Girl Runner (14 page)

I laugh. I’m wrestling with the laces and my back is pinched with pain.

She is like Father was, at the end, emptied of all but the most persistent fragments of original self. Like I may be too, losing myself without even knowing it. I wonder: What is the meaning of what’s left behind? I don’t think, not really, that what’s left behind is the true self revealed. I am not that cruel. It seems instead an accidental picture of a life, and true to the way life is lived—not as we may wish it to be lived, but as it insists on being lived.

A man like my father can vanish almost entirely while he wanders the house and the fields, handling objects as if they are artifacts from an impenetrably foreign world, stumbling, searching for what’s been taken from him. I remember that Cora told me it was a relief when Father fell and broke his hip, and could no longer stray. I was living in the city and I thought her cruel beyond all measure. I stayed away, myself. And now I wonder how she managed, the two of them, alone here. The simplest actions painful, laboured rituals of baroque effort. To eat. To toilet. To bathe.

To sleep. No peace.

The shoes are laced, at last. I have a dozen pairs, all as worn as me, simple rubber soles and canvas uppers, splitting along the seams. But when could I get to the city to buy another pair—and how? Our groceries come delivered from the store in town. We have no telephone, so I run to the store to put in our order and run home again, every other week, more or less the same items. Not on this day. On this day, I will travel the woods and the fields. I’ve seen children playing in the woods, and it cheers me. I’ve been hearing their shouts, seeing evidence of forts built and wrecked and rebuilt just off the path, jumbles of sticks and rotten leaves pushed into piles that make sense, if you recognize in them a plan larger and more elaborate than can be seen by the eye alone.

Someone’s living in Edith’s house these past few years. I saw a large metal rubbish bin out back for a while, and thought maybe they’d tear the place down, but that never happened. It must have been three summers ago, a woman brought over a coffee cake, but Cora sent her packing, so she said; I was off running at the time, and have no evidence whatsoever of the exchange. I’ve seen a grey car in the drive, and lights shining out of the windows after dusk, shedding puddles of orange and blue light. We don’t need anyone’s coffee cake. Cora and I have got a recipe we favour, old as the hills, to make for ourselves, if we care to. I leave the neighbours be, whoever they are. None of my business, not anymore.

Go ahead, go on, leave me like always, here, alone!

Do I answer my sister? I wish it so. I may, instead, go quietly, part without a word, without protest, in silence, as is my habit—only afterward wishing a kindness from my mouth.

I’m away.

Breathing in, breathing out. Ninety-five years of age and running yet. I call it running—it is what’s left of running. My pace shuffles, my gait as stiff as my joints, my breath thin, whispered. Yet I run and run until my chest warms and my lungs warm and I can feel my lips peeling into a smile. The ground is not yet hard.

I hear the crunch of leaves on the path. I see fallen colour over a darker mulch, a light wind picking up and moving the tops of the trees. I am running. I remember this.

How can I forget? I will not run again.

On this last run, this last day of this life that feels like it might go on and on forever, I smell smoke from an autumn fire. I tell myself it is the good scent of humble chimney smoke, or that it arises from a burning leaf pile, but I think perhaps I am worried, just a little bit, that the scent is too pungent for either of these.

I run out of the woods and past the row of pines along our back field, their branches thinned by age. I run past the empty lighthouse that towers over the pond, and I avert my eyes, as I always do. The scent of smoke comes sharp and acrid, it flowers in the crispness of rattling weeds. Still, I can see nothing until coming around to where the barn used to stand whole and tall, like a ship in the great wide field. Parts of the barn remain. Skeleton. Bones. Cavernous underbelly.

And I see as if I’ve seen it already, as if it is a dream I’ve dreamed before, the mind striving to make sense of the insensible.

There is the great house, down the little slope: black plumes of smoke rising, choking. I am running. “Cora, Cora, Cora!” I am inside the smoke, throwing open the side door, stumbling into the kitchen where I am blasted backward by a wall of heat. I am staggered, staggering. I cannot believe what is happening, nor what I’m losing, I can’t believe that our lives together are coming to a close, and in this way. I can’t believe the evidence of my blistered palms.

I am turning circles in the lane, making a noise in my throat that hurts, later.

I am running the shorn front field to Edith and Carson’s, searching for their names, struggling to call for them, confused now. Time telescopes. Where has everyone gone?

Near Edith and Carson’s bare lane, a big black farm dog lopes up to me, challenges me at field’s edge, barking and barking, hackles high, head angled oddly over outstretched paws, as if prepared to leap for my throat.

