Sarah Shun-lien Bynum Reads Joan Silber

I'm Deborah Treesman, fiction editor at the New Yorker.

“Each month we invite a writer to choose a story from the magazine's archives to read”

and discuss. This month we're going to hear evolution by Joan Silver, which appeared in the New Yorker in September of 2022. I ran away with a boy when I was 16. He was three years older, and I was enormously flattered that he wanted me to run off with

him. We didn't say we loved each other. We didn't drink that up, but my lust for him was great and constant. The story was chosen by Sarah Swanian Bynam, who was the author of three books of fiction, including the novel Ms. Hempel Chronicles, a Penn Faulkner Award finalist, and the Story Collection

Likes, which was published in 2020. Hi, Sarah. Hi, Deborah. So you chose to read a story by Joan Silver, who has published 10 books of fiction in the past 45 years or so.

“Have you read a lot of her work and what makes it really stand out for you?”

I love Joan Silver's work, which I first discovered in 2003 when I was reading the

Oh Henry Prize Anthology, and she had a story, and it called The High Road, and it was this first person voice that just leapt out and dazzled me, and I have just been such a admirer of her work ever since then, and each successive book has just been filled with these sharp, indelible voices telling their life stories, and I get pleasure every time I dive into one of them.

Would you think makes her voice so indelible in that way? I think the retrospection, there's this mix of retrospection and immediacy, where she's looking back on a life and reflecting on the shape of life's meaning, but then she is able to animate it with this very intimate conversational tone and these vivid magical details. So I love the combination of both the sense of like sweep and perspective, and then the

just coziness that I feel whenever I'm with one of her narrators and one of her characters. Right, and I guess that's true of this story evolution.

We are aware from the very beginning that she's looking back, that the first person narrators

looking back, but then for most of the story, you're so immediately in the moment, in the present, you almost forget it. And that's one of her great magic tricks is that we meet this character first when she's a 10-year-old, and then when she's a 16-year-old, and then when she's the mother of two adult children, and she inhabits each of those experiences with total immediacy, like the 10-year-old,

I feel as if I'm completely seeing the world through her eyes, and then again for the teenager, and then again for the older mother, and I am just given so much pleasure by the way in which she fully brings those different life stages to the page. And she's this story, it was written as a freestanding story, but also as part of a novel

“in progress, which became the novel Mercy, and I think several of her books, it's sort”

of formed from a lot of different voices in a way each telling their own story, and then those stories become woven together, so that each story has its own life and can stand by itself. Yes, and in fact, after I read the high road, I then read the novel that story became

a part of, and it was the first time she had innovated this form where the stories are

interwoven and ultimately create what she calls a ring, and that book and the way in which it reimagined how a novel could be shaped gave me so much permission. Yeah, and what made you choose evolution?

a story that covers a lot of time, and the second is a story that follows the adventures

of a teenage girl.

“Wonderful, I think we should now hear those adventures, so we'll talk some more after”

the reading, and now here is Sarah Swanyan by them reading evolution by Joan Silver. Evolution, I was ten when my mother had to take me to the emergency room. I'd sort of skidded on our firescape while I was recklessly dancing around on it, showing off for the kid in the apartment across the way. I'd done a bunk tubum, and I was singing woof to you woof to you, and starting a foxy little

move while waving the ends of my bathroom sash when I slipped on the rested flooring that was splash with snow, and collapsed on it sea through slats in an unnatural crumple. The backyard was three floors below, too visible.

I screamed when I tried to get up.

I wanted my mother to hear me, she was watching TV, she thought I was asleep. How would she guess where I was? I knew I had done something very bad to my leg.

“Fortunately, me and I sat in bound for whom I'd been showing off, screamed for her own”

mother. In the frozen air between our buildings, I heard her whale that I was dead. Every part of me was shaking. It was winter in New York, and I'd been fluttering around in my nightclothes, and now I'd gone from entertainment greatness to being a heap of cracked bones in the wind.

When my mother finally appeared, she carefully dragged me over the black metal slats and lifted me through the window. I was still trembling too much to speak, but I could see that my mother's face was pale and weird. I understood that dying, which I might be about to do, was something I'd have to manage

alone, and no one had taught me how. "I was angry about this.

“I'm fine," I said, not that nicely either.”

Because this was New York in February of 1974, nobody bothered to call an ambulance. You'd get old waiting, so Nina's mother ran to get us a taxi.

Her father, whom I'd always liked, carried me down the stairs, but when he jostled

my leg, handing me to my mother, I screamed again. "Why did you do this, Cara?" my mother kept saying. She said it as we moved through traffic, and she said it as she carried me into the hospital into the big, scuffed hall, crowded with New York at its bad news worst. A man held a bloody towel to his neck, which was the waiting area for the emergency room.

"We're okay now, sweetie," my mother said. We had to wait. She needs attention, my mother had to tell them over and over. She filled out a form, she kept walking up to some desk to ask questions, "I hated this room.

A man was shouting that the president of our country wanted to kill everyone here, and that he was doing a good job too." Nobody said one of the doctors would be with us very soon. There was no soothing behavior in this room, wait or die waiting, take it or leave it. I had of us in the line of chairs was a man with a mustache, with his arm around a man

who was slumped against his chest. The leaning man was wearing his sweater inside out, and he was sleeping. Maybe he wasn't sleeping. Maybe he was dead. Would you bring someone dead to a hospital?

Did people do that? The mustache guy was talking to him. I know you hate Saint Vincent's, but it was the closest. Almost in, don't go under, hear me, Eddie? They could have been brothers, but I thought they were friends.

My own friend, Nini, had yelled to high heaven to save me. If no one else had been around, she would have phoned someone to help. And if she'd been the one to fall, I would have dragged her outside and talked to taxi into taking us. I had more nerve than she did when was better at persuading people.

My leg was on fire now, even when I didn't move it. I told my mother this, and she went up to the desk one more time. Meanwhile, the guy next to us had got to his feet and was settling his limp, maybe drugged out, friend, into the molded plastic chair, getting him positioned so he didn't fall to

He smoothed his friends' hair down, he padded his head, and then he edged out of the row and along an aisle and headed through a hallway. Where was he going? He was gone. When I told my mother, she said, "Oh, he'll come back."

And he did it, the friend was alone. Well, they weren't friends, were they? A long time went by, and new people did terrible things.

