Book Review : Coping With Weirdness

Margaret of the Imperfections Stories by Lynda Sexon. (Persea Books; $16.95; 191 pages)

These are white-trash stories, tales of ladies who sprinkle their ironing with a pop-bottle, fight almost to the death over cups and saucers made of carnival glass, get pregnant at 16 or miss the boat entirely, ending up at 39 with three hope chests filled with embroidered pillow cases never used.

These are reminders of a white Protestant past that our dominant culture might not want to acknowledge: The churchgoers here don’t sally forth in three-piece suits to the Presbyterian Church in Westwood, but haul out instead--decked out in Elvis Presley charm bracelets--to some garage, to hear about the End Time: “The preacher was going on now about how the devil was getting into everything, and she could tell that her father liked this part. It was about Communists and sex and movie pictures and showing it was Time. . . .”

That’s Life

This is a world where men are carpenters, and get their hands sawed off, or they’re mechanics who have trouble starting their cars, or they’re retired, which is often a polite word for unemployed. Their women tell the same excruciatingly dull stories over and over, but they’re spit-and-polish housekeepers; they’re excellent cooks.

Excepting the title story, and another, set in Korea (having to do with American brutishness in that part of the world), these tales have to do with the total weirdness of daily life, and how the individual undertakes to express himself/herself within these confines.

In “The Chalk Line,” a long-married husband finds himself totally bamboozled by his wife, who has drawn a chalk line through their house. He gets the shower, she keeps the tub and the bubble bath for herself. He’s always one or two steps behind in this game. That wife is a mean one: She always makes sure to keep her husband away from his stamp collection, and then snatches single stamps from his perfect collected sheets. She’s got him between a rock and a hard place: “Marvin, you leave this house and it’s abandonment. You’ll never see one stick nor one penny out of this place; you lose it all. You lay a hand on me and it’s assault. Wife beating. So big talk, I just don’t know what you can do about it.”

This husband’s solution is not to fly out of the problem but to plunge further into it. But when your physical world is so constrained and so emotionally impoverished, the only way out is usually through some kind of astral projection, some kind of block-building in the mind. Many women in these stories spend lots of time crying. The first story here follows this process.

Comfortingly Crazy

The narrator, as we see her at the beginning, is perfectly “fine.” She has a husband, three kids, works in a library. Her brother calls up, now that they’re 40, and says he has found the angel he saw as a kid. When his sister comes to visit and check this out, the angel says, politely, “. . . I come from a fine old extinguished family. . . .” OK, the sister buys it, but she still feels her brother ought not to get involved--because, of course, she loves her brother with a carnal love and is, herself, about ready to fly out of that problem by going conveniently, comfortingly, crazy.

Our daily life is unbearable and some forms of insanity can be our best comfort seems to be the message here. In that Korean story, the narrator’s dad and best friend come home from that war as beasts: “They laughed . . . as they cut the frogs in half. The front halves of the frogs tried to walk away, spilling their entrails behind them. . . .” Space out, or cry, or wonder that love exists at all in such a framework, Sexon says. Make pearls, make stories, from these imperfections.