← Selected Shorts
Selected Shorts
Holidays with Mom
00:58:16
Guest host Meg Wolitzer presents our holiday show--two stories about being home for the holidays and how you can count on your Mom to be there for you—and possibly to complicate things. First, memoirist Augusten Burroughs recalls a disastrous—and hilarious—childhood cooking project. Reader Michael Cerveris relishes every bite. And in “Live Wires” by Thomas Beller, a young man invites his girlfriend to his mother’s annual Hanukkah party. The reader is Jane Curtin.
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- [01:11]
Meg Wolitzer
There's nothing like home for the holidays. Unless it's being in other people's homes for the holidays. On this Selected Shorts, Augustin Burrows and Thomas Beller invite us in to meet their moms, sisters and sweetheart. Join us, Meg I'm Meg Wolitzer and you're listening to Selected Shorts where our greatest actors transport us through the magic of fiction one short story at a time. On this selected shorts, we're celebrating the holidays with two charming and rueful stories about how things don't always go as planned, but you can definitely count on your mother to play a big part to keep things on track, or maybe even to complicate them. We're sharing two stories with very different takes on how mothers and children interact at the holidays. These encounters are so intense when we're young, and then they become indelible parts of our memories later on. Stories that you tell your friends, you know. You know that thing that happened that night all those years ago? Oh my God. Our first story is Augustine Burroughs and Two Eyes Made out of Coal, which, in case you needed reminding, is how the classical snowman is completed. In this sweet and funny autobiographical sketch, Burroughs introduces two further that children are dangerously ambitious in the kitchen and that mothers, at least the good ones, serve up unconditional love. Memoir is Burroughs home turf, and for him that includes the bestsellers Running With Scissors and Dry Reading. And Two Eyes Made out of Coal is Tony Award winning actor Michael Cerverus, whose Broadway credits include Fun Home and Assassins. Happily, we can also count him as among our regular and most inspired readers. Here he is with Augustine Burroughs and two Eyes Made out of Coal.
- [03:10]
Augusten Burroughs
For as long as I could remember, my mother would buy an intricate, often handcrafted Advent calendar and hang it on the refrigerator. It was she who introduced me to the concept of a calendar for the month of December, a countdown to Christmas, where Each date from 1 to 25 was printed on a little door you could open, and behind the door a visual surprise, a little scene or charming sketch. I wanted nothing more than to sit on the floor of the thing and tear off all the doors at once so I could get immediately to Christmas. I had, over the years, developed something more than a fondness for the paper calendar. Each Christmas, when the calendar went up, I stopped living and started waiting. My mother surely must have regretted ever introducing me to the Advent calendar, because now she could never take it away. It would be like getting your child hooked on heroin and then withholding the needle. Only one row of doors remained closed on the Advent calendar. For the last 18 days, it had been the single focus of my life. My mother would not allow me to open a new door before 8 o'clock in the evening. By 7 each night I was sitting on the floor in front of the refrigerator like a dog, staring up at the calendar and asking her every few minutes, is it almost 8 o'clock? Always there was a fleeting disappointment on opening the door because the image revealed was never one I recognized. What is that? What does some old man on a camel have to do with Christmas? My mother leaned over to inspect the image in question, and then she explained. Oh, look at that. What a beautiful image. See, now I believe these are actually woodblock prints behind the doors. But done with such fine, fine detail. I would love to be able to achieve a line like that, she said, pointing to the hump on the camel's back. But what is it? Well, this is one of the three wise men, I imagine on his way to see Jesus. Or maybe he's just riding around in the desert for some fresh air. Look at the way they captured the wind on the sand. It's gorgeous. You know, I bought this calendar from Faces in Amherst. It's German. I wish I'd picked up all those napkin rings while I was there. By this point I was no longer listening to her and was instead focused on the next night's door. Surely there was something better under that door. The last week was always the worst. It was like an unbearable itch I could not reach. You have waited patiently for 345 days and you only have one more week, my mother would tell me. But somehow this one week seemed longer than all the others combined, so I was constantly seeking a distraction, but one that was related to Christmas. My mother helped by offering to sit with me and string cranberries and popcorn together into long garlands for the tree. We each had a needle and thread as we sat before the television set with a large bowl of popcorn and a bag of fresh cranberries on the table between us. But even this couldn't go on for a week. Oh my God. You need to put that mess down now and go wash your hands and put some band aids on your fingers. But I don't want to stop. I can keep going. We need more Augustine. You are going to get blood all over the house. You have just pricked your fingers to death with that sewing needle and see, look at that. Your entire rope of popcorn is bloody. You don't want to hang bloody popcorn on the tree, do you? Mine can go in the back, I said protectively, clutching the needle and thread and bloody popcorn rope to my chest. She shook her head.
