Tremphya Advertisement Voice
Healthcare providers knew that Tremphya was being used. This may have increased results. Results may vary.
- [00:27]
Colman Domingo (Reader of Trash Kites)
Serious allergic reactions may occur. Tremphya may increase your risk of infections and lower your ability to fight them. Before treatment, your doctor should check you for infections and tuberculosis. Tell your doctor if you have an infection or symptoms of infection, including fever, sweats, chills, muscle aches or cough. Tell your doctor if he had a vaccine or plan to emerge.
- [00:46]
Tremphya Advertisement Voice
As you learn more about Tremphya, including important safety information, at tremphya.com or call 1-877-578-35276 in food and Wine magazine for patients prescribed Tremphia, cost support may be available.
- [01:02]
Narrator/Reader
911 what is your emergency?
- [01:03]
Colman Domingo (Reader of Trash Kites)
Get off the field. 911 has faced nearly every emergency on Earth. ABC Thursdays they will go where no first responders have gone before.
- [01:16]
Meg Wolitzer (Host/Narrator)
Five everyday heroes were launched into space.
- [01:19]
Narrator/Commentator
All contact with the spacecraft was lost due to a sudden geomagnetic storm. Mission control dude you co 911 all.
- [01:28]
Colman Domingo (Reader of Trash Kites)
New Thursdays, 87 Central on ABC and stream on Hulu.
- [01:39]
Meg Wolitzer (Host/Narrator)
So you don't get TikTok. Well, maybe your parents didn't get Tamagotchi or the Rubik's Cube or lava lamps or, heck, the old hoop and stick game. Generations may never see eye to eye, but on this week's selected shorts, they find common ground. I'm Meg Wolitzer, your boomer host. 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. Before I committed fully to calling myself a boomer, I decided to take one of those online quizzes and and this one said something like, only baby boomers can pass this online quiz. And not only did I pass, I got a 100. And then the teacher called me up to her desk to give my test a star, which was in the shape of a 1960s TV dinner for that extra boomer feeling. So if you need any dated references for your own short fiction, you know who to call. When we say generation gap, we think about the ways, the mores, customs and social expectations of one older group of people seem foreign to a younger group, and vice versa. The term, which emerged in the 1960s, often implies disapproval or amazement when I was your age or I can't believe you did that back then. But between intimate relations, these gaps can reveal themselves in much subtler ways. Love, hope, or disappointment might mix in with the usual sort of exasperation or disbelief when you see photos from previous generations in your family. Often the young people look sort of old and serious and you think, they're nothing like me. It's because of their clothes and hairstyles, and sometimes it's just what a sepia tinge will do. But other times it can be sort of moving and disconcerting to see old photos of your parents or grandparents when they were young and think, wow, they actually look young. In fact, they do look like me, because then you know that though you are of different generations, nothing separates people from the passage of time. Not even listening to this show, I'm sorry to say. Yes, they did things differently when they were your age. Turn on, tune in, drop out, yada yada, but we're all on this ride together. The three stories on this program are humorous but also rueful. In one, clandestine kite flying tests the limits of a demanding parent. In the second, a mother daughter relationship is subtly changing. And in the third, the lesson plan calls for ancient Romans, but but they can't compete with Beyonce. Our first story, Trash Kites, is by Justin Torres. He's the author of the novels we the Animals and Blackouts and has published short fiction in the New Yorker and Granta, among other magazines. Trash Kites was read at a live selected shorts program called Objects of Desire, and you'll hear how much imagination and yearning can be projected onto even the lowliest object. Our reader is the very talented and busy Colman Domingo, an award winning actor, playwright and director who's appeared in Selma Lincoln and the forthcoming new film version of the Color Purple.
- [05:06]
Colman Domingo (Reader of Trash Kites)
We walked for miles, the three of us kicking up gravel, dragging sticks behind us. We were sneaking out. We were finding freedom. Above us, naked branches stretched into shadows and the sky deepened, wrapping itself up in a shroud of dark purple. It was getting colder, and Joel and I wondered out loud if maybe we should turn back. We're on a good path, manny said. We're doing right. We're safe. We reached an empty field, tossed our backpacks into the grass and set up camp. Wind whipped the tips of our ears and stole a plastic bag right out of Manny's hand. He thought it was a sign and fished through our supplies until he pulled out a tight, fat roll of twine and three black plastic bags. We made kites, trash bags on strings. We ran, slipped the knees of our dungarees, all grass stained. We got up, ran, choked ourselves half to death with laughter. But we found speed and our trash kites soared. We flew for an hour or so until daylight fully buried itself into night and all of the lights sank back except for the stars and toenail clipping of moon. And the kites disappeared, black on blackness. That's when we let go, and our trash kites really soared up and away, heavenward, like prayers our hearts chasing after Pabst came crunching down the road with his high beams on our sleeping bags and backpacks and our shielded faces, all caught in his searchlight. Manny said we should have slept in the woods, but probably Pabst would have hunted us down anyway. He was like that. He knew tricks for tracking down people who didn't want to be found. Pabst assumed it was all Manny's idea, because Manny was the oldest and because it was actually all Manny's idea. He didn't wait to get home, but beat Manny right there in the field, the headlights scaling back the night, casting long, wild shadows on the trees, the engine running and the door left wide open so that the inside of the car was perfectly lit and I could see from 20ft away, moths fluttering in and bumping into one another. He beat Manny bad, Punched his face, punched his crotch. Manny went crazy, hooting and hollering.
