Strangely, the following afternoon I saw Coach Sacks after a track meet. He was limping and whispering to himself, probably curses, headed for his car. His girls hadn’t placed and he was upset. At first I was going to leave him alone, but I caught up with him and we talked. He asked me, “It’s true, isn’t it?” I didn’t understand until he continued, “She got married,” and then I realized that he was talking about Flo. I guess he wasn’t invited to the wedding either. I told him that it was a fact. We looked at each other for a long time and said nothing, and then he said that he had to leave.
By the way, I heard about Wallace’s remarriage to the widow Gracie Majors, and his raising of her three children. They’re all under five years of age? He certainly has his hands full. I assume that you are good with everything.
Women love men and live in a world of men who make the rules. Women might not agree, but they still love the men who made and make and enforce these rules. I’ve always believed this to be your test. Loving men without succumbing, not missing out on loving men. Discerning your own path. Men and women are joined and glued to each other and cannot be detached without the tearing of skin and organ, and that is painful. Being vigilant and loving, and that’s not easy and has never been my challenge.
I know that you know this but I have never told you. I don’t love men but I have to live with them and inside their rules. I have to find my own path. It can feel like trying to destroy the fog by flinging a stick of dynamite into it. It doesn’t work. It’s loud and bright and causes a scene but the fog is still there. It can feel like it’s all around and everywhere and inside me, influential and ingenious. It can overwhelm me. But then I remember that I do not wish to have everything that I wish. I like to have everything happen as it happens, and then my life is good.
I often remember finding you running near the Athletic Club. How you tried to jump from my sight! Even thinking about it now brings a grin to my face. It reminds me of all that is unique, what can’t be categorized, and what is mysterious and continually surprises me. And then I remember that I don’t want to have everything that I wish, that I like to be surprised.
Please give Jack my best. I hope you are enjoying Montana and that Jack is resting and recovering satisfactorily. Is he able to live without his cigarettes? A stroke is a serious matter, but three strokes! I don’t care if they’re “mild.” Three strokes! I must admit, I can’t imagine him living a clean life. Retired! In fact, tug his ear, smack his backside, and kiss him full on the mouth, then tell him that’s from Farmer.
This morning I woke and knew I could wait no longer. I had to write to you. Last month we were called into a meeting and told that we were not to report the news. Can you imagine? Reporters told not to report. The decision comes from high up and is final. But I have lived with the information and find that you are the one person I know who will understand as I do.
I must ask for your discretion. My job depends on it. I know that I can count on you and trust you, but I must ask.
Hugh Williams took his life with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to his heart. He shot his heart out, Mel. No suicide note, but he used that gun that they gave him as a prize for his Olympic victories—remember that big silver gun the mayor presented to him at that other ceremony after that small one?—which to me IS his note.
Last year he donated his golds to the Sports Hall of Fame. Remember the uproar when they were stolen? That was the last time I spoke to him. The paper sent me. Everyone wanted to know if his golds would be replaced. They sent me because I was at the Olympics with him. So they sent a woman reporter, which they never would’ve done. Would he demand that his golds be replaced? I questioned him and he didn’t care. That was his exact quote: “I don’t care,” and he shrugged. “So what if I was once the world’s greatest runner,” he said. “When I go to the store for milk, the clerk still wants his money.” He was an insurance agent. Skinny and sad-looking with glasses. He suffered from arthritis like me, lived with his mom, and he told me that he did it all for her and for his coach and that he didn’t like to run. “I was just a kid,” he said. “I was bewildered. Oh, I was so glad to get out of it.” That was the last time we spoke.
Isn’t it so strange? The government makes them heroes, and they don’t care. They don’t care! So we’re not supposed to report it because of our national pride? It makes me look back on the parades and the ceremonies and all those speeches, and even the Olympics. It seems to me that people like to hold athletes up and make them heroes because it makes people feel important. They want to have a feeling of consequence, to advance their politics and national interests, and to simply not think about life, so they make them heroes.
