The New YorkerModify

Watching Donald Trump’s press conference at Mar-a-Lago on Saturday, in which he said that the U.S. would “run” Venezuela and seize some of the country’s oil wealth “in the form of reimbursement for the damages caused us by that country,” my mind went back to 2003. In the immediate aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, I spent several weeks travelling around the country’s oil fields, some of which were still littered with live ordnance, speaking with members of the U.S.-led Task Force Rio—the “Rio” stood for “Restore Iraqi Oil”—and local workers. I also went to Baghdad, where I interviewed officials from the Iraqi oil ministry.

Venezuela isn’t Iraq, of course, and so far, at least, there hasn’t been a U.S. occupation. (Although Trump remarked, “We’re not afraid of boots on the ground.”) Nonetheless, this is the second time in twenty-three years that the United States has deposed the authoritarian leader of an oil-rich nation—the third if you count the NATO strikes on Libya in 2011, which hastened the fall of Muammar Gaddafi. History has some lessons to offer.

Unlike Trump, who is an unashamed petro-imperialist, members of the Bush Administration insisted that their push for regime change in Iraq was unconnected to hydrocarbons—Donald Rumsfeld famously said it had “literally nothing to do with oil”—and that the postwar reconstruction of Iraq’s oil industry was designed purely to help the country. At an oil refinery in Basra, I sat in on a meeting chaired by the American brigadier general who headed up Task Force Rio. An aide to the general gave me a handout, which said, “Who will be running the Iraqi oil industry? Iraqis are responsible for the energy sector.”

Many queried U.S. intentions. Iraq then had the second-largest proven oil reserves of any country in the Middle East, and Bush, shortly after taking office in 2001, had declared an energy crisis. At the time, the United States was importing about half the oil it burned. An energy task force led by Vice-President Dick Cheney, who had previously been the chief executive of the oil-services company Halliburton, issued a report that recommended more investments in renewables, energy-saving technology, and fossil fuels. It also called for more imports from Latin America, including Venezuela, which was already the third-largest foreign supplier to the U.S., after Canada and Saudi Arabia. While barely mentioning Iraq, the report said, “Energy security must be a priority of US trade and foreign policy.”

Today, as a result of the shale-oil revolution—fracking—the United States is the world’s largest oil producer, even larger than Saudi Arabia, and a net exporter of petroleum. But the A.I. buildout is rapidly increasing the demand for power, and the Trump Administration, despite its aversion to renewables, is set on achieving what it termed, in its recently published national-security strategy, “Energy Dominance.” In this context, it’s hardly surprising that Venezuela, which now enjoys the status of the country with the largest proven oil reserves—more than three hundred billion barrels—has attracted Trump’s attention. Most of the Venezuelan oil is situated in the Orinoco Belt, which runs east to west in the north of the country. Many of the crude deposits are in the form of a heavy sludge, which is difficult to extract and refine. But, with expertise and capital, it can be done. Moreover, many U.S. refineries, particularly in the Gulf and on the West Coast, are configured for heavy crude.

Despite this domestic refining capacity, ramping up production in Venezuela will be a mighty task. Like its Iraqi counterpart under Saddam Hussein, the Venezuelan oil industry has suffered from many years of sanctions and chronic underinvestment. Many of its skilled employees have emigrated. Last year, the industry produced about a million barrels a day, roughly a third of its output a quarter of a century ago. On Saturday, Trump said that big U.S. oil companies would “go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country.” It’s not that simple.

One challenge is the scale of investment required: one energy analyst told the Financial Times it would take more than a hundred billion dollars to double Venezuela’s oil output. Another issue is the price of crude, which recently dipped below sixty dollars, reaching a four-year low. At the moment, Chevron is the only major U.S. oil company operating in Venezuela. Shortly before Christmas, it emerged that the Administration had approached other U.S. firms, such as ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips, to see if they are interested in returning to a country where they operated before the government of Hugo Chávez, Nicolás Maduro’s predecessor, seized their assets. (Lawsuits sparked by that seizure are still ongoing.) Politico reported that some responses to the Administration’s feelers were negative. “Frankly, there’s not a lot of interest from the industry, in light of lower oil prices and more attractive fields globally,” one source told the news site.

The removal of Maduro from power could change the oil companies’ calculations, but the lesson from Iraq is that they need a guarantee of long-term political stability before they will make major investments. In 2003, Iraq’s interim oil minister told me that attracting foreign investments to Iraq’s underdeveloped oil fields was “only a matter of putting in place a system of contracts.” Philip J. Carroll, a Houston oilman whom the White House had appointed as an adviser to the Iraqi oil ministry, was more circumspect. Oil companies “will want to see an Iraqi government and have confidence in it before sinking down large sums of money,” Carroll said. “They will want to know what the world will be like in six or seven years.” This skepticism proved well founded. More than a decade of civil war and violent insurgency deterred foreign companies from returning to Iraq in any substantial way. It’s only in the past couple of years, more than two decades after the invasion, that the likes of Exxon and Chevron have done so.

Right now, Venezuela’s future is opaque: it’s not even clear what sort of government in Caracas the Trump Administration favors for the longer term: A former ally of Maduro? A democratically elected leader? An American viceroy? Whatever happens in the coming weeks and months, though, Venezuelans of all political persuasions will surely oppose anything that smacks of Yankee petro-imperialism, which was something it took the country a long time to escape.

Nearly a hundred years ago, when Standard Oil of New Jersey (a precursor to Exxon), Gulf Oil (which Chevron acquired in 1984), and Royal Dutch/Shell entered Venezuela, the oil companies obtained highly favorable contracts, which required them to pay modest commissions to the host country. In the nineteen-forties, the Venezuelan government insisted on a fifty-fifty split in oil revenues, and in 1960, Venezuela became the only non-Arab founding member of OPEC, which was designed to secure better prices from the Seven Sisters—the big Western oil companies, five of them American, which dominated the industry. In 1976, a government led by Carlos Andrés Pérez, one of the founders of the center-left Accion Democratica Party, nationalized much of the oil industry, creating a state-owned company, Petróleos de Venezuela. From then on, this company, which is commonly referred to as P.D.V.S.A., dominated the industry, although some American companies were subsequently allowed to start new projects, until Chávez’s government seized control of them in 2007.

