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Selected Shorts
The New Yorker: A Century of Fiction
00:59:39
Host Meg Wolitzer presents a program celebrating the 100th anniversary of The New Yorker. One of the magazine’s strengths has always been its fiction, and honor of this winning literary streak, this year saw the release of the collection, A Century of Fiction in The New Yorker. The quartet of stories on this show is drawn from that volume. The program includes a pithy satire by E. B. White, “Life Cycle of a Literary Genius,” read by Liev Schreiber; “Love,” by William Maxwell, a tender recounting of an collective adolescent crush, read by Fred Hechinger; “Bullet in the Brain,” a powerful reversal of fortune tale by Tobias Wolff, read by Liev Schreiber; and “All Will be Well,” an intriguing tangle of truths and half-truths by Yiyun Li, read by Ann Harada.
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- [00:08]
Meg Wolitzer
This week on Selected Shorts, we collaborated with the New Yorker magazine, known for, among other things, its spectacular short fiction. We're excited to bring you New Yorker mainstays like William Maxwell and contemporary contributors like Tobias Wolf and Ian Lee. I'm Meg Wolitzer. Stay with me for a page turning listening experience. You're listening to Selected Shorts, where our greatest actors transport us through the magic of fiction, one short story at a time. The New Yorker magazine turned 100 this year. In 1925, Harold Ross, the magazine's founding editor, envisioned a magazine of wit, reporting, fiction, art and criticism, a reflection in word and picture of metropolitan life. There was nothing like it at the time. And while it started by reflecting metropolitan life, it soon embraced the breadth of American culture in all its forms. And one of those forms is its fiction. Writers who have been featured in the magazine throughout their careers include Raymond Carver, Jhumpa Lahiri, Lori Moore, Haruki Murakami, and John Updike, to name just a few members of its extended fictional family. In honor of this winning literary streak, this year saw the release of the collection A Century of Fiction in the New Yorker. And we at Selected Shorts thought that was a reason to celebrate. So we invited the magazine's longtime fiction editor, Deborah Treisman, to host an evening featuring some of the works included in the anthology. You can think of this program as a sort of New Yorker sampler. It includes a pithy satire by E.B. white, a tender recounting of an adolescent crush by William Maxwell, a powerful reversal of fortune by Tobias Wolf, and an intriguing tangle of truths and half truths by Ian Lee. Here's Deborah Treisman introducing the evening from the stage at Symphony Space.
- [02:17]
Deborah Treisman
This was a project that ate up a huge amount of my reading time for almost a year. Doing all this reading was time consuming, but it also gave me a vivid sense of the ways in which our ideas about what a short story is or can be have changed over the decades. The New Yorker began its life as a humor magazine, and many of the early stories are what we would now think of as comic sketches. But as the years passed, those sketches expanded into plots and narratives that would extend over time and through change that incorporated a wider sense of what was happening in the country, in the world, and explored lives, ideas and language in ever changing ways. So in making selections for the anthology, I had to ask myself a lot of questions about what made a story feel like a landmark in the New Yorker's fiction publishing history. And there were a lot of different answers to that question. One solid thing I can say about the choices I made for this book was that for every story that's in there, there were 10 more I wanted to include. So tonight we're going to hear a number of different pieces of fiction that the New Yorker published at some point in the last century. There's no way in the course of an evening here to express the full breadth of what we've printed in the magazine, but we gave it a shot.
- [03:35]
Meg Wolitzer
That was Deborah Treisman speaking from the stage at Symphony Space. Now we'll hear Our first story, E.B. white's life cycle of a Literary Genius. White was a New Yorker writer for many years and contributed to its reputation for droll humor. He is also, of course, the author of treasured children's books Stuart Little and Charlotte's Web, and the co author of the Writers and Editor's bible, the Elements of Style. His little amuse bouche. Life Cycle of a Literary Genius is performed by Liev Schreiber. His work includes the title role in Ray Donovan on television, and he also appeared in Glengarry Glen Ross on Broadway.
- [04:27]
Liev Schreiber
Life Cycle of a Literary Genius one Shows precocity at six years of age, writes poem entitled To a Little Mouse beginning last night I heard a noise in my scrap basket. His mother likes poem and shows it to Aunt Susie. 2. At 14 years of age, encouraged by former success, writes short essay entitled the woods in Winter beginning I whistled to my dog Don and he raced and romped as we set out together. Sends this to St. Nicholas magazine and wins Silver Badge. 3. At 18 years of age, encouraged by success, writes sonnet entitled Too Blank and sends it to newspaper column columnist rewrites 13 lines and publishes it on dull day. 4. Encouraged by success at 24 years of age, writes whimsical article on on sex above 138th street, which he sends to Popular magazine. The article refers incidentally to 17 year locusts. Editor of magazine marks it use when timely and publishes it 16 years later when the locusts appear. 5. At 40, encouraged by success and accepts invitation to have lunch with editor of the popular magazine. Editor orders exotic dishes and mentions an opening on the staff. 6. Encouraged by success, dies of nervous indigestion right after lunch, leaving an illegitimate son who grows up in obscurity and writes the great American novel.
