Excerpts -- The Way We Live, Stories of Utah Women

My mother lives in Oregon, but her name is already carved into a headstone, my father's, in Salt Lake City. For six years I've made an annual pilgrimage to his grave at Wasatch Lawn. These are my rituals: I plant American flags in the grass in front of the granite marker. I balance pots of purple and yellow mums upright. I carefully arrange cut flowers to cover my mother's name and date of her birth, in case I decide to send her a picture.

This year on Memorial Day, the afternoon sun is so hot that I worry it will bleach the blue sky out of the photo. As I wedge the flower pots into the grass, I hear warbling, reedy notes. I see a bagpiper to the north. I whistle the piper's tune over and over again before I recognize what it is: Amazing Grace.

I shouldn't be, but somehow I feel connected to this place. I was raised on a filbert orchard two states west of Utah, but I've worked in my father's hometown, Salt Lake City, for most of my adult life. When I think about what writers refer to as place, I remember my pioneer ancestors who saw the Great Salt Lake Basin as the promised land, and I remember where my father's body finally settled.

In Utah, family ties pull with the force of gravity. My father certainly felt that tug. He was raised here, then left to fly a P-38 in the Philippines. After he returned home from World War II, he married my mother. Together they raised our family on an Oregon farm, near where my mother still lives, my brothers and sisters close by. My father left Utah, told getaway stories, but when it came time to be buried, he came home, a Utah body.

Sweat pools behind my knees as I crouch here by his grave, located four rows north of his younger sister, five plots west of his older brother. There's ground here reserved for my mother. I rub the space on the stone that will be engraved with the date of her death. I think of all the decisions my mother didn't get to make, all the stories they didn't pass down. This was my father's place, not hers; my mother never claimed Utah as her home but my father died first.

Our western myths are based on the stories of men, men like my father's, who scouted and hunted and farmed in the shadow of the everlasting hills. They were rugged settlers who transformed a cheatgrass desert on the shores of a salty sea into Zion; men who built one version, at least, of paradise.

The short fictions in this collection add something else: the narrative voices of fast-talking contemporary women who aren't content to settle on a man's frontier, who are staking out claims to the emotional landscape. Stories like these twelve—from women writers, most of whom live in the New West—are helping to reinvent the history of men and women whose lives collide under a big sky. These writers write about suffering in the promised land, and why a woman might stay. Or leave.

As a reader, I started looking for a collection like this several years ago. I was hungry to read stories that unveiled more narratives of the West, stories tracing connections of the heart.

Some of the writers whose stories are included in this book have published nationally; many have earned graduate degrees in writing programs, notably at the University of Utah; others are just starting to win awards and publish in literary journals. All of these writers are somehow rooted in Utah. All deserve to be discovered.

What is revealed here isn't religion, although the culture of Utah's saints cuts through these stories like irrigation canals in the desert. These are stories from Mormon country, where horses are named Adversity and Zion and polygamists live on raspberry fields by the shores of Bear Lake.

These are getaway stories, gambling tales. Audrey, a woman stranded in "Nevada Border Towns," bets on her grandmother's advice: "Love is only a decision to stop moving." In "Sisterwives: The Order Things Took," a child bride wears an eggshell cream dress decorated with a fringe of colored ribbons. "Pure white," Evie says, "makes we women look too dangerous for words."

A younger, even more precocious child talks. She talks about the time she and her mother deserted their movie-star wannabe father. She talks about the bombs exploding above their southern Utah ranch. "I was a year old," says the child narrator of "In The Shadows of Upshot-Knothole," "just a small flowing river of sounds, words that spun unrecognizable, but my mother and I had complete conversations anyway. She says that she had been waiting her whole life for me. When I arrived, there was a lot for us to talk about."

If "literature is mostly about having sex and not having children," as critic David Lodge writes, "and life is the other way around," then these stories are from a land where people are in labor—literally. A childless woman follows pregnant strangers to offer her services as a birth coach in "Where Detail In The Background Is Permissible." There's the mother in "Mouth To Mouth" who labors under fear, the fear of high places and the fear of loving her children.

This is rugged emotional country, filled with characters like Del, who stands out from the minute he races into town, according to Dawna, owner of the local bar who explains "Why I Left Paradise." "It was true the car looked silly in this kind of place, against the dust and the wide sky, and so did his new boots and his white felt hat still clean from the box," she says. "`What'll you have?' I said. And he smiled, and I said, `Don't be too sure.'"

Dawna's story unfolds the heat of combustible sex, while the bragging-rights kind of intercourse unravels a hard secret in "Blue, Blue, My Love is Blue." These are stories from love's combat zone, tales of shifting, heartbreaking emotion, inspiration provided by a singer with rolling kneecaps and "crazy hoppin' rollin' legs" in "Some Body Parts Remember a War." There are other body parts, too, pressed skin-to-skin in "Finding a Wife for My Brother." In addition to all the connections, there's the long distance separating two emotionally isolated women in "Calla Lilies."

Here also are sketches of the complicated, treacherous territory dividing mothers and daughters. "My mother was six-foot-one and a natural platinum blonde and I was dark and short and stocky," says Mim Jr. in "The Way I Live," "so obviously I must have taken after my father, whoever he may have been, which is what I say when I want to make Mim really mad."

Julie, the narrator of "Waltzing the Cat," recalls seeing photos of a time when her parents looked like two people who could actually have sex with each other. "Everything was perfect with your father and me before you were born," her mother tells her, confusion in her voice, but not blame. "I guess he was jealous, or something, and then all the best parts of him just went away. But," she adds, as she makes the cat a plate of sour cream herring, chopped up fine, "it has all been worth it because of you."

Because of you. Stories about the view beyond the next canyon, about gambling on a heartbeat, about the strong gravital pull of love and family and landscape. These are weighty stories as powerful as the myths of paradise, stories about the wildness that remains in this amazing place.

Ellen Fagg
Salt Lake City
September 1994