- [08:00]
Narrator/Commentator
Murderer.
- [08:01]
Colman Domingo (Reader of Trash Kites)
Over and over.
- [08:03]
Narrator/Commentator
Murderer.
- [08:04]
Colman Domingo (Reader of Trash Kites)
He screamed at our father, but no one was dead. He crawled over to where I stood, grabbed my sleeve, looked into my eyes. Murderer, he said. But who's dead? Me, he said. Me.
- [08:19]
Narrator/Reader
I'm dead.
- [08:20]
Colman Domingo (Reader of Trash Kites)
And my children. Manny was always saying all kinds of crazy, most of it to me, because Joel had a way of closing himself off from crazy. But I couldn't figure out how to stop from hearing his words and howls, how to look away. So later that night, back at home, just before dawn, Manny climbed into my bed and woke me up, telling me how he had dreamt of kites. A whole sky full of kites, and he was holding all the strings. He told me how the good kites and wicked kites got all mixed up and how he tried to hold on to the good and let the rest float away, but after a while he couldn't tell them apart. I didn't say anything. We were on our backs, not touching, but I could tell he was holding himself tight, every little muscle tight. I thought he might cry or scream. I thought he might climb on top of me. Paps apologize, you know, manny said. For using his fists. He told me he was scared that something serious could have happened to us. He rolled onto his side and watched my face. I pretended to yawn. I didn't like his eyes on me. I used to believe we could escape, he whispered. I had it all figured out. Like when we were in the field today. I was sure that God will grab hold of those kites and lift us up, protect us. He took my chin and turned my face toward his. But now I know, he said, God scattered all the clean amongst the dirty. You and me and Joel were nothing more than a fistful of seed that God tossed into the mud and horsesh. We're on our own. He wrapped one arm and one leg around me and was silent and still for a stretch of time, and I drifted into sleep. After a while Manny started up again, talking to himself, plotting, saying, what we gotta do is we gotta figure out a way to reverse gravity so that we all fall upward through the clouds and sky, all the way to heaven. And as he said the words, the picture formed in my mind, my brothers and me flailing our arms, rising, the world telescoping away, falling up past the stars through space and blackness, floating upward until we were safe as seed, wrapped up in the fist of God.
- [11:51]
Meg Wolitzer (Host/Narrator)
Colman Domingo performed Trash Kites by Justin Torres simple as this story seems, it tests the boundaries of all the characters, creating from the apparent limits of their world the possibility of limitlessness. Our second work, the World With My Mother still in it, is by Katherine Chetkovic, and navigates different generational and temporal gaps aging parents who still remember all the most embarrassing bits of their youth, a newish husband, and the possibility of children sometime in the future. Reading this story is Philippa Sue, a musical theater star whose credits include the original cast of Hamilton and the television series Dopesick. And here she is with the world, with my mother still in it.
- [12:44]
Narrator/Reader
My parents and I are drinking watery Tom Collinses and talking over the sound of 60 minutes. Several pills are scattered near the corner of my father's placemat, and he occasionally reaches down to rub his leg, which has been cramping and giving him trouble lately. My mother, who used to manage sit down dinners for 40, brings out a bowl of snacks made from various breakfast cereals tossed with seasoning salt. It's a recipe she clipped from one of the health and longevity magazines my father subscribes to in her name. Well, my Father accuses me. You look good. How's Stephen? He's fine. I told Stephen he did not have to come along with me tonight. A test he failed by taking me at my word and staying home to listen to the game on the radio. You look good too. I hear myself talking in what Steven calls my Donna Reed voice. Both of you. My father tilts his head toward my mother. She's the one, he says. The constitution of a horse. He rubs his fingers over his knee in a slow circle. My mother rolls her eyes. Oh, I know, she says. You'll never guess who we heard from today. I look from one to the other. My father's attention is back on the television. Who? Ray. My Ray? My mother has the unnerving habit of keeping in touch with my old boyfriends, and I turn around suddenly, half expecting him to come walking through the swinging kitchen door. When he and Anna got married, Steven and I went to the wedding. But that must be four years ago now and we've fallen out of touch. Wasn't he the one who totaled your car? My father keeps my exes straight with these Homeric epithets, the two timing one, the one who always called collect. For the millionth time, dad, that was not his fault. He was rear ended. My father waves this information away. As I recall, he didn't pay you a cent for your troubles. Dad, it wasn't his fault. Besides, the other person's insurance paid for everything. Good thing. My father sniffs and turns back to the television. I look at the clock. I have been here half an hour. Anyway, my mother says, he and his wife just had a baby. We got the announcement in the mail today. For a moment I have that strange startled feeling you get when you're staring at the phone and it suddenly rings. That's great, I hear myself say.
- [15:26]
Tremphya Advertisement Voice
Great.
