Girl Runner

by Carrie Snyder

  Glad laughs. “I run with Aggie. That’s all I need to keep me strong.”

  I blush and hack at my slice of ham with a dull butter knife. I should say something in reply, demure, make light, offer a compliment in return, but my mind is blank. This is what I mean when I say I’m unprepared for these experiences. I’m empty, I think. Fill me up. All I’ve got are these legs, trained for speed, this mind, trained to conquer a circle of track.

  But that is not entirely true. What I lack isn’t knowledge, of which I have more than most girls my age on subjects unmentionable—what I lack are ordinary social graces. I don’t know, yet, how easy these are to learn. They are strategies, nothing more.

  On the morning of the 100-metre final, I watch with the other Canadian athletes, crammed into the stands as close to the track as we can manage, leaning over the wooden rails to holler to our girls, as Glad lines up at the start. She looks over at us, and waves, flashing her grin to the newspapermen with their cameras, before settling into position, one foot on the line and the other ready to push, arms cocked, knees bent, spine angled forward yet upright, prepared to leap at the gun.

  On your marks, steady, BANG!

  They’re off. But just as suddenly, the pistol fires two shots into the air to call the runners back. There has been a false start. And we all know who it was, flying a half-step ahead of the others like a bird frightened out of a bush. Glad! We are holding our breath.

  The change in atmosphere is sudden, like we’ve stepped off a precipice into the unknown, we’re falling.

  Glad shakes her head, her arms, her legs. She walks a tight circle back to the line. She isn’t grinning, and she doesn’t look over to us, watching in the stands, calling out her name. I hear my own voice, its pitch frantic even to me: Glad, Glad, Glad! There isn’t time for Coach Tristan to speak to her, to try to steady her. The race must go on, and the girls line up a second time. Germany, the United States, France, Canada, Holland, Canada, Japan, Italy.

  The pistol fires. And again, almost instantly, fires twice more to stop the race.

  No.

  The crowd gasps, falls to silence. My hands clap my face.

  Surely there has been an error. Surely the judges will recognize that Glad twitched early but held off, that it only looked like she started ahead of the others. It is only that she’s so quick, she got the leap on them. Isn’t it? Give her another chance! Mr. Tristan is running onto the track, protesting, but he is blocked, held up, talked back by other men from the Canadian team.

  An official dressed all in white escorts Glad off the track, to the side. She has been disqualified. She will not run.

  Glad sinks to the grass in disbelief. She kneels, her hands buried in her hair, and bends her head to the ground. Rises up, only to stagger and sink again. I have never seen Glad in such pain. I have never seen her down. It is like watching a solid building crumble before your eyes. No, it is worse. It is like seeing a horse in a race suddenly snap its leg and tumble, confused, dazed, uncomprehending, trying to stand and stumbling to the ground in pain.

  The girls are lining up again. They avoid looking at Glad. But they can’t avoid hearing her animal cries.

  The pistol fires. They’re off, and almost just as soon, they’re done. Canada, thanks to Ernestine, has earned a surprise silver behind the American girl, a sixteen-year-old who can’t believe her good fortune. She leaps in the air with a shout. Such a sharp turn of luck; none of us can grasp it. Glad, the favourite going into the final, watching in agonized weeping from the side, and the pretty little American, her hair in two tight schoolgirl braids, lifted to the podium by teammates, biting her gold medal, behaving in a way not fitting of a sportswoman, as Miss Alexandrine Gibb will write in her column telling of Glad’s sad turn.

  We know not what goes through the mind of an athlete who works so hard only to see her dreams crumble before her very eyes. Miss Wright alone could tell us, and she has chosen, wisely we think, not to speak on the subject.

  Solace, perhaps, will come in the form of another chance, in another race. Miss Wright is among those who will line up to contest the 800 metre final on Thursday morning, along with her teammate and friend Aganetha Smart. These plucky girls finished first and second respectively, both breaking the former Canadian record, in what could only be described as the closest race of the Olympic qualifying championships in Halifax earlier this summer. Both girls earned the opportunity to compete here in Amsterdam proudly wearing Canada’s colours.

