Girl Runner (5 page)

“Oh—I haven’t made the team, exactly,” I mumble. I’m soaked in sweat from my sprints around the track, and although the sun remains high overhead the wind has gone chilly.

“What do you say, Mr. Tristan?” Glad grins. “I know I just met her, but I like her.”

“You might not like her quite so much when you see her run,” says the coach. I can feel the tension rushing out of me, out of him too. Glad’s doing.

“Consider yourself a Rosebud girl,” the coach says to me, bowing ever so slightly. “Glad needs the competition.”

“I do!” she agrees. “Have I come too late today?”

“You’re never too late for me, Glad,” says the coach. I blush, as if I’ve just seen him touch her face, but she ignores him and squeezes my hand once before dropping it, like we’re already friends. I’m amazed at the idea of being friends with someone like Glad, who effortlessly commands confidence. She seems at ease being a girl and a runner, both.

“Let’s go,” she says simply.

I am thirsty. I am dusty. My muscles are raging and torn, my feet blistered. I haven’t eaten since breakfast at Mrs. Smythe’s table, a woman never overgenerous with her portions, even when all she’s serving up is a splat of grey porridge with molasses and a skiff of milk.

“Yes, let’s,” I reply.

The coach gives me the inside lane. Glad stretches beside me, swinging her arms in circles, bending and rocking at the waist, kicking her legs out like a dancer on a stage.

“Twice ’round,” says the coach. “On my go.”

And we’re off.

I can feel her giving me the track. She is being polite, offering up space like some kind of bargain, letting me run ahead. Is she going easy on me? I don’t like it. I’m offended. But it’s good to race with a bit of gristle on the tongue.

As we enter the first turn, it comes to me that I’ve never raced like this before. My toughest contests have been in the schoolyard against boys, straightforward tests with no tactical underbelly. I’m either the fastest, or close to it, an accepted fact, as it is also accepted that the longer the race, the more unlikely it will be that even the fastest, tallest, strongest boy could best me.

I’ve never raced anyone like Glad—my match. There crackles between us an undercurrent of emotions that I haven’t the experience to gauge, nor use to any advantage. All I know is that I’ve taken the first turn ahead of her, and I’ve stayed ahead, though she’s on my shoulder now, pushing a little. I don’t mean she touches me, I mean I can feel her presence, sapping me of will and strength, drip by drip, as if she’s put a tap into me. I have to get away from her.

I open up a gap between us on the back straightaway, but on the turn, she taps me again, easily, and it takes a kind of fury to pull away as we pass the coach. I catch a sense of him as if in a still photo, his hands clenched into fists at his side, his shoulder muscles risen up, his mouth open. He might be shouting instructions or encouragement, but I can’t take it in.

I hear my own breath, chopping the air. The turn feels smooth. I haven’t given way this time. She hasn’t closed the gap. I’m ahead and sailing, and something in me loosens—and that is when she takes me. I don’t even feel her coming, but suddenly I hear the coach yelling, and I know he’s not yelling for me, he’s yelling for Glad. He wants her to win.

It’s like hitting a wall of water, like an ocean of resistance has risen up before me and I’m plunging into it. We are on the final turn and Glad is gathering speed ahead of me, seemingly without effort while I flail and churn through waves that come heavy and dark. I’m not sure I can stay upright for this last stretch.

She has me by an impossible gap. Still, I press. I finish on my feet. I have to walk in circles to stay upright. I feel like a fool, so easily tricked and beaten, battered, stolen of breath.

“Great run!” Glad dances around me, grinning, scarcely winded.

“Do another two of those, and then we’ll work on starts,” the coach directs Glad, and she salutes him, heads out, alone, to sprint the track. I watch her take that first corner, compact and mighty, her stride coming short, leaning into the curve with a force I know I don’t have.

“It’s your first day,” says the coach kindly. “Everyone has to have a first day.”

“I guess so.” I feel as down as I’ve ever felt; I’m not a girl inclined to despair. What I’m seeing in my mind is the lane and the fields of my home, I’m seeing the path I ran through the back woods, the shortcut to town.

“You’ll catch her within the year.” The coach’s voice is very low, very calm. “And she knows it. She knows it.”

In stillness, we watch her glide past, her hair tucked neatly behind her ears. “Once more!” he calls, and then says, just as low and calm, to me, “She’s a good girl, Glad. You’re in luck to run with her. Her uncle owns this place.” Mr. Tristan gestures with his thumb toward the red brick factory.

I’m too in awe to reply.

