Girl Runner (13 page)

“You’ve been hiding in here quite long enough, Miss Smart. It’s time to get up.”

I cough feebly.

In silence, she passes me the newspaper and I peer at the words on the page, the black print smudging my fingertips and the bedspread. The meaning of what I’m reading does not immediately register, entering slowly, like thick muddy water. This is not the story I suppose I’m halfway expecting to see: a flattering report about myself. This is quite another story altogether.

It’s news that burns, that clouds, that pollutes: the Olympic committee has voted against girls competing at the 800 metre distance in future Games. The committee has met and come to an immediate decision, argued for and supported most strongly by the Canadian representative. It is written that the collapse of runners after the final proves the distance is too taxing for a girl’s inferior strength.

“But—they’re talking about me! I fell down at the end. You were there, you saw me. I was on my feet in an instant! Can’t you tell them I was sick?”

“This isn’t about you. It’s not personal.”

“But—oh! Didn’t the boys fall down after their races?” I twist the bedcovers between my fists. “I saw them! They were rolling in the grass too, practically dead.”

Miss Gibb perches on the bed beside me. “Men don’t have uteruses,” she says. “Don’t tell your mother you know that word. I am supposed to be guarding your innocence.”

“My mother taught me that word.” I sink against the pillow. It has been so long since I’ve seen my mother, so long that I’ve accustomed myself not to think of her at all, to turn away from her in my thoughts, yet as soon as I recall her to Miss Gibb—her voice, her words—she’s present, as if waiting. I fall backward in my memory through years of separation that seem accidental, not deliberate, and yet impassable. The weeks spent in Amsterdam preparing for the races. A week spent on board the ship crossing the ocean. The train ride from Ontario to Montreal to Halifax. The qualifying races. Nearly two years spent training in Toronto. Two years before that at Packer’s Meats. It adds up to four years gone.

Here in a strange bed, in the city of Amsterdam, I remember myself at the age of sixteen leaving by train to visit Olive and George in Toronto. I am promising to be home again in two weeks.

“Be good.”

“Yes, Mama.”

MY MOTHER.

Her first name is Jessica, her middle name Eve, her father’s name Liddel.

I know my mother as part of the flow of the household, part of its noise and bustle, part of the air I breathe. That is how well I know her, and how mysterious to me she is and ever will be.

There is a knock on the side door after dark. Upon hearing it, one of us calls for her: “Mother!” We politely avoid scrutinizing the supplicant too closely, leaving the girl waiting just inside the door for Mother to come. It makes sense to me that anyone in trouble, in need, would come seeking my mother, if only to hear her soothing voice, to be bathed in it, and reassured.

When I am a child, I do not know exactly what my mother does. And when I discover what it is, I enter a new room in my life. I am no longer a child.

My mother is twenty-six—old for her first marriage—when she accepts my father’s proposal, which comes with four children ages nine and under, including an infant. Her own mother has recently died. Because my mother is never done, because her work stretches and spreads ahead and all around her, and even through the night, she sometimes falls asleep sitting at the supper table. Her head tilts, she begins to sigh, her breath slow and settled as she passes from wake to sleep without struggle. My father raises his hand to alert us. He retrieves a small pillow from the rocking chair and, standing behind her, tucks it between her ear and shoulder. This is a silent task. His hands brush her temples for a fraction longer than is necessary for the job.

Her breathing is regular and sound. She is relaxed, at peace.

My father resumes sitting and eating.

If this happens before dessert, Olive or Cora dish it out instead, and we eat and talk as we always do. It is quite impossible to disturb Mother, and in any case, she will wake within the half hour, and rise and go about her chores as if she’s never been away. She says she can hear what we’re saying, the whole time, woven into a kind of dream.

It is not fashionable to sift through one’s dreams to hunt for clues, but my mother does. She is fascinated by animals that enter a dream, and by people who shape-shift and become strangers, or strangers who shape-shift to become familiar.

She speaks freely, if infrequently. I know that I can ask her about anything.

“The mind is powerful strange,” I can hear her saying. “Powerful, powerful strange.”

This is before she changes.

