Girl Runner (11 page)

So much to remember!

Me: “I can’t do this!”

Glad: “You’ll be swimming laps within the week, I promise.”

When I float, when her hands come off me and I am briefly suspended, my face down in the dank greenish water, eyes wide open, I see little drowned James hanging atop the water in exactly the same posture.

I gasp and rear up.

“You did it!” says Glad, holding my elbows. “Kick,” she reminds me. She thinks I’m trembling from the cold. I nod grimly. I try again. Again, I see James, my half-brother, his very small body, near to mine. This happens each time I put my face into the water, until after days and weeks of being near him, or feeling him nearby, I become accustomed to it, and I think of it differently. I think we are swimming together, in a way, until it is just another version of remembering him, as I promised Fannie long ago I would do.

I accept the shadow in the water beside me.

GLAD BESTS ME
on the track, in practice, for the months of September, October, and November, 1926. When the snow falls and stays, we train indoors, in a wood-lined gymnasium, our rubber-soled feet squeaking on the floor. We work with dumbbells and ropes, and sprint from end to end, and practice a system of calisthenics devised by our coach, Mr. Tristan, who also urges those of us who are runners to go outside once a day to leap through the snowbanks around where we imagine the track to be.

I’m faster than Glad on these frigid dashes, but my long legs offer an advantage in the deep snow. I leap like a jackrabbit.

By April, we are back outside, training on the track. Mr. Tristan runs us in all weathers, and it is a chilly April, streaked with snow.

Glad bests me in practice for the months of April, May, and June, 1927. She bests me for most of July, but I am closing the gap. By August, it is a toss-up who will edge in front of whom on any given day, any given training run. We both know it, but we never talk about it. Never, not once. We meet to swim together three mornings a week. We meet at the track. We meet in motion, and speak sparingly as we prepare ourselves, and speak in shorthand afterward, spent and quiet.

“That was a good one,” she might say, and I will agree.

Or, “Tired today.” “Yes.”

This is friendship, as I understand it: a series of shared, parallel experiences that do not require elaboration.

MR. TRISTAN TELLS
me at the end of a hard practice: I’ve made the cut for the Canadian track and field championships at the Canadian National Exhibition—the CNE. He doesn’t need to tell me this will be the biggest race of my career so far, my chance to prove, after nearly a year of dedicated training, that I belong. He places one hand on my shoulder and offers the other, to shake mine: “You’ve qualified on time for the eight hundred. I knew you could do it.”

Holding his hand, I feel my face crumple toward tears. It’s a struggle to hold everything inside, but I command myself to become stone.

“Aggie,” he says gently, patting my shoulder, “this is good news. You’re supposed to be happy.”

I am, if I could reach through the numbness and find it. I nod. My first thought is to tell my mother—for some reason, I see her standing in the treetop in her apron, watching me on the barn roof. I want to tell her the news. I wonder—could she take the train to Toronto?

But it is August on the farm, the garden overflows, the train costs money.

I send a letter containing only the barest jots of news, and none of the fear and joy. I can’t ask her to come. She doesn’t think of it herself. She writes back to me in her formal hand, the script in delicate circles across the thin page: “Send us news of your race.”

I know it’s me who left. But I’m young enough to think that my mother should be there for me. I’m young enough to imagine that she might even surprise me.

MRS. SMYTHE PREPARES
eggs for breakfast—her silent contribution to the excitement. The other girls regret that they are working and can’t come to cheer me on. They talk of skipping out. Merry laughter. Yes, I think it entirely possible that I will win a medal—haven’t I caught up with Glad—so why should they not think so too?

“Will you be famous, then?” “Won’t she be?” “Will you cut your hair and buy a pretty dress, if they put you in the newspaper?”

Everything I do not yet know, the hours that are rushing at me, that will crash down on me like a massive wave of salt water: the crowd like an angry buzz, the lean limbs and pointed elbows of my competitors, girls I’ve never seen before, girls who are not like Glad but are more like me, tight and twisted up inside themselves, sharp with nerves. My guts roiling, wishing I’d never seen those eggs like two undercooked yellow eyeballs wobbling as they stared up at me.

