Sweet Talk

“Every so often that dead dog dreams me up again.”

So begins Stephanie Vaughn’s story “Dog Heaven,” one of the most surprising, stirring, beautiful stories in our literature. It takes place at an army base on the Niagara River, near the Falls, and is told by Gemma, a woman remembering her childhood there, and especially Duke, the magnificent dog who runs through these memories, and in some sense herds them together—as he herded Gemma’s family, bravely, improbably finding them when they were “lost.” For Duke is a responsible dog with a point of view (do dogs not have a point of view?), and his is honored here. Even as the family tells stories about Duke through the years, dreaming him up again, it comes to seem perfectly plausible that they owe some part of their existence to the dreams of his great soul.

Such is the world that Stephanie Vaughn herself has dreamed into life, story by story, and brought to completion in this singular gathering. I first encountered her work in the
New Yorker
in the late seventies, and all these years later I still feel the startled pleasure I experienced then at the freshness of her vision and voice, her effortless mastery of the form, her affectionate wit, her forgiving but clear-eyed view of the confused, fumbling, deceiving, self-deceived, mostly well-intended souls whose lives she observes.

Though the stories vary in time and place and
dramatis personae
, there is a sort of spine running through the collection, and that is the cumulative, evolving portrait of Gemma’s family. Her father is an army officer with duties related to our missile defense. To his daughter he is the very image of certainty and fearless resolve, of tough-loving, adamant character; the rock on which his wife and son and mother-in-law and Gemma herself build their sense of a secure life with a reliable future. This too proves a dream. Indeed, in story after story the confident adult world is revealed as a shaky edifice built not on rock but on sands yielding constantly to the influence of alcohol, war, bad luck, disease, and simple human frailty. It is, in other words, an adult world like the one we inhabit, and present as our legacy to those coming up behind us.

So much for the adult world. One of the pleasures of this collection for me is its evocation of the world of children, and in particular the world of children on military posts. I spent four years in the army, and while I was aware that some of our officers and NCOs had wives and therefore kids, kids who could occasionally be seen on a passing school bus or buying candy in the PX, I did not and could not imagine what their lives on base might be like. They composed, that is to say, a society, a culture, just a parade ground away, that might for all I knew of it have been lived out in the Hindu Kush or Papua New Guinea. These are young people with their own language and lore, their own understandings born of frequent moves and apparently arbitrary changes in what appears to be a monolithic, unchanging world—the military life. Like immigrants yearning for full citizenship, they are forever outsiders to the communities that surround them, where they go to school and play sports and run for class president. They try to fit in, but don’t, can’t; they are a society unto themselves, biding their time until the next set of orders comes through.

These stories are often very funny. In “We’re on TV in the Universe” the narrator crashes her car into a sheriff’s cruiser while on her way to a party, a caged chicken on the seat beside her—she’s hoping the chicken will bring her notice as “an interesting person.” In a Stephanie Vaughn story, you don’t just get into an accident. No, when this car hits the ice, “(it) did a kind of simple dance step down the highway on its way to meet the sheriff’s car. It threw its hips to the left, it threw its hips to the right, left, right, left, right, then turned and slid, as if making a rock-and-roll move toward the arms of a partner.”

I have never read a more exact evocation of the movement of a car going its own way on ice, the suspension of time, the almost clownish sashaying of its body. How perfect, and perfectly droll, to make it a figure in a dance. And yet we know even as we smile that this dance could end very badly. Indeed, through all these stories, even at their most antic, runs the current of mortality, sometimes as evident as that which reached for Duke as he fetched sticks in the Niagara, and eventually claimed one of Gemma’s friends, but more often felt as a kind of pulse in the relations of husbands and wives, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters.

Children play on fields not far from those where missiles are buried. As they grow older they experience betrayal, see youthful promise blighted by war, watch their parents weaken and fail. Yet in Stephanie Vaughn’s stories the effect of these revelations is to make us feel the beauty, the
dearness
, of everything that has joined us despite our weaknesses, and given us occasion to love, and to remember with love.