Girl Runner (17 page)

Yet I tell myself it is mine to keep. There are things I like about this life, things I want to keep. The fur coat, for example.

Home again, I describe to Johnny the sky I’ve seen, the one that belongs to his past, and how it has not frightened me, not at all, in its endlessness.

He tells me he’s imagined me wearing nothing but fur.

The department store wonders whether I might model their new swimsuit for women, for their summer campaign. It is sleeveless, cut in a curve on the upper thigh, and made of a new fabric that promises not to trap and hold water like wool does.

The photographs are taken inside a studio in early spring but are made to look like I’m posing on a beach with a child’s sand bucket and shovel—playthings—nearby. I have perfected the dreamy gaze, I think, oddly pleased with the effect, when the newspaper falls open to reveal this latest campaign. My eyes appear to address something exquisitely attractive just behind the camera. It makes a person want to turn around to see what could be there. I don’t really notice the rest of me, exposed on cheap newsprint.

“Ooo,” says Glad, leaning down for a closer inspection. “You look . . .”

But she doesn’t finish the sentence.

“I look what?”

“Bosomy,” she says. “Or something like that. Your legs look very long, even for you.”

“Is that a bad thing?”

“You’ve got lovely legs. Which everyone will now know.”

I feel myself go uneasy, slightly unmoored by her comments, though she seems to jest.

“You’ve got great gams—that’s what the boys will say. You’re a real doll. A babe.”

“Ugh. Stop. Please.”

“Isn’t she?” to Johnny who has just come in without knocking—he has a key—taking the steps to our apartment two at a time.

“Isn’t who what?”

“Isn’t your girl a doll.”

Johnny glances at the photograph spread across the table, but quickly averts his eyes. I flush hot. He won’t look at me either, not directly, and leaves the room.

I stand, leaving the newspaper open on the table, and I follow Johnny out of the kitchen without a word to Glad from either of us. I chase him up the stairs to my bedroom. I am terribly unsteady inside myself and he sits on the bed and looks at me, but I see that he’s not angry or upset. He looks at me like I can suddenly imagine boys looking at the photograph of me in the newspaper, and I don’t like it, it frightens me, like I’m made of paper, like I’m a printed picture, all surface, all skin, no depth, no muscle, no heft.

“Say something,” I demand of him.

“You’ve got great gams,” he says, and he breaks into a grin.

I feel safe, then. “Anything else?”

“Why do you have to go and be photographed like that,” he says, sincerely.

“Well.” I feel defensive. “It pays for this apartment for one thing. And I’m saving up.”

“For what? You’ll just be married someday.”

“Will I?”

“Won’t you?”

“Well maybe I won’t,” I say defiantly. “If this is a proposal, it stinks.”

“Who says it’s a proposal?”

My breath catches and I flood with humiliation, like I’ve been slapped. This is our second argument. Neither of us apologizes afterward. We pretend, instead, that it never happened.

THE NEWFANGLED BATHING COSTUME
is indeed more revealing than some decent people would like, and some decent people take time to compose and send letters expressing shock regarding modern levels of decency and morality to the newspapers that run the advertisements, which gives me a brief taste of notoriety before the newspapers do, indeed, pull them. Almost immediately I am offered another undergarment advertisement, but this time I tell Johnny, and he says simply,
I don’t like it.

JOHNNY AND I
have seen our photographs paired in the newspapers again this summer, Johnny as Canadian champion in the 100-metre hurdles. I’m a fading fourth in the women’s 800 metres, a distance now virtually defunct for girls—Glad does not choose to compete, focusing her training on the 100-metre sprint, which she wins cold.

Mr. Tristan is too merciful to chastise me. He’s gone soft with me, and I don’t respond well to softness. Perhaps, in truth, I don’t respond well to winning. I need to run from behind. I need to tell myself a story in which I’m not the best or the favourite, and no one is watching me too closely—no one believes I can win. The other story doesn’t work for me.