Are you feeling quite all right
,
Aggie?
Glad, noticing. Me, wishing she hadn’t.
Fine. I’m fine.

I search and scan, but my mother’s is not among the faces in the crowd.

Before I know it, it’s over. Just like that. Quick as a flash, two times round the track. I’ve gone out too fast, I’m passed early, I hang on to second place as the metres stretch desertlike and unending before me until I’m caught on the final curve by two runners.

One of the runners is Glad, and she’s sailing. She’ll catch the girl in front of me too.

I watch her go, following her up the stretch, knowing we’re in two different versions of the same story: hers is easy and mine is hard. This does not seem fair, after all we’ve shared. I feel as if she’s grabbed something essential right out of me, a section of my heart or a lung, and stolen merrily off with it, leaving me crippled, drained of my powers. I know this feeling—it’s betrayal, and I’m heavy beneath its weight, I must get out from under it.

As I approach the finish, I glimpse an open mouth in the crowd, jaw extended, veins popping from his neck. George, my brother—has he come to watch? If it is George, he does not seek me out afterward. I hope I’ve seen wrong.

I stagger across the line in fourth, out of the medals and the record books and the newspapers. An emotion that could be anger—though I don’t claim it—swells out of me in stupid tears.

I force myself to approach Glad: “Congratulations.”

I can hardly hear my own voice. I’m mumbling. I don’t press near enough to give her a hug, my offering measly amidst the grand wild thrill that surrounds Gladys Wright on this brilliantly warm and breezy Friday afternoon. Gladys Wright, the 1927 Canadian women’s champion at the 100 metres, with a surprise win at the 800-metre distance too.

Mr. Tristan drives me home after the meet, Lucy and Ernestine too. None of us have achieved what has been expected of us—or, more precisely, what we expected of ourselves—although Ernestine made the sprint finals. We are hot and dusty and do not speak, clamping our hats to our heads against the wind blowing into the open-roofed automobile.

“Chin up, that’s a girl,” Mr. Tristan says as I get out of his car.

I dread dinnertime. I dread telling Olive and Mr. and Mrs. Smythe and the girls what has happened.

But dinnertime comes and dinnertime goes, and I am required only to shake my head ever so slightly,
no, not good
, and the others leave me be. I need to be sad. I need to go to bed early, even though the day is still bright and hot, and I need to curl under the sheet, tuck knees to belly. I need to feel what I’m feeling.

It is a great kindness that nobody disturbs me with false assurances.

I WAKE TO FIND
Glad smiling out from the newspaper, waving a bouquet of white flowers and holding a big box of Rosebud Chocolates. Mr. Smythe must have shaken his paper open to this page, and folded it over, without making a comment on the subject over dinner. He must have kept the paper specially yesterday evening, he must have climbed the stairs when the house was asleep and quietly slid the folded newsprint under our door, because it is what I step on in my bare feet on this brand-new morning, when I am still my ordinary self, and not the champion I’d let myself imagine I might be.

I rustle open the page, smooth it across the summer quilt on top of Olive, who is half-asleep.

I think Glad looks perfect.

I go for Olive’s scissors and cut out the photo to keep. But my stomach hurts. I don’t eat breakfast. I don’t go swimming. I walk south to the lake, and west along the rocky shore, and north again through High Park and past the mineral pools where strangers are bathing. Eventually, it is time to make my way to practice.

Glad isn’t there. Perhaps she is exempted today, given her victories.

I run strong. I run fine. I can feel my sadness running out behind me, like it’s being spilled on the ground, and I figure that will be that. I won’t be sad anymore, not over this. I have a sense of impermeability, of elasticity, of bouncing off of something hard, and believing in the first instant that I’d been hurt, then understanding the pain is superficial. It is already gone.

This is called recovery. I recognize the sensation from running. Under every layer of pain another layer of recovery lies in wait, the sweet, forever surprising truth of endurance.

If Glad was here, I decide, I would hug her and I would say,
Congratulations
, and I would mean it this time. I am sorry she is not.

