← Selected Shorts
Selected Shorts
Pride Inside
00:58:15
It’s June, time to celebrate Pride privately and publicly. Host Meg Wolitzer presents four works that celebrate the complexities of love family and belonging. Ivan E. Coyote’s “No Bikini,” read by Becca Blackwell, offers one child’s act of quiet rebellion. Lovers drift together, and apart, in Michael Cunningham’s “Sleepless,” read by Mike Doyle. A newish couple faces harsh weather in Deesha Philyaw’s “Snowfall,” read by Michelle Beck, and poet Kay Ulanday Barrett shares their “Song for the Kicked Out.”
Loading summary
Transcript16 lines
- [00:00]
Narrator
High interest debt is one of the.
- [00:02]
Advertiser
Toughest opponents you'll face unless you power up with a SOFI personal loan. A Sofi personal loan could repackage your bad debt into one low fixed rate monthly payment.
- [00:12]
Narrator
It's even got superspeed since you could.
- [00:14]
Advertiser
Get the funds as soon as the.
- [00:15]
Becca Blackwell
Same day you sign.
- [00:17]
Advertiser
Visit sofi.compower to learn more. That's s o-fi.com P-O-W-E r loans originated by SoFi bank and a member FDIC. Terms and conditions apply. NMLS 696891.
- [00:38]
Meg Wolitzer
It's Pride Month, and we at Selected Shorts wanted to celebrate with stories that reflect the complexities of love, family and belonging. In each of them, there's both defiance and acceptance. Join me, Meg Wolitzer, as we change the world just a little bit in the company of some very thoughtful writers. 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. The 1969 Stonewall riots were a watershed moment socially and politically inspiring the gay pride movement, transforming private lives and public perception. One of its legacies was that lives that were once hidden could be shared and found to be, of course, like any other, with the usual measure of humor and heartache and finally, acceptance. This program celebrates that legacy with stories by queer writers. Our first work shares a bold childhood moment. In two stories, established couples face change, and a poem creates an anthem out of rejection. We begin with Ivan E. Coyote's no Bikini, in which swimming lessons at a summer camp lead to a comic moment of reconnaissance. Ivan E. Coyote is a writer, performer and activist whose published works include Care of Rebent, Sinner and the story collection One in Every Crowd. Reader Becca Blackwell is an actor, performer and playwright whose work includes their shows they Themself and Shmurm and Seagull Thinking of you.
- [02:23]
Advertiser
No bikini. I had a sex change once when I was six years old. The lion's pool where I grew up smelled like every other swimming pool, everywhere. That's the thing about pools. Same smell doesn't matter where you are. It was summer swimming lessons. It was a little red badge with white trim. We were all after beginners, age 5 to 7. My mom had bought me a bikini. It was one of those little girl bikinis, a two piece, I guess you would call it. The top part fit like a tight cutoff T shirt, red with blue squares on it. The bottoms were longer than panties but shorter than shorts. Blue with red squares. I tried it on the night before when my mom got home from work and found that if I raised both my arms up completely above my head too quickly, the top would slide up over my flat chest and people could see my you know what? You'll have to watch out for that. My mother had stated her concern, making lines in her forehead. Maybe I should have gotten the one piece, but all they had was yellow and pink left. And you don't like yellow either, do you? Pink was out of the question. We had already established this, so the blue and red two piece it was going to have to be. I was an accomplished tomboy at the time, so I was used to hating my clothes. It was so easy the first time that it didn't even feel like a crime. I just didn't wear the top part. There were lots of little boys getting changed with their mothers and nobody noticed me slipping out of my brown cords and striped T shirt and padding bare chested out to the poolside alone. Our swimming instructor was broad shouldered and walked with her toes pointing out she was a human bullhorn bellowing all instructions to us and punctuating each sentence with sharp blasts on a silver whistle which hung about her bulging neck on a leather bootlace. All right beginners, everyone line up at the shallow end. Boys here, girls here. Come on, come on, come on, come on. Boys on the left, girls on the right. It was that simple. And it only got easier after that. I wore my trunks under my pants and changed in the boys room after that first day. The short form of the birth name my parents bestowed on me was androgynous enough to allow my charade to proceed through the entire six weeks of swimming lessons. Six weeks of boyhood, six weeks of bliss. It was easier not to be afraid of things like diving boards and cannonballs and backstrokes when nobody expected you to be afraid. It was easier to jump into the deep end when you didn't have to worry about your top sliding up over your ears. I didn't have to be ashamed of my naked nipples because I had not covered them up in the first place. The water running over my shoulders and back felt simple and natural and good. Six weeks lasts a long time when you're six years old. So in the beginning, I guess I thought the summer would never really end, that grade two is still an age away. And I guess I thought that swimming lessons would continue far enough into the future that I didn't need to worry about a report card day. Or maybe I didn't think at all. He is not afraid of water over his head my mom read aloud in the car on the way home. My dad was driving, eyes straight ahead on the road. He can't tread water without a flotation device. Her eyes were narrow and hard and she kept trying to catch mine in the rear view mirror. Your son has successfully completed his beginners and intermediate badges and is ready for his Level one. I stared at the toes of my sneakers and said nothing. Now, excuse me, young lady, but would you like to explain to me just exactly what you have done here? How many people have you lied to? How have you been parading about all summer half naked? But how could I explain to her that it wasn't what I had done but what I didn't do? That I hadn't lied because no one had asked and that I had never, not once, felt naked? I can't believe you. You can't be trusted with a two piece. I said nothing the whole way home. There was nothing to say. She was right. I couldn't be trusted with a two piece. Not now and not then.