We stand silent, watching Glad run, and then he informs me, briskly, clearing his throat, that I may use the ladies’ change room, inside the building. It is near the back entrance, impossible to miss. I haven’t noticed until now that my body is a mass of shivers in the cool breeze. He informs me that the team practices evenings when it’s light, mornings when it gets too dark, and never on Sundays. When the snow is deep, the team uses a gymnasium inside the factory. “It isn’t much more than an underground bunker,” he says apologetically, as if I might object. I must make all practices, no excuse good enough. He will expect me to race for the team next summer. He tells me a job offer from Rosebud Confectionary will be forthcoming: this is part of the bargain, trading one alliance for another, trading greasy pork for waxy chocolate, trading cuts from flashing blades for burns from hot moulds, trading softball for track.

I know how badly I want Rosebud, not how badly Rosebud wants me, but I hear myself dare to blurt out a request.

“My sister—could she work here too, do you think?”

The coach says quite easily, as if it were nothing, really, that he will look into it, but he expects that will be fine. “See you tomorrow?” As if he is the one who is uncertain, who does not know.

It washes over me, all in a shock, that despite my youth, despite my inexperience, despite just losing the first race of my brief career, which I desperately wished to win, he wants me. Rosebud wants me. Mr. P. T. Pallister wants me. I’ve done what I came here to do.

What I don’t see, and fail to grasp, is that he might want me not despite, but because of, youth and inexperience and failure. I’m so sure of myself, of this track I’m on. I’m sure it will be as easy as muscles on fire and gritted teeth and learning to take the corners, as easy as responding to commands, as easy as running itself, which comes easily for me even when it is rough and painful and grim. I could run another lap right now, I know it. I could run until sundown, just like I said. I know I can’t be spent.

WE
’
VE COME TO
the blue car: nondescript, wouldn’t stand out in police alerts.

The young man, Max, is opening a rear door, and the girl wheels my chair nearer.

I say, Are we going somewhere?

No reply.

The girl stops, fumbles with the belt: “How do we get her in?”

Max bends and draws his arms under mine, and pulls, tentatively. I do not resist, though I’d like to know: Where are they taking me? The chair squirts backward, out from under me, and I crumple against the young stranger with unwanted intimacy. The girl has neglected to apply the brake. Max is panting. “Give me a hand here, Kaley!”

It’s hardly a stretch to surmise they’re unfamiliar with the elderly and disabled.

“If you get one of her arms around your neck—”

“Can you hold on to me, Mrs. Smart? With your hands?”

I can’t. The joints of my extremities are swollen, fused.

“Turn her this way!”

“Hang on!”

Neither of them have the least idea how to lift a person, and I wonder: Will they drop me? And if they do, if I slap the ground wearing this old body will it flop like a rag doll or crack like a glass bottle?

“We’re in, we’re in.”

One on either side, they’ve maneuvered me through the opened door of the car, and heaved me, slumping, onto a plastic seat, listing like a house with a rotten foundation. Max struggles to haul me into position without dislodging what’s left of my dignity, and his own. His scent, of rusty cologne, grows stronger the longer he struggles, bathing me unpleasantly. It’s too much for my liking—he’s covering something—but the girl’s scent is familiar, of clean skin with a whiff of embedded salt, condensed sweat. She is shifting my legs tentatively, I feel her touch.

“There,” he says, and they both fall quiet.

I close my eyes and try to rest. The sound of birds.

“When should we ask her?” the girl says.

“I think she’s asleep.” Someone is patting my hand.

I open my eyes with a grunt. Here they are, seated on either side of me, uncomfortable with my reptilian silence. But what have I got to say to them? Small-talk is a wearying distraction. What do we know of each other?
What do you know of me?

I must have said that last bit out loud, as the girl answers.

“I know you’re a great runner,” she says, and I am confused. She is speaking in the present tense.
Are we having a conversation
,
then?

“Aren’t we?”

He says, “Mrs. Smart, Kaley has something to ask you. It’s important.”

I wait. I can be patient. I’ve become accustomed to thinking that nothing can surprise me—but the girl does.

“Mrs. Smart,” she begins, her touch light on my fingers and trembling, “I would like to tell your story.”

My story?

“I’m not a reporter,” she adds hurriedly, as if this might be a possibility, as if I might mistake her for such. “I’m a runner, like you.”

“Marathon,” he adds, taking over. “We’re making a short documentary—a film—about Kaley, about what inspires her. You were a trailblazer, Mrs. Smart. Kaley is following in your footsteps. But the point is that your story’s kind of been, well . . .”

“Lost to the sands of time?” I burp out.

“Something like that,” he says, laughing with relief to hear my voice.

“Will you do it?” she asks. “Please?”

I have no cause to trust them, quite the opposite. They want something from me, and they’ve gone to some trouble, that’s clear, but I will figure them out. They won’t get by me.