I lived in New York, and I'd always been warned about what they might do.

When a nurse called the man's name, my mother said, "Just let my daughter go in instead. You have to let her. We can't wait while you figure out what to do." But I ever seen my mother cheat like this.

“I understood that she was cheating for my sake, but if he died because of us, what then?”

I was sure we'd never forget. Though I think now that people do forget such things, the nurse was stumped for a few seconds. "Hey, Edward," I said, and I shook his shoulder, in a rough way as if I were just a kid making fun of him. It hurt my leg when I moved.

The man made a choking, burbling sound, desperate, and liquid. He terrified us then. He was alive, but he was a dying monster. The nurse got an orderly to move him onto a gurney, and she was wheeling him away from us before we knew what was happening.

And then we had to wait again. I left there with a huge plaster cast on my leg, and I looked forward to having all my friends sign it. I had broken and splintered my tibia in a fairly major way.

“But what I took from that night most of all was the shock at the man walking out on”

his unconscious friend. The silent story of it. My mother set the man probably had reasons we couldn't know, which was definitely true, but what I held onto was the lasting certainty that I was going to have to look out for myself.

It wasn't my mother's fault.

She never neglected me before or after the divorce, or led me to think that she would.

But I saw what the world was. I saw how things could get. Nobody's sweetness could take that away. I ran away with a boy when I was 16. He was three years older, and I was enormously flattered that he wanted me to run off with

him. We didn't say we loved each other.

“We didn't bring that up, but my lust for him was great and constant.”

Lust was a big deal in the world around me. People believed in sex in a way that they don't quite anymore. Did we run that idea into the ground, overplay it? I could not have been prouder of myself in those days to be following sex as my guiding star.

I thought that it was an exalted idea, as well as a source of beautiful sensations. I thought that anyone who didn't have my opportunities was living a lesser life. I should have paid more attention to Brody, the boy in question. I was much too abstract in the way that I viewed him. We both worked at a donut shop on West 8th Street.

Ronald, the owner, was never there and told me to do whatever Brody said.

We had the long weekend shifts busy in the morning and dull in the late afternoon. Do you care about the hostages in Iran? I asked him. This was a leading question. I didn't care all that much myself.

Was I bragging about how heartless I was? Probably, and it drew Brody's interest. He said, "Well, be okay." Getting skinny, though. How pleased we were to be indifferent together.

I said they were proof the U.S. wasn't as powerful as it thought it was. Brody said, "People keep discovering that over and over, like it's news each time." Totally, I said. I was so thrilled when I went to get more boxes from the back and he found me behind the storage shelves.

For weeks after the shop was our love stack, up to a point. We kept our clothes on, though we did a lot of reaching around and under them. What the lights we hid in that background, I thought of them whenever I wasn't with him. Then, he decided we should start cutting school, and I sneaked him back to the apartment while my mother was at work.

I had slept with two other boys a few times each, so I knew something but not that much. The male anatomy was still an unfolding mystery to me.

And when she found out I was cutting school, I did it too many times.

“She banned him from our apartment and tried to get me to promise never to see him, which”

wasn't even the sort of thing she did. Cutting school, she said, "The gateway to a lot of things I hate to have to think about." In fact, she was right about that. Brody hardly ever talked about his family. His father drove a truck for the New York Post.

That was all I knew. Brody's mother stayed home, so there was no sneaking off to his place. He made fun of my mother, called her the mouse mother because she worked in a library. They'd met a few times when he came over, and they'd had gone okay, normal, thirsty exchanges.

He told her his favorite kind of books to read were true crime books. "I like action and death," he said. True crime is a very popular genre, I said. Brody said I should just lie to her about seeing him, so I did.

“The only person who knew I had a secret life was Nini.”

What scared her about Brody was the way he got money. But work, he sometimes rang up his own version of sales, but not too often. His other more ambitious scam was stealing items from department stores and then returning them for cash. Once a cashmere sweater, once a silk shirt, once a watch.

No one ever really goes to jail for that, I informed Nini. They were allied in my mind, the new bodily thrills and Brody's lawlessness. Sometimes we smoked weed in the park, I was very adamant about not drinking. I thought civilization had advanced beyond alcohol, which made people violent, to more peaceful drugs like cannabis.

An evolutionary change. Smoking pot made me nestle in Brody's arms on the park bench, curve against him in delight. By May Brody had finished a year of community college, allegedly studying business administration, and he said he'd had it with school crap. Want a hitch to Arizona?

He said it wouldn't be hard. He had a friend there we could stay with. It was a good place to live. He'd heard. The wide expanse of the desert.

We had found a new place to have sex, Nini's bedroom when her parents weren't home. He said this after a long intricate session. My mother had said she hated seeing me hang all over him, like a dooding idiot, and why wasn't he with someone his own age?

“Did I know how pathetic I looked, flinging myself at him?”

This insult that broke in my loyalty to my mother. So I could go wherever I wanted, couldn't I?

I'd never been farther away than Washington or Boston.

My mother was horrified that I was so unlike the cara she'd always known, but that was what elated me, the new depth I'd found in myself. My untapped capacities. I thought my mother had probably never had really good sex. Brody had ideas about what clothes I should bring to Arizona.

It was early June in New York, not really hot yet, but we'd do better picking up rides if I brought some of the nice things I had that showed my figure. I was a small, skinny girl, with a big bust, and he admired the sun dress with the clenching neckline, and the t-shirt that was tight and orange. Oh, also the ripped jeans with the tear near the crotch.

We have to think ahead, he said. In the end, a friend of his drove us as far as the New Jersey turnpike, and I stood by the highway in my little orange t-shirt and jeans, with Brody lurking behind the tree. How smug I felt when a large truck stopped right away, and Brody suddenly ran up to get in with me.

The driver was an old fat guy, and we squashed ourselves next to him by having Brody put me on his lap. My mother thought I was on a class trip to the Adarondacks. "You cozy?" the man said. He had a growl-ly voice, and snorted when he heard that we were heading all the way to Arizona. "Did we know how far that was?"

Watch out for the rattlesnakes, he said, when he let us off five exits further.

