THE DAY I ATE WHATEVER I WANTED: And Other Small Acts of Liberation. Elizabeth Berg. Random. 242 pages. $23.
If these short stories were dresses, and if you complimented Elizabeth Berg on them, you get the feeling she'd answer, ''Oh, this old thing? I've had it for ages!'' When, in fact, she would have picked out the finest material, designed her own pattern and stitched every seam by hand.
Berg uses her prodigious skill to mess with your unsuspecting mind. She's writing women's stories about women's condition in terms so simple they could easily turn up in the Ladies' Home Journal next to that monthly column that asks, ''Can this marriage be saved?,'' then takes a world-class awful marriage and jiggers with it until both parties can be cajoled into soldiering on, saving their marriage but wasting the rest of their lives. The message in that column, and in these stories, is that women's lot is not a happy one! We, as women, must learn to chew on that condition, gag down our own self-loathing and swallow life as it's shoveled into us.
Berg examines women's lot at many ages and stages of life. In How to Make an Apple Pie, the oldest woman here, 87, breathlessly and scatterbrainedly writes down her legendary recipe for that exemplary pastry for a neighbor's child, grown now.
In Full Count, a 12-year-old is brought low by yet another pie, this one made of mince. Janey, an Army brat, drives from Texas to North Dakota with her parents -- to reunite with her extended family. She requests one of her mom's wonderful mince pies to take on the trip and is rewarded with ambivalent parental glances. Janey is smart but deluded. She looks forward to seeing her cousins but she'll be defined by just one thing: She's become fat and worthy of their contempt. Food is this collection's central metaphor, and getting fat is what happens when Janey asks ``for pie, for French fries, for more.''
And why can't women have more? We can, in theory. In the past century, women have gotten the vote and the right to work just as hard as men. But when women get more, men often don't like it. In The Party, a group of women strike up a bawdy conversation and start to giggle and have fun. One of the husbands puts a quick stop to it. Later, the narrator thinks: ``Here is how I feel about men: I am angry at them for the way they sling their advantage about -- interrupting, taking over, forcing endings, pretending to not understand what equality between the sexes necessitates, then ensuring that they are always and forever the ones who say when. But I feel sorry for them, too.''
So men, in general, are seen here as killjoys and bores, and the women suck it up, hunker down, live their women's magazine lives. Their men are imprisoned by life, too. The women often find themselves married to their second choices, but when that first choice turns up again, he doesn't seem all that great either. Children grow up to be ungrateful but they, too, will live to be discounted and humiliated.
Haven't we put all that women's magazine groaning behind us? I think the answer is no. A striving woman still runs a strong risk of being censured and despised. And the vast majority of women have always known that it's counterproductive to whine. Giggling, cooking, eating, drinking, acting goofy to the point of imbecility, these are still probably women's best weapons in the Battle of the Sexes, a game that was rigged going in, as these skillful and unpretentious stories show.
Carolyn See reviewed this book for The Washington Post.
