Girl Runner (19 page)

“Sit,” she orders me, and she pours me a glass of thick milk, which I manage with some effort to work down. But I can’t for the life of me swallow even one bite of ham and onions. The mere act of cutting the fraying meat has me sweating and gritting my teeth. The milk is churning a sour froth in my gut, and the smell and sight of the pale pink flesh coming apart under my knife and fork triggers a gag, and another, and I stand abruptly. Without excuse, I run from the room.

I can hear that I’ve been followed. I flush the toilet, grateful for indoor plumbing. I rinse my mouth. I lean my head against the door. I don’t want to go out there. I don’t want to talk to him. But he is waiting for me, I know.

I open the door.

“Johnny?” I whisper.

His arms are crossed and he leans with one shoulder against the wall. I can’t read his posture, nor his face. I want to see concern, tenderness, but that is not what I see. I see idle interest, vague disgust. He shouldn’t have followed me. I’m angry that he has stood outside the door, spying, intruding on the private sounds of my sickness. I stalk past him to the bedroom and sit on the edge of my bed, my hands loose in my lap. They’re shaking and I let them lie there on my lap, one wrist on either knee, palms facing up while I stare down with a sense of distance, as if I am removed from my own body.

Johnny takes his time walking down the hallway.
He knows
, I think, when he closes the door and stands with his back against the long mirror. I see no dainty way to wrest open the conversation, and so I plunge directly in, as if into frigid water that arrests my breath.

“I might be . . . I am . . . I think. Having your baby.” I look at my shaking hands, not at him. I can’t bear the sight of his reaction, yet I can’t bear not knowing. I glance up at him with those words splashed into the air—
having your baby
—feeling shy, hot, humiliated, infuriated, and he does not deny that this might be so. “It’s my fault,” I offer because I feel that I should, that he expects it of me. I hope to catch his eye now that I’ve found it in me to look at him. I’m braver. The cold is bracing, but it won’t kill me. I turn my hands to grip my legs, wrapping the knee bones, unconsciously pulling myself into a protective hunch.

I’m ever so slightly reassured to see that the news has stirred him up.

But he won’t look at me, and can’t seem to take it in, moving restlessly around the room. “Are you sure?”

“I don’t know! It’s never happened to me before.”

“What are you going to do?”

I have no idea. For once in my life, I want him to tell me. No, I want him to say, with absolute hope and kindness and ardour:
Here is what we are going to do.
Maybe he could shout it. Would that be too much to ask? He could lift me in his arms, swing me in an elated embrace. Why doesn’t he? He could win me over and have me for good, if he tried even a little bit. Instead he paces the room, avoiding my eye. He plucks items from off my dressing table and stares at them. He goes and lays his fist against the windowpane, staring out across the street, his shoulders tight, the back of his neck shaved to short bristles. All the hope goes out of me.

The days are short and the deepness of night is already out there, beyond the glass. I can’t see another way.

“I’m going home,” I announce suddenly, with what passes for conviction. “I need to see my mother.” Still, he doesn’t turn.

Nor does he prevent me.

And suddenly it becomes too late for whatever might have been, whatever might have come to me, and to us, if only he would kneel before me and put his head in my lap, and say—but, no, I shall stop myself from going on in this way. Because that is not what happens.

This is the way it goes, instead.

Johnny turns from the window, says, “That sounds good. Your mother must miss you.” As if we are now talking only about a visit.

“She does miss me, yes,” I say.

“Let me help. Let me pay for your train ticket.” He comes nearer, his fingertips tucked into the palms of his hands. It’s a habit he has. His fingernails and the grooves of his fingerprints are stained black and oily from his work with automobile engines. As if I mind. How will he get to medical school? Oddly—with sadness—I think of this even as we’re saying good-bye.

“That is very kind,” I tell him, of his offer to purchase a ticket, “but no, thank you.”

“I insist.”

“So do I.” My blood rising, my spirit. “So do I, Johnny!”

He stands in silence. We could turn the ship, yet, couldn’t we? There’s still time. Silent before me, head dropping to chest. Quietly he says, “Write me, won’t you, Aggie?”