Many Venezuelans accept that Venezuela now needs to bring in foreign capital to rebuild its oil industry. The democratic opposition has drawn up a plan to do this, with the goal of raising production to four million barrels a day. But, after a quarter of a century of political fracturing, sanctions, and myriad economic deprivations, that isn’t the only task facing the country. It also needs to rebuild its infrastructure, reduce its onerous foreign-debt load, and reassimilate millions of people who have left. “What the U.S. needs to do is to implement a form of a Marshall Plan,” Orlando Ochoa, a Venezuelan economist who teaches at the Universidad Católica Andrés Bello, in Caracas, told the Wall Street Journal over the weekend. “This is about much more than coming into the oil and gas sector just to extract crude from the ground.” Surely, it is. But is there any chance of Donald Trump recognizing this and acting upon it? ♦

Easily missed on the back side of the November ballots that brought Zohran Mamdani to Gracie Mansion was a proposal for a new map of New York City. Proposal 5, as it was called, was among the least noticed initiatives that New Yorkers were asked to vote on—yet, as happens with most proposals that make it to the ballot, a majority of New Yorkers voted for it, probably without really knowing what it meant, but approving it, in the New York manner, mostly for having made it there at all. It’s the same spirit with which we duly tick off our approval of judges and assemblypersons whose names we barely know and whose positions we can only guess at.

Proposal 5 was actually a bit of skilled electoral craft on the part of the city’s map functionaries. (They exist.) There has been a digitized map of New York for nearly twenty-five years. The extended map, however, will add to its already rich inventory of features some street-specific ones that, for ancient and complicated reasons, have been jealously guarded on thousands of paper maps by the five borough presidents. Though no one in the know will say, exactly, that Proposal 5 was a way of using the electoral pressure of more than a million New Yorkers to get the borough presidents to release their maps, you do get the strong impression that Proposal 5 was a way of using the electoral pressure of more than a million New Yorkers to get the borough presidents to release their maps. Now street names, lines, and widths across the city will all be available on one consolidated official digital map.

The crazy spaghetti of subterranean New York—the cables and the water mains and the angles at which a sewer slants downward, as it must—will be there for the asking. If an asteroid strikes a street corner in the Bronx, emergency workers will be able to find out where the power lines run nearby, how close a passing subway might be, and the address of the nearest diner where they can get a coffee. Property lines will be more distinct, which may make it easier to build new housing; the potential degradation of the city’s shores by climate change will be more trackable and treatable. We will better know who we are by knowing where we are.

In truth, the mysteries and compromises of mapping New York are evident every day. Consider the new subway map, which recently replaced the one long familiar in train cars. (It is, in fact, a retro design, returning to the graphic premises of a short-lived but snazzy map from the nineteen-seventies.) The new map broadens the ribbons marking the routes, intending to show how the lines run, instead of giving, as the previous map did, a clear sense of where they go on the city’s grid. On the old map, you could tell that the B and the F trains ran along Sixth Avenue without easily seeing which stops the F served that the B skipped.

On the new map, you can readily see where each train stops, but with less of a sense of where you are on the grid. Central Park, for instance, has been reduced to a small, deformed square. This change is not as helpful to tourists as it is meant to be, but, then, locals secretly think that, if you don’t know where the B train runs, you shouldn’t be on it. (Anyway, locals and tourists alike, seeking some new destination, will ultimately turn to their phones, on which the cooing G.P.S. lady will tell them how to get there.)

Maps become less perfect, even as they attempt to become more perfect. In Lewis Carroll’s “Sylvie and Bruno Concluded,” we learn of a map, described by an ambitious philosopher, that increases in scale bit by bit until it’s the same size as the terrain it represents. Unable to roll the map out, its creators cheerfully realize that the country itself can serve as its own map. Perhaps the most beloved map in recent decades was Saul Steinberg’s view of New York, initially a cover for this magazine. In the guise of a map, it captured a mentality: New Yorkers see anything beyond Eleventh Avenue as blank, uncharted wilderness. Steinberg’s point was not that his fellow New Yorkers were provincial but that all maps record a state of mind. (Indeed, on the Steinbergian map of today’s New York state of mind, many Brooklyn neighborhoods would loom as large as his West Side avenues did.)

Even the current redistricting battle reveals the constant paradox: we draw firm lines around a fluctuating reality. The intention in Texas, recently green-lighted by the Supreme Court, was to redraw the congressional map to make it easier for Republicans to win more districts, however absurd the boundaries. But the shifting allegiances of the people within those boundaries may thwart the designers’ aim. The Latinos grouped together who were expected to vote Republican may, after the mass mobilization of ICE and the implementation of other anti-immigrant policies, no longer do so. The map itself can’t capture the changing views of the people who populate it.

“The map is not the territory” is by now a truism, but the more important truth is that the territory is inarticulate without a map to know it by. Maps are the ideal metaphor for our models of what the world might be. A new political map of New York City awaits us—“slight left turn ahead,” as the G.P.S. lady would say, unless she pauses and issues an unsettling “recalculating” alert.

And so for the map of the country. We live in a time when the chart of the nation, its recognizable edges and worn paths, has been largely erased and replaced with one that calls to mind medieval maps, with misshapen horizons, weirdly distorted territories, and dragons lurking beyond the borders. The primary feeling that many of us currently experience is not merely distress but profound disorientation. We not only don’t like where we are; we don’t know where we are. Once reliable routes to reality have been cut off.