  Could another one-two finish be a possibility on Thursday? Canada can only hold her breath and hope!

  MISS ALEXANDRINE GIBB raps on the door of the room I’ve been assigned to share with Lillianna, the high jumper, who is lanky and reserved, keeps to herself. She’s gone out and won’t be back all day. Miss Gibb knows I’m alone and enters without waiting for a reply. She carries with her a newspaper.

  “You’ve been hiding in here quite long enough, Miss Smart. It’s time to get up.”

  I cough feebly.

  In silence, she passes me the newspaper and I peer at the words on the page, the black print smudging my fingertips and the bedspread. The meaning of what I’m reading does not immediately register, entering slowly, like thick muddy water. This is not the story I suppose I’m halfway expecting to see: a flattering report about myself. This is quite another story altogether.

  It’s news that burns, that clouds, that pollutes: the Olympic committee has voted against girls competing at the 800 metre distance in future Games. The committee has met and come to an immediate decision, argued for and supported most strongly by the Canadian representative. It is written that the collapse of runners after the final proves the distance is too taxing for a girl’s inferior strength.

  “But—they’re talking about me! I fell down at the end. You were there, you saw me. I was on my feet in an instant! Can’t you tell them I was sick?”

  “This isn’t about you. It’s not personal.”

  “But—oh! Didn’t the boys fall down after their races?” I twist the bedcovers between my fists. “I saw them! They were rolling in the grass too, practically dead.”

  Miss Gibb perches on the bed beside me. “Men don’t have uteruses,” she says. “Don’t tell your mother you know that word. I am supposed to be guarding your innocence.”

  “My mother taught me that word.” I sink against the pillow. It has been so long since I’ve seen my mother, so long that I’ve accustomed myself not to think of her at all, to turn away from her in my thoughts, yet as soon as I recall her to Miss Gibb—her voice, her words—she’s present, as if waiting. I fall backward in my memory through years of separation that seem accidental, not deliberate, and yet impassable. The weeks spent in Amsterdam preparing for the races. A week spent on board the ship crossing the ocean. The train ride from Ontario to Montreal to Halifax. The qualifying races. Nearly two years spent training in Toronto. Two years before that at Packer’s Meats. It adds up to four years gone.

  Here in a strange bed, in the city of Amsterdam, I remember myself at the age of sixteen leaving by train to visit Olive and George in Toronto. I am promising to be home again in two weeks.

  “Be good.”

  “Yes, Mama.”

  MY MOTHER.

  Her first name is Jessica, her middle name Eve, her father’s name Liddel.

  I know my mother as part of the flow of the household, part of its noise and bustle, part of the air I breathe. That is how well I know her, and how mysterious to me she is and ever will be.

  There is a knock on the side door after dark. Upon hearing it, one of us calls for her: “Mother!” We politely avoid scrutinizing the supplicant too closely, leaving the girl waiting just inside the door for Mother to come. It makes sense to me that anyone in trouble, in need, would come seeking my mother, if only to hear her soothing voice, to be bathed in it, and reassured.

  When I am a child, I do not know exactly what my mother does. And when I discover what it is, I enter a new room in my life.
I am no longer a child.

  My mother is twenty-six—old for her first marriage—when she accepts my father’s proposal, which comes with four children ages nine and under, including an infant. Her own mother has recently died. Because my mother is never done, because her work stretches and spreads ahead and all around her, and even through the night, she sometimes falls asleep sitting at the supper table. Her head tilts, she begins to sigh, her breath slow and settled as she passes from wake to sleep without struggle. My father raises his hand to alert us. He retrieves a small pillow from the rocking chair and, standing behind her, tucks it between her ear and shoulder. This is a silent task. His hands brush her temples for a fraction longer than is necessary for the job.

