Girl Runner (10 page)

Father gets to work. He frames in the cabinet. Instead of cracks and holes, there are only smooth boards, the smell of planed wood and dried sap.

Fannie stops coming. I think I know why: she can’t get through.

We eat wrinkled potatoes and salt pork and the bright young dandelion greens that Cora and I gather from the front pasture. School’s out now.

Spring comes late, but that does not prevent the day from arriving on which Fannie died, one year ago. The day seems so unlike that other day and the house too—so unlike the house that Fannie left behind. It’s been emptied out, broken. I wonder whether the others are thinking the same thoughts as we bow our heads and eat warm biscuits with honey and butter. I eat and I swallow until the food is gone, but the feeling won’t go, even as I clear the table, dry the dishes, escape the house—restlessness.

It’s my job to muck out the horses’ stalls and lead them to the front pasture. Even the old mare is feeling her grain and kicks her heels and rolls in the mud.

It’s my job too to clean the chicken pen, and feed the squabbling, scrambling, brainless hens. I fight my way through the stinking pen with a pail of water, which spills down my dress and soaks right through to my thighs. The chickens peck and claw. I drop the bucket and back out of the pen, slamming the door.

Fannie isn’t in the house. Fannie isn’t here in the barn. But I believe her to be somewhere, nearby, just out of sight. I feel my heart slow with resolve. I will look for Fannie. I will find her.

Before I can think, I’m off and running, inexplicable excitement firing my limbs. I feel shaky at first, and my breath comes sharp. I run out behind the barn, along the field, to the woods. I run all the way to the edge of town. I look for Fannie in the early feathery green of leaves. I call her name, but quietly, under my breath. I figure she can hear me. When I don’t find her in the woods, I run farther, across the fields, in the ruts at the edges, heavy with mud and churned-up stones. When I don’t find her in the fields, I force myself to turn toward Edith’s. But I veer off before I’ve arrived, and run, instead, along the stony road.

The graveyard.

I climb the split rails, catching and tearing my skirt, and swing over the fence.

“Fannie, are you here?”

I kneel on her grave, as if I expect her to rise out of it, my fingers scrabbling to dig a hole in the mud. I’m damp with sweat, and soon shivering. I speak down into the earth, my voice rising even as I repeat her stories, each of them, beginning at the beginning with the twins, and then the boy who was only six months old, and drowned James—“It wasn’t your doing, Fannie!”—and the first mother, and Big Robbie killed at war, and ending with Fannie herself.

“You went so quick, Fannie.”

I dig down deeper, but there is no reply. My fingers hurt.

“Aganetha.”

I jump halfway out of my skin.

She’s come so quietly, I haven’t heard; or perhaps I’ve fallen so deeply inside my own head that I’ve lost sense of the outside world going on around me. This happens sometimes. Sometimes I startle to the sound of someone calling my name—a teacher, a sister, my mother—as if I’ve been deep inside a dream, away, though I can never think where. Somewhere beyond thoughts.

“Aganetha, child.” My mother stands just outside the fence, open arms, calling me to her.

I feel my mouth crumple, my eyes sting. I run to bury my cold face against her neck. Her arms fold like wings around me and we are wrapped together inside her warm shawl. We rock like this. I want to hide my grief against her body, so she can’t see, yet it isn’t long before I’m too restless to hold, even inside her care, her heavy arms, her steady breath. I break free, wiping my eyes clean with the sleeve of my dress.

“Fannie liked to come here,” my mother says, but more like she’s asking a question.

I nod.

“You liked to come with her. You came together.” More questions.

Yes.

“I would watch you go. I would think, how lucky little Aganetha is to have Fannie. And how lucky Fannie is to have little Aganetha.”

My mother stops. She doesn’t go on and say more. She picks up my dirty hands and squeezes them. There is dirt from my hands on her cheek.

Pictures of Fannie stream behind my eyes, moving pictures, fast-motion, but silent. She is bending over the gravestones. She is walking away from me, waving me off, and I am following.

Mother watches me closely, as if she might be reading my thoughts—I believe she can. She lets go of my hands and kneels on Fannie’s grave and gently covers over the hole I have dug.

Slowly she speaks, down to the ground. “People we love do disappoint us, you know, Aganetha. We don’t have to love them less for it. Maybe we have to love them more.”

I resist what my mother is saying.