We had to wait much longer there, and the guy in a Ford van who finally stopped had

me sit in the front and Brody in the back, and he patted my knee the whole way and began to stroke the zipper and put his finger into the ripped spot.

as his hand got more insistent, and I had endured quite a lot by the time he let us off

“near Pennsylvania." Brody thought it was funny when I told him, and I said, "Oh man,”

I was unhappy about it, but I wasn't frightened. Whatever happened was something I could put up with. Our next rides were guys who just wanted to talk, and Brody made up stories for them. We were going to Arizona so we could work on a date farm. We were going to Arizona to help manage a sunkel's silver mine. We were going to Arizona to work in his grandmother's hotel, and I was going to sing in the hotel's restaurant. He had me sing for the driver.

I could carry a tune okay, and I did home on the range and must crack love without my voice cracking. I liked this fight. And what were we going to do when night fell? How trusting I was. Brody had the driver drop us at a strip mall somewhere at the edge of Ohio, where

“a motel advertised rooms for $12 a night. He told the clerk we'd pay in the morning when”

we checked out, but the clerk said, "I don't think so." Brody said, "We were going to eat

first and come back. I was starving and very glad to be chomping down on a filet of fish

at the nearby McDonald's. It's the spot, doesn't it?" Brody said. "We were going to be on the road for the next three or four days at least," he added, and we didn't have money for hotel rooms if we wanted to eat. We were eating indoors at McDonald's, but the rancho deluxe restaurant a few doors down had picnic tables outside. We had to wait till everything closed and we could sleep on the benches. No one would even see. It was a nice night just a little chilly.

I was only sorry that we'd have to sleep on separate benches. What a great girl you are, he said.

“McDonald's didn't stay open much longer, and then Brody had his hike laps around the strip mall”

to keep us in our beautiful health. He carried the pack with our things in it, and we had our arms around each other's waist as we walked, and I was in a glorious moment of my life. We walked past the dark stores, with neon signs still lit, and passed a few eating joints whose brightness stayed on. The rancho took forever to close. We went around the mall any number of times, but then we rounded the corner and saw it dark at last. Brody put a blanket down on a bench

for me, and he sold it himself on another bench, and we held hands under the table. Brody lit a roach, and we passed it back and forth. I fell asleep on that plank of wood, like a passenger

on a boat. But how were we ever going to have sex if we never had a bed? Brody solved this

for us one night, somewhere in Missouri. By deciding we could camp out at a rest stop, behind a giant bush at the end of a parking lot. So I had the blanket under me on the grass. Once Brody got going, the pounding, pounding of the act was more than I wanted, and I wondered what aim of evolution was served by designing it this way. What force of nature wanted Brody's enthusiasm to leave wealth on my back? When it got too bad, I shifted around so I was on top,

which Brody liked fine, but I was already battered. And yet I believed more than ever, that we were nature's dearest creatures. It's add-ups. It's glowing initiates. My battered itself slept on Brody's chest. On the way to Oklahoma the next day, we had a creepy driver who told dirty jokes and laughed at the punchlines. It was her pussy all along! He didn't try to touch me, but he kept repeating lines and grinning. When he dropped us off at a rest stop, I decided I had

nine dollars in my wallet that we could spend for a motel. "You are such a princess," Brody said. "We're starting to smell," I said. "Excuse me, Miss Royalty. We fought over this until I thought he really was going to sleep outside by himself, but in the end he let me check us in, and I took a rapture shower for so long that the hot water ran out on Brody, who had no interest in making love that night. Okay, that was how he felt. I slept poorly and sadly hearing the murmur

and whistle of his breath. Our last day in Texas was steamy hot and had one unpleasant incident. Brody tried to steal a pack of American cheese and three pepperoni sausages from a gas station grocery, and the guy followed us to the door and said, "People get shot for less. I was terrified.

Arizona was thrilling to see outside the windows. They're really work-act-eye, but it was midnight

“on a dark desert night by the time we got close to Tucson where his friend lived.”

He won't mind our showing up so late. We'd been let out at a bare strip of closed snack joints along the highway. There were two payphones and one of them worked. Brody fed it all his change and dialed a number that rang and rang. After what seemed like hours, I heard him say, "Russle?" "Yeah, it's me." "Really? I told you." He wanted Russell to come pick us up, wherever we were, but Russell apparently wanted us to hitch to his house. So we stood with our

thumbs out, but no vehicle of any kind was stopping at this hour. Brody got more change from me

and went back to the payphone to call again, and then the wee hours of the morning and old

Dodge Dart came out of the black highway and stopped for us. "Why didn't has hole you are?"

“The driver said. He looked okay, skinny in his t-shirt, wearing a straw cowboy hat to keep out the”

sun to come. "Russle, my man, so good to see you," Brody said. "Who's the girl?" "Cara. Isn't she cute?" "Not really," he said. "I was in the backseat, they were in the front and Brody looked back at me, scowling. I don't even know you," Russell said. "And you've got me driving all over the state for you." They had met by Brody's account at a retreat in Nebraska that his high school sent somebody's had had with other Catholic schools. He and Russell had sneaked away from the

Sylvan premises together and had been sent home in disgrace thereby forming a lifelong bond,

or so Brody had decided. "I'm so happy to be in Arizona," Brody said. "It just feels freer here," the air. "I fell asleep in the car, with the free air blowing on my head, and Brody woke me up later to walk me into a very small Adobe house, cluttered with furniture I couldn't see. I was put in an armchair to sleep, and I didn't wake up to bright daylight got me, and I could hear voices from what turned out to be a kitchen alcove." "The girl is awake," Brody said.

"The two guys were laughing about something. That was good, and eating toast, and Brody actually gave me a piece from his plate. I scarfed it down without even speaking. I hadn't known how hungry I was." Russell said I could finish the loaf if I went out for supplies afterward with Brody. A 15-minute walk to the grocery store and we could admire the scenery. I saw that Russell's cube of the house was one room with too many chairs in it,

and the corner was a mattress with blue sheets, which seemed to be where Russell slept.

“"You know what I think?" Brody said. "You know that retreat we were on. They were right about one thing.”

Father Mike, don't remind me." He said that nature was how God revealed himself to us. "Have you been outside yet? What kind of God wants it to go up to 97 by noon?" Russell said, "Well, the great thing is this house has a swamp cooler. You know how they work? You're only sweltering a little, right?" "You've gone very local," Brody said.