I should regret my poor showing at the Canadian championships, but I don’t seem to care.

“Your heart’s not here,” Mr. Tristan tells me, calling me into his office. “If you want to consider retiring, I would understand.”

“Retiring?” I’m only twenty-one.

“You’ve got other things on your mind,” he says with a wink.

I do? I stare at him feeling stupid and dull as his meaning washes over me. Girls become wives—it’s what happens, it is the trajectory of our lives. Am I to be an ordinary girl after all, like Olive intends to be, when the right man asks her, like the girls at the factory, like every girl, everywhere? Am I to wind my fate up with the fortune of a man, and leave it at that?

“No thank you,” I tell Mr. Tristan stiffly. “I have no intention of retiring.”

“Then I’ll expect more out of you, as will Mr. P. T. Pallister, your sponsor,” he says, his tone changing fractionally, hardening. “You are not to skip any more practices. You are to work your hardest, as I’ve seen you do and know you can. Do I make myself clear, Miss Smart?”

I nod and pull myself up to my full height, shoulders back. But secretly, like a slow poisonous drip entering my bloodstream, I begin to know he’s more right than he is wrong in his assessment. I can’t pretend to feel the same urgency, the same desire to fling myself around the track, mile after mile, day after day, nursing aching muscles and blistered feet, chasing something I’ve already got.

My heart isn’t here.

I DON
’
T LIKE IT
,
I can hear Johnny saying. I’ve just told him about my burgeoning career as an undergarment model.

“I don’t like it,” he says. I can hear him. “You’re mine.”

“Am I?”

“You should be.” His voice goes rough with emotion, quite out of character, entirely unlike him, and the rumble of it sets me off like a starter’s pistol. It is a hot August evening and the windows are open to the street sounds below. We have the apartment to ourselves. I want to believe him, and in the very same breath don’t care if I do. My body whirls with a mess of emotions, tangling me up in the only sensation that seems to matter at all: to be with this man who desires me, who claims me. I fall onto my bed and look up at him. I think I know what I’m doing.

“Lock the door,” I say, and he does.

NO OFFERS FOLLOW.

My modelling career, which I like to pretend is the forerunner to my acting career, settles into a small lull—I assume it will be small.

It has been a year since I won gold at the Olympics. Miss Gibb hosts an anniversary party at her own apartment for the girls on the team of 1928: seven of us, excepting Lillianna, the only one who does not attend. She’s gone home to the Prairies. The swimmer has graduated from high school and is visibly pregnant, her wedding ring tight on her swollen finger. Of the girls who swept to silver on the 100-metre relay team, Ernestine has become engaged to a man in the dry goods business—she came in third this summer at the Canadian championships—and Sarah Jane and Beth, the other two, have chosen not to compete.

Sarah Jane is newly married. And Beth’s mother has begged her to stop running, please. “She says she wants grandbabies.” Beth laughs. “Someday.”

“Oh for God’s sake,” says Miss Gibb. “The ignorance of some people.”

“My husband too,” confesses Sarah Jane. “I mean, it could be true, Miss Gibb, the doctors say so.”

“What about you and Johnny?” The conversation turns on me like a spotlight catching out a comical character in a silent movie. I’m holding a slice of Miss Gibb’s carrot cake on the palm of my hand, eating it like a horse. Where are my manners?

“What about me and Johnny?” My mouth full of crumbs.

“Aren’t they just the darlingest couple?” Glad jumps to my rescue, and everyone is forced to agree.

Miss Gibb corners me privately, offering a cut crystal glass filled with red punch. The liquid is spiked with something alcoholic, and as the afternoon sinks into a wane, we’ve all taken several glasses more than we ought to have. The pregnant swimmer is crying happily on Miss Gibb’s sofa, while the other married or engaged girls surround her like acolytes, offering handkerchiefs, their own eyes filling with tears, a soft drawling hum of “I know, I know, you’re so lucky!”