- [06:36]
Meg Wolitzer
Liev Schreiber performed Life Cycle of a Literary Genius by E.B. white. I'm Meg Wolitzer. This little gem reminds us that the fact that you can put pen to paper or hands to keyboard. The piece was published in 1926 does not make you a genius unless you are E.B. white. Our second work, Love, is by one of the New Yorker's masters, William Maxwell. Maxwell was the New Yorker's fiction editor for 40 years. His own published works include the novel so Long, See youe Tomorrow and all the Days and the Collected Stories of William Maxwell. Reading Love is Fred Hechinger, someone we're always glad to welcome back? Since he is a Symphony Space alum. Hechinger attended the Symphony Space Book Club camp as a child and then went on to roles on series including the White Lotus and the film adaptation of Colson Whitehead's Nickel Boyce. Here he is with love.
- [07:40]
Fred Hechinger
Love, Ms. Vera Brown, she wrote on the blackboard, letter by letter, in flawlessly oval Palmer Method. Our teacher for the fifth grade. The name might as well have been graven in stone as she called the role. Her voice was as gentle as the expression in her beautiful dark brown eyes. She reminded me of pansies. When she called on Alvin Ahrens to recite and he said, I know, but I can't say, the class snickered, but she said, try encouragingly, and waited to be sure that he didn't know the answer, and then said to one of the hands waving in the air, tell Alvin what one fifth of three eighths is if we arrived late to school, red faced and out of breath and bursting with the excuse we had thought up on the way before we could speak, she said, I'm sure you couldn't help it. Close the door, please, and take your seat. If she kept us after school, it was not to scold us but to help us pass the hard part. Somebody left a big red apple on her desk for her to find when she came into the classroom, and she smiled and put it in her desk out of sight. Somebody else left some purple asters, which she put in her drinking glass. After that the presents kept coming. She was the only pretty teacher in the school. She never had to ask us to be quiet or to stop throwing erasers. We would not have dreamed of doing anything that would displease her. Somebody wormed it out of her. When her birthday was while she was out of the room, the class voted to present her with flowers from the greenhouse. Then they took another vote and Sweet Peas won. When she saw the florist's box waiting on her desk, she said, oh, look inside. We all said. Her delicate fingers seemed to take forever to remove the ribbon. In the end she raised the lid of the box and exclaimed, read the card. We shouted. Many happy returns to Ms. Vera Brown from the fifth grade, it said. She put her nose in the flowers and said, thank you all very, very much, and then turned our minds to the spelling lesson for the day after school. We escorted her downtown in a body to a special matinee of D.W. griffith's Hearts of the World. She was not allowed to buy her ticket. We paid for everything. We meant to have her for our teacher forever. We intended to pass right up through the 6th, 7th, and 8th grades and on into high school, taking her with us. But that isn't what happened. One day there was a substitute teacher. We expected our real teacher to be back the next day, but she wasn't. Week after week passed and the substitute continued to sit at Mrs. Brown's desk, calling on us to recite and giving out tests and handing them back with grades on them, and we went on acting the way we had when Ms. Brown was there because we didn't want her to come back and find we hadn't been nice to the substitute. One Monday morning she cleared her throat and said that Ms. Brown was sick and not coming back for the rest of the term in the fall. We had passed on into the sixth grade and she was still not back. Benny Irish's mother found out that she was living with an aunt and uncle on a farm a mile or so beyond the edge of town and told my mother who. Who told somebody in my hearing. One afternoon after school, Benny and I got on our bikes and rode out to see her at the place where the road turned off to go to the cemetery and the chautauqua grounds. There was a red barn with a huge circus poster on it showing the entire inside of the Sells Floto circus tent and everything that was going on in all three rings. In the summertime, riding in the backseat of my father's open Chalmers, I used to crane my neck as we passed that turn, hoping to see every last tiger and flying trapeze artist, but it was never possible. The poster was weather beaten now, with loose strips of paper hanging down. It was getting dark when we wheeled our bikes up the lane of the farmhouse where Ms. Brown lived. You knock, benny said as we started up on the porch. No, you do it, I said. We hadn't thought ahead to what it would be like to see her. We wouldn't have been surprised if she had come to the door herself and thrown up her hands in astonishment when she saw who it was, but instead a much older woman opened the door and said, what do you want? We came to see Miss Brown? I said. We're in her class at school, benny