I am remembering her as she was when I was a child. I try to keep her there. I want to keep her as she was, before I left home—which I believe, when I am eleven, that I will never do. I still believe this when I am twelve, when I am thirteen, when I am fourteen.

George has written to invite me to come visit him in the city, and I am showing her the letter, just a little bit afraid, and she asks,
What do you think about this, Aggie?
And I say,
I would never go, I would never leave you, Mother.

I am insisting, adamantly, in the kitchen, and she folds the letter and pulls me into her warmth. She smells musky, perhaps a bit unbathed, and she smells of the lavender that she keeps crumbled in drawers around the house. We will all smell of lavender, so long as we live in our mother’s house.

You may wish to go, my mother says. Someday.

No.

And if you go, you may always come home again, no matter what happens, my mother says, I promise.

IN A HOT
curtained room in Amsterdam, that is the mother I make up in my mind. I make her up and seek her out, suddenly weak with missing her, sick for
before
, though before what, I do not know. I can’t go far enough back in my memory to find the perfect resting place.

“You must have an unusual mother,” Miss Gibb says.

I nod. I can’t tell Miss Gibb more, specifically. There is too much to tell, and none of it belongs in this room.

Miss Gibb picks up my hand and strokes the knuckles soothingly. “A girl who has an understanding mother is a fortunate girl. Perhaps I could stand in for your mother, just for now.”

I remove my hand from hers, suddenly wary.

How I like Miss Alexandrine Gibb, how I admire her. She is far and away the most independent woman I have ever met. She writes newspaper articles for the
Toronto Daily Star
, and she is our manager, in charge of the girls on the Canadian Olympic team. She is unmarried, perhaps fifteen years my senior, her hair sleek and black in a tightly wound bun, the lines of her fitted suits crisp and sharp, and such dramatic hats. I have never seen Miss Gibb out of sorts or uneasy, but I have seen her cause others to become out of sorts and uneasy. I don’t want to be her, exactly, but I study her, curious to locate the source of her power.

“I think I know why you’re hiding away,” she says in a low, steady voice. She is making me uneasy. My eyes flit away from hers, but only for a moment. Somehow she draws my gaze to hers. I read sympathy there, but it is cool, appraising, purposeful.

“You’re well enough, aren’t you, dear? It’s just that you’re afraid to face someone—you think you have put your friendship in jeopardy. I suspect you believe you oughtn’t to have won that race. Now, I’m not going to tell you what to do, but I’m warning you to be careful. If you believe something, it will be so. Don’t make it so. Here in this city are people who want to take your photograph and write about you, and back home in Canada are people watching to see what you will do with yourself, now that you are a Golden Girl, as they say.

“If I were you,” says Miss Gibb, and she takes my hand again and squeezes, powerfully, inducing pain, “I would put the race behind you. Do not think of it. Do not reflect on it. Your friend has run her own races. You owe her nothing.”

“You mean—Glad?” I whisper.

She nods but doesn’t say anything further, gazing at me. It’s her silence that pulls it out of me—this is a good trick to learn, as a reporter. You can ask all the questions you like, but it’s the awkward pause, perfectly timed, that will net the biggest fish.

“Didn’t you see the race?” I blurt and blunder. “It wasn’t mine. I was going to lose.”

“But you didn’t, did you?” she asks, examining me intently.

I shake my head, flooded with shame, avoiding her eyes.

“Then you won, fair and square.”

But I didn’t, I think.

I look at Miss Alexandrine Gibb, and she says, “You won and she lost. She’s been more than graceful in defeat. It’s your turn to be graceful in victory.”

IT IS THANKS
to Miss Gibb that I’m here in the stands to cheer when our Canadian girls win silver in the 100-metre relay. It is thanks to Miss Gibb that I’m screaming so fervently that the next day I’ll wake up with a sore throat. Glad runs the third leg, Ernestine the anchor. There are no errors. I jump from the stands, dash onto the field, barge into the crowd to greet Glad with a hug. I swing her into the air off her feet—she’s so tiny.

“We’ve matching medals, now, Aggie,” Glad says, and I believe she means it.