It helps to know where we’re going before we get there. If there is a consoling reflection in this season, it is that all good maps, like the digitized city map, turn out to be shared work, made by many hands over a long period of time. Drawing a plan of our plans is the necessary task of the approaching year, as an act of collective imagination and common hope. ♦

The Jamaican patty is, I propose, a culinary avatar of New York on par with the hot dog, the pizza slice, and the bagel, those other portable totems of immigrant ingenuity and the city’s knack for making the quick address of hunger into something like a civic religion. Today, in at least four of the five boroughs, you’re always within two blocks of a patty ready to be bitten into, whether it’s microwaved behind the counter at a bodega or a slice joint, or pulled from the steam cabinet at a dedicated patty shop: a flaky, golden half-moon filled with curried meat or fish or vegetables or whatever else can be coaxed into its turmeric-stained folds. As the knish descends from the metropolitan pantheon—ave atque vale to that Eastern European stalwart, its crust filled with onion-scented potato and the ghost of another century’s promises—the patty, a thrilling, dynamic distillation of South Asian, African, and Caribbean influences, should take its rightful place as the city’s most iconic pastry.

At Kingston Tropical, in the Bronx’s Wakefield neighborhood, open since the nineteen-seventies, the patties burst with meat and veggies, a hearty snack for around five bucks. Little Miss Muffin ’N’ Her Stuffin, on the edge of Prospect Heights, makes barbecue-chicken patties that cannot be beat. Natural Blend, a plant-based Brooklyn mini-chain, turns out lentil-filled patties that are out of this world. The pastry’s stature in the city was further boosted this year with the arrival of Juici Patties, a beloved Jamaican chain that opened outposts in Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Queens. Unlike the patties at the ubiquitous chain Golden Krust, which are reliably just O.K., Juici’s patties are quick-service perfection: the fillings generous and vibrantly spiced, the texture a perfect uniform savory mush. The $4.25 spicy beef has a broad, meaty flavor spiked with the curry-floral fieriness of Scotch-bonnet chiles. It’s even better with the addition of a slice of American cheese, which melts around the beef and adds a facet of creamy sweetness. At any half-decent patty shop, you can get your pastry inserted into a big, fluffy piece of coco bread, a squishy Caribbean roll made with coconut milk. I love the carb-on-carb opulence of this sandwich, not least because the bread neatly contains all the pastry shards that otherwise tend to explode out with every bite, making an enormous mess of your lap or shirtfront.

The biggest story of the Jamaican patty lately has been its inroads into the higher end, following the same trajectory as pizza and bagels before it. Perhaps the first New York chef to place the patty on a pedestal was Kwame Onwuachi, in 2022, when he opened Tatiana, his glittering Lincoln Center restaurant, with a menu that included miniature, semicircular pastries filled with spicy curried goat. Onwuachi is a poetic interpreter of New York’s Black culinary vernacular, and his upscale patties shared a menu with versions of other dishes generally considered unworthy of haute-culinaire attention—corner-store snack cakes, a truffled chopped cheese. But earlier this year he democratized his vision with Chef Kwame’s Patty Palace, an apparent chain in the making, which began with a stall at Citi Field and recently expanded to Union Square’s Time Out Market food hall. The patties at the Palace are full-sized and set into big, steamy wedges of gently sweet coco bread. Similar to the patties served at Tatiana, they come with a pair of sauces—here, it’s a slathering of jerk-spiced barbecue sauce and a tart green hot sauce, along with a bright tangle of ginger-cabbage slaw. Whether you’ve chosen a flaky pastry stuffed with piquant, cumin-scented curried chicken, or a doughy baked shell wrapped around bland and mushy jerk-spiced mushrooms, the forceful toppings tend to overpower whatever’s going on inside the patties themselves. Still, the sandwiches are awfully good.

The leader of the fancy-patty movement, for me, though, is Bar Kabawa, the swanky, sexy East Village Daiquiri joint that’s attached to Kabawa, the chef Paul Carmichael’s marvellous Caribbean tasting-menu spot. Carmichael’s patties are cheffy and ambitious, for sure, with a dazzling array of creative fillings including curried crab with squash; pepper-pot-spiced duck with foie gras; and an unctuous blend of short rib, conch, and bone marrow. Some of the patties come with laminated Haitian-style casements that are burnished in a deep fryer. Others, with breadier wrappers, are baked. The prices are high—on a recent visit, a patty filled with kale and oats (richer and livelier than it sounds) was ten dollars, and one containing a briny, spicy mixture of lobster and herring cost more than twenty. (Coco bread, if you’re feeling sandwich-y, was an extra four dollars.) Somehow, despite their decadence, these pastries never feel one bit haughty or pretentious: Carmichael understands that a patty isn’t for fussing over. It’s for tearing into. It’s for devouring.

Jamaican and other Caribbean immigrants brought the patty to New York beginning in the sixties, and it is still a staple of the city’s West Indian enclaves. It’s Caribbean food, Black food, American food—and, like so much of what makes New York’s cuisine vital, it comes from communities whose contributions to the city often go unrecognized until they become impossible to ignore. In that sense, there’s a bit of poignant irony in the patty’s current elevation: it takes a moment of trendiness, of pageantry and gussying up, for the patty to claim its crown. My own first Jamaican patty came from a corner store on 111th Street. It was shoved into my hands one hungover morning by a friend who had been living in the city a year or so longer than I had, and who had a lot to teach me. That patty, almost certainly mass-produced by Tower Isles, the city’s ubiquitous patty distributor, remains my benchmark: warm as a kitten, neon-yellowy, with a gooey filling that tasted mostly of salt and hot pepper. The great and grand patties of the new generation aren’t better than that, though neither are they worse: they’re just fancier, louder, higher-wattage. The Jamaican patty has made it into the ballpark, thanks to Onwuachi; perhaps next it’ll be printed on T-shirts, or used as Big Apple shorthand in the movies, or added to the ranks of MOMA’s N.Y.C.-themed collection of Christmas ornaments, alongside the Anthora coffee cup and the yellow cab and the cranky pigeon. But the patty is what matters, the joy of it, the heat and the flake and the bite. ♦

Pam is seeing someone, but she’s not talking about it. Of course, her friends know, but she has not told her parents or her sister, Wendy. She would tell her father, Charles, because he doesn’t pry, but then he would tell her mother, Helen. As for Wendy, she can’t keep a secret from anyone, Helen least of all. If Helen knew, she would pester and pass judgment, so Pam is keeping John from her. She’s done being judged. Well, almost done. She’s working on it.

