Sandlin's Message

When I was a kid, I was forever bringing home sparkly rocks, chunks of quartz I'd found beside the highway that ran past my house. I remember that the adults around me thought it was cute. But I was deadly serious in my determined searching. It seemed altogether possible that treasure would be found out in the open, hiding in plain sight by the side of an ugly, weedy, killer black highway. When you're a kid, you think like that.

When you are an adult writing for the oh-so-hip Austin Chronicle, you do not, at least not as much. You accept the invitation to judge the 1997 Austin Writers' League Violet Crown Awards with a small measure of grim foreboding in your heart, knowing that it isn't the truly bad work that turns your world gray. The mediocre stuff is what in the end will drown us all. And then you find a book like Message to the Nurse of Dreams by Lisa Sandlin (Cinco Puntos Press, $11.95 paper). By the end of the first story, "If You Don't Watch Out," you are wide-eyed. Every once in a while during the second, "Cold in the Bone," you have to stop and remind yourself to breathe. By the last luminous page of "Vidor," you are hooked, you are in love with this woman and her snaggletoothed way of looking at things, you are dancing around the room holding one of those stupid chunks of quartz in your hand and remembering what the hell made you think it was a diamond, after all. And knowing the difference, which is even better.

The country these short stories cover is East Texas oil town country not long after integration. Sandlin's setting may be small town, but her vision is vast and beneficent. She accords to all of her characters the possibility of redemption through action. In "Cold in the Bone," a young girl watches her parents argue in the nursing home where her greatgrandmother is being placed. "Ma and Dad must have been on their twentieth form. It occurred to me that I could crash a folding chair through the window. Not that I would, but that I could." In "Terrell's House," a woman and her son meet in the hospital room where her father has died. Together, they shave and scrub bloodstains and in the process change him from a "code" back into a human being.

In the face of certain realities, Sandlin is rightfully speechless, resorting to the subjunctive, "what if" voice. In the title story, she writes, "What a relief it would be if Johnetta Pierce and I had met in a dream. We could have traded legs - a white set for brown, brown for white... Sawed open ribs and looked inside. Tried on each other's tongues... All in order to answer the two questions neither of us ever asked aloud: Are you or are you not the basic same as me?" Sandlin's prose is relentlessly tender, remorselessly poetic. Beyond a doubt, she knows how to write from the heart and the gut. It is rare to feel so blessed by the words of another. Message to the Nurse of Dreams is that hoped-for diamond, unexpectedly kicked up among all the flotsam on the grubby, weedy side of a satin asphalt highway.

- Barbara Strickland