I lose the ability to calculate my own age. Suddenly, I become so very old, as if age is an extremity I’ve been searching for, as if I’ve scaled its heights, stumbled upon its limits. I stare down at the dog, down at my soft pants and sweatshirt hanging loose around scaly, shrinking limbs, rickety and frail.

I don’t know the woman who opens Edith’s door.

She hollers to call off the dog. I try to explain, to ask for help, but my throat is raw and I can find no words. The woman sees the rolling smoke behind me, rolling into the thin blue sky, blackening and spreading across the afternoon.

She waves me closer, frantically, to come, come into her house. The yard is little changed and now is not the moment to express curiosity, but I can’t help looking. A child’s plastic picnic table is tipped over in the wind, a scattering of scraggly spruce bushes sprouts around the cracked stone foundation where nothing ever agreed to grow without complaint. Maybe it was always in the soil, this infertility, this refusal to thrive; maybe it was nothing to do with poor Edith after all.

I am not to call her poor Edith, not ever. I hear my mother’s mighty tone.

“Come in, please,” the woman calls me, the stranger on Edith’s doorstep.

I’m chilled, shaking, but I refuse to enter. I haven’t stepped inside that house since Edith carried her lovely daughter—such a big, bonnie girl, already talking—through the door, and left me standing in the yard, as I stand now, feeling then as now frail and spent and bewildered, calling after them.

Am I never to visit, then? Am I never to say hello, never to talk, never to love you and yours, Edith? Never?

I turn away.

Against the wind, now, fighting, I move out of the yard and across the field, dragging a terrible weight behind me, so heavy I pause and look around to see what’s there, but it’s nothing that can be seen. I’m chilled through. I drag myself all the way across the field, up the lane, stopped by the heat. This is where I stand to watch the burning of my family’s house. This is where I hear the smash of windows breaking, witness the sudden caving of the roof, the retreat of the men who have arrived with hoses hooked to a tanker truck, sparks cascading. Heat like a vicious sun, like my face might suffer a sunburn. A crinkling silver emergency blanket thrown over my shoulders. A ride to the hospital rocking in the rear of an ambulance. My sister’s name, saying it.

Can we notify your next of kin?

There is no one, just her. We lived alone. She died alone. I should have cleaned the chimney. I should have blown out the candles and the lamps. No, the house was never wired for electricity. No, we have no telephone. I left a pot of soup simmering on the stove for our suppers, nine days old, pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold.

VOICES DRIFT AROUND ME.
This is how memory works. I could be looking intently at the tiniest detail and not realize it, losing sense of the larger landscape in which the detail rests.

“Remember when we tried to build a fort out of these scraps? We were always building forts.” The young man digs around in the debris. “Remember when I was babysitting you, and you cut your hand on a nail and it was bleeding, and I wrapped it up in my shirt. I paid you two dollars not to tell Mom, and I threw out the shirt because I couldn’t figure how to get out the blood. Like it was a crime. We worked on that fort the whole summer. Bet it’s still here.”

“Two dollars!” The girl laughs. “I kind of remember that. Not really.”

“We came over here all the time. Looking for treasure.”

“Did we find any?”

Rustling noises. “I think the fort was over here.”

“What do you think she remembers—Mrs. Smart?”

“She’s clear, sometimes.”

“Don’t you feel sorry for her, Max?”

“Why should I?”

“She was this amazing runner, amazing—and look at her now. I can’t even imagine.”

Slowly I open myself to her, to him, I let them leak through my skin, her pity and her need, his camera lens, their youth.

I’ve known my body well enough to recognize its limits, and this chair is only the most recent diminishment in a long descending line. You never run again like you run as a child: without pain. Later, you reach a point at which you’ve run the fastest you will ever run—the pinnacle that goes unrecognized at the time. I remember whispering the word
indestructible
as I ran or as I approached a great grief, but I only chanted it because I knew I wasn’t. I never ran because I was strong, if you see what I’m saying. It wasn’t strength that made me a runner, it was the desire to be strong.

I ran for courage. Still do, if only in my mind.

Why do you run?

“Did she say something? Mrs. Smart?”

“Why do you run?” I pronounce each word as if it were standing by itself.

“She’s talking to you, Kaley.”

The sunlight is particularly piercing and cold.

“Why do I run?”

“Excellent question, Mrs. Smart!” The young man and his camera approve. “Why do you run, Kaley?”

The girl is struck silent.

“I don’t know,” she says slowly.

“Are you trying to run away from something?” her brother asks, genuinely curious.

“I don’t think so.” Very slowly.

“Then you’re running toward something?”