- [15:30]
Narrator/Reader
Steven and I talk about children sometimes, but talking seems to be our version of actually having them. I can't exactly say I want them, but as the youngest in my family and with no children of my own, I do sometimes feel like the caboose, hurtling forward and facing backward, watching the empty track behind me run off and disappear through all that open, dusty landscape. Poor Ray. I'm sure he has absolutely no idea, my mother says. My father, with his motto, expect the worst and you won't be disappointed, is considered the cynic in the family. But it's my mother, that realist who always puts temporary happiness in a long term context. I thought I'd get them something. She says to me. Now do you want to go in on something with me. She let him walk away from a wrecked car. Isn't that enough? My father, clearly enjoying himself, scoops up a handful of the little cereal pillows. By 8 dinner is over and the dishes are almost done. One of my parents regular programs is about to come on, and my father hovers in the kitchen doorway, working a toothpick around in his mouth and glancing at the clock. My mother finishes wiping the counters and says, okay, with the exhaling satisfaction of someone crossing the last chore off a list. She unties her apron, which she has had on since I arrived, and disappears into the pantry. My father steps over and pulls a couple of folded $20 bills from his pocket. Here, he says, holding them toward me. For gas. Dad, you don't need to do that, I say, but he holds the money there, point it at my heart, and I take it. My mother returns with a bag of oatmeal cookies in one hand and a small jar in the other. Steven likes these fancy mustards, doesn't he? She says from the front door. They watch me walk out to the car. Tell Steven to come along next time, my mother calls out. Not if he's working, my father adds. You tell him. If he has to work, we understand. After the years I spent with film students and drummers between bands, my father still can't quite believe I married a man with a job. Outside the light is just beginning to fade and the air is still soft and warm. I drive home with the windows rolled down to let in the summer evening, the smell of watered concrete, chlorine from someone's pool, a sudden sweet blossom my father, an unlikely gardener, would know the name of. I wish for things without knowing what they are. At home, Stephen is lying on the couch in the darkening room, listening to the game. His head and feet, in socks that are wearing at the heel, are propped on the arms of the couch. On the radio, the Giant's middle reliever gives up a double and runs, scores. I have trouble for a second, recognizing this as the life I have chosen, but then Stephen moves over to make room for me on the couch. He takes my hand and he asks me how I'm doing. A walk, then a single, and then the manager takes what announcers always refer to as that long, slow trip to the mound. I can feel the length of Steven's body next to mine. I rest my hand on his thigh. Soon it's almost completely dark, except for the tiny red lights on the stereo receiver. I suddenly remember that it was Ray who taught me the boy's pleasure of listening to a game in the dark, and I later taught it to Stephen in the darkness. Stephen's body is a kind of palimpsest on which I can make out the faint, erased marks of the of the few important ones who came before. Ray was the first of these, so he became the prototype for all the handsome, preoccupied men I fell in love with after, the ones who, when we were out, would pull me close and kiss me on the forehead while they looked over my head at something down the street. A year or so after we broke up, I saw Ray at a party that we had both gone to alone. I was still so young that even I thought of myself as young. I remember a feeling I had then that the cement of my life had not even been poured, much less begun to set. A couple of hours into the party, when I saw Ray go into the bathroom, I slipped in after him. He hesitated for a moment, then stepped over to the toilet and unzipped his pants. Later that night we ended up back at his apartment and made that familiar, distracted love once more. But it was the ease of sitting on the bathroom counter while he peed, not the sex, that reminded me of my heart by breaking it. I've had a hard time getting over you, he said, playing with my hair in the darkness of his bedroom. I hope to God you don't intend to put us both through that again. That seems to be my special gift, getting men to throw me the keys on condition that I won't take them anywhere. My arm's asleep, stephen says, pulling it from under my neck. It's the eighth inning, and the game is now comfortably out of reach. It's just a matter of nailing the last pieces of the loss into place. Ray and his wife just had a baby, I say into the darkness. And Stephen, God love him, says Ray, who I lock my eyes on the back of my mother's flowered overblouse as we tack our way toward the baby department. I get dizzy and fatigued if I step off the linoleum trail in department stores, but my mother bushwhacks her way through that dense landscape of fabric with her usual sense of direction, empty sleeves swinging in her wake. It is not too late for you, you know, she says, shuffling expertly through the tiny outfits on the sale rack. Oh, this is cute. She checks the price tag. Oh, well, not that cute. She moves to another rack.
- [21:53]
Tremphya Advertisement Voice
Mom.
- [21:54]
Narrator/Reader
I squeeze a grunting pig and a quacking duck in conversation. I am doing what I always do when I go shopping with my mother, waiting for her to make up our mind. I'm just talking, she says. I'm not saying anything. I never told my mother about the abortion I had with Ray, and this moment among the pastels and friendly animals at Macy's suddenly seems as close to telling her as I'm likely to get. But it's like spotting the exit for a place you always meant to go while you're on the freeway headed somewhere else. He always seemed like a lost soul, my mother says cheerfully. Maybe fatherhood will bring him back to earth. We finally settle on a bright yellow outfit and a cow with big black stitches for eyelashes. On our way back across the store, we pull up at a table piled with sweaters and my mother tries to buy me one. Or would you rather have something else? She says when I look at them without picking one up. A skirt, maybe, and I can see where this is going. So I set down the shopping bag to pick up a sweater, and when I reach down again for the handles, the cow's harlequin face is looking up at me from its nest of tissue paper. For a strange, mixed up moment I imagine my mother snapping Ray's new daughter into her little yellow playsuit while my father stands a few feet away making funny noises and congratulating himself on getting the baby to smile. We buy the sweater and cross the mall into a coffee place my mother likes. After we sit down, she leans across the table conspiratorially. That man over there goes to my church. His wife died last year. Even sitting down, the man looks unsteady. He stirs his coffee with a badly shaking hand. He looks like someone you would hate to be behind on the road. Is he okay? I say. What do you mean? I shrug. He seems old. He's younger than your father. Before we leave, my mother gets up to go to the restroom. On the way she stops at the old man's table. He starts to get up, but she touches his shoulder lightly and he sinks back down. He gestures to the chair across from him and my mother smiles but gestures back to me. He takes her hand in both of his. If something were to happen to my father, I find myself thinking this guy would be standing in line. The word stepfather jumps incongruously into my mind. Finally my mother heads down the hallway to the restrooms and I get up.
