Girl Runner (16 page)

What do you want, Aggie? I ask myself in the mirror, but I don’t know what I want, only that I haven’t got it.

I find Glad in our main room, reading a magazine, legs crossed on a chair beside the fireplace that does not work. The ceilings in the rooms are tall, shadows thrown wide and high from the bare electrified bulb that shines above her head.

“Miss Gibb sent me this.” I show Glad the letter.

“Undergarments aren’t quite Hollywood,” says Glad. She unwinds herself from the chair and strolls around the room, waving the letter thoughtfully, letting the paper brush her lips.

“Rosebud Confectionary paid me lots to pose with chocolates,” I say. “And it was easy!”

“You’re too sweet.” Glad turns and sizes me up. “Come here. Let’s play out a scene. I’ll be the director, you be you.”

I approach.

“In your undergarments, please,” says Glad, adopting a directorial tone.

“Pardon me?” I stammer.

“Well how do you suppose I shall photograph you for my advertisement, dear? Undergarments, now!”

“Well I won’t,” I say, but I’m hedging, hesitating. Should I? I can feel my shoulders folding protectively over my chest, a tall girl’s instinctive cower.

“You’re wasting my precious time. I shall rip up your contract now!” She raises the letter dramatically.

“Wait!”

“I’m waiting.”

Slowly, I straighten my spine and reach my arms behind my neck and tug at the zipper on my dress. My hands shake. A rush of strangeness washes through me. I think that I might begin to cry, or to laugh, I can’t tell which. I am terrified that my sister Olive will come in from the kitchen and find us, standing like this before the fireplace that doesn’t work, in the harsh light cast by bare bulbs that stick out of the wall and toss our shadows against white plaster.

Glad seems very near me, although she isn’t, not really. We are staring at each other and I can’t read her eyes. They aren’t laughing, like they almost always are. This does not seem, suddenly, to be a joke.

Slowly, the zipper unsinks its tiny metal teeth until the fabric begins to loosen and gape and my fingers pull open the neck of the dress, sliding it down over my shoulder, exposing skin. I feel myself moving deliberately, slowing down, scarcely breathing.

“Stop.” Glad sounds angry, and not as if she’s acting.

“You see,” I say. “I could do it.”

“But don’t. Don’t you see? I agree with Miss Gibb.”

Glad turns away, flushed, and goes to stand by one of the tall windows that overlook Yonge Street. I don’t understand her anger—are we playacting, or is this real? Have I hurt her in some way? When I put my hand on her arm, she pulls away harshly, crossing one arm over her chest, the other flying out, finger raised and pointed.

“Out, out, out of my studio!” She is back to being the director, acting again. It must be said that Glad is a much more natural actress than I will ever be, even if the newspapers haven’t promised her a Hollywood career.

“Glad!”

Her look is hard, appraising. “You’re too sweet, Aggie,” she says, repeating her words from earlier. “You should never trust what a person says to you. Would you really take your clothes off for a man with a camera?”

My face burns with shame.

Glad is laughing again, brushing my bare shoulder with her cool fingertips. “It’s just that I love you so, Aggie. Don’t do the advertisement.”

“Zip me up.” I flick her hand off my shoulder. “I suppose you’re right. You’re always right.”

But her fingers on the zipper light a mutual shock, a spark of electricity that stings for a second. “Never mind. I’ll do it myself.” I walk away from her, my hands behind my neck, struggling with the zipper.

“What are you doing?” Olive asks when I come into the kitchen. “I thought Johnny left ages ago.”

“This zipper is broken,” I say, dropping into a chair without further explanation.

“I’ll mend it for you.” My big sister brushes aside my hair and takes a look. “It’s not broken, it’s jammed. Just hold still . . .”

I sit at the kitchen table after Olive’s gone, under the blazing bulb, listening to the sound of mice scrabbling through the walls, and I compose a letter in return to Miss Gibb.

I HAVE NOT
yet sent the letter. I can’t say why, exactly, but it waits on my vanity in an envelope, addressed and stamped, and unsent.

“You’re writing to Miss Gibb?” Johnny picks up the envelope and looks at it.

“She’s a friend,” I say.

“I don’t like that woman.”

I’ve heard other men say it, boys on the team, even Mr. Tristan, who resented her authority over “his” girls, as he called us, but never have I heard this opinion from Johnny. I can’t say that I like it.