“Well, obviously, I’ve got goals. I want to break the Canadian women’s marathon record. I want to make the Olympic team. Obviously. But—” She stops altogether. She looks at the camera, then at me. “I think I would run even if I knew I would never win another race again. It’s weird. I can’t explain it. It’s like something I can’t turn off.”

“Good girl,” I say. I reach for her hand—there, I’ve got it—and I squeeze until she squeezes back. I would like to think she is not afraid of me right now. I would like to think, also, that she does not pity me.

The girl feels me shivering: “She’s cold.”

Well, so much for that.

“This is a nice frame,” says Max, the stubby lens between his face and ours. “Let’s get one quick shot. Follow your script, Kales—the opening.”

The girl inhales deeply, sighs it out, and launches into her lines. “My name is Kaley”—her voice gone declarative and unnatural—“and this is my story. Let me introduce you to my inspiration, Aganetha Smart.”

Max gives her a silent thumbs-up.

“You might not guess it from looking at her,” she continues stiffly, doggedly, “but Aganetha Smart was once the most famous woman runner in Canada. Weren’t you, Mrs. Smart?”

The burying past tense. I’ve never liked it. My teeth are clamped and I won’t reply.

“How did it feel to win gold, Mrs. Smart? I want to know.” Her voice goes breathy and anxious—genuine—greedy, almost. This is not an idle question, and perhaps, I think, off-script.

But I can’t answer the girl’s question, much as I’d like to. The details I remember most clearly stand apart from my own emotions, as if severed from feeling altogether: the sounds of voices ricocheting, and suddenly a quick clear cast of words in my ear, in Glad’s laughing tones:
You won! You did it! I knew that you could!
And then her voice is gone, and I can’t reproduce it nor hear what comes next, or came before, and the truth is I can’t set straight whether that happened, or whether it’s a story I’ve told myself until it might well have happened—but I hear it happening. I hear and almost see a buzz of sound and the quick focus in, the clarity of her joy. But not my own.

I shake my head and reverse back inside myself.

“She’s really shivering, Max.”

“Good enough. Let’s go.”

THE MOST INTERESTING STORY
of my life it is not. It is quite ordinary, really. And yet it is the story that makes me swoon, forever after. I fall into it in dreams—no, I fall into him. In dreams, he is unchanged, as am I. Or, we are older, but not aged. We remain ourselves. We find each other and we grin,
Oh, it’s you, you’ve come again.
How happy we are. We meet clean and unformed, at the beginning of our story, without pasts, our lives as they happened to us vanished. Dreams are lovely for this.

But in dreams we never quite manage to come together. If we do, if our lips meet or we find ourselves climbing with ravenous hunger into some makeshift bed, we are interrupted, parted by a silly detail that intrudes, a task that must be completed, another woman walking into the room, or, occasionally, by shame. We are caught and found out by our futures, our original intentions, our desire, dissipating into nothingness.

I wake and insist on returning to the best part. To before.

But a dream will not be commanded, no more than life will.

I think I must want to keep us here, forever in a state of meeting. I want to preserve the surprise of being desired, and not knowing why, the mystery of being wanted and of wanting, the tangle of possibility—suspended on the verge of being fulfilled. I don’t want to fall through to the other side. I don’t want the mystery to collapse. I want not to know anything.

I want us to meet, forever, as we were, and never after that.

I am twenty years old and Johnny is twenty-two. He makes his living as an automobile mechanic. He would like to become a doctor, like his father was before dying an early and unlucky death—blood poisoning. And Johnny is an athlete. If he’d have won, he says, he would have found a way to use his fame to pay for school. As it is, he’ll have to work his way there by old-fashioned means: hard labour and careful saving. His father is dead, and his mother lives on the Prairies with his younger brothers and sisters. There are grandparents too. Johnny sends money home.

We meet on board the ship from Europe to Canada, or rather, the ship is where we find each other; we are not then meeting for the first time. I know who he is—the hurdler who stumbled over the final jump and fell out of the medals—and he knows who I am—everyone does. We belong to a select group: Canada’s 1928 Olympic team, with its large contingent of young men, and much smaller, special group of girls.

“We can have our pick,” one of the girls says—the young swimmer who failed to get through to the finals.

“Aw, who needs ’em,” says Glad.

I quietly agree with Glad. I am thinking myself quite sophisticated. I don’t need a boy, and besides, we girls are chaperoned up to our ears. Picture this: nearly seventy young people in top physical form confined on board a ship for a little more than a week. Some of us have won and many more have lost. Our fitness is a useless energy we can’t help but trail around. We are firecrackers crying for a match. We run morning laps around the decks in good weather, and a large room has been set aside for calisthenics and stretching and, in the evenings after supper, a whole lot of foolishness that comes awfully close to dancing.