- [07:25]
Meg Wolitzer
Becca Blackwell Performed no Bikini by Ivan E. Coyote I'm Meg Wolitzer. This is such a charming, low key rite of passage story. You know that things may get tougher down the line, but right now there's the quiet triumph of knowing exactly who you are, no matter what you're wearing. Our second work, Sleepless, is by Michael Cunningham, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of the Hours. Other works include the novel A Home at the End of the World and the collection A Wild Swan and Other Tales from which we featured some stories. He's an old friend of selected shorts, so was high on our list of writers we commissioned to contribute to our anthology Small Odysseys. In the bittersweet tale that follows, lovers who have drifted through their lives try for a moment of permanent switch like sleep is just out of reach. The reader is someone we've called on a lot recently to give some ballast to stories of uncertainty and regret. Mike Doyle. He's a Law and Order SVU alum and other work includes the television series New Amsterdam and the film Rabbit Hole. Here is Michael Cunningham's Sleepless, performed by Mike Doyle.
- [08:47]
Becca Blackwell
Sleepless We've been awake three or four days now. It isn't the drugs or the music or the dog. It isn't only that. It's because we've gotten too nervous and interested to sleep. We've been so many places we stopped setting our clocks long ago when we realized it was always going to be too late. We had what we needed. There wasn't anything for us to be on time for. We had Pilate, our shepherd retriever mix who took everything that happened with the same baffled good cheer. We had Heather, our sister mother who'd had the good sense to jump into our truck and leave it all behind. The Dunkin Donuts uniform, the Pittsburgh rain. If you're willing to call us pilgrims you could say we were taking the little path. Wherever you look for us we've always just left. But when your dog starts sighing into herself, when you know from her eyes that she's ready to disappear, you stop driving and you pick her a spot. You get her a little stillness, a place she can vanish into. You raid the emergency fund in the Folgers can find a house to rent at the water's edge, far north, far enough that in summer night brushes across it all quickly and gently as a silk scarf. It's granite and sky here, Witch pines the blue black mirror of the ocean and us a dream this old house is having. Pilot panting softly in her corner in the bed. We've made her out of quilts and towels, no longer paying attention to the food and water we keep putting out. Trask and I still using and Heather not. She's got a plan. Massage school and Fall river classes start the day after tomorrow. Tonight, our third or fourth sleepless one. Trask and I make out on the sofa. We sit with Pilate as she huffingly contemplates her final mystery, read the bloated old magazines and play the scratchy vinyls we found here. John Coltrane and Miles Davis, Charles Mingus and Herbie Hancock. Trask and I do a slow snakey dance to Miles D. Who says with his horn, gaudy beautiful world, Gaudy beautiful world. We're blissed out on the last of the Dilaudid we'd copped in Burlington. We dance lazily but with grace, a kind of grace, moving as we are through the soft heavy atmosphere as it wraps its invisible shapes around us. Heather says, you boys are too much. It's a surprising thing for her to say. I'd assumed we were too little. Heather stands solidly with her lace up boots, hands on hips. Her platinum hair is the brightest spot in the room. She could be the wife of the music. Everything about her is famous to us. Trask says our careers as modern dancers were tragically cut short by circumstances beyond our control. Heather shakes her head over the strangeness of us. I could say what if you didn't go? But we all know it's time. Classes are about to start and besides, Heather has ridden with us until we reached her destination. She's ready for a mailbox and a washing machine. Nobody blames her. Later. Trask stands with me on the front porch, gaunt and blue, white as a medieval saint. Heather's inside, sitting in a dim circle of lamplight, reading one of her massage books. Out here on the porch it's all strands and helixes of stars. It's the single hour of true night and I know what Trask is thinking because I'm thinking the same thing. The earth is forgetting us. Look at all that. It's forgotten already. Look at what it chooses to remember. Wind, gnarled trees and black rocks washed by tides. A single star reflected in a pool of tidewater. Heather is forgetting us too. Not our names or our faces but us, our anthems and inclinations, the way we affect a room. Trask and I are already becoming an adventure she had. We got her out of Pittsburgh. We pierced her nightly with the arrows of our love. We were probably always meant to become a story she'd tell about how two peculiar boys, hopped up on who knows what, pulled up to the Duncan one graveyard shift night and did what they could to get her from a sad life to a better one. Out on the porch Trask says, hey. Just that, I say. Hey yourself. We stopped conversing a long while ago. We know all we need to know. We know that we're together right now. We'll be together tomorrow when the bus pulls away with Heather on it. We'll be two figures in a bus station parking lot, getting smaller and smaller as we wave goodbye. We'll be together later when we put Pilate into the pine grove above the house. Trask looks down at the ebony ocean. We are the lords of this particular universe, this star speckled water, this funky porch with its busted rattan and dead geraniums still prim in their pots. Trask says, I'm feeling a little tired. Me too. No you're not. You're never tired. Right, I answer. It's true. I sleep like everybody does, but I have no sleep self, no dark refuge from the waking world. Sleep for me is a low gray static that comes in little bursts, then goes again. The world is too noisy and remarkable for me to slip away from it for very long. Or it might just be the drugs, Trask says. It'd be nice to say somewhere for a while. Like