Pretending the Bed Is a Raft (review)

family, and her mother—a mother who says, "You may write to me,/ not saying who we are." In "My Mother's Counsels" she writes, "I've slept like a rake, cold teeth/pointed to the stars./But never under her hand knit afghans/my head on her pillowy breast, lips/parted and crusted with milk." The poems in the last section are meditations on the poet's present life, her transformation from angry child to accepting adult, that we understand more deeply because of the knowledge imparted in the first two sections. With subject matter this personal , it would be easy for a poet to alienate her reader. Inez's honesty, craftsmanship and diversity of approach are what save these poems and render her confessions more than just palatable. Inez's images are almost tactile in their vividness, and her poems are as well crafted as they are strongly felt. Clemency is a worthy accomplishment. (EC) Pretending the Bed Is a Raft by Nanci Kincaid Algonquin, 1997, 241 pp., $17.95 "Wives are women men are stuck with. Lovers are women men choose. I prefer being chosen," Mona, the lover of a middle-aged English professor, declares in "Why Richard Can't," one of eight short stories in Nanci Kincaid's debut collection. Like Mona, Kincaid's other characters are mostly beautiful Southern women and girls who seem at first to be the needy, lovelorn types for whom self-help books are often written . Yet ultimately they rise above that stereotype in surprising ways as the stories trace the conflicting emotions of complex love affairs from their points of view. "Total Recoil" features a twice-married woman who chastises herself for believing that if a man doesn't notice her then she's "a bunch of makebelieve ," as unreal as the adulterous relationship she imagines—entirely "a head thing"—with a coworker. In "Like Your Daddy Does," fourteenyear -old Tammy babysits next door for Jack, a man who is "sorta handsome ." When the children are in bed and his wife is working late at the hospital, she pretends to be his wife; they might even slow dance to Johnny Mathis. He makes a "good practice husband," Tammy thinks, until she discovers that her still attractive mother, Norma June, has been making clandestine visits of her own to Jack. The title story of the collection looks at the last desires of a young mother dying of cancer. Brenda wants to die better than she lived, so she makes a list ofthings she wants to achieve: "get baptized," "get my picture made," "make love to at least three other men," "find Virgil a girlfriend ." Yet between finding a lover for herself and a prospective wife for her husband, she discovers that she wouldn't trade her "small life" in a trailer behind her mother's house for any other. Kincaid's voice is cool and confident , with a twinge ofvulnerability as she bravely pursues what some readers might consider familiar war stories about love, lust and desire. Yet the various truths she uncovers are anything but everyday. Her wit and wisdom aUow her to transcend the, obvious and transform even ordinary The Missouri Review · 213 objects such as a bed into a life raft, keeping the love-weary afloat for a time as they brave shark-infested waters. (KS) Charming Billy by Alice McDermott Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998, 280 pp., $22 Like Alice McDermotfs 1992 novel, Weddings and Wakes, Charming Billy explores the relationships between members of an Irish American family. The narrative begins at a small bar and grill in the Bronx, where friends and family have gathered for Billy's funeral party. It becomes immediately clear that alcoholism is responsible for his death, but it's equally apparent that "alcoholic" is not an adequate label for Billy. There's no irony in McDermott's title; Billy really was charming, and completely loyal to his wife, Maeve, even while he spent a lifetime quietly loving and mourning Eva, an Irish woman whom he nearly married in his youth. Instead of recounting a life doomed by disease, McDermott tells how Billy's life went on in spite of alcoholism , providing...