Mail-Order Bride: Three Stories by Sara Baker

Women’s Inner LivesThree Compelling Stories

Beneath the quotidian surfaces of these lives, lie depths of yearning, passion and grief. These stories of contemporary women explore marriage, divorce, friendship, motherhood, aging and sex in complex and subtle ways. Set in a familiar suburban swimming pool or on an almost deserted island, these stories will take you on a singular journey not to be missed.

Looking at the red-haired woman, now arguing with the boy, she tries to imagine her in her home country. Kristin’s impressions of Eastern Europe are grainy and bleak like the films she’s seen, the stories she’s read, but they are also compelling. Images come to her of Cold War skirmishes in old cities with narrow streets, of Orthodox Jews in dark coats scurrying to prayer, of sad-faced mosaic Madonnas glinting in Russian churches, of dancing Gypsy women in bright skirts. She thinks of it as a place of old rivalries and new ideologies, of betrayals and alliances, a place dense with a history she could never hope to understand. She wonders how this thin, hennaed woman will fare under the guileless American sky. She wonders what accident of history brought her here, and whether she will one day swim and gossip in the lap lanes.