BOOK REVIEW : Coming of Age in Familiar Surroundings

White Girls by Lynn Lauber (Norton: $17.95; 187 pp)

If you had the luck (good or bad, depending on your point of view) to grow up in a town with a single family-owned department store, a couple of drive-ins and maybe--like Union, Ohio--an exotic dining spot that offered Chinese pressed duck; if there was a “right” side and a “wrong” side of the tracks, then you won’t care if “White Girls” is a novel or a collection of vignettes. You’ll be back there in the boondocks with the narrator of this beguiling book, dreaming of escape, determined to avoid reliving your mother’s life, becoming a teen-age expert in deceit and deception.

Divided, like the town itself, into halves, “White Girls” begins with a first person account of Loretta Dardio’s immediate neighborhood, Rosewood Avenue. She’s still in grade school, at Marcus Aurelius, where “the ceilings were low, and the floors made so slick by the black janitor, Mr. Jefferson, that visitors from the PTA often slipped and fell on their tail bones when they came inside.” Lauber doesn’t have to tell you that Marcus Aurelius was hastily built of cinder block and acoustical tile in time to receive the surprise crop of baby boomers. You’ll know the corridors of that school, just the way you’ll recognize the author’s mother, who changed “that year we moved to Rosewood, when she saw that my brother and I were all she would accomplish in life.”

Union, Ohio, was just large enough to have its own TV station; the hours from 11 to 2 were filled by Coral Baker’s talk show, watched “mostly by shut-ins or ironing mothers,” the celebrity guests the chairman of the March of Dimes, the secretary of the Parks Department and that day’s birthday child. In Union, you didn’t get television from Burbank on your 9-inch screen, although there was a Goodwill and a Men’s Mission competing for the limited amount of castoffs, and curiously, a permanent population of vagrants and prostitutes, who functioned as a “warning to the girls of Union that if they couldn’t type fifty words per minute, or bear clerking at Woolworth’s candy counter (next to the bird department, so that the ju-jus and chocolate-covered peanuts tasted of molt), or find a mild husband to prop themselves up, this might also be their lot.” At this point in her life, Loretta is still an observer, commenting precociously on the ladies’ bowling team, Gregg’s Department Store, summer vacation at the lake and the agonies of Dardio family reunions.

By Part II, she’s in high school and even more spirited and defiant. Having served her apprenticeship as a spectator at life’s smorgasbord, she’s desperately eager to sample some of the more exotic delicacies. With teased hair and kohl-rimmed eyes, she manages to attract the interest of Luther Biggs, one of Union High’s few black students. The number of whispered late-night telephone conversations finally arouses her abstracted mother’s suspicions, and Loretta finds herself in the office of Dr. Erwin, surely the town’s only psychologist, who cautions her firmly against becoming involved with someone in Luther’s “cultural milieu.” Up to this point, “White Girls” is a delightful diversion, but the tone darkens almost at once. Dr. Erwin’s mincing euphemism is a goad, and Loretta dives headfirst into Luther’s world.

“Sugar Street,” the second half of the book, describes her total immersion into a thrilling and perilous emotional adventure, involved not only with Luther himself, but with his generous and capable mother, Annie, his skeptical sister, Nettie, and the other members of Union’s black community. Infatuation deprives Loretta of the detachment that lent the first half of the book its tart charm, replacing her innocence with premature wisdom: Even in Union, Ohio, where the gulf separating Rosewood Avenue from Sugar Street seems relatively narrow, one crosses the division at considerable personal risk; Loretta gambles and loses.

By the end of this taut and affecting memoir, Loretta has taken a giant step away from her mother’s drab and disappointing life, but not quite in the direction she would have chosen had she been less desperate to get away, had she been patient for a year or two longer. Honest, wry and rueful, “White Girls” is the coming-of-age novel with a vengeance.