John is not Jewish. For Helen, that’s a deal-breaker—but this isn’t Helen’s deal to break! He is not young, but, at fifty-six, Pam is not young, either. He is mostly bald. His knees are bad. He’s heavy, and he has a little twitch when he is nervous, a slight blink of his left eye. He’s shy, soft-spoken, and divorced, which, in Helen’s mind, is a moral failing. Helen would never say it, but Pam knows what she thinks. Helen, who has the most solicitous husband in the world, believes that divorced people give up too easily.

For these reasons, Pam does not even mention John on the phone, and her mother assumes that she is still single. You know, your mother worries, Charles tells Pam, and she feels a little guilty, but not enough to change the status quo, which is that she and John spend nearly every weekend together, either at her place, in Providence, or at his, in Jamaica Plain. He doesn’t twitch at all when they’re together. In fact, his eyes are wonderfully green. Like Pam, he is a lawyer, but he is a sole practitioner specializing in wills and trusts. Like Pam, he enjoys black coffee and good jazz. But those are surface details. More important, he is openhearted. He loves animals. His ginger, Taffy, passed recently, and he keeps her picture on his desk. He does not think it strange that Pam still mourns her own cat, Shadow.

John is big, and his bulk comforts Pam, because she is so small. He is effusive, whereas Pam is more reserved. When he embraces her, he lifts her off the ground. He has a warmth about him, like an oven radiating heat. Pam warms her feet on him in bed. The first time, she said, “I’m sorry, my feet are cold.” And he said, “I don’t mind. I like it.”

They have been seeing each other for six months when he says that he wants her to meet his daughter. Isabella is his only child, and he is careful with her. He does not rush to introduce her to people he is dating.

“Who else have you dated?” Pam asks, because he has been divorced for only a year.

“Well, just you,” John says. They are walking in the Arnold Arboretum on a clear October day. They take a path over gentle hills, and John says, “I want to introduce you because I think you’ll really like each other.”

“Oh!” Pam’s heart jumps. She knows all about Isabella, even though she has not met her yet. John’s daughter is fourteen, and she attends the Winsor School and sings. Pam has watched videos of Bella in choir—although it’s hard to see which one she is. Isabella is a terrific student. John keeps her essays in a folder. And her math tests! She is good at math as well. She is gifted, John says, and Pam recognizes his partiality. She has other friends with children, and they are all loving, but those with just one child are lovesick, their attention undivided. An only child must be everything at once. Student, athlete, artist. Pam used to laugh about this, but when John praises his daughter she views him with tenderness. Isabella is a writer and a mathematician and an artist and why not? At John’s house, Pam gazes at Bella’s acrylic paintings and says, “She’s so talented!” Her portrait of her father looks just like him. The green eyes, the smooth dome of his head.

As they walk through the trees, John’s cheeks are ruddy in the fresh, crisp air. “I thought the three of us could go somewhere together.”

He says it near a hemlock. The trees in the arboretum are labelled with metal tags, and Pam takes note because she is going to remember this moment. “We could meet for lunch,” she says.

“Maybe it would be better to do something,” John suggests.

Pam tries to think. What’s a good thing to do with a fourteen-year-old girl? A movie? Canoeing on the Charles? She hates canoeing. Trampolines? Not with John’s knees. “How about a museum?” She is thinking of Isabella’s art. “The M.F.A. Or what about the Gardner?”

“I haven’t been there in years,” John says.

“Me either,” Pam says, but the memories rush in on her. The Italian palace right in Boston. The museum’s courtyard like a fairy tale as you enter. Walls pale pink like the inside of a shell, a glass roof far above, and at the courtyard’s center an enchanted garden with a mosaic floor and a fountain, delicate flowering vines.

“The Gardner is a great idea,” John says.

“And you know what? She can get in for free,” Pam tells him.

“What do you mean?”

“If your name is Isabella, you can always get in for free.”

“Really?”

“In college, I had a friend named Isabel, and it didn’t count. You can’t be Isabel or Izzy. You have to be Isabella, like Isabella Stewart Gardner.”

“Is that still true?”

“Look it up.”

While he checks his phone, she hovers at his shoulder, and they laugh with pleasure, because it’s still true, just as Pam says. They are standing near the hemlock, with its green and golden leaves, and everything seems meant to be.

However, they can’t get to the museum right away. They need to wait for one of John’s weekends, and, even then, Isabella is busy. She’s not just a singer and a painter. She plays soccer every Saturday. Pam knows the schedule, because John can’t see her when Bella has a game. He’s got to drive and watch and cheer. During the season, there’s hardly any time, and then it’s Thanksgiving, which he and his ex-wife, Alison, choreograph to maximize relatives on both sides of the family. John takes Bella to his parents’ in Winchester for dinner, and then Bella and her mother and her aunts run in the Turkey Trot on Friday morning, and they all go to J.P. Licks for ice cream afterward.

“That’s right near my parents’ house,” Pam says while they are eating breakfast at her place.

“Not the one in Brookline. The original J.P. Licks,” John says, meaning the one in Jamaica Plain, on Centre Street.

“But that’s close, too,” Pam says.