I hold this moment, shining, in my memory, when all things are equal between me and Glad, when our rivalry on the track is scratched out by friendship, or so it seems, in the great balance of the world. When I love Glad and Glad—yes, I’ll say it because I believe it, despite everything to come—loves me.

THE GIRL WON
’
T
stop pushing me up the lane, awfully determined she is to deliver me here. The house is hidden; not for long. My hands begin to knot themselves together.

“Mrs. Smart, we’re taking you home, like you wanted. Remember?”

This is what I wanted? I remember like I am washing down a raging river and on the banks the past is standing, waving to me, trees bending in the wind. But I can’t see everything, not all at once like this, and it isn’t lined up in order, and it flashes past as I flail.

The wheels cease turning.

We’ve arrived, or so the girl says: “This is where your house used to be, Mrs. Smart. But it’s all gone.” She sounds like someone affecting to sound sad, who has never been dealt a blow of real grief. That may not be fair. It may only be that she is a bad actress and being filmed turns her stiff and implausible. I can sympathize, having been a lousy actress myself. As if to prove it, my hands fly to my face, smack-dab over my mouth. The boy’s camera will recognize the posture: melodramatic disbelief.

But I do believe, and I see, and she is wrong, quite wrong. The house is not gone.

It is smaller, I’ll allow, without its walls and its roof, stripped of its dimensions. It is not what it was, but neither am I.

Everything stands back from this place, even the trees, their limbs damaged, trunks blackened—or do I only imagine it. The stones are smeared with black. A sunken pit. A small ruin. The ashes long since blown away.

“I did this,” I mumble.

“They said she didn’t suffer—your sister, I mean. They said it wasn’t your fault.”

Whoever they are.

I consider the parallels: my body like the body of the house, slumped and hollowed out, an apparent ruin. Everything stands apart from it, even this girl; especially her. I can’t explain why this should cause me such a deep ache. A long slow leak of sadness spilling between my ribs.

I gather the clues, apparent and invisible, one by one. This girl and her brother do not know what it means to suffer if they think my sister—Cora—did not. They do not recognize culpability if they think I am innocent. They would like the world to bend to their wishes, to absolve them, and they think I need the same things too, but they know nothing about how to comfort a body.

No, nor do I. It must not have been what we were put on the earth to do.

AFTER FANNIE DIES.

After George leaves home.

The house closes in on those of us who remain—Mother, Father, Olive, Cora, me—my father’s second family, whole and complete. But we do not feel whole or complete because we belong, also, to the first family, to the stories buried in the graveyard, and to our sisters and brothers from the first mother. Maybe the house tries too hard to keep us. Maybe it is hoping for the past to curl around and return us to the fortune it has been built to hold.

It is a magnificent house. Sometimes I walk around it in my dreams. Sometimes I am wide-awake, and can see everything as it is, as if I am eleven years old. Yet even at eleven, the house cannot hold me, no matter how it tries. I am walking around it only to walk away.

Each section of the house has its own season.

The sun’s heat beats on the board-and-batten summer kitchen, on my mother’s flourishing herb garden.

But already it is shadier as I pass the dining room. Sunlight never penetrates this far, and I shiver, an absence of grass beneath heavy pines, a soft carpet of fallen brown needles under my bare feet.

Here is the Granny Room with its peaked tin roof, a den or nest, sheltered by banks of blown snow.

It is spring the moment I come to the back of the house. I hurry through a grove of fragrant lilacs, the path to the vegetable garden beaten down in fresh, muddy grass. Oh, I am restless. Just past the laundry line is an orchard of pear trees and apple trees in fragile bloom, and beyond that, a lane that leads to the field on the western side of our land. I am leaving the house behind, cutting through the orchard to the wide back lane, which slopes toward the western field. Black walnut trees on either side. I pass like the ghost I am, unnoticed.

Here is the field’s edge.

I can see Edith and Carson’s back lane, although theirs is exposed to the sun, parched and bare, and leads to the stinking manure pile behind their barn. I might cross the field to visit. Or I might not.

