My initial reaction was that the whole thing was a little poky. About two or three pages in I quickly cadged to the eureka moment the author wants to imply from the get-go – “the tiny, meaningless things” are our brief human lives (she spells it out a bit too explicitly in the lines about “She couldn’t bear the triviality of their life together” & “Burl was a daily reminder that most of the ways people invented to fill up time were harrowingly insignificant”) – but her older woman Evelyn was well-rendered, and “Eve”’s relationship with the neighbor’s boy Scotty was intriguing in its lack of clichéd familiarity. The characters were well-named. The older woman’s casual, non-judgmental condescension to younger generations came across, as did her sense of personal history and sites of memory (failures imprint themselves more than triumphs, we forget so much more than we retain). The self-aware humans in the world (the vast minority) are constantly disappointed by the lack of self-awareness of the majority. The concern of the self-aware for the un-self-aware often can curdle into anger.

Secret-sharing between adults and children is far too often construed as “creepy,” sexualized by a banal and immature American mass-and-social media, so it’s refreshing to see The New Yorker publishing something with depth, nuance, and context. This is a story with lintels and chamois, so the author’s bonafides are privileged over simplistic/reductive political self-righteousness (that occasionally pervades The New Yorker’s pages).

Silver’s story feints at a suicidal end for the protagonist, which does not come, this woman who understands that she has wisdom and that her attempts to pass on wisdom to others will mostly be ignored. Of course it’s horrible to care, as she notes, hence the popularity of apathy. To try is pointless, yet it’s like we can’t help ourselves.

Shoes that lean against the wall like tired men waiting for a bus = badass simile.

Theft as theme, along with the precision of the phrasing (the way the boy eats his cinnamon toast, for example) took my mind to Katherine Anne Porter as an influence. Silver manages to point out the undervalued role of women in the workplace without being a grandstanding SJW speechmaker about it (the golf pencils are a superb example of the protagonist’s crucial contributions). She even allows her elderly character to be a bit of doddy old attention whore. Complicated three-dimensional characters who are neither heroes nor villains, neither noble victims nor dastardly predators make for a good piece of short fiction. A woman has been violated by a pair of children, one male and one female, and though she loves both, the trauma and PTSD she experiences are quite real.

A still-life portrait of a woman of a certain generation not might set some readers on fire, but the well-limned literary notions and writerly craft on display have an artisanal quality. For instance, the lobby chairs no one ever sits in make a good image/symbol for the futility and absurdity of existence – prisoners so acculturated to incarceration that when released they cannot open doors for themselves or stroke victims who can’t remember how to use a fork; these are fine descriptors. Deeply deterministic text, in a way few American stories have the courage to be.