On the Road to Find Out

by Rachel Toor

  It wasn’t that different from what I usually did, but I felt awful. I didn’t mean to be self-involved and inconsiderate. I didn’t mean to forget Mom’s birthday or keep putting off asking Jenni about her plans for next year. It wasn’t like I didn’t care. I just got stuck in my own head, mired in my own muck.

  On Saturday, I started working at Joan’s store, Runner’s Edge, which Mom referred to as “Joan’s store” and I guess I picked that up from her.

  The stockroom, littered with piles of boxes and plastic bags containing shirts and shorts, needed help. I sat on the floor and put everything into neat stacks so I could use the fun machine that made price tags. After a couple of hours, the piles were a lot smaller. Occasionally I’d bring merchandise to Joan and she’d put it on hangers on the round racks.

  A compact woman with thick red corkscrew hair burst through the door and shouted, “Hi honey, I’m home!”

  “Nikki!” Joan said.

  “Yo.” These two tiny chicks gave each other a chest bump—as if they were basketball players.

  The woman told Joan she needed a new pair of shoes and wanted to try something with a lower profile. “I’m not ready to join the barefoot craze,” she said, “but, well, I don’t know, I wondered if there was maybe some middle ground.”

  “I have something I think you’ll like, Nik,” Joan said, and went into the stockroom.

  “Great,” said the woman. She had been wearing hiking boots and now she peeled off thick wool socks.

  Her feet were even uglier than mine, if you can believe that. A couple of her toes curled down and her two big toenails were purple. Not painted purple, like with nail polish, but the nails themselves.

  “What?” she said, when she saw me looking at them. “Never seen a runner’s feet before?”

  I said, “First day on the job.” Then I felt really awkward so I said, “Um, can I offer you a Tootsie Roll?” Joan kept a big jar of candy on the front counter. She said runners really liked candy. From what I’d seen that morning, it was Joan who really liked candy.

  Joan came out with two boxes of shoes and said, “They run small, so I brought you a 9 as well as an 8½. And here’s a pair of socks.” She tossed them at Nikki.

  Joan lifted her chin in my direction and said, “Alice just started running. She’s learning.”

  Then she turned to me and explained, “Many runners end up with black toenails from blood blisters that form under the nail bed. Sometimes they’re the result of wearing shoes that are too small, but usually, especially for experienced runners like Nikki, they’re the price of doing business. Nikki is a fast downhill runner, and the foot naturally slides forward in the shoe. There’s nothing dangerous about them—”

  “They hurt like mofos,” Nikki said.

  “—but they don’t make for pretty feet. Eventually, they fall off.”

  “The toenail falls off?” I blurted out. “That’s disgusting.”

  I realized too late that may not have been the most polite thing to say. But both Joan and Nikki were laughing.

  “Yep,” said Nikki. “Usually by that time, a new one has begun to grow underneath. I have a collection of them at home in a bowl in the guest bathroom.”

  Nikki put on the new shoes, got up, and walked around. She jumped up and down a few times. She said, “I rarely have ten toenails at one time. Wow. This feels strange. Kind of like wearing Earth Shoes. Remember Earth Shoes, Joan, where the heel was lower than the front? I’m tipping backward.” And she rocked back as if she was going to fall.

  “They’re cushioned, superlight, and I think for the kind of running you do, both roads and trails, they might work well. Take them out for a spin.”

  Nikki ran out the door. Joan said to me, “Wait until you see the hammer toes. And the bunions. And the blisters—you’ve never seen blisters until you see someone who’s had a rough race. The whole bottom of the foot can be one giant blister.”

  I must have made a face because she said, “We think of them as badges of honor, along with our cuts and bruises and scrapes. It’s because we’re out mixing it up. If you run hard, you might fall. If you fall, you might get dirty, a little bloody. Nothing too bad. Most serious injuries come from overuse.”

  Nikki burst back into the store. “Yes!” she said. “Love them.”

  “Thought you might,” said Joan, and she moved to the register. I followed and watched her ring up the sale. She said, “Charleston Running Club members get a 10 percent discount.” I knew about the club from the Red Dress Run.

  “Also need something for chub rub,” Nikki said.

