Men Giving Money, Women Yelling

July 31, 1997
"Find stories with action, not just love and thinking," a dance teacher tells her students in this endearing collection of intersecting stories, and that direction sums up Mattison's (Hilda and Pearl) modus operandi. Her characters are in constant motion, dancing their way through their days and predicaments, entering and exiting these 15 stories like people in a slightly ironic musical comedy. The cast includes two young women who are high-school teachers (and their boyfriends past and present), three grown brothers, a yogurt-shop owner, two social workers, various dogs and a fey drifter named Denny, who slips in and out of windows and the other characters' lives. Set in and around New Haven, Conn. (in a soup kitchen, a dance studio, a lawyer's office and a city park; in downtown apartments and a cottage on the Long Island Sound), these stories are full of lifelike interruptions, distractions and unexpected turns. If Mattison's spry language and light touch belie her careful framing of events, they also blithely pave the way for her finely hewn endings, which in almost every story capture the unspoken charm and mystery of a character or a moment.