explained. I could see that the woman was trying to decide whether she should tell us to go away, but she said, I'll find out if she wants to see you, and left us standing on the porch for what seemed like a long time. Then she appeared again and said, you can come in now. As we followed her through the front parlor I could make out in the dim light that that there was an old fashioned organ like the kind you used to see in country churches, and linoleum on the floor and stiff uncomfortable chairs and family portraits behind curved glass and big oval frames. The room beyond it was lighted by a coal oil lamp but seemed ever so much darker than the unlighted room we had just passed through. Propped up on pillows in a big double bed was our teacher, but so changed. Her arms were like sticks and all the life in her seemed concentrated in her eyes, which had dark circles around them and were enormous. She managed a flicker of recognition, but I was struck dumb by the fact that she didn't seem glad to see us. She didn't belong to us anymore. She belonged to her illness. Benny said, I hope you get well soon. The angel who watches over little boys who know but they can't say it saw to it that we didn't touch anything, and in a minute we were outside on our bicycles, riding through the dusk toward the turn in the road. In town a few weeks later I read in the Lincoln Evening Courier that Ms. Vera Brown, who taught the fifth grade in Central School, had died of tuberculosis, aged 23 years and seven months. Sometimes I went with my mother when she put flowers on the graves of my grandparents. The cinder roads wound through the cemetery in ways she understood and I didn't, and I would read the names on the monuments. Brower, Cadwalader, Andrews, Bates, Mitchell. In loving memory of infant daughter of beloved wife of the cemetery was so large and so many people were buried there it would have taken a long time to locate a particular grave if you didn't know where it was already. But I know the way. I sometimes know what is in wrapped packages, that the elderly woman who let us in and who took care of Ms. Brown during her last illness went to the cemetery regularly and poured the rancid water out of the tin receptacle that was sunk below the level of the grass at the foot of her grave and filled it with fresh water from a nearby faucet and arranged the flowers she had brought in such a way as to please the eye of the Living and the closed Eyes of the Dead.
- [15:47]
Meg Wolitzer
Fred Hechinger performed William Maxwell's Love hello, I'm Meg Wolitzer. This quietly moving story about a teacher and her devoted class makes us remember that love can take very different forms at different points in our lives. And as we heard in this story, one form of love arriving at a very early point might be simple, ardent, and forever. When we return, one life in a flash and two lives intertwined. 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. On this show, we're celebrating a century of fiction published in the New Yorker. But we didn't need an anniversary to appreciate the magazine's dazzling lineup of writers. We've been featuring them on our radio programs and podcasts for years. For other works by New Yorker contributors and by others in our distinguished roster of authors, go to our website, selectedshorts.org. you can also find us and them on your favorite podcast platforms. Our third work celebrating a century of fiction in the New Yorker magazine is by Tobias Wolf. Over the years, we've performed strong works from his story collections, which include in the Garden of the North American Martyrs and the Night in Question. Woolf is also a novelist and author of the celebrated memoir the this Boy's Life. Leah Schreiber was our first reader on this program, and here he is again with Wolf's Bullet in the Brain. A word of caution While this story is about what makes up a life, the setup is brutal and probably not for younger listeners.
- [18:05]
Liev Schreiber
Bullet in the Brain the line was endless. Anders couldn't get to the bank until just before it closed, and now he was stuck behind two women whose loud, stupid conversation put him in a murderous temper. He was never in the best of tempers anyway. Anders, a book critic known for the weary, elegant savagery with which he dispatched almost everything he reviewed. With the line still doubled around the rope, one of the tellers stuck a Position Close sign in her window and walked to the back of the bank, where she leaned against a desk and began to pass the time with a man shuffling papers. The women in front of Anders broke off their conversation and watched the teller with hatred. Oh, that's nice, one of them said. She turned to Anders and added, confident of his accord, one of those little human touches that keep us coming back. Anders had conceived his own towering hatred of the teller, but he immediately turned it on the presumptuous crybaby in front of him. Damned unfair, he said. Tragic, really. If they're not chopping off the wrong leg or bombing your ancestral village, they're closing their positions. She stood her ground. I didn't say it