here? I ask. Trask hoots out a laugh, tussles my hair. Good idea, he says. And we pay for the castle. How exactly? Right. We can barely afford a few days in the house, and only because it's not expensive. With its doors too warped to close and its lines of softly luminous mold in the shower tile grout, I say we could probably live in the attic for a long time before anybody noticed. And do what? Wait for somebody to notice, I guess. Traska and I have a laugh together, each of us cracking the other one up, though what I just said wasn't all that funny. We seem to be laughing about the joke of the world, its avenues and mansions, its immaculate stores blazing and trumpeting along as Trask and I cavort on the edges, little clownish guys all battered hat and broken shoe shuffle, dancing, bowing to the citizens who happen by. I'll miss Pilot, I say. Yeah, trask answers. She's a good dog. Hey, where do you think we should go from here? Trask is attracted to destinations. I do what I can to think up a few. It's potato season, I say. We could get work in Idaho. Do potatoes have a season this far north? I say. You got to dig them up before the ground freezes. It could be true. Neither of us can think of a reason for it to be untrue. Or there's Oregon, I say. We could fish for salmon in Oregon. There is, in fact, Oregon. It's beautiful, people say. And rainy and bright green, right? So people say. He and I hold hands to locate ourselves in terms of each other. A larger sense of location is too challenging. At present, Trask believes he's searching for a home in the world, but the that's due to the fact that he comes from a place where lawns are mowed and everybody went to college, a place he needed to be rescued from in ways not unlike Heather getting out from behind the counter at Dunkin Donuts, though Trask would never tell himself the story in that particular way. So let's go to Oregon, I say. We could. We could absolutely go to Oregon. He looks wistfully out at the brightening night. He's getting tired of always being somewhere else. He's getting ready to choose some strange place and start calling it where he lives. I, on the other hand, maintain that it's all homes. Some of them are rich and comfortable, and some of them are bleak. But even the worst of them, even the parking lot behind the Nashville Walmart where we got robbed by the handsome hitchhiker on the hottest day of the year, even the doctorless emergency room in Cicero, they were homes. Trask is having his misspent youth. He's needed for a while to be not that guy, all the more so because he's so well qualified. He's looking to escape his own white boy handsomeness, his SAT score, all the gifts he didn't ask for. The world is not only forgetting us, we're starting to forget ourselves. But Trask is already remembering us on this rented porch, talking about where to go to next. But now, right now, we're here. Trask has my hair to touch. I have the knobs of his spine to finger walk. I have his smell, that Melanie insinuation, overripe cantaloupe under the rancor sweat of him. Heather takes a look at us through the living room window, and because she loves us more than she wants to, she puts a record on. It's John Coltrane. Just as dawn flares up, a shimmer of silver light announces itself. The ocean takes on its first hint of the day's transparency. Heather returns to her chair to read up on pressure points, and Pilate continues the work of relinquishing herself. The constellations blink out in recognition of the encroaching day. Trask watches as they're absorbed into the ether. He turns to me, he says, hello there, beautiful boy. That's when I'm sure he's never called me beautiful boy before. When I tell him he's the beauty here, he just looks away again. He's already too late to catch the last of the stars. I'll miss Trask, but I'm also thinking about my own future. There's always someone who needs help getting away from whatever it is that has pinned them to their boards exam week or a toxic job or a girlfriend who wonders why he gets home so late. People want to get out of almost everything. Usually, in my experience, the cord will only stretch so far. I think for Trask it was the night the highway patrol woman kept asking questions with her flashlight beamed on his face like he was an empty room she was talking into. No matter how courteously he asked her to talk to him with her actual face. Sooner or later you understand that becoming inconsequential took much less time and effort than you'd ever imagined. Tresk wants to start mattering again. Who could blame him for that? But it's not going to be a story about a doomed romance when he's got his own mailbox and washing machine. He won't be able he, with his sweet if impractical devotion to the truth, to offer the confessional version in which he, a heartthrob, went astray long enough to pierce a lost boy's Heart. That's not his story. We both had our hearts pierced. We both know rather than look at me, he demonstrates in profile and how beautiful an innocent, exhausted being can be when he's already looked up the train times. We both know about that, too. From inside the house, Coltrane blows into his horn. Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me? I can't be heartbroken for Trask. I'd give him the story he wants if I had it to offer. But I've already given him all my admittedly modest offerings. My absence of destination, conscience and reluctance. I can't pretend to hopes I've never held. I'd do that for him if I could manage it. I give him the story about himself as a reckless and rapacious love criminal. Something to sob into a future girlfriend's lap, something for her to forgive. It's a plausible version. You took the ride for a while. You've been somewhere. You're not just another of those guys who believe in what they're wearing and saying. But Trask and I know who's heartbroken here. We know who's unable to live with the changes. Which is why, when he aims his full face at me, when his doomed gorgeousness blooms one more time for my benefit alone, when he asks me if I care to dance, I say, why, yes. Thank you. I believe I would. Thanks.