- [24:39]
Narrator/Commentator
To pay the check.
- [24:40]
Narrator/Reader
The cashier, a dark haired beauty, is busy flirting with the young man piloting the espresso machine. Excuse me, I say. Sure, she says, taking the slip without looking at me. She has rings on six or seven fingers, and her eyes are outlined in black, and I feel a brief stab of regret that when I was the age to wear that look myself, I was convinced that makeup and too much jewelry were the tools of the patriarchy. After I pay, I move toward the door to wait for my mother outside. In the filtered light of the mall, kids stand around with their arms crossed and women wheel by with their strollers. A few minutes later, when my mother has still not appeared, I turn back toward the tables to look for her. The old man is gone, and there's my mother, standing at the mouth of the hallway, searching the room of tables, and when she does not step forward but just stands there holding her purse in both hands, I realize she's lost.
- [25:47]
Meg Wolitzer (Host/Narrator)
Mom?
- [25:48]
Narrator/Reader
Mom. I hurry toward her. I can see her start to smile at the sound of my voice. When she spots me, her shoulders drop in relief. Oh, that was the strangest thing, she says as soon as I reach her, picking the moment up and putting it carefully in the past. I just got completely turned around when I came out of the ladies room, I guess. Are you okay? Oh, yes, yes, I'm fine. You know how it is when everything suddenly looks unfamiliar. I do not say what I'm thinking, and neither does she. I move both the shopping bags to one side and I take hold of her hand with my free one. Once we get outside, she gives my hand a squeeze and let's go. I'm not going to say anything to dad about that, and I don't want you to either, she says. About what? Right, she says. We're crossing the hot parking lot toward the car. After the banners and fountains and piped in music of the mall. The asphalt and glare outside seem like part of an essential biblical landscape. The stiff, twined handles of the shopping bags cut into my fingers. The coffee and the sugar have made me jumpy. My feet are hot, I feel tired and cranky, and I can sense my mother, that peculiar love of my life, starting to slip off one edge of the world and the children. I am not going to have those cherubic monsters slipping off the other. Almost there, my mother says as the car comes into view. We're almost there. Thank you.
- [27:52]
Meg Wolitzer (Host/Narrator)
Philippa. Sue performed the World with my Mother still in it. By Kathryn Chetkovic I'm Meg Wolitzer. There's something about stories, about adults who are still someone's children that really get to me. You always keep one foot or even a toe in childhood if a parent is still in your life. And maybe that never entirely changes. But it starts to shift for sure. As the surface of this narrator's life thins, other possible lives arise and you sense that her mother is one of the elements that makes that fabric whole. And now it's fraying. When we return, high society, Upper east side and Ancient Roman style. I'm Meg Wolitzer. You're listening to selected shorts recorded live in performance at Symphony Space in New York City and at other venues nationwide.
- [28:39]
Tremphya Advertisement Voice
For adults with Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis symptoms, every choice matters. Tremphya offers self injection or intravenous infusion from the start. Tremphya is administered as injections under the skin or infusions through a vein every four weeks, followed by injections under the skin every four or eight weeks. If your doctor decides that you can self inject Tremphya, proper training is required. Tremphya is a prescription medicine used to treat adults with moderately to severely active Crohn's disease and adults with moderately to severely active ulcerative colitis. Serious allergic reactions and increased risk of infections and liver problems may occur. Before treatment, your doctor should check you for infections and tuberculosis. Tell your doctor if you have an infection, flu like symptoms or if you need a vaccine. Explore what's possible. Ask your doctor about tremphya today. Call 1-800-526-7736 to learn more or visit trempharadio.com 911 what is your emergency?
- [29:40]
Colman Domingo (Reader of Trash Kites)
Get off the field. 911 has faced near every emergency on Earth. ABC Thursdays they will go where no first responders have gone before.
- [29:52]
Meg Wolitzer (Host/Narrator)
Five everyday heroes were launched into space.
- [29:55]
Narrator/Commentator
All contact with the spacecraft was lost due to a sudden geomagnetic storm. Mission Control, dude, you copy?
- [30:03]
Colman Domingo (Reader of Trash Kites)
911 all new Thursdays 87 Central on ABC and stream on HUL.