If I am eleven, Little Robbie must be five, and his affection grows wilder, more demanding with each passing year. He leaps on me, wraps his arms and legs around me, squeezes my cheeks with his hands, with a frantic need to touch and be touched. I can see him now. I am leaning down so that our faces are very near, and he is pressing my cheeks between his hands, hard.

Stop! Little Robbie, I don’t like that
,
it hurts!

But he can’t stop. He can’t let go, when he’s got something to hold. His eyes are shining, fanatical, and he’s making a strange noise in his throat, almost a growl.

So I don’t cross the field to visit Little Robbie.

Instead, I continue on to the backwoods, stepping off the dusky trail to push a path through tangled undergrowth. I play that I am lost; why does this please me so, to imagine slipping out of reach? I am startled, then, to hear footsteps scuffing along the trail I consider all mine.

I dart farther into the brush, but I stop, hold my breath and crouch down, wait to see who is coming.

Edith?

She hurries with her head tilted at an angle. No, her gait is quicker than hurry. Edith is running, her skirt lifted, her breath harsh. I follow, but she stops where the trail ends at the edge of our back field, out behind the barn. I wait while she waits, wondering if she will see me or hear me, holding my breath, watching her. But the only disturbance is in her mind and she turns, her face blank, eyes stark and inward. She retraces her steps away from my hiding place.

I listen for the dull sound of her feet in their laced black boots coming this way again, but she is gone to wherever she is going.

This could belong to a dream, or it could be a story I’ve made up to tell myself, though I can’t think why it should be. Why shouldn’t it be true? Why shouldn’t Edith run, even if she only travels home the way she came, her hair damp and stuck to the nape of her neck.

My mother’s cures aren’t working. Edith has only Little Robbie, and what will become of him, his clawing grip, the way he pushes on me even while squeezing, like he wants to break us both? What of him, grown to the size of a man, with that growl in his throat, those shining eyes? He will make a fine killer, fighting for his country in another war.

And what of her, Edith, aimless, fasting and counting days and swallowing tinctures, bounded by these trees and fields? And what of me? And what of this house? Of all we can’t hold, and won’t, and didn’t, and couldn’t. In my dreams, I am walking around the house, through its seasons and weathers and magnificence. I walk until I’m out of sight. And then the house is gone.

I SEE THE HOUSE:
alight and disintegrating, its shape visible as a darkness behind the flame. It looks like a model cut from cardboard and set aflame. A paper house—stone and masonry and plaster and lathe turned to paper. Crumpling.

I should be watching Cora, so clumsy, so stiffened with arthritis I have to carry her to the toilet, though her weight is almost too heavy for my own weakened arms, her legs dragging on the floor; so cruel too. We hardly speak without visiting her litany of accusations, which I will not repeat. She tells the truth, does Cora, but it isn’t a truth we need to drag between us till death do us part.

I don’t know who is to blame. It tires me to consider it. What does it matter?

I say to her,
I’ll be off for my run, then
, and she says,
Go on, begone with ye
, and I say,
You’re tucked and cozy, so you are
, and she says,
Like a baby, poor baby, poor soul
, and I say,
I’ll be back
, and she says,
Don’t leave me
, and I say,
I’m sorry
, and she says,
You should be
, and I say,
Here’s your tea then
, and she says,
You should be sorry shouldn’t you shouldn’t you
, and I bend to tie my shoelaces. I want to go and I will go even knowing I should stay here with her, so clumsy, so angry, so stuck.

Cora, everything that has happened in your life up to this moment has been of your own damn choosing.

But I don’t say it. I’ll not say it. Is it kindness or cowardice? Am I a good woman, or do I fear confrontation? (No, I don’t fear it. I dislike it. I find it distasteful. I’ve seen its harm and how its harm can’t be undone.) I don’t say what I’m thinking, not to Cora, not to most, not to anyone. On this morning, I dress myself in jogging trousers worn thin with use, and cap my head with a woollen toque, turning away from my sister, grateful that I can remove myself from the stale warmth of our shared room, with its patched and greasy walls, its blackened ceiling, its blankets and slippers and cups stained with half-drunk tea.