“What will you do next?” Miss Gibb asks me quietly. “Oh, please, please, don’t be predictable. I hate when a girl like you becomes predictable.”

“I was thinking of getting married,” I say, accepting the glass of punch, and glancing warily at the marrieds-and-engaged.

“Well I won’t say that’s not predictable,” says Miss Gibb, quite kindly. “And is that what Johnny is thinking too?”

“I think so.”

Miss Gibb lifts her eyebrows.

“Well, I haven’t gotten it in writing if that’s what you mean,” I say, sounding more defensive than I’d intended. Glad comes to join us in the corner. “I’m tipsy as a jaybird. Either of you want to throw back your heads and wail a bit?”

“You’re a good girl, Glad,” says Miss Gibb.

“I won’t get married. I’d like to see Los Angeles,” Glad tells us—Los Angeles is where the next Olympic games will be held. “You won’t see Los Angeles if you’re married. Don’t get married, please, Aggie. You must come too. We’ll train together. It will be just like it was!”

“I’m not fast enough,” I say, and I recognize the truth in it. It strikes me that the truth should make me sadder than it does. Instead, I feel unexpectedly freed. No more races. I can do something else instead.

“She is so fast enough, isn’t she, Miss Gibb?”

Miss Gibb inclines her head and examines me. “No,” she says simply. “I must agree with Aggie. Aggie is not made for the sprint distance.”

I swallow the rest of the punch in one burning gulp. It’s one thing to say it for myself, and quite another to have it confirmed. I can feel my breath accelerating as my future contracts. But Miss Gibb isn’t done. “Aggie is not a sprinter. She’s something else instead. Aggie will go a long, long way, mark my words.”

Glad throws her head back and laughs. “I think you’re tipsy too, Miss Gibb.”

“You may be right, Miss Wright.”

“She always is, you know,” I say, but the conversation isn’t mine anymore. I am drifting elsewhere, into another story that might just be mine to claim. I am imagining myself as Mrs. Johnny Tracy, and the thought of it makes me want to leap in among the girls on the sofa, drowning in punch, crying and laughing with my head thrown back.

But that isn’t my way of being. I couldn’t really do such a thing, cross over the invisible boundary that keeps me always apart. Maybe the distant gaze I’ve perfected in photographs is not an invention, but a true telling of myself. My imagination stops here. I’ve come as far as I can in this game of being Aganetha Smart, golden girl runner.

“More punch, Miss Gibb?” says Glad.

“I am a god-awful chaperone.”

“And we thank you for it, Miss Gibb.”

NOT LONG AFTER
falls Black Thursday. October 24, 1929.

Nothing is the same again, although we can’t guess that, not immediately, and none of us do. I am preoccupied in any case. I am not thinking about Black Thursday. It does not occur to me that Mr. P. T. Pallister of Rosebud Confectionary will shutter his sponsorship of the Rosebud Ladies’ Athletics Club effective immediately and fire Mr. Tristan, nor that most of the track clubs in Toronto will vanish—those for women most suddenly—and that hundreds of factory girls will be laid off and there will be no more girls’ softball teams, or hockey teams, or track teams.

I am caught up in another problem altogether, a private problem that seems to belong only to me. I tell no one for the time being.

And Johnny says nothing further of marriage.

“
MOM, SHE THINKS
you’re Edith.”

“Isn’t that something.” The woman locks the brake. She’s got me facing the galley kitchen, where the girl has gone and helped herself to a tall glass of juice. I see the ice cube tray left out on the counter, already melting.

The woman comes around before me. “Do I remind you of your sister Edith?”

I sit up straighter in my chair. Do you know Edith? The kettle whistles.

It isn’t herbal tea I’m wanting, but the girl places a cup of steaming peppermint under my nose.

“You look the same as always, Miss Smart, not that we ever really had the chance to speak up close like this,” the woman says, going to the counter to put away the ice cube tray. My eyes fill with sudden tears. She has called me by my proper title. It would seem she knows me better than her children do, better than anyone I’ve met in years. It would seem she knows me.

