Girl Runner (20 page)

I AM INSIDE
the apartment, alone before Olive’s mirror, brushing my hair one hundred strokes, one thousand, when Glad wins the 100-metre dash for the second year in a row, retaining her reign as Canadian women’s champion. Johnny takes third place in the hurdles, and promptly announces his retirement. He intends to go to medical school instead.

Olive carries home the afternoon paper and knocks on the door. She knows I’m in here, but she doesn’t choose to disturb me, even though it is her room, by rights. I hear the sound of newsprint sliding under the door, paper crinkling and rustling, and of Olive’s soft retreating footsteps. She’s folded the pages in such a way that I am certain to see the two of them the moment I turn to look. Here they are, pictured in black-and-white, Glad and Johnny, the two of them together. Yet they are no more together than they were when I saw them beside the train. They do not touch, they face the camera, they grin in tandem. But I see it clearly: I’ve been forgotten—no, it is as if I don’t exist. I feel clammy, though it’s hot.

I don’t say to Olive “I’m going out.” I overtake her in my rush down the stairs, and I don’t stop running until I’m outside. I feel like a bug whose rock has just been overturned, exposed suddenly to the blaring massive world from which it has been hiding.

I stumble along the crowded summer street: electric trolleys and horse carts and automobiles sounding horns and bicycles and dogs and children underfoot or chasing balls and I know that I must look for a job, and soon. No one is going to hire me to pose in a fur coat or a bathing costume. My time has come and gone. So soon. I can hardly believe it. The understanding fills my body from the outside in like cold water is being pumped into my bowels. There is no money anymore, the money has vanished in the crash. This new decade has stumbled before it can get properly started—where will it go?

I begin to run, between people, around them, my feet in their hard-soled black shoes tapping the paved sidewalk. I run even though I know how ridiculous I must look in my long dark skirt and elbow-length sleeves. I run south until everything crowding in on me grows indistinct and loses shape and doesn’t matter, until I meet the lake, and then I stop and hold myself still, and watch the water lap the shore.

Is it possible that I am twenty-two and already at the end of the best part of my story?

GLAD CRIES.

I hear Olive on the stairs, coming in from outside, and I hear her pause, and retreat and go back down and close the door. I hear the click of Olive’s key in the lock, shutting us in. She’s guessed too, what we all know, and she’s been waiting, like all of us, for what must finally be done about it.

Glad and Johnny are in love.

That is not what Glad says.

She says, “We’d like to marry, Johnny and me. Oh, Aggie.” She slumps in one of the hard, velvet-covered chairs I bought with my fur money, and which we arranged in front of the fireplace that has never worked. The sounds that accumulate on a hot city sidewalk rise and spill through our open window and into the long narrow room. We’ll never fill the room with enough furniture. It echoes. Glad wipes her eyes and blows her nose exhaustively into a handkerchief.

“This is awful,” she says, looking up at me.

“No, it’s not,” I say, leaning my tall frame against the plaster wall beside the fireplace, suddenly as languid and easy as a blade of meadow grass moving with the wind. I’m relieved it is up to her to tell me, and not Johnny, although it seems cowardly on his part, fundamentally unfair. I suppose it speaks to their relationship: Glad is happy to spare Johnny the suffering, and Johnny is happy to be spared. I suppose it speaks to my relationship with each of them too. I see that I trust Glad in a way that I never trusted Johnny. I’ve always been sure of Glad.

I come close, kneel before her, and lay my head in her lap, and hold her hands.

“I’m a terrible friend,” says Glad solemnly. “You deserve better.”

“You’re not. You’re the best friend I ever had.” I mean it too, even as I hear the past tense eliding us into once upon a time. I see Glad in that claustrophobic change room in the bowels of Rosebud Confectionary, marching up to me and telling me what to do. I see her sleek bobbed head cresting inexorably past mine on the track, and I remember looking for her as I cross the line and steal gold. What do I care of Johnny? I’ve had many months to foreclose on that loss. I can convince myself that I never really knew him, the distance between us like a long railroad line between the East and the Prairies. What we had seems ordinary, I guess, something anyone else might have too, and I can pretend that ordinary comes easy, goes easy.

It’s Glad I want to keep.