"I was still thinking about God and nature. I had my own secret theory that sexual feeling existed to impress on humans the sense of a beyond the reality of another plane. There was no other reason for it to be the way it was. I certainly wasn't going to say any of this to Brody, though I'd once talked to Nini about it. I sort of love the landscape. So flat you could see forever with its cluster of houses, the vivid blue sky, and a horizon with mountains on one side.

And I liked the little bodega where we pooled our money to get bread and peanut butter and hot dogs and milk. I felt sure that we could find jobs in this city. Russell worked in a Xerox store a few days a week. We could do that. Brody and I could be a couple living together. We got a bit lost walking back to the house and once we were there I washed fast and then collapsed on the armchair and fell asleep. I woke up, who knew when, with Brody nestled next to me and his hands

all over me, ready for action. He was lifting my t-shirt over my head and hooking my bra. I was doing my part in glee and reunion rising to our bodily celebration when I heard the sound of water running in the kitchen sink and I knew then, with my eyes closed, that Brody had us performing

burn to it. I did what I could to speed him on. I wanted it over. We were coiled in the armchair

“in a twisted pose that was hard on my bat leg and when he collapsed against me, he said into my neck,”

"You like that, didn't you?" I had never really loved Brody. If love requires

adoration, but everything about his body was very dear to me. What a simple life I tried to lead. "You are great," I said. "Why was I afraid to make him angry?" Maybe I just always took what I thought was the easy road. Russell was gone by the time we stirred ourselves and got up from the chair. He came back sometime later when we were trying to make a dinner out of hot dogs and bread and some cheese we found in his fridge. The girl is a great cook, Brody said,

"authoring in some." Russell chomped on it and said, "How long did you think you could stay here?" "What was your plan?" Five or six years, Brody said. Russell didn't laugh. "You have another day," he said. That's it. He offered recommendations. There was a why. There was a homeless shelter. There were places where you could count, but you shouldn't have anything valuable on you. "You have each other," he said. "I wasn't sure how ironically he meant that."

"You know, I have a friend in Phoenix," Brody said. "We can hitch there."

He never told me. I said, "That's great." "Plan B," he said. "Since some people don't know what

friendship is." That night, in our big armchair, he was a force of non-stop order, a zealot of every orifice, more than ever before. I didn't forget that Russell was there on his mattress across the room. A flush of horror came and went, but I did what we were doing. I was used to it. And I thought that Phoenix would probably be better. The friend there lived in a big house with a great view, according to Brody. Good night, babe. He said, "When we were done, and he fell asleep

in seconds, with his weight on my chest." And what seemed like the middle of the night,

I woke to feel Brody twisting around and getting up. By the time I opened my eyes, he was standing

nearby pulling on his pants. "I'm going out to see the sunrise," he said. "Sleep on, my girl," which I did. He wasn't there when I woke up, and I was glad to have the bathroom to myself, though I didn't hog the shower for too long. The little house was very quiet when I emerged. I thought it was so full of Brody to stay on after sunrise, still looking at whatever the visit was. Maybe I'd walk a little myself. I was looking for my baseball hat. Everybody said you needed a hat here,

“but I couldn't find our backpack. Not anywhere. Had I put my hat in my shoulder bag?”

My bag was on the floor, with its contents spilling out. My wallet was still there right on top, and I could see immediately that the billful was empty. I was suddenly very afraid that a robber had come in while we slept, and I wanted to tell Brody, as if Brody weren't gone. I went back to the bathroom to check. No Brody shampoo. No Brody shaving cream. He'd made a clean sweep. In the kitchen there was a note on the table.

Looks like your asshole boyfriend is gone. I'm at work, see you later. Here's a key. Do not leave the door unlocked if you go out. R. There was a much food left, three slices of bread, two slices of cheese, and that was the moment when I couldn't stand it. I was weeping, little soft sobs that turned louder. I heard myself howl. Brody had left me without anything, in the middle of nowhere. Brody whose penis had been in every portal of my body,

Brody whose skin I'd liked and loved the taste of, whose smell was in my clothing.

“I took Russell's key and walked outside, pastries with branches like knorled fans,”

and houses the color of sand and rust, but I didn't get very far in the heat without a hat, too. Where had Brody looked at any sunrise? I was heading back and I knew what I was going to do. My mother was at the library at her job, but she'd be home by six, which was three here, and I could call her collect. I'd given my mother a bad scare, and I was sorry now.

I was hoping that Brody would be there. But of course he wasn't.

“How could I keep on longing for him? Well, I could. I knew he had dishonored the power of our”

bodies by running away. I'd stayed faithful to my beliefs. I buoyed myself with this truth, while I waited for Russell to get home. My poor mother. Russell had been home for a while. He'd been grouchy, but it fed me some spaghetti when I finally tried phoning her. "Oh, Kara," she said, when she heard my voice. "Why did you do this?" She had pastored and plagued Nini, who would say only that we were on the road.

She had called Brody's family, who thought he was at a friends but weren't sure. She had called the police who took the details but said it was difficult to track runaways across state lines. "You're okay?" she said. "Tell me how you are. I'm totally okay. I'm fine," I said. "And she knew how to send me a money order. She knew how to buy me a plane ticket that I could pick up. She knew how to get me out of there. You'll be home soon, sweetie," she said.

"Erzone is not a bad state," I said. "Oh, Kara," my mother said. Russell was not happy about my staying one more night and when he drove me into town the next morning to get the money order. He said, "I think you owe me some for room and board. I peeled off a

“20 and said, I'll never forget you, which was true if not kindly meant. He took me to the airport.”

He could have been much worse. All those hours of travel I was longing for Brody. I had to switch

planes and Phoenix. I'd never done such a thing alone and of course I kept looking for him in the

airport. Wherever I was I occupied myself by remembering all that we'd done in bed or in that ridiculous easy chair. My mind was furnished with Brody. My mother met me at the gate and she crushed me to her in a long hug saying, "Do not do this again." And truth, I was really very happy to be home and I hope she was going to make me pancakes the way she'd done when I came back from science camp. "You have no idea what you put me through," she said. "Do you?" And I had to go be a junior again

with three weeks left in the semester. I was a walking ghost. I couldn't talk to anyone except

Nini. Nini said, "You'll never be the same, will you?" But after a while, I had stories for those who asked.

The thing about hitching, I told people, "Is that you can't let drivers leave you in some

“nowhere spot? You have to speak up. I told them that a person could get by on no money at all."”