- [22:55]
Meg Wolitzer
Mike Doyle performed Michael Cunningham's Sleepless. I'm Meg Wallitzer. Sleepless also inspired a new work by an artist in another medium. On the day Mike Doyle recorded his performance, our live audience was treated to a new movement piece choreographed by Larry Kegwin, who's created dynamic work for 15 years at venues such as Lincoln center and the Joyce. If you enjoyed the story, check out the performance. You can find it, as well as other performances inspired by the small odyssey stories@pledshorts.org what Cunningham does with devastating beauty is place you inside his characters. We inhabit their bodies and hearts, feel their intermingled sadness and joy, and lose ourselves for the span of the peace. A story like this strips away stubborn boundaries between the self and the other. And thinking about it now, in many ways, the legacy of Stonewall is about challenging the dominant culture to do the same. When we return, Stormy Weather. 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. 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. You already know Selected Shorts is a radio show and podcast, but did you know it starts with a real live show? Join us at Symphony Space in New York City, on tour across the country, or as part of our Livestream audience. As an audience member, you will be part of what makes Selected Shorts broadcasts and podcasts so special, and you can listen to your favorite stories again on your local public radio station or on our podcast. To find out more about where to be part of the action, visit selectedshorts.org on this show, we're celebrating pride but leaving the front lines for the important right to share ordinary yet still extraordinary stories of love and family from a rich variety of perspectives. Our third work on this program, Snowfall, is by Deesha Filyaw, an American author, columnist and public speaker. It comes from her debut short story collection, the Secret Lives of Church Ladies, which was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award in Fiction and won the story prize. Snowfall will speak to all of us who've spent a seemingly endless amount of time digging our cars out in the winter. Not you. Don't worry, the rest of the story will speak to you anyway. A newish couple have moved from their native south to the frozen north, and it's not only the roadways that are slippery. Snowfall is read by Michelle Beck, a New York City based theatrical powerhouse who's worked with Sam Mendy's acclaimed Bridge Project and appeared in a raft of Shakespearean roles at the Public Theater and Theater for a New Audience. But now she's neck deep in Snowfall.
- [26:11]
Narrator
Snowfall. Black women aren't meant to shovel snow. Rhonda mumbles this as we are knee deep in the stuff. We have to do it when it snows heavy overnight. We wake before the sun comes up to get dressed, shovel ourselves out, clear off our Honda, prevent slip and fall lawsuits from neighbors, and still get to work on time. But I know where Rhonda is coming from. We, who apparently are built for everything, are simply not built for this. No gloves exist that keep our hands from freezing as we move snow and ice from one spot to another and from the car windshield. No boots exist that can keep the cold from numbing our toes. No amount of layers and waterproof pants keep the chill at bay. We feel it through our chests. And no, the physical activity does not warm us up. It makes us resentful. We don't like to admit it, but the snow is beautiful. When it's that light dusting that rests on bare branches, when it looks all puffy and cottony and innocent, the problem is the work snow demands. Still, I say, maybe it's just us, as I clear a stripe into the snow on the trunk of the car. All the black women born and raised in this city. Well, yeah, there aren't that many, but they must be used to it by now. It's only our first winner here. Maybe in time. Not everything has to be interrogated. Arlitha, rhonda says as she scrapes away a patch of ice on the edge of the driveway. I'm Arlitha when she's pissed at me. I'm Leelee the rest of the time, which is most of the time. Most of the time, we live in the space between my need to dissect and her need to keep things whole with declarative statements. Right now we are living in the space of the morning after yet another bedtime conversation that started innocently enough. We are living in the space of me staring at the ceiling for hours, then oversleeping again, of Rhonda having to do the bulk of the snow and ice clearing again. The third time I rolled over and asked Rhonda to give me five more minutes, she didn't answer. By the time I woke up, I could hear her shovel stabbing the sheet of snow on the driveway. Through our bedroom window, I watched her work skull cap pull down tight over her locks, which fall over her shoulders and are dotted with snowflakes, slim arms delivering harder blows to the ice that steam seems possible. I brushed the last mounds of snow off of the hood of the car and returned my scraper to the trunk. Rhonda is almost done clearing the ice. When my teaching job at the university brought us here last fall, we knew there would be snow, but we didn't know the stuff would shape the course of so many of our days and nights. Neither of us has fully mastered driving in the snow yet, and our experience with Uber drivers has been hit or miss, so we stock up on groceries and run as many errands as possible on clear days. But it's not just the snow. The cold temperatures alone have kept us in binge watching episodes of the Office and having Thai food delivered. There's just something about being out in it that makes us mildly cranky and singularly focused on getting to the next heated place. We were born and raised in warmer places, Georgia and Florida warmer, too, in the residual charm, polite smiles, and gentility of the white people whose ancestors owned ours. In the south, the weather does not force tears from your eyes, causing the faces of passing strangers to register worry about you for a millisecond it's the wind, you want to tell them, but a millisecond is