“Honey?” the girl says, and I think, for a flash, that she is addressing me.
Honey.
But she stirs a dollop into my cup before I’ve had a chance to refuse. She plops into the chair beside me and guzzles from her glass. She doesn’t think to spoon me my tea, which I cannot otherwise consume. Distractedly, the woman directs the girl to help.

And so she lifts a spoonful and blows on its liquid surface. I open my mouth.

“I’ve found something for your movie, Max—I just have to go and. . . .” The woman drifts around the room, plucking at the stacks of papers, exits hazily.

“I think it’s going well,” the girl tells her brother. He pours himself a glass of juice identical to hers, and sits at the table in the vacated chair.

I see the tray of ice cubes once again out upon the countertop, melting.

“I hate this place,” the girl adds in a low voice. “Mom’s got to sell. Mrs. Smart too.”

“Miss Smart.”

“Miss Smart,” the girl repeats automatically, and shivers. “It’s almost like it’s haunted.”

What’s wrong with that, I’d like to know?

Here is Fannie, as if she’s been waiting for her cue, coming in through a crack that runs down the plaster wall on an angle from top to bottom, like someone’s carved it there, though I know its cause is nothing more than the shifting of rocks and earth under a rotting foundation. Fannie slips into the room and walks around the perimeter, her face turned from mine. I can’t catch her eye.

She’s troubled. She circles the room, faster and faster, becoming a whirl, a shadow. She wants me to follow. She’s gone, smashing insubstantial through the window that is visible when I turn my head.

Out the window, a ploughed field and a stand of pines, and I see what Fannie’s trying to tell me: I’m sitting on the wrong side of things.

I grip the table, but cannot rise.

The woman’s footfalls shake the floor on approach. “Here it is!” She’s waving a scrap of glossy paper. “Look, Miss Smart, it’s you! You were in a magazine. I found the clipping on my mother’s dresser after she passed. It was in an envelope with your name on it, Miss Smart, but never licked shut. Mama’s husband cleared everything out—her second husband, that is, not my father. They were living in Vancouver and I was in Toronto, so I couldn’t rescue more than letters and photos to carry home on the plane. Car accident, Miss Smart, tragic. You never really get over a shock like that. But it was years ago now. Kaley wasn’t even born.”

She pauses in her story. Already, I know too much about her; I recognize the type, a woman comfortable foisting intimate, unwanted details of her life onto strangers. Next, she’ll be telling me about her cervical polyps and divorce settlement.

The woman continues: “Mama always clipped things to give to people—recipes, news stories, book reviews. I assume she meant this for you, Miss Smart, though we never had any back-and-forth. We always knew you were some kind of famous runner. That’s what gave Max the idea for the movie! We remembered you running in our back field.”

I can’t see the envelope or the photograph. “My glasses,” I mutter, but I haven’t got any. Lost them years ago. Never found them, though I look from time to time, pawing in jacket pockets, thumping around my bedside table.

“It’s you running past the lighthouse,” the girl tells me.

“The lighthouse? Is that still standing?” Surprise grinds the words out of me.

“Of course!” she says. “We’re going to take you there.”

“Kaley!” Max’s tone is warning. He’s standing on a chair, aiming his camera at the photo flattened on the tabletop.

“Read out the caption,” he directs.

The girl’s sleek head leans over the tiny black text: “‘Miss Aganetha Smart, age seventy-six, and a gold medalist in track at the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics, runs on her farm west of Toronto. This summer’s Games is the first at which women will contest the marathon distance.’”

“What’s the date?” he asks.

“Doesn’t say, but it had to be 1984,” she tells him. “Los Angeles. The Canadian women’s marathon record was set way back then, and it’s never been broken since. Crazy, huh.”

“That’s your job, right, Kales? And they’ll put you in magazines too.”

She doesn’t answer him.