And he goes, like that, quietly, shutting the door behind himself with care and caution. I would like to say that tears are shed, teeth gnashed, passion stirred, but instead I sit frozen, my eyes hooked on the thin line at the bottom of the door where the electric light from the hallway shines under. My room is quite dark. It is lit only by the pale yellow glow that rises up from the streetlights below, fogged and haloed.

I do not protest.

And there is no returning to this room or this moment, nor will there be, ever again.

OLIVE ACCOMPANIES ME
home for Christmas, early. She tells Mother as soon as we catch a private moment together, because I can’t bring myself to. It is just the three of us. I stand silent, teeth gritted, staring out the kitchen window at our snowed-in fields, at Cora stalking grimly to the barn in her grey mittens, carrying a basket to collect the morning’s eggs.

“I thought there was something peaky about you,” Mother says. She is as level as Johnny’s prairie. She does not fall into imagining the worst for me. She brings me to the Granny Room, and lays me on the bed, and palpates my abdomen through the silky fabric of my dress. She tells me I am about three months on, and what would I like to do?

I would like to undo what’s happened. Or, I would like Johnny to come for me. Both, I think.

She waits. When I do not reply, my mother says that a young woman in my situation has options, not many, just a few. “You could birth the baby, and we could find a home for it, or you might miscarry and the baby will come too early.” She does not say that she will help bring on a miscarriage. She does not say that I might keep the baby.

I can’t think clearly.

“There is not a great deal of time to wait,” she says. “When the early months have passed, the baby is quite settled and will grow regardless. Do you understand?”

“I thought Johnny . . .” I falter.

“Does he know?”

I nod and look at her helplessly. How many versions of this old story has my mother listened to, without judgement, and though never foolish herself? Now here is a question for which I would love the answer, and failed to ask when given the chance: Why does my mother choose to help foolish girls?

“I’m sorry, Mother,” I tell her and her face goes soft and her eyes fill with tears, for me, and she strokes my face. “I know.”

She knows her help can only encompass so much, and after that I’ll be on my own, as you are, if you are brave enough to know it—though I could put that differently, I suppose. I could say you’re on your own, as you are, if you’re stubborn enough to know it.

“Let me help,” my mother says.

Here it is, told plain and thin. I’m become a girl in the Granny Room.

I RETURN TO TORONTO
in the spring, coming the same way I’d gone: by train.

Johnny is waiting for me at the station. Glad too. They stand near each other—not too near—but she looks at him and he at her, only a glance, brief as lightning, as the train shudders to a stop. They cannot know that I am watching them. It is like intercepting enemy code. Their seriousness, their silence, their unity as they wait for me is frightening. I know, instantly.

Still, when the three of us meet at the bottom of the steps, we appear to go on as before, as if nothing has changed. Pretence erects a stiff structure around me, dictating what I can and cannot say or do, lest I crumble—or the world beyond me crumbles. There are rules. I must hold fast.

Glad is quick to throw her arms around me and reach up to kiss me on both cheeks, and I receive her offering warmly, my heart beating wildly. She does not seem a stranger, and I want to weep with relief.

“Are you all better then? Are you quite well?”

I bite my lip and nod yes. I cling to Glad. I’ve missed her.

I don’t dare look at Johnny to guess his thoughts. Did we ever really know each other? It seems unfathomable. It is as if he is that much greater than me, and I am that much smaller. If she notices, Glad doesn’t let on. She holds me at arm’s length, a whirlwind of information, reporting on our apartment, and on the irritating habits of the roommate who has replaced me, and on how I am not to worry, because I can stay in her room—Glad’s—for now.

I don’t want to stay in Glad’s room.

We are following a script we can’t step away from.

I’m a wretched actress, never worse, but Glad and Johnny read their lines naturally, believably, and I can only look on and admire their fluency in dissemblance, quite out of my reach.

Johnny does not kiss me, of course. I am surprised when he squeezes my hand. The hope that leaps in my heart at his touch is dreadful. I think,
Couldn’t we continue like this, the three of us? Couldn’t we, just?
I think how happy we could be, the three of us. I don’t need him all to myself, I think. I could let her have as much of him as she liked. I wouldn’t be jealous, if only I could keep them both, like this.

Johnny is squeezing my hand, and my heart soars, but just as abruptly, he lets go my fingers from his. I struggle to find a reason to keep breathing. Jealousy attacks me like a coward, leaping from behind, and I know that I can’t share, after all—either of them.