not enough time. In the south, the weather does not hurt you down to your bones or force you to wake up half an hour early to remedy what it has done to your steps, your sidewalk, your driveway and your car as you slept. But the south has hurricanes, they say. Yes, but not damn near daily and not for a quarter of the year. You tell people up here that you're from the south, and nine times out of ten they say the same old thing. I'm sure you miss the sunshine. Rhonda and I both miss taking sunshine and early morning commutes for granted. But what we really miss are the laughter and embrace of our mothers and grandmothers and aunties, kin and not kin. We miss the big oak tables and at their dining rooms where as kids in the 70s and 80s we ate bowl after bowl of their banana pudding as they talked to each other about how much weight we'd gained like you weren't even there. We miss helping them snap green beans and shell peas sitting at their kitchen tables watching the Young and the Restless on tv, the perched on the pass through. We miss how they loved Victor Newman, hated Jill foster and envied Ms. Chancellor and how she dripped diamonds and chandeliers. We miss their bare, browned arms reaching to hang clothes on the line with wooden pins. We missed their sun tea, brewed all day in big jars on the picnic table in the backyard, then later loaded with sugar and sipped over plates of their fried chicken in the early evening. We missed lying next to them at night in their four poster beds with two soft mattresses covered by iron sheets and three generation old blankets. We missed their housecoats perfumed with absorbine junior liniment and hints of the white shoulders they'd spritzed on from an atomizer that morning before church. We missed tracing the soft folds in their skin when we held hands and watched their favorite TV shows in their beds, Dallas Dynasty, Knott's Landing, and Falcon Crest. We miss how they laughed and were easy with each other, how their friendships lasted lifetimes, outlasting wayward husbands and ungrateful children. Outlasted. That time Alma caught Joe cheating and she whacked him in the head with a sword he brought back from the war but he told the people at the hospital that he didn't know who did it. Outlasted having to hide your medicine bottles and your shoes because otherwise seven of your nine children are liable to steal them. We miss how they seem to judge everyone but themselves. Or maybe that judgment was in the nerve pills they procured from the Chinese doctor on Bay street who didn't ask questions. We miss their furtive cups of brown liquor on Friday and unabashed cries for Jesus come Sunday. We missed their one gold tooth that made us wonder who they had been as young women. We missed their blue crabs, the shells boiled to a blood red in washtubs atop bricks over makeshift fires built in the yard. The washtubs reminded us of a cauldron full of rock salt and cayenne drenched pepper, water bubbling and rolling mesh, bags of seasoning and halved onions and peppers floating on top along with potatoes and ears of corn. We miss how they stood over those cauldrons like witches stirring a potion with sweat beading on the tips of their nose and smoke swirling around their hands and wrists. They wielded long handled spoons to press the frantic, flailing crabs towards their death. We miss how they made our Easter dresses and pound cakes and away out of no way. But we lost all of those things when we chose each other. Only the memories remain. Which is why, even though we grew up in different places, so many of our bedtime conversations start with Remember when? As we lie there in the dark with our nostalgia and nothing to distract us from it. Not even each other. Not anymore. It did snow once in my little town in Florida in 1989. I was home from college for winter break. I was visiting Tanya, a childhood friend, when my mom called her house looking for me, worried had I seen the weather report? I hadn't. When she told me the forecast called for snow and ice, I laughed and asked if she'd been drinking. Mama huffed, girl, I'm serious. This weather ain't to be played with. Mayretta said over by her car's just slipping and sliding all over the road because these people don't know how to drive in it. I know I asked you to stop by churches on your way home and get me a two piece, but you just come on home now. Yes, ma' am. But of course I didn't listen. I stayed at Tanya's another hour. Mama told me later that she tried to call back, but apparently Tanya's mother was on the phone and they didn't have call waiting, and when Mama finally got through, I'd left. Of course this was before cell phones, so the minute I walked in the door Mama started fussing. I was worried sick thinking you were dead in a ditch somewhere. I held out the bag of Church's chicken to her and she looked at it like it was an alien. I told you. I know, I said. But the roads between Tanya's and Church's and Church's in here were fine. And I know you really wanted the chicken. I got you all the wings. I held out the bag to her again and I remembered your hot pepper. Mama dropped down to her favorite armchair and laughed and cried all at once. She pulled me down into her lap and rocked me. I was as big as she was, so we must have been a sight. Lili, you're all I've got in the world, mama said. The idea of anything happening to you. It had always been just Mama and me. Mama never married or to my knowledge, dated. My father didn't want to be one, or at least not mine. Mama said he had a wife and kids and was a deacon at the church she and her family used to go to before I was born. She said that the Lord had given me to her when she was 41. No spring chicken, and he didn't make mistakes. I knew Mama loved me. I knew she always worked two jobs and sacrificed so that I could have everything I needed and most everything I wanted. Disney World when I was five, when it was all she could do to keep the lights on, sending me $10 money orders at college, when my tuition was the same amount she earned in a year at her second job. That's why I insisted on bringing her the chicken. She