Love as a Bridge

By Irma Pascal Heldman

UP THE SANDBOX by Anne Richardson Roiphe. 155 pages. Simon & Schuster. $4.95.

Walter Mitty is alive and well in the appealing shape of a young matron on Manhattan's Upper West Side. She is Margaret Reynolds, the decidedly sane housewife-heroine of Up the Sandbox, a fresh, beguiling, bittersweet novel that looks into those three old hats: men, marriage, motherhood.

Margaret stands somewhere to the right of Women's Lib but to the left of total fulfillment through old-fashioned marriage. She loves her husband Paul, a college professor who is a scholar of social disorder. She is inordinately proud of the body that brings her pleasure and has borne her two children. But her sharpest perceptions affirm her worst fears: "My life hardly differs from that of an Indian squaw settled in a tepee on the same Manhattan land centuries ago. Pick, clean, prepare, throw out, dig a hole, bury the waste--she was my sister. She would understand why there should be one day of total fast each week."

How does the lady cope? By alternating between reality and dreams of glory that Mitty would be proud to claim. Her hours watching her offspring in the playground are brief respites from harrowing trips to Viet Nam and nights interviewing Fidel Castro as America's star female reporter. By day she extols the virtues of the grocery list as pop art. By night she is an intern working miracles in a ghetto hospital. She is a loving spectator of the sandbox-and-sprinkler set but her mind's eye is on PROWL, a black revolutionary group where she is mistress to the leader. Playground palaver is easy to ignore when at dusk in the arms of your lover you will play a pivotal role in a plot to blow up the George Washington Bridge.

There are certain psychic risks, of course, to a life led beneath the surface of domestic bliss. In the darkest Amazon, when a poison arrow proves nearly fatal, Margaret finds herself praying, "Paul, my darling, if I make it home to you ... I will learn to bake bread and make chocolate mousse." Here the most committed housewife asleep in her phoenix dreams will recognize that she and Margaret are soul mates. Few crises cannot be better met if the house is filled with the aroma of freshly baked bread. In the end, Margaret affirms the reality of her existence in another pregnancy--man's eternal solution to fear of mortality. The reader rejoices that unto them a child will be born--and unto Margaret, a whole new set of ego building fantasies.

Following on the heels of Digging Out, a critically acclaimed but entirely conventional first novel, Author Roiphe this time has happily been willing to experiment, a rare enough quality in second novelists. Skillfully--and without too much cloy--she captures the minutiae of matrimony and maternity, evoking only too clearly the "educated" woman's dilemma, torn between vulnerability for her children and her demands for self. The Reynoldses make a city scene familiar in particular to New Yorkers. But Margaret's inner scene will be recognized and applauded by young mothers everywhere who, like Margaret, are "too old for an identity crisis and yet not past the age of uncertainty." If the authors insights are at times more precious than rare, her message is not. It is meant for those who dig men and the other two Ms and ask only to be out of the doll's house part of the day.

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