- [30:26]
Meg Wolitzer (Host/Narrator)
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. This show focuses on generation gaps between children and parents and student and teacher. These gaps are something we all need to navigate, and many of our stories provide illuminating roadmaps. Visit our website SelectedShorts.org for links to other programs, our podcast and our anthology Small Odysseys. Our final work in this program about the distances between Generations is Kyle McCarthy's deliciously ironic ancient Rome. Although completely contemporary, it aligns with such models as Jane Eyre or Vanity Fair's Becky Sharp. The gaps here are not just about age, but about class and expectation. I'm especially happy to be sharing this work with you. It was one of my picks the year that I edited the Best American Short stories anthology in 2017. I chose this story because I loved that we get to look at someone else looking at a family and their enormous wealth. There's a kind of double voyeurism going on, and it's filtered first through the eyes of the young narrator, who is just trying to make sense of what she sees as are we. So we are not only listeners but also honorary private tutors, if only for a day. And A Note to Parents Ancient Rome includes brief references to adult behavior. The reader is Tavi Gevinson, known for her work on Gossip Girl and, more recently on stage in productions of the Crucible and the Cherry Orchard, among others.
- [32:13]
Narrator/Commentator
We might as well begin with the homes, the condos, the townhouses, the penthouses, the classic sixes and sevens. Let's begin there, and with the servants that cook and clean them, though servant is not the term used. The wealthy prefer housekeeper. This one time I was called for an emergency paper intervention, dispatched on 24 hours notice to 70th and park, where Isabel Shear led me past her snowy white bedroom, a capacious boudoir whose proportions easily exceeded my Brooklyn studio, and into her office, a tidy little space by the back staircase dedicated solely to the serious intellectual work of 8th grade. The assignment that had caused Isabel Shear so much grief read as follows. Compare the impact of the cult of domesticity on an upper class woman, a working class woman, and a slave during the last years of the Roman Empire. If you send your child to a top Manhattan independent school, she will complete essentially this assignment for the next 12 years of her life. Note the nod to historical relevance, the dutiful attention to women and minorities. Note, too, that Isabel must complete this assignment using only primary documents because Trinity wants to train her to be a real historian. How many primary documents from 100 A.D. do you think discuss the housekeeping practices of slaves? I see from the word document glowing on her wispy Mac that upper class women have given Isabel no trouble at all. She knows exactly how they were oppressed. Working class, too, Isabel has managed, but when it comes to the part of her outline labeled slaves, she has only three question marks. Following my gaze, she says, yeah, I've been having trouble with that part. Because, like, slaves don't have homes. Slaves have homes, I say. No, they don't. She seems offended by the suggestion. They're slaves. How can you have a home if you're a slave? Why don't we look at the primary documents? We stare blankly at Marcus Aurelius Meditations. See, I say uncertainly. Even if these slaves had to live in a bad part of the house, maybe a place that you or I would not want to call home. I think confusedly of my own apartment, the chipped tile, dank shower and two burner stove. It was still their home. They still took pride in it. They had domestic feelings. No, they didn't. Now there is a real bitterness in Isabel's voice, as if I have deliberately led her into a tautology, as if I and not her teacher, no doubt a freshly minted PhD who had dreamt of seminars at Wellesley, not first period at Trinity, had assigned her this important, impossible task. How can they be domestic if they don't even have a home? A light knock, followed by the soundless entrance of a Filipino woman in lavender sweats. You can put it here, isabel says, pushing aside her laptop. Down glides a tuna steak on a scalloped white plate, some kind of green reduction drizzled over its charred flesh. Isabel says not a word. Specifically, she does not say the word thanks. The woman steps back. Our eyes meet. I try to convey subtle irony, an intimation of here we both are serving this 13 year old. Absurdly, I hope I will be recognized by her as a comrade conscripted into this lucrative, absurd work. You want something to drink? She says. A sandwich. Aghast, I shake my head. Oh no, I'm fine. Really, I'm great. A big smile, but she has already turned away. I did not do well on my SATs. I did fine. To be frank, I probably did better than you, but I did not rocket them out of the park. In my defense, I never got tutored. I didn't buy a practice book. I took them only once. Any extra effort would have struck me as gauche. During my teenage years I conceived of my intelligence as a natural phenomenon. Like the science. The sea does not try to get better. The sea is. The extent of my preparation was to add a banana to my morning cereal, then bubbles for three hours, then talking shit in the parking lot. How easy was that math? I boasted to my best friend, Lacey, and then we went to get high near the Stop and Shop where they carried the vegan moon pies. We loved what I did rather than ace my sats. I will tell you this because you probably want to know, because you probably will ask, as most of my clients eventually ask, especially after I assure them that it's okay not to be good at standardized tests, that I in fact, am not good at standardized tests. They say not to be rude or anything, but how did you get into Harvard then? Is that I wrote a play. A play in which the biblical Eve kills the biblical Adam, then travels forward in time to counsel a young heroin addict named Jane. Never mind that I knew nothing of heroin or addiction. Never mind that I had not until that year, ever read the Bible. I had a vision. At the climax of the play, Eve lifts her shirt and presses Jane's palm against her ribs. You didn't come from Adam, she intones. You came from