The change room is emptying out. I rinse my face in the sink. I strip off my soaked training clothes, peel off socks, dry myself with a large piece of absorbent flannel. I powder my armpits with soda and talcum. I dress. I unbraid my hair and brush it out and let it fall down my back, unfashionably long and loose, crinkled from the braid. I gather my damp belongings and fold them. I am the only person left, and the building is quiet and emptied out, the Saturday shift gone home at five o’clock, the cleaning shift not yet arrived.

I open the door, quite entirely inside my own head, and thoughts.

“I think I know what’s wrong.” Mr. Tristan is waiting in the hallway outside the change room.

My heart is a runaway horse, spooked into a gallop. I try to hide my surprise. His hand on my upper arm, gently, steers me to the little room that is his office. “Now, then. Let’s talk.”

I refuse to sit, even though he points me to a chair squeezed beside his desk.

I’m wearing a dress made of summer-weight fabric with a plain collar and short sleeves, belted at the waist, and a skirt, like most skirts, that is too short on my long legs, and falls to just below the knee. It is a yellow dress, pale yellow, approximately the same colour as my hair. There is nothing fashionable about it, nor about the straw hat on my head. I carry my valise, with the sharp-smelling training uniform folded inside, over my left shoulder. I will take it home and wash the uniform and hang it to dry in the room I share with Olive. By practice on Monday it will be dry, but usually, at most practices, the fabric is still slightly damp when I put it on again. I will pull on the shirt and the short pants and the socks and something about the dampness, the odour of sweat and lanolin, will bring me comfort, or nearly.

“Good showing yesterday?”

I stare dumbly. Is he asking a question?

“Are you happy with fourth?” he presses.

I shake my head. No.

“You know you can do better. I think I know what’s wrong,” he says, again. He takes a seat behind his desk and narrows his eyelids, scrutinizing me. I have the petrified feeling that he can see through to my thoughts.

“I’ve been watching you,” he says.

I feel as transparent as glass, open as a wound. What has he seen?

“You’re tough as hell in practice, but in races you let her get past. You know who I mean. Glad. You ease up.”

“I don’t!” The fury of my reply shocks me. I’m shaking.

Because even as he’s saying it, and I’m denying it, I know somehow he’s right.

Yesterday’s race washes over me, a series of short sharply illuminated frames, glimpses. Out of a too-quick start, a nervy start, I’m burning, falling to second, but holding on. The pace as we enter the second lap a little quicker than I prefer—can I hold it? I don’t question, just push.

Here is where I’d like to make my move—on the outside turn, back straightaway. I glance over my shoulder.

Never look back
, I hear Mr. Tristan saying as if he’s running beside me, in the race, saying it into my ear. Too late. I see what I see.

Glad on my heels, grinning. Glad pulling me back, pulling on me. Like a tide. Like rope. Glad like a stone in a slingshot zinging past my shoulder, brushing arms. My fingers fold into my palms. I let her go.

The finish line, fluttering tape, one two three four strides behind first, second, and third. My head turns, left shoulder dipping. Too easy, I think. I’ve got too much left in me. This is not what you want to feel at the end of a race. You do not want to finish a race and know you could have given more. You want to pour everything out. You want to be emptied.

Mr. Tristan is watching me.

I’m back in the tiny office with him, back with the sharp sunlight angling through the dusty windowpane. It’s hot in here, airless, like a closet. His expression is unguarded, as I am unguarded too. I shake my head violently to shake away the sensation of losing. To shake off the emotions flooding me again, fresh as yesterday: jealousy, envy, shame, and worst of all, betrayal.

“You like Glad,” he says simply.

I flush hot.

“You’d do well to like her a bit less.” Mr. Tristan speaks coolly, thrumming his fingers on the desk. “Her uncle pays the bills, mine included, but that won’t stop me from telling you the truth, because the truth is I like you, Aganetha Smart. No, don’t go all coltish and startled. I’m speaking as your coach. I like your potential, always have. You work harder than anyone else out there. Harder than anyone I’ve ever seen. You’ve earned your place on this team the hard way. That’s what I like about you. You’re like me. You come from nothing.”

I do not
, I think defiantly, hardly hearing what he’s saying.

“You like Glad,” he continues. “What’s not to like? She’s a friendly kid, she’s got the world on a string, happy-go-lucky, always gets what she wants, always has.”