- [07:02]
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- [07:03]
Augusten Burroughs
Go wash your hands and use some Bactine before you put on the band aids. The stores had begun filling their shelves with Christmas decorations way back in October, so along with Jack o'lanterns and paper turkeys, you could buy a can of spray snow. By this point, I had burned through numerous cans, even though my father paid good money to have the real stuff removed from our driveway and front steps. I had sprayed it on my bedroom windows, adding a string of wildly blinking lights. Tinsel, my favorite product, was draped from anything in my room that protruded even slightly. The needle arm of my record player, curtain rods, the switch to my desk lamp. My room was a festering, glittering shrine in honor of my favorite day of the year. But there were only so many times I could move my own small artificial Christmas tree from one side of the room to the other. At a certain point during that last painful week, I simply ran out of pre holiday amusements. So I would wander into the living room to at least be in the same room with the real tree as it had for weeks. My scratchy copy of Charlie Brown Christmas continued to moan away on the record player because all the magazines that had arrived featured Christmas trees and stockings and other holiday paraphernalia on their covers. I would thumb through these, searching only for the colorful ads. This was what I was doing the Saturday morning before Christmas, while my parents were downstairs sleeping. On Saturdays it was rare for them to come upstairs before 10 or even noon. That gave me a good five to seven hours alone upstairs with complete, unsupervised access to a fully equipped kitchen. The photograph on the COVID of my Mother's Woman's Day magazine appealed to me enormously. A gumdrop bejeweled gingerbread house from a spun sugar fantasy world. The tall, peaked roof was swirled with mounds of frosting snow. Glittering crystal sugar icicles hung from the eaves and the walls. Smooth sheets of pure gingerbread had been pressed into raw sugar, giving them the appearance of stucco. Hansel and Gretel had been fools to abandon such a house after they cooked the witch alive in her own oven. I absolutely would have claimed the house as my own and used the witch's skull as a soup tureen. When I thought about it, Hansel and Gretel deserved to die for their lack of imagination and poor real estate choices. But that was just a stupid fantasy. A story for babies. This gingerbread house was real. There was a recipe. Gingerbread Dreams Build this Foolproof Fantasy House, directed the headline. I would make it as a surprise for my mother. I would bake the gingerbread house and I wouldn't get any blood on it, and it would be the center of our Christmas table. Won't she be surprised, I thought, when she comes upstairs in six hours and sees my glorious gingerbread house resting on a plate, Two candy cane trees beside the front door. The word foolproof spoke to me because my older brother often said, I believe you may be a complete fool. Quite nearly. I'm going to have to find out what kind of pesticides were in use when our mother was carrying you. If even a fool could make the house on the COVID of this magazine, I should be able to make it, too. Then again, I knew that merely boiling water was not foolproof. Not when you got sidetracked by Fat Albert and the Cosby kids and forgot about the water, which was then evaporated and the pot fused to the burner of the stove. Had they actually tested this recipe on a fool? I wondered. But this was no pot of boiling water. This was only gingerbread and gumdrops. It was just plain silly to be worried about candy canes. No, the gingerbread house would look exactly like the one on the magazine cover. I knew it would. I love to experiment in the kitchen, and if I ever used a recipe, it was only for inspiration. Recipes, I felt, were for the unimaginative. However, with this particular project, I would do my best to follow the recipe to the letter. And where that wasn't possible, I would at least stay true to its spirit. Molasses, whatever the hell that was, sure was not in our cupboard. But I knew it was a liquid because you were supposed to gently pour it onto the other ingredients. So I used some of my mother's cooking sherry, something she herself often incorporated into fancier recipes. We had flour because the gingerbread house was gingerbread colored. I used the brown flour made out of wheat and not the other flour made out of white. And wasn't baking soda the same thing as baking powder? I thought so, so I used the latter. As for the spices, cinnamon, cardamom, nutmeg, ginger, fennel I skipped them all because right there, next to the Tabasco sauce and peeking out from behind a bottle of my mother's saccharine, was a little jar of allspice. Just the name tasted like gingerbread. It was all the spices I needed, plus the rest of them. It was all of them. All spice. Briefly, I worried about the spectacular mess I had somehow created. I had managed to use my mother's entire set of six white mixing bowls, her electric beater, a number of pans, each of which I had greased with corn oil and assorted spatulas, knives, forks, a cheese grater, and my father's hammer from the basement. It was just a shame that I wouldn't be able to help my mother wash all these dishes, but I couldn't get all my band aids wet, so she would have to do them herself. I smiled. She always said that art was born from chaos. The creative process can be very messy. You have to be comfortable with that. I was comfortable. I poured the thick, gluey batter onto trays and baked it stiff. Prying the gingerbread, which was nearly black from the cookie sheets, I set about to assemble my Gingerbread Dreams Fantasy house. Gloomily, I came to accept the fact that it was a structural impossibility to create a steep, peaked roof like in the picture. The gingerbread