I think that she is asking too much, that her demands are too steep, that she cannot possibly understand or mean what she says. But her words strike deep into me. I will think of them again, the years of my life unwinding in a whirl of hard-cast moments. I will think of what she is asking me to do. Can I do it?

“Come, let’s eat.”

We walk up the lane, mother and daughter. I let her hold my hand.

HERE LIES FANNIE
in her smooth wooden box. I can feel her beneath the earth, resting and waiting for this: for me to come home. I feel strangely peaceful. My breath comes deeply and slowly. I am aware of effort all around me, strain, excitement, but I let it go. The tiny muscles in my face and throat and neck and chest relax almost imperceptibly and my heartbeat slows.

I rest like I’m preparing for a race, one I didn’t know I’d been entered in. I’ll do my best. I’d never say no to a race. I take several unnaturally long breaths in order to steady my heart, to enter a place of stillness, a trick I learned as a young runner: how to conserve my strength, blot out disruption.

Don’t disturb me. Don’t try to move me.

She is a strong girl, but she can’t lift me. I smell her fear, peppery and sharp. Her touch flutters, wary. She turns me, and I lie on my back among the stones like a beetle, exposed.

“Are you okay, Mrs. Smart? Is she okay? This is awful—we should just tell her the truth, just tell her everything.”

Oh, don’t do that, dear. I won’t if you won’t. A rash confession is quickly a regret, believe me.

As if she hears me, the girl leans onto her heels, gone separate and apart. She no longer touches me. I can hear the two of us breathing, or it could be the wind is picking up. It’s gone cool.

The sky behind her head is a wall of grey. It looks like rain is blowing in:
April showers bring May flowers
, if this indeed is April. Might be May. Must be spring. I think I am quite all right, in fact. Whatever her motives, I would like to thank her for bringing me here, girl whose name I can’t remember. Girl, who seems so familiar, though I can’t place why.

She’s got red hair, yellow at the roots, a long face, dark eyes. Clues, all clues. She moves gracefully, yet she’s prone to clumsiness, if this fall is proof of anything.

“I’m really really sorry, Mrs. Smart,” the girl cries. “After all you’ve done. You don’t deserve this.”

I turn my eyes to Max, hovering indistinct on the other side of me.

What need have I for men bearing cameras? What need have you, young lady?

I move my hand by inches until I find hers, and I pat it gently.

“What should I do?” the girl asks me—I’d like to think it’s me she’s asking. She’s calm enough now, I can read it on her skin. She’ll carry me across the line.

ON THE GRASS TRACK
out behind Rosebud Confectionary our coach, Mr. Tristan, winds us up like toys and sets us loose, again and again. I fall inside a perfectly relaxed state for the few moments we have before he’ll wind us up again. We are the lucky ones, recruited to train and race for Mr. P. T. Pallister’s team. Everyone knows: P. T. has the best girls and the best coach; he has oceans of money, and he likes girl athletes.

Mr. P. T. Pallister announces in the
Toronto Daily Star
that he will personally guarantee girl athletes will win gold for Canada in Amsterdam at the 1928 Olympic Games. Personally guarantee it! He will personally spare no expense to see that it is so.

He finds Lillianna out in the Prairies and brings her by train to Toronto; Lillianna can jump like a gazelle. He discovers Ernestine at her high school near the lake. Glad is his own niece, but she earns her spot fair and square. Lucy comes from New Brunswick, but she will get homesick and drop out before the Canadian championships.

As for me, all I know is that a man comes knocking on the door at 445 Bathurst Street and leaves a message with the landlady, Mrs. Smythe, who informs me at dinner in front of everyone before serving up the gut-filling starter: a watery rice pudding, no raisins.

Olive and I slump at the table, aching and famished after the day’s shift at Packer’s Meats. Our hands and arms are rubbed raw and red, and our feet hurt, and we carry the scent of animal fat in our hair and on our clothes. I work as a “runner,” which means filling in wherever I’m told to, while Olive works on a line, chopping pork into a fine mince. We wear tidy white aprons that are stained by day’s end, and which we are obliged to launder ourselves. We tie our hair off our faces with kerchiefs.

We come to our landlady’s table like ghosts of girls, too weary to speak, and we eat passively of her coarse black bread and cabbage borschts.

“This came for you today.” A letter at my plate.

“Oh?”

“A fellow in a suit asking for you.”

“What is it?” Olive wonders. She is busy saving her money for when she gets married. She will spend it on china and silver and linens, she says. She has not met a prospective husband, but I can imagine what he will look like. He will look like a fellow in a suit.

