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Grace and Gravity: Fiction by Washington Area Women
Edited by Richard Peabody
Paycock Press
ISBN Number: 0-931181-18-6
Reviewer: Barbara M. Simon
The Washington metropolitan area has had a good friend in Richard Peabody, editor of this fine collection of short stories. Since the late 1970’s, Peabody has been a force in the literary arts, producing not only Gargoyle, one of the better literary magazines along the Virginia, Maryland, DC corridor, but also some of the more interesting anthologies to come out in the 1990’s. Among them are such classics as Mondo Barbie, Mondo Elvis, and Coming to Terms: A Literary Response to Abortion. Peabody has also been an especially good friend to women authors. One of my favorite books he edited is A Different Beat: writings by women of the beat generation. In Grace and Gravity, a collection of thirty-one stories, Peabody has paid honor to some of the best writers--the fact that they are female being secondary to the fact that they are talented--practicing their craft in the area.
By nature, anthologies are samplers reflecting the editor’s sensibilities as well as the selected authors’ skills. Peabody’s taste is sure, the stories in this collection amply demonstrating an eclecticism missing from books featuring the work of only one author. Plus, as Peabody promises in his preface, these are not “safe" stories. The authors take chances, not so much with form, most of the selections hewing to the standards of literary fiction--lots of imagery, quirky characters, shifting points of view and open endings--but rather with plot and theme.
An example of the “wildness" inherent in Grace and Gravity is “The Yellow Bathrobe" by Elly Williams. Slightly longer than most of the stories, “The Yellow Bathrobe" roams all over the landscape of womanhood. We are inside the head of Frances, mother of a grown daughter, grandmother, wife of Leon. Are we to sympathize with Frances, woman whose husband has cheated on her throughout their marriage with a series of “incidents," or are we to dislike her, woman who is jealous of her daughter? Perhaps, we are to feel sorry for her. She has a lump in her breast, tried to commit suicide, had a baby succumb to SIDS and is incapable of feeling happiness. Williams doesn’t tell us what to feel-- or even if we should feel.
That sort of restraint from an author makes for a good read, and Grace and Gravity is full of many other great stories. Patti Kim in “Bashay and Me" brings us into the muddled world of the cross-cultural, her ten year-old narrator’s voice sure and strong. Kim takes risks. Her protagonist understands her mother’s meanness and vanity, her father’s willingness to reward her, even her own ten year-old ability to get what she wants, whether it’s permission to spend the summer home or to tell the neighbor boy she plans to kiss one day that she’d almost died.
While it may not be politically correct to note that between men and women there frequently exist different sensibilities, Grace and Gravity clearly resonates with ideas particular to women. Perhaps nowhere is that better revealed than in Donna Hemans’ clever story “Access to the Gods." Here, two women, both in their mid thirties, strike a bargain. Maureen, the surrogate, will carry a child for Maya, an affluent TV newscaster, provided Maya and her husband allow Maureen to keep and ultimately carry to term another one of the fertilized eggs. Faced with that demand, Maya observes, “Your demand is not so innocent.... You’re buying the essence of a woman...."
Even the casual reader has to admit that the stories in Grace and Gravity do capture the “essence" of what it is to be a woman. Whether it’s Eunice-Marie Thornton’s post-partum craziness in I.P. Del Nino’s “Shaking Loose the Pancake Hosts from Heaven" or Lila’s coming to terms with her death “pal" in Ivy Goodman’s “At Home, after a Brief Illness," these stories weave us into a world uniquely female, ultimately precarious.
Each story in Grace and Gravity offers a surprise. Patricia Griffith (“Hiding Places") mines the odd intersection of the psychic and young college women reared in Texas Baptist backgrounds while Barbara Eastman (“Uses for the Word “Fuck") takes us along on the journey of daughters into caretakers, ending with the protagonist Ellen’s realization that she and her elderly mother had really encountered one another-- “For an afternoon, at least. For the moment, fuck the rest."
I would be remiss in this review were I not to single out Mary Ann Suehle’s story “A Scream of Her Own." While the story pivots on the mother-daughter relationship, with the question being will the daughter ever get her own voice, on a deeper level the story asks us to examine what mothers do to their daughters. Do we make them into ourselves? Do we give them the freedom to become who they must be? In this selection, the mother finally tells her nineteen year-old daughter, “It’s pain, just sing it out." Those words are of special import in the case of Mary Ann Suehle whose voice was silenced late in the summer of 2004. A talented writer as well as a valiant contributor to the Washington metropolitan literary scene, Mary Ann lost her battle with cancer.
Grace and Gravity is ideal for anyone interested in literary fiction. The stories are both accessible and serious, presenting a cross-section of women’s ideas without sinking into the torpid swamp of “women’s issues." The book is pleasantly designed with the stories organized alphabetically. In fact, my only critique of the volume is that given the richness of the selections, Peabody might have structured the volume more creatively so that the ideas and themes unfolded from and against one another. That, however, is a very minor point. If you want to know how women think, take a read through Grace and Gravity.
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