kept breaking. The instant coffee I had added for color must have made it brittle. So I gave the building a flat roof, like the modern house down the street that my mother often admired, and then spent an hour applying white frosting from a can for snow, which looked nothing like mounds of snow, but like piles of insulation left behind by a work crew that had gone on strike. It looked actually just like the house even farther down the street, the one built in the center of a dirt field with plastic stapled to the outside in place of siding and asphalt nailed here and there to patch holes. My mother hated that house. It ruins the entire damn street. I had made that house in black gingerbread. If only I had two miniature flat tires and an upside down swing set to place in front. I cut out more windows, two rows of them. Immediately this looked wrong. It looked non residential. The deeper into the project I tumbled, the more dire the results. The colorful gumdrops I'd attached randomly to the front facade didn't look cheerful. They looked like what they were, an easy colorful ploy to manipulate the eye and distract it from the wanton ugliness right before it. The more I did to try and decorate my way out of the monstrosity I had built, the worse it looked by not even the most elastic stretch of the imagination. Was this a gingerbread house. Four walls, a flat ceiling, rows of windows four stories high. I had built a gingerbread public housing tenement, a little gingerbread slum, and I could populate my small scale confectionary representation of urban blight with the deformed gingerbread men that I had baked alongside the cake. Men with misshapen arms and legs, heads that had expanded into great amoeba like structures. I had baked an entire population of pitiful armless and legless subjects, each with a physical deformity worthy of the most corrupt circus. I didn't even bother to frost my gingerbread misfits. Why shame them with frivolous frosting hats and raisin eyes? Let them be plain and blind. I could give them that much dignity. I would think of them as a large family who had unfortunately farmed too near a leaking nuclear power plant, and now they only wanted to live the remainder of their sad lives in the solitude of the cookie jar and not displayed on a platter near my public housing unit. It was almost like I had baked a scene from the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. My mother made a bold and insincere fuss. Oh, it is just precious, she said. Precious being the word Southern women have always used to describe the indescribable, the unsavory. It's also what my grandmother had said after peering at the hair lip on the baby of a friend's daughter. Precious meant so positively hideous I could produce vomit this instant, and without the aid of my index finger, she was reduced to bland compliments. It's so original. I like it very much more than the picture in the magazine when I asked her, but doesn't it look like one of the slums on the news? Like something out of Springfield? She replied, oh, no, honey, not at all. But I could see in her eyes the distinct flicker of recognition and then agreement. Her eyes said exactly. I knew that what I had constructed was an insult to the picture in the magazine, to the entire magazine itself, and to baking in general. If the people at Woman's Day ever saw my gingerbread horror, they would cancel my mother's subscription. Why hadn't I followed the directions exactly? Why had I thrown the measuring cups to the wind and decided to spread my architectural wings? Worse, though, than the visual representation was the sensation of the gingerbread house inside the mouth. First, the teeth made hard, damaging contact with the bathroom tile like cake. Next, the tongue was burned by the cheap, hardened vanilla frosting. A single bite was enough to onset juvenile diabetes. Still, the front door and a tiny portion of roof were politely sampled. A number of gumdrops had been removed, then placed back. The dog refused a chunk of window, even though it was caked with frosting snow. This very same dog did not hesitate to eat the wadded up ball of aluminum foil she found on the floor next to the trash can. And so my fiasco sat in ruin on a platter in the center of the dining table, now no longer a food item but a stand in for a decoration. And then my brother appeared. He had briefly left his bedroom and all the electronic equipment in there to forage for food. With one swift and decisive motion of the hand, he cracked a thumb of the roof away from the structure and got as much of it into his mouth as possible before I could scream at him and tell him to stop. But I wasn't going to scream at him. My mouth was open in amazement, not anger. I was just waiting for him to snarl in disgust and spit the partially chewed roof right out onto the floor. You like it? I asked, amazed. He shrugged. Mm, it's okay, I guess. Why? Did you put something funny in it? He said suspiciously, holding the last corner of roof out away from him. No, it's edible, I said. There's no tricks. He nodded. Then he devoured the fragment in his hand and returned to the cake for more, breaking away nearly one entire wall of my holiday housing unit. Well, since nobody else is going to eat it, he said, carrying the wall away with him down the hall and back to his room. I looked at the wretched structure on the table and I smiled. My gingerbread hovel had suddenly turned into a loved or at least somewhat appreciated gingerbread home.
- [22:30]
Meg Wolitzer
That was Augustine Burroughs and Two Eyes Made out of Coal Performed by Michael Cerverus I'm Meg Wolitzer. Even though the story has comic elements worthy of Jean shepherd, it's really about the warm relationship between a mother and son. When we return, your significant other meets your mother. O you're listening to selected shorts recorded live in performance at Symphony Space in New York City and at other venues nationwide.