did everything for me and so little for herself. But like a beautiful quilt in summertime, my mother's love was the suffocating kind, the kind you chafe against and don't miss until the seasons change and it's gone. Back then I didn't know if my mother would still love me if she knew that Tanya was more than just a friend and I wasn't trying to find out. Rhonda and I are not without black women friends in this city. There's Faith, Stacey, Olivia, Kelly. But friendship is not the same as history, just as a bone is not the same as its marrow. These friends, they tell us that this city of iron and steel and cold is better, safer than where we came from. They imagine where we come from and see Confederate flags and rednecks and dusty dudes with gold grills rapping about bitches and hoes. They don't see home when we lie in bed at night and remember when Rhonda doesn't see home either. Just sepia moments and sepia people, artifacts frozen in amber, like putting the well worn photo album back on the shelf or turning off the TV after watching Good Times on TV Land, she drifts off to sleep so easily, leaving me alone to fend off my thoughts. Last night my thoughts won. I stared at the ceiling and thought about my mother lying in her bed, a quilt and a portable heater sufficient for winter in her world. I haven't spoken to her since October, but even then we pretty much just checked in to make sure the other person was alive. We talked about the Lady's Auxiliary fish fry and the hat she bought for Women's Day at church, which elderly neighbor's son got sent to prison, third strike for selling them drugs. Whether or not I like my job at the university, yes, and then the usual tension returned, and the regret we each felt for calling, for answering was palpable on those rare calls. My mother never asks about Rhonda. I stared at the ceiling and wondered if my mother still refers to Rhonda as some girl she met on the Internet when she talks to Ms. Mayrita or her other friends about us. She knows Rhonda's name because I told her. I told her everything about me that she claimed she didn't know, an ignorance belied by her questions, years of endless questions about the nameless boys who never called, never took me to prom, never gave her a different reason to be ashamed of me. But my mother knew Rhonda's name and she refused to say it, refused to meet her, refused to do anything but pray for my soul. As I walked out her front door for the last time eight months ago, she hurled the words at my back. Running off from here with some girl you met on the Internet? Who raised you, Lili, you're all I've got in this world. How could my mother's world just keep right on spinning without me in it? Maybe it hadn't. Maybe she was lying in bed thinking about me too, worrying. Maybe Rhonda's mother had put her out as a teenager. They hadn't spoken in 20 years. Rhonda had couch surfed for a while, turned 18, moved to the city and got a job at the post office. She saved up for an apartment of her own and vowed never again to be anywhere she wasn't wanted. When I met her, we were 30 and she just bought a house. We visited back and forth between her town and mine for a few years until I got a job at the university. She didn't hesitate when I asked her to move here with me. You are home, Lee, she'd said, and at first I didn't catch what she meant Then I did. When we first moved here, I believed she could be right. I believed that we were all the home either of us could ever need. Through the end of a mild summer and through a gorgeous red gold fall, I believed it. And then last night, after an hour or so of staring at the ceiling, I did something I never do. I woke Rhonda up and I asked her, do you ever think about us moving back home? Earlier this year, a cousin had told Rhonda that whenever people asked about her, her mother said that she was probably dead somewhere, even though the cousin had let her know that Rhonda was alive and well. In the dark I couldn't make out Rhonda's face, but in the ensuing silence I imagined her blinking her way out of the sleep fog. Then she said, arletha, I already told you where home is for me, and immediately I wished I could take that question back. Rhonda leans the shovel against the side of the house and sprinkles salt on the clear driveway and sidewalk. I wait for her inside the warm car. With only one car and a shitty mass transit system, I will drop her off at her clerk job at the corner courthouse and then drive to campus. On Fridays I teach an afternoon class, Black Feminism, so I have a few hours to get some grading and prep done. When Rhonda is done with the salt, she climbs in beside me. I brush a smattering of snowflakes from her locks and they melt from the heat of my hand. I can't tell if she stiffened at my touch or if I just imagined it. Her silence as I back out of the driveway suggests the former forecast says there's another storm coming through. Later, I say, how many more weeks of this shit? Whatever that groundhog says, I guess. Rhonda says it's slow going down the steep hills that lead out of our neighborhood. I fear the brakes locking up and us coasting right through a stop sign. A bigger fear is other drivers, probably natives, who slow down very little, if at all on days like this. Once the roads are clear, it's a free for all, but I guess if you've been here long enough, you have more confidence that the black road is just road and not black ice. Rhonda and I don't yet have a critical mass of data points to give us that confidence. The natives don't know this, of course. They ride our bumper, honk, and swerve around us when we go too slowly for their liking. I want to hang a sign in the back window that says we are not from here. Please understand. Rhonda just says fuck these people and flips them off as they whiz by us. But today's ride into the city is fuck free. Rude drivers pass and honk without a word from Rhonda in front of the courthouse. I lean over to kiss her before she gets out of the car, and our lips barely touch before she's gone. How long had it been since we'd done anything more in bed than kiss and reminiscence? But