I rip open the letter and scan its typed-out contents.

“What is it? What is it?”

We share a table with three other girls, none of them older than twenty-two, also factory workers, and with the landlady’s husband, Mr. Smythe, who irritably ignores us and reads the evening paper while eating. But everyone else is curious, even Mrs. Smythe.

“Has she got a beau?” “Oo! Aggie’s got a beau!”

“I have not,” I say across the table. Closer acquaintance has not brought me friendship. I don’t like the other girls particularly, and they don’t particularly like me. I think them silly and obvious, and they think me standoffish and peculiar. Perhaps we are right about each other, as much as we are wrong. We are all of us young, independent, hoping for more, but at different volumes. They are loud and declarative and crudely funny, cruel in a tribal sense, bonding against rather than with, and I am shy and bold and uncompromising.

Examine our hair for comparison.

They are constantly worrying over theirs. Washing it, drying it, tying it in rags and sleeping on it overnight, wrapping it around wooden curlers, brushing it, pinning it up, taking it down, trimming it, shaping it, asking each other to comment on the results, or to help.
Help! What should I do with my hair? What is my hair doing?

I wear mine in a braid down my back for work. I can wind it and tie it into a knot at the nape of my neck if further tidiness is required. Otherwise, I brush it at night, as my mother taught me to do, and I keep it long. Olive trims the dead ends. I can sit on my hair if I tilt my head back. I wouldn’t say that hair matters nothing to me, because I like mine, the colour, the texture, the weight of it, but I would say that the maintenance and care of my hair matters nothing to me. I can’t be bothered, even knowing that not bothering sets me apart from the other girls.

“Well, what is it?” Olive asks again, of the letter, and I take a deep involuntary breath, almost like a sigh, startling everyone, even myself.

“Not bad news?” says Mrs. Smythe.

“Not bad news,” I say, disappointing her. “Good news, I think. It’s just, I don’t understand . . .”

Olive takes the letter from my hand. “Well,” she says several times, reading it over. I can see she doesn’t know what to think either. “It’s private,” she says finally. “I shouldn’t think it’s something to be discussed over dinner.”

Well, that gets the girls interested. Even Mr. Smythe rustles his newspaper in a way that suggests he’s been listening in on the conversation.

“I don’t think you should go,” Olive tells me in our shared room, in a whisper. “You don’t even know if the offer is real. What if it’s a trick?”

“Why would it be a trick?” I move away from her and set my palm flat on the cool, warped pane of our window.

“To get girls, or, I don’t know, honestly. That’s beside the point. The point is, do you know this man personally?”

“Of course not.”

“Then you should not meet with him. It wouldn’t look right.”

“I wouldn’t be meeting with him. I’d be meeting with the coach of his team, and it’s at the factory, and it’s in the middle of the day.”

“And you’d have to ask for a half-day off.”

I’m silent.

“I suppose you’ll do what you please.”

I lift my cold fingers to my lips, and then stretch my arms over my head.

“I suppose you always have,” says Olive.

“Have I?” I say slowly.

I stare out the window at the dark evening sky, pricked with windows like ours lit by oil lamps, or, others, by blazing electric lights. I keep my back to my sister.

When it comes to hair, that measure of a girl, Olive is on the other side. She takes joy from scented hair creams and satin ribbons that I think make her look juvenile. Only recently, and somewhat alarmingly, Olive has gotten her hair cut to her chin in a newfangled bob that has been cause for many squeals and much discussion from the girls we work with and the girls we live with. I wonder: Is it out of Olive’s character to be in fashion? I decide it is not. Olive wants to be like everyone else. If you are like everyone else, no one will pay special attention to you. No one will notice that you aren’t. That is Olive.

She is tolerant of me, loving, and we do not hope for the same things, but I trust her opinion.

“Oh, well, what would be the harm?” she says suddenly, coming to me and hugging me around the shoulders, so hard it hurts. “You want to go, so go, and run. You’re so fast they’ll surely want you for their team, and you’ll be wonderful. I know it.”

I kiss her cheek.

“And just think of making chocolates instead of canned hams,” she says.

Soon, that is just what we are doing, both of us: making chocolates instead of canned hams. The girls at Mrs. Smythe’s are jealous and my popularity improves, ever so slightly, around the dinner table, especially when we pass around a box of broken candies to share.

