The Elizabeth Stories<i> by Isabel Huggan (Viking: $15.95; 184 pp.) </i>

Sometimes childhood just doesn’t work out the way it should. It’s a situation that we usually try to deny, or gloss over, or tell funny stories about. The reason we try all those evasive actions is that in order to go on, we must believe that most humans are decent folk (except for whatever “enemy” we have designated at any particular time). More specifically, we often believe that people on the other side of the world may not care for their children. The very very rich may neglect their children (as stories like the Gloria Vanderbilt biography may conveniently prove). It’s also convenient to believe that the very poor don’t care for their children, because those parents don’t have good jobs or feed their children balanced meals, or squander their relief checks on gin or worse. But we-- we!-- who take our daughters to dancing class and our sons to Cub Scouts, and go to barbecues and family vacations, we love our children, and they love us at least until they grow into their pesky teens, dye their faces blue like druids, get “into” drugs that make them crazy. When all that happens, of course, it isn’t our children ; it’s the PCP, the LSD, the coke, the smack, and never little Phil or Phyllis who hates our guts (and truth be told, we were never wild about them either).

Some say Oliver North is brave, or the man who happened to be on the Pueblo when it was captured was brave, but I say the real medal for bravery goes to Isabel Huggan, who in “The Elizabeth Stories” addresses herself to the proposition that many parents of “our” sort would walk across the street to avoid their children (and vice versa) no matter how cultured, how middle class, how religious, how anything a given particular family is.

How does this dynamic play itself out? A mother cannot admit she can’t stand her kid. So, she blames her feelings on her child. The father retreats into a dim niche of fearsome authority, where he is (1) always on the verge of being irritated, or (2) always irritated. The child proceeds from a position of blind despair: Just what is it that he or she has done to deserve this lack of love, this blatant hatred that he or she is currently drowning in? Finding no answer, and not liking his parents very much either, the child’s next step is to retreat into the adolescent scorn that some parents perversely almost welcome, because it brings the battle out into the open. Then, if the child has a brain, comes the interesting part: What was really going on in his or her family structure? Were the parents playing on the same team, or did they not like each other very much either? What were their original expectations? What part did sex have to play in this mysterious family dynamic? And can the child escape, not just from his or her own family, but from the terrible, terrible curse of having children who will be, in turn, unloved? One thing is certain: Dancing lessons and Cub Scouts won’t change this infrastructure.

Young Elizabeth lives in the small Canadian town of Garten. Her mother doesn’t like her. Her father wanted a boy. At school, Elizabeth cries so much that she’s called “Sucky Baby,” but she makes sure to find someone weaker than she to make life miserable for. Later when kids play their childhood sex games, it gets “fixed” in town that the other kid gets blamed, and the luckless boy must move away. (Her parents “know,” however, that Elizabeth is to blame.)

What a dreadful home Elizabeth lives in! It’s all leftover roast, a banker-dad who won’t have a dog in the house because he might get hair on his suit, doleful house dresses and despair, and when Mom entertains an old girlfriend who drinks and plays poker, she’s banished from the house by Elizabeth’s irate father because life is hardship and emotional oppression and the dreariness of the everyday. If all that isn’t enough, Elizabeth is getting taller and taller.

Her father wanted a son, but if she grows to be a full 15 feet high, Elizabeth will never fulfill that expectation. Her mother wanted a delicate little girl, and Elizabeth will never be that either. In an excruciating story, “Jack of Hearts,” Elizabeth is made to play a boy in a dance recital, even as her mother, shamefaced and distraught, must go out and buy her a bra--to prevent an on-stage catastrophe.

As Elizabeth gets older, she begins dimly to understand that her parents dislike her because she is an emblem of their own lives’ dashed hopes. By the last two stories, she begins to see that her own mother’s venom and grinding migraine headaches come from a misery at least as debilitating as her own. How did everyone in the town of Garten manage to get into this hopeless fix? Isabel Huggan suggests that it’s the heterosexual erotic urge that traps us before we know what’s happening; that it victimizes everyone, parents and children alike. Her most horrifying story, the “Sorrows of the Flesh,” illustrates this exquisitely.

If these tales sound morbid or too depressing to read, take heart. The elation that comes from telling the truth at last sings through “The Elizabeth Stories.” Anyone who has longed more than life to escape from an unbearable existence--has been bad-rapped by a parent for being “thoughtless,” “clumsy,” a “show-off,” “chunky,” “impertinent,” “ungrateful,” and so on, should put “The Elizabeth Stories” in a household shrine and make Huggan a Kitchen Goddess. She tells the truth, and makes us love it.