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Number
289
January February March 2002
Angled
Mirrors
MIMI
ALBERT
Copyright
© 2002 Poetry Flash
DISTANCE NO OBJECT, stories by Gloria Frym,
City Lights, San Francisco, 2000, 168 pages, $10.95
paper.
So much good American fiction is regional. Grace
Paley's Faith sits in a tree overlooking what
everyone knows is Washington Square Park; Updike's
Rabbit shoots baskets (and later, sells cars) in a
region that's unmistakably Western Pennsylvania,
while his witches and their consort cavort in the
kind of New England village that, by its very
topography, tugs at the heartstrings of all
Easterners. And it goes without saying that the
number of writers who contribute their mite to the
lore about the regional South are legion. There are
readers for whom these locales are interesting by
virtue of their exoticism, but for some of us,
their real value lies in their familiarity.
Even if the cover blurb of her new book,
Distance No Object, didn't inform the reader
that poet and short fiction writer Gloria Frym is
turning her "ironic, passionate gaze to
post-Vietnam Berkeley and San Francisco" in this
collection of stories, their locations, physical
and emotional, would be unmistakable. Although she
occasionally digresses and takes a side trip to
Prague or Auschwitz (in the latter of which, she
sharply notes, the "average life
expectancy…was five weeks"), most of the
stories here capture the essence of Berkeley city
life so authentically that it feels as if she must
be living right down the block, observing comings
and goings as painstakingly as those European
housewives who kept track of their neighbors by
watching them through specially angled mirrors.
The effect is delightful, particularly because
the characters, as well as the locales, are so
alive.
Some of the stories are brief, allowing us
glimpses into a particular variable of human
consciousness or way of life. But even in the
longer stories, it's the accretion of minutiae at
which Frym excels: "We had the big things in
common," she writes of a disintegrating marriage;
"…It was the little disagreements that
bankrupted our romance, like so many unrecorded
withdrawals."
Her stories unfold around this kind of
"unrecorded withdrawal" so frequently that the
reader begins to identify it as a leitmotif. In the
deceptive simplicity of her narratives, Frym
demonstrates the maxim that it's not the grandest
moments of our lives but the quietest which define
us. Perhaps this kind of perception comes more
easily to women, and the stories often unfold
around the lives of women---among them, the rueful
divorcee of "To See Her in Sunlight Was To See
Marxism Die," the imperious and horny widow who
plots to seduce an old and reluctant lover in "The
Dean's Widow," and the marvelously wise narrator of
"A Little Window," who, despite having been
mugged---("You are a fat, crippled old lady with
jewels!" her brother Harry harangues her after this
event: "He knocks down your cane and voila! He's
got you.")---nonetheless ends this brief, glowing
story by insisting, "…I wouldn't stay home if
I was on my last leg, I mean my last, and I still
got two."
However, valor, narrative charm and empyrean
revelations leading to epiphany frequently
characterize the male personae of Frym's stories as
well. In her "Crime and Punishment," a Berkeley
cop---who, according to Frym, are "…famous for
their mustaches, longish hair, and sensitivity
training…"---stops a woman driving home,
slightly drunk, after seeing a movie (French) with
friends. She has been going "thirty-nine in a
twenty-five-mile residential zone," but rather than
just writing out a ticket and handing it to her, he
expresses concern for her driving alone (it's
late), and ends by asking her to "…Think of it
this way.…Do you deserve a ticket?" The
question isn't really answered by the story's end,
but the cop, having decided that the driver---a
college English professor, as it turns out---is "a
good person," seems disposed to let her go. Their
last interchange is about Hemingway: "Absurd, yeah,
now, that's a word.…you're the professor. Is
that a Hemingway word?" the cop asks, deferring to
the professor. And in the title piece, Lopo
Ramirez, a museum guard from a Latin American
country finds himself deeply moved by---almost in
love with---one of the works of art he is hired to
watch, a circle of rocks "one layer deep, piled
about eight inches high, all relatively uniform
chunks, each perhaps six inches in diameter."
"I felt I knew every rock or I didn't know any
at all," Ramirez confides to a barely interested
listener. "…I had to live with the Chalk
Circle, I had to look at it, and I tell you, it is
holy."
When he is finally and inevitably laid off, Lopo
Ramirez is less troubled by the prospect of finding
another job than by the realization that none of
the people who will be hired (at a lower wage) to
take his place in the museum will "appreciate the
Chalk Circle like I did."
In this lovely book Frym offers brief glimpses
of what must resonate as some aspect of our own
lives; moments in an unemployment office, on a BART
train in which a homeless man verbally assaults the
other passengers, in a beauty shop where a pierced
and tattooed young hairdresser joyfully
contemplates motherhood, in Live Oak Park, where
"When the sun goes down, there's a village with no
name where people gather and trade their wares and
speak and eat and wash their clothes and make love
and sigh and sleep." In all of it, Frym reminds us
of not only where, but of how we live. As with all
good prose, she illuminates our city and its
inhabitants so precisely that we can exult in the
recognition of people, buildings, streets, events,
and ultimately, ourselves.
Mimi Albert is the author of two novels,
The Second Story Man and Skirts,
numerous short stories, and book reviews in
publications from American Book Review to
the San Francisco Chronicle. Her work
appears in A Different Beat: Writings by Women
of the Beat Generation. She teaches fiction
writing at UC Berkeley Extension.
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