This is the writer's voice, new fiction from the New Yorker.

I'm Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at The New Yorker. On this

episode of the writer's voice we'll hear Kate Walbert read her story To Do from

the September 2nd 2019 issue of the magazine. Walbert's novels include Our Kind, a short history of women, and his favorites.

A new story collection, She Was Like That, will be published in October.

Now here's Kate Walbert.

To Do.

Her mother had been a beauty, a green-eyed blonde who wore a long braid down her back in high school and then college, Basser 57.

In New York, Katie Gibbs 58 and her job in the typing pool at Westinghouse before she was asked, actually told, to adopt the more stylish

updews of the time. She refused, her boss accusing her of hysteria, though the origin of the word, do you know this, is the once

belief that the uterus could reach up its bloody hands and grip the throat.

Constance addresses the mostly silent women, many from her department, who have gathered

in the antlers bar on Elm, near the loop, for the new Storytelling Wednesdays.

The audience is silence, not silence, but agitated, bored distraction,

as Constance closes with a recitation of her mother's to-do list.

One of the many she found among her mother's things last spring upon her passing, she's explained,

cirrhosis of the liver, but that's another story.

This list was picked at random from a drawer in the condos kitchenette, her mother in one of those retirement

communities haunted by women and men at the end stage, although whoever saw the men.

The men were parked in different hallways.

Narrow wall-papored corridors lined with orchids,

Constance says. Miles and miles of orchids, she continues.

...