My boyfriend said, "I was too reckless, but we came out of it, fine." "Who in my class had done what I'd done?" Well, it was 1980 some had done worse. I was good at reporting certain scenes, me singing songs for a truck driver, Brody stealing delicious food for us from a gas station, Brody bragging about me to his friend. My mother was afraid I was going to escalate, take off into drugs and crime, dare myself

into bigger trouble. And I might have, but I didn't, not then. Why didn't I? I was still hungry for Brody for a long time, and I wasn't sure I liked anything else. I knew perfectly well that he was an

asshole. I'd sort of always known it, but I thought that what we'd had was a tremendous thing.

In its way, it had taken me more than 2,000 miles across the country, and it caused me to sleep on the ground on benches and chairs, without even minding. It had led me to eagerly slip into dozens of vehicles driven by strangers. It had its own unnamed beauties of feeling. I didn't have to call it love, and I didn't. But even as I thought pretty poorly of him, I believed it was something. I'd been through my days and nights of initiation, testing my metal, and I took pride in that.

I had now passed beyond a lot of what went on around me. I turned out to be much closer to normal than my poor mother ever expected. I got into cocaine, a little in college, and some of my boy friends were alarming, but I was all right. I never held up a bank or O.D. on anything or joined a cult or even dropped out of school. I did things I still regret. I slept with the best friend of a

because I could, and because such adventures were still irresistible to me. I thought that I was

“onto something that had been known throughout history, but never acted out as candidly. Meanie,”

who was studying anthropology at NYU, pointed out to me that sexual behavior was always a social

construct. Okay, I'm a creature of my times, I said. Actually, Neanie had had affairs with women, and was much more up to date than I was. I lived at home during those years. I took the subway up to City College in Harlem, and I let my mother meet only one of the boys I dated. If you could call it dating, he was a nice guy. Anyone could see that nerdy, but alluring, who talked to my mother about geophysical research, she thought it was fine when I went off to Berkeley for graduate,

following him, that we split up midway through the first semester. Northern California turned out was a great place for me. What a pleasant and civilized climate. What cool people? So when I

“came home to frozen New York for Christmas break, I felt distant and older. Long ago, I had lived here,”

but I was happy to see Neanie again, and I fondly walked by my old high school, even stopped by the donut shop on eighth street that had once been rationed up to employ me. My old boss, Ronald, was behind the counter, a little balder, and more creased. "Look at you," he said. "You are a pip squeak when I saw you last, and now you're a grown woman." "How's it been going without me," I said.

Business was down, eighth street wasn't what it once was, but he was always glad to see his old

workers. "Crollers weren't selling, did I want one for free?" I did. It was so sad about Brody, wasn't it? He said. "What?" Brody had never been completely out of my thoughts, and I used to guess how far he'd hitched, and where he'd ended up. "Was Vegas?" "Bah, Ronald, who couldn't get over my not knowing?" I thought you two were friends. Finally got to the sentences about how Brody had been killed some years ago when he drove through a stop sign right into another car somewhere in

Maine. Brody had a car in Maine? "I thought you two were friends," Ronald had to say again. And then I was walking down eighth street with the crawler in my hand. My first thought was to be struck with remorse for the mean things I said in our fights. Brody, I'm sorry. And my next thought was to want back what he'd stolen, my hat that I'd liked, and a favorite scarf that had been in the backpack. No Brody to blame anymore. Brody was gone.

How could it be that even if I'd never planned to see him again, our story was a different story now.

He'd been dead for years without my even knowing, which made me feel ignorant and shallow. I hope he'd thought of me often and well in whatever time he'd had. Was I allowed to hope that? I would have liked to do something in this memory, set down a bunch of flowers somewhere, but I couldn't really think of a symbolic spot. Meanie always said Americans were totally feeble in their death rituals. Her senior thesis had

been on Bali, which had big cremation ceremonies that even the tourists went to. According to Meanie, Balinese Hindus thought cremation freed the soul to enter the upper realm, where it might eventually be released from the cycle of birth and death. Evil residents of the lower realm were always trying to claim the soul. It would be just like Brody to walk into such a battle. I did light a candle for him in my room,

but I didn't tell my mother and I never told Neanie either. In California, a decade later, I had my daughter Isabelle four weeks earlier than anyone expected. My ex didn't even know that he was the father. My mother wanted to fly across country to help, but I wouldn't let her. This was stupid of me, actually. Six years later, after I had my second daughter Elena, my mother said,

“"I thought you were smarter than me. You were. Life is not all progress," I said.”

In fact, I has loved being the mother of two daughters. Amazing creatures with distinct characters ever changing. As teenagers, they confided in me much more than I would have expected.

but I had other terms for it, other measures. Isabelle lived with her reaching disappointment. Her entirely correct moral horror at the state of the world and said that heterosexual sex, she didn't like other kinds, was marked by selfishness and prone to violence. Violence. I couldn't get her to give me up, for instance, except to say that choking was sort of a thing.

It wasn't freedom to her, this sex. Elena hated the way certain people were always posting

their intimate reports on social media, and yet most of the time they had crushes on various men. They managed, in their ways, my clever, despairing girls. When I was 10, and jumping around on the fire escape,

“doing my foxy little moves, what did I think I was doing?”

As my mother asked, putting on my power, that's what I thought I was doing. I remembered Nini, whaling to her mother that I was dead. Ha ha, I wasn't. But I was taken to the land of the dead, that demanded emergency room. My mother tried to edge me away from the worst, the bleeding and the ranting. Later, I told Nini it was all very interesting.

I acted as if I'd wanted to know everything, though I didn't. Who does? When I was back in school with my plaster cast with all the signatures on it, I'd look at those names and feel superior.

“For having been in that room, with its evidence of what the body was.”

I believed my tibial would grow back fine. I was a confident girl. But bone didn't last forever, did it? I kept this question to myself, as if no one were in on the mystery, but me. That was Sarah Swanyan-Vinam, reading evolution by Joan Silver. The story appeared in the New Yorker in September 2022,

and became part of Silver's novel Mercy, which was published in 2025.

So Sarah, our first vision of Cara is of this ten-year-old

sashing around on her New York City fire escape in the middle of winter, swinging her bathroom belt. And singing quite a way to establish a character from the get-go. Do you think that that moment is in any way symbolic, you know, that we have this girl who's in a sense playing with danger,

“and then engaging with sexuality, and then suddenly gets hurt by it?”