“Ooo, what’s this pink stuff?”

“Tastes like strawberries.”

“It’s strawberry with coconut. Do you like it?”

“Not so much as the caramel. Is there a caramel anywhere?”

“I’ll eat it if you don’t want it.”

“You’ll all get fat,” says the landlady grimly, and quite seriously, prompting a tableful of girls to stare at her midchew, and her husband, newspaper at half-mast, hand hovering over the proffered box, to wave it away. Dessert has never been on her menu.

“Oh, won’t you try one, Mrs. Smythe? So delicious!”

“Not me, no I will not, no thank you.”

There are other girls who run with the Rosebud Ladies’ Athletics Club, but only a handful of us are believed to be Olympic prospects—only me, Glad, Lillianna, Ernestine, and Lucy, and we are expected at every practice, and exempted from work on the factory floor. I’m offered, instead, a secretarial job despite never having learned to type. That is my first assignment: learn how to type. Mr. P. T. Pallister arranges for me to attend secretarial school. It is Olive who brings home the boxes of broken chocolates, Olive who does, as Mrs. Smythe warns, grow plumper and plumper during our time at Rosebud Confectionary.

Me, I learn how to type and I learn shorthand and transcription and bookkeeping. My muscles grow leaner, my spine even straighter.

And I meet Glad.

BEFORE I MEET GLAD,
I’m the girl who doesn’t bother with her hair, who runs along city streets chased by jeering boys on bicycles. Before I meet Glad, I’m the girl who perversely and in anger, in defiant defensiveness, does not care. I don’t see the point of friendship, somehow, if it makes you pretend to be someone you aren’t. Friendship looks calculating to me: a shallow alliance designed around exclusion.

After I meet Glad, I begin to care, and to take more care. I change in small ways to please her, even though she does not ask it of me.

Before I meet Glad, I do not know how to be a friend.

I LIKE HER
almost instantly, but there is nothing amazing in that—everyone likes Glad. What is amazing is that Glad likes me in return.

On my second evening with the team, she comes looking for me after practice. I am hiding in the change room, sitting slumped against the wall, legs pulled to my chest, staring at my bared feet, blistered and red. The room is tiny, furnished with a wooden bench and a line of cabinets, and I have tucked myself into a small space between the cabinets and the wall. Directly across from me is a toilet perched oddly on a high concrete pedestal, and beside that a cold-water shower spout over a drain in the floor, blocked off from the rest of the room by a single floor-to-ceiling thin board wall. It is a dismal space, and I’m a dismal mess of dismal emotions:
I thought I was fast?

“There you are!” Glad marches right over, addresses me with arms crossed, head cocked. “You need new shoes. Those boots are tearing your feet apart.”

I nod dumbly.

“You know what I do?” Glad puts out an arm and leans against the wall, tapping it thoughtfully. “I swim. It helps with the aches. I like to go in the morning. Why don’t you come with me.” But she doesn’t ask it like a question. She offers it like an answer.

“I can’t swim,” I say. “I don’t know how.”

“I’ll teach you! It’s easy. Everyone should know how to swim.”

In the YWCA on McGill Street the water is cold as ice, filling a tank sunk into a concrete floor. It’s a dark echoing space, claustrophobic, slippery, spare. Water sloshes the sides of the tank. Girls churn back and forth, and it feels like there’s not enough room to breathe. I panic. Glad’s dark hair is tucked under a swim cap, mine is exposed and plastered to my head. Our black jersey suits are heavy, straight-cut across the thighs, scooped necks, no sleeves, and mine is borrowed from Glad and therefore too short, tight at the shoulders—“Don’t worry, I’ve got lots, I’m always trying out the new styles!”

No men are allowed.

My hair tangles in my mouth. I flail. I’ll sink.

Glad’s legs spin like an eggbeater and she bobs some small distance clear of me. “Keep hold of the side.”

Shivering. “You’re turning blue, Aggie! You should see your lips!”

“This is not fun,” I mutter.

She laughs, yet somehow I don’t hate her. “You need to get moving. Here, I’ll hold you.”

Glad’s hands are under me, on my stomach, holding me in a float. She directs me as we edge slowly down the length of the pool. Face in, and turn, in and turn. Blow bubbles, and turn, blow bubbles, and turn. Float, relax, relax. Pull, pull, pull under the water. Kick with straight legs. Cup your hands. Don’t crane your neck.