Yesterday I read The Little Disturbances of Man, short stories by Grace Paley.  The “Little Disturbances” refer to the blips of desire, glitches of love, and swells of temptation and surrender that punctuate the life of anybody with a beating heart, a survival instinct, and working parts (which would be just about everybody).  The heroines of Paley’s stories are scrappy, every last one of them, and realists in the bargaining and bartering of love.  Some are closeted realists using sentimental phrasing to express blatant desire, some are just kids still figuring out the difference between stirring between the legs and stirrings of the heart, and some just take love as it comes and leave it the same way.  No one in this book is broken by love — not that they would admit to anyway — and no one is giving up on it, either.

One woman, trying to keep a Dad figure around for her kids’ sake, takes in an old beau but never stops believing that her husband, who walked out the door to join an army — he reasoned that any army would be better than four kids — will one day come back to her. She is sure he will walk back in and bring her right down on the floor with him, where she wants to be: “before I can even make myself half comfortable on that polka-dotted linoleum, he got into me right where we were, and truth is, we were so happy, we forgot the precautions.”  Number five on the way.

Paley is pitch perfect with her dialogues, catching the nature of each character, their good humor or their angst or their frantic race for connection.  She is also very good at the Jewish self-deprecation:  “You’re in America!  Clara, you wanted to come here.  In Palestine the Arabs would be eating you alive.  Europe you had pogroms.  Argentina is full of Indians.  Here you got Christmas…some joke, ha?“  This from an hilarious story about Jewish kids performing their school’s Christmas play, picked for the leading roles because of their big voices and dramatic gestures.   No sex in this story but plenty of the survival tactics of acceptance, humor, and grudging surrender.

“Good-bye and Good Luck” is the title of the first story and that tempo of good-natured heave-ho, of enjoying the good that life gives you and making the best of the rest of it, continues throughout the book until the appearance of three strange and disturbing stories  that frankly I didn’t get at all.  But then, like a breath of fresh air (not country air, never country air: Paley writes with fresh City air full of brash knowledge and desire to get on with it and get done and get made), she gives us “The  Floating Truth”.  This is a very funny story about a woman looking for work and her “vocational counselor” who lives and works out of his car ( he has moved beyond the “habitations of men”).  The characters reminded me of Maggie Estep’s crazy crew in Alice Fantastic and I just loved this story.

Paley writes so well.  She picks her words carefully and then uses them wildly and recklessly to create great characters in familiar but slightly (or very) wacky situations that they must figure out, or get the hell out of.  The harmony of her stories seems improvised, they are so fresh and of  the moment. Paley died in 2007, at the age of eighty-four, but she will always be kicking and alive in her writings, which include wonderful short stories, lovely poems, and her stirring anti-war piece, 365 Reasons Not to Have Another War.