“I meant to give it to you.” The woman smoothes the crumpled magazine page, as if she hasn’t followed along with the conversation but is still thinking of her mother. “I kept it, after all. I did mean to give it to you, Miss Smart, but after I moved back here with the kids, and I brought over a coffee cake—you know, meet your neighbours—and your sister invited me in, and you were so upset by it—well. We never had any back-and-forth.”

I don’t remember that. I don’t think she’s telling that story at all the way it really happened. Does she mean to imply I’ve cast unfair judgement on her? Who does she think I am? She won’t let it go. She repeats herself deliberately, rolling her observation around. She wants me to consider the implications, but it means nothing to me:
We never had any back-and-forth.

“Do I know you?” I demand.

ACROSS THE FIELD
behind the line of pines is the Granny Room. Behind the pines is my mother. She is not afraid to step forward and show herself, spine straight, her eyes deep with calm like the colours of an ocean shot through with sun.

There are two stories to get straight in my head. They don’t belong together, and they do, and I want them straight in my head.

Both stories are about my mother.

My mother is a woman of grave and particular knowledge, and she helps many girls and women, but in the manner of how she helps them, here is the problem. It is the kind of help that draws a stark line between people: for it, or against.

My mother is not like most.

My mother thinks in practicalities. She does not judge a person’s situation in moral terms. She seems incapable of it. She listens, and she responds.

“Is Mrs. Smart in?” “Is the lady of the house in?” “I was told there was a lady here could help.” “Help me, please.” Hushed whispers. Begging. Fear.

The men, the husbands, they come differently, loud and hoarse and excited, to fetch Mrs. Smart to birth their brand-new sons. The fathers always hope for sons, and mostly, so do the mothers. Sons never turn up whispering for the aid of Mrs. Smart.

Fannie is four summers buried when what happens happens. I am fourteen years old, and I’ve begun my monthlies, which are not yet regular. Mother doses me with a tonic when she thinks I look peaky. I look peaky more often than not this summer, but it isn’t my monthlies, which haven’t come since April, it’s a general restlessness building in me. George’s letters, now infrequent, invite me to come and visit.

George writes about seeing a dance marathon, the girls and men whirling the open floor for hours, even through the night and into the next day; he tells of how he won a bet by picking the winning couple, an unlikely pair, both girls, sisters. He writes about Sunnyside Amusement Park, and the rides, and the gigantic swimming pool churning with bathers.

Carefully, I read out George’s invitation to my mother. “‘If you come, I’ll take you to the races.’”

“The races?” Mother is distracted, paring and soaking small whole cucumbers for pickling.

“Horses, I think,” I say.

“Do you want to see horses race?”

I am silent.

“Let George come home to visit,” says Mother. “Toronto is a big city. You would need chaperoning. And what is he thinking of, asking in the middle of summer, our busiest time?”

She exaggerates. Late summer or early fall is our busiest time—harvest, more precisely—but I know
no
when I hear it.

“But I want to see George. He’s my brother!”

“Edith is your sister. Go visit her. Cora, you go too.” Cora has come into the kitchen with another basin of freshly picked cukes. “Bake Edith a cake,” says our mother. “Take her some beans and tomatoes from the garden.”

We don’t want to, Cora and I. Reluctantly we shuffle around the kitchen, gathering ingredients for a sweet loaf with a crumb top.

There is a knock at the summer kitchen door. Olive, who is packing beans into glass jars in preparation for canning them on the hot stove, answers. She comes quickly into the house.

“Mother,” Olive says quietly. “A girl for you.”

Cora and I look to catch a glimpse of the girl, but we see only that she is not much older than us, and that we do not know her. Someone has brought her here and dropped her at the end of our lane, and she has walked slowly up it, wondering what she will find in this house. We lower our eyes as she follows Mother through the dining room. The sound of Father’s hammer comes from upstairs. He is building cedar closets in unlikely corners of the house. The tang of the planed wood perfumes the air and fragrant boards are stacked in the great room, through which Mother and the girl must pass.

