GALAXY GIRLS: WONDER WOMEN: STORIES, by Anne Whitney Pierce, Helicon Nine Editions, 190 pages, $12.95.

How would you feel if, at the ripe old age of 8, you overheard a nosy neighbor saying that your single mother was never “sans homme” (“without a man”)? Or, what if your 9-year-old son should suddenly meet, adore and mimic his elderly grandmother, the woman who grieved over your older brother’s death to such an extent that your childhood had no love, no direction, no fun? Or, perhaps your aging mother begins to think she is one (or more) of the characters in the movie “Casablanca” and she begins demanding lion meat from the local grocer? Like most of us, I’m guessing that you would like to think you would be able to handle these bizarre yet believable life events. Well, if you’re one of Anne Whitney Pierce’s “Galaxy Girls: Wonder Women,” you cope, you crack, or you recreate a life out of whole cloth, but you never, ever admit defeat even if you must succumb to the forces of fate.

In this collection of stories which won the 1993 Willa Cather Fiction Prize, these galaxy girls hearken to us from the ocean waves of seaside Maine, the violent streets of Boston, and places beyond. But, like T.S. Eliot’s aging, self-conscious “Prufrock,” who “measured out (his) life with coffee spoons” and who dared not “disturb the universe,” we, too, hear the mermaids singing but not to us. And, even as they seem to entice us from our securely predictable worlds into theirs, there is a sadness, a poignancy about even the most courageous of these free-born, adventurous women. All of them seem to get their ideas, lives, their very existence if not purpose from others. This does not diminish their courage.

The opening piece, called “Sans Homme,” involves an unkind neighbor’s description of a young girl’s mother as one who is never “sans homme,” a claim that confuses the daughter, and so her love and loyalty for her mother are tested by this woman’s penchant for men of almost any ilk and feather. These hommes are attracted by the mother’s exquisite beauty, who easily if half-heartedly agree to the mother’s conditional relationships with them — her daughter and her needs must preclude the men’s desires. Of course, none of the men ever believes this carefree Venus will expect him to uphold his end of the agreement, until she invites him for his favorite meal — a signal of the end of that relationship.

Here, as elsewhere in this work, the daughter seems more maternal as she parents her mother rather than the other way around. Even so, they are reasonably happy together until both easily — too easily — succumb to the charms of Dusty, a blond waiter cum philosopher who changes their lives forever. His philial friendship for the daughter is as powerful and energetic as his erotic one with the mother and both expect him to stay, but he is not the usual, a singular truth.

In “The Gumball Man,” a woman is determined to protect her yet-unborn child from an irresponsible father and the vicious cycle of violence in Boston as she ekes out a living writing strangely twisted stories of star-crossed lovers with predictable endings. One day, while having a new story copied at the local xerox office, she risks her tenuous hold on life when she confronts a robber whose childhood memories, luckily, coincide with hers. The thief steals all the office money and all the valuables of the customers, yet he has, it seems, a soul. Peering into the Gumball Man’s meager sack of coins, he hands it back, saying he could never rob the Gumball Man. He, like the writer, still cherishes his memories of the Gumball Man, the source of many a child’s innocent happiness. And so, this time at least, a random act of theft does not end in murder.

In the “Empire Beauty Salon,” Roxanne, a New York City-born beautician, longs for the steamy shores of far-off Fiji, decorating her beauty parlor with travel posters, books, shells, and other paraphernalia which attracts a good yet older clientele eager to indulge their dreams of far-off happiness with her. Yet, she is alone and lonely, so she finally sells out and moves to the seashore — not Fiji, which is too hot and too different for Roxanne, but Morocco, Maine! Thus, in her new location, the “Empire Beauty Salon” is created, with pictures, models, brochures, etc., celebrating New York City. She is unexpectedly welcomed warmly by the Mainers who are a bit in awe of her decor but who like her common-sense, practical approach to hair management. She gives them exactly what they want and she is very good at it. But, like so many of Pierce’s women, Roxanne just misses her chance at love, at happiness, pursuing the wrong men.

It is this quality that is bothersome about the women in this book. Although the girls in the stories all have a strength of character and a nobility one must admire, the women emerge as mere replicas of responsible adults. In almost every story, they are so totally dependent on others for their identities that they often appear as mere simulacra — not the full-blooded, heart-rending women of depth and substance one expects from the images of girls here, but the diminishing shadows of someone’s mother, daughter, wife, lover. We never see them as whole people in and of themselves. Perhaps this is Pierce’s view of “women’s place” in the ’90s; I hope not. The poignant truth, though, is that they, like us, suffer losses and attempt to overcome them even as their stories end not with an epiphany, but a shock of disillusionment, resignation, never despair.

Linda L. Labin is an associate professor of history at Husson College.