was tragic, she said. I just think it's a pretty lousy way to treat your customers. Unforgivable, anders said. Heaven will take note. She sucked in her cheeks but stared past him and said nothing. Anders saw that the other woman, her friend, was looking in the same direction, and then the tellers stopped what they were doing and the customers slowly turned and silence came over the bank. Two men wearing black ski masks and blue business suits were standing to the side of the door. One of them had a pistol pressed against the guard's neck. The guard's eyes were closed and his lips were moving. The other man had a sawed off shotgun. Keep your big mouth shut, the man with the pistol said, though no one had spoken a word. One of you tellers hits the alarm, you're all dead meat. Got it? The tellers nodded. Oh, bravo, anders said. Dead meat. He turned to the woman in front of him. Great script, eh? The stern brass knuckled of the dangerous classes. She looked at him with drowning eyes. The man with the shotgun pushed the guard to his knees. He handed the shotgun to his partner and yanked the guard's wrist up behind his back and locked them together with a pair of handcuffs. He then toppled him onto the floor with a kick between the shoulder blades. He took his shotgun back and went over to the security gate at the end of the counter. He was short and heavy and moved with peculiar slowness, even torpor. Buzz him in, his partner said. The man with the shotgun sauntered along the line of tellers, handing each of them a hefty bag. When he came to the empty position, he looked over at the man with the pistol who said, whose slot is that? Anders watched the teller. She put her hand to her throat and turned to the man she'd been talking to. He nodded. Mine, she said. Then get your ugly ass and gear and fill that bag. There you go, andrew said to the woman in front of him. Justice is done. Hey, bright boy, did I tell you to talk? No, anders said. Then shut your trap. Did you hear that? Anders said. Bright boy right out of the killers. Please be quiet, the woman said. Hey, you deaf or what? The man with the pistol walked over to Anders. He poked the weapon into Anders gut. You think I'm playing games? No, anders said. But the barrel tickled like a stiff finger and he had to fight back the titters. He did this by making himself stare into the man's eyes, which were clearly visible behind the holes in the mask. Pale blue and rawly red rimmed. The man's left eyelid kept twitching. He breathed out a piercing, ammoniac smell that shocked Anders more than anything that had happened, and he was beginning to develop a sense of unease when the man prodded him again with the pistol. You like me, bright boy? He said. You want to suck my dick? No, Anderson. Then stop looking at me. Anders fixed his gaze on the man's shiny wingtip shoes. Not down there. Up there. He stuck the pistol under Anders chin and pushed it upwards until Anders was looking at the ceiling. Anders had never paid much attention to that part of the bank, a pompous old building with marble floors and counters and pillars and gilt scrollwork over the teller's cages. The dome's ceiling had been decorated with mythological figures whose fleshy toga draped ugliness. Anders had taken in at a glance many years earlier and afterward declined to notice. Now he had no choice but to scrutinize the painter's work. It was worse than he remembered, and all of it executed with the utmost gravity. The artist had a few tricks up his sleeve and used them again and again. A certain rosy blush under the underside of the clouds, a coy backward glance on the faces of the cupids and the fauns. The ceiling was crowded with various dramas, but the one that caught Anders eye was Zeus and Europa, portrayed in this rendition as a bull ogling a cow from behind a haystack. To make the cow sexy, the painter had canted her hips suggestively and given her long, droopy eyelashes, through which he gazed back at the bull with sultry welcome. The bull wore a smirk and his eyebrows were arched. If there'd been a bubble coming out of his mouth, it would have said, hubba hubba. What's so funny, bright boy? Nothing. You think I'm comical? You think I'm some kind of a clown? No. You think you can fuck with me? No. Fuck with me again. Your history. Capiche? Anders burst out laughing. He covered his mouth with both hands and said, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, and snorted helplessly through his fingers and said, capiche?
- [25:53]
Anne Harada
Oh, God.
- [25:53]
Liev Schreiber