There's also an exuberance there is, yes. And the exuberance is there in the performance, but it's also there in the language with which the narrator recollects this moment, the woopty woopty and the foxy little move. I mean, even the way she tells the story has the sassiness that I imagined

that that ten-year-old girl had out of the fire escape. So yes, it's absolutely setting up the vulnerability of the body, the fact that this exuberance ten-year-old does end up majorly fracturing her tibia. And it also sets up the curiosity about winning people's attention through her sexy moves, but to me almost as importantly, it introduces us to this joyful, playful aspect

of her character as well, right? And then we go straight from that exuberance to this kind of abrupt awareness of death, you know, as she's coming in the window, she's suddenly quite sure she's going to have to manage dying alone, and she's angry at her mother for not having taught her how to do it, which is kind of hilarious as well, because her mother hasn't yet done it. So how would she know? But this moment of getting her leads to that revelation,

you know, that she has both at home, and at the hospital when she sees this man be abandoned

by his friend, that in a sense one is always alone. One does have to manage alone.

because we see this character always in relationship, whether that's with her mother or with

“meaning or with the irresistible brody or with her own daughters at the end. So I'm struck by how”

that realization she has is put into conversation with the actual story that we see unfold, where even with Russell, she has this sort of interesting, rye exchange at the very end, and that's just one of sort of the many tensions and contradictions in the story that bring it so much sort of aliveness to me. Yeah, I mean, we get the tension of that almost immediately because she says after this injury that she realizes that she will have to

look out for herself. That's the lesson she walks away with. And then, well, it's six years later, but it's instantly on the page, she puts herself entirely into brody's hands, you know, completely trusting. This is not very trustworthy guy. So is that about not having learned the lesson she thought she'd learned or is that about defying that lesson or the

“pessimism of that lesson? I think in so many ways this story is about the defiance of pessimism.”

Oh, I feel as if it is a wonderful kind of yelp of defiance that she lets out both in her 16-year-old self and then in a sort of much more reflective, the mused way, as she's looking back on it, she's not judging or apologizing for what her 16-year-old self went out in search of. And even despite that rather bleak revelation that she has there in that opening

in the emergency room and that sort of first encounter with the body's fragility and impermanence,

I feel as if sort of the real energy of this story comes from her insistence upon the body's

“vitality and it's enormous capacity for feeling and experience. Yeah, that's something she stands by.”

Yeah, her whole life, it seems. Yeah, and you know, it's one of the things that's so striking to me about Silver's work is how her work is very idea-driven. It's very her novels, they thematically cohere each novel has like a different preoccupation that it's exploring through these woven together voices. And in this story, I feel as if the story offers quite plainly one of the ideas that it's interested in exploring when when Meanie says to her

sexual behavior is always a social construct. And I just marvel at the fact that the story

kind of runs directly at that idea without ever simplifying it or feeling as if it's purely illustrative. Yeah, I just want to first think about the ideas that Cara has in the course of the story because there are four or five spots where she does try to define sexuality in some way. And it's I don't think ever in terms of society. It's always in terms of nature and God and living on a higher plane. So for her in her mind, that time anyway, when she's 16,

it's not a social construct. It's more a kind of natural force. Absolutely. And I feel as if she's seeking an ecstatic experience, an experience beyond herself, an experience that allows her to tap into something much greater and more mysterious. And for her at this age, sex and sex with Brody is the way that she's accessing that or beginning to apprehend the possibilities of that.

constructed. But it's interesting how the moment where she's talking about not drinking and

“and not believing in alcohol sort of becomes a snapshot of the mindset of the time in which she grew”

up. And it's the moment that the title arises out of, right? So I thought that was such a death-tway for silver to introduce the historically specific ways of thinking that Cara has absorbed while not actually having her 16-year-old self think about her erotic life in terms of a product of the '70s. Exactly. Exactly. She calls it, you know, unguiding star and exalted idea.

She says they're glowing initiates. So it's a religious cult. Sexual feeling existed to impress

on humans the sense of a beyond the reality of another plane. Yes. It's wonderful to see her

“take off in these flights of language. When the rest of her narration, you know, it's very”

plain spoken. It's sometimes even a little vernacular. You know, one of the qualities of that silver's prose that I really admire is just how clean and unfussy and fourth-right it is. And, you know, she makes it seem so effortless, but in fact, it's incredibly hard to write. A voice that feels that natural, but even in this very direct plain spoken language, they're these moments where the language becomes elevated. And they happen so gently. They really

do feel like we're just kind of like lifting off for a moment into her exalted excitement. And I

“was remembering that Joan Silver had been a student as an undergraduate of Grace Paley. And I was”

thinking about how Grace Paley's stories are also absolutely suffused with that sense of a fight-a-living voice and how I feel as if silver is so much the inheritor of that. So, so I was poking around on the internet and I was thinking about Joan Silver and Grace Paley. And then I found this wonderful thing that Silver had written about being Paley's student. And she said what she taught the most thoroughly was the need for vividness.

I know this is a vague term, but she applauded the moments when characters fully animated the prose. When their hidden energies and unforced capacity for eloquence took over. And I was thrilled when I stumbled across this because I felt as if that captured so beautifully exactly those moments that you were just referencing. Those moments when she is talking about the spiritual plane that she has lifted on to through her erotic adventures.

But the language feels just ripened with that eloquence in a way that I loved experiencing as a reader. Yeah, and the joke of it all is that she's experiencing this exalted spiritual pleasure and joy and kind of uplift with someone who is so pedestrian and unworthy of it, you know. And it's almost like a feat of pure imagination for her to invest it with those qualities when wroteies at the other end of it.

Absolutely, but one of the great things about this portrait of Brudy is that it makes completely clear that he is totally besides the point of that he just sort of happens to be the unwitting

partner in her own exploration of this. Yeah, even in Jesus, she never actually loves him.

Yeah, he just loves his body. Yes, and the way she talks about it, so really convinces me

dialogue from Brudy because it's such a stark contrast to the ways in which she talks about how

just transported she is by him. And yeah, it does create this wonderful fit of humor in the story.

“And I don't think we ever get a physical description of him, do we?”

We don't, which was fine because then we can just project our own fantasies onto what this 19-year-old might look like. Well, let's talk about that because I was

16 about six or seven years after Kara. And so I inherited a bit of that era in my attitudes.