“Why ever not?” I frown.

We are about to launch into our first fight.

“She thinks she knows everything.”

“She knows more than you.”

“She isn’t a real woman.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“You know what it means.”

I know he’s talking about sex, and I’m familiar too with the slur of “mannish woman” that gets attached to sporting girls, and suddenly I’m furious, rent up inside with rage. The right words don’t come to me—well, this is no surprise. I’m not made for pithy speeches pouring from some deep well. In their weakness, I hear my own lack, and failure: “I thought you were nice, Johnny. I don’t like you right now, not at all.”

“Then I’ll go.”

“Yes. Go.”

A little while later there is a knock on my door. Glad pokes her head in, even though I’ve chosen not to answer. I’m lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling. “Everything okay?” she asks.

I’m not made for this. Conversing about my feelings? Parsing my emotions? Being in love? I’d sooner jump out the window. “I need to run,” I tell Glad, and instantly I feel better. Just the idea of it. “Or swim.”

“We’ll swim in the morning,” says Glad.

“I miss training,” I say.

“We’ll get back to it in the spring.”

“I have to run.”

“So run, who’s stopping you?” She comes into the room, and stands over me with her arms crossed. “People fight,” she says. “And then they say I’m sorry. You should know these things.”

“I’m sorry?” I say, looking up at her. Maybe I’ll see her forever, as she is, looking down at me, compact, impatient, shaking me free, if only she can, from my own special form of blindness.

She laughs, almost sadly. “Not to me, dummy. To him.”

Oh.

“You don’t want to, but you have to. Now get up and come downstairs and have dessert. Olive’s made some kind of lemon cake thing and it smells like heaven.”

This is the night our brother George turns up. Maybe he smelled the lemon cake from across town—I wouldn’t put it past him. He bangs on the door at the bottom of the staircase. Olive doesn’t want to unlock it, but Glad marches down with me close behind, and hauls open the door, stands there with her arms crossed.

“Are you trying to scare us to death?”

George stumbles across the threshold, rubbing his bare hands. He doesn’t know how to say he’s sorry either—a family trait? I’m thankful for the fight if only because it means that Johnny has left early this evening. I do not want George and Johnny to cross paths, not like this, maybe not ever. George gazes at me owlishly before beginning to climb the stairs.

I glance at Glad, ashamed of my brother, and she shrugs.
Not your fault
.

We have nothing to drink in the house, which is for the best, with George.

“Nothing at all?”

“I’ll make you a cup of tea,” offers Olive. The three of us, Smarts, stand awkwardly clumped at the entry to the kitchen, neither in nor out.

Glad observes us from where she’s gone and curled into the comfortable chair beside the fireplace, like our half-grown kitten.

“Tea is it?” George’s tone is sneering. “Mother’s special tea?”

And Olive takes one step backward in order to have room to hit him with a bright shocking slap. The sound of it seems to hold.

Nobody moves.

The tea on offer is, in fact, mailed to us by our mother, tea she has prepared with herbs grown in her garden, and dried, and carefully blended. She supplies us with several different boxes, each marked with its special purpose. After-Dinner Tea to soothe the troubled stomach. Woman’s Tea to ease the pains of a difficult cycle. Every Day Tea, with a mild laxative. And the tea I assume Olive has intended to serve George, which is our favourite, a mixture of mints and lemon balm, called Tea for All Occasions. Now this is an occasion—I almost want to laugh, thinking of serving it now.

Glad rises in slow motion out of the chair. I catch her eye and shake my head, one short
no
.

“What’s that for?” George rubs his jaw.

“Leave Mother be,” says Olive in a low voice.

“I’ve no interest in your mother.”

“What did you come for, George?” I ask quickly. I can hardly bear to hear him say “your mother,” as if she hasn’t raised him as her own, from infancy. As if she isn’t the only mother he’s ever known. As if her love is not worthy, somehow. But it is my own pity of my mother that haunts me most, and I know that George is not to blame for that—it is only that his dismissal makes me feel doubly traitorous. I’ve given up on George. I can hardly remember the brother who believed I could fly.

“I’m short,” he says bluntly, to me. “I thought of you.”

I stare at the floor and chew the inside of my mouth.