The air outdoors will be clean, it will wash me clean. If only I could drag Cora outside from time to time. It’s like she’s nesting in her chair in a ragged heap of blankets that she picks at and plucks at with her bird claws. She needs to breathe. She can’t think straight in our smothering room—I can’t think straight in here either, my thoughts scrambling, racing to escape.

I’ve been seeing a lot of Fannie in the walls, but when I report this fact to Cora, she tells me I’m a crazy old lady.
Yes
, I agree,
we’re two crazy old ladies. But Fannie’s still a girl, and she’ll watch over you while I’m out. Just look for her, Cora, do it for me. If you need anything, just tell Fannie.

Cora doesn’t like to hear of Fannie.

I heard Fannie was a bad woman
, says Cora.
Now, now. Don’t go repeating gossip
, I say, and Cora says,
I’m glad she’s gone.
But that last is the sickness talking. Cora is losing herself, moment by moment, in each breath that much less herself than in the breath before. I wonder sometimes whether the sickness is stripping away a veneer to reveal her true and exposed under-self, that voice in the head that all of us have, that we none of us would want to share. Is that the true self?

I told Carson it wasn’t me, but Edith won’t believe it
, she declares.
I’m not someone who speaks ill of her own kin. I’ll tell him again, next time I see him. I’ll go over there on purpose just to tell him
.

That is when I crouch, creaking and aching, and tie my laces with fingers too stiff, knuckles too swollen to bend. It takes me a good long while to pull and push the soft laces into tidy bows, my head pounding as the blood rushes to it, and Cora on and on all the while.
It wasn’t me, you know. Everyone’s speaking of it in the town. And Edith blames me. Mother blames me too. So do you.

I don’t
, I say.
Nobody blames you for anything, Cora.

It was all your fault. We were happy till
—

Cora
, I say,
everyone’s dead. Mother’s dead. Edith’s dead. Carson’s dead
.

I can be cruel too.

She bursts out it was Fannie killed Carson, and I say no, and she says then it was Edith, but no, I remind her, it was Carson’s own bloody heart. Blocked-up arteries, years of bacon and butter sandwiches, stopped up and keeled over, gone. And Edith outlived him by two decades, sickly through the years and plagued with miseries till the very end, when some ailment finally did as promised and killed her.

Remember?
I tell Cora, knowing she doesn’t. I suppose it comes as a shock every time. I suppose that should make me kinder in the telling. I suppose I could spare her, rather than breaking the bad news over and over again.

I embroider the stories, each time told with different details.
We didn’t go to Carson’s funeral, out of respect for Edith’s wishes. She didn’t want us there, she sent one of Carson’s cousins to take Father to the service. I came home to stay that weekend
—
remember? We never had such fun—we played cards, and Father joined in when the cousin brought him home again. He remembered the rules to “Pit.” He couldn’t tell us one useful detail from the afternoon, except he hadn’t liked the pickle sandwiches. “Pickle sandwiches?” We laughed, you and I. “What on God’s green earth is a pickle sandwich?”

I don’t add that the news of Carson’s death did not affect me greatly at the time. It does not affect me greatly now. I was never enamoured of the man. He had a soft face, pouting lips, a man who thought highly of himself in the mirror, and honed his skills as a flirt, even practicing on a young girl like me: “Aggie, those big blue eyes could send a fellow the wrong message.” A man likely to suffer when his hair began falling out. No, I was not an admirer.

Edith’s funeral, now that was different.
I stop.

That was different, yes
, agrees Cora.

Do you remember?
I ask her.

Don’t I?

The way she says it, so hesitantly, like she’s touching her tongue to a sensitive tooth, testing it for pain, assures me she’s lost track of the memory just as soon as it was found.

Well it wasn’t much of a funeral
, I say, although I wasn’t there to see it. Maybe Cora doesn’t remember that, either.
She was an old woman. She kept to herself. She had few friends
.

Like us
, says Cora.

Just when I think nothing stays in that head of hers, she goes and surprises me.

And then she’s lost again, looking me up and down like she’s seeing me brand-new all over again.
What are you dressed up like that for? Leaving me again? Run, run, as fast as you can, you can’t catch me, I’m Aganetha Smart.