John looks puzzled, as if to say, What are you suggesting? And for the first time she feels uncertain—trapped in a kind of Catch-22. She might be close. She is close, but she can’t join him and his family, because she hasn’t even met his daughter.

“I just wish,” she says.

“Wish what?” he asks.

“That we could be together more.”

“We will be.” He kisses her, and uncertainty evaporates. There is something about the way he holds her face in his hands. When she was young, the guys she loved were charming, confident, a little mean. John is none of those things. When he takes her in his arms, she wants to be with him forever. She wants everyone to know that they’re together, everyone except her mother.

Thanksgiving is desolate with freezing rain. Pam drives to her parents’, but her sister can’t come, because her wife is working on the holiday.

“What about Aunt Sylvia and Uncle Lew?” Pam asks when she arrives.

Her father shakes his head.

“They’re just twenty minutes away.” Pam collapses her umbrella in the entryway.

“Leave it on the porch,” her mother calls out from the kitchen. She can sense a wet umbrella without seeing it.

“Do you even know what Aunt Sylvia did?” Pam whispers to her dad.

“Your mother was very hurt,” Charles tells her, as he always does.

“Hurt, or took offense?”

Charles shrugs as if to ask, Is there a difference? Does it really matter?

Pam knows about taking offense. Like Aunt Sylvia, Pam’s dog is not invited to Thanksgiving. The last time Pam brought her to the house, Rosie rampaged through the garden, trampling the flowers, and now she remains home, with a sitter. So it’s just Pam and her parents and the secret Pam is keeping. Such a big secret that she nearly sets a fourth place at the table.

“This is a lot of food,” Pam says when they sit down.

“I can always freeze the leftovers,” Helen says.

Pam glances at her father, who will be eating turkey sandwiches and cornbread stuffing and roasted Brussels sprouts forever. “What about the Metzgers?”

“All the usual suspects are in Boca,” Charles says.

“The Metzgers are in West Palm,” Helen corrects him.

“Do you ever think about going down there?” Pam asks.

“Occasionally, in moments of weakness,” Charles says. “But—”

Helen finishes his sentence. “We hate it there.”

Pam says, “I hate to see you isolated.”

“We aren’t isolated.” Charles refills Pam’s glass.

“You seem that way.” Pam’s face is hot. She was a diver as a girl, and she recognizes the feeling. Flushed excitement, climbing the ladder. “You seem bored and lonely.”

“I am never bored,” Helen declares, as though Pam has accused her of a mortal sin. Laziness. Superficiality.

“I worry about you guys,” Pam says.

“You don’t have to worry about us,” her father says.

“I worry that you’re lonely,” Helen tells Pam.

“Why?” She realizes how absurd this is—fighting about who’s lonelier at a three-person Thanksgiving dinner.

“You’ve been single for a long time,” Charles says in his doctor’s voice, courteous and at the same time chiding.

“How do you know I’m single?” Pam shoots back.

Helen turns on her. “You’re seeing somebody!”

“I am.” Suddenly, she’s done it. The secret’s out.

“Really!” Charles sets down his fork.

“Who is it?” Helen asks.

Pam tilts her chair way back on its hind legs, just to get a little distance from the table.

“Don’t do that,” her mother says.

“His name is John.” Pam thumps down to earth, all four chair legs on the floor.

“How did you meet?” Charles asks.

“John who?” Helen asks, because, as she’s told Pam many times, it’s irritating when people are introduced by first name only.

“John O’Neill,” Pam says.

“O.K.,” her dad says.

“What does he do?” her mother asks.

“And, no, he isn’t Jewish.” Pam’s cheeks are burning now.

“I gathered that,” Charles says. “I figured that out.”

Helen says, “It doesn’t matter.”

“What?” Pam splutters, half laughing, half indignant. “You always said that was a deal-breaker!”

“At your age?” Helen asks.

Charles looks miffed. “Who do you take us for? Your sister married a woman.”

“O.K., Dad.”

“A Catholic woman,” Helen adds.

“Right. Give us a little credit,” Charles says.

“He’s divorced.” Pam tests her mother.

Helen doesn’t even blink. “The main question is: what’s he like?”

“He’s a good person,” Pam answers, and she resolves to say no more. Not another word. But her mother doesn’t honor this.

“A good person? What does ‘good’ mean?”

“Good. Just good,” Pam tells her.

“So, you know him well?” Charles asks.

“How long have you been dating?” Helen asks.

“Seven months.”

Charles says, “All right. We’re not going to put you on the spot.”

But then he can’t resist. “What does he do?”

He kisses me, Pam thinks. He holds me in his arms at night. She says, “He’s a lawyer.”

“How long has he been divorced?” Helen asks.

Here we go, Pam tells herself. “A year.”

“That’s not very long.”

“How long should it be?” Pam laughs a little. She can’t help it.

Speaking about John makes dinner bearable. Even speaking about him to her mother. Strangely, Pam doesn’t mind talking, now that she’s begun. Somehow, nothing Helen says can hurt her. In fact, at this moment, Helen’s eyes are kind. She is open, pleasantly surprised. Charles is, too.

“Does he have children?” Helen asks.

“Yes,” Pam says. “He has a daughter at Winsor.”

“A good school,” Charles says.

“What’s her name?” Helen asks.

For a second, Pam doesn’t want to answer. She wants to declare, “I’m not at liberty to say.” But she has come this far. She tells them. “Isabella.”

“That’s pretty,” Charles says.

“Is she in high school?” Helen asks.

“She’s in ninth grade.”

“John must be much younger than you,” Helen says.

“No, he’s my age.”

“So he’s quite an old father!”

Charles turns to Helen. “Lots of people have children late.”

“I am aware,” Helen tells him. Then she asks, “What’s the daughter like?”

That question needles Pam. “I haven’t met her yet. We’re planning to do something together.”

“Dinner?” Charles asks.

“The Gardner Museum.”

