The Ex Talk

“Great work, everyone,” Kent says, slapping Jason on the shoulder. “I’m glad we were able to get to this today.”

I jostle my glasses as I rub at the space between my eyes where a headache is brewing. “This isn’t right,” I say after Kent leaves.

“It’s good motherfucking radio,” Jason says in a singsong, imitating Kent.

“It feels invasive.”

“The public doesn’t have a right to know that the mayor’s a shady piece of shit?”

“They do, but not on our show.”

Jason follows my gaze, glancing between Dominic and me. Jason and I were hired within a couple weeks of each other, and he knows me too well not to realize why I’m upset. “You hate that Dominic is so good at this,” he says. “You hate that he’s a natural, that he’s live on the air a few months after he started working here.”

“I’m—” I start, but stumble over my words. It makes me sound so shitty when he puts it that way. “It doesn’t matter how I feel about it. I have no desire to be on air.” Not anymore, at least. No point in wanting something I know will never happen.

Ruthie comes back in, cheeks flushed.

“Mary Beth’s pissed.” She clamps her headphones over her ears. “She says she had to cancel a private training session with one of Bill Gates’s kids to be here.”

“We’ll send a groveling email later. No—I’ll call her.”

“I don’t have enough lines,” Griffin says in my ear.

“Ruthie, can you help Griffin? I’ll pitch in if I need to.”

“On it.”

“Thank you.”

Dominic reads off each illicit payment one by one. The numbers are staggering. It’s not that this is a bad show—it’s that somehow, it’s become Dominic’s show, and I’m no longer in control. He is the star.

So I sit back and let Paloma and Dominic take over. Dominic will win accolades and audiences, and I’ll stay right here behind the scenes.

Ends: never.

2

Even though he was never on the air, my dad had the best radio voice. It was powerful but soft, a crackling fire on the coldest night of the year. He grew up fixing radios and owned an electronics repair shop, though of course he eventually learned how to fix laptops and phones, too. Goldstein Gadgets: my favorite place in the world.

I inherited his love for public radio but not his voice. Mine is the kind of high-pitched voice men love to weaponize against women. Shrill. Unintelligent. Girly, as though being a girl is the worst kind of insult. I’ve been teased my whole life, and I still brace myself for cleverly disguised insults when I’m talking to someone for the first time.

My dad never cared. We hosted radio shows in our kitchen (“Tell me, Shay Goldstein, what kind of cereal are you having this morning?”) and on road trips (“Can you describe the scenery at this middle-of-nowhere rest stop??

??). I’d spend afternoons with him at Goldstein Gadgets, doing my homework and listening to game shows, Car Talk, This American Life. All we needed was a great story.

I wanted him to hear me on the radio so badly, even if no one else did.

When he died my senior year of high school after a sudden cardiac arrest, it shattered me. Classes didn’t matter. Friends didn’t matter. I didn’t turn on the radio for weeks. Somehow, I managed a B-minus average for the University of Washington, but I couldn’t even celebrate getting in. I was still submerged in depression when I landed my internship at Pacific Public Radio, and slowly, slowly, I climbed out of darkness and into a conviction that the only way forward was to try to rebuild what I’d lost. Here I am, twenty-nine and clinging to that childish dream.

“Make people cry, and then make them laugh,” my dad would say. “But most of all, make sure you’re telling a good story.”

I’m not sure how he would have felt about Ask a Trainer.

* * *

—

I’m the fifth wheel at dinner tonight. My mother and her boyfriend Phil, and my best friend, Ameena, and her boyfriend, TJ are already seated at a Capitol Hill French-Vietnamese fusion restaurant by the time I emerge from rush hour traffic. Ameena Chaudhry and I grew up across the street from each other, and she’s been a constant in my life for more than twenty years.