  Her breathing is regular and sound. She is relaxed, at peace.

  My father resumes sitting and eating.

  If this happens before dessert, Olive or Cora dish it out instead, and we eat and talk as we always do. It is quite impossible to disturb Mother, and in any case, she will wake within the half hour, and rise and go about her chores as if she’s never been away. She says she can hear what we’re saying, the whole time, woven into a kind of dream.

  It is not fashionable to sift through one’s dreams to hunt for clues, but my mother does. She is fascinated by animals that enter a dream, and by people who shape-shift and become strangers, or strangers who shape-shift to become familiar.

  She speaks freely, if infrequently. I know that I can ask her about anything.

  “The mind is powerful strange,” I can hear her saying. “Powerful, powerful strange.”

  This is before she changes.

  I am remembering her as she was when I was a child. I try to keep her there. I want to keep her as she was, before I left home—which I believe, when I am eleven, that I will never do. I still believe this when I am twelve, when I am thirteen, when I am fourteen.

  George has written to invite me to come visit him in the city, and I am showing her the letter, just a little bit afraid, and she asks, What do you think about this, Aggie? And I say, I would never go, I would never leave you, Mother.

  I am insisting, adamantly, in the kitchen, and she folds the letter and pulls me into her warmth. She smells musky, perhaps a bit unbathed, and she smells of the lavender that she keeps crumbled in drawers around the house. We will all smell of lavender, so long as we live in our mother’s house.

  You may wish to go, my mother says. Someday.

  No.

  And if you go, you may always come home again, no matter what happens, my mother says, I promise.

  IN A HOT curtained room in Amsterdam, that is the mother I make up in my mind. I make her up and seek her out, suddenly weak with missing her, sick for before, though before what, I do not know. I can’t go far enough back in my memory to find the perfect resting place.

  “You must have an unusual mother,” Miss Gibb says.

  I nod. I can’t tell Miss Gibb more, specifically. There is too much to tell, and none of it belongs in this room.

  Miss Gibb picks up my hand and strokes the knuckles soothingly. “A girl who has an understanding mother is a fortunate girl. Perhaps I could stand in for your mother, just for now.”

  I remove my hand from hers, suddenly wary.

  How I like Miss Alexandrine Gibb, how I admire her. She is far and away the most independent woman I have ever met. She writes newspaper articles for the Toronto Daily Star, and she is our manager, in charge of the girls on the Canadian Olympic team. She is unmarried, perhaps fifteen years my senior, her hair sleek and black in a tightly wound bun, the lines of her fitted suits crisp and sharp, and such dramatic hats. I have never seen Miss Gibb out of sorts or uneasy, but I have seen her cause others to become out of sorts and uneasy. I don’t want to be her, exactly, but I study her, curious to locate the source of her power.

  “I think I know why you’re hiding away,” she says in a low, steady voice. She is making me uneasy. My eyes flit away from hers, but only for a moment. Somehow she draws my gaze to hers. I read sympathy there, but it is cool, appraising, purposeful.

  “You’re well enough, aren’t you, dear? It’s just that you’re afraid to face someone—you think you have put your friendship in jeopardy. I suspect you believe you oughtn’t to have won that race. Now, I’m not going to tell you what to do, but I’m warning you to be careful. If you believe something, it will be so. Don’t make it so. Here in this city are people who want to take your photograph and write about you, and back home in Canada are people watching to see what you will do with yourself, now that you are a Golden Girl, as they say.

  “If I were you,” says Miss Gibb, and she takes my hand again and squeezes, powerfully, inducing pain, “I would put the race behind you. Do not think of it. Do not reflect on it. Your friend has run her own races. You owe her nothing.”

  “You mean—Glad?” I whisper.

  She nods but doesn’t say anything further, gazing at me. It’s her silence that pulls it out of me—this is a good trick to learn, as a reporter. You can ask all the questions you like, but it’s the awkward pause, perfectly timed, that will net the biggest fish.

