Women on the Verge
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The novel opens in September when Deirdre Murphy, a schoolteacher, is walking to school thinking about the new semester and students in her classes. The first installment of “The Girls,” told in the third person, reveals students’ and their families’ reaction when they learn that Leo Rivera’s body has been found “buried in a container of lime, skin dissolved like an animal carcass.”

Deirdre Murphy’s partner SJ (Sarah Jane) is a librarian who has been tutoring Mickey in reading. Mickey was one of the movers when the two moved into their current home. This is the same Mickey who picked up Rivera the last day anyone saw him. SJ is unhappy in her five-year relationship with Deirdre. Even though they’ve just moved into a new house, she has signed a lease, without telling Deirdre, for her own apartment.

In addition, Deirdre has a student, Anna, who has a crush on her. At the end of a field trip, an obviously upset Anna remains on the bus, where Deirdre tries to find out why she’s sad. She embraces Anna as a gesture of comfort, and the girl kisses her. At that moment Anna’s mother, the world’s stuffiest parent, comes to pick up her daughter and catches the two kissing. Deirdre is suspended from the job she loves while school authorities investigate. When SJ learns of Deirdre’s suspension, she can’t bring herself to tell her about the apartment. Instead, she focuses on work and convinces herself that she needs to find Mickey (her reading student), who has stopped coming to the library for instruction. She finds him and they talk, but before she can leave, he forces a kiss on her. Thus each partner has been kissed against her will, and these kisses both lead to trouble.

Late in the book, police leave a voice message saying they need Deirdre to come to the station. So SJ drives her there. Deirdre is taken to an interview room, Mirandized, and thrown in jail for a long weekend. There’s a lot missing in this chapter: the charges aren’t clear, there’s no mention of a police investigation, and not much of an interview. What evidence did they produce beside the girl and her mother’s statements? If police had questioned any of the other students or chaperones, they’d find the molestation of Anna doubtful. So how did we get from questioning to an arrest? The reader has known from the beginning that Mickey had someone with him when he lured Leo Rivera into his car, but this person’s identity is not revealed until close to the end of the book, and then in only a couple of sentences.

After the first chapter, the author spills a lot of ink introducing the main characters, of which there are several, so the first few chapters are short on plot development. But soon enough events start to move at a good pace, and many sections of this novel are well-written. The dynamics between the lesbian couple are quite compelling. Smith takes on several important issues, such as classism, racism, and bigotry, but in the end she leaves the reader with too many unanswered questions.

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Martha Miller is a Midwestern writer of plays, short fiction, reviews, articles, and novels. Her latest book is Tales from The Levee.