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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 alleviates 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, misunderstanding 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 symbolic 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 «+