Capiche. And at that, the man with the pistol raised the pistol and shot Anders right in the head. The bullet smashed Anders skull and plowed through his brain and exited behind his right ear, scattering shards of bone into the cerebral cortex, the corpus callosum, back toward the basal ganglia and down into the thalamus. But before all this occurred, the first appearance of the bullet in the cerebrum set off a crackling chain of ion transports and neurotransmissions. Because of their peculiar origin, these traced a peculiar pattern, flukishly calling to life a summer afternoon some 40 years ago and long since lost a memory. After striking the cranium, the bullet was moving at 900ft per second, a pathetically sluggish glacial pace compared with the synaptic lightning that flashed around it. Once in the brain, that is, the bullet came under the mediation of brain time, which gave Anders plenty of leisure and to contemplate the scene that, in a phrase he would have abhorred, passed before his eyes. It is worth noting what Anders did not remember, given what he did remember. He did not remember his first lover, Sherry, or what he had most madly loved about her before it came to irritate him, her unembarrassed carnality, and especially the cordial way she had with his unit, which she called Mr. Mole, as in, uh oh, looks like Mr. Mole wants to play and let's hide Mr. Mole. Anders did not remember his wife, whom he had also loved before she exhausted him with her predictability, or his daughter, now a sullen professor of economics at Dartmouth. He did not remember standing just outside his daughter's door as she lectured her bear about his naughtiness and described the truly appalling punishments Paul's would receive unless he changed his ways. He did not remember a single line of the hundreds of poems he had committed to memory in his youth so that he could give himself the shivers at will, not silent upon a peak in Darien or My God, I heard this day, or all my pretty ones. Did you say all, O Hellkite? All. None of these did he remember. Not one. Anders did not remember his dying mother saying of his father, I should have stabbed him in his sleep. He did not remember Professor Joseph's telling his class how the Spartans had released Athenian prisoners from their minds if they could recite Aeschylus and then reciting Aeschylus himself right there in the Greek. Anders did not remember how his eyes had burned at those sounds. He did not remember the surprise of seeing a college classmate's name on the jacket of a novel not long after they graduated, or the respect he had felt after reading the book. He did not remember the pleasure of giving respect. Nor did Anders remember seeing a woman leap to her death from the building opposite his own just days after his daughter was born. He did not remember shouting, lord have mercy. He did not remember deliberately crashing his father's car into a tree, or having his ribs kicked in by three policemen at an anti war rally, or waking himself up with laughter. He did not remember when he began to regard the heap of books on his desk with boredom and dread, or when he grew angry at writers for writing them. He did not remember when everything began to remind him of something else. This is what he remembered. Heat. A baseball field, yellow grass, the whir of insects. Himself leaning against a tree as the boys of the neighborhood gather for a pickup game. The captains precociously large boys named Burns and Darsh argue the relative genius of Mantle and Maze. They have been worrying this subject all summer, and it's become tedious to Anders, an oppression like the heat. Then the last two boys arrive, Coyle and a cousin of his from Mississippi. Anders never met Coyle's cousin before and will never see him again. He says hi with the rest but takes no further notice of him until they've chosen sides and Darsh asks Cousin the what position he wants to play. Short stop, the boy says. Short's the best position they is. Anders turns and looks at him. He wants to hear Coyle's cousin repeat what he's just said, but he knows better than to ask. The others will think he's being a jerk, ragging the kid for his grammar. But that isn't it, not at all. It's that Anders is strangely roused, elated by those final two words, their pure unexpectedness and their music. He takes the field in a trance, repeating them to himself. The bullet is already in the brain. It won't be outrun forever or charmed to a halt. In the end it will do its work and leave the troubled skull behind, dragging its comet's tail of memory and hope and talent and love into the marble hall of commerce. That can't be helped. But for now Anders can still make time. Time for the shadows to lengthen on the grass, time for the tethered dog to bark at the flying ball. Time for the boy in right field to smack his sweat blackened mitt and softly chant, they is, they is. They is.
- [32:54]
Meg Wolitzer
Liev Schreiber Performed Tobias Wolf's Bullet in the Brain I'm Meg Wolitzer. This challenging tale is both harsh and lyrical. In unspooling the life of a Dying man, it reminds us of why the New Yorker is revered as a showcase for fiction. Our final work from the anthology a century of fiction in the New Yorker is All Will Be well by Eun Lee. Her works include Wednesday's Child and Kinder Than Solitude. While set in a hair salon, the story feels like a fairy tale. You'll see what I mean in a minute. This slightly abridged version of All Will Be well is performed by Anne Harada, a Broadway regular who starred in the original production of Avenue Q, as well as the recent remount of into the Woods. You may have also seen her on the Apple TV series Schmigadoon. Here she is to tell you that all will be well.