But this is not a story that would be set today. You know, we're much less open to hearing about 16-year-old girls' sexuality at this point. If you were setting a story right now in which

“in 19-year-old takes a 16-year-old girl across state lines for sexual purposes, you know,”

be sending the police. So, and he could actually go to prison for that. So, it's kind of fascinating to read it from the perspective of Kara's grown daughters, you know, who sees sex and such a so much more negative light. And I feel as if by allowing the duration of the time in the story to stretch all the way up to our present moment or approximately our contemporary moment, really defines so much of the stories, meaning and purpose, because if this story had simply

ended with Kara's safe return and her wanting pancakes for breakfast, the story would have had a very different impact and a very different meaning. And I feel as if the introduction of the grown daughters and the grown daughters own deep ambivalence about love and romance and heterosexual sex is really what casts these teenage adventures in a, it's not in any ways an nostalgic light. And that's again something else I really appreciate about sober about how

she can write about this past and this freedom without romanticizing it. And in some ways, I feel as if Kara's telling of her own erotic coming of age offers a sort of counter narrative to the language that we have currently to think about young women's sexuality, you know, and she has that great line at the end about, well, I knew what they knew, but I had other terms for it, other measures, and I was just thinking about how now telling her story and sort of looking at the circumstances,

it would be so tempting to pathologize it. How her behavior is the result of growing up with absent father and she's a latch key kid and she's seeking out the attention and affirmation of an older man and using her body to gain that. And I feel as if in her telling of it, she counters that. She argues against that by continually kind of insisting upon her own agency, by celebrating her own sort of robustness, if that makes sense, that she really wants to make clear to us that

“she did not want to be a sort of shrinking violet in the world or a victim, exactly. And I think”

it's quite amazing how the story allows us to both see the real danger she was in and the real

violations that she endured while not sort of retroactively pathologizing it as a case of hapless young woman being the victim of the world. That's true, but I also I wonder, you know,

well, first of all, in the second ride, the truck driver, the van drivers, you know,

“sticking his finger into a hole in her jeans and she does say if she had endured quite a lot”

by the time he let us off near Pennsylvania. And she does say that she thought it was her her responsibility to be polite and friendly and not object to this. So, and then the next sexual act is Brody pounding and pounding and putting Wilts on her back and she refers to herself as battered and wonders, you know, it was not what she was looking for. It was more than she wanted.

And that's the expression she uses. And then the next time he's, you know, stripping her in front of

his friend and that feels violating. It's a friction with a burn to it. It's a bad dream.

“She calls it a flush of horror, came and went, but I was used to it. She says, so if you isolate the”

moments of actual sex and her saying after that scene, why was she so afraid of making Brody angry? You know, she didn't stop him because she was afraid. You can look at it with today's eyes. You can look at it even with eyes from then and see, she's, you know, she's perhaps using the language of what she wants these experiences to be rather than the language of what they actually were. Yeah, and that's such a difficult question to wrestle with as a reader, which is

that which do we give more weight to, that the scenes that she actually shows us and it's true, those scenes are really unsettling, really disturbing. And even the sort of euphemisms with which she speaks of what's happening make them all the more disturbing. When she uses that phrase, you know, I endured quite a lot. Yeah. That euphemism was chilling to me. And the physical detail of the wipes on her back, the horrible way in which Russell and Brody referred to her as the girl,

repeatedly, like she's never referred to by name. I mean, the story is unspearing

in including those moments and those details. And so much of that is what we see happen in scene, yet the narrator is up the same time offering us this elevated, just rapturous language about how enamored she is of the sexual ecstasy that she has discovered. So it's really interesting to think about like, do we take the narrator at her word for that or do we sort of look more dispassionately at what is actually being shown to us in these scenes? And I feel as if the story

doesn't land, you know, in one play. And that's one of its powers is that it doesn't decisively sort of say, yes, this is an unreliable narrator. I don't feel like the story is making that argument, but yet the welts on the back, the, oh, that probing finger, their horrors, their horrors. And the story doesn't let us off from experiencing those. Yeah. In a way, it made me think a bit about Lolita because we're getting it from the opposite end,

you know, where Hamburg uses all kinds of flowery language to cast a positive light on what he's doing and her car is on the other end of it and using that language to cast a positive light. But

“maybe also, you know, I think what, what the language that Joan Silver used when talking about”

the story in a Q&A was, she's pledged to being sturdy to being equal to what happens. So Cara and her own mind is framing these moments as part of her quest for experiences, part of her quest to own her own sexuality and somehow maybe avoiding being damaged

about sex is the thing that makes it possible for her to have come out on the other side of this.

“Yeah, she's kind of irrepressible. She is. And some way. And she is. And what's interesting also is that,”

you know, Brody abandoned Sarah and steals from her and does everything bad he can do. But it seems as though in Cara's life, men become somewhat disposable.

You know, she's like, she doesn't bother telling her acts that she had his child. We never hear

about who the father of the second daughter was. Right. The geophysicist is serves as purpose because he gets her out to California and then we never see him again. Yeah. The men end up kind of being beside the point that they're useful in terms of achieving that sense of

“expansiveness or that sense of possibility that Cara is so hungry for that they allow her”

avatates to have sort of full rain, free rain. But but that ultimately they're still just very

much supporting characters. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And we never, I mean, I suppose Brody's

the one we get to know most, but we don't really get to know him. All we know of him is or the words that come out of his mouth and his actions, you know. Yeah. And then when we learn of his death, that is, you know, we feel that all the more keenly of who was Brody? Why was he in mean like the abruptness with which he leaves this plane in presses upon both Cara and Anas's

“the readers just how little we know about him. Yeah. And there's that moment when she finds out”

that he's died. And she says, how could it be that even if I'd never planned to see him again,

our story was a different story now. And it's not the first time that she brings up stories. When she comes back from Arizona for a while, she's a walking ghost and she's sort of silent, but then after a while, I had stories for those who asked and and that becomes in a sense like her dancing on the firescape, it's her means of entertaining others and also feeling somehow superior, you know, she's seen things that they haven't. So she's very aware of her lived experiences

as stories in an interesting way. Yeah. And she's interested too in how the duration of the story changes its meaning just as how silver is very interested in that. And then she tells another story about, you know, she tells herself another story about Brody fighting the evil residents in the afterlife, you know. So you know, so it's like there's both the spiritual story, the happening. There's the sentimental story. And then there's the Buddhist reincarnation

afterlife. Yeah. So so I love how those are all existing together at the same time. And I feel as if that presence of that sense of they're always sort of being after life or a sense of a world beyond ours is just throwing beneath the entirety of evolution as a story that even as we're there at the gas station and getting the hot dogs as grounded as it is in the sort of quotidian nature of life on Earth that there's also always this sort of like just low-throm.