“Where will you live?” I wonder, and stop myself. “No, don’t tell me. I don’t need to know.”

“We won’t get married right away,” Glad says all in a rush. “We’ll wait. Until everyone is ready.”

“Ready?” I cry, pulling away from her. “Everyone?”

I am ashamed, my desolation circling her ankles like a beaten dog.

What went wrong between us?
I want to know, as if she’s done this to me deliberately, just to hurt me.

She is distracted and rises, pacing around the room like she’s marking out a track for a race we’ve yet to run.

I want to tell her about being a girl in the Granny Room and have to curl into a ball to stop the truth from flowing out.

Please get up, she says to me. I’ll always be your friend. Please believe me.

THERE. I
’
VE JUST DENIED
my own sister. I’ve said I don’t know her. I’ve said she couldn’t be who they say she is. I’ve told a terrible lie, and the room is rocked by it.

“She’s not making sense anymore.”

“No, it’s that she doesn’t believe us.”

“I’m going to cry!”

“Don’t get dramatic, Kaley,” the woman says. “We’ll take her to the lighthouse, like we planned. It’s this house. She’s not happy here.”

I’ve told a terrible lie, and my heart is rocked by it.

I’m experiencing an old familiar itch. It isn’t good. It’s the urge to confess, to tell all, like a bared and humbled person who wants to scrape herself clean, to cut from herself a balled-up truth that’s so ingrown it will leave an ugly hole in its absence.

I’ve hidden this scrap so long, I thought I’d killed it, but here it is, beating like an extra heart.

I want these people to know. I very particularly want the girl—the runner—to know.

Is this why I’m here, in this room where I shouldn’t be, looking out this window at a stand of pines, with no one to reassure me that I am who I believe myself to be? Something has rushed us toward one another, some clarity of purpose that I can’t recognize. But I will. I will get to the bottom of it. It is my job, after all. It is a job I’m very good at, no matter that I’m a woman: I get to the bottom and bring up every piece of it and hang it out clean and simple, without adornment, plain and true and utterly, intractably mysterious.

OUR GRAND APARTMENT
over Yonge Street empties out like it’s been lifted and turned upside down, its contents pitched into the trash heap of begone and good riddance. Glad escapes home to her family; that is all I know, and I don’t want to know more. Olive and I move without leaving a forwarding address, together, into a different apartment, a rooming house with a landlady who cooks the meals. We bring with us the hard, velvet-covered chairs, which we stuff into the single shabby respectable room we share, like we did before I’d gone golden.

“You look familiar.” The landlady scrutinizes me, almost accusingly, when Olive and I come to arrange about the room.

“I’m Olive Smart, and this is my sister Aganetha Smart,” says Olive. “Aganetha won gold for Canada at the Olympics.”

The woman gazes blankly between us.

“She beat a German girl in a running race.”

No, the woman shakes her head. That isn’t it. She frowns at me. Even though the weather is merely mild, I am wearing the fur coat from the advertisement that I made for Canada’s most famous department store, and which I kept as part of my payment, and which I have not sold, even though Olive and I could use the money. Olive is the one who tells me not to: “You’re better off keeping something like that, in the long run. Who knows when it will come in handy?”

The fur coat offers courage and disguise. I turn the collar up around my neck and strike a pose. Recognition flickers across the woman’s face. She appears to be any age between thirty and fifty, with skin as waxy and smooth and plain as a clean white potato.

“Aganetha also modelled in advertisements.”

“I knew it! I knew I knew you. Come in, see the room. You’re boarding together, are you? Sisters?”

“Sisters.”

Olive also finds me a job at Rosebud, even though half the girls have been fired and those who remain have taken a pay cut. The Rosebud Ladies’ Athletics Club has vanished as presumptively as it arrived. The track goes unkempt. Mr. P. T. Pallister himself is rumoured to have gone insane or tried to kill himself. It is his wife now in charge of the business, and she is hard as stone, because it is her duty to keep what he couldn’t safe for her children. Mothers can be hard when it comes to their children.

Leave it to Olive to get me hired under such circumstances.