“I’ll pay you back,” he says. “You know I will.”

“You never have yet,” counters Olive.

“Not just for me, Aggie. Please.” George tries to catch my eye.

“Not for you,” Olive says, disbelieving. “If not for you, George, than for who?”

For whom
, I think, knowing perfectly well of whom my brother speaks, but George has sworn me to secrecy on the subject, and I see no reason to break my silence now, to pull the complication of Tattie, the woman who is not his wife, and her children, who are also his if not by law, into this room, into our lives.

“Business is tight,” says George softly. “You win some, you lose some. I’ve got a chance to invest in this horse. Finest filly I ever seen. I always bet on the fillies, Aggie, you know that.”

“How much?” I say.

In my head, I’m tearing up the letter to Miss Gibb and writing a different one.

I will say,
If it’s not too much trouble, could you explain that I’m a modest girl. I hate to turn them down. Perhaps they will understand. Perhaps they would like a modest girl, anyway. What do you think? I will come for a visit on Friday, after my acting class, if you are available. Please write and tell me where we shall meet.

JOHNNY SAYS HE
’
S SORRY.
Therefore, I don’t have to. This is probably bad for me, but good for us.

I decide not to tell him—or anyone, including Glad—about the undergarment advertisement until after the photographs have been taken. I am photographed as modestly as one can imagine, fully clothed—demurely clothed, even. I tell myself that this is fun. I pretend that I am having fun. But I am discovering that modelling is tedious work. The lighting is hot, the greasy paint on my face is thick and sticky and looks unnatural, I perspire and my feet ache, my back aches, my shoulders crunch, the clothes are ill fitting and pinned all over. I throw every effort into not looking or feeling anything like myself. I do understand that part of the job: it isn’t me the photographer wants, sweating and irked and dull, it’s a girl stripped of her visceral qualities who is willing to suspend herself in amber.

“Smile, Miss Smart, there’s a good girl. Less teeth, there’s a lass. Just a natural smile, like you’re catching the eye of a boy you like. That’s better, Miss Smart. We’ll get it yet.”

“It” is a version of me gazing airily into space, a vapid expression upon my features, chin on folded hands. This girl, who is not really me, can be found widely in newspapers, flyers, and magazines, lost in happy reverie. I suppose I’m meant to be thinking about my underthings, dreamily, “as one does,” as Glad remarks, sending me and Olive into fits of giggles around the kitchen table. I pose, “as one does,” while Glad narrates an imagined inner monologue on the cascading charms of undergarments. “Oh, lacy loveliness, my heart doth flutter to think of you, folded into colourful stacks, one upon the other, in my secret drawers.” Her voice drops low on
secret drawers.
“What wouldn’t I give to have an armful of your satiny softness pressed against my pillowy bosom?”

“Glad.” Olive clicks her tongue in warning and indicates with a shake of her head Johnny’s presence at our otherwise feminine table. His lips twitch, and he gazes at the ceiling and blinks hard.

“I’ve gone too far.”

“You have,” agrees Olive.

Glad wonders: “What were you thinking of, Aggie, when the photo was being taken, for real?”

“Nothing,” I say.

I’m mildly troubled by the emptiness of my expression in the photograph, even while I recognize its appeal. Its blankness makes me restless, makes me want to run.

Atop my neatly made quilt, upstairs, Johnny repeats Glad’s question: what was I thinking about—really—when the photograph was taken.

“They told me to think about you,” I say honestly.

He seems to find this arousing, and it occurs to me, for the first time, that perhaps he doesn’t know me at all. That he thinks I’m someone quite different from who I am. Why should he want a girl with eyes so empty to be thinking of him?

AFTER THE UNDERGARMENTS,
I am offered a job modelling a fur coat for a department store. In this photograph, my gaze is distant but somewhat sterner, as if I am dreaming of icy mountaintops, my hands clutching the collar around my neck. The advertisement is a success, and I am invited to continue the promotion by wearing the coat at the department store while signing autographs, and as the department store has locations in several cities across the country, an early winter tour is arranged by train, although I only travel so far west as Winnipeg. The train struggles along its iron tracks through a stark, naked, snowy landscape. I am billeted in the home of the department store’s manager, chaperoned by his wife. I am not unhappy. It is as though I’m living a life that belongs to someone else, a borrowed life.