me. Obviously. It was a smash success, an empowering tale that to a certain kind of middle aged Second Wave feminist, a woman possessed of a slow, simmering anger, say, a woman sure that something still wasn't right, that something was in fact wrong with today's females, the ones who said they weren't feminists, who were applying to medical school in record numbers, putting off childbearing in record numbers, giving blowjobs and getting boob jobs and joining sororities in record numbers. To that kind of despairing older woman, to those English teachers and underemployed actors who had agreed to judge the Young Playwrights competition, my play was pure vindication, the raising of the banner they'd seen so dispiritingly flag. They gave it all to me. I won everything there was to win. Briefly and too young. I felt invincible. Not that I say this to all my clients. Instead I murmur that I liked to write back in high school and that I got some attention for it. The first time I told Isabel this, she said, so you were angular. What? Even as I spoke, it dawned on me what other word would mean the opposite of well rounded? A freak who is freakishly good at one random thing? She sighed. Admissions people love them. Angularity may have gotten me into Harvard, but it also had the unfortunate effect of turning me into a writer. My blood, infused once with praise, sang for more. But how? Once you hit 18, slinging two decent lines of dialogue together is little more than a party trick. In the years after graduation, as I wrote and failed to get money for my writing, I began to weigh my Ivy League degree, thinking of all the anxious elites who believed in its talismanic power enough to pay for it. So I pumped up my scores and queried a host of tutoring companies. That was how I found myself at 7:30 at night, gliding upward in a mirrored box, steered by a solemn youth with acne and a great garnet bow tie. That first time Isabel had answered the door herself, a tiny girl in tiny green shorts, dwarfed by a darkly glowing hall of gold and onyx. Let's go up to my office, she said, which surprised me. Usually apartments do not have ups. Usually teenage girls do not have offices. I asked, should I take off my shoes? And she said sure, but I had only asked to be polite. I hate taking off my shoes in my students houses, especially if I'm not wearing socks. It makes my feet feel dirty, polluted from the world of subways and streets. Here the doorknobs shone, the walls were shadowed by delicate spindly sculptures, and the carpet was so soft that my toes, my profane toes, curled with delight as we drew back into the house. The texture kept changing underfoot, raised nubs, soft pile, ridged geometric designs, all of it clean and fluffy and fresh. Up and up we went, two flights of stairs, down a long hall filled with glossy black and white photos of her family, portraits so artful they seemed like magazine spreads, as if the Shear family were a celebrity family, as if we were passing their Annie Leibowitz shots from Vogue. Finally we reached the modest white cubby where Isabel did her work, a small room tricked out with a laser printer, a MacBook Pro, a stray iPad, and a curated row of tiny international souvenirs, which, more than the Frank Stella hanging in the bathroom, more than the drawer of chilled Pellegrino or the courtside tickets to the US Open, would come to represent to me all the mysteries of the way the very rich raise their children. There was a tiny koala bear, a geisha in red and gold, a snowball with the Leaning Tower of Pisa inside. There was a big Ben, a noseless sphinx, a penguin with its flippers out. They were not what a child would have picked. They were kitsch, but carefully curated kitsch, ironic nods to the idea of souvenir, a symbol not so much of these places Australia, Japan, Italy, Egypt as of the idea of travel as consumption. A joke, in other words, much too elaborate for Isabel to understand. I was distracted by her lips. Were they artificially plumped? Hard to believe. Maybe she was just suffering a mild allergic reaction to, say, gluten, which she definitely and in defiance of her mother, ate. Isabel ate a bagel and went into a gluten fog right before her PSATs, Rachel Scheer had written in her first and only email to me. I had seen Isabel with packages of peanut butter crackers. She was, after all, 13 and hungry and not yet completely brainwashed by fad diets. Regardless, though, she was in every other sense a child, though she had tiny child limbs that squirmed as she sat at her desk and a washboard for a chest and a delicate stem of a neck. Her lips were somehow adult, big and fat and swollen. Botox lips, Angelina Jolie lips, definitively sexy lips. She had a habit when I talked of leaning back in her chair with her legs up, her head tilted and her mouth slightly agape, her eyes dreamy and soft. She looked like a soft porn star when she did this. But her complete lack of awareness as she assumed a posture of sexual abandonment only revealed how completely, how utterly, she was still a child. Right on the cork board over her desk, she or a decorator had tacked photos of her from all the bar and bat mitzvahs she had attended over the past year. A kaleidoscope of Isabelle's dressed and coiffed like a Barbie doll, gleaming in dozens of configurations. There she was with her friends, always posing, fixing the photographer with an empty eyed pout. There was another photo of her, black and white, a professional headshot. She was trying to become an actress and again her hair hung in soft coils, her makeup was flawless, her eyes dark and inky as she gave that dead sexed out stare. And she looked 19. I mean she looked legal up there on the cork board. But when she was before me, copying out her medieval history textbook word for word, wearing mesh shorts and an old T shirt, she looked like she might still enjoy Truth or Dare, might still enjoy a bedtime story. I don't mean to sound shocked. All 13 year old girls want to be 17 unless they want to be 10 again. No 13 year old wants to be 13. They are always straining forward or back. But I was one of the ones who wanted to go back to be 10. In fact, sometimes I think I could have been 10 forever, that I would be happy still, playing touch football with the boys, riding my bike, inventing