But if ever a girl gets too intimate with a boy, here is Miss Alexandrine Gibb shouldering in between, ticktocking her forefinger.

Glad earns the most ticktocks, but it is only because the boys like her so—like one of their own. She could have any boy she wants, I think, and it’s because she seems not to want or need any of them. She is in no danger of being discovered in a broom closet kissing a discus thrower, as happens to the young swimmer. That isn’t Glad, not at all. If she throws her arm around a boy, it’s to say,
Hey, pal.
That’s all. Hey. And the boy knows it too.

I wish, in this way, to be like Glad.

But I’m not like her. It isn’t just owing to my height, or my long golden hair, my angularity, my lips that look to have been stained red though I never paint them. It is the way I hold myself apart. I watch, I observe. When approached by an interested party, I stiffen as if offended or, worse, threatened: “What do you want?”

Johnny doesn’t approach. His manners are not like the other boys’. Like me, he stands stiffly, holding himself apart. He is focused on maintaining his strength and speed, as if he hasn’t already raced and lost. He does not enter into the frothy atmosphere in which we sail across the ocean blue.

We find each other on deck.

I am running slow laps in the early afternoon, breathing the sea air, feeling the chilly spray on my face. I have a terror of falling overboard, and yet I can’t bear to lie in my bunk paging through magazines, any more than I can bear to laze around gossiping with the girls. Johnny falls in beside me. He doesn’t say a word. I suppose I appreciate that. For a few rounds we keep our thoughts to ourselves, and it is only the sound of breath that speaks. I am running beside a boy very nearly my own age, something I have not done since my school years.

But when I was near those boys, it was not the same.

Up until this moment, I’ve imagined that I understood romance, a state to be scorned. I understood love, a curse, of sorts, that binds women to men, weakens them. But as we run together, Johnny and me, I forget all of that. My imagination has failed me: it never took into account the flesh and blood awakening of desire.

Johnny is as tall as me, slender but sleekly muscled. I can feel myself appraising him as we jog, and not coolly—with rising tension. It is as if we’re protected inside a bubble that contains only the two us, with room for nothing else. I am suddenly and acutely attuned to the smallest particulars of his person: his dark blue eyes, dark curling hair, his long jaw. Still, we haven’t spoken a word. As if we are of one mind, we slow in tandem, come to a stop. We do not look around to see whether or not we are alone. We know we are alone. Our hands graze each other’s, gravely. Behind him, a red door, shut. I see his eyes, their kindness, their surprise.

I like you
, he says.

No boy has ever said this to me. The only words I can think to describe what I’m feeling are ridiculous as a trembling swoon, but swoon it is, and trembling, flushing, quickening.

The roar of the engines. His hand on my cheek, over my ear, our mouths in silence meeting. My hands covering his eyes, as if I can’t bear to have him see my desire.

We kiss and pull away, kiss and break apart, and kiss again, the sounds of the ocean and the engines roaring around us. He doesn’t need to ask me to be his girl, because it’s all settled there against the red door. I’m his girl. (Aren’t I? I’m too shy and too proud to ask, too uncalculating, too satisfied on evidence alone. The way he kisses me is proof enough. The way he came looking for me, in particular. The way he holds my hand, later, when we walk in the parade down Yonge Street, the air over our heads thick with ticker tape. The way he brushes the bits of shredded paper from my hair, his hands on my temples as gently as my father’s on my mother’s. I remember. And I think I know enough to be sure.)

It is an ordinary story. A very ordinary story. But I don’t care. It’s mine.

It’s all I’ve got.

I DO THINK,
briefly, that I shall never have to work in a factory again. I take a leave of absence from my bookkeeping job at Rosebud Confectionary. Rosebud pays me, instead—oh glory, oh thrill!—to pose with a box of their gold-dusted chocolates. I do think, briefly, that I shall never again have to do work that I do not find amusing. I am in love with being loved. Here is my photograph in the newspaper on the foldout “Society Page.” Here I am arm in arm with Johnny, smiling for the camera.

Here I am, coming home, again. A visit to the farm seems easy, suddenly. I’ll just leap over the years that separate us. I will go home.

Olive and I take the train. It seems perfect. Return as I left, complete the circle. Am I even thinking in such terms? Well. I suppose not. I suppose I think it’s perfect because I’m so sweetly satisfied with myself. I suppose I think I’ve become someone quite different, a new and improved Aganetha Smart.