Page 49 [49]
GARDENS OF His MAKING: THREE STORIES BY ALICE MUNRO
Bea and Liza represent very different personalities and life routes. One is
disorganized and vain “with a checkered career” (265); the other is maybe a
little too organized: “[Liza] never drank alcohol now, she never even ate sugar.
She didn’t want Warren eating a Danish on his break, so she packed him oat
muffins that she made at home. She did the laundry every Wednesday night
and counted the strokes when she brushed her teeth and got up early in the
morning to do knee bends and read Bible verses” (276). Yet, neither Liza nor
Bea is able to face the truth about their Adam. They both insist on their own
narrative: Bea on her version of what love is, Liza on her reason to hate Bea:
“I already told you what she did to me. She sent me to college!” (283), she tells
her husband. And “[s]he didn’t like college, didn’t like the people there. By that
time she had become a Christian” (276), notes her husband to himself.
“RUNAWAY” (2004)
In “Runaway,” Carla, a young wife and Clark, her older husband live on a rather
isolated farm in a trailer, which Clark is constantly tinkering on. Carla allevi¬
ates Clark’s sexual disfunction by making up “dirty” stories to satisfy his
sexual fantasies. In some of these, their then ailing, now dead neighbor, the
nationally recognized poet Leon, is a protagonist. When they run into money
trouble, Clark tries to persuade his wife to blackmail Sylvia, Leon’s retired wife
by threatening her with airing Leon’s (fictive) sexual molestation of Carla. Carla
does not dare confront her husband, but neither does she want to fall for an
obvious lie, so she chooses to run away on an impulse when Sylvia, misunder¬
standing the situation, encourages her to start a new life. But Carla soon changes
her mind and returns to her husband. It is only later that she realizes that it
was her husband who had killed her missing pet goat Flora, probably to punish
her for her disobedience and her attempt at running away. But she deliberately
ignores this possibility: she chooses not to investigate what happened to Flora,
no matter how much her loss may hurt.
In the story, the isolated farm acts as the Garden, Carla as Eve, Clark as
Adam, and Sylvia as the tempter. Sylvia inadvertently lets Carla observe her
marriage to Clark from a different angle by telling her about an incident with
Flora. Flora is a pet, a surrogate child, a biblical scapegoat and a symbol of the
relationship dynamic between Carla and Clark at the same time. In one scene
of the narrative, she appears with an apple in her mouth, reinforcing her sym¬
bolic meaning and association with knowledge. At the start of the narrative
she is already missing, as is at the end, but in a letter to Carla, Sylvia tells her
that Flora reappeared when Clark brought her borrowed clothes back after the
failed attempt at running away. Carla thus catches Clark lying about the goat
when he tells her that he still cannot find Flora and although Carla faintly
« 47 «+