His Wonders to Perform : THE MIRACULOUS DAY OF AMALIA GOMEZ <i> By John Rechy</i> , <i> (Arcade Publishing/Little, Brown; $19.95; 206 pp.) </i>

John Rechy’s ninth book of fiction, “The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez,” is a disturbing portrayal of one day in the life of a middle-aged Mexican-American woman who is struggling to raise her children amid the decaying and drug-ridden neighborhoods of East Los Angeles and Hollywood.

Amalia Gomez’s remarkable day begins when she wakes and thinks, for one brief moment, that beyond the iron-barred window of her decaying stucco bungalow she sees an omen--a silver cross dangling in the otherwise clear sky. Is it really a sign? And if so, how should she read it?

A logical Mexican-American woman in her mid-40s, Amalia begins to doubt the apparition. “No miraculous sign would appear to a twice-divorced woman with grown rebellious children and living with a man who wasn’t her husband,” she thinks, “although God was forgiving, wasn’t He?”

The mysterious ways of God tend to preoccupy Amalia. Catholicism is etched on her soul; she wants to believe God has sent her an omen, that it certainly portends something, if only she could decipher what that is.

In truth, she has decoded very little of her own experience. She has tumbled from crisis to crisis throughout her life, a victim of accidents and chance. She has no regrets because she cannot remember a time when any desirable choice had been presented to her; there were no “missed opportunities.”

Born in El Paso, Texas, where her childhood was marred by an alcoholic father (“a violent stranger” is how she remembers him), Amalia is raped as a teen-ager and forced to marry her attacker, Salvador, who ends up a heroin addict, condemned to prison. Impregnated and abandoned by a second husband, Gabriel, who tells her “I can’t afford a child,” she follows him to California, first settling in Torrance, then Boyle Heights, only to discover herself alone in a frighteningly foreign place and pregnant once again, inhaling “the scorched odor of Los Angeles.”

Amalia’s troubles intensify later when her oldest son, Manuel, gets involved with a gang. “Juvenile home, county detention camp, youth authority, detention center, youth training school . . . Amalia could not keep the names straight. Manny was in and out of them . . . he was there for fighting, for stealing. Even the exact charges Amalia could not remember.” Manny dies in jail, the victim of a beating, or a suicide, no one is quite clear.

All this a reader learns in a series of flashbacks that occur throughout the day of Amalia Gomez’s miraculous sighting. We see how she was programmed early for a dream world of submissiveness, pain and self-denial. Men have used her and moved on, and she has sought out other men, not for romance but for help with the rent. Only once, on the night before the sighting of the cross in the sky, has Amalia experienced sexual tenderness, and even then, things had turned out badly.

She is a woman ill-equipped for the world in which she finds herself. She is so beautiful that people mistake her for a movie star--Ava Gardner, or Maria Felix, the Mexican actress--yet her looks won’t earn her bread, only unwanted advances from opportunistic men, and so she has spent her life cleaning houses and working in sweatshops.

Her children are strangers, like her father. She has lied to them, out of shame, pretending Raynaldo, her current live-in boyfriend, is her husband. On and off throughout her miraculous day, Amalia grieves for her dead son Manuel, and fears her two remaining teen-aged children, Gloria and Juan, are headed for some unnamable kind of trouble.

In a series of skillful vignettes, Rechy evokes the world of seedy neighborhoods, describing the lines that form outside the county jail, the violence in the lives of the poor, the mystical pilgrimage of an old woman crawling on her knees up the steps of a church.

By the end of the day, Amalia will have discovered her children’s secrets, information that shouldn’t be revealed in this review. But for Amalia, it’s a painful outcome, in many ways, to a day that had started with such a promising sign--but only if you think knowing the truth is more damaging than ignorance. No feminist, no thinking person, would agree that it is. “Do you ever face anything?” Gloria confronts her mother at one point.

The disturbing truth is that Amalia faces nothing, and everything. Ghosts and worries preoccupy her, while reality slides by, unacknowledged. When she finally acts decisively, in the book’s last scene, to save her own skin during a robbery in a mall, the reader can’t help but feel gratified that Amalia has gained a little courage from her experience of truth, brought on by her children’s disclosures.

In one sense, Rechy’s novel is an ardently feminist piece of writing. By portraying her abusive past, the poverty and the narrow choices facing Amalia Gomez, Rechy illuminates the plight of certain minority women who remain locked in the dark ages of female emancipation, shut off from any help. Of what use are minimum-wage or equal-opportunity laws to a woman scrubbing bathrooms in Beverly Hills or sewing on labels in a sweatshop? What equal treatment under the law can be expected when barrio children are handled differently by police, condemned and punished long before they ever reach a court of justice? How do you live in a world that you are only marginally a part of?

Rechy is, above all, a story-teller, so these concerns are woven quietly into his tale. They nevertheless become the real story: Amalia Gomez may be the main character, but poverty and ignorance, injustice and fear, are the real subjects of this engaging novel.