Short Stories Embrace Gender Gap, Everyday Pleasures

ORDINARY LIFE

Stories

By Elizabeth Berg

Random House

198 pp., $22.95

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In the world of Elizabeth Berg’s fiction, women like to talk, but men generally don’t. The women are eager to examine their lives and relationships, to ask themselves if they’re really happy. The men don’t want to go down this road, preferring to confine their conversations to sports and politics. Sometimes it seems as if they might all be happier if they lived in single-sex dormitories and got together only for the purpose of mating.

In the title story of Berg’s latest collection, “Ordinary Life,� a 79-year-old woman named Mavis locks herself in the bathroom. She’s lined the bathtub with pillows and laid in a supply of snack food and magazines, plus a notebook and a pen. Her hapless husband, Al, fears she wants out of their marriage, but he meekly acquiesces to what he hopes is probably just a whim, bringing her food and clothing until she condescends to rejoin him a few days later. How would she feel if he did what she is doing? He demands at one point: “‘I would just let you do it,’� she replies, “‘and I would talk to you when you wanted to talk, and when you needed things I would bring them to you, and I would not try to make you feel bad and guilty.’ Silence. And in it, his recognition that she is absolutely right.�

An all-too-typical moment in the fiction of Berg: The woman condescends to the man, and, worse yet, the writer condescends to the reader.

Having taken her little bathtub “vacation,� Mavis returns with a deeper appreciation of the value of ordinary life. A similar pattern of withdrawal and return can be found in the second story, “Departure from Normal,� about a woman with cancer. Berg’s writing style, nicely clear and simple at the best of times, in this instance borders on the simplistic: “Alice likes to tell her story this way: First I got cancer. Then I got depressed. Then I got divorced. Then my parakeet got cancer. Then I really got depressed.� Alice’s husband, as we discover, behaved wonderfully in the wake of her mastectomy: He was loving, patient and caring. This made no difference to Alice, who wanted to be alone. Fortunately for her, he seems ready to take her back when she changes her mind.

In “The Party,� a group of women, none of whom has met one another before, get involved in a juicy conversation about their first experiences of sex. Soon, they’re all laughing, convivial and intimate. Across the room, one of the women sees her husband discussing the Middle East with another man. “They didn’t look as if they were having much fun....� she observes.

“Here is how I feel about men: I am angry at them for the way they sling their advantage about--interrupting, forcing endings, taking over. But I am sorry for them for the way they can never be like us. And if the real truths ever got told, I think they would say they’d like to be.� Sometimes, the men get to have their say. A customarily taciturn husband in another story, badgered by his wife to “Take This Quiz,� ends up expressing some feelings that might better have been left unexpressed. In “Martin’s Letter to Nan,� the husband of the heroine of Berg’s 1996 novel, “The Pull of the Moon,� tells his wife how he feels about her decision to go off and find herself. Bluntly expressing his exasperation--and his affection--Martin’s missive is funny, tender and truthful.

Indeed, in several of these stories, the men and women do find ways of reaching out to one another, learning to bridge the gap or, at the very least, adjust to their temperamental differences. But not all 15 pieces in this collection are about the gender gap. In “Caretaking,� a daughter tries to cope with her aging mother’s increasing infirmity, remembering, as she does so, her own childhood when her mother did such a good job of caring for her. The narrator of “What Stays� pays tribute to a mother who was mentally unbalanced but still had many qualities that her daughter continues to cherish. An adult daughter finally finds something to like about her sour, grumpy father in “One Time at Christmas, in My Sister’s Bathroom� (Berg does seem to have a special affinity for rooms with porcelain and plumbing).

Yet, while “What Stays� and “Caretaking� have real poignancy, “One Time at Christmas, in My Sister’s Bathroom� is more of a sentimental set-piece. And there’s a similarly prefabricated feel to the two closing stories, “The Thief� and “Today’s Special,� the one an unlikely tale about a housewife’s encounter with an improbably insightful burglar; the other a rather forced celebration of the quotidian world as showcased in a diner. But despite her occasional lapses into mere coyness, Berg’s more deftly drawn pictures of ordinary life can help remind us of its oft-unheeded charms.