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- [23:28]
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- [24:16]
Meg Wolitzer
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. We're listening to stories about the holidays and what we might discover about this time of year. If you'd like more presents, visit selectedshorts.org while there, you can hear past episodes and find out about the Selected Shorts Writing contest. And if you subscribe to our podcast, you'll receive the gift that comes unwrapped. You'll find new and past episodes and bonus interviews with some of my fellow authors. Tis the season, so please share our show with a friend. On this holiday show, we've offered up a comic Christmas tale. And now here's a little something for Hanukkah. I wish we could do eight stories, one for each night, but we don't have time. Still, this one by Thomas Beller Burns Bright. He's the author of Seduction Theory Stories and How to Be a Scenes from a Protracted Boyhood, among other works in Livewires. A young man brings his girlfriend to his family's annual Hanukkah party, and there's no one better at creating a good electric current than our longtime shorts friend and reader Jane Curtin. Here she is with Thomas Beller's live wires.
- [25:40]
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The living room is quiet and serene, and Alex Feder takes a deep breath as if the silence were a fragrance. Then the doorbell rings. He stands up and goes to answer it, wondering which guests have arrived first and feeling slightly annoyed at them for being on time. He makes strange and dramatic faces as he walks to the door. He's just shaved, and his skin has the texture of plexiglass. He puts his hand on the cool doorknob, makes one last face, and catches a glimpse of himself in the hallway mirror. Electrocution, he says, and flings the door open. Hi. He nearly shrieks. It's the Brienne Fields. Hello, Alexander. Cry the Brienfields and begin to pile into the apartment, crowded together under the weight of their winter coats and scarves and gloves and a big shopping bag that contains the gifts. They see the empty living room and exclaimed, we're first. With a hint of dismay. Alex stares into the hearty, broad face of Mr. Breenfeld. It is a face he has been greeting at these Hanukkah parties for the past 14 years, but this time it seems a little different. It's as though the blood behind Mr. Brienfield's cheeks is thinned somewhat, while the brow that sits like a ridge above his eyes has thickened. At 25, Alex has begun to see his mother's friends in a new light. Here, give me everything, he says. I'm the coat check. Years of practice have made Alex expert at getting people to part with their coats. He heads down the long, dark hallway in the direction of his mother's room, where the bed is the designated resting spot for coats. Mom, he whispers at the closed door to the dressing room. People are here. Hurrying back to the living room, he tries to think of something to say to the Brienfields. Their relation to him, like that of so many people who come to the party, is no longer definable. They're just there, a fixed part of the landscape of affiliations and friends of the Feder family, that sprawling brood of two. The doorbell rings again, and then he hears the metallic click of the door opening. Panic touches him. What if it's Christine? He thinks, and then what would Christine in the Brienfields possibly talk about? What in the world was I thinking when I invited her to this thing? He enters the foyer just as the Zuckermans come walking in. Some private moment of truth has been postponed, and Alex smiles like a slot machine player who is just one small he likes the Zuckermans As a family and individually, the parents are handsome, successful, and reserved, and the kids are appealingly bashful. Come in, come in, come in, says Alex, and he presses hands and kisses cheeks. A damp coldness still hangs on the Zuckerman's coat. They live just four blocks up Riverside Drive and have walked. Give me all your stuff, my mother. But just then their faces turn together and brighten as if an angel had appeared. Alex turns and sees his mother entering the foyer in a white silk shirt and billowy black pants. Her clothes undulate with each step, giving her the appearance not so much of walking as of floating. Her face has the special radiance and charm it takes on when she's anticipating the company of people, people she likes. The Brienfields and Zuckermans all move toward her instinctively, and Alex feels like an unmoving pier deserted by an outgoing tide. His mother's translucent happiness provokes him in a mixture of elation and disgust. Watching her now, he's reminded of Anna Karenina. He's been reading the book for the first time since high school, and he has come to see more and more of his mother in the character of Anna. For one thing, the two women both have a glowing and unaffected manner that people are drawn to. That and a maddening willfulness. Watching his mother now, Alex thinks it's a bitch having a mother who belongs to the 19th century. The Zuckermans descend on her with cries of joy. Mouths pucker into kisses and fingers, clasped necks and caressed cheeks. The doorbell rings again, and Alex flees down the dim hallway with another armload of coats. The annual Feder Hanukkah party is officially underway. The apartment has become crowded, and Alex moves from room to room, past people standing in little circles as if around campfires. He doesn't join in the conversations yet, but pauses next to each one just long enough to get its flavor. There's something odd and exhilarating about having so many lives suddenly packed within walls that are used to so few. When he was a boy, he would become delighted and intimidated by this transformation to such a degree that he had to take breaks in his mother's room, burying his face among the coats and breathing the musty, personal scent of dried rain and old perfume. Now he continues to roam, taking in the bright faces. He doesn't live here anymore, but in a way he does. But he doesn't. He finds his mother in the kitchen, slicing cherry tomatoes into a huge wooden salad bowl. He comes up next to her and watches as the sharp blade presses against the red flesh of each tomato penetrates it after encountering some resistance, and then quickly moves through it, miraculously stopping just as it reaches her thumb. How's it going? He says. Oh, she says, startled. Very good. I'm almost done. Everybody's asking for you, he says. I keep hearing your name murmured here and there. It's like you're some greatly anticipated celebrity who hasn't arrived yet. He scowls as he says this, and his mother at once picks up his train of thought. Is Christine here yet? She says. No, not yet. I don't know why I invited her. She's not even Jewish, Alexander, that doesn't matter. Many people come here who aren't Jewish. It's true this is a carefully secular Hanukkah party, as usual, but if it doesn't matter, he feels like saying, why do we bother to celebrate Hanukkah or Passover, or even debate fasting on Yom Kippur? But he knows the answer. Or rather he doesn't know the answer but somehow understands it. Well, I imagine she's probably late because she's terrified, he says. I describe the goings on here, and I think I saw her cringe when I mentioned the singing. She'll enjoy it, says his mother, finishing with the last tomato. She's open minded. Alex feels a stab of irritation at his mother for presuming things about his girlfriend, though what she says about Christine is probably right. The two have met several times and although their styles could not be more different, they have seen seem to connect. Alex has been intensely sensitive to the progress of these encounters. Christine is eight years older than he and occupies a strange place in the age spectrum, somewhere between himself and his mother. This worries him for some strange reason. Come, says his mother. Let's go out to the party. They step shyly into the foyer, pausing together to survey the scene. Then someone rushes up to Alex's mother with outstretched arms. Eve. The woman cries. Eve.