  “Didn’t you see the race?” I blurt and blunder. “It wasn’t mine. I was going to lose.”

  “But you didn’t, did you?” she asks, examining me intently.

  I shake my head, flooded with shame, avoiding her eyes.

  “Then you won, fair and square.”

  But I didn’t, I think.

  I look at Miss Alexandrine Gibb, and she says, “You won and she lost. She’s been more than graceful in defeat. It’s your turn to be graceful in victory.”

  IT IS THANKS to Miss Gibb that I’m here in the stands to cheer when our Canadian girls win silver in the 100-metre relay. It is thanks to Miss Gibb that I’m screaming so fervently that the next day I’ll wake up with a sore throat. Glad runs the third leg, Ernestine the anchor. There are no errors. I jump from the stands, dash onto the field, barge into the crowd to greet Glad with a hug. I swing her into the air off her feet—she’s so tiny.

  “We’ve matching medals, now, Aggie,” Glad says, and I believe she means it.

  I hold this moment, shining, in my memory, when all things are equal between me and Glad, when our rivalry on the track is scratched out by friendship, or so it seems, in the great balance of the world. When I love Glad and Glad—yes, I’ll say it because I believe it, despite everything to come—loves me.

  11

  House

  THE GIRL WON’T stop pushing me up the lane, awfully determined she is to deliver me here. The house is hidden; not for long. My hands begin to knot themselves together.

  “Mrs. Smart, we’re taking you home, like you wanted. Remember?”

  This is what I wanted? I remember like I am washing down a raging river and on the banks the past is standing, waving to me, trees bending in the wind. But I can’t see everything, not all at once like this, and it isn’t lined up in order, and it flashes past as I flail.

  The wheels cease turning.

  We’ve arrived, or so the girl says: “This is where your house used to be, Mrs. Smart. But it’s all gone.” She sounds like someone affecting to sound sad, who has never been dealt a blow of real grief. That may not be fair. It may only be that she is a bad actress and being filmed turns her stiff and implausible. I can sympathize, having been a lousy actress myself. As if to prove it, my hands fly to my face, smack-dab over my mouth. The boy’s camera will recognize the posture: melodramatic disbelief.

  But I do believe, and I see, and she is wrong, quite wrong. The house is not gone.

  It is smaller, I’ll allow, without its walls and its roof, stripped of its dimensions. It is not what it was, but neither am I.

  Everything stands back from this place, even the trees, their limbs damaged, trunks blackened—or do I only imagine it. The stones are smeared with black. A sunken pit. A small ruin. The ashes long since blown away.

  “I did this,” I mumble.

  “They said she
didn’t suffer—your sister, I mean. They said it wasn’t your fault.”

  Whoever they are.

  I consider the parallels: my body like the body of the house, slumped and hollowed out, an apparent ruin. Everything stands apart from it, even this girl; especially her. I can’t explain why this should cause me such a deep ache. A long slow leak of sadness spilling between my ribs.

  I gather the clues, apparent and invisible, one by one. This girl and her brother do not know what it means to suffer if they think my sister—Cora—did not. They do not recognize culpability if they think I am innocent. They would like the world to bend to their wishes, to absolve them, and they think I need the same things too, but they know nothing about how to comfort a body.

  No, nor do I. It must not have been what we were put on the earth to do.

  AFTER FANNIE DIES.

  After George leaves home.

  The house closes in on those of us who remain—Mother, Father, Olive, Cora, me—my father’s second family, whole and complete. But we do not feel whole or complete because we belong, also, to the first family, to the stories buried in the graveyard, and to our sisters and brothers from the first mother. Maybe the house tries too hard to keep us. Maybe it is hoping for the past to curl around and return us to the fortune it has been built to hold.

  It is a magnificent house. Sometimes I walk around it in my dreams. Sometimes I am wide-awake, and can see everything as it is, as if I am eleven years old. Yet even at eleven, the house cannot hold me, no matter how it tries. I am walking around it only to walk away.