- [33:57]
Anne Harada
All will be well. Once upon a time, I was addicted to a salon. I never called ahead and rarely had to wait. Not everyone went to Lily's for a haircut. The old men Lily called Uncle sat at a card table reading newspapers and magazines and Chinese and Vietnamese. The television above the counter was tuned to a channel based in Riverside, and the aunties, related or not related to the uncles, watched cooking shows and teledramas in Mandarin. I was the only customer under 60 and the only one who spoke in English with others. Lily used Vietnamese, Cantonese or Mandarin. The first time we met, I lied and said that I had been adopted by a couple from Holland when I was a year old and that we moved to America when I was in middle school. What do you do? She asked, and I lied again and said I was a student. She picked up a strand of hair and let it fall. My hair had just begun to show signs of gray. What subject? She asked, and I said I'd gone back to school because I wanted to become a writer. Will you make money being a writer? She asked, and I said not really. When I went to Lily's, I wore a dark sweatshirt and blue jeans with a $20 bill tucked in the back pocket. Once, returning to campus after a haircut, I ran into a colleague. My goodness, she said. I thought you were a student. I blend in, I replied. I went to Lily's more often than was necessary. Had I been superstitious, I would have thought that she had put a spell on me. Lily liked to chat. There were always dramas in her life. Once, her husband broke a toe when he tripped on the carpet that they had finally installed in their house after 10 years of planning. Once her youngest son, who went to State University, overslept on the very same morning that a man hacked at random pedestrians with a knife on their street. He could have been killed, lily said. He's the laziest of the three, but now he says it pays to be Lazy. Her father in law, just before his death, had made friends with a man whose first name was Casino. The poor man thought it was a sign that he would win some money, she said. Turned out Casino was not a true friend. Casino didn't even go gambling with him. I listened, smiled, and asked questions. These were my most tiresome traits, and I used them tirelessly. Each encounter was a test I set up for myself. How long could I get people to talk about themselves without remembering to ask me a question? I had no stories to share. I had opinions, and yet I was asleep. Stubborn as Bartleby, I would prefer not to, I would reply if asked to remark on people's stories. In any case, Lily didn't care about my opinions or my stories. She got plenty of both from the uncles and aunties. I liked to believe that she had waited years for a perfect client like me. Elsewhere, I wasn't entirely free from the demands of stating my opinions. Once a student complained about a JM Coetzee novel I'd assigned. It's so insulting that this book is all about ideas and offers nothing for the heart, she said, and I snapped unprofessionally that in my view, bad taste was more insulting. Once a student called Charles Simic a misogynist because he hadn't written enough about his mother in his memoir. Read a book for what it is, I admonished the student. Not for what you want it to be. The student replied that I had only stale ideas of what literature was about. My goal is to dismantle your canon, she said, pointing to the Tolstoy and Chekhov on my desk. They're not about real life. What is life? I wanted to ask. What is real? But right away I felt exhausted. I longed to sit in Lily's chair. She would trim my hair and talk about the bubble tea and frozen yogurt place her husband had decided to invest in, or her neighbor's new profession as a breeder of rare goldfish, or her eldest son's ridiculous dream of quitting his job at the law firm and attending a culinary institute. Cannons did not have a place in Lily's life. If she were to dismantle anything, it would be a house worth buying as a flipper. So I went to Lily's. To my surprise, that day she did not want to talk about her husband or children or in laws. Or perhaps it was a different day when she decided to tell me a love story. It didn't matter. All those stories she had told me before had been only a prologue. It took one haircut for me to get the bare bones of the story and a few more to gather the details. And still a few more for me to start looking at Lily askance. What was real, what was life? Perhaps we could all make up stories for ourselves when we didn't know the answers. Here's Lily's story. She grew up in an ethnic Chinese family in Vietnam. At 16, she fell in love with the Vietnamese boy next door, who was 16, too. She was beautiful. He was handsome. But when war broke out between their countries the following year, Lily's father decided that it was no longer safe for his family to live in Vietnam. Thuan came to my parents, lily said. He asked to leave the country with us. He would do anything just to be with me, he told my parents. My father said, you're not our son. You're your parents son. I thought about that war three weeks and six days long, which was nearly forgotten now. When I was in elementary school in Beijing, my best friend subscribed to a children's magazine that often featured stories set on the border between Vietnam and China, with illustrations of maimed bodies and bombed villages and the heroic faces of intrepid soldiers. But placed in history, that war was no more than a skin knee or a sneeze to mankind. When Lilly asked me if I knew the history between the two countries, I almost slipped and said yes. Then I remembered I was supposed to have grown up in a country far from Asia, with an enviable childhood. Lily's family had become boat people, migrating from Vietnam to Hong Kong, to Hawaii, and later to California. She had helped her parents in their Chinese takeout, apprenticed with an older cousin who ran a hair salon in Los Angeles, married, and had children. This nondescript life of an immigrant would have continued if she hadn't recently had news of Tuan, the boy of her girlhood. Our story is like a movie, she said. Like a play, I said. Romeo and Juliet. Do you know someone who can make our story into a movie For a while Lily kept asking me that, and each time I replied no. Feeling bad for delivering disappointing news, yet not bad enough to stop going to see her. Years of standing in the same spot, cutting and shaving and dying and listening to the uncles and aunties had turned Lily into an unhurried