In the Chokehold of the Male Principle : SWEET TALK Stories <i> by Stephanie Vaughn (Random House: $16.95; 164 pp.) </i>

Because the father is tall and has a resonant voice and a command of language, and because the taut ship he runs with such assurance has woodworm and breaks up; because of this, the daughter will grow up to be a sucker for tall men and their warm voices, and find herself wet-shod and treading water amid their driftwood.

That is not entirely the point about Gemma, whom we follow from adolescence to the foothills of middle age in these stories by Stephanie Vaughn. She could have had a different father and been marked differently. A mother, or any number of other things, could have marked her. The point is that we come out of childhood with twin legacies of beauty and pain, and struggle to balance their books for the rest of our life.

This is the general point about “Sweet Talk.” What is most important is more particular. These stories, bred on familiar minimal ground, expand into a generosity chivied by imagination and a nervy voice.

Usually, the voice belongs to Gemma, raised as an army daughter on a succession of military posts, attempting a flaky, flower-child post-adolescence, maturing into a woman trying to come to terms with herself and her past. Sometimes the voice slips into a third-person; sometimes the I is not quite Gemma but a kind of variation on her. Gemma herself has variations; in one story she is an only child, in another she has a brother.

The image of the father dominates three of the stories and suggests itself in several others. The fullest portrait is in “Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog.” Second-in-command on a military base near Niagara Falls, the father waits for a promotion that will never come.

He is a military man, one hundred percent, and that one hundred percent marks the romantic anarchist. Your successful army careers require a mix: about one half soldier and the rest divided among politician, businessman, compromiser and schemer. Gemma’s father’s faith in the right way to do things in a logical universe is a romantic excess. He ends up drinking too much, insulting his commanding officer and leaving the army.

In “Able, Baker,” we see him as the family autocrat, well-meaning but bent on arranging everyone’s lives. He imparts his lore to Gemma at didactic dinner-table sessions; he teaches her how to load shotgun shells, how to plant tomatoes, and--hence the title--how to communicate through the military alphabet.

And through Gemma’s voice, we see the daughter growing away from her role as Daddy’s girl. When her father gets drunk and abusive one night, she calms him; they walk out by the partly frozen lake and, in a kind of despair, he begins to jump the ice floes. “Be sure and write,” she calls out, making a joke of it instead of a tragedy. Only years later, after he dies, will that night’s fear and grief be recognized and assimilated.

In “My Mother Breathing Light,” Gemma visits her mother, a widow, and ill with cancer. Able to see and love her fully for the first time, she gives us a portrait of a brave, eccentric, funny woman whose life has been crippled by her husband’s domination but who has preserved a luminous independence.

“Kid MacArthur,” one of the most powerful stories in this wonderful collection, tells of the long struggle between Gemma’s father and her brother, MacArthur, who, under the father’s influence, goes off to Vietnam and comes back to become a dropout and a hermit.

Gemma’s narrative, aching and dispassionate at the same time, is a tragicomedy of two men drowning in a mutual chokehold over the male principle. When they were children, Gemma recalls with irony, the father had offered to include her in the shotgun-shell lessons he gave to MacArthur--note the difference with the first story--but she sticks to twirling the baton. Later, when a woman commiserates with her on her “degradation” as a majorette, she reflects: “When I left high school I went to college. When MacArthur left high school he went to war.”

Women can learn to survive male dominations, but they are still vulnerable to men. In two of the stories, the protagonists deal with a husband or a lover who has replaced the macho principle with a free-floating, privileged polymorphousness that is quite as oppressive, and much emptier.

In “Other Women,” the narrator, living with the gentle and amiable Harvey, is persuaded to let Harvey’s former wife stay with them for a while. All three, it soon turns out, have crabs; Harvey has shared his amiability. As it further turns out, he has shared it even more widely: with the narrator’s best friend, who had been giving advice about crab removal and who, as we learn, was the initial purveyor.

Megan, the protagonist of “The Architecture of California,” discovers that Vera, her best friend and confidante, is pregnant by her husband George. The revelation is made when Vera comes over to make an organic pasta dinner for them. It is all very civilized until Megan suddenly comes into her fury.

“She waits for the rage to pass, and when it doesn’t she sees that handfuls of ricotta cheese are flying across the kitchen. When she sits back down at the table, she says, ‘All I wanted was not to know.’ George and Vera stand by the stove spattered with wholesome food.” Later, civility restored, Megan will drive Vera to the abortion clinic and wait with her.

This, of course, is sharp social comedy, with the pain delicately outlined. Vaughn does it beautifully, although these stories are less remarkable than her full-throated, resonant stories of Gemma’s family life. There, the men and the women are wrong-headed extremists, but funny and tragic. Out of that tragedy, something worthwhile comes: the myths that give fire and form to memory, even when that memory is harbored among the latter-day crab-sharers and manicotti-hurlers.