“Oh! Wonderful,” Helen says. “Does she like art?”

“She’s an artist.” Pam feels the conversation spinning out of control, but she can’t stop talking. “She’s an amazing painter.”

“You’ve seen her work?” her dad asks, as though Bella were a professional.

“I mean, only in John’s kitchen.” Why does she say that? Why does she say anything? Pam learned long ago not to confide in her parents, but now she’s blushing, and it’s not the wine. It’s happiness. Here she is whipping out her phone to show them a photo of Isabella’s painting. The portrait of John, radiant with his green eyes and the glowing dome of his pink forehead.

Helen says, “Hold on, I have to get my glasses.”

Meanwhile, Charles squints at the phone. “That’s very good. Is it her father?”

“Let me see.” Helen takes a long look. “The flat face and green eyes remind me of Modigliani.”

“Really?” Pam says.

“If he were painting a middle-aged man,” Helen says without irony.

“With a short neck,” Charles says.

“He doesn’t have such a short neck,” Pam defends John.

“You’re right,” Charles says. “It’s not that his neck is short. It’s that the necks in Modigliani’s paintings are so long.”

“She’s talented,” Helen declares.

“She is,” Pam says.

Charles asks, “When are you taking her to the museum?”

“We’re trying to—we have to figure out the schedule.”

“Oh.” Helen sounds more like herself. A little colder. Firmer. “Because she’s living with her mother.”

“John has joint custody.”

“And who is the mother?” Helen asks.

Pam thinks fast. Mostly, she knows what John has told her, which is that his ex-wife broke his heart and smashed it into little pieces. “Her name is Alison. She’s an oncologist at the Brigham.” She says this for her dad’s benefit, because he is a retired otolaryngologist. He is always modest about his career. He says that he could never fix a broken heart like Grandpa Morris. Still, he was an attending for many years at Mass Eye and Ear.

“Alison who?” Charles asks, in case he knows her.

“Alison Friedlander.”

“Jewish!” Helen says.

“You don’t know that,” Pam says.

“Of course I do.”

“It’s a Jewish name,” Charles says.

“Isn’t it German or something?” Pam asks.

“No,” Helen says. “It’s a Jewish name. She’s Jewish.”

Charles chimes in. “And you know what that means!”

They have that twinnish look they get when they solve the acrostic in the Sunday paper. Almost in unison, they say, “John’s daughter is Jewish, too.”

“You guys are terrible!” Pam says, because what are they doing, seizing this innocent child? Five minutes ago, Pam admitted that she was dating someone, and now they’ve claimed a girl they haven’t met. A girl she hasn’t met. They’re ready to adopt John’s daughter. “You don’t know anything about her.”

“Her mother’s name is Friedlander,” Helen says.

“Believe me, no one’s raising Isabella Jewish,” Pam says.

“That doesn’t matter,” Helen tells her.

“She celebrates Christmas with John’s parents.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Charles intones.

Cartoon by Lars Kenseth

Copy link to cartoon

Link copied

Shop

“John and Isabella decorate a tree each year.”

Helen dismisses this. “Her mother is Jewish, so she is a Jew.”

“What else can she be?” Charles asks.

They are so pleased. They have forgotten John entirely. They’ve nearly forgotten Pam across the table. It’s as if they have an instant granddaughter. Already, they are plotting. Pam can see it in their eyes. “Don’t get excited,” she warns. “Don’t jump to conclusions.”

“Who’s jumping?” Charles asks.

“Just don’t get your hopes up.”

“About what?” Charles asks.

“About anything!” Pam feels superstitious. Relieved yet regretful that she told them. “Don’t assume.”

“I don’t assume anything,” Helen says, and yet she’s smiling.

“Charles, would you get dessert plates?”

Usually, Pam escapes as fast as possible, driving home early the morning after Thanksgiving. This weekend, she lingers most of Friday. Partly to stack firewood, because her dad can’t do it anymore. Partly because her mother is so pleasant. Helen does not question Pam’s short hair or tell her wistfully, But you could get the gray out. There are no dark comments about living alone. No mournful speeches starting with the words “I worry . . .” Most surprising, Helen does not interrogate Pam about John. Clearly, Helen has decided—maybe she and Charles have decided together—that they will not intrude.

It’s like a staring contest, these two keeping their mouths shut. Helen does not say a word about Pam’s relationship. Charles does almost as well. True to form, Helen maintains discipline, but Charles cracks.

They are standing in the driveway, and Pam is about to head home to Providence, where Rosie waits for her. Helen says, “Goodbye, dear. I’m so glad you could come.”

“Thanks, Mom,” Pam says.

“Drive safely,” Charles says. “Keep us posted.”

Helen shoots him a warning look—but she’s amused by his little hint. She’s won! “Just let us know when you get home,” she tells Pam.

“O.K., bye. I’ll call you.” Pam’s words are swallowed up in her father’s embrace.

And he cannot resist. “Tell us all about the Gardner.”

“Only if you want to,” Helen says, radiating curiosity and hope.

Pam’s parents are funny, almost charming, as they stand in front of their brick house. I love you, Pam thinks suddenly. “I will,” she promises. “I’ll tell you how it goes.”

If only she had something to report. The visit to the Gardner keeps getting postponed. First, it’s Isabella’s choir concert, and then she has exams, and then the holidays are coming. Pam and John can hardly see each other, let alone take Isabella to the museum. All that’s left is the Friday that Isabella gets out of school for winter break, and Pam reserves tickets.

She drives to John’s office in Jamaica Plain so that they can pick up Bella together. His building is a small Victorian that used to be a house. An orthodontist leases the first floor, and John shares the second floor with an insurance agent. John’s space is in front. He’s got a big bay window that would be perfect for plants, but he has none. There are only framed pictures of Bella and Taffy, on his desk.

“Hold on.” He is typing something on his phone. “One second.”