the kiss, such as it is, is still a kiss, and I wonder if I will ever stop noticing and cataloging all of the things we do here that we didn't couldn't do back home. I wonder if that catalog will ever grow long enough to become enough for me. Once I got to campus, it's harder than usual to find parking because snow had been plowed into some of the spaces. Eventually I find a spot two blocks from my office on a tree lined side street. I brace myself for the cold and throw open the car door. I step out and my feet slide from under me. In an instant my butt slams into a patch of ice and my shoulder and back scrape against the base of the car. When I land, the car door blocks my view and my first thought is, does anyone see me? But I'm not sure if I want to be seen or not. The cold seeps through my waterproof pants and pain shoots up from my lower back to my shoulders. I want to get up, but I'm afraid of slipping and falling down again. I can hear people walking and driving past. I could call out to them. I could get help. I look up at the sky, which is gray like the branches overhead. The branches bend towards me, yielding beneath the weight of the snow piled along them. A thought crystallizes and takes hold, a thought I haven't had in years, maybe a decade. I want my mother. If my phone wasn't in my purse in the backseat of the car, I would call my mother right this minute. My mother who had been my soft place to land until she wasn't. Everything hurts, and I suspect standing up will hurt even more. I wince at the thought of walking the two blocks to my office. Then I tell myself I'm being ridiculous. Get up, get up, get up, get up. I repeat this in my head and then under my breath until I'm on my knees. I hoist myself back into the driver's seat and slam the door shut. I turn the car on and the heat. I'm sobbing now and it's as if the sound belongs to someone else. Like the time I woke up from minor surgery, annoyed that there was a woman nearby who wouldn't stop crying, not realizing that the woman was me. It hurts to reach back and grab my purse, but I do it anyway. I take out my phone and I pull up my mother's number. I sit there with my finger hovering over the call button for forever, it seems, but then I scroll through the recent calls list and tap Rhonda's name. I try to get the crying under control before she answers, but I can't. Lili, baby, slow down, slow down, she says. I can't understand what you're saying. What happened? I hate this fucking snow, okay? I hate the snow. I hate winter. I hate this city. I don't want to be here. Silence. Rhonda sighs. Where do you want to be? I don't know. I think you do know. I slipped. What? I slipped and fell getting out of the car. I'm fine. But I almost called my mother. Silence. And then Rhonda says, must be nice. I want to explain how it was just a primal reaction, this urge to call my mother. I want to tell her that she is home, too, that she is now my soft place to land and I am hers. But nothing I can say will change the fact of my mother privilege. I could call my mother if I wanted to, and she would answer, and she might even offer a modicum of comfort and concern, same as she would offer a stranger. I could get that, at least. Rhonda could not. Lee, if you're sure you're fine, rhonda says. I have to get back to work. Fresh tears sting my eyes. I'm sure. Yeah. The call drops and I return the phone to my purse. I push through the pain and get out of the car again, this time stepping over the icy patch. The walk to the office isn't too bad, but I can feel a bruise pulsing across my neck and shoulders. By the time my class starts, I've taken three Tylenol, and I get through it by sitting in a chair in the front of the room instead of standing and lecturing like I normally do. I feel like maybe I'm moving a beat slower than usual, but my students, a really engaged group of 12 women and two men, don't seem to notice. I tell them that they are the only bright spot in an otherwise awful day. I'm sure this weirds them out, but I felt like saying it later, when Rhonda gets in the car, she asks how I'm feeling. I tell her I'm fine, and we make the slow crawl through rush hour traffic in silence. The snow is just starting to come down hard as we enter our neighborhood. I pull the car into the driveway and push through the pain again to slowly ease out of the car. When my feet are steady, I notice Rhonda standing next to the driver's side door with her car keys in her hand. Head upstairs and I'll see you in a few, she says. Where are you going? It's snowing. I know, Lee. It'll be all right. But where are you going? Rhonda shakes her head. Just go in the house and get yourself a warm bath, please. I go inside, run the bath, and try not to worry. Our tub is the clawfoot kind, the kind we'd had in my house growing up. Rhonda thinks I chose this house because of the tub, and she might be right. There were houses in better shape and in better neighborhoods than this one, but only this one had a claw foot tub. I sink down, letting the water cover my back and shoulders, letting my eyelids close. I guess this is how Rhonda felt the night of the first snow. I was out in it, driving, and she was at home, worried. She had stayed home from work that day to wait for the electrician to come and replace some outlets in the house. Traffic was awful because of the and an accident, so by the time I got home, it had been dark for a while. Rhonda had been torn between staying on the phone with me to know I was safe and hanging up so that I wouldn't be distracted. Then my phone died and the dilemma was solved. Now my fully charged phone rests on the floor next to the tub. I distract myself with a childhood game. I soap up my hands and blow bubbles, using my fingers in the okay sign position as a makeshift wand. The pain in my back and shoulders begins to subside. I imagine it disappearing into the water mixed in with the soap residue. Eventually I doze off. I wake up off and on to add hot water and to check my phone. At one point there's a text from Rhonda on my way. I text back, love you. No reply. When I wake up again, Rhonda