The book's title story is its last, and it does not come from the pale-green melon. But despite her heart's desire, she leaves them, too, and her reasons are not what we expect. When the little girl asks Ingrid if she is a witch, she is delighted, not offended. Ingrid does not expect her own response to the rural landscape, nor the connection she forges to the family - her nephew, his wife and their 5-year-old daughter. Stone is the emotionally resonant story of Ingrid, a stylish "woman of a certain age, twice widowed, made rich by the second spouse." She moves from her Upper West Side apartment, leaving behind a circle of devoted female friends, to stay for several months with her nephew and his family in "a stone house in a flat town" to help him get a business venture off the ground. He thought of employing his loupe, but she wasn't a work of art, and even if she had been a painting he was too far away to examine brushstrokes." But Pearlman is much closer, and her portrait of Paige and Bobby emerges in vivid detail toward a surprising end.
He thought of dragging out his opera glasses, but she wasn't a soprano. "He thought of buying binoculars, but she wasn't a bird. But she connects with her customers, who treat her services as "a kind of secular confessional" as they discover what a good listener she is.īobby, a teacher recently separated from his wife, moves into town and finds that his rented upper-floor rooms give him a perfect vantage point to watch Paige at work across the street - a pastime that grows fascinating. That leaves her cut off as well, from her grief. Each of his parts was severed from the others, and his whole - his former whole - was severed from Paige." And then, three days into the desert, the tank he was riding met a mine. It's run by Paige, a middle-aged woman whose husband joined the Marines "mainly to get further mechanical training at the military's expense. The book opens with Tenderfoot, a story that takes its name from a small-town pedicure parlor. Pearlman's most frequent subjects are shared with those two writers, too: relationships within families and between men and women, and the universal and utterly personal experiences of love and death. Its 20 beautifully crafted stories firmly place Pearlman among the ranks of such modern masters of the form as Alice Munro and John Updike. Now comes Honeydew, her fifth book and the first to be published by a major house, along with a profile in the New York Times and an unprecedented - for this quiet talent - wave of publicity.
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