storyteller. She took detours and, like a verbal magician, offered dazzling distractions and commonplace tricks. Where does your husband get his hair cut? She asked once. Tell him to come here. I'll give him a discount because you're my best client. More people came into the story, marching in and out like a platoon of extras. Her schoolmates were remembered. Some of them also had crushes on Twan. The friendships between the fathers and between the eldest sons of the two families were recollected, but friendships severed by war were hardly worth a movie. Lily's parents had sympathized with their daughter when they first left Vietnam, but soon afterward they had shown impatience when she pined. Well, I can't blame them, lily said. Love doesn't put rice in the cooker or a roof over our heads. What does love do? I asked. Oh, love makes a good movie, she said. Without movies, what would we do with ourselves? Tuan cried for three days and three nights in front of Lily's old house. After she and her family left, no one could pry his fingers off the chain lock. At the end of the third night, his elder brothers were finally able to take him back to their house. Everyone thought he was going to die. Three days and three nights, lily said, never a step away from our door. She had heard about this from an old friend whom she had seen recently when he and his wife were visiting their children in America. Could anyone cry non stop for three days and three nights without food or drink or sleep? But what right did I have to doubt the boy? What right did I have to want him to express his heartbreak more poetically or die more realistically? I did not know sorrow then and later when I did after my elder son's death, I thought that Lily's young lover had been fortunate to have so many tears in him. Sorrow only desiccated me. Tears came to an end. Desiccation persisted. The boy did not die. He recovered and eventually moved to another province in Vietnam to teach mathematics at a middle school. A woman in town fell in love with him, though he did not reciprocate. He was waiting for me to come back, Lily said. Before we parted. He said he would wait for me all his life. A life of waiting was interrupted by a bout of illness, during which the woman took care of Tuan like a good wife. After that, the two were married, and together they raised three daughters. Isn't it interesting that he has three daughters and I have three sons? Lily asked. Think of where our promises went. Did you promise to return? I asked. Of course I did. But we left as refugees. We knew we wouldn't go back, but he could have kept his promise. Now that'd be a really good love story, lily said. But I don't hold it against him that he didn't. He shouldn't have the next time I went to Lily's, after I'd been away for two months for the summer holidays. She looked ruffled. Where have you been all these weeks? She asked, and before I could answer, she said, my friends have put me in touch with Tuan. Did you see him? No. How can I? We aren't the kind of people who take time off from work. And he lives in Vietnam, lily said. But they gave my contact information to him. He wrote and asked about my family and told me a few things about his wife and daughters. Everything was fine then, I thought a love story had arrived at a tranquil ending. He asked me to forgive him, Lily said. Oh dear, I thought. Do you think I should call him? He asked me if I would be willing to talk on the phone. Why not? I said. What if I turn out to be a disappointment? Not the girl he remembered. It's only a phone call. You won't see each other. You'll just hear each other's voice, say a few nice things. You don't have to talk about the past. The two countries were to blame, not the two of you. What if he turns out to be different from the boy I remember? She said. Maybe you shouldn't call him, then, I said. You don't have to. But how can I not if I miss him this time? We'll miss each other all our lives. The phone call didn't go the way I had imagined. I had thought that Lily and her former lover would have a bittersweet conversation about their youth and exchange a few superficial details about their marriages and their children. Nothing too concrete, happiness and adversity both withheld. Or that they might be more forthright as adults and take a philosophical view, agreeing that their love might not have weathered the changes. As they grew older, they would tell each other that they would remain friends. They might even say that their two families could become friends. But I am not a good writer of love stories. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of by my limited imagination. When Lily finally called, the man had no words but only tears, and she listened to him sob. He was disturbed, Lily told me. I almost felt like crying myself, but I kept saying to him, hello, do you have something to say? We've waited for this for so many years. We can't waste our time crying. After a long while, he was still crying. One of his daughters took the phone away from him. It's too much for Father, she said to Lily, calling her auntie. Lily asked the girl about their family life in Vietnam. And she answered with warmth. Father often talks about you, the girl said. We all feel you're part of our family. Lily was working on the nape of my neck when she said this. I couldn't catch her eyes in the mirror. She didn't sound perturbed when she recounted the girl's words, which troubled me. Her voice was dreamy in a menacing way, like a voiceover in a movie. I pictured an actress standing in front of an open window, her back to an unlit room, the moonlight cold in her theatrical eyes. Does he deserve your love, or does he deserve to be killed by you? She asked herself, her face frozen with indecision. Do you have a choice? And then Lily said, you won't believe this. The daughter said that all three sisters names have a Chinese character from my name. I never told you my Chinese name has the character Blossom in it. He put the same character in their names. I shuddered the way one shudders when stepping out of the hot summer sun and into an abandoned tunnel. Where had the thought of a tunnel come from? And then I remembered. It was an abandoned nuclear shelter next to our apartment building in Beijing. My parents generation had dug the tunnels when it was feared that a war between China and the Soviet Union was inevitable. In elementary school I had played truant often and gone into one of the tunnels with a box of matches. The damp and moldy air, the