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My God, I was wondering if I was going to see you at your own party. The woman is quite tall and thin, and her arms tighten around his mother like a lasso. She's one of those guests who show up each year whose names Alex can never remember. Last December he discovered that she was a criminal judge, and as he watches her embrace his mother now, he tries to contrast the image with one of her sitting on the bench, meting out stiff senses. Alex drifts away, noticing details in their apartment. A small violin case, dust covered, that sits under the piano, an antique dagger hanging on the wall that he never notices unless other people are present. It's as if each object projects light. Later on, with the party now in full swing, Alex is talking to one of his mother's old friends, Mrs. Tallman. She's been dear to him ever since they first met when he was about 11, and she pressed his head into her warm, plentiful, and highly fragrant breasts in a polite but enveloping embrace. Now that he's grown up, it's her head that seems about to be pressed into his chest, but he still feels a charge whenever they're together. She has glittering dark eyes and tan Mediterranean skin. Look at this handsome man, she says. I hear that your girlfriend's going to be here. I can't wait to meet her. Why? He asks defensively. Because she's your girlfriend. I'm curious to see what kind of company you're keeping. Noticing the distressed look on his face, she adds, the advanced word has been very favorable. I'm not quite sure why I invited her. I think I figured that if I didn't, it would be like hiding something from her or from us. The things I've been hiding from my mother and her friends could fill a textbook. I don't know about that, said Mrs. Tallman. Children always overestimate the naivete of their parents. When it comes down to it, our secrets are much more shocking than yours. It is into this atmosphere that Alex's current girlfriend and passionate flame, Christine Derry, steps gingerly. Alarm overtakes him as he sees her standing in the vestibule, looking into the mass of chatting guests with the expression of someone on a high diving board peering at the pool below. Oh my God, he says out loud, as though a fire had just broken out. He glances apologetically at Mrs. Talman and rushes towards Christine. All his rationalizations for her presence crumble in the face of disaster. What is it about her at this party that makes him so uneasy? He has been putting the question to himself, and his answers feel insufficient. He and she have come from different backgrounds, her suburban and Midwestern, and now at this party, his own background has been laid bare in all of its foreignness. And then there's the difference in their ages, a detail that would be undetectable. She has youthful features and fine, unlined skin, except that her hair, which is cut short just below her ears, is unabashedly, almost defiantly, gray. None of this has proved to be an obstacle during their year together. In fact, these differences have made their claim closeness all the more exciting. But now it worries him. As he approaches Christine, he feels a strong pulse of sensations he remembers from their first meeting. In their first conversations at another party, she had gazed at him impassively with her wide gray blue eyes, her center of gravity fixed with such calm precision that she hardly shifted her weight. As they talked, a wave of anger had overtaken him. She seemed to be speaking to him from within a glass case, and he wanted nothing more than to shatter that glass. What he had ended up shattering was his plastic wine glass, which he had massaged with increasing force until it cracked and spilled his drink all over their shoes. It was during the ensuing laughter, hers and stammered apologies, his, that they first connected his subsequent familiarity with the details of her life, her job at an advertising agency, her fussy insistence on drinking tea with enormous amounts of honey first thing in the morning. Her lamentations about a jury summons had slightly lessened his wish to shatter something, and with this change came an almost gallant protectiveness. You're late, he begins to say, but then catches himself. It's our guest of honor, he says instead. Hi, she says. It's crowded. He bends over and brings his face near hers. They've gotten into the habit of greeting each other by brushing the tips of their noses. I'd have been here sooner, she says, but two pigeons landed on my windowsill. We're going through this feverish courtship. I didn't know pigeons made out in December, alex says. He's frowning. Let me take your coat. It's my big job here. Coat check. I've developed a talent for it. I don't know anyone, she says. What were you expecting? These are friendly old Jewish people. He doesn't know why he said the word Jewish, except perhaps to get it out of the way. He's never had an affair with a Jewish girl. It hasn't been a conscious decision, but it has become a noticeable fact. I'll introduce you to some people. I've been told that your arrival is greatly anticipated.