  Joan said to me, “Body Glide,” and motioned to an item on the wall rack that looked like a stick of deodorant. “Chafing,” she explained, and pointed in the direction of her inner thighs. Then she yelped, “Nikki! I forgot! How was your marathon?”

  Nikki put her hands into her head of curls and groaned. “You don’t want to know.”

  “What happened? You were shooting for sub–2:50, right?”

  “That was the plan. You know what happens when people plan. God laughs. At my race, she laughed so hard she probably peed her pants.”

  “Your training went so well.”

  “Yeah, but my racing didn’t go well that day. I got behind on calories. I was feeling good, running fast, but I didn’t take in enough fuel. I bonked. Hit the wall at 25.”

  Bonked? I thought. Hit the wall? There’s a wall? Near the end of a marathon?

  Joan looked at me and said, “That’s a saying. Not a literal wall.”

  “Sure feels like it. I was on pace through 24 and a half. Then the wheels came off. I could not get my legs to move. There was nothing I could do to change my fate.”

  “Glycogen debt,” Joan said. “Been there.”

  “I never had been before. It sucked. There were so many spectators, and I was the first woman, and they were all cheering me on but when I got to the mile marker at 25, I had nothing left. And after that, you’re beyond all help. Gatorade or gel or salt tabs—nothing does any good. It’s all muscling and mentalling it out and I couldn’t do it. I finished in 2:57. Humiliated.”

  I had some thoughts:

  1. Seven minutes were that big a deal?

  2. It seemed silly to be able to run at mile 24 but not at mile 25. I mean, you’ve already run that many miles. What’s one more?

  3. I felt like I’d been stuck in my own version of mile 25 since I’d been rejected from Yale.

  “So sorry, Nik,” Joan said. “We’ve all been there. Sometimes you’re the windshield, sometimes you’re the bug.”

  “I was beyond insectitude at that point. I was slime. I was primordial ooze. But I’m back at it.”

  “Box?” Joan called. Nikki had picked out packets of gel in different flavors and flipped them onto the counter.

  “No thanks,” she said, “but I need to stock up on portable calories.”

  Joan handed me the empty shoe box and I brought it back into the stockroom. Then the front door jingled and I heard Joan say, “Miles!”

  Without moving a muscle, without breathing, I listened.

  “Hey, kid,” I heard Nikki say. “You here to pick up your weekly recipe for speed?”

  “Know it,” Miles said in the easiest, most comfortable voice. “You chicked me once. Not going to happen again.”

  “We’ll see about that,” Nikki said.

  “I hate that word,” Joan said. “The idea of getting ‘chicked’ is ridiculous. We are competing in different races. If a woman beats a man and wins overall, she still gets the trophy with the boobs. She’s still only First Woman, not Overall Winner. So why is getting beaten by a woman any big thing? Why do so many men care about beating the first woman? You’re competing against other men, Miles; Nikki is competing against other women. When she beats you—”

  “You’ve been chicked,” Nikki said with a laugh, “and you will be again.”

  “Argh,” said Joan.

  I heard Nikki thank Joan, tell Miles sh
e’d see him around, and leave the store. I didn’t want to come out of the stockroom. Then Joan called my name.

  17

  When I finally emerged, Miles was standing there, in short shorts and a long-sleeved T-shirt that said Jingle Bell 10K. He’d obviously been running.

  Joan said, “You remember Miles.”

  “Um, sure.”

  “Alice. Hey.”

  Awkward, I thought.

  Joan said, “I need to dash over to the bank for a minute. Will you take the helm?” She grabbed a cloth envelope from the safe, stuffed most of the bills from the register into it, and pranced out the door.

  I thought, awkward! again, and said, “Um, sure,” again and started straightening up the brochures on the rack beside the register.

  Miles said, “So what’s up?”

  What’s up? I never know how to answer that. The sky? The national debt?

  I said, “Not much.” Big improvement over “Um, sure,” I know.

  Miles said, “Cool.”

  He came over and stood close beside me. He picked up one of the flyers for a race. It was glossier than the others, which were mostly single-page Xeroxes announcing a 5K, a 10K.

  He waved the flyer at me and said, “Can’t wait for this.”