scurrying bugs and rats, the rusty nails I had collected in a box as treasure. I felt terror imagining my children on an exploration like that. Yet I had been happy then. And then his daughter said, auntie, I don't think Father can talk with you today. It's too much for him. We worry about his health. But do you want to talk to Mother? She is here. She wants to talk with you too. Did you talk to his wife? I asked, knowing that Lily's pause was a gesture to allow me to be included in her narrative. She did. I would have too. Do you know anyone who could make this into a movie? I'm telling you, it's a love story and it's a movie. I don't know anyone who makes movies, I said. But what happened? You talked with his wife, and then what? She came on the phone and I liked her voice right away. I think he married a good woman. She called me sister, like the daughter. She also said he talked about me often. And then she said, you don't know how much he loves you. You will never understand. And all of a sudden I started to cry. Imagine that. I didn't shed a single tear when he was bawling on the phone, his wife said, but you shouldn't cry, sister. You should be happy. You're the only love he's had all these years. He's kept your photo. On our night in the bedroom the two of them share? I asked. Yes, Lily said. Are you serious? Why would I lie? Why would anyone lie to anyone? But people do, I thought. All the time I talked with his wife and then with the two other daughters. Lily said it was a long phone call, and I didn't hear a single word from him. But you know what made me the saddest? His wife said, you're the most beautiful woman I've ever known. No one has ever said that to me. We both looked up at the mirror. I had not thought of Lily as a pretty woman. I was an exhausted young mother then, courageously blind to the dangers of the world and stubbornly blind to its beauties. I now studied Lily and thought that she was indeed pretty. I also started to think that she made up the whole story, just as I had invented my upbringing in Holland. We all had our reasons for doing this, as long as no harm was done. Even so, I began to resent Lily. She must have put a spell on me, tricking me into her chair, hypnotizing me with girlish dreams that had not been hardened by life. Maybe you can write my story and then someone will make a movie from it, lily said. I should have stopped going to Lily's right away. Perhaps she had seen through me. Tell me a story. She must have known that every time I sat down in her chair, I was making that request. A real story. Lily, let me tell you a story, she agreed, and let me make it unreal for you. We saw each other one more time after that. She had promised to show me a copy of the photo of her and the boy, the one he kept in his marriage bedroom. A photo would prove nothing, I thought. But where else could I go for a haircut? Finding another salon would be like starting a new relationship, forging a new friendship. Well, all I wanted was to keep the unknown, good or bad, at a distance. Forget life, real or unreal. What I wanted to do was to raise my children as a good mother should. In those years, the days seemed long, never ending. And sometimes I felt impatient for my children to grow up and then felt guilty for my impatience. The photo that Lily showed me. What can I say? Years later, after my son died, I felt a constant ache similar to what I had felt for Lily and the boy when I saw them in the photo, the same ache I imagined would afflict those who now looked at photos of my son. He died at about the age Lily and Tuan were when they fell in love, but that ache was still as distant and as theoretical as a nebula. When I was sitting in Lily's chair, she opened an envelope in which a sepia toned black and white photo was preserved between two sheets of tissue paper. The girl in the photo was dressed in a white ao dai, and the boy in a white silk shirt and a pair of white pants. She was beautiful. He was handsome, but those were not the words I would use to describe them. They were young, their faces cloudless, their bodies insubstantial, closer to childhood than to adulthood. They looked like two lambs impeccably prepared by their elders as sacrifices to appease a beast or a God. Would anyone have been surprised to hear that they died right after the photo was taken? Some children were born tragedies. What do you think? Lily asked, studying my face. Wow, I said. Maybe you can write a romantic novel about us. When tragedies drag on, do they become comedies instead or grow more tragic? I could not make a romance out of Lily's story. She was not the first person I had let down with my writing. A few days ago I got an email from my former student who had vowed to dismantle my canon. She said that she was traveling in South America. She mentioned a few things she had learned from our clashes. I remember that once you said to us, one must want to be great in order to be good. To this day, I still wonder why you look sad when you said that, she wrote. Under what circumstances had I said that? And sad about what? Had she written to enlighten me about what real life was, I would have applauded her consistency. Instead, in her long email, she talked about what I had taught her. I too, had been young then. How could I have taught anyone anything? All will be well. All will be well, and every kind of thing shall be well. Yet I could not even write a lying note to console my children.
- [57:40]
Meg Wolitzer
Anne Harada performed All Will Be well by Eon Lee. I'm Meg Wolitzer. If Wolf's story gives us a whole life in the time it takes to lose it, Lee's work does the opposite, unraveling two parallel lives and stories over a long period. Lee's use of the oft quoted homily by Mother Juliane of Norwich, All Will be well was inspired by a sampler on which it was embroidered, and it's up to us to decide if it is meant to be consoling or ironic. The deep wit that runs through this hypnotic story sets the ultimate ache into relief. Anne Harada's performance summons both aspects equally well and feels tonally just right. So that's our show, featuring four stories that demonstrate the breadth and imagination of writers who have become part of the New Yorker's century of fiction. We wish them another hundred years and many happy returns. 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 mix engineer for this episode was Jennifer Nolsen. 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 by 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.