'HOW TO BREATHE UNDERWATER' | A review Author navigates the hazards of life with skill, compassion

There's a message here for us to learn.
By CONNIE OGLE
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
"How to Breathe Underwater: Stories," by Julie Orringer (Knopf, $21).
They are more resilient than they realize, these resolute girls in Julie Orringer's arresting debut collection. They are smart, and they are sensitive, and, oh, do bad things happen to them. They have mothers sick with rapacious cancers, or gorgeous, careless French model cousins, or friends and boys they observe through a confusing haze of envy and affection. They are all engaged in the laborious balancing act that Orringer explores with wisdom and a simple, eloquent style: navigating the hazards of everyday life.
You know: love and hate, war and peace, a thrilling naked hot-tub adventure and the joy and horror of sixth-grade dance class. Finding a way to fit in AND stand out. Breathing, you know, underwater.
Listen, you don't think everyday life is brutal? Oh, you're so wrong. Have you forgotten?
"On Wednesdays wear a skirt. A skirt is better for dancing. After school, remember not to take the bus. Go to McDonald's instead. Order the fries. Don't even bother trying to sit with Patricia and Cara. Instead, try to sit with Sasha and Toni Sue. If they won't let you, try to sit with Andrea Shaw. And if Andrea Shaw gets up and throws away the rest of her fries rather than sit with you, sit alone and do not look at anyone. Particularly not the boys."
Like our world
In Orringer's world, which is very much like the one we inhabit, Andrea Shaw will most certainly ditch her fries to escape you, so you'd better be prepared. That's a motto, a mantra. Pay attention. "When Miss Miggie comes out, do not look at her enormous breasts," thinks this same narrator in the hilarious, poignant "Note to Sixth-Grade Self." "Breasts like those will never grow on your scarecrow body. Do not waste your time wanting them." The boy you love might dance with you under orders, but he will not choose you, at least not in the presence of others. Don't waste your time wanting that, either. Make adjustments and move on.
So be ready. Don't long for what you can't have. Model yourself after the frustrated, overweight artist narrator of "When She Is Old and I Am Famous," who desperately wants her teen-age model cousin out of her life -- "Can someone tell her, please, to go home? This is my Italy and my story" -- but steels herself to remember that beauty fades, and art lasts forever.
Inevitability and the grace to accept it, then, is Orringer's message, and she expresses this with skill and compassion. She links her stories with fine lines of tension and fear and barely acknowledged grief. In "Pilgrims," a young girl endures an uncomfortable Thanksgiving among strangers and gets a glimpse of the family horrors to come as her ill mother grows weaker.
"Care" describes a harrowing day in San Francisco, when drug-addled Tessa loses her niece on the pier. "Maybe that's what she's been hoping for all day, maybe that's why she let herself lose Olivia: to make things so terrible they'd have to change." When tragedy is averted, Tessa scrambles for the pills she's hidden near a park bench. "She has to have them, and she has to keep having them." Inevitability, it seems, doesn't necessarily guarantee peace of mind.
Best story
Perhaps the best story in the collection is the haunting "The Isabel Fish," in which 14-year-old Maddy suffers the unswerving anger of her older brother. "I am the canker of my brother Sage's life," she confides, because she has survived a car crash that killed his girlfriend Isabel, after whom one of her pet fish is named.
On the way to scuba class, Sage taunts her with the ways she could die diving. Blown out eardrums. Imploding lungs. Shark attack. Maddy tries to ignore him. "Tonight, for the first time," she thinks, "I'll begin to know what my fish have known all their lives: how to breathe underwater." What she doesn't know then, what she'll learn later, is that she's already well on her way to doing just that. Pay attention. You might be able to do it, too.