FICTION

MY BODY TO YOU by Elizabeth Searle (University of Iowa Press: $22.95; 182 pp.) Why not think of these 13 stories as bodies? After all, the body-consciousness of Elizabeth Searle’s female protagonists ranges from a nagging itch to a full-blown obsession. The outside world batters them with sensory data: “A zipper glints between vertical lips of denim. As the boy shifts his weight, a diamond-shaped flash of white cotton shows. Surrender flag. . . . Metal gives its plaintive subway shriek.” The pressure inside these women--pressure to test the limits of the sensible, the approved, even the sexually possible--is almost more than mere skin can hold.

An unpopular girl named Alisa leads a double life as glamorous Lisa in the movie theater where she works. An unattractive but bright girl and her mindlessly beautiful mother form “one person.” A visitor to a home for the retarded is tempted to have sex with an inmate who wouldn’t know what was happening to him. Two women teachers visiting a home for violent children are unexpectedly drawn to each other. A girl in love with a gay man--a transvestite, no less--tries to turn herself into a man so that he will desire her.

Searle, who once taught autistic children, has a feel for institutions and a humane view of fringe behavior. Her favorite trick as a storyteller is overload: the piling on of stimuli until the institution crumbles and the individual’s mind shuts down in favor of instinct. This produces suspense, because in the midst of chaos--forced to stay in the present and on the surface of the story--we can’t tell whether what’s happening will prove to be touchingly semi-normal or genuinely strange. Such command of technique, matched with Searle’s vision, makes this an impressive body of work.