The real Games are about human performance, about real people excelling at sport under great pressure and a global spotlight. Of course there’s the nationalism, politics, and discrimination, but the Olympics changed me, and not because I won gold. My knowledge and appreciation of the world and various cultures has enriched my life. It changed my politics. It changed everything. There’s a humanity that we all have in common, no matter our differences and nationalities. We have a physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual connection through our humanity, and I learned this.
But for Hugh and Ginger, the press turned them into human billboards, and no wonder they both turned their backs. Like Dr. Frankensteins, the press possessed, created, invented, and cast them. Ginger’s fate was a bit different because she was a female beauty first, with athlete a close second.
Now I’m not supposed to report any of it. I’m supposed to arrange, regulate, and fix the truth to suit the public’s idolatry.
Do great athletes ever die satisfied, Mel? How do they live with decline? These questions plague me. But then I’m proof that it is possible. I live well. I have my dog and my house and we are happy. It is enough for me to watch my dog dreaming with her legs twitching and see and know that she has an inner world just like mine. I love her and we have our relationship and that is good. It is enough.
I’ve been doing so much thinking and remembering about us—about the Peerless Four and what it all means. Do sports have meaning and mystery like life? We create meaning and it’s like Sisyphus and his rock going up the hill and then the rock rolling down again. Always another game, another chance. No one stays a winner eternally.
I think about girls and history and progress. I meet these girl athletes now, and they don’t seem to want to acknowledge the women who made strides before them, so that they could have it better. Why do women betray that? Why pretend it’s not connected to their lives? Is it because it’s easier not to acknowledge and accept?
I decided to write an article but the paper nixed it right away when they saw what I was up to. I’d already gone to Grass Valley, California, by then, made a trip to interview Ginger. I wanted to see for myself if the reports were true. There was a rumor that she sicced her dog on the last reporter who tried to talk to her. Her divorce came through. She was married to two at one time. Did you know that? She divorced both of them, and then one more. Now she is alone, just like she wanted.
Danny’s married and living in Vancouver. She’s doing okay. She doesn’t want to talk about Ginger, though. I tried. “I’m through,” she said. “I have my own life now.”
I went to Grass Valley and found Ginger. Her house sits back from the others on a residential street, accessible only by a dirt path and sheltered behind these large, overlapping trees. She doesn’t own a telephone, so I couldn’t call to let her know that I was coming. Even before I made it up the front porch steps, she was peering at me through her living room curtains. It was an overcast afternoon reminding me of Amsterdam, and it seemed that it would start raining (though it never did).
She’s the town recluse, known to be cold and aloof, and when I asked around about her at city hall beforehand, a woman told me that she’d seen Ginger only once, pushing a shopping cart at the grocery store (apparently Ginger pays a boy to deliver her groceries each week) an
d wearing a baseball hat. The woman said that when Ginger stopped in front of the canned soups, she passed her hand across her throat, and that for some reason this gesture seemed sad and elegant. That’s what the woman told me. Sad and elegant. That’s the most I got out of anyone.
Ginger stared right at me from between those curtains when I walked up her front porch. Her face looked open, Mel—as open as I’d ever seen it. That’s the only way I can describe it. For a second she was like a kid. But when I nodded, her face tightened, and then those curtains closed around her. I knocked but she wouldn’t come to the door. I knocked again. “It’s just me,” I said. “I know you saw me. I’m not leaving. I’ll just stay here.”
A long time passed, and then she finally opened the door a crack from its chain lock. There was this big black Doberman growling at me with pink gums, and she shushed him and called him Dog, so I guess his name is Dog. “Sit, Dog,” she said. “Stay, Dog.” The house was dark but it didn’t look dirty, and I could see a radio and a couch and the kitchen table.