Yeah. And then, you know, at the end, we go back to the opening. We go back to the Foxy little dance moves on the fire escape and to that to the kind of terror of the emergency room. And that first moment where she becomes aware of the body as the housing for both life and death, right, the center of life and the center of death. And I suppose that kind of captures the

dismantling the common wisdom that teenagers are convinced of their own invincibility or

“or you know that they believe they're immortal or they're invulnerable. And by starting the story”

with Cara's first brush with mortality and the fact that her leg continues to hurt even

years afterward that that great moment where after the horrible sex in the armchair, she feels his weight making her bad leg hurt. You know, that the story doesn't let us forget the impermanence and the fragility of the body. And I feel as if Cara is aware of that. She is not a teenager convinced of her own immortality. And in fact, I feel as if that makes her

her embrace and her seeking out these ecstatic physical experiences feel all the more

charged because she does know that this is not going to last forever. Yeah. So, you know, we do have this flash forward at the end to Cara's an adult with her adult daughters. And that serves a purpose. It shows us how much has changed socially in attitudes towards young women and sex. And we're in young women's attitudes towards sex, I suppose. And it also shows us Cara, a different time of her life. And I'm wondering how you think she has evolved.

I mean, I think one of the ways that she has evolved is by recognizing that change doesn't

necessarily mean improvement. And it's amazing how, you know, in just half a page, we have three

generations there talking to each other. There's like a conversation happening between mothers and daughters across a wide range of time periods and experiences. And Cara's mother says to her,

“"I thought you were smarter than me, you were." And Cara replies, "Life is not all progress."”

And I, and so struck by how the story allows me to look at this sort of larger sweep and to ask, it wasn't better back then. You know? And certainly all of those chilling details that the story unblinkingly includes, remind us that it's not better than, but the very concise little snapshot that she offers of her daughter's experience now, right? Does not look like progress to me? That does not look as if it's a freedom or a power that has expanded.

So I feel as if maybe that is one of the things that Cara has come to see more clearly with time.

“I think she's also come to see more clearly that what she was”

describing to herself as freedom was much more complicated than that. And I think the ways in which she does touch down in those particular scenes of sex, complicate her narrative and complicate her 16-year-old notions about the progress that she was the beneficiary of, right? And there's, you know, it's interesting because there's that one. There's like a little tiny moment where we hear Brody saying something kind of just anane when he's like, "Oh Arizona,

I feel so free here. It's the air." And there's just this funny little ride moment where Cara describes herself falling asleep in the car with the free air blowing her hair. And it's such a little gesture, it's such a light gesture. But I feel as if that's a kind of moment when the

about this notion of freedom and what that meant in that moment. Yeah. So I think, you know,

when she then brings that word up again at the end, when she's talking to Isabelle and Isabelle is talking about sex being marked by selfishness and prone to violence. Cara, comments, it wasn't freedom to hurt this sex. And I wonder if she were to push that thought a

“little further, would she now say that the sex that she was having in 1980, was that freedom?”

And I feel like that's a question that the story and the telling of it raises, raises but doesn't answer, but doesn't answer. But I was so happy that she raises it because it was exhilarating to me to be back in the body and mind of a 16 year old who was just feeling so high on the possibility of what sex could be. And I don't know if that's a feeling that 16 year olds have available to them anymore in the same way. You know, like you a little younger than Cara is

and I came with age sort of six, eight years later than she did. And in that moment, when the sexual freedom of the 70s was shifting into the fear around HIV and AIDS. But I even as I was

“coming of age, kind of at that moment of transition, I still just remember so clearly that”

sense of excitement and hunger to experience something kind of beyond the everyday. And I love how Cara, as this narrator, is able to give voice to that with such conviction. Yeah, and the one thing that Cara doesn't mention in relationship to her daughters is

the fact that back in 1980, sexual discovery was discovery. It was a first time.

No one had seen it on the internet. Yes, and this is huge, huge difference for her daughter's generation. Absolutely, there's that great line of how even though she's had sex a couple of times,

“male anatomy was still an unfolding mystery to her. Yes, and I think part of the excitement and”

the sense of a possibility was the mystery that that was still attached to it. And there is that very sort of subtle nod to the different moment that her daughters have come of age. And I couldn't get her to give me a for instance, except to say that choking was sort of a thing. And I loved, like, the just kind of bewildered way, which she, she says was sort of a thing. Again, it's just, this is such a deeply endearing voice. I just just love this character.

I love her voice. I love the frankness with which she talks about her adventures and her blind spots. So I do feel as if one of the big questions that leaves us is that question you raised earlier about which do we listen to more? This, this wonderfully warm, frank, funny,

forthright voice or the scenes that she paints for us. Yeah, and ultimately we probably just have to

listen to both. Yeah, well, thank you so much Sarah. Deborah, thank you. This was great fun. Joan Sober has published 10 books of fiction, including the story collections, ideas of heaven, and fools, and the novels improvement for which she won the National Book

Her most recent story in the New Yorker's safety was also published last year.

“Sarah Swanyan Bynum is the author of the novels Madeline is Sleeping, a National Book Award”

finalist, and Miss Hempel Chronicles, and the story collection likes. She was named one of the New Yorker's

20 under 40 fiction writers in 2010, and she's been publishing fiction in the magazine since 2008.

“You can download more than 220 previous episodes of the New Yorker fiction podcast,”

including one in which Sarah Swanyan Bynum reads "Extra by Eun Lee" or "Subscribe to the podcast

for free and Apple Podcasts." On the writer's voice podcast, you can hear short stories from

“the magazine read by their authors. You can find the writer's voice and other New Yorker podcasts”

on your podcast app. Tell us what you thought of this program on our Facebook page or "Rake and Review Us" in Apple Podcasts. This episode of the New Yorker fiction podcast was produced by John The May. I'm Deborah Treesman, thanks for listening. X.