The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Trailer Girl and Other Stories by Terese SvobodaTrey Strecker
Terese Svoboda. Trailer Girl and Other Stories. Counterpoint, 2001. 240 pp. $23.00.
Svoboda’s stories explore disturbing cycles of “beatings and deprivings,” violence and poverty. Fourteen hauntingly detailed short-short stories provide concentrated, surrealistic vignettes of a world outside the comfort zone of “wide lawns and white houses,” a painful world where Svoboda’s characters live while “the rest of the world pretends it is normal.” In “A Mama,” by far the most powerful and successful short piece, Svoboda triangulates a fragmented account of child abuse through the eyes of the social worker, the mother, and the grown child. “Sundress” describes the misadventures of a homeless woman and her companion, who break into a suburban home while its owners are on vacation and quickly become friendly fixtures in the neighborhood, until they are forced to leave by the original owner’s return. The title novella-length story takes place in a trailer court beyond the edge of town, among antenna trees and bottle gardens, old tires and swing sets, TV noise and parents yelling. The narrator, a woman the neighbors dismiss as “the trash lady,” imagines she has spotted a missing girl hiding in a nearby gully. No one will believe her story, including the girl’s addicted mother. While the angry narrator accuses the mother of neglect, she begins to understand “she is the one who is not grown up, who needs things the child can’t even know to get for her, the child who gets kicked because she doesn’t know, the child who gets nothing over and over because who has anything?” [Trey Strecker]