We stood in a sort of stunned adjustment, not talking. I wondered if she knew about Hugh but I wasn’t going to be the one to tell her. She wore these blue socks bunched around her ankles, and the buttons on her robe gaped at her bust. Her hair was pulled from her face by a tortoiseshell headband and she was trying to be unattractive but it wasn’t working. She’s still so pretty, Mel. She can’t shake her beauty.
“Leave me alone,” she finally said.
I didn’t know what to say.
“I know about Hugh,” she said, and she looked right at me. She looked at me until I looked away. We stood with me not facing her for a while, and then she shushed Dog again because he’d begun whimpering.
“What do you want?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said, and I didn’t know. I thought I knew but I didn’t. I suppose I wanted to know that she would be okay, and that she wouldn’t shoot herself in the heart like her friend. But I didn’t know at the time, and even if I did, I wouldn’t have known how to tell her.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “really sorry, that you feel like you have to hide.”
“A person can disappear,” she said. “With effort and money, a person can disappear. Even the Dream Girl,” and her face went down. She was sorry about it all, and that was what she was telling me. So I left her.
What I feared at that very instant as I walked down her porch steps is what I still fear: that I somehow contributed to her demise. That I had made her into the Dream Girl like the others.
She called out: “Thank you, Farmer.” Instead of turning to face her, I raised my hand in the air.
This morning it started to rain, and after some time, the rain turned to ice and then to snow. I knew that I would write you and let you know what is on my heart and mind because you are on my heart and mind, connected to everything that I write. Please write me back when you can.
Truly yours,
Muriel
I read Farmer’s letter over and over for days, and I did tug Jack’s ear, slap his backside, kiss him full on the mouth, and tell him, That’s from Farmer. I shared the letter with him and he kept silent about its contents. The only thing he did say was that I would wear out the paper with all my readings. He moved slowly, lumbering from room to room. His face sagged on the left side. Often he lay on his back on the floor, his arms up and stretched over his head as if in surrender—palms open—and his feet and legs extended on the wall. Like an L. Eyes squinted shut and breathing deeply. This position was the most comfortable, he told me. Otherwise he was the same. He smoked cigarettes behind the barn and took hits from his flask. I found the butts and smelled the nicotine and whiskey but pretended not to know. But we drank and smoked less and did so without each other’s company.
It took me a week to decide what to write back to Farmer. I ran in the late afternoons, when the sun was low. I could see the shining river with the ducks and birds gathered there and, on clear days, the hazy snow-peaked mountains toward Canada, blue-tinted and darkening in the vanishing light. When I finished, the waxing moon was visible, fuller each time. I thought about how to respond to Farmer. I ran and ran and ran, on through the fields and into the woods, up and down went my legs, in and out went my arms, my breath and feet corresponding. I crossed creeks and listened, thinking about nothing but how to respond. I thought about how women have struggled so long and resolute, and how our accomplishments carry a resonance of sacrifice, struggle, and elusive victory gained over incredible odds. How the doctors told me that I wouldn’t have babies, and that my uterus would fall out. I don’t have children, but it’s not because I run. I don’t know why I couldn’t.
The sky was as big as Canada, with puffy clouds, and the river a chill slate gray. Tall trees lined the bank. Sometimes the faces of Wallace’s children and his wife would flash through me, for he’d sent a photograph. He was still a part of me and now they were, too, and their faces would flash through me, and my skin would prickle with sorrow and joy. My eyes would go wet, and then their faces would be gone. I’d see Danny and Ginger, Flo and Bonnie, and Farmer. They were me and I was them and then I would go to a deeper place that I can’t explain. I only know that what I felt was bigger than me. Honest and real and the fact of it would be there no matter what I felt at other times or went through, and no matter what anybody else told me or tried to tell me, because it was mine and belonged inside me. But it was also connected to something bigger and beyond me and outside me.
I understood this best that week when my feet pulled me forward on the ground. I ended up more within myself, and more outside myself. I passed a decomposing bird on my path, its feathers and bones ground into the earth a little more each time, and I would think, Things are here and then they’re over, and that’s enough, all the while tasting the vast spread of time’s abyss, and the universe and infinity, and my small life, and then one afternoon the bird was earth.
