Work
The Plaza
In both 1946 and 1947, Margie Bixby was crowned Trout Queen of the Upper Delaware River, an honor she lost in 1948 only because it wouldn’t do for the daughter of the newspaper editor—the editor of the paper that sponsored the pageant—to win three times.
Read an interview I did about this story in The New Yorker here!
Women Corinne Does Not Actually Know
the professor of archaeology
In the small Southern town where Corinne has rented an apartment for the summer, she has found a yoga studio. It’s quainter than her usual one in Boston. At home, the women are lasered and sanded, the leggings sleek, the yoga competitive. To this place, which is above a tech-help center, people wear cargo shorts and baggy T-shirts. They pay by leaving cash or a personal check in a basket, register by signing a spiral notebook. They say oof as they bend. Corinne always unrolls her mat in the back corner, tries not to interlope.
A Story for Your Daughters, a Story for Your Sons
The war had closed much of the city, cut off many of the smaller towns. Unable to trace his usual routes, the hat merchant headed into the mountains to try his luck. His father, before he died, had circled a small mountain village on his map, had noted that the trading was good but the trip took two difficult days. Indeed, the snaking road narrowed fast, and the bridge was down to splinters so his horse had to wade to the knees.
The November Story
An edited version of “The November Story,” which originally appeared in Crazyhorse, was featured on This American Life in August, 2011. You can listen to the whole thing if you click the link. Yes, this is my voice. No, it isn’t a true story. No, I didn’t get to meet Ira. Yes, recording this is the coolest thing I’ve ever gotten to do.
Dead Turtle
Maggie assumed it was her fault: that if she’d gotten there a minute earlier, she’d have seen him waggle his stumps, seen him fall eerily still, and she could have knocked on his shell and startled him back to life.
Cross
“He had wedged his thigh between her legs, and she felt her feet leave the earth, felt the dampness of the building soak through the back of her dress. Gravity rearranged itself so that leaning back against the theater’s slippery verticality was enough to keep from floating off into the night.”
The George Spelvin Players
Barnes Harlow was actually Jason something, but no one dreamed of calling him that. He was Barnes Harlow when he was robbed of the Daytime Emmy, he was Barnes Harlow all twelve years he played Dalton Shaw, Esq., and he was Barnes Harlow when, in that guise, he married Silvia Romero Caldwell Blake, poisoned his mother-in-law, opened a restaurant, burned down that restaurant, was drugged by Michaela, and saved the Whitney family from carbon monoxide poisoning.
The Way You Hold Your Knife
“Ulf, the museum director, whose hand she’d shaken on the way in, who had offered her a sympathetic and conspiratorial nod, announced loudly from the information desk in Danish, then English, that the museum would close in ten minutes. A few people began to leave—the boys with the sneakers followed their parents toward the exit—but there were still twenty people now, maybe thirty, clustering together near the windows, feigning interest in the wall plaques and photos of carnivorous plants.”
Wedding Night
“I’m seventeen years old, sitting with Randy Osterman on his picnic bench. He’s got his dad’s binoculars trained on the bride, but I’m watching the couple in the gazebo stare out across the lake and garden. You can tell they’re talking about the wedding, how expensive and lovely and delicious, what an unusual location. She hands him her champagne glass so she can reach her hand under the hem of her bright pink dress and fix her slip.
“It’s Alright, It’s Alright, It’s Alright”
The day she turned 34, Catherine received, through her agent, a typewritten letter from Rudy Upchurch, who’d seen her onstage in Travesties. “You might be familiar with my movies,” it began, an understatement for the ages. No need to audition; he simply wanted her in London for filming. Catherine had been hired on sight before — when a director wanted wavy red hair, she was a shoo-in — but that was in her teenage days of soap opera bits.