is standing next to the tub, holding one of the oversized T shirts I sleep in. Your back looks like you've been in a fight with a bear and lost. Come on, she says. I have something for you. Downstairs, she's changed out of her work clothes and into a strapless sundress I hadn't seen since before we moved here. I dry off and I follow her downstairs. I smell it before I see it. The pepper hits my nose first, and then the full array of aromas. Onions, peppers, old Bay, Zatarin's crab boil seasoning. Grocery store bags littered the floor and counters. The kitchen table is covered in newspapers that Rhonda must have bought at the store. My mother always saved old newspapers to cover the picnic table in the backyard, and just like on my mother's table, there are little bowls of melted butter, a bottle of Louisiana hot sauce, and a pitcher of sweet tea. On the stove, the stock pot is full of boiling bright red water. A tiny furious ocean full of snow, crab legs, potatoes, and ears of corn. We've tried before to get live blue crabs at Holy's, the fresh seafood place everyone recommends, but their shipment comes in early Monday mornings and they sell out within minutes. I turn to Rhonda. She smiles and throws her arms out wide. They're frozen, but they're the best cure we got for the winter blues. Just then I caught on to the song playing on Rhonda's ipod, Summertime by DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince. I two step my way to Rhonda's arms, and we sway each other around and around the kitchen until the crabs are ready and our faces are damp from the moist, salty air. Rhonda fills an aluminum pan with crabs and sets it in the middle of the table. I pour some tea. Not that you need my permission, rhonda says as she joins me at the table, but it's okay with me if you want to call your mother. I mean, don't let me be the reason you don't call her. And maybe you want to go see her, spend some time with her. She calls, not much, but that means she's leaving space for you in her life. I try to detect any trace of resignation or martyrdom beneath her words, but as is always the case, what Rhonda says is exactly what she means. Babe, I say, the space my mother has left for me isn't big enough for two. Rhonda nods and we dig in. Outside, snow blankets our deck. It will fall all night, and tomorrow again will do its bidding.
- [53:13]
Meg Wolitzer
Michelle Beck Performed Snowfall by Deesha Filyaw I'm Meg Wolitzer. This story isn't just about the rocky road to love. It's it's about the moment when a house becomes a home, about how you can keep what you thought you left behind, about really being known by another person, even if you did meet her on the Internet. And the physical life here is just so vivid. I swear the cold seeped into my bones as I listened. There's nothing mild in this story, not the weather outside, or for that matter, the weather inside. Our final work is a reminder that all this comfort did come at a cost. Poet K Ulande Barrett's Song for the Kicked out is performed by the author. Barrett contributes regularly to magazines such as Asian American Literary Review and the New York Times, and has two published collections, when the Chant Comes and More Than Organization.
- [54:19]
Kay Ulande Barrett
The streets are not gold they lied I got a rough throat, I got a rough life the streets are not made with gold they lied I got too much queer and brown in me to live their way tonight and my mama, ooh, she found me waist up in you I said my Catholic Filipino mother, rest her soul Found me waist up drinking you and my mama said that I was the devil made this journey here a waste. Couldn't I just make some money? Put on some lipstick, some makeup, a knock? It is so hard in this country for us Couldn't I just behave? My mother said you have to leave this house her spirit filled with ache My belongings freckled the street this journey here is not self made I say all you laughing and juking in the alleys I say all you sleeping to roaches cries I say all of you couch surfing despite the fuss and fights I say all you kissing despite those aching cries Together we are an anthem, a song no matter what. Together we're bigger than all their hetero CIS straight fuss. Together we are louder than all the worlds unsaid. Together we're as mighty as our ancestors up from the dead because we are bigger than the skylines that hold us. We are bigger than the sirens that stab our hearts. We are bigger than Boys Town, progress, rainbow flags, vodka ads and bars. We are bigger than bleeding our blood up to the stars because together, my family, we are a psalm, a prayer, a chant, a riot, a hope, no matter what. And we're bigger than all their hetero cis, straight white American fuss. Together we are larger than all the world's unsets. Together we're as mighty as our ancestors up from the dead.
- [56:29]
Meg Wolitzer
Kay Ulande Barrett performed their poem Song for the Kicked Out. I'm Meg Walitzer. This powerful work really throws the gauntlet down. While Barrett laments the loss of their previous life, they remind us what they've gained a right to tell their own story. Stories like this from authors like Michael Cunningham and Ivan E. Coyote help us to see some of the promise of pride fulfilled. LGBTQ people living what we might call ordinary lives with the usual degrees of happiness, sadness and humor. I lived in the village in my 20s, right around the corner from Stonewall, which at the time had become a Chinese restaurant that my friends and I frequented. You could have cold sesame noodles and a side of remembering Wikipedia informs me that over the years the building has been a bagel shop and a shoe store, and now it's called the Stonewall Inn again. But regardless of what you can buy in that space a year or a decade from now, it'll always have a powerful history. 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. Selected Shorts is supported by the Dungannon Foundation. This program is also made possible with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature. Selected Shorts is produced and distributed by Symphony Space.
- [58:18]
Narrator
Sam.