- [39:11]
Augusten Burroughs
By whom?
- [39:13]
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I don't know exactly. I guess a lot of these people have known me since I was little, and they're curious to know what kind of company I'm keeping. They'll be horrified to know that you're dating an old hag. As she says this, she slips out of her coat. It is a big gray woolen thing, and her body emerges from it like the tender insides of enormous nut. Her dress is pink, her arms bare. She looks like candy, he thinks. I'll be right back, he says. He hurries down the hallway with her coat, throws it on the bed, and is about to hurry back when the bed catches his eye. It is piled high with voluptuous winter coats, and a tremendous urge to take a swan dive into the pile comes over it. He pauses, debating it, and then remembers that his last such dive there at age 13, had produced a sharp cracking sound, after which there was always a sag in one part of the bed. Anyway, he's grown up now. When Alex returns to the foyer, Christine is gone. A quick scan locates her at the other side of the room with a woman named Julia. She's a nice lady who's been coming to the Hanukkah party year after year. She's one of several women who show up alone at these parties. They occupy an age, somewhere between the mid-40s and mid-60s, and have an upbeat but somewhat beleaguered quality. Alex has always looked at them with a mixture of curiosity and trepidation, the way someone waiting to go into a haunted house looks at the people just emerging. These are women. There are a few men who come alone too, but they're different, who have wound their way through love and marriage and children and divorce and even death. And now, he sees, find themselves blinking outside in the daylight, alone. It's strange to think that this is a group that his mother belongs to as well, though somehow she doesn't have that blinking quality. Alex arrives in time to hear Julia say to Christine, really, I'm serious. Like in those trashy romance novels, you know, when they describe the heroine's sex, you know, smooth white, porcelain fair, 20 adjectives in a row. They're describing your skin. Really? I know, I wrote one. Well, that's nice of you, said Christine. I don't think I believe you, though. Alex flashes to an image of Christine stepping into their bed with several layers of expensive and mysterious creams and mists massaged into her face. The process, which they jokingly referred to as the beauty ritual, is so elaborate that it is a struggle for Alex to stay awake through it, and often he's awakened by Christine's body in her pink pajamas, sliding into bed next to him. Hello, Alex, says Julia distractedly. I was just telling your friend that she has exactly the kind of she thinks I look like one of those women in trashy books who are innocent and pure and end up sleeping with terrible men, says Christine. That's not quite how I put it, says Julia. She's about to elaborate when a shushing sound sweeps through the room and attention moves to the baby grand piano in one corner of the room, behind which stands his mother. Everybody, she says, it's time for the singing, those who know how it goes, and there should be many of you by now, please sing along. And those who are new, there is sheets being passed around. Guests gather from all parts of the apartment, crowding into the living room, bearing chairs and drinks, and now fumbling with song sheets. Alex looks at Christine with an apologetic expression. Does this seem really weird? He says. No, she says. It seems nice. Her answer doesn't quell his anxiety and he's called over to the piano. It's time for the lighting of the candles. People sit in chairs pressed up close to one another, making an unruly semicircle around the piano. Four unfortunate guests are perched on the remains of the couch, which is elegant in its appearance, a few rips aside, but otherwise completely ruined. Anyone sitting down on it, Alex knows, is sucked down into a swirl of cushions and springs and practically lowered to the floor. He stares at two couples lined up there. Each person is trying to act as if the awkward position they've been placed in, knees up near their armpits, is not unusual. He vows not to make a nervous joke about the couch. He has made a joke about it every year for as long as he can remember. Then, with the oily loquaciousness of a lounge act. Mc, he murmurs, if anybody's missing a friend, you might want to check the couch. It's a lovely couch, but its relation to furniture is similar to the Venus fly trap's relation to flowers. Then the matches are handed to him. Silence. A little red tipped twig in his fingers, the thunderous crack of the tip against the brown flint of the matchbox. Success on the very first try. And then the horrible aching off key sound of his own voice, half chanting, half singing as he lights the middle candle and then passes its flame from candle to candle. It's the last night of Hanukkah, so all eight candles have to be lit, and he tries to get each wick going as soon as possible. Baruch atta adonai elohenu melech haolam, he croaks. Asher kit sharnu bemitzvotaf. He managed to sing with a moderate amount of vigor, telling himself that his religion seems to stipulate that such songs be sung in a discordant, wavery voice with hardly any sense of rhythm. When it's over, he joins his mother on the piano bench and the room stumbles its way through the first song, his mother almost the only one to sing the words in a cloud, clear, melodic voice. At the end Alex feels a huge sense of relief mingled with regret. Everyone, he has noticed, feels uncomfortable with the singing until the last note has begun to fade, at which point everyone pretends to have enjoyed it all. It's Hanukkah. The pile of gifts under the menorah looms large and