THE PEOPLE I KNOW <i> by Nancy Zafris (University of Georgia Press: $16.95; 162 pp.) </i>

One of the nine stories in Nancy Zafris’ Flannery O’Connor Award-winning collection is narrated by a handicapped girl. The biggest event of her life was when TV cameras picked her out as she sat in the studio audience at a local kiddie show. And that wasn’t exactly a thrill. At the end, she reflects that the future will bring “trouble and wild moods and frantic adolescent love” for her healthy sister, while she will have to make do with “a procession of humble pleasures which would give more joy to others than to me.”

This sense of being in the bleachers while the real show goes on just out of reach is what Zafris’ characters, otherwise so various, have in common. An old woman who lives in a beachfront hotel imagines that she is the mastermind of a burglary ring that cracks the secrets of her neighbors’ rooms. A Japanese businessman who happens to be as tall as an American finds himself caught between cultures, unable to conform like his former schoolmates or to cope with the obnoxious Yank in the next office. A young man who helps his father run an auto-wrecking yard dreams of earning an MBA and working in an I. M. Pei office building while he listens to workers’ tales about wild dogs and people who have been gulped down by the yard’s metal-shredder.

In her slighter stories, Zafris relies on a standard minimalist device: Because she tells us so little about her characters, the details she does provide, however ordinary, seem weighty and somehow strange. In longer stories, the strangeness arises from how her passive protagonists see and hear other people: as grotesquely loud, energetic, colorful. The show going on in front of the bleachers is a comedy. It’s often slapstick comedy (the wrecking-yard crew), though it also can involve remarkable subtlety and accuracy of observation (the handicapped girl’s family and friends).

The two stories set in Japan stand apart from the rest. Here Zafris doesn’t have to make anything strange, because everything is strange already; she just has to describe foreign places and people, and so comes round to realism by the back door. The most moving character in the collection is a young Japanese woman trapped in an unhappy marriage; though the mother of three, she never has been kissed. To the American student who stays at her remote mountain inn and wants to “save” her--but is about to leave--she hardly seems to acknowledge her plight, but she doesn’t have to; her life is so richly described that it yields its meaning as softly as a teakettle’s sigh.