Cora measures flour and soda as I read off instructions from a “receipt” written in our mother’s hand. Crumb Cake, it’s called. We bake it for every day, not company. Butter, oats, flour, brown sugar. Best eaten hot from the oven with a fresh cup of tea, to wash down the crumbs. A bit dry by the second day.

“Two eggs, well beaten. One cup of sour milk.”

“You sour it.”

We have poured the batter into pans, ready to bring to Olive in the summer kitchen, in hopes that she can watch them for us in the oven out there, when there is another knock. This time it’s at the door that opens into the dining room. But we hear the man already backing up into the yard, calling for Mrs. Smart, as if the windows might answer him.

The hammering above stops briefly before resuming again.

I look at Cora and Cora looks at me. Olive comes in from the summer kitchen, drying her hands on her stained apron.

“Busy day,” I say.

Olive opens the door to the man, who won’t come in. He’s from the neighbouring county, and it’s their first baby, and he doesn’t know what to do, but he can’t leave her, his wife, for long, she’s moaning, can Mrs. Smart hurry, please!

Olive fetches Mother. Mother comes calmly, asks a few questions about the type of pains, the frequency, has there been a gush of water, and she determines she must go.

“But the gir—” Mother stops Cora’s question with her hand.

“I’ll gather my things and follow you right away,” Mother tells the man, and she shuts the door on him, and turns to us. “You will look after the girl who has come. Her name is Betty, and she will need much watching, just now. Olive, you know how to apply the cold compresses. Brew some of my Woman’s Tea with fresh garlic to fight infection. She is comfortable now, but she could become very ill, and if she takes a turn for the worse, you must find a way to fetch me. And keep your hands washed and very clean.”

“But our cake for Edith?”

“Leave the cake for later. I know you girls will be of help to Betty. One of you must stay with her at all times, do you understand?”

And then, just before she walks out the door, she says to me that I must not run for the doctor. “The doctor will not be able to help.”

The ordinary summer day is changed, like that.

Our mother gone down the lane, Cora and I follow Olive on hushed, eager feet toward the Granny Room, where a bed is kept for the girls who come. The girls rarely stay longer than a night or two, sometimes a week at most. I do not wonder whether my mother accepts payment, or whether the girls offer it, or their families. I know nothing about the transactions that go on here, or even, it must be said, about the work itself that my mother does on behalf of these girls. I have not, until today, been permitted to enter the Granny Room, not while a girl rests there.

Olive leads Cora and me through the great room, littered and crammed with our father’s detritus, and through the front hall, which no one ever uses as an entryway, although there is a door, and into the parlour, which belonged to our grandmother. I remember her not at all, but Olive and Cora claim bits and pieces of memory: horehound candies kept in a glass jar with a cork stopper, handed out to little visitors, and a scrap of black netting she wore pinned to her tightly knotted hair to signify perpetual mourning: she had much to mourn, having lived through the deaths of her husband, four grandchildren, and a daughter-in-law.

Grandmother’s furniture remains: a stiff horsehair chair and matching sofa, with carved dark wooden legs and backs, and a china cabinet of dark wood and glass, in which Mother now keeps her tinctures, medicines, and preparations. There is a red rug on the floor, richly patterned with vines and flowers, leaves and birds.

I would like to stop and examine it more closely. Are the birds speaking to one another? Are there wild animals among the vines?

We pause outside the closed door: the bedroom.

“Not all of us at once,” says Olive. “We’ll frighten her.”

“She deserves to be frightened,” says Cora rather breathlessly. “After what she’s done.”

“What has she done?” I’m confused.

“Nothing that concerns us,” says Olive.

“It concerns us now. She’s in our charge.”

“And we’ll look after her like Mother would,” says Olive, becoming suddenly fierce and turning on Cora: “And if you won’t, then stay away. Do the beans and bake the crumb cake and go off and visit Edith, and leave this girl to me and Aggie.”