appetizing. Smells waft in from the kitchen. Very good. His mother calls out when the last mooing, mumbling words have died away. Let's try that one again. Alex feels the room's collective heart sink and he bends his head so as not to have to look at anyone. The guests launch into it again, and this time a few more voices join in. Mausor Y When it's over, his mother plays another, slightly more lively song, and then finally a last peppy one. This one is called Sevy Von, she says, and it's about a little dreidel which is very mischievous and runs through the woods and streams and goes anywhere it wants. The words woods and streams seem almost criminal to Alex. They belong to a pre ironic language that the world has long since cast aside. His mother starts to play. He stares at her fingers on the white and black keys. They aren't the world's most elegant fingers, yet they exude the maddening kind of optimism possessed by people who like to plant gardens. The lyrics of this last song are repetitive, and more and more people gradually join in the singing. His mother quickens the pace and without stopping spins the song into a second go round. For a moment, Alex lets his eyes flick upward. He sees a tableau of faces, some somber, some cheerful, some staring with concentration down at individual sheets of paper while they sit, some singing heartily to the ceiling, some outright faking it. He half glimpses Christine sitting in the corner and can't tell if her lips are moving. All the faces are bathed in a warm light from the lamps around the room. Some of the silk lampshades he knows, are ripped on the inside, and fringes of silk hang down like vines. Others are so old that they cast a yellow glow like a candle's. The moment seems to contain everything about life that is attractive and perfect and nourishing and also everything that makes one want to flee and hide under a rock and hope that someone someday might find a cure for the awkward, transparent fragility of people such as these. It is over. Gifts are distributed, a surfeit of scarves for the men, more personal items for the women, and then everyone begins to file into the study for dinner. A buffet. Alex finds Christine talking to Mrs. Zuckerman. He catches Christine's eye, but then decides to leave her alone. She and Mrs. Zuckerman seem relaxed together. A sense of lightness comes over him now that the main event is over, finally relinquishing her duties. His mother is roaming around talking to people, and Alex keeps shifting his gaze from Christine to his mother and back. They're like two live wires, separate, yet each connected to him. He is aware of an impulse to keep them apart, but doesn't know what that means. The party starts to wind down, a gradual thinning and then a sudden rush. Then it is done. The last people crowd down the hallway in a group, holding their coats and gifts. There is an awkward period in the hall while the elevator climbs and slows and everyone's attention turns to the churning, wheezing sounds it makes as it prepares to stop. They huddle in, offer a last frantic flurry of waves and goodbyes, as if they were on the deck of a departing ship. And then the door closes. Alex and his mother and Christine go back into the apartment, which is awash in ribbons and colored paper and scattered chairs and plates and half emptied wine glasses with traces of lipstick around the edges. This moment, too, has duplicated itself year after year, though now there's a variation. The cast has grown to three. Alex realizes the most difficult part of the evening is at hand. It is a foregone conclusion that he's going home with Christine, but how is he going to negotiate the transition is suddenly a mystery. Oh my, says his mother, exultant with relief. That was one of the best ones. Then she turns to Christine. Thank you so much for coming. Why are you thanking me? I should thank you. It was a really nice party. I've never been to a Hanukkah party before. It was amazingly friendly. Once again, her calm assurance, the first thing he had noticed about her, strikes Alex. She's performing a social function with this sort of talk, but there's something about her, an openness that takes it somewhere else. Her cheeks are full of color and her eyes seem unusually bright. Shall we open the presents? Says his mother. Alex stands still. The business of opening presents with his mother is so personal that he can't imagine this third party taking part. The two women look at him and he is reminded of an unpleasant experience he had not long ago with his incoherent aunt Louise, his father's sister, who lives in a nursing home in New Jersey. She has Alzheimer's. During the visit, he had waved a picture of Christine in front of her face and said, this is my girlfriend. My girlfriend. What do you think? Not bad. Huh? Aunt Louise rarely said anything, so Alex was in the habit of keeping up both sides of the conversation in her presence. But this time she swerved briefly back into the cantankerous and acerbic woman she had been for so many years, and her face took on an alarmed and vaguely contemptuous expression. Eve, she said. It's Eve. No, no, said Alex, horrified. It's my but his aunt's eyes removed themselves again, and he was left staring at the photograph, struck by the idea that he had managed to find a woman who resembled his mother when she was younger. He saw it quite suddenly, the same broad, smooth forehead, the pencil thin eyebrows, the elegant nose, but most of all the mouth, that half smile that was an expression neither of happiness nor sadness, coldness nor affection, but of a private and elusive pleasure. Now, staring back at these two faces, he feels unsecure how best to prevent the three of them opening gifts together. Christine would tear hers open, and his mother would unpeel each piece of tape to