Pam takes a seat in a blue-and-chrome chair and looks at Bella as a tiny girl on the beach and Bella in her choir robe and Bella smiling with braces on her teeth. Does she go to the orthodontist downstairs? Her eyes are brown. Her hair is long and shining, perfectly brushed. Burnished. That’s the word that comes to mind. Some combination of brushed and polished. She is not just pretty. She is cherished.

“Hi,” John says.

“Hi!”

“There’s a problem.”

Again? Pam thinks. Really?

“Alison broke her foot.”

“What?” Pam blurts out. Then she says, “Oh, no.”

“She just had an X-ray.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Pam asks, because she’s been driving for an hour.

“It just happened this morning, and now it looks like she’ll need surgery to put a pin in—so I need to be there with Bella.”

“O.K.,” Pam says, slowly. “We can reschedule. I just wish you’d called me.”

“We were still figuring out what to do.”

“But, if I’d known, I wouldn’t have taken off work—”

“Well, it’s an emergency.”

“Yes, but.”

He stares at her. “What do you mean but?”

She tries not to let her disappointment show, but she can’t help it. “I feel like we’re cursed or something.”

“What are you talking about?” His eye is twitching, just a little. He is looking at her as though she were an alien—how could she think about museums at a time like this? “Alison’s in the hospital.”

Isn’t she always in the hospital? Pam thinks. Doesn’t she work there? “O.K., I guess I’ll just go over to your house and wait.”

“No, I’m taking Bella for the weekend,” he tells her.

Pam nods, because of course she can’t be at the house with them. Bella hasn’t even met her. “I guess I should just turn around and drive home.”

“No, don’t do that,” John says as he sits at his desk.

She feels as distant as a client. “You didn’t call me.”

“The situation was unfolding!” he exclaims.

The situation? she thinks. What is the situation here? All she wanted was to meet his daughter. He had suggested it himself, but there’s no room for her. His heart is with Alison and Bella, because he is a good person and they are family. “You have your hands full,” she says.

“I’m not trying to ruin your plans.”

“They’re my plans now? I thought we were planning to take Bella to the Gardner together.”

He is astonished. “Pam, Alison’s foot is very badly broken!”

“It’s always something.”

“This is not just something.”

Tears start to well up in her eyes. “It’s never going to happen. You’re not going to let it happen.”

“What are you talking about?”

“We’ll never get to the museum.”

“Why are you still talking about the museum? This has nothing to do with the museum.”

“I know,” Pam says. “It’s about not seeing me.”

He looks at her across his desk and asks, “Do you think I’m trying to avoid you? Or exclude you?”

She takes a breath. “I don’t feel excluded.”

“Thank you.”

She stands up. “I feel extraneous.”

“I don’t know what that means,” he says.

“It’s just that I’m alone,” she tells him. “And my feelings are extraneous.”

“Pam!” He walks around his desk and reaches for her. He is always reaching, but when he embraces her she feels like he’s somewhere else. All the action in his life is happening without her. It’s offstage, where she can’t see. No. It’s just the opposite. She’s the one offstage, in the shadows.

“I’m sorry about Alison’s foot,” she says.

“I know.”

They are standing there together, doing the right thing. Her voice is muffled because her face is pressed against his chest. “I just have a feeling that we’ll never get to the Gardner.”

“We will,” he says. “We’ll go together.”

Just us? she thinks. Just us, without your daughter? She had envisioned stepping from winter into the pink courtyard and seeing it through Bella’s eyes. She had imagined that delight. The mosaic and the ferns and the climbing vines. The sudden burst of Italy. “I wanted to be there when she walks in for the first time.”

“She’s been there,” John says with some surprise. “She went on a field trip with her class last year.”

Pam pulls away. “You never told me that.”

He points out the obvious. “Her school is right there.”

“Oh.” She should have thought of that. Winsor is practically across the street. Of course, the girls would visit the Gardner. “I had a whole story in my mind!”

“What story?”

She is half laughing at herself. “I made up a whole story, and none of it was real!”

“We’ll figure it out,” he promises.

She doesn’t answer.

“Don’t you believe me?”

She just shrugs. She can’t give him what he wants. She doesn’t have it in her to say yes.

“I better pick her up,” he says.

“O.K.”

“Don’t look at me like that.”

“How do I look?”

“Crestfallen,” he says.

And it’s true. She is so anxious and dramatic. This is the gulf between them. She has never been married. She has never been a parent. “You think I’m selfish.”

“No,” he says. “You’re just not used to—”

“Putting other people first?”

“Changing the schedule sometimes.”

“But I am used to it!” she says, because how many times have they postponed the museum trip? How many times have they rescheduled? She’s been flexible. She’s been hoping.

“And we will get to the museum.”

“No, that’s O.K.” Her voice sounds small and cold, but she can’t help it. That’s how she begins to feel. Chilly, as though she were outside again. She’s zipping up her coat, and John looks so sorry. He looks sorry for her. Righteous anger rushes in—or is it her self-respect awakening? “Don’t do me any favors,” she says, because she has no desire to walk through the Gardner’s doors. To see the Madonnas or the bits of lace, the altarpieces, the Rembrandt self-portrait. The one where he’s so young and self-assured.

Quietly, John says, “I have to go.” He is disappointed in her. She can see it in his face. He is shocked by her behavior (as if she’s in the wrong!), but, even now, he’s kind. “I’ll call you later.”

“O.K.” With a sinking feeling, she remembers that she called her parents from the road. She told them she was going to the Gardner with John and Bella that afternoon.

He drives off to collect his daughter. Pam sits in her car trying to figure out where to go. Not to the museum. Not to her parents’. They’re just a few minutes away, but she can’t face them. No way can she tell them about all of this.

She drives to Providence and picks up Rosie. Her dog panting, unquestioning, always thrilled to see her. Jamie, the dog-sitter, is startled that Pam is back so soon.

