Books: Question Marks

YOURS, AND MINE by JUDITH RASCOE 204 pages. Atlantic—Little, Brown.$6.95.

There are funny, sad girls who look at you with lopsided little smiles and say “Oh, well,” making it sound like an amen to doomsday. Even their answers end with question marks. They move around a lot—New York to California, job to job, man to man. But wherever they are, they seem to perch on an invisible staircase, spying upon the grownups’ party below.

Somewhere in their past a normal expectation failed, a reasonable trust in life was lost. Other people live. The sad girls merely survive—spiritually older than their grandmothers, younger than the children they will never have—lonely refugees in a no woman’s land.

These are the Little Girls Blue that Judith Rascoe has chosen to mourn and celebrate. How do they get that way? A chronic case of rootlessness helps. Rascoe heroines begin life in bad boarding schools (“A Line of Order”), grow up to borrow haunted apartments from the friends of friends (“Small Sounds and Tilting Shadows”), and climax their fate rolling down the road in a camper (“Short Rounds with the Champ”).

The ultimate Rascoe exile—Margaret in the title novella—is a film editor trying to splice all her scenes together in the futile hope they will spell home. This means renegotiating her definition of family with a half brother she has not seen since she was six, parents on the verge of divorce and an old lover whom she seems destined from birth to reject.

In Margaret’s equation, the sense of belonging she dearly wants never quite equals the sense of freedom she absolutely needs. And so she ends up a poor little princess in the kingdom of transients: California, a land of real estate agents in fake Spanish haciendas, freeways choked with white Lincolns and plum Mercedes, and always and everywhere the fugitive smell of eucalyptus.

The broken family, the broken community—the American Humpty Dumpty—this is the theme of Yours, and Mine. That terrible, splitting comma in the title divides up life itself as if it were a community property Rascoe’s characters have found no way to share. They never will, either. For if one cannot put together one’s past, one cannot put together one’s future; so goes the implacable Rascoe law.

Judith Rascoe, 31, is an ex-English teacher and a screenwriter. This is her first book. A first book of short stories, moreover, is generally one of literature’s less attended events. But this book asks the attention due an accomplished talent. It stakes out through wit, intelligence, and dry elegance of style a small but classical province of human experience.

Melvin Maddocks