elaborate dares with Lacey, keeping scientific records of rocks, having sleepovers, reading chapter books in bed until lights out at 9:30 and then bounding forth each morning, sweet smelling and hungry and happy and confident of the day. Yes, I would go back to 10 in a heartbeat. I would. But I also mistrust this nostalgia of mine, for I belong to the generation who hit puberty just as reviving Ophelia hit the bookshelves. At once female adolescents went from a time of transition to a time of doom, an apocalyptic meltdown of personality. Mary Pfeiffer, Ph.D. described the brilliant, vivacious girls she had known, how in the teenage years they stopped speaking in class and started cutting themselves little red slices on the skin across the nation in suburbs everywhere. Mothers read this book and their daughters read it too. Maybe this is why I want to go back. Because I snuck Reviving Ophelia from my mother's nightstand and learned how I was going to lose myself, that my childhood was Eden. But I had to leave that in this poisonous late 20th century misogynist culture, anorexia and suicide and rape and self hate were the inevitable wages of womanhood. And now here I was, 15 years later, locked in a little white room with a little white girl who was rushing as fast as she could toward the time when she would have to be a woman every day. Fine, fair enough. But usually when little girls try to be women, their inept experiments with eyeshadow and cheap dresses from H and M mark them as babies. Only playing pretend. Isabel had an army of hairstylists and makeup artists, the very best in New York, no doubt to turn her into a spirit starlet, an ingenue, a little Lolita. I couldn't stand it. I remember the woman who played the heroine addict in my play. She was a skinny white woman with a long orange ponytail named Catherine. And the woman who played Eve was an older black woman with a round moon face named Melanie. One day as we were all sitting around the table, I gave a little speech about the play. I meant it to be a feminist speech, a rousing speech speech we are all oppressed as hell speech. But Melanie, when I finished, said, I don't know. I've always really liked being a woman. It doesn't seem so bad to me. I still remember the shame I felt. She was right. My life wasn't so bad. It was hard to say, or it seemed to me at the time, hard to say exactly why being female was so awful, exactly how I had been oppressed. I mean, I still talked a ton in class. I hadn't tried to kill myself, not even once. And also, even though I knew nothing about her life, nothing except that she was an actor, a middle aged black woman who did regional theater in Philadelphia, I thought or sensed or assumed that her life had been harder than mine, that if she liked being female then what reason could I possibly have to complain? But as I said, I knew nothing about her. And because I was 16, a 16 year old girl who had not properly washed her hair in a month, who wore baggy men's corduroys from Goodwill and giant hoodies in colors like Dune and Umber, because I undoubtedly spent a lot of that rehearsal when I was not talking about oppression, wondering whether Jonah, my high school boyfriend, was not asking me to have sex because he was a good girl or because he just didn't want to have sex. Because when you are 16, it is actually medically impossible to think of anyone except yourself for longer than 30 seconds. Because of all these things. I probably did not think too much about her, about Melanie. I mean, I wanted to have sex. I felt I was ready. We were ready. We were 16. We were in love. We had been dating for a year. But I needed him to ask. I needed him to want it. Want it so badly that he would do the thing you were never supposed to do, the thing that we had been warned about again and again in health class. Put pressure on me. Pressure. Boys must not pressure girls. Girls should not pressure girls. No one must pressure anyone to do anything ever. But I wanted him to pressure me. I wanted to have sex without choosing fully to have sex. I wanted to avoid responsibility just a little bit, for my wanting the day that Isabel turns in her paper about the slaves we do not celebrate or linger. It is on to the Sermon on the Mount. Christianity sneaks up on us as it snuck up on the Romans. We read each line than discuss. I gloss over the bad news about rich people because I am sensitive and whisk her ahead to the part about the light, about not keeping your lighthead. She considers, says, so Jesus is just like, worship me. Worship me? Yeah, pretty much. Oh my God, he's like Beyonce or something. He's bigger than Beyonce. She contemplates this for a minute, and then her face screws up. Wait, can you imagine if you were Beyonce? She clamps her hand over her mouth, agog. If you actually were her. Until this moment, it has never occurred to Isabel that Beyonce is an actual person. Until this moment, Beyonce has been a behemoth, an empire, a brand. There is too much Beyonce for Beyonce to be contained in one person. Of all the mementos from bar mitzvahs on Isabel's desk, the one that fascinates me the most is a small yellow box of candy. Isabel's face is on it, smiling in a white satin gown. She gestures like Vanna White at the gumdrops, a perfect sugar princess. This is what the rich do after they have bought epic pieces of property and priceless art, after they have grown bored of travel and the ballet and a box at the baseball stadium. They buy their way closer to celebrity, and then they buy themselves a simulacrum of it. Yet they never quite believe their own pose. Nothing excites Isabel so much as Beyonce, I think, because Beyonce has something Isabel cannot buy. Later, when Jonah and I finally did have sex, when I said, all my friends think it's weird we haven't had sex yet. And he said, oh, do you want to have sex? In a jovial, sporting tone, as if I had suggested we take up an obscure but hypothetically enjoyable hobby. And then, when we had finally gotten naked and his basement bedroom, when he had torn the foil packet of the Trojan condom that I had made him buy, when we had actually started to do it, we could not stop laughing. The whole procedure seemed unwieldy and faintly absurd. We could not muster the requisite solemnity.
- [52:45]
Narrator/Reader
Ow. Ow.