  I looked at it for the first time. He moved closer so I could read it—and when I did, I could hardly breathe. It was for a half marathon in June in a town about ninety miles away.

  “There’s money,” Miles said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Cash awards for the top ten runners. It usually attracts a fast crowd, sometimes even Kenyans come, so the pace will be blistering. I just want to beat Nikki and Owen.”

  “You could win money?” I asked. That would be like being a professional runner.

  “Nah,” he said. “I’m not that fast. But the race will be stacked with talent. It’s my best chance for a PR.”

  “A personal record—‘the best race time at a given distance,’” I said, remembering what Joan had told me, and defining it like an SAT word.

  “Yep. Joan is writing me a program so I can peak for this race,” he said, shaking the flyer again.

  “Cool,” I said.

  He looked down at the paper Joan had given him before she left the store. “Gotta do a long run tomorrow.” He paused. He seemed to be thinking about something. He had rolled the race flyer into a tube. Then he tapped me lightly on the shoulder with it.

  “I was wondering,” he said slowly, more slowly than he usually spoke, “after I’m finished with my workout, I told Harry—”

  “—your grandmother,” I interrupted, too eager.

  “Yeah. I told her that I’d take Potato out for a trot while I warmed down.”

  We stood there in awkward silence for a while.

  Then he said, “You wanna?”

  “Wanna what?”

  “Come with?”

  I’m sure he must have been able to see my soon-to-expire telltale heart thump-thump-thumping through my shirt. Or heard it drub-drub-drubbing.

  I said, “Um, okay.”

  “Cool,” he said. “Meet on the boulevard and Ruffner, around noon?”

  “Okay,” I said, and immediately worried I wouldn’t be able to keep up with him. As if he’d read my mind he said, “It’ll be slow. I’ll be pretty beat at that point.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  He turned to leave. “High noon.”

  “Okay,” I said, pretending to draw a revolver from a holster on my hip and waving it in his direction.

  18

  I was at home with Walter, telling him how stupid I sounded whenever I was around Miles. I couldn’t form a coherent sentence, let alone speak in more than one syllable. I could practically hear Walter saying, “Use your words, Alice.”

  Instead, he just crunched on a piece of dry macaroni. He makes the funniest, cutest noise when he eats uncooked noodles. You can’t believe chewing could be so loud. And so cute.

  Maybe he did need some fattening up. So I made him a special treat: a bowl filled with pasta, peanut butter, and the head of a marshmallow Peep. Walter loves him some Peeps. But only the yellow chicks, since they are the best, as we know.

  Walter had one leg stretched out taut and was grabbing it with his hands. He looked like a ballet dancer doing exercises. Or like he was playing the cello. That rat had a lot of smooth moves. Sometimes, when he was feeling perky, he would jump into the air straight up, for no reason except to celebrate the joy of having a physical body. And when he wanted to run, oh man, the guy could move.

  When he was hard asleep, he’d close his eyes. Often during his naps he would keep them slightly open. He was always aware of his environment. Not worried, but alert to possibilities.

  My pied beauty was both predator and prey. He liked to chase my finger or a piece of yarn and I’d call him a predatory panther. But when he snoozed on his back, his feet stuck up in the air and his hands on his chest, he looked as defenseless and vulnerable as a baby. How easy it would be for someone to come and snarf him up.

  While he was generally quick to right himself after a back-sleeping session, seeing him so exposed, so trusting, nearly always made me want to cry. He was prepared to take action if necessary, but he lived as if nothing bad would ever happen to him. He knew I would take care of him, that we two together were something formidable and mighty.

  Without each other, we’d each be diminished.

  And without Jenni, I felt less than myself. We’d never gone this long without talking. But after she’d left the night of my mom’s birthday I got mad that she had got mad at me and decided not to call her. It seemed like she’d decided the same thing. We were in a standoff. It made me sad and cranky.

  Settling down to read was impossible. I played Snood but felt restive (“unable to keep still”). I checked Web sites for the colleges to see if they might have updates on when decisions would be announced, but no. Probably just as well, since I knew what the answers would be. No, no, no, and no. And then more no’s.