preserve the wrapping, and he would sit in the middle, feeling embarrassed. I'll do the dishes, he suddenly offers. There are all these dishes, and I can't leave you with them. It's not fair. Let's just clean up first. For the first time in his life, he's glad that his mother doesn't have a dishwasher. In moments he is in his official dishwashing posture, his forehead pressed to the cabinet above the sink, while his hands and arms work and he enters a dishwashing trance. Christine and his mother move about the apartment, gathering dishes and glasses and silver and bringing them to him. Nearly an hour has passed before the last spoon has been rinsed and dried. Christine and his mother are sitting at the kitchen table, talking, their faces pleasant and relaxed. Well, alex says finally, I guess that's that. All right, says his mother. The air is filled with departure. She smiles brightly, but Alex feels there's something slightly forced about it. The gifts still lie unopened. I'll get our coats, he says, and goes to retrieve them. As he and Christine are leaving, Alex finds that the living room looks like a stage set after the play is over and the actors have all gone home. Chairs stand at odd angles to one another, and remnants of the party are scattered about. The menorah, which had presided grandly over the event, now sits quietly, its eight candles burnt down. The neat pile of unopened gifts that lie at its base. His gifts for his mother, hers for him, and those brought by the guests, seem like an oversight. The idea of his mother left alone on this stage is suddenly excruciating to him, and his departing manner is almost abrupt. All right, that was great, he says. I'll call you tomorrow. We'll do the present soon. Thank you so much, Eve, says Christine, and the sound of his mother's name on her lips surprises him. The two women embrace warmly, pausing in each other's arms, almost as if commiseration. He's entirely outside of this moment, and he peers at them curiously, wondering what is happening. They have more in common with each other than either has with him, two women and a bystander. Then he bends to kiss his mother's warm cheek. Out in the hall, a vague dizziness overtakes him as the dial beside the elevator slowly turns toward the number of their floor. The door opens. He and Christine step in. It closes behind them, his mother's face momentarily visible through the small rectangular window in the elevator door. Bye, calls Christine. The elevator starts down. Goodbye, comes the reply, but his mother's face has disappeared. It is a cold, clear winter night, and the streets are hard, windswept, and empty. Alex and Christine walk hand in hand toward West End Avenue, the sound of their shoes echoing against the pavement. What do you think? Alex said in a minute. It was nice, christine said. They walk in silence for a few more steps. There was something heartwarming about it, and sort of heartrending, too, the way all those people seem so friendly and kind and your mother being so enthusiastic. It's almost enough to make you optimistic about people. Almost, says Alex. She says nothing more, and for a moment he hates her. They wait on the deserted corner until an empty taxi screeches to a stop in front of them. They clamber in and head downtown toward Christine's apartment. It's an old taxi with ancient shocks and windows that don't quite close. The smell is pleasant, though old leather and some previous passengers perfume. Alex and Christine huddle against each other in the back seat. Alex? She says at one point. Yeah, he replies, but she doesn't say anything else. The cold wind whistles through the doors. Every block or so they hit a bump and the cab rises off the ground as though it had just flown over the crest of a hill. The glow of each passing street light falls across Christine's face and then recedes. Alex reflects on the impossibility of his relationship with her, the doom and despair that await him, and the heartbreak. He misses the familiar warmth and security of the apartment he has just left. Yet his departure was inevitable, a thrilling turn of events. He holds Christine tight as they go over a bump, up goes the taxi in a smooth, effortless glide, and a tiny smile comes over Alex's face. As they hang in midair.
- [57:44]
Meg Wolitzer
We heard Jane Curtin's performance of Thomas Beller's Live Wires. I'm Meg Wolitzer. When Thomas Beller published the story in the reissue of his collection, he changed the title to the Hanukkah Party. I like both titles. I'm not really sure why he changed it, but maybe he thought Livewires gives too much away. Alex fears the collision of his two worlds, which he suspects ought to be kept separate. One benefit of setting a story at a party is that the writer doesn't have to awkwardly drag the characters into a scene they've already been invited before. It starts. At parties in life and in fiction, characters often reveal only their public selves, but the writer is also charged with revealing their private selves. And Thomas Bellard gives us Alex Feder's public and private selves so beautifully. Here. Alex is a young man who's still someone's son, but also someone else's lover, and various people in the room at the party think of him in different ways. So how is he supposed to feel or act? So two stories about the holidays. How much we love them. How much we dread them. We hope all of yours are filled with friends and family and comfort and joy. If you have a funny or tender holiday tale to share, we'd love to hear it via Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. 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 Miles B. Smith. Our programs, presented at the Getty center in 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.
- [60:21]
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