- [52:45]
Narrator/Commentator
You're hurting me. I gasped, but I was giggling. I guess I was nervous. I guess we both her. It's hard for me to imagine Isabel finding anything funny about sex. It's too hooked into glamour for her, too connected to looking a certain way. When her teacher returns her paper in two days, it will be branded a B. This will prompt her mother to decide that I don't understand Isabel's needs, that it is simply not working out. We don't know it yet, Isabel and I, but we are on our last session together. After tonight, we will never see each other again. We move on to the adultery section of the Sermon on the Mount. Most people forget it's there, so I try to explain. Jesus is saying that before you weren't allowed to commit adultery, but now you can't even think about it. Thinking about it is as bad as doing it. Her mouth is open. Her eyes are far away. We forge on. Wait. What does that mean? She asks. I scrutinize. I stall. Finally, I say, so if you stop sleeping with your wife, you can't divorce her. And if another man wants to marry her, he can't, because you will still be married to. To her, even if you're not sleeping with her anymore. For some reason, I feel wildly unsure whether Isabel knows what sleeping with means, even as I know that she does, that she probably knows more words than I know, words for acts I cannot even imagine, acts that probably involve cell phones. She is paying attention now. She says, are you a feminist? Yes, I say, are you? She hesitates. Yes. She looks both bashful and proud. But I don't do any feminist work. Me neither, I tell her, and we grin at each other like two housewives who've just admitted that we don't iron the sheets. Later, though, I keep thinking about it. Feminist work. What is feminist work? For some reason, the only two answers that come to mind are escorting women past anti abortion activists and answering phones at a domestic violence shelter. But obviously that can't be right. I feel like I do feminist work. I feel like feminism is more about being than doing. But maybe this is a cop out. I think of the column my friend Maddie ran in our college newspaper called Ask a Feminist. Nobody had any questions, so she made them up. Dear Maddie, is it feminist to carry a Nalgene bottle? Sincerely confused in the Co Op, she replied, Dear Confused in the Co Op, a Nalgene bottle aids in hydration and insofar as it is a feminist principle to stay hydrated and generally healthy, yes, it is feminist to carry an Algine bottle. Back then I thought this hilarious, but now its faith touches me. From this perspective, my whole life is a feminist work. All those dark leafy greens in the crisper, the yoga class I went to last Tuesday, even the fact that I live alone, have lived alone for six years now in a little household of one, washed the dishes and taken out the garbage and written my godforsaken manuscript all by myself for six years, all alone is a feminist work. Maybe I am a feminist work. I imagine explaining all this to Isabel, grabbing her by the shoulders before she can grow into those images on the wall, those photos of her older self, and saying, who cares? Go live your life. Go muck stalls. Go farm potatoes. Go smoke pot in the parking lot of a Stop and shop. Hello, Isabel says, peering at me. You look totally spaced out. She's right. I am spaced out, floating. Realizing that I don't know anything about her, I try to imagine if I were Isabel, if I actually were her. Hello, she says again. Anybody home?
- [57:42]
Meg Wolitzer (Host/Narrator)
Tavi gevinson performed Kyle McCarthy's Ancient Rome. I'm Meg Wolitzer. I love the way this story is so beautifully crafted. The small, carefully controlled present relationship is freighted with the past of the teacher and the unknown future of the girl. It seems that both may be in need of rescuing the one from disappointment and uncertainty, the other from a kind of gilded cage. The travel tchotchkas alone are worth the price of admission, and hovering at the edges is the specter of ancient Rome and its unknowable women. You're subtle people, so you already knew that generation gap meant more than being amazed at old hairstyles and ties. And I hope you've enjoyed hearing a well worn phrase be tested in so many different contexts. A parent whose harsh love threatens the dreams of young boys, a shifting mother daughter relationship, and a student and teacher trying to find common ground between privilege and naivete on one side and protectiveness and world weariness on the other. I'm Meg Wolitzer. Thanks for closing the gap and 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 Miles B. Smith. Our programs, presented at the Getty center in Los Angeles are recorded by Phil Richards. Our mix engineer for this episode was Mi? A White. Our theme music is David Peterson's that's the Deal, performed by the Deardorf Petersen Group. Selected Shorts is supported by the Dungannon For 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.
- [60:16]
Tremphya Advertisement Voice
For adults with Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis symptoms, every choice matters. Tremphya offers self injection or intravenous infusion from the start. Tremphya is administered as injections under the skin or infusions through a vein every four weeks, followed by injections under the skin every four or eight weeks. If your doctor decides that you can self inject Tremphya, proper training is required. Tremphya is a prescription medicine used to treat adults with moderately to severely active Crohn's disease and adult with moderately to severely active ulcerative colitis. Serious allergic reactions and increased risk of infections and liver problems may occur. Before treatment, your doctor should check you for infections and tuberculosis. Tell your doctor if you have an infection, flu like symptoms or if you need a vaccine. Explore what's possible. Ask your doctor about tremphya today. Call 1-800-526-7736. To learn more or find visit tremphyaradio.com with Cold Weather around the corner, go for a jacket that feels like you're wearing a hug. Columbia's Sportswear's new Amaze Puff protects you from the elements and feels, well, amazingly warm, cozy and comfortable. You know Columbia makes tough winter layers, but the Amazepuff jacket is definitely for the girls. Built to be soft and warm while also looking great with tons of colors and lengths to match any mood or look. Visit Columbia.com to get your hands on an Amaze Puff jacket. It's tough on cold, soft on you.