  Walter picked at the Peep, but didn’t seem hungry, and also didn’t do what he’d normally do, which was take everything I offered and stash it under the bed. He was probably as tired as I was, so I scooped him up, kissed him on the nose, put him back in his cage, and went downstairs, where my parents and Walter-the-Man were watching a Duke basketball game.

  I knew they were watching a game because the screams penetrated through the second floor, through Mom’s office, through the guest room and the guest bathroom and the guest TV room; the screams crept up through my parents’ bedroom and their bathroom; they reverberated through Mom’s shoe temple, and through their sitting room, where Dad sometimes huddled with his laptop and watched CNN as if it was porn, and finally they made their way up to me, to my room.

  So annoying.

  I went downstairs to find a rerun of a scene I’d seen a zillion times before: Mom clenching a magazine, her glasses perched low on her nose as she watched the TV, Dad white-knuckled and mostly silent, and Walter-the-Man shrieking his freaking head off.

  Three minutes and forty-seven seconds remained in the first half. The camera alternated between showing the court and zooming in on the genius college students who painted themselves blue and camped out for tickets to the games.

  Walter-the-Man: “Three minutes. That’s a lot of time. Come on, Duke, you can do it. C’mon, Duke.”

  Mom: “That little point guard is really holding his own.”

  Walter-the-Man: [Colorful questioning of the ref’s manhood.]

  Walter-the-Man: “Yes, oh yes! YES.” [Arms raised in the air like an Olympic gymnast sticking a landing.]

  Mom: “Nicely done.”

  Walter-the-Man: “NOOOO! How could you miss a layup like that? Oy vey Maria!”

  Dad: “Oy vey Maria?”

  Walter-the-Man: “Nice play, boys, nice play—oh no, not a three. NOT A THREE! Why do they keep trying for all these threes? You know what I always say.” [Looks ar
ound, first at my dad, who doesn’t acknowledge him, and then at my mom, magazine still hanging off her hand, and finally at me, like I care.] “Live by the three, die by the three.”

  Walter-the-Man: “ARE YOU KIDDING ME? ARE YOU GODDAMN FREAKING KIDDING ME? Is there a lid on that bucket? Does anyone here see a lid on that bucket?” [Looks around to see if anyone sees a lid on that bucket.]

  Mom: “This is a better game than I expected. Carolina’s been so weak this season.”

  Walter-the-Man: “Guard your man, you scrawny doofus.” [Head in his hands.]

  Walter-the-Man: “YES! YES! DE-NIED! DEEEEE-NIED!” [Furious hand-clapping.]

  Walter-the-Man: [Cheering along with the blue-painted students on TV.] “Go to hell, Carolina, go to hell! [Clap clap.] Go to hell, Carolina, go to hell! [Clap clap.]

  The buzzer sounded and Mom went back to Real Simple. Dad took out his iPad and started on a new crossword. Walter-the-Man shook his empty beer bottle at me.

  I shook my head at him.

  Me: “Walter-the-Man, did you go to Duke?”

  Walter-the-Man: “No, Alice, I did not.”

  Me: “Do you have any actual connection to Duke?”

  Walter-the-Man: [Slowly.] “No. I do not.”

  Me: “So both of my parents have graduate degrees from Duke. I can sort of understand why they would spend their time watching this team. But you are crazy for Duke and have no connection to the school. Don’t you think that’s strange? Most people around here root for U. Or Kentucky. Why Duke?”

  Mom: “Alice.”

  Me: “Well, isn’t it a little weird to be so fanatical about a team you have no real link to?”

  There’s a car commercial and another car commercial, and then these two commentators start talking about the game.

  Me: “Did you ever play college basketball?”

  Dad: [Warning look.]

  Walter-the-Man: “No, Alice, I didn’t.”

  Me: “High school?”

  Mom: [Sharply.] “Alice.”

  I knew I should shut up and go back to my room. When I got in a pissy mood like this, I knew I should avoid humans. But the whole thing made no sense to me. Walter-the-Man planned his life around Duke basketball games. Most of them he watched at our house, whether or not my parents were home. He came in, got himself a beer from the fridge, and settled on the couch for two hours of screaming at the television.