But all she could hear were a few syllables that might have been, that should have been, that probably weren’t ‘love’ and ‘remember’ and ‘afraid.’” “She tried to listen to the couple’s soft, low conversation,” she writes in “The Little Wife,” collected in 2011’s “Binocular Vision.” “. This is one of the key dynamics of Pearlman’s fiction, the ability she has to reveal someone in an instant, to let us see what happens when the guards come down. Zeph is just one of the characters who functions in the role of a confessor there is also Paige, the widowed pedicurist at the center of “Tenderfoot,” or Rennie, who appears in several of these pieces, the proprietor of Forget Me Not, a curio shop in the fictional town of Godolphin, Mass. “The dialogue began in a confidential mode and soon acquired a tone of intimacy,” Pearlman explains in “Castle 4,” a story in her new book, “Honeydew,” which describes the relationship between an anesthesiologist named Zeph and the patients with whom he consults before sedating them. The connection to which I’m referring, though, is different, involving a kind of witness, a space in which a secret is exposed. Sure, there are lovers in her stories: husbands and wives, young women and their feckless boyfriends, girls experiencing the first taste of something we might recognize as desire. Edith Pearlman’s fiction is all about the ways we touch each other - albeit not in the manner we expect.
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