Let’s begin with what we know, I say to them: precious little. You would like to do a story about me. Do you think this is the first proposal I’ve fielded on the subject? Do you assume I will agree?

KNOCK-KNOCK-KNOCK
.

Cora is in the kitchen, warming a can of soup, nearest the door, and she is the one who goes to it and opens it.

I’m in the great room where we keep the beds, as we’ve shuttered off the rest. It’s a draughty old beast of a house, and we inhabit only the rooms on the first floor, and only a few of them. We warm the great room with a wood-burning stove, which I installed. Father wouldn’t have liked it. He admired form and function, and the stove is pure function, no form. It smokes. It sits crooked on slabs of rough stone joined by cement, which I laid and poured, respectively, myself. The stove ruins the lines of the room, but we don’t care, for we sleep and sit in warmth. Cora busies her hands with work, knitting baby bonnets for African children, and I busy my mind solving puzzles and listening to the radio. We’ll never agree on the station, me and Cora. Gospel and country for Cora, talk talk talk for me.

I leave her to it most days. I fill in the tiny squares of the puzzle with tiny letters, and then I burn it. Cora takes care of the house, and I take care of everything else, which explains why the house is in such a state. We are hardly in a position to accept visitors, and hardly any visitors come. When the occasional car ventures down our lane, we know it’s not for us. It will be someone lost, asking for directions. Cora loves giving directions.

But not this time. This time, I hear Cora saying, “Yes, that’s she. That’s my sister. Yes, she lives here. Yes, we’re alone, just the two of us.” Cora has less and less sense as the years swing past, takes after our father. I set my cup of black tea on the stove top and come marching out, wrapped in my old fur coat, drawing up to my full height, lips pinched.

“What do you want?” I ask, hiding my surprise at seeing it’s a woman standing on our doorstep. She’s carrying a heavy bag over one shoulder that looks like it will topple her. She is thin and pinched, a cigarette smoker, her hair sprayed into a professional pouf on top of her head, and coloured blond. I recognize what she is instantly, having occupied the same trade, once upon a time.

“I’m looking for Ms. Aganetha Smart.”

“You’re a reporter,” I say.

“I am.”

“What would you want with Aganetha Smart,” I continue flatly. “Aganetha Smart has nothing to say.”

“I’m doing a story on women in sports, pioneers, in advance of this summer’s Olympics.” She names her magazine. It is a woman’s magazine.

“Good for you. But Aganetha Smart has nothing to say on the subject.”

“Ms. Smart, are you aware that you’re the last woman alive from the 1928 Canadian Olympic team?” She waits, but I won’t take the bait. I am not aware of that, no, and the knowledge strikes me like a shovel to the chest, but I have no intention of betraying either my ignorance or my emotion. “Ms. Smart, I understand that your speciality was long-distance running, and that you were prevented from participating in long-distance races due to your sex. Would you like to comment on the fact that female athletes will be permitted to contest the marathon at this summer’s Games?”

I don’t say a word. I don’t know what this emotion is, flooding my body, but I feel myself going weak, quite suddenly.

Cora snaps to her senses. “My sister has nothing to say.”

“I’m very sorry to hear it,” says the reporter. “No comment? Nothing at all?”

“She doesn’t talk about that time,” says Cora. Cora can rise to the occasion, and does when I least expect it. It’s true, what she’s saying, I never talk about that time. There is no reason to be bitter, to be anything but proud of that one damned race; only, it hurts me to talk of it. My reward burnt itself bright and quick, its ashes too precious to spoil with gossip, or nostalgia.

“Is that a lighthouse in the field over there?” the reporter asks us. She is switching tack, playing for time, maneuvering. I recognize her tricks, having perfected them myself.

“It is not,” I say, although it clearly is: denial easier than explanation.

“Why build a lighthouse in a field, nowhere near water?” the woman persists, as if this weren’t a question Cora and I both asked our father repeatedly, and entirely in vain. As if our perplexing inheritance is any of her business.

Cora quietly pushes the door shut on the woman, turns the bolt. I should thank my sister, but I don’t. She looks at me wearily, shakes her head, and shuffles in her slippers back to the warm room. We take up our positions once again across from each other at the stove. We wait for the sound of a car’s engine turning over, the sound of a car retreating down the lane.

“I’ll never know why you wanted to do it—go away, run away, run, run, run,” Cora says with irritation. “Look what it brought us.”

“It had nothing to do with you,” I say with equal irritation. We are back where we started, and where we’ve spent our lives, locked in opposition.

“If you’d never gone,” she says.

And I say, “Your problem is you’re always looking backward.”

“Well, what’s ahead for us, Aggie? Tell me?”

