JAMES MASON AND THE WALK-IN CLOSET

Stories quietly celebrating the insights that middle-aged women, born too early for today's big careers, salvage from the wreckage of their lives. By the author of Is This What Other Women Feel Too? (1991), etc. Seese's women, usually in their late 40s or early 50s, went to college but learned nothing that prepared them for the rest of their lives. ``I am a receptionist,'' announces the narrator of the title novella. ``Another girl who paid the price of reading what I wanted for four years.'' The women also tend to be Catholic, were raised in blue-collar neighborhoods, and left home as soon as they could. The novella's narrator recalls a past that has led to a life of constant travel and many disappointments, assuaged only by watching reruns of James Mason movies. She recalls a botched abortion; a love affair with an Irish student; a friend who murdered her cold and unloving mother; a recent winter in Dublin when she had an affair with a priest and worked for an American homosexual. In notable pieces like ``the Polish Girl and the Black Musician,'' ``Hildegarde's Long Gloves,'' and ``Ashtrays,'' respectively, a young Polish-American artist from Detroit marries a black musician from St. Louis so that she ``can leave this factory town,'' although her courage is only a mask for desperation; a middle-aged woman tells her childhood friend that ``life is not a fashion statement,'' and then recalls the white gloves she stole as a child because she wanted to be like Hildegarde, ``who wore white gloves and sang in a voice that made [her] shiver''; and a divorced woman (``forty, not long separated and smoking so much'') leaves San Francisco for North Carolina, though she's still in love with her homosexual husband. Slender stories that resonate with wisdom and a wry understanding of the familiar angst of middle age for lonely women.