“We were just going for a run,” Jamie says.

“That’s O.K. I’ll take her.” Pam pays for three full days and takes Rosie home.

Her parents are trying to hold back. Pam can tell, because they don’t call for three days. They don’t even text, but she can hear them wondering about her. They are in suspense. Then they are speculating. Didn’t she say she’d tell them how it went?

She senses them wishing that she would call, or at least send them a few words. Tap the hull of her drowned submarine. On the fourth day, she texts to say she’s fine.

Her mother texts back immediately That’s good to hear. And Pam reads everything in those few words. Reproach, concern, regret.

That night, Pam fortifies herself with a few drinks and answers when the phone rings.

“Hello,” she says.

“Pam?” her mother asks.

Who else would it be? Pam thinks. She says, “Hi. Yes.”

“How are you?”

“Good,” Pam says.

“Hold on. Let me put you on speaker.”

“You’re doing all right?” her dad asks.

“I’m fine.”

“I figured as much,” Helen says, because of course she has figured out everything.

“Yeah, we didn’t get to the museum,” Pam says.

“What happened?” Charles asks.

“I don’t know. Scheduling. Medical emergency.”

“Really!” Charles says.

“I mean, it wasn’t life-threatening.”

“I’m sorry,” Helen says. For a split second, it sounds like she’s sorry the emergency was minor—but Pam knows what she means.

“It’s O.K.,” Pam says. “In the end, I didn’t really want to go.”

“You broke up with him!” Helen is direct, as always.

“Well,” Pam says. “We’re still speaking. He is very—”

“Very what?” Helen asks.

“Committed.”

“That’s a good thing,” Charles ventures.

“To his ex-wife and daughter.”

“Oh,” her mother says.

Alone in her kitchen, where no one can see, Pam tilts her chair back. “What do you call those trees that hold on to all their leaves, even after they shrivel in the winter?”

“Persistent?” Charles asks.

“Marcescent,” Helen says, because she knows the word for everything. She is such a puzzler.

“That’s how he is,” Pam tells them.

“Good for him,” Helen says, and Pam knows that she means good riddance.

Charles’s voice is gentler. “So, you haven’t met Isabella.”

Pam can hear his wistfulness and yearning. She senses it in both her parents, though it’s hidden in her mother.

“I told you not to get your hopes up,” Pam says, but this is harsh, and she regrets it. “We’re still friends,” she amends. “We’re on good terms.”

They say nothing.

Their silence lasts for so long that Pam asks, “Are you still there?”

“We’re here,” Charles says.

“Mom?”

“I’m here,” Helen says. “I was just thinking.”

“What are you thinking?” Pam asks, although she can imagine. Helen is thinking that John was a mirage and that there won’t be an instant granddaughter. Not even a granddaughter once removed, a step-granddaughter, a granddaughter by adoption.

Helen says none of this, however. She asks, “Why don’t you come here for the weekend?”

“I mean—” Pam starts.

“So you won’t be alone.”

“I’m not alone. I’m sitting here with Rosie.”

“Wonderful.”

“We’re taking obedience classes.”

“That’s a good idea,” Helen says.

“That way, when she graduates, we can visit you together.”

“No,” Helen says immediately. “You are always welcome here. Without the dog.”

Pam laughs at that. Strange to say, her mother’s retort comforts her. Any wistfulness on Helen’s part is over. She will not suffer fools or dogs or trees. She will not sigh about what might have been. Pam’s dog will not return, and John won’t set foot in Helen’s house, either. Has he failed a test? Absolutely. Pam can’t help but admire her mother’s clarity. Helen is difficult. She’s daunting, but she is crisp. She never clings. She does not remain on good terms to avoid a scene, nor does she stay friends when she doesn’t feel friendly. Helen has never met John, but that’s no impediment. She is disowning him. She has never spoken to him, but it doesn’t matter. If she had spoken to him, she would never speak to him again. ♦

This is drawn from “This Is Not About Us.”

There’s something uncanny about this still and stunning portrait of a twenty-one-year-old Taylor Swift, shot by Katy Grannan for Lizzie Widdicombe’s Profile of the singer, in 2011. Swift was already enormously famous (“Fearless,” from 2008, won a Grammy for Album of the Year; “Speak Now,” released in 2010, sold more than a million copies in its first week), but she hadn’t yet become the object of such fervent and unwavering interest that she had to hold her hand over her mouth when she spoke in public, lest she send a nation of lip-readers into a frenzy. Looking at this image is like seeing a picture of yourself taken just before something seismic happened: maybe you met a great love, or learned you were having a baby, or lost someone. There’s your smiling face, forever moored in the Before.

Did Swift sense what was coming? Maybe. She has always been savvy about cultural desires. Certain aspects of her life have changed dramatically in the past fourteen years, but the grand theme of her work has remained the same. As she told Widdicombe, she is interested in “love, and unrequited love, and love that didn’t last, or love that you wish had lasted, or love that never even got started.” At the time, Swift was beginning to assume a more complicated view of romance—Widdicombe points to the lyric “There’s a drawer of my things at your place” as evidence of more grownup themes. Swift is still in tune with the tenderness of a new love affair, but she is less Pollyannaish, singing about sex and heartache with ease. Young Swift possessed a kind of guilelessness, but the thirty-six-year-old version has seen things, felt things, been hurt. It has made her only more compelling. ♦

You Belong with Me

How Taylor Swift made teen angst into a business empire.

Listen and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Google | Wherever You Listen

Sign up to receive our weekly Books & Fiction newsletter.

Allegra Goodman reads her story “Deal-Breaker,” from the January 12, 2026, issue of the magazine. Goodman is the author of ten books of fiction, including the novels “Kaaterskill Falls,” which was a National Book Award finalist, “Sam,” and “Isola,” published last year. Her new collection of linked stories, “This Is Not About Us,” will come out in February.