Child’s Play by Alice Munro

“Every year, when you are a child, you become a different person. Generally it’s in the fall, when you reenter school, take your place in a higher grade, leave behind the muddle  and lethargy of summer vacation. That’s when you register the change most sharply.”

This is the story of one summer vacation that locks two girls in time. Marlene and Charlene meet at summer camp and become fast friends. Alice Munro details the initial comparing and then sharing that accompanies all female bonding – the expected transactions that proceed the intimacy of friendship. “The kind of intimacy I’m talking about – with women-  is not erotic, or pre-erotic. I’ve experienced that as well, before puberty. Then too there would be confidences, probably lies, maybe leading to games. A certain hot temporary excitement, with or without genital teasing. Followed by ill-feeling, denial, disgust.” Here it is the exchange of confidences: Charlene tells of walking in on her brother having sex with his girlfriend. “His thing slapped…his bare white bum had pimples on it. sickening.” Marlene counters with Verna, the mentally handicapped girl who she grew up in a duplex with. Marlene believes that there is a kind of evil power that Verna haunts her with – “Something that clings, in the way of love, though on my side it felt like hate.”

Verna arrives at the summer camp with a group of “special kids”  for the final weekend. Between them, Charlene and Marlene heighten the sense of drama and victimization that Marlene spoke of in memory. It becomes the driving force that leads them, in their one and only confrontation with Verna, to quickly and quietly push her head beneath the water and hold it there. “Charlene and I kept our eyes on eachother then, rather than looking down at what our hands were doing…This could have been an accident. As if we, in trying to get our balance, grabbed on to this nearby large rubbery object, hardly realizing what we were doing. I have thought it all out. I think we would have been forgiven. Young children. Terrified.”

But the reader does not know of the guilt that binds the two friends through the rest of their lives, though they never see each other after camp. The second half of the flashback – the drowning scene –  comes at the very end, after Marlene receives a cryptic letter from her friend on her deathbed, wanting her to seek a Catholic priest in her hometown. We are baffled by  this last request, and assume Marlene is also, until we see her try to fill it and learn the truth. Marlene:  “I am sure we never said anything as banal, as insulting or unnecessary as Don’t Tell.”

Alice Munro is a master of the short story framed by a flashback – this is a great example.

 

Man and Wife by Katie Chase

“”Now, I know Daddy explained that you’re going to be a wife. But do you know what that means?” I refused to look at her; though I could feel her eyes on my face. ” Yeah. I’ll go live with Mr. Middleton. I’ll have to make him dinner.”

“Yes,” she said. “But you’ll have to do more than that.”

“Can I still play Barbies with Stacie? I promised her.”

“You did, did you.”

Man and Wife is the story of an arranged marriage between a nine year-old girl and an aging, wealthy business man. It is a preposterous and creepy concept for white-middle class suburban america, but the characters act so naturally, that it seems a strangely familiar scene, a version of something we’ve seen before; barbies next to profit margins, quarter analyses and diet cokes, a young girl in training to be a wife.

One Saturday Mr. Middleton arrives at the house when Mary Ellen’s parents are out. She proceeds to show him her much coveted Barbie house and he admires her reuse of materials: “A creative way to cut costs.” She says her parents won’t buy her anything else, and he tells her: “You work well within limits…you have quite a talent for design – I’ve seen professional blueprints more flawed.”

We stick with the story because Mary Ellen has an original and surprising voice that defies her position as she succumbs to it. The voice of this wife-child has a combination of candor and wisdom that one could not expect to find under any other circumstances. The transaction and title has clear sexual implications of course, but in this story we are suspended between a sterile ‘matter of business’ mindset  and the pious romance of a child.  The reader is perhaps the implied pervert, the one made to inquire “What If?”