“I’ll stay with Olive,” I say. I don’t make an excuse for turning down Glad’s offer to share her own room.

“Oh!” says Glad, as if I’ve hurt her, but I don’t care.

THE ROOMMATE
with the alleged irritating habits who has taken my former quarters is not a runner. She works days, dawn to dusk, piecing gloves in a factory, and passes her spare hours at the pictures. She seems genuinely excited to meet me—a girl whose picture she’s seen in a magazine—but she does not take to me. In real life, in the flesh, I disappoint. All the qualities projected onto a girl photographed in a fur coat pale when the girl herself steps into one’s kitchen, wearing gloves and a hat and a blue serge coat with plain black buttons. Especially when the girl is me. Girl of projection: beautiful, self-possessed, elegant, bold. Girl of reality: in need of a hairbrush, distracted, scattered, cool.

The roommate is the sort of girl who takes care of her clothes and hair. She keeps the door to her room closed and spends plenty of leisurely time before the bathroom mirror, or so I assume. When we pass each other in the hallway or the kitchen, the silence is awkward, broken by mistimed statements about the weather that cross each other in the air.

The ginger tom has forgotten me, and hisses whenever I come near. I try not to take offence, but it seems a judgement. My spirits are that low. I am not prepared to be the person I have become.

This is the thick of summer. I practice exercises in Olive’s room, between the bed and the wall of windows. I place my hands flat on the floorboards to stretch my aching legs. I jog in place and perform jumping jacks that shake the rafters. The windows are open and the air off the lake is humid. It is far too late in the season to qualify for the Canadian championships, even if I wanted to.

“Come join us at the track,” Glad offers, but I decline.

“I’m still mending,” I say, and cough lightly, touching my chest with my fingers to prove it—Olive and I agreed last winter it would be best if she returned to the city and spread the word that I’d taken ill, and that my mother was caring for me. Even the suggestion of tuberculosis would be better than the whisper of unwanted pregnancy. As I cough, I realize that I almost believe the lie myself. It’s so plausible: of course I cannot run with Glad and Johnny. My cough is to blame. My cough has made me weak.

And it is true that I am weak, or weakened. I’ve pushed myself down too far inside, sanded off my edges, narrowed my hopes. I’ve got a secret now. It dare not be spoken, lest it ruin me.

Where to start again, after that?

Staring at myself in Olive’s mirror, I think that I look essentially unchanged—slender, tall, pale, my hair long, almost transparent—yet I feel strange within the apartment, my former home, its high white walls and huge open windows somehow confining. This is a place where I’ve been so free, so certain of love. Thinking of it, reminded, I can hardly breathe. But I cannot bear to leave its safety. I hide in Olive’s hushed room, relieved that she works long hours and that I am all alone. Sometimes I lie flat on the wide wood floorboards and bathe in radiant sunshine that streams through the windows, soaking in the warmth, as if it might liven me to wakening.

At night, I share the bed with my sister.

Sometimes I wake and I am holding her by the hand. Sometimes I wake and she is already awake, peering at me with concern. “You were talking in your sleep again. Shouting, more like it.”

I tell her I can’t remember.

“Just a dream,” she says, and I agree. But it is hard to relax. I curl in on myself and draw to the edge of the bed, as far from Olive as I can get, and try not to focus on her breathing, which tells me she’s lying there just as awake as I am, both of us miles from sleep.

I do not leave the apartment for an entire week, and then another, and another, and another, long enough to lose the roommate, who gives her month’s notice at the end of July, which is bad news, as I can ill afford to pay my share of the rent.

The tom cat switches his tail at me in disdain.

I hear Johnny’s voice, occasionally, in the rooms downstairs, and I take care not to go down, and he does not come up. Once I step unguardedly into the kitchen and discover him sitting at the table with a cup of tea, his feet bare and propped up on a chair, his hair slicked down and wet, perhaps with sweat. It is almost as if I’ve been electrocuted, so violent is my reaction. There is no hiding the way I crash against the doorframe, continue like an automaton to the cupboard over the sink, open it, stare inside blankly, leave it open, and stumble out of the room, smashing my shoulder again against the frame, as if my trajectory, once set, cannot be changed. As if I can’t see the opening, only its hard edges.