Then came the stopping. The physical relief of being done. Walking and returning. Smelling the piney metallic air. Coming home to Jack. His openness helped me open up, and drew me out, and when all is said and done, he told me once, it’s all about the love. Even when it’s not about the love it’s about the love. It’s just the love. We’re pieced together from each other and we’re shapeless yet each of us touches the other. We play our games, and in the end there are winners and losers and losers and winners, and you try your best just the same. Each bit, each moment, plays its own game, and slow, slow, slowly—and sometimes quickly—things change, and sometimes you’re part of that change.
Regardless, I need to hold on to my inner self—my inner freedom—for this is my most valuable substance. But I know very little, my knowledge puny when reflected against this astounding world.
Instead of trying to explain all of this to Farmer, I wrote on the backside of a postcard of a moose: I miss and love you. I will visit soon. Yours always, Mel.
I never did worry about Farmer. She was ahead of me and didn’t need my elucidation.
I mailed my postcard. Then I went for a run.
Before the Peerless Four*
776 BC—The first Olympics are held in ancient Greece without women, so women compete every four years in their own Games of Hera, in honor of the Greek goddess who ruled over women and the earth.
396 BC—Kyniska, a Spartan princess, wins an Olympic chariot race but is barred from collecting her prize in person.
1406—Dame Julian Berners of Great Britain writes “Treatise of Fishing with an Angle,” the first known essay on sportfishing, describing how to make a rod and flies, when to fish, and the many kinds of fishing.
1784—Elizabeth Thible of Lyons, France, is the first woman to soar in a hot-air balloon.
1798—France’s Jeanne Labrosse makes a solo balloon flight.
1805—Madeleine Sophie Aramant Blanchard solos in the first of sixty-seven gas-powered balloon flights. She made her living as a balloonist, was appointed official Aeronaut of the Empire by Nap
oleon, and toured Europe. She fell to her death in an aerial fireworks display in 1819.
1805—Englishwoman Alicia Meynell, riding as Mrs. Thornton, defeats a leading male jockey.
1811—On January 9, the first known women’s golf tournament is held at Musselburgh Golf Club, Scotland, among the town fishwives.
1819—Mademoiselle Adophe is the first woman tightrope performer in New York City.
1825—Madame Johnson takes off in a hot-air balloon in New York, landing in a New Jersey swamp.
1850—Amelia Jenks Bloomers begins publicizing a new style of women’s dress, first introduced by Fanny Kemble, a British-born actress—loose-fitting pants worn under a skirt. Women’s rights leaders such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony adopt the new style.
1856—Physiology and Calisthenics for Schools and Families, by Catherine Beecher, is published; it is the first fitness manual for women.
1858—Wearing bloomers, Julia Archibald Holmes climbs Pikes Peak in Colorado.
1867—The Dolly Vardens, a black women’s professional baseball team from Philadelphia, is formed.
1871—Carrie A. Moore demonstrates a variety of roller-skating movements at the Occidental Rink in San Francisco. Later in the same day, she exhibits her skill on a velocipede.
1873—Ten young women compete in a mile-long swimming contest in the Harlem River. Delilah Goboess wins the prize, a silk dress worth $175.
1874—Mary Ewing Outerbridge of Staten Island introduces tennis to the United States. She purchases tennis equipment in Bermuda, has difficulty getting it through customs, and uses it to set up the first U.S. tennis court at the Staten Island Cricket and Baseball Club.
1875—Lizzie Ihling, the niece of famed American balloonist John Wise, makes a solo flight. The skin of the bag rips, sending the balloon falling to earth. Lizzie is not injured.
1875—The Blondes and the Brunettes play their first match in Springfield, Illinois. Newspapers herald the event as the “first game of baseball ever played in public for gate money between feminine ball-tossers.”
The Peerless Four Page 16