Olive is resourceful like that. By spring, having got me settled, she will find herself a husband in similar fashion, applying sheer determination and persistence, even if he will move her to Australia. She will blend in with her new circumstances. She will farm sheep, her fair skin broiling under a foreign sun. She will do battle with herds of wild rabbits. She will raise a handful of hearty Australian children. Her letters to me, arriving several times a year, seem to drop in from another planet, a world only remotely connected to my own. I can’t read them without being moved to tears. The thought of Olive—sturdy, practical, indispensable—claiming a brand-new life, stomping her own path in rubber wellies and trousers, her dark hair gone to wild grey. I ask for photographs. She’ll travel home for our mother’s funeral, but not our father’s, and after that we will not see each other again.

But for now, we are together. For now, I take us for granted, and our pairing in times of need, the comfort of sharing a bed and sleeping side by side, her shallow nighttime breath warm on my neck.

I FEEL HOLLOW.
I go about my tasks in a haze, removed from the ordinary sensations of living. “Keep moving,” the girl beside me has to prompt as the greasy moulds pile up at my elbow, and I stand staring blankly into space, thinking of nothing, it seems.

I can’t enter into my body; it is a struggle. I am drifting. I drift toward vanishing.

Except when I am running.

When I am running I inhabit and exit my body in the same moment. I bear witness to the harshest of physical sensations, even while I feel myself flying free and away. I do not want to remember what has happened to me. I do not want to reflect on the past. I can’t, in a way. I’m not made for regret.

I run alone, out behind Rosebud Confectionary. I run evenings, after my shift, even after the snow falls, even after it piles deep, I run with extra socks inside my black boots, slipping and sliding around and around, knocking a path flat where my feet land.

I suppose I look a sight. I suppose I don’t care a hoot.

I run until the lights on the top floor of the factory go dark. That means the floor has been cleaned for the night, and the women are moving their heavy buckets down to one below, wrung mops slung over shoulders. Then I run the four streets over to the narrow row house where Olive and I share a room. Soaked through, I change out of my wet woollen clothes in a hurry, shivering, chilled to the core. There isn’t enough hot water to draw a bath, but Olive fetches a boiling kettle from the landlady’s kitchen and fills a basin, and I damn near scald myself sluicing my arms and face and neck with a hot cloth, wringing it out and washing until the water has lost its heat. And then I wrap in blankets and huddle in our shared bed until the shivering stops.

The landlady saves me supper.

IT
’
S MARCH.
It must be just March. The light has changed. Evenings are brighter, the snow is a dirty skiff on the track. I am loosening into my warm-up rounds when I see Glad coming around the side of the squat flat-roofed red brick factory building. She must have slipped through the fencing. I am too startled to stop, though I feel like I’ve been thrown sideways. Yet I hardly pause in my stride.

I haven’t glimpsed sight of her since our parting last summer, the memory of which I’ve shredded and burnt and buried.

She falls in beside me as I pass by her. We don’t say a word as we pace each other stride for stride around the track. I’m on the inside, so she has to work a little harder on the turns, like another race we ran together.

I consider saying to her “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to beat you, I only meant to win.” But I can’t say what isn’t true—I’m not sorry and never will be, because gold was what I wanted. I would have given anything to win, yes; wouldn’t she have too?

We go twice around like this, in silence, winding ourselves up, until we’re giddy from the absurdity, almost, giggling at our own speechless awkwardness. I can’t be the first to speak—it’s what I feel strongly when I first see her coming around the building, that it is up to Glad to say whatever she’s come to say. But as we run stride for stride, step for step, an easiness enters my bones and muscles, a lightness I haven’t experienced in all the months of hard solitary work, and it is all I can do to stop myself from lifting her into a whirling hug. That’s how much I’ve missed her.

“Sprints?” she says to me.

I nod.

We run Coach Tristan’s favourite drill, jogging the turns, sprinting the straightaways, around and around until I’m quite certain I’ll be sick. We’re gasping on the turns, slowing to a crawl as we prepare ourselves for the burn of another go.

I don’t want to be the first to quit. From her silence, I know Glad doesn’t either.

We’ve stopped looking at each other. We can’t speak. We’re too far gone. Without a coach to give us the signal, I fight through the fog of depletion to wonder what will happen. Will we go until one of us drops? Or will we go forever? It seems a possibility.