She’s got me there. We’re both of us nearly eighty years old. The answer seems pretty clear. I finish my tea and plot the last word into the last empty boxes of the puzzle, and carry my cup to the kitchen where I clatter around making noise, nothing more. Then I stalk past Cora to the frigid bathroom to get changed, and stalk past again, saying, “I’m going out!”

Cora doesn’t reply. I wouldn’t expect her to.

The reporter’s car is parked in the lane, turned around so as to make a quick getaway if needed. She hasn’t gone after all. I follow her boot prints through the snow, dainty little marks with a deep point where the heel has stabbed through the crust. She can’t have gone far in this footwear. I reach one arm over my head and pull on the elbow, then the other. I roll my neck to loosen it, and take several long low repeating strides to stretch out my hamstrings and calves. I jump on the spot, pointing my toes to ease the ache in my ankles that never quite goes away. I’m wearing a tracksuit zipped to the chin, thin gloves, a light toque, a windbreaker, double socks, and thin-soled running shoes.

I follow the reporter’s tracks until I find her, behind the old empty barn, what’s left of it, snapping photos of the lighthouse.

“What did you come for, really?” I ask, making her jump. My voice carries across the snowbanks.

“I came for a story, Ms. Smart.”

“Is that the story you came for?” I point to the lighthouse.

“I don’t think so, but it may be.”

“It isn’t,” I assure her.

“You’re going for a run,” she says. “May I photograph you, even if you choose not to comment?”

I shrug. I’ve never objected to being photographed, and it’s been a fair while since anyone has made such a request. I rather liked having my picture taken, in my youth. My face, while never pretty, proved unexpectedly photogenic, oddly haunting on film. I loved to see it in the papers. It never felt like I was looking at myself, but at a version of myself that might survive beyond mortality, a projection of the best of me. It was a vanity that served me poorly, and yet I’ll admit I seem not to be entirely clear of the seduction. Who says we live and learn?

What happens to these photographs taken today, in the snow, if indeed the reporter snaps any? I’ll not find out. Cora and I aren’t the type to subscribe to a woman’s magazine, nor do we know anyone who might, with a thrill of familiarity, rip out a relevant clipping and mail it to us.

I set off for my run, but I say to the woman, in parting, “You’ll be gone before I’m back, and you’ll not disturb my sister again.”

I follow my usual route, along the fields at the edges where dried weeds stand through the snow and wave their pale golden seed heads.

Today, I cross the land that belonged to my sister Edith and her husband. I don’t know who farms the fields now, but the house stands boarded and empty in its barren yard. I check its perimeter for signs of breach by wild animals, or teenagers: it has stood empty now for nearly ten years. After Edith died, her daughter did not stay, and who’s to blame her for wanting to take her girl and leave? Cora passed the rumours on to me, as she would—that Edith’s daughter’s girl had no father. Perhaps, wondered Cora, such qualities run in the blood? Perhaps, I wondered in return, it was sour old gossips such as herself who chased the young away?

I circle the house once, then cut toward the path through the backwoods.

My route shifts subtly with the season, or my mood, or my energy, sometimes aiming longer, sometimes shorter, sometimes looping over and over a favourite section. Much has changed. Seventy years gone by, and the woods through which I ran as a child are shrunken, though not disappeared. The town has eaten into the far side, so I rarely follow that path, or if I do, I turn back before the trees thin out to reveal houses situated on cul-de-sacs, monstrosities with gleaming backyard pools shrouded in black plastic now that it is winter. The houses and their yards look tidy, trim, and silent, as if emptied of their people.

But I prefer not to see anyone.

If I meet a dog walker on the path, or in the winter a couple on skiis or snowshoes, I do not expect to recognize them. It is likely that they know who I am, in a general way. People in town do. Cora and I are known in the way that eccentrics are known, as curiosities to be avoided or peered at from a distance. One outgrows fame. Ancient fame carries a whiff of notoriety. People forget, or no longer care. One grows into another version of loneliness.

Even in summer, I rarely see anyone swim in the glistening, silent pools.

I would enjoy diving in myself, in fine weather, and I am reminded of Glad every time I run past and resist the temptation, as if I can hear her urging me to jump—and I miss her. I miss her with an ache, not with tears. It’s the ache you feel when you leave a place you know you can never return to. Oh how I ache today. I can’t run from it, I know that. I run with it. It sits inside me, at my throat, expanding across my chest. Before today, I did not know. I think of how the reporter has come to my door and told me, quite without guessing its significance, that Glad has died—though I don’t know when, nor how, nor can I ask for details. Her obituary will go unwritten, at least by me. How have I missed the news? Its absence on our radio waves suggests that when I die, that news too will go unreported, and with it all that we accomplished, Glad and I.