Glad stumbles—how many laps in? It is growing dark. She stumbles and I grab her hand to prevent her falling into the hard gravel and icy chunks on the track. I feel it before I see it—a ring, a band of cold metal. I pull away.

She says nothing, but her smile is sad. Maybe I’m just projecting.

“You’re married?” The words slam out of me. I can’t stop them, surprised by the anger in my voice.

“Just,” Glad confesses. “I wanted to tell you before it came out in the papers.”

“I never read the papers,” I say.

“Well,” she says. “Well. We’re married.”

“That’s nice.” What else am I to say? Not that, I think furiously—saying nothing would have been better.

“Isn’t it?” Glad leaps on my conventional reply. Her sweet face opens to my pinched envy. “Oh, isn’t it?” As if I might be a friend like any other, but I am not, and she is not. We are not just friends, and never have been, right from the very start. From the very start we’ve been rivals too, opponents, competitors. Perhaps Glad has always known this; perhaps I did not want to.

She’s won. She’s beat me. I may have bested her in a running race—gently fading victory—but this time, when it really matters, I’ve lost, and she wants, sweetly and hopefully—do you see what I am saying?—to be certain that I know.

She wants to hurt me, just a little bit; only now do I understand.

I’m not angry anymore.

“It is nice,” I say, of her marriage, but also of all that I can now leave unspoken between us. I need not apologize for what’s gone before. I need only give her leave to be who she is, and love her as she goes, which is all that has ever been asked of me—isn’t it?—by the ones that I love. “It’s very very nice,” I say again, flushing as I repeat myself.

“I’m glad,” she speaks confidingly.

“Of course you are, you’ll always be,” I say, attempting a joke.

After a pause: “You’re working here again?”

I nod. I don’t mention that my job is in the scullery, cleaning moulds. The long metal trays with their inverted rosebuds must be scoured and sterilized in a three-step process that cracks and reddens the skin on my hands and arms, and steams open the pores of my face. My hands look like they belong to an old woman, but my face is clear as a child’s.

Glad and I cross the dirty slush that is freezing into hard ridges as night approaches. I offer her a drink from the glass jar I keep by the door. The water is sharp with shards.

When we’ve drunk, I open the back door of the factory with a key, and we walk along the quiet hall, past the darkened windows, over the parquet flooring, dripping wet, aching, flushed and silent, quite as if nothing has ever changed, as if inside these walls we’ve stepped into our former selves: teammates, friends.

“Miss Smart,” nods the night watchman. He opens the front door for us, and we pass through and out into the darkening night. The doors are locked behind us.

We stand in the street at the bottom of the factory’s wide polished concrete steps.

I need to go home to the room I share with Olive. I need the kettle of hot water, and the scalding cloth, and the blankets, and my bed. I need the landlady’s plate of mash with carrots and boiled salt pork. I need what I need.

Glad needs what she needs.

“I can’t retire yet,” Glad is telling me. “I want to see Los Angeles! I hear the weather’s beautiful. What about you, Aggie? Won’t you race this summer? You can’t keep training all by yourself.”

I’ve not been thinking of these sessions as preparation for anything at all. This isn’t training, it’s survival.

“Johnny’s studying medicine—and I’ve been running with the university’s team. You’d like the coach. He’s just as mean as Mr. Tristan, not that you’d know about that. You were always Tristan’s favouri—”

“Please, Glad. I don’t need a coach.” Harsher than I mean it to be. I begin to walk, Glad falling in beside me.

“I’m not a student, I’m just training with them—I’m the only girl—it’s really fun, you’d love it, Aggie, and you’re just as good as any of us. You could keep up.”

I shake my head.

“But I miss you, Aggie.”

My stomach plunges.
You do?

“I’m sorry,” I hear myself saying. I see that it is my turn to walk away, to step into the corn and vanish.

“It’s for the best.” I quicken my pace. I’m shivering in my damp clothes, and she must be chilled too. We need to get out of the cold.

“You’re not saying good-bye?” Glad may be entirely sincere but she sounds like a breathless actress in a movie, a Jean Harlow type. I laugh. I actually laugh. It could be taken as cruel, but Glad laughs in return. “Of course not,” she says, to reassure herself. “Of course it’s not good-bye, it never is, not really.”